Monthly Archive for November, 2011

Matthias Stork: Chaos Cinema/Classical Cinema, Part Two

November 21, 2011 in John’s Bailiwick
5 Comments

Florencia Colucci and her lantern, “La Casa Muda.”

On Halloween night, this year’s Uruguayan entry for the foreign film Oscar was screened at the Academy’s Goldwyn Theater. Merely fortuitous, or more likely, a programming wag’s “in joke,” La Casa Muda (The Silent House) is a tense horror film of the “girl trapped in a haunted house” sub-genre. Its defining marker is that it conforms to the even smaller genre of films photographed, like The Russian Ark, in a single, uncut shot (or so the distributor’s ad copy and critics’ gullibility would have you believe.) I knew none of this promotional copy beforehand, but it did become clear with the opening long tracking shot starting from a parked car, walking through a wooded field, around the front of a farmhouse and finally into the house’s dark recesses, as it follows a young girl, Laura, played by Florencia Colucci. Clearly, this was not going to be a chaos cinema movie of 3000 plus edits; I decided to try to discern the few cutting points. This was difficult as the camera cleverly panned into blackness or used swish pans several times to hide cut points. In an email, the film’s producer, Gustavo Rojas, confirmed to me that there are only a dozen shots in its 78 minutes running time. This is a film that owes much of its fear factor not only to the inky depths beyond Laura’s handheld lantern or its device of unfolding in real time, but (in the Bressonian sense that Matthias Stork talks about in his video essay) in the canny and dramatic use of ambient sound. A statement by director Gustavo Hernández cites the primacy of sound as a unifying factor:

Many years ago, when I was a child, I listened [to] a strange noise in my house attic, a soft noise but very clear, that paralyzed me completely. For many seconds that seemed hours, all of my senses were aware, trying to convince myself that [it] was only the wind pushing the window. I sharpened my ear and held my breath simply searching for the silence. It was a tiny experience that I perfectly remember; because in my memory it is the first time that I felt fear, different, raw, and basic.

Continue reading ‘Matthias Stork: Chaos Cinema/Classical Cinema, Part Two’

Matthias Stork: Chaos Cinema/Classical Cinema, Part One

November 7, 2011 in John’s Bailiwick
2 Comments

Matthias Stork is more likely to be found hunched over a research desk at the Academy’s Margaret Herrick Library than in the darker recesses of a multiplex cinema playing the latest Hollywood visual effects laden action flick. He is, after all, a graduate student in the Department of Film and Television at UCLA. He has an M.A. in Education from Goethe University, Frankfurt, in his native Germany. His current focus is on German expressionist films of the 1920s.

In the last decade of the silent era the Hollywood studios siphoned off many of the finest German filmmakers; the stream became a flood with the rise of National Socialism in 1933. It included director Fritz Lang and the great cinematographer Karl Freund, who had emigrated to the US in 1929. Several years earlier, German émigré F.W. Murnau’s first American film, Sunrise, was one of the high water marks of this great stream. But it is the lesser-known director, Paul Leni, who is the object of Stork’s current research. Leni had made the macabre Waxworks in 1924 Weimar Germany. In Hollywood, he directed only four films before an early death at age 44 in September of 1929. He seems a worthy figure for exegesis for a young German film scholar.

Matthias Stork at the Herrick Library, October 2011.

But here is the surprise. Stork’s real scholarly passion is the American action film, a genre that at first glance seems ill tailored for an academic suit. But one of the endearing qualities of German scholarship in science as well as in the arts is its ability to imprint an academic perspective on pop culture as easily as on philosophical ontology. Continue reading ‘Matthias Stork: Chaos Cinema/Classical Cinema, Part One’