The God Spider Has Come...

One of the greatest directors of all-time past away today. The great Ingmar Bergman is no longer on this Earth. The world has just gotten a little less cooler again.

Check out The Seventh Seal, Fanny & Alexander, Smiles of a Summer Night, Through a Glass Darkly, and Wild Strawberries to see cinema pushed to it’s limit.

Like a lot of people, I first encountered Ingmar Bergman with The Seventh Seal, which remains my favorite from his body of work. The Seventh Seal is a brilliant meditation on the existence of God and death. For many people when they think of The Seventh Seal, they automatically think of Max von Sydow’s Antonius Block facing off against Death in a game of chess. Me, I think of the scene where the Knight and his Squire come across the Witch being burned at the stake.

Squire: “Who will take care of that child. God, the devil, the nothingness? The nothingness, perhaps?”

Antonius Block: “It can't be so!”

Business Needs a Lift

Fucking brilliant teaser poster for Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street!

Sunless Experience

Watching Chris Marker’s Sans Soliel can be extremely tedious. Sans Soliel is a 100 minute meditation on time and memory done in a quasi-documentary style. A female narrator helps guide you through hundreds of video images from Japan, Africa, and Alfred Hitchcock Vertigo.

I don’t think the film is bad or un-watchable. It’s just after the first ten minutes, you’ve seen pretty much what the film has to offer. Sans Soliel is one of the rare times I’ve check a clock to see how much time was left in a movie.

The film’s highlight is a giraffe being shot by a hunter. Presumably something to do with time and memory…

Sans Soliel is really a film for the class room or for the most adventurous filmgoer. I guess I wasn’t feeling like Indiana Jones today.