Saturday, 7/17/10, @ 11:30AM. FREE screening, discussion and meal to follow. Please bring food or drink to share.
16Beaver is 16 Beaver Street, Floor 4, New York, NY.
LA COMMUNE, (Watkins, 2000, 345mins, DVD) is one of Peter Watkins most assertive measures against Monoform,* methods of media production and distribution. It is an event, a collaboration, and a beseeching — a warm, crafty endurance that produces questions like weeds throughout its nearly six hour run time.
Length is only the most discussed abbererant feature of LA COMMUNE, and perhaps the least interesting. Watkins employed techniques in casting, research, shooting, and editing that address form and delivery in radical ways, many of which surface in his other work, but are taken to a deliberately lengthy extent here.
“If Hollywood’s colonization of world cinema markets is an integral component of the media apparatus, as the film explicitly argues in the later sections (by means of the black title screens that narrate a bulk of the action), then making a film in deliberate defiance of the standards which embody the Hollywood ethic is a step toward reappropriating cinema. Every aspect of the filmmaking serves this end: the overwhelming use of non-professional actors; the director’s deference to the actors for much of the script; the offhand shift in temporal perspectives; the constant breaking of the “fourth wall”; the exclusion of all on-screen violence; the unusual amount of reading the viewer is forced to do. None of these techniques are new in themselves, but rarely have they been fused in one film, on the scale of La Commune.” –Jacob Collins, Evergreen Review
Posted in: UnionDocs News.
