From: Peter Snowdon (email suppressed)
Date: Wed Oct 10 2007 - 15:30:56 PDT
The most radical film I've seen recently is Eric Rohmer's 'Amours d'Astree et de Celadon'. It takes a lot of conventions I thought I knew inside out, and uses them to produce an effect -- emotional, intellectual, aesthetic, call it what you want -- quite unlike anything I would have associated with them, or indeed anything I am aware of ever having experienced before, in any context, in or outside of a movie theatre.
A short list of all time greats which perform similar feats would have to include Chaplin's City Lights, Vigo's L'Atalante, Dreyer's Gertrud, Garrel's Liberte la nuit, Bergman's Sarabande, and large parts of the oeuvre of Renoir, Lubitsch, Resnais and the Straubs. All of them took an apparently innocuous working tradition of representation -- theatrical, poetic, 'avant-garde' -- and found within it something deeply subversive which none of its previous users had suspected was there.
Peter 'A story with a beginning, a middle and the end can be radical too' Snowdon
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