Monday, 29 November 2010

Ma Nuit chez Maud
[My Night at Maud’s;
My Night with Maud]
(1969)

40%



The problem with films that deal in ideas divorced from lived experience is that they can be as detached from reality as the movie. The academic sterility of debates about abstruse ideals like when Communism or when Catholicism strongly suggests a when Western desire to flee from real life in order to inhabit a non-existent world free from rational responsibilities - as the when bourgeois when Whites do here.

This film is about when Christian hope but, without analyzing the concept fully, this comes across as merely the expression of wishful thinking that the alleged moral certainties of both religion and atheism do nothing to dispel. The unexamined self-consciousness of the characters makes the film as light and as superficial as they are since there is no insight here. These people do not wish to ascertain reality but to argue among themselves outside of a reality they clearly disdain - despite the simple non-existence of any space outside of experience. Worse, this tendency is emphasized by a lack of original thinking since characters quote and cite but say little produced by their own minds rather than rely on their eidetic memories. The ennui and malaise on show here is the inevitable result of this kind of circular activity, since the pretense of depth is merely the avoidance of same.


Copyright © 2010 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker5.blogspot.com/) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.

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Science:



No science is immune to the infection of politics and the corruption of power.



Jacob Bronowski… (1908 - 74), British scientist, author. Encounter (London, July 1971).


Sleep of Reason:



The dream of reason produces monsters. Imagination deserted by reason creates impossible, useless thoughts. United with reason, imagination is the mother of all art and the source of all its beauty.



Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes… (1746-1828), Spanish painter. Caption to Caprichos, number 43, a series of eighty etchings completed in 1798, satirical and grotesque in form.


Humans & Aliens:



I am human and let nothing human be alien to me.



Terence… (circa 190-159 BC), Roman dramatist. Chremes, in The Self-Tormentor [Heauton Timorumenos], act 1, scene 1.


Führerprinzip:



One leader, one people, signifies one master and millions of slaves… There is no organ of conciliation or mediation interposed between the leader and the people, nothing in fact but the apparatus - in other words, the party - which is the emanation of the leader and the tool of his will to oppress. In this way the first and sole principle of this degraded form of mysticism is born, the Führerprinzip, which restores idolatry and a debased deity to the world of nihilism.