A Cinephile’s Instinctive Travels: Berkeley, California

Reliving the people and places I encounter through the sights and sounds of the films they inspired.

David Liu | 19 March 2012

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GREAT SCENES
The Searchers (John Ford, 1956) 

Shot 1: Ethan Edwards arrives on horseback with Debbie.

A man will search his heart and soul

Shot 2: For a simple man like Mose Harper, happiness comes in the form of a rocking chair.

Go searchin’ way out there

Shot 3: Ethan returns Debbie to her relatives. He stands on the porch and looks on wistfully.

His peace of mind he knows he’ll find 

The camera pulls back, revealing the visual motif of the framed doorway — the impenetrable barrier between danger and refuge, loneliness and fulfillment — one last time. 

But where, O Lord 
Lord where?

Enter Martin Pawley and Laurie Jorgensen, exuberant young lovers reunited at last. As they step inside the doorway, Ethan turns and walks off into the distance.

Ride away
Ride away
Ride away 

In a stroke of visual and aural poetry, Ford closes the door on one of the most haunted figures in American cinema.

Illusions of Past Lives

David Liu | 25 February 2012

“The mystery is that even if we know that it’s only staged, that it’s a fiction, it still fascinates us. That’s the fundamental magic of film. Illusion persists. There is something real in the illusion, more real than in the reality behind it.”

— Slavoj Žižek

Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)

Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010)

—

“When events are represented through cinema, they become shared memories of the crew, the cast, and the public. A new layer of synthetic memory is augmented in the audience’s experience. In this regard, filmmaking is not unlike creating synthetic past lives.”

— Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Princess Mononoke (Hayao Miyazaki, 1997)

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2011)

Art & Film: Hopper/Malick

From the canvas to the cinema.

David Liu | 21 January 2012

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Notes on Evolution: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

David Liu | 1 January 2012

From Zodiac’s restless journalists and detectives to Seven’s ruthless killer, from Edward Norton’s white-collar waif in Fight Club to the troubled young entrepreneurs of The Social Network, the heroes and antiheroes of David Fincher’s films are forces of nature, obsessive and meticulous to a fault. Their hunger for progression and distaste for established norms reflect common psychological impulses connecting the director’s body of work.

It’s no stretch to say that Fincher revisits familiar territory with his latest The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.The film begins by giving us snapshots of the physically scarred, emotionally neutered Lisbeth Salander, played brilliantly by Rooney Mara. As her relationship with journalist Mikael Blomkvist develops, Salander evolves into a fascinating contradiction — alternating between cool detachment and feral intensity, she comes to embody both spectrums of the “Fincherian” archetype.

The more of Fincher’s films we experience (and experience again), the more they seem to share the same dialectical universe. Every line of dialogue, gesture and expression springs from an unconsummated desire for fulfillment, fragments of colossal puzzles that straddle the divide between revelation and oblivion.