Kurosawa famously said that “not to have seen the cinema of [Satyajit] Ray means existing in the world without seeing the sun or the moon.” Ray’s opera prima, পথের পাঁচালী Pather Panchali [Song of the Road] (1955), fits that description admirably.(*) Labelling it – as it is often done – a “neorealist” film misses, though,…
Category: Cinema
Pasolini and the Politics of the Sacred
Deleuze writes that “[a] close-up does not tear away its object from a set […] of which it would be a part, but on the contrary it abstracts it from all spatio-temporal co-ordinates, that is to say it raises it to the state of Entity.”(⊕) Think e.g. on the close-up of a face, which are,…
Oedipus Rex
Duplicity. “When Oedipus speaks he sometimes says something other than or even the opposite of what he thinks he is saying.” Yet “the ambiguity of what he says does not reflect a duplicity in his character, which is perfectly consistent, but, more profoundly, the duality of his being. He is double. He is himself a…
On Pasolini’s Medea // Carlos
There are – among others, to be sure – three fascinating things in Pasolini’s Medea, which I recommend you to watch here before reading this post. First, a necessary distinction between meaning and sense. Inevitably, one wanders about the specific meaning of certain issues: which are the phases of the human sacrifice offered in Colchis,…