Word: franz
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...that Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz opens with a man's release from prison, and chronicles the difficulty he encounters in adjusting to the outside world. After taking part in a 15-hour marathon showing of the 1979 made-for-TV miniseries, one can certainly relate to protagonist Franz Biberkopf's temporary detachment from reality...
Last week's Thursday night session included Band of Outsiders. A gangster story with a twist, it tells the story of two con-men, Franz and Arthur, and their attempt to work over a young girl, Odile (played by the one and only Anna Karina). One of Godard's lesser known films, it nonetheless embodies the curious mix between word and image, humor and tragic romance, that is so very Godard. Characters are lonely but have no desire to connect to those around them. Awkwardness only occurs within familiar situations. Dialogue is impulsive and witty...
Godard's deep-voiced narrator even instructs us on how to react and read the images and characters of his film by entering into the film periodically, creating cinematic parentheses. The narrative voice enters, for example, when the three main characters are at a dance club. Odile, Franz and Arthur move across the floor in a beautiful synchrony. In this way we are brought into the mental worlds of the three main characters. Odile wonders whether the men who flank her on either side notice her breasts bobbing beneath her schoolgirl sweater. Arthur imagines kissing Odile. And the ever-slick...
Later in the film, the three protagonists discuss the meaning of silence while seated in a nightclub cafe. "How long is one minute of silence?" Franz wonders aloud. And in response, the narrator/director cuts the sound off, leaving us to our own thoughts...
...this deeply implanted instinct for the spiritual and the visionary. Sometimes it was drenched in a yearning for nature as a source of metaphor, as in the pantheistic paintings of Arshile Gorky; sometimes its sources lay hidden in the unconscious, as with Pollock. Except for de Kooning and Franz Kline, most of the Abexers--Gorky, Pollock, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, William Baziotes, Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb, Clyfford Still--saw the socially grounded activist art of the 1930s, whether Nativist like the Regionalism of Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton or left-wing Social Realist, as provincial, shallow and irrelevant. "Poor...