Blindness (2008)『ブラインドネス』
Directed by Fernando Meirelles

This film, based on a novel by José Saramago, depicts a world overcome by a highly infectious virus that leaves people instantly blind.  Like Golding’s Lord of the Flies, this film uses this premise to present an exploration of human nature that is horrifying and deeply moving in turns.  With unflinching eyes, it examines the ways that we as humans interact, choosing to hate, hurt, and love. 

Superbly acted, supremely powerful, and beautifully filmed, this film left me with the rare feeling that I have seen something entirely new.  As of tonight, I am adding this film to my list of top ten films of all time.

The Joy of Books (Filmed in Toronto)

XXY (2007)

This Argentine film, written and directed by Lucía Puenzo, is one of the most sensitive and lovely explorations of the intersex experience I have seen. This film does a beautiful job of showing the tremendous pressures and tensions that gender-related expectations place on people who do not fit ordinary categories of “male” and “female,” as well as their families.  At the same time, it also explores the power and drama of waking up to one’s own sexual desires, especially in non-heteronormative situations.

Incidentally, one out of 650 people usually classified as male at birth has “XXY syndrome” (also called Klinefelter’s syndrome), in which a person has chromosomes of both genders and may develop some secondary sexual characteristics usually associated with women.  (Consider those odds!  Most of us know enough people that the odds are we DO know someone in this situation, whether they have chosen to share this with us or not.)  Clearly, gender is not binary—i.e. we are not just male or female.  Society ought to challenge the assumptions, so prevalent in our language and our society, that there are only two, and those determine the ways that we should live and act.  Why do we need gender categories anyway? 

Gaspard Noé: Enter the Void (2009)

This evening, I watched Argentinian-born, French director Gaspard Noé’s film Enter the Void, which was set in the dark underworld of Tokyo.  The story is about a brother and sister from New York—two people broken by their traumatic past—who find themselves in the drug-filled underworld of Tokyo, where they are swept along in dark currents that flow too fast for any of them. 

Visually, it is utterly stunning film that grabs the viewer, right from the ultra-aggressive, almost assaulting, high-speed credits that shout at the viewer from the screen.  The main character dies early in the film, but this is only the beginning of the story.  Much of the film has us wandering through his patchwork of memories, interlaced with ultra-psychadelic visions of Tokyo—both real and imagined—as he floats through Bardo, the “intermediate state” described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. The story is given an unusual architecture as the patched-together, overlapping memories bring together a portrait of a traumatized young man, obsessed with the mother he had lost during his youth, and the complicated ways that this plays out in the relationships with his sister and friends in Tokyo. 

Certain scenes in this film, especially the many abstract scenes, are so stunningly beautiful that I found myself hoping that they would never end.  The US trailer quotes a New York Times review that states that the director was an artist trying to show us something we have never seen before.  With Noé, we are breaking new cinematic territory. 

Len LYE (1958)
Free Radicals

This hypnotic experimental film, made by the avant-garde New Zealander Len Lye, was made by scratching the surface of each frame of film in order to produce these rhythmic dances. 

This 1953 animated adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” filled with its eerie angles, dark shadows, glaring intensity, and fragmentary narration utterly terrified me when I saw it on TV when I was around ten years old.  It gave me nightmares for days, and yet I tuned into the same channel that had showed it over and over, hoping to see it again!  When I found it again on YouTube, I was astounded at how vividly I had remembered it for all of these years! 

One of the shots that lodged in my ten-year old memory most was the final hand that suddenly appears in the frame of the screen, pressing up against the door of the prison cell.  This little touch puts the viewer in the position of the confined madman, who is looking out of his cell.  I probably had never encountered that filmic technique before, and I found it terrifying that the director could force the viewer into certain positions, especially ones as scary as being locked away as a madman! 

According to the comments from the person who posted on YouTube, it was the first cartoon to be X-rated, for adults only, in Great Britain under the British Board of Film Censors classification system.   Despite my hopes to see this again, I never did see it on TV again.  I wonder if there weren’t too many complaints from parents, who found it too frightening and intense for a kid’s channel.