Was there a better year for slow cinema and Delphine Seyrig than 1975? That was, most famously, the year Jeanne Dielman, reviewed last month here on ArtsPaper, burrowed into theaters and helped change the way movies could be made. Astonishingly, though, it’s not even the most radical Seyrig vehicle to be released that year. That honor goes to India Song, the novelist Marguerite … [Read more...]
The View From Home: The minimalist perfection of ‘Jeanne Dielman’
“A lonely widow turns to prostitution to make ends meet.” This one-sentence synopsis offered by HBO Max for its presentation of Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai Du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, is as literally accurate as it as tonally, emotionally, thoroughly misleading. It suggests that Chantal Akerman’s 1977 masterpiece could be a humanist melodrama, the sort of hardscrabble women’s … [Read more...]
The View From Home 80: Sokurov at the Louvre, Pialat’s Van Gogh, Resnais, Makavajev, Verhoeven and forbidden love
Francofonia: Defying categorization, Alexander Sokurov’s hypnotically watchable Francofonia (Music Box, $24.19 Blu-ray, $20.69 DVD) is an essay and a collage, a historical fiction that is also documentary about its own creation, a place where past and present can collide during a single circular pan. Its subject is the Louvre, particularly the museum’s uncertain future during … [Read more...]