mt-carmel Reviews

Dekalog (1989–1990)

A Postscript to the Postscript. Some years later...

[1/10 · 30 November 2007]

Simuland misses the point me thinks. 'K tries to add to the Bible' but fails! In an interview with Kieslowski, he tells a young student of film, that he wasn't trying to moralise but to ethicise, as moralism is too monolithic and closes down dialogue. He felt that to move to an ethical stance, it opened up a dialogue with the viewers. This I don't think is an attempt to add to the Bible, but in truth registers the fact that the trace of history - to allude to Ricoeur - is such that we have to realise that this is a different age. And Biblically of course a different dispensation, having moved from Law to Grace. Not that I'm a theologian, so hey shoot me before it happens! Nor do I think it peters out. It stands as a 'tour de force' in film-making, which rejects the temptation to moralise and tub-thump and is wonderfully aesthetic, allusive and after all gets us talking.

What more can you ask for, in a film or 10?

Man with a Movie Camera (1929)

Russian CINEMA'S FINEST HOUR?

[10/10 · 27 July 2005]

I'm a novice when it comes to this kind of thing, but on viewing the film several times now, once with a live soundtrack provided by Michael Nyman, Vertov's ingenuity never ceases to amaze me. I don't have the technical skill to pass comment on the cinematography side of things, but it seems to me to be very innovative. Will digital photography allow such innovation during the filming process? I'm a keen photographer and like using infra-red film and was told by a fellow photographer and digi-phile, that you could 'fiddle' such effects post-production as it were. Am I a Philistine, or is the digital age going to 'lose' photographic information, or limit it at least? It seems to me that Vertov was a master of the art of cinema, but I'm not sure about the philosophical underpinnings of his project as evinced in this film; that plot and character are bourgeois conceits and an international visual language could do away with such things. Would such an international language be truly proletarian then? It is interesting that, later, Vertov fell foul of the Communist Regime, as they became suspicious of his 'formal' style, seeing it as possibly stemming from a bourgeois (false) consciousness.

The erroneous, as I see it, philosophical arguments don't spoil it for me, but certainly make it a product of its time (cultural context), rather than transcending it. However, does it make it an expression of Communist propaganda?