Horacio Bernades
Horacio Bernades
Critic, Página/12
Argentina
Voted in the critics poll
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.