CiNEMERCATOR - Louis Theroux My Scientology Movie 2015
Filmlover,
Merthe Voorhoeve,
Andreas van Riet,
Maaike Hasselaar
& Elisabeth van Vliet,
each are programming 1 precious film per month. That's 4 precious films per month!
CiNEMERCATOR
doors open 19:00
start 20:00
ticket 3€
23-9
Louis Theroux
My Scientology Movie
2015
Louis Theroux has always been drawn to people who inhabit their own private weather systems. Before My Scientology Movie, his documentaries had already made a speciality of entering strange subcultures without quite knowing whether he was interviewing them or being absorbed by them. His method is deceptively mild; curiosity as a kind of soft instrument of pressure.
In My Scientology Movie, directed by John Dower, that method meets an organisation whose doors are famously difficult to open. When Scientology refuses Theroux access, he does something characteristically mischievous; he reconstructs it from the outside, employing actors, former members and the filmmaker Adam S. Meyer to stage scenes of Scientology life. The imitation becomes the investigation.
This gives the film its peculiar, almost Kafkaesque energy. Again and again, Theroux discovers that reality is less stable than the performance designed to represent it. His replicas are sometimes absurd, sometimes unsettling; meanwhile the refusal to participate becomes its own kind of presence.
The result is not a comprehensive examination of Scientology so much as a film about what happens when an institution refuses to be filmed. Theroux's gentle bewilderment becomes the central instrument. He does not break through the wall. He walks around it, tapping experimentally, until the wall begins to sound hollow.
This film is chosen by Maaike
30-9
Alfred Hitchcok
ROPE
1948
There is a corpse, a length of rope and an apartment in which nobody seems to consider the obvious solution: opening a window and taking a very long breath.
Two young men, Brandon and Phillip have murdered a former classmate. Not out of passion, revenge or self-defence, but as an intellectual exercise. They want to prove that certain superior people might have the right to kill inferior ones. Then they throw a dinner party. This is roughly the equivalent of robbing a bank and inviting the police over for champagne afterwards.
The real brilliance of Rope lies less in the plot than in its spatial trap. Almost the entire film takes place inside one apartment. Hitchcock’s camera drifts through the rooms, passing behind characters and pieces of furniture, creating the sensation that the whole thing is happening in one continuous take. Of course it isn't. The cuts are simply disguised. The film is, in a sense, lying about its own construction- which is rather appropriate for a story about people trying to construct their own reality.
What makes Rope so deliciously uncomfortable is that the murderers don't ultimately collapse because their grand philosophy is defeated in some spectacular intellectual duel. They collapse because human beings are terrible at maintaining a perfect fiction. They sweat. They drink. They contradict themselves. They become vain. They say too much.
Rope is not a flawless film. Its theatricality occasionally becomes very visible and its technical experiment can feel like an experiment. But that artificiality is also what makes it fascinating. Hitchcock doesn't try to hide the fact that we're watching a constructed stage. He turns the apartment into a kind of pressure chamber, where every movement and every pause acquires suspicious significance. The murderers have hidden the body. Hitchcock has hidden the cuts. Eventually, you realise that both are becoming increasingly difficult to keep hidden.
This film is chosen by Elisabeth
1-10
Michelangelo Antonioni
L'Avventura
1960
Michelangelo Antonioni, one of the great architects of modern European cinema, had little interest in making films behave properly. After beginning in the orbit of Italian neorealism, he gradually turned his attention away from social reality and towards the private landscapes of disconnection, desire and boredom. L’Avventura (1960) is the film where that language fully crystallises; the first part of the loose trilogy completed by La notte and L’eclisse.
It begins with a disappearance and then, rather perversely, loses interest in solving it. Anna vanishes from a small island; her friends search for her, but the real subject gradually becomes the strange emotional vacuum her absence exposes.
Antonioni’s revolution is almost embarrassingly simple: he lets nothing happen for long enough that we are forced to notice everything else. Architecture, bodies, silences, the geometry of a room- all become more expressive than dialogue. Monica Vitti and Gabriele Ferzetti move through the film like people trying to remember what desire is supposed to feel like.
It’s often called a film about alienation, which is true but not quite sufficient. L’Avventura is less interested in loneliness than in the peculiar boredom of people who can no longer tell what they want. The missing woman becomes almost incidental. What disappears instead is certainty about love, morality, narrative- even cinema itself.
No wonder the film caused such a stir at Cannes in 1960, where it received the Jury Prize. Antonioni had made a mystery in which the mystery itself slowly becomes irrelevant. And he is perfectly happy to leave the hole open.
This film is chosen by Andreas
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