The Function of the Photoplay

"But the richest source of the unique satisfaction in the photoplay is probably that esthetic feeling which is significant for the new art and which we have understood from its psychological conditions. The massive outer world has lost its weight, it has been freed from space, time, and causality, and it has been clothed in the forms of our own consciousness. The mind has triumphed over matter and the pictures roll on with the ease of musical tones. It is a superb enjoyment which no other art can furnish us. No wonder that temples for the new goddess are built in every little hamlet."
-Hugo Münsterberg

Ne le Dis a Personne

About as satisfying as a movie experience can be. Tell No One is an old school movie mystery, the kind in which all of the plot threads are tightly wound together and each little piece receives a satisfactory resolution.

The France, Our Lady.

I don't even know how to think about La France, let alone what.

In a lot of ways, I felt that this was an anti-Cold Mountain (though never deliberately so). The two plots, in many ways, parallel each other, and they are both structured around music, but they are both handled in such different manners. Where Cold Mountain spares us no Hollywood flourishes, La France is content with flat, bare statements, willfully unadorned. La France goes out of its way in a few places to avoid narrative engagement with the audience. And the ending, instead of filled with passionate reconciliation, ends with a slow, almost sad sexual release.