My favourite short film of 2015, Isabella Morra is a 22-minute epic by French newcomer Isabel Pagliai. It world-premiered—amid minimal-to-zero fanfare—at the gigantic International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (Idfa) in November, as part of the 'Paradocs' sidebar devoted to edgy/experimental material, mainly shorts. "Cinema verité portrait of a French suburb that demonstrates how the threat of deadly adult violence lurks below the surface of child’s play," the Idfa website drily noted. "Isabella Morra", wrote Paradocs programmer Joost Daamen, "was the daughter of an early-16th-century Italian baron. When he left his wife and eight children to amuse himself at the French court, Isabella fell under the authority of her two narrow-minded, jealous brothers. They decided she was getting too familiar with their neighbour and punished her by death. Six years later, Isabella’s sonnets and songs were published, which made her into a well-known Renaissance poet. "Twentieth-century novelist...
- 12/30/2015
- by Neil Young
- MUBI
"Inspired by the idiosyncratic personality of author, theorist, and artist Pierre Klossowski whose densely cerebral erotic fiction was influenced by such notorious literary figures as the Marquis de Sade and the excommunicated surrealist Georges Bataille, as well as Klossowski's final novel La Baphomet, The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting is an indelibly haunting, endlessly fascinating, and maddeningly abstruse composition on Pirandellian ambiguity and the inherent subjectivity of perspective. Raoul Ruiz's ingenious use of baroque, compositional tableaux vivants that intrinsically meld static art and corporeal physicality creates a blurred delineation between reality and fiction that, in turn, conflates the multi-layered existential relativity between subject and viewer, operating as both an aesthetic evaluation of the paintings and as a psychological portrait of the eccentric logic behind the conspiracy-obsessed collector. (Note a similar narrative permutation in Ruiz's surreal whimsical fable, Love Torn in Dream.) Ruiz further fuses art and reality by visually...
- 8/27/2011
- MUBI
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