Anodyne
Monday, February 05, 2007
 

Oh Death, Where Is Thy Sting?

Yet another context for ghosts: the opening credits and first scene of Lars Von Trier's Riget (aka The Kingdom). "Tiny signs of fatigue are appearing in the solid, modern edifice." Well, yes, exactly. Not to mention the director's gleeful shifts from uninflected realism to full-on techno-gothic noir (those white hands, pushing up through the grave's wet soil; the wall of blood; that explosive Kraut-rock score, packed with orchestral oomph and flourishes). And the phantom ambulance. The short post-credits sequence with the sleepy and puzzled orderly wandering out through the automatic doors to examine the ambulance up close reminds me of Robert Bresson, and enormously affected me when I first saw it at the Pacific Cinematheque in the early 1990s.
- posted by cjb @ 9:43 PM


<< Home

Powered by Blogger

.post-title { display: none!important; }