Art House (Every Other) Tuesday #94

Kaili Blues (2015)

Hey all,

I hope some of you got to enjoy Kaili Blues. Laden with poetry readings, the film declares its enigmatic nature from the start. Structured very much like his subsequent feature, Long Day's Journey Into Night, Kaili Blues revolves around a 40+ minute unbroken take. Chen's need to reconcile his past and make right the present is thrown into the subconscious realm of this long suspended sequences. Rather than resolving these narrative threads in this altered space, they reverberate, each element warping the dream space in unexpected ways.

While sparsely plotted, Bi Gan loads his waking dream with an array of elements. Wild men who cause car accidents; a gangster whose son was buried alive; a boy who's obsessed with clocks. These ideas flow through the film like its poetry. There's no single element to hang a story on, rather a mix of feelings that bounce between longing and foreboding. Though I'm sure every viewing is different, I came away with the sense that life is mostly dreamlike in its nature and any attempt to bend it is as futile as trying to dream a perfect dream. So if you're into winding misty roads this one's for you.

                                                "They only danced. Never talked."

This week we're jumping from dreamlike to dreamlike. This week we're watching Luis Buñuel's '62 offering: The Exterminating Angel

You can see a trailer here:

While I know no label to place them under, artists like Bi Gan, David Lynch, Apichatpong Weerasethakul all produce dreamlike works with (sometimes) utterly opaque narratives. Their work seems to strive towards something unknowable; dreams and memories permeate their films and characters find themselves in worlds adjacent to our own but operate outside of logic. So what a better place to go to next in our cinema exploration than an art movement very interested in dreams and the unconscious: surrealism! I've never seen a feature film from any surrealist artist and I'm very curious to see what similarities there are, or aren't, with these modern, dreamy tales. Let's find out together!

As always, if you want to join me to chat Tuesday after watching the film let me know. This is book club style so anyone who has seen this flick can't join the conversation.

You can find the list of all our Art House Films watched so far here.

Sincerely,
Jesse Sperling
jessesperling.com
@sperlingsilver