Montage

Terowie is a small mid-north town in South Australia, today it would be seen as a ghost town. From the heady days of nearly 2000 residents today, just over 100 people call it home.  But it is such an interesting town that I urge you to visit if you are ever in the area.  The buildings in the main street are a snapshot of a 19th-century Australian town.   In researching my blog I came to understand what a remarkable town Terowie was and continues to be.  Very much a community and seems to continue today.  But it is the 'community' heart of Terowie that made it different than other towns during the 1920s through to the 1960s when they came together to 'put on a show' for each other.  That is what I love about picture theatres the social heart of them in a city, in a suburb in a town.  Where people come together, whether it be strangers or fellow townsfolk.  Going to the pictures was and continues to be a very social outing.   https://...

The humanist man is a construct that divides human and non-human. It is the conviction that humans exist ‘either outside of nature or above it’ (Gilebbi, 2019 p. 357).  Gilebbi suggests that The Great Beauty (2013) is an allegory of the crisis of the Humanist Man by implying that Jep is searching for a posthumanist subjectivity (2019, p. 356).  Jep is searching for his place in the world that surrounds him. He is distanced from the ecosphere, this is shown by placing Jep up high above the city at the party, at his house, etc. And when he walks through the city he watches as others such as the nun who is collecting the oranges, appear to become one with her environment, as she almost vanishes into the tree. About 1 hour and 35 minutes into the film Jep asks Arturo to ‘make me vanish too’ and Arturo replies, ‘it’s just a trick’. The giraffe scene harks back to the zoetrope, an optical toy of the late 19th century, and a precursor to film and film cameras. The zoetrope gave the ...

  I watched this film for the first time many years ago, pre my studies and I will say back then I really didn't appreciate it.  I found the goats humorous, who wouldn't? But I didn't understand what Frammartino was saying, and that was all my fault, not his.   This is a sublime piece of filmmaking.  It tells the story of the four circles of life. Human, non-human, organic and mineral.  It places humankind, not at the centre of the story, but rather just one of the parts of the story. And that is how we are in life, we are not the centre of the story, we are simply just one of the parts of the story.  But with all of our intelligence we somehow don't realise this, well some of us don't, a good percentage sadly.  It is mostly set and filmed in the south of Italy in a little village called Caulonia.  Le Quattro Volte (2010) is a non-anthropocentric film, The director, Michelangelo Frammartino, by not placing humankind at the centre of his film...

De Sica was one of the great Italian directors of the neorealism era. He directed one of my favourite films, Bicycle Thieves (1948), and the stunning and heartbreaking Umberto. D (1952) (some say the last true neorealism film). Both those films pull at the heartstrings, but De Sica knew when enough was enough and was never over-sentimental. He directed   The Roof  in 1957. It contains many of the elements of neorealism. But it sits outside of the dates that most film historians and scholars agree that true neorealism exists. In The Roof, the main protagonists struggle to survive, struggle to get ahead.   It is a simple premise.  A young married couple just trying to get not only find a house to live in but one that will afford them some privacy. They start off sharing a house with his parents, his younger sister and his elder sister, her husband and their family of several children. They share their bedroom with his parents and his younger sister. Eventua...

 This technology has already been used in film production. This brings back projection to a whole new level and I can imagine for some camera operators they would be itching to try,  ICVFX . I do wonder how this impacts actors though, I would think this be better than working in front of green screens.  I would think it would give the actor more to feed off so to speak.

I've recently studied Italian cinema at University.  We watched several films with an eco-cinema gaze on the films. We watched some amazing films and I have to say it was one of my favourite courses that I did, except for the last essay (I struggled with that). The films that I watched are The Four Times (Le Quattro Volte) Director: Michelangelo Frammartino, The Consquences of Love (Le Conseguenze dell'amore) Director Paolo Sorrentino, The Wonders (Le maraviglie) Director: Alice Rohrwacher, The Great Beauty (La grande bellezza) Director Paolo Sorrentino , Basilcata Coast to Coast - Director Rocco Papaleo, I am Love (Lo soon L'amore) Director: Luca Guadagnino and Gemorrah (Gomorro) Director:Matteo Garron. And I loved each and every one. One of the films led me to a film that I hadn't watched. Basilicata Coast to Coast is a road trip comedy about a group of musicians and a journalist that travel by foot from one side of the region of Basilicata, Italy, to the othe...

 I do, from time to time.  Obviously in films that have been made using a language that I don't know (that is every language but English,  I am sad to say).  But have you found yourself turning on the subtitles when you watch something that is in your native language? Apparently, we are not alone. This is an excellent doco that I found on Youtube, that I think may go some way to answer why we need to.

Where do I start with this one?   Again I don't want to give too much away, but this is a film that will stay with me for a very long time, a very, very long time.  I do not go to the movies very much, and for someone with a BA  double majoring in Media and Screen Culture, I know the irony.  I love watching films, I especially love movies that are about the human experience.  And this one is certainly about the human experience.   Now, before I go forward I want to warn spoilers may be lurking ahead. The Banshees of Inisherin (2022)  is set in 1923 and from the island of Inisherin, you can see the impact of the civil war across the bay. (which the film narrative is a metaphor for). The film starts as a comedy, albeit a dark comedy. But to me, this film at about the halfway point turns into a horror film, with Colm (Brendan Gleeson) as the chief protagonist in the storyline. From about the halfway point I was sitting on the edge of my seat jus...

Let's deal with the elephant in the room first. I don't really remember why I stopped posting here. I enjoyed doing this blog and will continue to post from now onwards. Since my last post, I have been studying towards my BA in Media and Screen Studies(which is so close to completion I can taste it). I also started another blog on another platform, https://sapicturetheatres.wixsite.com/sapicturetheatres which is about the history of picture theatres in South Australia. It's a work in progress. I aim to post about once a month on there, so if you are interested please have a look. So to quote Austin Powers "I'm back baby". Let's now talk about the film, and what a film it is. The Consequences of Love is a 2004 film directed by Paolo Sorrentino. Sorrentino is a masterful Italian director who if you don't know his name, you may know some of his work,   The Great Beauty (2013),  Youth (2015), and  The Young Pope (2016). He has also done a number of...