Night in the Lens

Mexico / 1972 / Spanish

Directed by Arturo Ripstein

With Claudio Brook, Rita Macedo, Arturo Beristáin

There’s this theory that cult leaders are very lonely people – even lonelier than the vulnerable types they attract – and that their power-tripping is just an extreme expression of the strategies we use every day to create and maintain relationships. If that’s the case, Gabriel Lima, the paranoid and autocratic paterfamilias of The Castle of Purity, and in whose cobwebbed house nearly the whole film is set, staves off his staggering loneliness by regulating everything that his family can say, do, and think. Read the rest of this entry »

Indonesia / 1954 / Indonesian

Directed by Usmar Ismail

With A.N. Alcaff, Netty Herawaty, Dahlia

Iskandar traverses the empty city at night. Perhaps his mind is still far away as he walks towards the lighted window, as he doesn’t notice the soldiers yelling at him until they’ve already begun to give chase. He takes off into the mess of knotted alleys and loses them. Ironically, he himself was a soldier just yesterday, today a civilian. Read the rest of this entry »