Lav Diaz. Photo © Bradley Liew."Cinema shows another world, a different world," says the man who, in 1896, first showed the Lumières' cinematograph in the Philippines. These lines are spoken 120 years later in Lav Diaz's majestic A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery, all eight hours of which premiered in competition at the Berlinale in an audaciously prominent gesture of support from the festival for this Filipino director's sprawling, deeply political epic of storytelling. That different world of the Lumières, that which the cinema can show, is precisely what A Lullaby envisions: the previously untold, unseen history of the outskirts of the 1896 Philippine Revolution. In other words, this movie's other world is the world, but one without such images, sounds and movement—until now.This saga shot in somber, high contrast black and white of fierce crispness and tremendous stature alternates between two groups, one all men and the other mostly women,...
- 3/1/2016
- by Daniel Kasman
- MUBI
Starting with the Spanish conquest of the Philippines in the mid-16th century, the country was under the colonial rule of four different foreign powers for nearly 400 years. Independence gave way to two decades of vicious dictatorship and a democracy severely compromised by corruption and extensive external influence. As a nation that encompasses a staggering number of ethnicities and languages, the Philippines’ centuries-long experience of oppression has engendered an enduring identity crisis. It’s this crisis that has brought forth the films of Lav Diaz. They are dedicated to an excavation of his country’s turbulent past in search of its identity; the simultaneously chimeric and vital nature of this endeavor constitutes the emancipatory dialectic that drives his cinema. Having addressed Ferdinand Marcos’ dictatorship from a variety of angles in several earlier features, Diaz turns his attention to the Philippine Revolution of 1896-97 with A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery,...
- 2/22/2016
- by Giovanni Marchini Camia
- The Film Stage
"Cinema shows another world, a different world," says the man who, in 1896, first showed the Lumières' cinematograph in the Philippines. These lines are spoken 120 years later in Lav Diaz's majestic A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery, all eight hours of which premiered in competition at the Berlinale in an audaciously prominent gesture of support from the festival for this Filipino director's sprawling, deeply political epic of storytelling. That different world of the Lumières, that which the cinema can show, is precisely what A Lullaby envisions: the previously untold, unseen history of the outskirts of the 1896 Philippine Revolution. In other words, this movie's other world is the world, but one without such images, sounds and movement—until now.This saga shot in somber, high contrast black and white of fierce crispness and tremendous stature, alternates between two groups, one all men and the other mostly women, who leave their society...
- 2/20/2016
- by Daniel Kasman
- MUBI
If there’s any truth to the old chestnut that great works of art teach you how to experience them, few films exemplify it quite so fully as Jacques Rivette‘s Out 1. Then again, when so few films akin to Out 1 in the first place, comparisons will only go so far before discourse hits a wall. Or so I, in the two weeks since seeing it, have been inclined to think of a conspiracy-filled, paranoia-fueled, melancholy-drenched 13-hour movie that’s no less indebted to Fritz Lang and classic melodrama than Aeschylus and Balzac. If this weren’t a particularly good film, its restoration and subsequent theatrical release, which begins at New York’s BAMcinématek this evening, would still be something to celebrate — mostly as a signal that people with a power to save rare films are placing their resources where it counts. But given what is, to my mind, the...
- 11/4/2015
- by Nick Newman
- The Film Stage
When a film is described as poetic, it is often taken as a compliment. However, when a film is described as theatrical, it is seen as a critique, scathing at that. What makes poetry the better spouse to cinema? Isn't cinema but a visual and aural interplay of poetry and theater to begin with? Theater provides the cornerstones: the narrative, the milieu, the setting and the characters. Poetry, on the other hand, more than the façade and the flourishes, provides the requisite subtlety in the execution --- the minute gestures that accentuate a character, that last five seconds of absolute silence before a cut, the symbols, the verses, the rhymes, and rhythms. This is purely hypothetical. But if films are judged based on a balance where theatricality is measured with poetry, and the former outweighs the latter by a large margin, does it mean that the film is better off staged than filmed?...
- 7/22/2010
- Screen Anarchy
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