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pistol opera
Last night I watched Pistol Opera, a new-ish film by director Seijun Suzuki, probably best known for his assassin thriller Branded to Kill (1967).
Branded to Kill is stylish and weird, but it's positively traditionalist in comparison to Pistol Opera, which does to the genre of the "assassin thriller" what Godard's Alphaville does to the genres of science fiction and noir. Both Suzuki's film and Godard's take systems of American filmic iconography and subject them to a radical cultural reworking; both films formalize and ritualize their "action" to the point where it begins to register as purely gestural, something more akin to dance or experimental theatre; both are disjunctive, beautifully shot, thrillingly strange. Labels: media commentary |
Sunday, August 22, 2004
8:35 PM
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