Is That All There Is?
by Giampaolo Bianconi
The White Ribbon, dir. Michael Haneke (2009)
A friend once told me: “keep with highbrow, but distrust respectable.” I’ve always found it a useful dictum. When thinking about Michael Haneke’s latest film—the one that took the Palme D’Or at Cannes—nothing comes to mind more than respectable. The film manages to achieve a level of nauseating respectability on par with Schindler’s List, featuring pensive black and white photography, truthfully cinematic long takes, eastern European austerity, classical music, and a self-important relationship to historical events. These clichéd cues, somehow, seem to have been enough to satisfy hoards of hungry film critics around the world who appreciate mature, elegant, and adult filmmaking from Haneke. (more…)
A Short History of 20th Century Paranoia
by Giampaolo Bianconi
Shutter Island, dir. Martin Scorsese (2010)
As Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo approach Shutter Island by ferry, what strikes us is the sky: it goes on forever in a way that anyone from Boston knows is impossible, and the artificiality of the colors and the actors makes it clear that this isn’t Changeling or Schindler’s List. This is the past of film, not a film of the past, and it’s clear that Scorsese is taking his cues from Samuel Fuller’s camp experiments as much as Alfred Hitchcock’s psychological obsessions, tossed with a dose of Hiroshima Mon Amour. (more…)