Video essays
Expanding on new forms of film criticism.
By Jessica McGoff
This video essay was commissioned as part of the Critics’ Choice strand of the International Film Festival Rotterdam, as a response to Janis Rafa’s Kala Azar. The strand’s theme was the notion of collectivity, and the video seeks to think through the possibilities of a collective way of living, of coexistence. Kala Azar is an elusive and textural work, focusing on a young couple who collect animal cadavers for burial. Rafa’s film, and her previous visual work, explores the relationship between animals and humans.
Por Mónica Delgado
En Un verano con Mónica (Sommaren med Monika, 1952), Ingmar Bergman propone una serie de recursos para describir una historia pesimista de confrontación entre la ciudad y el campo, entre la juventud y la pesadez de la vida adulta, entre la vida obrera y el disfrute burgués sin sentimiento de culpa.
By Mónica Delgado
In The Night (La Notte, 1961), Michelangelo Antonioni proposes the progressive rupture of the relationship in a bourgeois marriage (a writer, and a writer’s wife). However, on the symbolic level, the filmmaker establishes in advance, the sexual desire imaginary of Lidia (Jeanne Moreau) facing her husband’s disinterest. Hence, The Night is not a film about a couple in crisis, but about the gaze of a woman on this crisis.
By Monica Delgado
In three moments of Adam’s Rib (EEUU, 1949), George Cukor uses the resource of breaking the fourth Wall, not with the usual intention in comedy, but to obtain some kind of filiation of the spectator in this war of the sexes which was declared.
By Monica Delgado
With La Ciénaga (2001), Lucrecia Martel made her debut into feature films, and did so with clear and rational structure that looks to reflect the signs of decadence of a social class, with characters that spend summer in an Argentinian northern rural zone estate. Beyond raising the question of how a determined social stratum in Argentina becomes reflected in this film, I’m interested in finding out some motives about the idea of family that La Ciénaga suggests.
By Mónica Delgado
Beyond the power of technology and its control over the libido of teenagers that is posed in Videophilia (And Other Viral Syndromes), it seems that Peruvian filmmaker Juan Daniel Molero also proposes a reading about the consequences of this type of “infection” from female guilt and repression.
By Mónica Delgado
What are the similarities, beyond their arguments, between On The Silver Globe and Hard to Be a God? Both in Andrzej Zulawski’s film, as in Aleksei German’s, science fiction is the point of departure to tell stories of scientific nature in two planets similar to Earth. In both films there are characters forced to live in new communities, or to establish them, where historical processes experienced on Earth are replicated under the same social and human dialectics. These are dystopian and pessimistic universes, where research and investigation become focus and narrative eye.
Por Mónica Delgado
Cuando escribí sobre El Limpiador, ópera prima de Adrián Saba, en diciembre de 2012, me acerqué desde otro punto de vista, que no tiene que ver con el mismo acto de escribir, pero donde me detuve en un tipo de representación de una Lima esquiva, sometida por esta peste que sostiene todo el espíritu del argumento y la puesta en escena. En esta segundo revisión, desde la misma creación del video-ensayo, he podido desentrañar las mismas formas del film, su arquitectura de verticalidades, su intención de no explorar a la ciudad en sí en esta distopía sepia, sino proponer un relato desde lo íntimo, desde un lado físico de lo doméstico, más claro y tangible.
Por José Sarmiento
Videoensayo realizado en el marco del Translab 2015, conversatorio: “El videoensayo como nueva forma de crítica cinematográfica.” de Transcinema en asociación con Desistfilm.com
