SCREENING LOG - 7/10/2006-7/16/2006

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Terra em Transe / Land in Anguish (1967, Glauber Rocha)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062352/
TSPDT #874
Glauber Rocha is proving to be my major personal discovery of the year. With BLACK GOD WHITE DEVIL and this film, there's clearly a creative force involved whose enthusiasm for filmmaking is infectious, not in the least because it's tied into a bottomless passion for understanding the heart and soul of his people. In BLACK GOD WHITE DEVIL Rocha invented a genre all its own, the Brazilian Marxist musical gangster western, to explore the bleak possibilities that peasants have to rise up against the forces oppressing them. In TERRA EM TRANSE Rocha's story is more self-conscious and has less mythic resonance, but is no less infused with passion. Here a poet-revolutionary struggles against two politicians whom he had formerly supported but had become corrupt. Not only does he have to contend against their well-entrenched positions of authority, but he must also resist the decadence of middle-class life that sucks his countrymen into a lifestyle of perpetual distraction and indulgence, numbing them from the injustices that surround them. Rocha's meditations are remarkably bleak, suggesting that the possibilities for a truly democratic and humanist society were squelched before they even had a chance to thrive. But his eye for details is passionately observant throughout, with montage sequences set to intense, pounding music, like a desperate cry for help in the dark.
YES (#5 for 1967 between MOUCHETTE and THE RED AND THE WHITE)

Harakiri (1962, Masaki Kobayashi)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056058/
TSPDT #875
A masterpiece in the classical vein (right when that mode of Japanese filmmaking was on the brink of collapsing), whose story unfolds in an assuredly slow and steady manner before exploding into inexorable violence that's more grim than glorified. This seems to do for the samurai genre what UNFORGIVEN did for the Western.
YES (#9 for 1962 between THE TRIAL OF JOAN OF ARC and THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL)

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