Word: chiaroscuro
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Filmed in handsome chiaroscuro and with an austere camera zest, this Russian film makes for a poignant humanist fable. So does the story of its making and suppression. Writer-Director Alexander Askoldov finished his film in 1967. But the Soviet authorities, accusing Askoldov of "promoting Zionism and . . . imperialist chauvinism," shelved Commissar, and Askoldov has never made another picture. Only last year, as glasnost was opening the door of artistic freedom, was the director able to free his kidnaped film. Commissar won a Silver Bear at the 1988 Berlin Film Festival, though the Soviet press neglected to mention it. A true...
Well, yes. The colors are dismal. The film is distorted. The director's intentions are trashed. It is true that most old films are junk anyway, so colorizing them would turn dank junk into juiced-up junk. It is also true that watching Casablanca for the chiaroscuro lighting rather than the dialogue is a bit like buying Playboy for the articles. The charge of philistinism is slightly overdrawn. But, on the whole, only slightly...
...monitor in a 7-Eleven store. You could find the proceedings funny or tedious; Jarmusch was too hip to care. He does have an eye, though, and aided by Cinematographer Robby Muller he makes Down by Law a ravishing shadow play. A canoe knifes through a tapioca swamp; the chiaroscuro that swathes a prostitute's body shows her proud and pouting; the long, matching faces of Lurie and Co-Star Tom Waits catch the furtive light like desanctified El Grecos...
...morning, the dryness of leaves in the evening: nothing is fixed in a schema. Constable became convinced that he must overcome the stasis that convention and idealism produce in art: his project would then be, as he put it, "to arrest the more abrupt and transient appearances of the Chiaroscuro in Nature . . . to give 'to one brief moment, caught from fleeting time' a lasting and sober existence...
...actress on whose life and perplexing death the film is based, Veronika is an aging movie star on the way down and out. For Veronika, the '40s were all beautiful music and the caress of a soft-focus lens; the '50s are jangly cowboy songs and cruel chiaroscuro. Propelled by her screenwriter husband (who fades out of his own picture), her producer (who finds younger actresses for his casting couch), her neurologist (who ladles out morphine) and a curious reporter (who cannot escape the lure of decadence), Veronika travels down Sunset Boulevard to a dead end. Fassbinder...