67. Trento Film Festival

A bunch of society's rejects (drug addicts, AIDS and mental institutions' patients, prisoners, homeless people) are asked to read or recite ages of the Book of Revelation. You're not ready for this, no one is. In framing these people, Dal Bosco (recently ed away) has the uncompromising and radical gaze of Pasolini and Brakhage, the camera slowly and obsessively swinging left and right, again and again, while through their mouths God himself is unleashing his rage…

I decided to try out a review in chapters for this second viewing of The Return, in which I'll update this entry as I watch the show's Parts. Each update will include some thoughts/sensations about the Part I just watched and will probably discuss some plot points, so I'm afraid there are gonna be spoilers (although I doubt that there are that many people who haven't watched this yet).

I have the feeling that this second time will be much…

Sort of variation on the theme of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde - the duality of men, the innate evil inside them and so on - filtered through the pseudo-professional psychiatric/psychoanalytic lens recently popularised by Psycho. Not only that, The Mask also draws on the whole voodoo mythology, both in of how the mask itself works and the primitive quality of the rituals in the visions. The surreal nightmares are obviously the most fascinating parts of the film, not…

"No one ever tells him what to be, only what not to be; boys become boys, in large part, by not being girls. [...] Later, he will be with women, and feel what he has been robbed of."

The creation of the male gender (there's a conflation in the film between sex and gender, its discourse tackling the traditional/patriarchal production of gender roles) is for once seen as a result of negative repression and the traumas provoked by the always-already…