Victor Vazquez portrays Carribean culture through a dusty sepia lense. His images are riddled with shadows and dark recesses hiding the ghosts of Puerto Rican and island culture. These images, although employing local symbols, embody the universal problems of life and death, sex and birth, acculturation and isolation. His subjects are nearly always nude, and mainly women. They appear to be asleep or dead. Their passivity is the background to their persecution. Vazquez’s Liquids and Signs depicts living organisms oppressed by artificial sexual objects, genitalia, blades, and swimming sperm drawn large on their bodies. Sex, in these images, is not a life-producing event, but rather ravages its subjects. Sex brings death and affliction.
Continue reading ‘Death Shall Make Life His Dominion: Victor Vazquez’
The movie begins with us inside the voice of the old, soon to retire sheriff, and though ostensibly the action occurs elsewhere, we realize at the end of the film that we’ve never left this voice, in fact we’ve fallen deeper into its Texan cracks, even into its dreams. How do we know this? We know this because, like a sheriff, and unlike a movie, we miss most of the action. Sure, we come upon it in anticipation, but most of the killings are (literally) veiled from our eyes. We can’t figure out who the heroes are because they keep dying in very anticlimactic ways, right before, or right after, our attention has been called. I’m so excited that a filmmaker (two even!) have resurrected the art of “not showing”–Hitchcock definitely had that one down, as did many others, though perhaps in part out of regard for the censors. Well the censors have mostly gone home, but the viewers remain, and No Country for Old Men is described as a “violent” film or one that is “action packed,” but these lines come from censors who were once viewers. The truth is that the film simply shows us what it’s like to be an old man who is too slow, too peaceful, and too intelligent, for the world of terror.
The Chicago Reader Film Blog has a cool post about the use of the supernatural and cosmic in the latest Pirates of the Caribbean. The post asserts that while some of the imagery is borrowed from the french director Eric Rohmer, especially the green flash symbolizing the transference of a person from this world to the other, the film ultimately fails to plumb the depths of the supernatural to which it sets out. I agree. On a purely symbolic level (we won’t even discuss the quality of the film), many images are introduced, but, like many of my high school students’ essay, the movie fails to seal the deal. The introduction is given, a lot of irrelevant details are used (presumably) as supporting evidence, and the conclusion predictably is a happy one although divorced from the deep, spiritual elements. One feels as though one has been shot by Dick Cheney’s shotgun, left with nothing else to do but apologize for being there in the first place.
Which brings me to the movie I really wanted to talk about today: The Fountain, directed by Darren Aronofsky (Pi, Requiem for a Dream). If you want to get really fucked up tonight, go out and rent this gem. Aronofsky, unlike Verbinski, seems to recognize that what matters more in the fantasy genre is drawing the audience in with the question of the supernatural, not the assumed, unexplored premise of the supernatural. “We’ve seen it all. It’s not really interesting to audiences anymore. The interesting things are the ideas; the search for God, the search for meaning.” This is where Pirates fails, not so much because it lacked the “ideas”, but because it seemed to be unaware (inasmuch as a movie can be unaware or aware) that it even had the ideas…. maybe that’s a little harsh.
The Fountain, on the other hand, is bursting with the ideas and the questions. The imagery is overflowing, yet understated. Rather than throwing many different images on the screen, they return to the same imagery throughout the film, exploring new aspects, letting the chaos settle as the story nears its conclusion. I really appreciated the way the question of the supernatural didn’t fight death, but embraced it, unlike Pirates where in the end the main character managed to evade death for the moment. Whereas Pirates of the Caribbean advocates an uneasy truce with death, the Fountain’s main character takes a 1000 year voyage to finally be at peace with his and his wife’s death, the end of the book.
I’m watching The Fountain with an 11th grade AP English class tomorrow morning. I’m afraid it may be a bit heavy for them, but they’ll at least get exposure to religious imagery in film. So, I’ll let you all know how it goes.
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