"Rossellini, the only major director besides Vidor to make a film on the history of iron ..." (Tag Gallagher)
"The films which have most excited me recently are Skolimowski's two films and The Enchanted Desna [Dovzhenko]. These are films about which I don't know what to say critically, which give me the feeling of having a lot to learn. Also Rossellini's film about steel [L'Età del ferro / The Age of Iron]. They are films which cut right through me; whereas with others I can see what to take and what to leave. I say this is great, but I could never do it myself. I don't rate these three films above or below the rest, they are films I want to talk about because I don't really know what should be said." (Jean-Luc Godard in an interview with Les Cahiers du cinéma, translated/reprinted, pp. 231-232 in Godard on Godard.)
I don't believe Rossellini's iron film played in the MoMA retrospective ...
6 comments:
Be sure to watch Jean-Daniel Pollet's documentary/essay, Pour mémoire (la forge), on a traditional manual foundry that is about to be shut down because of the competition with mechanisation. His poetical commentary on the relationship of men with the melted matter is beautiful.
Reading this, I was reminded of Nicolas Rey's experimental essay-film Schuss!, which weaves together themes of the near-synchronous invention of several 'processes'--aluminum manufacturing, psychoanalysis, cinema--at the end of the 19th c. (Darren writes about it here; and Olaf Moller reviewed it in a Film Comment fest report).
And these 'molten' images also call to mind (for me) Stromboli's lava...
They remind me in equal measure of Days Of Heaven and Terminator 2.
Days Of Heaven + Terminator 2 = Greatest American Movie of All Time.
actually, that sort of sounds like what Children of Men was aiming at.
starting tomorrow, I'm done being flip on the internet.
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