Une catastrophe

The legendary French film director Jean-Luc Godard made a trailer for the 2008 Viennale film festival. This trailer was called Une catastrophe, and it is Godard's poetic way to briefly look at violence and love in films. Its length is only ONE MINUTE. The short film is a montage of video and sound clips from other movies - including Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (1925). The trailer / short film also features a German poem. Une catastrophe is eligible for my project so I thought I should briefly mention it on this blog after I watched it. It's a solid work of art, but nothing more.

Score: 5 out of 10

PS: You can even watch it on YouTube!

My Winnipeg

Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg (2007) is clearly one of the weirdest and most experimental films I have ever seen. It is something I would call a "dry hallucination": its absurd surreality is executed in an extremely dry and awkwardly self-aware way. Even though the form is very experimental, Guy Maddin seems to control it quite well although there are a few maddening inconsistencies in it, which breaks the flow. The form obscurely uses a lot of elements from silent films and I wont go into details on that, but it's certainly interesting. Combine that with the heavy-handed narration and you have a form that could be seen as awfully pretentious - and the film barely tiptoes the line between being good and pretentious. The content is supposed to Maddin's portrayal of Winnipeg, but it is filled with absurd and fictive "facts" which are explored quite aimlessly. Not that these incorrect facts are a flaw because Maddin certainly wanted to be dryly funny with this film, but I hardly had a good time with the film because I felt the content was way too over-the-top and incomprehensible.

Score: 6 out of 10