Smashbomb

"The Mirror was the closest cinema came to poetry. Tarkovsky abandoned narrative and mixed up different perspectives, stitching together the personal and the historical in a totally unique way. He made some other powerful films, but for me The Mirror is the one I keep going back to for air and inspiration. Its collage, fractured-mirror approach and refusal of anything literal and linear make sure the film will always keep its power and mystery, not unlike Eliot’s Waste Land. I have a problem these days getting through Tarkovsky’s more linear films, with these long, slow tracking shots that have spawned so many imitators (mainly male directors who love to exercise their power over a captive audience for hours). The other Tarkovsky film I can watch repeatedly and keep discovering anew is Ivan’s Childhood."

Source

Kudos

Sloane Crosley recommended Fanny and Alexander (1982) in Movies (curated)

Fanny and Alexander (1982)

1982 | Drama, International

8.3

(3 Ratings)

Movie Favorite

"This is generally known as Bergman’s most personal film, a complete masterpiece and triumphant study of childhood and the human condition, but I came to it by accident. This is a bit embarrassing, but I was about fifteen and I thought it was the movie adaptation of Salinger’s Franny and Zooey. To a highly untrained teenager’s eye, there are just enough similarities—like messed-up bourgeois family dynamics as seen through the prism of siblings—that I must have thought, “Well, I guess the whole thing just takes place over Christmas now. And they changed the names. And everyone’s Swedish.” Best cinematic mix-up of my life. Even better than that time in college when I drunkenly watched the second disc of Magnolia first and thought it made total sense."

Source

Kudos

Sjon recommended Summer Book in Books (curated)

Summer Book

Tove Jansson, Esther Freud | 2013 | Fiction & Poetry

(0 Ratings)

Book Favorite

"As counterweight to the weird and eerie elements in many of the books I have selected I propose the sweet and kind Summer Book. Tove Jansson’s fictionalized memoir about the summers she spent as a girl with her grandmother on a tiny island in the archipelago off Finland’s south coast is a wonderful ode to the curiosity of childhood and the wisdom of old age. In a precise, lyrical language that never gives in to easy sentiments Jansson allows us to take part in the summer days with the girl and the grandmother as one is discovering nature for the first time and the other is contemplating its vulnerability. It is sunshine in the shape of a book — for the shadowy part of Jansson’s oeuvre one must look to her children stories about the Moomins."

Source

Kudos

ClareR (6129 KP) rated The Complete Persepolis in Books

Sep 24, 2019

The Complete Persepolis

Marjane Satrapi | 2003 | Biography, Comics & Graphic Novels

8.8

(5 Ratings)

Book Rating

This was so good. Persepolis tells the story of the authors childhood in Iran, the troubles that the country went through, the war, violence, religious extremism, and political upheavals. It tells of what it was like to grow up amidst all of these things, and what it was like to be sent away on your own, as a young teenager, to be educated in a ‘free’ country (in this case, Austria). It’s not over-dramatised, it’s more of a ‘this is how it was’. The pictures add so much to the story as well. What started out as a book that my son was asked to read for school, turned into a book that I read when he wasn’t reading it - and I think I enjoyed it far more 🤷🏼‍♀️