High and Low / Akira Kurosawa / 1963
This one has been waiting for my attention ever since I came back from India. Calcutta's entertainment stores had a surprisingly good selection of movies at very cheap prices so that I could sample some lesser known Kurosawa and Bergman movies.
High and Low was a nice and surprisingly entertaining thriller. What I particularly liked about it is the ability to observe how Japanese culture re-interprets itself to cope with the capitalist world.
Of course Kurosawa's touch is very evident. His style could at best be described as theatrical. You can tell this by only looking at the way he positions his characters on the screen as if it was a stage. Particularly at negotiation scenes at the main character's villa, every move of his characters (almost 10 of them), number of steps they should walk, angles they should hold to the camera is clearly calculated in great detail and dictated. Just like in Bergman's cinema.
Hiroshima Mon Amor / Alain Resnais / 1959
This one is a tough one. One of the best movies I have seen for quite a long time.
Actually this wasn't the first time I saw it. I had seen it in Istanbul's film festival some 10 years ago. But by then the movie just couldn't attract my attention and had bored me to death. It is funny how sometimes you have to experience life first before you can understand such creations.
Hiroshima Mon Amour is about two married people, a Japanese architect and a French actress, falling in love and about the only two days they spend together. The movie is set in Hiroshima with occasional flashbacks to French woman's youth at her home town of Nevers. The terrible emotional baggage Hiroshima carries and scenes shot in Nevers where she had her own share of WWII's horror, act as a brilliant Leitmotiv between the characters' past and today and for that matter between the two characters as well.
The movie has a very famous but also a quite disturbing opening sequence.
Elle: Hi-ro-shi-ma. Hiroshima. That is your name.
Lui: Yes, that is my name. Your name is Ne-vers. Nevers in France.
---
Elle: You're destroying me. You're good for me.
Der Baader Meinhof Komplex / Uli Edel / 2008
I think new products of the German cinema like Der Untergang, Das Leben Der Anderen and Fatih Akin's movies mark the brilliant point it has come to. They are easily entertaining yet they never compromise from European sensibility.
This particular movie is about Rote Armee Fraktion - RAF (Red Army Faction), a terror group which influenced German politics quite harshly in 70s. What I have found particularly interesting was how lost people could build and rebuild their values to justify their terrible actions; actions that cause them to become marginalized even further and eventually become ever more lost.
The movie opens with the best demonstration scene I have ever seen. It is so well taken that depicted unsymmetrical violence applied by Iranians and by the German police brings tears to your eyes. And the music used at this scene. Oh boy.
