Rey’s description: “Prisoners sitting in the pits of an imaginary fascist state, Molussia, transmit one another stories about the outside world like a series of political and philosophical fables.” This was based on fragments of a German novel from the 1930s, written while the author was married to Hannah Arendt. Nine chapters which you can watch in any order – I think my shuffle version worked out nicely.

6. Extremely grainy urban landscapes… modern cube-shaped buildings… the camera sits, then pans, then spins like crazy. Olo and Yegussa discuss circumstances and causes of actions over ocean footage, then we see the narrator at his mic.

5. The camera camps outside factories and industrial buildings. Story of the “displaced rurals” who became “typical city scum.” Some non-narrating people, a woman on her computer, the grain is now big jagged chunks like someone is mothlighting the film with confetti.

2. Ah a grainy shot of a factory, ok. The movie’s techniques seem pointedly primitive, like the silent soundtrack suddenly clicking into static background noise. Olo and friends discuss how peace and health are imperceptible, only war and sickness are noticed.

9. Opens with images of the narrator this time, then quick story of a futile vendetta, then a grainy beach scene. Lot of why-am-i-watching-this imagery in this movie, but also some grain so thick it’s transcendent, and another camera spin – the sky is the ground when you’re upside down.

8. A thunderstorm.

1. Early spinning, on a roadway. Burru wants to be “elected by the vanquished.” Election malfeasance, then all becomes grain.

4. What do they mean by “pariahs”? Story of a dangerous smart person who started proving untruths to impress people.

3. Burru leads his people into bloody war.

7. Good choice for a final chapter, story of a sailor who pre-wrote years of montly postcards to his mother as he lay dying, then she died too, and his friend kept sending the postcards “from the deceased to the deceased.”


Better Late Than Never:
Cinema Scope’s Top Movies of 2012

(their picks, my ranking)

Holy Motors
Cosmopolis
Moonrise Kingdom
Room 237
Leviathan
Django Unchained
Barbara
Bestiaire
Viola
Tabu
Neighbouring Sounds
The Master
Last Time I Saw Macao
Differently, Molussia
In Another Country

Porco is a daredevil pilot with a broken-down plane, chasing pirates, who at least have a code of honor. The pirates team up with hotshot pilot Curtis, who falls for Porco’s girl Gina. Porco is stuck with young architect Fio until his climactic dogfight, which becomes a boxing match when both planes are incapacitated, then everyone gets back up and flees the fascist government. It’s a fun pig adventure that holds onto a nice sense of mystery at the end.

Remarkable-looking movie with time-slippage editing. I think the Coens were taking style notes. Hopefully they took better plot notes than me – I wrote “a surreal kinda movie,” probably because it was late and I lost track of story details. Pretty gay and horny, overall. For all they didn’t care about sound sync, the Italians know good music (notably, the action moving from Italy to France doesn’t fix the sync). Brilliant cinematography by Vittorio Storaro (The Last Emperor, One From the Heart), but this only got a writing nomination(?), losing to The French Connection(??).

Trintignant is a handsome, remorseless fascist assassin who had a traumatic youth. He takes a mission to murder an old friend, he and his wife (Stefania Sandrelli, the wimpy guy’s mom in Jamón, Jamón) get into a love triangle with the friend’s daughter Dominique Sanda (who’d reunite with Sandrelli in 1900), then he betrays pretty much everyone except his wife.

Mike D’Angelo on lboxd:

I’m something of a Sorrentino apologist, but rewatching The Conformist made me realize that he’s too often wedding maximalist formalism to equally emphatic performances, hat-on-a-hat-style; here, Trintignant’s opaque stillness is at disarming odds with all the canted angles, expressionistic colors and triumphalist architecture, and it’s the contrast that conveys meaning.

Trint’s dad, in a marble nuthouse:

Silent newsreel footage played at a handful of frames per second, beginning with Il Duce’s death. Unfortunately I am not someone well-versed in history who says “ah it’s that famous footage I know so well of the notorious event at the end of Il Duce’s life,” but rather I am someone who has to wikipedia who Il Duce was… ah, it’s Mussolini, fascist dictator of Italy for twenty years. The movie then flashes back to footage from early in his reign and carries on forward.

It’s silent for the first ten minutes, then gentle glimmering drone music kicks in as Duce stands at some kind of parade or rally, looking like the fourth Stooge. Closeups of the Great Man get intensely slowed down, while crowd shots of darker-skinned people run at almost full speed.

Segment 3 in Tripoli features a Florence Foster Jenkins song about modern Europe letting refugees die. 100,000 Libyans were shot in the 1920’s? Italy carried out a North African genocide by raining poison gas from planes? Someone needs to look into this. The movie is doing some sort of Ken Jacobs thing, hypnotizing the viewer with archive footage (I fell asleep at least once and had to rewind). “Barbaric Land” was a phrase used about Ethiopia when Italy was colonizing.

The evil dictator… the fascist system… the normal people who carried out orders to exterminate thousands, photos of them smiling casually next to their planes loaded with poison gas, and period pictures of Africans representing the victims… a photo slideshow, the pictures handheld by gloved fingers, trembling in front of the camera.