Monday, January 31, 2005

Toute une nuit (Chantal Akerman)

Yipes. Watched this film in crit studies class today...man, it might have been the most boring film I've ever seen. I've seen some odd ones, that Chris Marker film about memories, Sans Solei, and the Quay Brothers, Institute Benjamenta, both of which I though had some super interesting aspects...but ultimately suffered from being pull your hair out of your head boring.

But this film took it to a whole new level. The premise was an assortment of everyday, banal activities by a series of characters that live in a neighborhood. Thematically, it had to do with leaving and arriving and men and women and somehow it felt like a feminist film, but I couldn't exactly articulate why, other than the women seemed outside of the male "gaze." The filmmaker is apparently famous for being a "feminist" filmmaker, but it seems to me, that one ought to be able to make a feminist film that is also exciting.

Anyhow, there were literally scenes of people sleeping, of people waiting, of people drinking a soda or a beer, of relationships ending. There were a few "unexpected" events, but they were still not really even on the borderline of being exciting.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Greg - this isn't really a response to any post of yours. But I was reading yours, and started clicking then "next blog" button and found something interesting. Three or four blogs down from yours, there is a woman, and all she does is take self-help quizzes and posts the results. Here's the link: http://shedandbroken.blogspot.com/
I like it. JR.

Charles said...

Do Crit studies people think it's their duty to bore the hell out of the rest of us. I guess it's the cinematic equivalent of reading Nietsche or Kant or something, but damn if I can take it. Would cinema still exist as it is now without all the "critical thought" put in by this group of over analytic scholars? Perhaps not, I don't know much about the french new wave other than Rhomer and Truffaut were critics before becoming filmmakers, were they the kind of people who would make you sit through "Toute une nuit" I wonder??