Cinema Derive
Line up: Media, World of Glory
Open: 19:30 - 22:30 hrs
Tickets: € 3 / Also tickets at the door
MEDEA (1988)
Directed by Lars von Trier
75 minutes
In danish with English subtitles
This film is visually stunning, full of fire and smoke, but it also remains one of Lars von Trier's least seen movies. It is considered to be among the director's very best for many of the few that have seen it... a magnificent tone poem which captures the dread of Medea's fate in a way that few films could ever hope to match. Von Trier's Medea is expressionist, meaning the subject’s visceral emotions mirror the atmosphere. In this version of the story, Von Trier replaces the setting of Greece with the cold, windy marshes of Scandinavia (think of the dark hidden world of the hospital's past in Von Trier's The Kingdom, but expanded into an entire landscape). In these foggy marshlands, there is a castle that looks more like a sewer. A tale of mythology, set deep in the soaked natural elements that is visually rich, dark, and exact. As one critic described it "Leaving the shores of the Aegean Sea, the director restructures the places of the story, abstracts himself from the Hellenic peoples, and proposes a rereading to the relents as northern as Shakespearean. In the air hang the touchdowns of Ingmar Bergman. Under our feet, shudder a Tarkovskien broth."
It is this film about the plight of Medea, and its female protagonist would influence the films von Trier would make for the next decade... most specifically Breaking the Waves and Dancer in the Dark. In retrospect, we can see that the story of Medea was a perfect vehicle for Von Trier. He claimed to have been in constant telepathic contact with another Danish filmmaker, the great Carl Theodor Dreyer, who wrote the script but was unable to film it before his death in 1968. If you're looking for cinematic references, you can only compare it to the most poetic and dreamy movies by Andrei Tarkovsky. The evocative images flow over you... shifting, grainy, elusive, haunting.
Medea is a tale of being cut to your last breath, with everything you love having been taken from you. revenge, humanity as a shattered mirror. It also stars Udo Kier (Andy Warhol's Dracula & Frankenstein).
+
World of Glory (1991)
(Härlig är jorden)
Directed by Roy Andersson
17 minutes
In Swedish with English subtitles
Swedish director Roy Andersson (the opposite of Wes Anderson, don't get them confused) made highly stylised movies, depicting the dreariness of the world around us... but done with such vividness and imagination and absurdity that they are rapturous. This one is about our modern world, a perfectly functioning heaven of atrocities. An efficient world, where the most blatant inhumanities can be drowned out by a trivialised, dull, existence.
CINEMA DÉRIVE
Ventilator space/Overtoom 301 / 2nd floor
Doors open at 19:30, films start at 20:00
3 euros
