Rosemary’s Baby (1968, Roman Polanski)

Between the devil and the deep blue sea (of dreams?), indeed.

Un long dimanche de fiançailles (2004, Jean-Pierre Jeunet)

The shape of revenge in darkness.

Un long dimanche de fiançailles (2004, Jean-Pierre Jeunet)

The sound of waves crashing against a lovers’ tryst.

Un long dimanche de fiançailles (2004, Jean-Pierre Jeunet). MMM: “Manech aime Mathilde.”

The romance of piggy-back rides and church bells.

Un long dimanche de fiançailles (2004, Jean-Pierre Jeunet). A time of lightness and darkness, and the shadows in between.

I love Jeunet’s magnificent landscape-shots. The worlds he constructs are located precisely in that liminal space between lightness and darkness, but also between La Belle Époque and post-apocalyptic pastiche-ruins.

Un long dimanche de fiançailles (2004, Jean-Pierre Jeunet)

A time of waiting. A time of war. A time of winding staircases of memories. A time of hope and solitude.

Une femme est une femme (1961, Jean-Luc Godard)

My second submission to Criterion’s photo box contest.

Repulsion (1965, Roman Polanski)

My first submission to Criterion’s photo box contest.

Das weisse Band (2009, Michael Haneke)

Haneke’s genre-bending films continue with Das weisse Band and its explicit reference to the tropes of the fear in and of small towns and children as bad seeds.

It Takes A Village: Das weisse Band (2009, Michael Haneke)

Haneke ups the ante in terms of his “clinical realism” in Das weisse band by taking away colour altogether. Sure, black-and-white makes things “of the past,” which makes sense since the film takes place in the 1910s. But the film’s texture and tone of black-and-white is paler, cooler, and allows no room for nostalgia that black-and-white images can provoke.

When I say clinical, I don’t necessarily mean that the film is devoid of emotion. On the contrary, the film grips you by the throat so that by film’s end, you’re stunned and speechless. The increasing violence that one witnesses is an insidious kind of horror, which slowly dawns upon the spectator. The horror is all the more insidious because for the town, the very surface order of things is the priority, nothing seems to be changing, or so a majority of the inhabitants want to think. The force of the facade, of the house, as a shield against contamination or rumour is powerful.

A tough visual, narrative tightrope to walk and cross: clinical yet affective and powerful; a claustrophobic atmosphere, tense and taut with each touch, yet marked by the everyday-ness of it all.