Word: veronika
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...fortuitous that one of the animators for Poets on Film was Veronika Soul, whose own film in the show, How the Hell Are You?, gives the audience a chance to take in her fast, ironical style. Her addition to last weekend's program, Tales from the Vienna Woods, based on the letters of Sigmund Freud, was equally eerie and compelling and funny. Her films, like Vera Neubauer's Animation for Live Action, are disturbing collages of live action film, rotoscoping, photography, freehand drawing, and photography of photography, with radical feminism and black humor. Soul's How the Hell...
...point, Veronika turns towards the audience and says, "In a bad film, that is what would be called the message." The implication is that only bad films have messages. Eustache made his film bulletproof against interpretation; it succeeds in finally smothering the impulse to find a pattern, while giving us just enough on the surface--of profanity, wit, and nudity--to keep our interest. There is an air of parody about parts of the film--Alexandre, for example, dresses precisely like Eustache himself. In the middle of her tearful confessional Veronika rises from the floor and slyly mocks...
...FILM'S FALSE ending shows this ambiguity best: After Veronika's monologue, Alexandre leaves to drive her home; and Marie is left alone, lying on her bed, her head against the wall. She puts on a song by Marlene Dietrich and when the song is over the audience expects the film to be over: Veronika has just delivered a devastating judgment about the lives of Alexandre and Marie; she seems determined to walk out of their lives. Instead, Eustache returns to Alexandre and Veronika and the audience titters in annoyance that the film isn't finished yet, that an easy...
...bulk of the film portrays that old life with Marie and Veronika and blocks all avenues of escape. The three characters live almost entirely at night, inside the same two or three rooms and the same two or three cafes, imprisoned by the motifs of their decadence: whisky, cigarettes, Proust, Dietrich. Any attempt to get out of this claustrophobic world, like marriage, seems like just another manipulation of unreality. The only thing that makes the acceptance of marriage seem so important is that it is discussed at the end of the film, but Eustache has built The Mother...
...double-take shock of recognition that he does. Eustache's characters have lost the knack of establishing decent relationships with each other, but he needs time to work through to failure all their varying attempts. By the time we have spent three and a half hours with Alexandre and Veronika we know that a marriage between them would be an impossible joke; after only an hour and a half, though, we might have been able to accept such an event as a "character reversal...