morgan leigh.

The real genius of Upstream Color is that it is filmed in such a way that enhances this feeling of powerlessness, of radical presence. It is a film of immense beauty and little dialogue; it is a film that moves elliptically amongst its subjects and characters in ways that may not make perfect sense to our rational, thinking brains but that exerts a kind of terrifying pull on our unconscious psychologies. To watch Upstream Color is to subject yourself, as a viewer, to an experience you cannot control but that will impact you in ways you cannot possibly predict when you sit down in the theater. Like Kris, the audience member experiences something both psychological and, somehow, physical; most importantly, the experience is entirely out of the viewer’s control.

Read more: The Radical Present of Shane Carruth’s “Upstream Color”

I promise this is the last time I will post a link to this piece, but I wanted to remind everybody who hasn’t gotten a chance to see it yet to check the full release schedule: it’s opening in loads more cities today! GO SEE THIS MOVIE, and then you can read this (or, uh, not, as you so choose).

Carruth and Seimetz look enough alike, and Carruth’s camera spends enough time lingering close to each of their faces, that it would be difficult not to notice the similarity in their appearances. This, taken in conjunction with the similarity of their past experiences - which rewrote their psyches - and their progressive isolation from the the rest of the world, suggests that their are living out a kind of fated destiny, although their initial encounter was the result of chance. But instead of playing out patterns of a Freudian unconscious, the two of them are bound to something more recent and more literal.

Read more: The Radical Present of Shane Carruth’s “Upstream Color”

Bringing this back since Upstream Color is now playing in many more cities! The full release schedule is here. Once again: you probably should not read this until you have seen the movie.

Upstream Color is concerned with an almost radical presentness. In the first act, we watch as one of the film’s two main characters is systematically broken down, her identity erased and the entire context of her life scraped away, replaced by nothing but the now. The person Kris (Amy Seimetz) was before this violation does not matter to the movie, and soon does not matter even to Kris herself: all that matters is the trauma, an experience that she cannot remember but that we, the audience, have witnessed in full. This trauma is both psychological and excruciatingly, grotesquely physical: no part of her is left unscathed. She is thus reborn, in the middle of her adult life, as a nobody: savings gone, job gone, relationships gone, body compromised, she must find a way to live that somehow attains meaning in the absence of context.

Read more: The Radical Present of Shane Carruth’s “Upstream Color”

Once again: warning for spoilers! See the movie before reading this! Seriously. It’s out in New York now; here’s the full release schedule.

oldfilmsflicker:

The Thin Red Line, 1998 (dir. Terrence Malick)

That’s the problem with trouble. It always starts out as such fun.

(via interwar)

(Source: oldfilmsflicker)

- I was right.
- You were right. 

(via yesterdaysdreams)