Horacio Bernades

Horacio Bernades

Critic, Página/12
Argentina
Voted in the critics poll

Voted for:

Age d'Or, L' 1930 Luis Buñuel
Close-Up 1989 Abbas Kiarostami
Disenchantment, The 1976 Jaime Chávarri
Faces 1968 John Cassavetes
Incredible Shrinking Man, The 1957 Jack Arnold
Lola Montès 1955 Max Ophüls
Sátántangó 1994 Béla Tarr
Sherlock Jr 1924 Buster Keaton
Tarnation 2004 Jonathan Caouette
Vertigo 1958 Alfred Hitchcock

Comments

The cinematic machine was never so mesmerising as in Vertigo. Close Up masterly (and devishly) documents fiction as it builds reality. In Sátántangó Béla Tarr builds an entire universe with a movie camera (and camera movements, above all). With Sherlock Jr., Buster Keaton rethought cinema when cinema was new, while natural forces are unleashed. L’Age d’or represents the first time desire ravaged the sacred sanctuary of cinema. Ophüls was the great choreographer of lost time and Lola Montes his masterpiece among masterpieces. If I think of cinematic poetry, I think of The Incredible Shrinking Man. Cassavetes often shot the pure flow of time, but maybe never as systematically as in Faces. In The Disenchantment, a family (that of the poet Leopoldo Panero) is exposed for the camera in the most vivid present tense. And in Tarnation, Jonathan Caouette demolishes cinema and then reinvents it, stripping itself in the camera.