Skip to main content

Song of Ceylon

Director: Basil Wright
Year: 1934
Run-time: 38 min

- Compared to Salt for Svanetia, this doesn't have the same larger agenda of promoting Soviet unity and progression. It's actually a sympathetic portrait of a land on the edge of British colonialism, and melancholic about what the future would have in store for its people.  It isn't particularly interested in having the Sinhalese narrate their own story, instead choosing to recount a British sailor's account of the island (I didn't catch much of the narration, since the version I picked on Youtube had poor sound issues). Nevertheless it's the strongest documentary we've seen so far, unless you count Man with a Movie Camera.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Fétiche Mascotte (The Mascot)

Director: Ladislas Starevich Year: 1933 Run-time: 26 min Source: Youtube Notable For : The second animated short on the list from 1933 is this stop-motion piece from the Polish-Russian film-maker Ladislas Starevich.  Stop-motion is almost as old as cinema itself (Starevich had been innovating since 1912).  The craft here is as good as any modern film, and Starevich's twisted imagination is on full display, with dolls and household objects coming to life in a dark version of Toy Story.  For animation fans, it almost goes without saying that Starevich was an influence on Jan Svankmajer's work much later. Verdict :  Every frame is a bizarre delight. There didn't seem to be an overarching plan to this work (indeed, it's possible that The Mascot  is an amalgamation of several shorter films featuring the same dog character), and so the film veers from one strange scene to the next, with much of the second half taking place in some kind of tchotchke hell governe...

A Trip to the Moon

Director: Georges Méliès Year: 1902 Seeing the painstakingly restored hand-colored print of A Trip to the Moon, in a literally mind-numbing 14 frames per second, makes it utterly clear that cinema is and has always been witchcraft. Every frame of this short feels bursting with magic, and even watching it on a modern TV in a space age that would have blown the mind of any of the actors of this film, you're left thinking "How did they do that?".

Paisan

Director: Roberto Rossellini Year: 1946 The greatest innovation in cinema around this period is the emergence of mainstream films that are anchored so specifically in contemporary life, that were deliberately not timeless. Rossellini went further than anyone else in this direction - Paisan  deliberately interweaves stock war footage with staged settings, real actors with non-professionals, to create something that deliberately skirts the line between fiction and documentary. Paisan  is also the first great bilingual film on the list, not only featuring English and Italian but many different dialects, making the film extremely difficult for a native Italian to understand. The performances are often extremely stilted, and there are glaring editing mistakes, but many of the stories are extremely compelling.