Loitering about and stumbling into a cinema
I actually wanted to go to see Marcel L'Herbier's L'Inhumaine as a part of Musée d'Orsay's exhibition on the 1920s, or les années folles as they call them here. But in the end it got too late and I decided that would be best to go to Pedro Costa's "En Avant Jeunesse" at 5.15 p.m. But for some reason I thought that it was 5.45 p.m. and so I go there too late for the film and too early for anything else.
I walked up to Odeon and decided I'd just see Cédric Klapisch's "Paris" but I had an hour to kill before that started. So I walked down, got a beer in a café and read my book and ended up being too late even for "Paris". As my cellphone battery had died in this time, I longer had a precise idea of the time. I finally walked back to St.Sulplice and saw Brain de Palma's "REDACTED" at l'Arlequin.
A very interesting film - definitely. Especially in the way the narrative is constructed using sources that have come to serve as intermediaries between us and the war, such as news footage, terrorist execution tapes, You Tube, etc. all bound together into a narrative by a video camera floating around in the military unit, initially as a video journal of one of the cadets.
While the director doesn't flinch from providing a very personal point of view on the Iraq war, and stays away from any liberal notion "objectivity", or from patronizing audiences by trying to "present all viewpoints", the same honesty betrays his typically left-liberal elitist parti pris. The aspiring film student, the guy interested in literature and the other middle-class guy from the north are all prone to having a conscience while the two illiterate, working-class thugs from the south are just inbred, racist rapists with no remorse or conscience whatsoever. Conscience and morality of course, being a product of middle-class notions of upbringing such as formal education and artistic interests.
The film is definitely worth seeing just for the way the narrative is constructed to fully incorporate the audience in the diegesis.
I walked up to Odeon and decided I'd just see Cédric Klapisch's "Paris" but I had an hour to kill before that started. So I walked down, got a beer in a café and read my book and ended up being too late even for "Paris". As my cellphone battery had died in this time, I longer had a precise idea of the time. I finally walked back to St.Sulplice and saw Brain de Palma's "REDACTED" at l'Arlequin.
A very interesting film - definitely. Especially in the way the narrative is constructed using sources that have come to serve as intermediaries between us and the war, such as news footage, terrorist execution tapes, You Tube, etc. all bound together into a narrative by a video camera floating around in the military unit, initially as a video journal of one of the cadets.
While the director doesn't flinch from providing a very personal point of view on the Iraq war, and stays away from any liberal notion "objectivity", or from patronizing audiences by trying to "present all viewpoints", the same honesty betrays his typically left-liberal elitist parti pris. The aspiring film student, the guy interested in literature and the other middle-class guy from the north are all prone to having a conscience while the two illiterate, working-class thugs from the south are just inbred, racist rapists with no remorse or conscience whatsoever. Conscience and morality of course, being a product of middle-class notions of upbringing such as formal education and artistic interests.
The film is definitely worth seeing just for the way the narrative is constructed to fully incorporate the audience in the diegesis.