Word: collard
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...William Winborn's criticism of Cyril Coallard's "Savage Nights" ("Dramatic, Passionate, Mad `Saving Nights' Scintillates," movie review, April 14, 1994 is, If I read him correctly, itself perhaps an example of our current level of spiritual consciousness which Collard's him tries hard to itself break through...
...film's end, as Windborn recognizes, is more rough sketch than any full rendering of a new dawn of wholeness (that sea, that night, that survey form land's ending of life's ending) these cliches perhaps more pointer to epiphany than believable rendering of it--I fell Collard's intent, even though never quite reached, makes necessary a rather more generous critique of "Savage Nights" that Winborn's eventual and, as I read him regretful dismissal...
There are so many elements in the film which Winborn sensitively and individually apprehends, such as his suspicion that Collard "believes Jean (Genet's) quotation `only violence can out an end to men's (violent?) way," as somehow as explanation of why "We get to see plenty of violence--domestic, sexual, racial" in the film. He describes some of these scenes, correctly says they have been deliberately chosen precisely for their shocking violence--but then does not connect these scenes to that Genet quotation even though the recognizes Collard likely somehow must...
Perhaps that "breakthrough to a new level of consciousness" might more fully explain Collard's use of violence...
From the beginning, we see Jean's careless sexual activities, and as emotionally-charged as AIDS is, one cannot help but believe that on some level he must assume responsibility for the God-complex which leads him to play with the lives of others. Collard shows Jean having sex with random men in abandoned buildings, picking up people on the street and engaging in his fetish, being urinated on. Squeamishness is what Collard is counting on in the viewer, but the eventual emotion evoked is not pathos but repulsion...