The Angel (1983)
L'ange (1983)
DVD5 | VIDEO_TS | NTSC 4:3 | 01:04:02 | 4,04 Gb
Musical Score AC3 2.0 @ 192 Kbps without any languages
Genre: Avant-garde, Experimental, Fantasy
DVD5 | VIDEO_TS | NTSC 4:3 | 01:04:02 | 4,04 Gb
Musical Score AC3 2.0 @ 192 Kbps without any languages
Genre: Avant-garde, Experimental, Fantasy
Dazzling example of early-80s avant-garde experimenta is essentially non-narrative, though it’s possible to piece together some aspects of what might constitute a “story” (involving shenanigans in a cavernous mansion at some point in what looks like the 18th century)….
IMDB
The Angel (1983)
What do Jean Cocteau, Luis Bunuel, Man Ray, Sergei Eisenstein, Mary Ellen Bute, Slavko Vorkapich and Joseph Cornell have in common? If you're familiar with all of them, you probably are or were in film studies. They're all early experimental film makers. If you think that you enjoy "art house" flicks because you've caught a Truffaut or Fellini film once or twice, wait until you get a load of the work of these artists. At its most extreme, we're talking… no narrative… no characters… no semblance of rhyme or reason whatsoever. We're talking MOOD. We're talking VISUAL POETRY. And, yeah… we're talking PRETENTIOUS. But who gives a damn? If there's a place for "Santa with Muscles," there's a place for pretentious, too. [Actually… scratch that. If there's a place for John Murlowski/Hulk Hogan movies, it's the trash.]
The Angel (1983)
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If you're not familiar with any of the aforementioned directors, I'd probably say that the closest thing you've seen to the dazzling cinematography of "L'Ange" would be the dream sequences of David Lynch's "Twin Peaks" or Tarsem Singh's "The Cell." If you haven't seen either of those movies… I honestly don't know what to tell you. Many directors, in fact, employ Bokanowski's techniques as devices in their films. The main differences are… first… they didn't start using them in 1982. In fact, it's taken them the better part of twenty years to catch up with him. Second, they don't make whole films that way. Whole films of eerie avant-garde images don't sell at the box office. Hollywood hasn't financed experimental cinema in over sixty years; if you really think that Lynch and Scorsese's films are daring… well… that's you.
The Angel (1983)
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"L'Ange" is a wonderful film. Simply put. See it yourself. There's no reason to describe what's in it, because everyone must have a different experience of this film, even if that includes sleeping, walking out, screaming or falling into a hypnotically-induced torpor. Patrick Borkanowski is not an important director… he's an important artist. In "The Critic as Artist," Wilde said, "Mere colour, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways." I'm not sure exactly in which way "L'Ange" spoke to me, but I can tell you this: This is a creepy little peace of heaven.IMDB Reviewer
The Angel (1983)
Bokanowski expands his talented dream-like art to a full-length movie with disappointing results. The movie is basically a collection of shorts that move from room to room to setting, each with its strange occupants wearing bizarre life-like masks and performing various activities, each with their own visual imagery, effects, sounds and colors that go with the room's theme.
The Angel (1983)
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There's a striking nightmarish stairwell, a man practising his swordsmanship on a doll hanging in the middle of the room, a woman serving an old man without hands and a repeatedly falling pitcher, a comical man taking a bath and dressing backwards, bookish men buzzing around a library, very surreal scenes of frantic men running with a battering ram towards a naked woman enclosed in a geometric cell, and various other oddities and experiments with light and cinematography, all leading to heavenly figures bathed in light ascending stairs to a scene Bokanowski chose not to include of an angel at the top of the hierarchy.
The Angel (1983)
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Some scenes are more striking than others, and there is an overuse of freeze-frames that break up the dream-like effect, but the big flaw here is the punishing repetition of repeating imagery repeated repeatedly with minute variations and rhythm. Of some interest for its striking art, visuals and mood but as it stands, it's more of a collage of repetitive visual experiments.
The Angel (1983)
Dazzling example of early-80s avant-garde experimenta is essentially non-narrative, though it’s possible to piece together some aspects of what might constitute a “story” (involving shenanigans in a cavernous mansion at some point in what looks like the 18th century.) That would, however, be somewhat to miss the point: what is presented is a series of discrete “episodes”, each executed in a slightly different style, but all relying on fundamental ideas of repetition, disorientation, and the scrutiny of the projected celluloid image. It doesn’t all come off, and one or two of the sequences descend into banality. But at its best – such as the first nine minutes, which constitute one of the most astonishing and original openings in all of cinema – the work reaches genuinely sublime heights of brilliant transcendence.
The Angel (1983)
Special Features:
- Michèle Bokanowski Interview
- Draft Sketches
- Making L'ange
- Trailer for Short Films
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