Alternative History of Jesus: Episode 2 Surely we have all born witness to the Monkey Jesus* that now adorns a flaky bit of plaster in the Santuario de Nuestra Señora de la Misericordia, a quiet church nestled in the western corner of Zaragoza. Once a fairly prosaic fresco in the mode of ecce homo, an amateur […]
From Notes on the Cinematographer: Accustom the public to divining the whole of which they are given only a part. Make people diviners. Make them desire it. Be as ignorant of what you are going to catch as is a fisherman of what is at the end of his fishing rod. (The fish that arises […]
“Models. What they lose in apparent prominence during the shooting, they gain in depth and truth on the screen. It is the flattest and dullest parts that have in the end the most life.” – Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer
If you’re hoping for a horror movie, Zombie will disappoint. Even seemingly climactic scenes mystify rather than thrill: they pay off only in mood and a slow accumulation of character detail. Eventually, even the basic narrative seem to dissipate. Forced to fill in narrative gaps by intuition, we must assemble scraps of dialogue and details of behaviour into our best guess about what’s going on – a narrative strategy that forces us to “lean in” to the story, heightening our attention and tuning us to nuance, atmosphere, suggestion. However much we succeed in making sense of the story on repeat viewings, we’re left with unsettling questions, unsure we’ll ever have the full story. Kind of like life.
Psychologically complex, genuinely sexy, hauntingly sad – and when it comes to the creepy stuff, Cat People plays for keeps. Tourneur’s aren’t called “supernatural thrillers” for nothing: the films are both thrilling and theological. The supernatural is rendered spiritual, otherworldliness is grounded in the everyday world, and sin and the human condition are taken seriously.