Week 43/2024

At the end of this week, winter hour starts and the night wins an hour. Have you started taking vitamin D? D for despair, for dark? Even if she’s not in this selection, we turn to Akerman for some words of advice: “You need courage to make films, but you need it for everything […] When it’s grey outside, close the curtains, to see nothing, switch on the artificial lights.” Our selection this week is quite eclectic, spilling some light – fireflies? – from different corners of our dark world.

D for disruption. In Carpenter’s They Live, it’s not the curtains that change our ways of seeing but a pair of sunglasses. Not the subtlest rendition of the cave metaphor but nevertheless, “what's at stake in They Live is a return to the truth of reality, from which men are constantly kept at a distance, on the edge, by the false pretenses of a skillfully ‘managed’ reality.” (Alice Laguarda)

Kiarostami and Antonioni had no illusions that their work could reduce this distance. As Architects of Vision (the title of one monograph on Antonioni’s work), they construct buildings of which the sightlines allow only our senses (or obstruct them) to travel into that distance, not with resignation but with grace. In their films, they address separation, if not from reality, from a lover. Theirs are precise but never definitive modulations of our situatedness, negotiations with the night when lovers’ suspicion divides them even in their embrace and binds them even in loss. Barthes on Antonioni: “your work is not a fixed reflection, but an iridescent surface over which there pass, depending on what catches your eye or what the times demand of you, figures of the Social or the Passions and those of formal innovations.” In both La notte and The Report, these figures collide as we follow two very different couples growing apart, violently, mundanely. D for distance.