David Lynch's Inland Empire( or perhaps Inward Empire )

Join the surreal world of Lynch and watch the uniquely inspired visual poems reachable only by going past the rational mind.

Lost Highway

Non-Euclidean geometry

Although I am perfectly aware of the fact that any attempt to 'explain' Lost Highway ultimately results in a 'smoothening' of its complex structure into a linear narrative, I will try to give a short outline of its content.
The enigmaticity of David Lynch's movies and specially Lost Highway confronts us with the question: How do we read films?
The answer lies in another question if a should necessarily be about something ?
David Lynch himself has warned against attempts at reading of a filmic text, especially when asked for the 'hidden meaning" of Lost Highway: "the beauty of a film that is more abstract is everybody has a different take. ... When you are spoon-fed a film, people instantly know what it is ... I love things that leave room to Dream ..."
(http://www.mikedunn.com/lynch/lh/cinelh.html )
Being particularly vague with respect to the question of 'meaning,' Lynch on the other hand emphasizes film as an art form in its own right - " It doesn't do any good ... to say 'This is what it means.' Film is what it means" (Cinefantastique).

In order to approach the mystery of lost Highway , Lynch and Barry Gifford, with whom Lynch collaborated on the screenplay, have mentioned Moebius Strip in their interviews ,a topology accounting for a time-space that differs from Euclidean space concepts.
(http://mathforum.org/sum95/math_and/moebius/moebius.html)

Moebius Strip seemingly has two sides, but in fact it does only one. At one point the two sides can be clearly distinguished, but when you traverse the strip as a whole, the two sides are experienced as being continuous. In Lacanian Psychoanalysis the Moebius Strip is introduced as a model to conceptualize the "return of the repressed," an issue which is very important in Lost Highway as well. Mobieus Strip can illustrate the way psychoanalysis conceptualizes certain binary oppositions, such as inside/outside, before/after, etc. - and with respect to Lost Highway, characterize Fred/Pete!which are seen completely distinct. Reni Celeste when commenting on Lynch's emphasizes the position where "violence meets tenderness, waking meets dream, blond meets brunette, lipstick meets blood, where something very sweet and innocuous becomes something very sick and degrading, at the very border where opposites becomes both discrete and indistinguishable" (Celeste).
We can see specific example of this inside –outside pattern in the scene in which Fred meets the Mystery Man for the first time. In fact, the Mystery Man - simultaneously being inside and outside –( I am at your home now , MM pulls out his mobiles and asks Fred to call his house !) -the twist in the Moebius strip.
A last reference I want to make use of is the term "psychogenic fugue" that David Lynch has used :
Sometime during the shooting, the unit publicist wasreading up on different types of mental illness, and she hitupon this thing called "psychogenic fugue." The personsuffering from it creates in their mind a completely newidentity, new friends, new home, new everything - theyforget their past identity. This has reverberations with LostHighway, and it's also a musical term. A fugue starts offone way, takes up on another direction, and then comesback to the original, so it [relates] to the form of the film."
-David Lynch

Repulsion
Directed by
Roman Polański
Starring
Catherine Deneuve,Ian Hendry,John Fraser
Release date
January 1965 (UK)
Running time 104 min
at whom is the young Carol staring?

The weird shadows and dark corners of Carol's house, Hands protrude from walls and everyday objects transforming into objects of horror,walls which are cracking up ,amplification of the sounds of everyday life--the ticking of a clock, the voices of nuns playing catch in the convent garden, the dripping of a faucet-all define One of the most impressive films of Polanski's "apartment trilogy".

the gifted filmmaker , Roman Polanski dresses his first English speaking film with pertinent details that further exemplify both Carol's madness and the aching passage of time.
The audiences share the mental deteriorating state of carol by Polanski's inventive use of black-and-white film, wide-angle lenses and close-ups which creates an unsparing vision of detachment of reality as if we are all drawn into her mind .

Tess of d'urbervilles

Directed by Roman Polanski; written by Mr. Polanski, Gerard Brach, and John Brownjohn, based on the novel Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy; cinematographers, Geoffrey Unsworth and Ghislain Cloquet; edited by Alastair McIntyre and Tom Priestley; music by Philippe Sarde; production designer, Pierre Guffroy; produced by Claude Berri; released by Columbia Pictures. Running time: 170 minutes.

With: Nastassja Kinski (Tess), John Collin (John Durbeyfield), Leigh Lawson (Alec Durbeyfield), Tony Church (Parson Tringham) and Peter Firth (Angel Clare).

Last night I watched Tess by Roman Polanski an adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s Novel “Tess of the d'Urbervilles”.
i gave Polanski’s Tess my highest rating for the excellent translation of the words into cinematographic images which said is a very slow film. I do believe If you can get into the emotion, you won't notice the 3 hours running time that passes.That might be impossible for many on the home screen,myself included , since the phone rings,…and you probably won’t have a chance to dedicate yourself solely to the pictures.
Polanski’s Tess although heavily criticized by many when was shown at the Cannes Film Festival,due to the coincidence of Polanski facing criminal charges in USA have been very successful in expressing directors targeted ideas .
Tess played skillfully by Nastassja Kinski in the title role is a passive innocent girl trapped in a world which human conduct is governed by social prejudices and elements of small coincidences which conforms her destiny. his father discovers through an accidental encounter that he is the oldest branch of an old aristocratic and because of that she is forced to follow the fate which is governed for her through a series of events which leads to a tragedy unless she has every attribute that should make for happiness ….
I believe Polanski have been able to add an extra dimension to this atmosphere by using different filters in both interior and exterior scenes (the photography spanned for nearly 9 months to cover the changes in seasons which reflect changes in Tess’s life) and in my idea over-stereotyping the characters such as Alec D’uberville( his moustache and oiled hair and the expressions he uses) and applying monotonous voices to the characters .

For me the saddest part is when Tess writes a letter to Angel and leaves it by his door confessing to what has happened to her. The letter is not found and read by Angel, an angel who can not pardon Tess for her past and even now Tess is unable to convince him to stay….

Angel returns from Brazil and finally finds Tess in a Boarding house in sandBourne , during all these scenes our attention is continuously focused on her although she is not shown till we immediately find everything about her just by her appearance….

Polanski’s Tess is a victim and remains a victim and even her Angel fails to help her out. At the final scenes Tess sleeps on Slabs which is believed to be a place where the victims where sacrificed. The sun beautifully rises and another beautiful day begins…..

Oedipus Rex

Directed by: Pier Paolo Pasolini. Screenplay: Pier Paolo Pasolini, based on Sophocles’ tragedies Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonus. Director of Photography: Giuseppe Ruzzolini. Set Design: Luigi Scaccianoce. Costume Design: Danilo Donati. Film Editor: Nino Baragli. Cast: Franco Citti (Oedipus), Silvana Mangano (Jocasta), Alida Valli (Merope), Ninetto Davoli (Herald), Julian Beck (Teiresias), Carmelo Bene (Creon), Luciano Bartoli (Laius), Pier Paolo Pasolini (High priest), Jean-Claude Biette (Priest). Production: Alfredo Bini for Arco Film. Length: 104 min. Colour.
Oedipus Rex, filmed in the summer of 1967, is Pasolini' adaptation of the ancient myth of Oedipus, a man who unknowingly kills his father and marries his mother. Pasolini has deliberately chosen to create a non-intellectual Oedipus who does not want to explore the unknown. He is not concerned with the meaning of life. Pasolini avoids the inclusion of any scene in which Oedipus might be seen investigating, examining, questioning, inferring, clarifying, or demonstrating. When Pasolini’s Oedipus comes to a crossroad and must decide which road to take, clasps his hands to his eyes and spins around several times and then removes his hands from his eyes and walks off to the right.
In the scene where Oedipus encounters the Sphinx , Pasolini’s Oedipus not only does not save the city of Thebes by unraveling the riddle that no other man could solve but also slays the Sphinx ….
pasolini’s Oedipus rex could be reviewed from Freudian psychoanalysis view points or could be expressed as a perfect example of director’s poetic cinematography in re projecting his own obsessions into a myth, I am going to add my personal insights to the theme which is perfectly depicted by Pasolini as non- intellectuality from the stand point of statistical thermodynamics and entropy .

All great philosophical and theological systems have been built around the question of order and disorder, and they have all privileged order over disorder.

For Claude Levi-Strauss, primitive thought is just as much based on the demand for order as is scientific thought, whose most basic postulate is that nature itself is orderly. For native thought, "all sacred things must have their place." Sacred objects contribute to the maintenance of order by occupying the places allocated to them. If they were taken out of their place, even in thought, the entire order of the universe would be destroyed. (The Savage Mind, p. 10)

As we witness in Oedipus, what he has unknowingly done, is essentially generating disorder. His actions offend against order. Eliminating it is not a negative moment, but a positive effort to organize the environment and respect the Rituals of purity, so he tries to purify himself by blinding himself to suffer for the rest of his life to pay for his interference in maintenance of order through a sin.

Pasolini through the medium of film, extends the disorder caused by his primitive oedipus to our present time and strips it of history in order to remind us that "Order is a kind of compulsion to repeat which, when a regulation has been laid down once and for all, decides when, where and how a thing shall be done" (Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, p.40)
Natural processes always move towards an increase in disorder, which is measured by entropy. The second law of thermodynamics, which states that entropy can never decrease, is thus an argument for the irreversibility .
In statistical mechanics, Ludwig Boltzmann expressed entropy as S = k (lnP) where S is entropy, k is Boltzmann's constant, and lnP is the natural log of probablilty. We set its value to 1 without affecting the generality of the arguments presented here.
Erwin Schrödinger in his book “What is Life?” considered life, which is highly improbable, to be the inverse of S, which he called negentropy. Thus an intellectual act becomes the " work" that achieves and maintains order in systems whose internal disorder would otherwise increase. For pasolini ,only intelligence in contradiction to primitiveness can reduce entropy and maintain order .

James Clerk Maxwel in his famous letter to P.G. Tait of 1867, in which he imagined "a finite being who knows the paths and velocities of all the molecules by simple inspection but can do no work except open and close a hole...by means of a slide without mass. "
Maxwell's demon ressembles the kind of divine intelligence that has a more human quality, and is especially important as a guardian of free will. He is a sort of "ghost in the machine,"in Paolini’s art works the demon has is a true divine Artist mostly palyed by himself in many of his movies as he believed in rule of a true artist who can create new cultural forms in opposition to global averages and perform work and radiates intelligence whose energetic price compensates the later useful work even after his death.
Just to recap ,only an intelligent system (intelligent human being) can process information and energy to reduce entropy. This unequivocal fact then demonstrates the existence of a regulating biological intelligence within the human body. Intelligence is the way in which life affronts entropy.

Rendez-vous
Cast and CrewDirector André TéchinéWriter Olivier Assayas , André Téchiné Actors Lambert Wilson , Juliette Binoche , Wadeck Stanczak , Jean-Louis Trintignant , ...... Music Philippe SardeRun time :82 Minutes France:1985Best Director award winner ,1985 ,Cannes International Film Festival

unhappy souls whom finaly find a common emotional ground
you should realy see Juliette Binoche as an actress on a rendezvous with destiny brilliantly portraited by Téchiné, she doesn't really have much of a personality and just sort of passively moves between people who don't treat her very well. her scense with Scrutzler, the director in the movie who is also touched by his own tragedy toward the end are what the movie is leading up to in its slow, quiet way - two people trying to come to terms with loss, but very reluctant to address it directly.