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Reviews
Why Didn't Anybody Tell Me It Would Become This Bad in Afghanistan (2007)
That rare film in which Afghanistan really gets under your skin.
The battleground of Afghanistan haunts the experimental Dutch film "Why Didn't Anybody Tell Me It Would Become This Bad in Afghanistan." Director Cyrus Frisch's first-person narrative - if it can be called that - was shot almost entirely on a cell phone, and the result is something between an impressionist rendering of Amsterdam and a Hans Hoffmann canvas in motion. More than anything else, this 70-minute document of a day in the life of a Dutch veteran of the Afghanistan war reveals a state of mind terrorism has introduced to the West: the fragmented image, the trembling camera-phone, the vague sense of menace are all part of it. Mr. Frisch's unconventional cinema may not be for everyone, but this is that rare film in which Afghanistan really gets under your skin.
Review by Darrell Hartman, writer/filmproducer
Oogverblindend (2009)
Dazzle reveals the crack in the walls of humanity, delicately reflecting upon man's inability to survive when emotional burden becomes too much to handle.
Dutch filmmaking provocateur Cyrus Frisch opens his new film Dazzle with a pixilated shot of a man walking down a sun-glistening beach, revealing the current world in a fractured state, but with slight glimmers of hope lingering in the background. Frisch's cinematic kaleidoscope presents a voyeuristic look at a city's many scattered, sidelined street dwellers from the view of a girl's apartment. The twentysomething girl is hardly seen, but her voice is overlaid on the disparate-essentially documentary-video recordings taken throughout Amsterdam as she feverishly rants on the phone with a doctor who initially calls to speak to a friend. Her disembodied voice proves a telling vehicle, almost God-like, and as she looks on from above, judging the desperate fools who sit on her block corner, guilt takes over her mind. The film's images are supplied by everything from a camera phone to a movie camera, and as he sporadically cuts to a starkly black, void-like frame, Frisch uses negative space to suggest a kind of sanctuary from the ugly dirge of street life, sufficiently establishing a dire mood wherever a city's lost souls congregate and their unclean bodies fester. The filmmaker melds together a myriad of archival footage, deftly exhibiting a gritty, grainy texture on the screen, which cements the dour tone of this compelling work. Frisch sees the well-meaning girl and doctor who converse over the phone as deeply concerned observers, sharing maddening descriptions of decay and, in effect, narrating the routine existence of the countless meandering, displaced vagabonds who deal drugs in the daytime and howl in the streets when the darkness settles. As abstract modes manifest a deluge of unearthly creatures and madness, Dazzle reveals the crack in the walls of humanity, delicately reflecting upon man's inability to survive when emotional burden becomes too much to handle.
Review by Adam Keleman, filmmaker/critic.
Blackwater Fever (2008)
Cyrus Frisch and Roeland Fernhout in a dazzling embrace - 1
We weep not because we are sad; we are sad because we weep. William James
The land resembles a Big Mac, composed of layers of earth from Namibia, Spain and a few other desert regions. Between them some tough vegetation, trimmed by a broad road. On it, a splendid American limo of uncertain age flashes forward out of the distance, as if from a fata morgana. It dashes past us with a roaring din like a passing jet plane. The old tin beast is not completely without elegance, so that it is some time before we realise that the car is nothing more than a sick, blundering body, a piece of wounded game running hunted into the bush. It keeps on re-emerging far away in the locale, and it keeps on rattling, rumbling, ticking and clattering past us. Apparently, it is a clear warning of what is to follow.
Yet as the head of the driver then comes into the picture, we are actually still not ready for what is in store for us. The desperate traveller's week-end beard is still tentative, it can still be shaven off, as if his fate is not yet quite sealed. Only when a woman suddenly appears at his side without really anything changing, do we realize that salvation is no longer possible.
The traveller is then already condemned to himself, he has become a Persona, a mask. The commonplace traveller appears to have become a Traveller. The director of the film is also powerless before this change. The Traveller is a sun worshipper, he continually gazes at the sun directly, with his classic National Health specs as intermediary. One glass is focused; the other, almost transparent, glass works as camera, telescope and binoculars at one and the same time. For the moment Frisch's optical material is not really working for him, although really everything can be discerned on the Traveller's countenance. But the subtly exploratory camera gradually does obtain insight into the quirks of mystical fate written upon it. How, to compensate for initiation into the secret of the Sun, he is felled by blindness and the blackwater fever.
An initially malevolent entrance that after all is said and done, we are to share, weeping, with him as a necessary rite-de-passage.
Blackwater Fever (2008)
Cyrus Frisch and Roeland Fernhout in a dazzling embrace - 1
We weep not because we are sad; we are sad because we weep. William James
The land resembles a Big Mac, composed of layers of earth from Namibia, Spain and a few other desert regions. Between them some tough vegetation, trimmed by a broad road. On it, a splendid American limo of uncertain age flashes forward out of the distance, as if from a fata morgana. It dashes past us with a roaring din like a passing jet plane. The old tin beast is not completely without elegance, so that it is some time before we realise that the car is nothing more than a sick, blundering body, a piece of wounded game running hunted into the bush. It keeps on re-emerging far away in the locale, and it keeps on rattling, rumbling, ticking and clattering past us. Apparently, it is a clear warning of what is to follow.
Yet as the head of the driver then comes into the picture, we are actually still not ready for what is in store for us. The desperate traveller's week-end beard is still tentative, it can still be shaven off, as if his fate is not yet quite sealed. Only when a woman suddenly appears at his side without really anything changing, do we realize that salvation is no longer possible.
The traveller is then already condemned to himself, he has become a Persona, a mask. The commonplace traveller appears to have become a Traveller. The director of the film is also powerless before this change. The Traveller is a sun worshipper, he continually gazes at the sun directly, with his classic National Health specs as intermediary. One glass is focused; the other, almost transparent, glass works as camera, telescope and binoculars at one and the same time. For the moment Frisch's optical material is not really working for him, although really everything can be discerned on the Traveller's countenance. But the subtly exploratory camera gradually does obtain insight into the quirks of mystical fate written upon it. How, to compensate for initiation into the secret of the Sun, he is felled by blindness and the blackwater fever.
An initially malevolent entrance that after all is said and done, we are to share, weeping, with him as a necessary rite-de-passage.
Blackwater Fever (2008)
Cyrus Frisch and Roeland Fernhout in a dazzling embrace - 1
We weep not because we are sad; we are sad because we weep. William James
The land resembles a Big Mac, composed of layers of earth from Namibia, Spain and a few other desert regions. Between them some tough vegetation, trimmed by a broad road. On it, a splendid American limo of uncertain age flashes forward out of the distance, as if from a fata morgana. It dashes past us with a roaring din like a passing jet plane. The old tin beast is not completely without elegance, so that it is some time before we realise that the car is nothing more than a sick, blundering body, a piece of wounded game running hunted into the bush. It keeps on re-emerging far away in the locale, and it keeps on rattling, rumbling, ticking and clattering past us. Apparently, it is a clear warning of what is to follow.
Yet as the head of the driver then comes into the picture, we are actually still not ready for what is in store for us. The desperate traveller's week-end beard is still tentative, it can still be shaven off, as if his fate is not yet quite sealed. Only when a woman suddenly appears at his side without really anything changing, do we realize that salvation is no longer possible.
The traveller is then already condemned to himself, he has become a Persona, a mask. The commonplace traveller appears to have become a Traveller. The director of the film is also powerless before this change. The Traveller is a sun worshipper, he continually gazes at the sun directly, with his classic National Health specs as intermediary. One glass is focused; the other, almost transparent, glass works as camera, telescope and binoculars at one and the same time. For the moment Frisch's optical material is not really working for him, although really everything can be discerned on the Traveller's countenance. But the subtly exploratory camera gradually does obtain insight into the quirks of mystical fate written upon it. How, to compensate for initiation into the secret of the Sun, he is felled by blindness and the blackwater fever.
An initially malevolent entrance that after all is said and done, we are to share, weeping, with him as a necessary rite-de-passage.