Excursions into Essential Cinema 301 reviews by Bruce Fenn 190335

  Come and see (1985) a true horrifying look at war This review will be of Elem Klimov’s 1985 anti-war masterpiece Come and See , which even the co-wr iter Ales Adamovich admitted he couldn’t watch (Hoberman 2020). This review will argue why Come and See is one of the best war films, through Bordwell, Thompson and Smith’s (2017:61) evaluation criteria: Coherence, intensity of effect, complexity and originality. Film summary: Come and See follows a fourteen-year-old partisan that is separated from his troop in the mid st of the 1943 Nazi invasion of Byelorussia (Ebert 2010). Coherence: The film is both unified and disjointed. Everything follows the narrative, but then there are shots that would cut away from the main focus as The cinema cartography (2017) points out, but this doesn’t run the unity. Instead it enhances it. The whole film shows how Flyora views the world and what he thinks he is seeing and these cutaways show what Flyora is imagining what is happening ar...

  Un Chien Andalou (1929), a call to murder. One way to describe Un Chien Andalou is that it is a Freudian fever dream and like Freud, it’s obsessed with sex and groping women (Crews 2017). This review will look at the film through Bordwell, Thompson and Smith’s (2017:61) evaluation criteria: Coherence, Intensity of effect, Complexity and Originality. But first the plot: Un Chien Andalou begins with a man sharpening a straight razor that leads to one of film’s iconic shot: a woman’s eye being cut open, setting the scene for the rest of the film which is men’s sadomasochistic tendencies towards woman (Stent 2014) and leads into a narrative about a man who with all his might tries to fight (symbolically and literary) the societal rules that hold him back as he attempts to rape a woman. Coherence: The film is all over the place giving it that surrealist dreamlike quality, aimed to “replicate their (dreams) very processes through illogical, irrational disruptions and disturb...