BFF FILM & FESTIVAL BLOG
Baring More Than the Soul
A critical analysis of how sex scenes are shot and the way women are depicted on the screen.
Written by Alyssa Cosme
Photo Credit: Jason Laveris via Getty Images
As she promoted her new Netflix film The Last Letter from Your Lover, actress Shailene Woodley discussed her most recent roles with The Hollywood Reporter. She talked about shooting sex scenes, by critisizing the way women are depicted on the screen. Most actors know the ways they must expose their bodies in intimate scenes, but most audience members are unaware, causing some scenes to go over the heads of viewers. It made me think about how sex scenes in television shows and movies have been portrayed over the past few years. Woodley goes on to say that “Oftentimes in movies, you see two people having sex and the woman has her bra on, and in real life, I don't think I ever did that, sex with a bra — or very, very rarely.” It was more important to capture whatever the director envisioned. Woodley described the type of relationship an actor could have to successfully hit the mark when it comes to filming intimate scenes. She shares:
“I always sit down and talk with the director, the other actor. We always have conversations of, ‘Is nudity necessary? Is it going to distract from the scene, add the scene?’ We know exactly what the boundaries are. And I’ve never been in a situation where those things haven’t been honored.”
It is very important for actors to be vocal and honest with their directors, not only because it will make everyone on set more comfortable, it will ultimately convey realistic and organic storytelling. Woodley is no stranger to filming intimate movies. She is well known for her dark projects such as Big Little Lies and White Bird in A Blizzard. Although, Big Little Lies contained sexual violence, the context was important for the narrative in this particular series. I think she is the perfect person to expand upon this topic because she is very open with intimacy in her work. This comes from an actress who had her big break starring as a pregnant teenager in the ABC family drama The Secret Life of the American Teenager, a groundbreaking show when it premiered in 2008.
Photo Credit: Normal People via IMDB
Moreover, I wondered how many other people thought about the ways sex scenes in the media have taken a toll on the overall arc of the narrative. So what purpose do these scenes serve? I realized that audiences enjoy shows on streaming services that leave little to the imagination in their sex scenes, such as Normal People which aired on Hulu and Bridgerton which appeared on Netflix. I found that it was the closeness of these stories that kept the shows engaging and overall fun to watch. And by that, I mean that this kind of content can be impactful for people. It may make them look at themselves differently by how sex is represented and affect them negatively or positively, depending on the subject matter and the person. Overall, it is the way we engage with intimacy. It was the perfect feeling that many people might have felt watching dramas back in the day. It could be the ones that had us at the edge of our seats, waiting to see what happened next week. It could be the reason so many people lined up to see movies like Fifty Shades of Grey. Whatever the reason, there is definitely something to expand upon.
Photo Credit via Netflix
The idea of including sex scenes can be tricky because you wonder if the filmmakers decided upon it because they want to advance the narrative and the potential character development or for the sake of shock factor. Woodley highlights “realism over modesty” when it comes to her roles. Perhaps she wanted to convey that she values how realistic and natural these scenes are and pointing out the fact that wearing bras is just an idea that society is holding back because she says so herself that it is not something that she has done. The fact that we are having these conversations is significant because it is important to mention how realistic intimate scenes can be for actual people. Also, being able to talk about topics like these can be more accepted for mainstream purposes. For so long women were silenced when it came to discussions on sexuality and nudity in the media. And as time has gone on, we have become accustomed to intimate scenes and possible comfort in the relationships we see on screen. In some instances, it seems as though modesty is not an issue. In recent times, baring more than one’s soul is nothing out of the ordinary. It is in fact, very typical in any kind of show or movie. I’ve noticed this level of intimacy in many genres across all media platforms more than ever before. This certain kind of content has continued to to be explored and keeps the conversations open and less restrictive, which I appreciate as an avid movie/tv show watcher.
We can make up our own minds about how much intimacy we want to see, on the big or small screens. Perhaps this can make someone else think about the way they watch films or how they view people in general.
Alyssa is a recent Marymount Manhattan College graduate where she focused on script writing and media studies. She continues to write while residing in NYC.
Common Language: Lingua Franca and Auteurship
Isabel Sandoval is an auteur “staking her claim” in cinema. Sandoval’s control over her work is an important ownership, and in the film Lingua Franca, supports the film's themes of trans identity, addiction and immigration.
Written by Lex Young
Photo Credit via Lingua Franca trailer on Youtube
Isabel Sandoval is an auteur who has been creating her own home in cinema. Lingua Franca, which she wrote, directed, edited, starred in and produced, is a film where this control supports its trans identity and immigration themes. Each character is in conversation with their autonomy, home, and family. The control Sandoval exhibits over the film and its narrative is empowering, solidifying her importance in modern cinema and the vital need for trans folks and immigrants to have authorship over their narrative in cinema and life.
In Lingua Franca, each character grapples with control. The film begins with Olga, an elderly Russian immigrant who struggles with her memory. We see her in a kitchen, reminiscent of Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, women who meander through routine, domestic ritual, finding comfort in this routine, but not happiness, a forced expectation of femininity. Odes to Akerman can be seen throughout the lonely landscapes of New York beautifully captured by Sandoval. This is a marker of Akerman’s cinema as well, emphasizing a separation between self, identity and place. Two women who are looking for themselves in a vast and crowded city, a struggle to find home.
The character of Olivia, played by Sandoval herself, is bound in constraints of care, a duty to her family, her job as a caretaker for Olga, and someone she paid to marry her for a green card. Throughout the film, she speaks with a faceless mother, whose voice we only hear through the phone, and she is seen preparing care packages for her family back in the Philippines. This faceless mother is a striking absence of an image, just a distant voice, emphasizing the separation between two homes and family.
Insecurity can be found in the character of Alex, the grandson of Olga, his own identity wrought with the instabilities of addiction and toxic masculinity. This is shown by Sandoval, through the character of Olivia, displays Alex and his toxicities with an empathy that comes from desire. Sandoval plays with this idea of a savior. Alex is someone who desired Olivia without knowing her fears of deportation, her status as an immigrant, her loss of a green card marriage, and her trans identity. When he does find out it’s through deception and influence from his friends who spew transmisogynist slurs. Sandoval beautifully depicts the ongoing and never ending fight with policy, violence and fear that plague immigrants and trans folk alike.
Lingua Franca ends with Olivia’s rejection of Alex’s marriage proposal, and Olga once again struggling to remember herself and routine. It’s an open ending, not exactly a conclusion but a cycle; we’re empowered all the same with the knowledge of Olivia’s choice of a new beginning. Olivia speaks on the phone to her mother of another job and that she met someone new. Yet we’re left alone with Olga, in her bleak kitchen, wondering about our place in the world. It’s a nod to the continuous journey of finding comfort in one’s own identity, and the continuous struggles of trans folks and immigrants.
Isabel Sandoval highlights the importance of trans folk and immigrants controlling one’s narrative. Her auteurship is vital in her work, and to the empowerment of trans and immigrant voices, a pedestal formed with her own hands.
Lingua Franca
Director: Isabel Sandoval
Year: 2019
Streaming on Netflix
Lex Young is currently watching movies, writing and making things in New York. Catch more of their work on Instagram
The Power of Positive Media Representation for Trans Youth
Media has played a large role in reshaping public perception of the LGBTQ+ community, creating a more accurate and positive representation that lead to advancements in civil rights. As an anti-trans youth bill sweeps through state legislatures in 2021, progress must be made in the media to advance the representation of trans people.
It’s been 52 years since the Stonewall Uprising snatched the media’s attention and thrust the gay rights movement into the public eye, allowing millions of people to witness the injustices experienced by the LGBTQ+ community on a daily basis. Thanks to the diligent work of activists over the decades, depictions of gays and lesbians in the media became more positive, leading the culture to shift favorably towards gay rights — anti-discrimination laws have been passed to protect LGBTQ+ people, who can now serve openly in the military without punishment and whose right to marriage equality is now federally protected under the law. Considering the progressive strides made in recent years, it’s all too easy to accept the status quo, to forget how society became as accepting of the LGBTQ+ community as it is today, and to ignore the continued legislative backlash currently targeting transgender youth. Without persistent awareness and continued activism, however, progress will halt or even reverse course.
Before the gay rights movement making its foothold in pop culture, the public perception of the gay lifestyle was widely one of fear and ignorance. If homosexuality was mentioned in the media at all it was painted as sick or perverted, a deviant way of life led by villainous criminals or the pitifully weak, both deserving of terrible fates. Think of the cross-dressing serial killer in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) or The Children’s Hour (1961), a story centered around two school teachers who are accused of lesbianism that ends with one of them committing suicide because she is so appalled by her homosexual longings. These damaging stereotypes persisted throughout most of film and media until GLAAD (Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) was formed by a group of journalists and writers in 1985. GLAAD started as a response to defamatory news coverage of the HIV/AIDS crisis that disproportionately affected the gay community. What began as a protest outside of The New York Post’s office building grew into a national effort to reshape the media’s derogatory narrative on homosexuality.
Shirley MacLaine and Audrey Hepburn in The Children’s Hour (1961) - ALAMY
By 1990, as GLAAD grew in size and influence, the organization began hosting its own media awards ceremony honoring fair and inclusive representations of LBGTQ+ issues. They launched several successful ad campaigns casting gay people in a better light and convinced industry giants to change editorial policy to use more appropriate and respectful terms in their media coverage. GLAAD was becoming a media watchdog that fought defamation while simultaneously advocating for visibility. From the late 1990s through the 2000s, shows like Ellen, Will & Grace, and Modern Family— accompanied by other popular programs that prominently featured dynamic gay characters— helped normalize same-sex couples in the mind of the average American viewer who otherwise didn’t know any “out” LGBTQ+ people. Human beings are typically compelled by good storytelling and are more likely to show compassion towards gay issues if they feel a bond with a gay person, or even a gay character. A 2017 study at Pepperdine University “Changing Media and Changing Minds: Media Exposure and Viewer Attitudes Towards Homosexuality” found that, “people with more exposure to media with more positive representations of homosexual people and the issue of homosexuality will have higher acceptability for the issue and willingness to learn more about the issue.”
In today’s world, with wireless internet and countless media sources, the LGBTQ+ community is more positively viewed by the public than ever before, and yet transgendered people, particularly black trans women, are murdered at disproportionately higher rates. The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) reports, “Sadly, 2020 has already seen at least 44 transgender or gender non-conforming people fatally shot or killed by other violent means, the majority of which were Black and Latinx transgender women. We say at least because too often these stories go unreported -- or misreported.” Alongside increased violence against trans people, HRC published an article on anti-LGBTQ bills currently sweeping through local and state legislature entitled, “2021 Officially Becomes Worst Year in Recent History for LGBTQ State Legislative Attacks as Unprecedented Number of States Enact Record-Shattering Number of Anti-LGBTQ Measures Into Law.” Most of the proposed bills target trans youth, aiming to restrict their ability to participate in sports or receive gender-affirming health care. In April of 2021, Arkansas passed HB1570, making it illegal for healthcare practitioners to provide puberty blockers or hormone therapy for transgender minors, prohibiting them from transitioning. According to The Advocate, the new law has sparked a rash of suicide attempts among trans youth, an at-risk group that already has statistically higher rates of suicide. How the media represents transgender people matters now more than ever before, but when it comes to accurate or positive trans visibility in the mainstream, the media still has work to do.
Cast of Pose clockwise from top: Angelica Ross, MJ Rodriguez, Hailie Sahar, Dominique Jackson, Indya Moore Photo credit: Bethany Wade
GLAAD published findings from a recent Pew Poll estimating, “nearly 90% of Americans say they personally know someone who is lesbian, gay, or bisexual. However, multiple polls show that approximately 20% of Americans say they personally know someone who is transgender. Given this reality, most Americans learn about transgender people through the media.” The problem lies in the continued use of defamatory stereotypes for trans characters, if they are present at all, and the casting of cisgendered actors to play trans roles. In Disclosure, a documentary about trans representation in the media available on Netflix, the various transgender tropes are broken down to reveal not only the harmful effects they have on public perception of the transgender community, but also the negative impact they have on trans people’s perceptions of themselves. More often than not, trans people are still cast as either victims or villains who are disposable one-dimensional characters, and their gender is often used as a plot twist or the butt of a joke. Even an exceptional performance of a cisgender actor playing a trans role sends the wrong message to audiences, a message that in some way trans people are just pretending. There is a dire need for stories inclusive of the trans perspective without trans identity at the center, stories that show trans characters thriving and not at odds with themselves or society. If most Americans derive their understanding of transgender people through the media, the media must give them trans characters they can identify with— and root for. In recent years, breakthrough shows like Transparent, which featured many trans actors, and Pose, the first show to star mostly trans women of color, proved there is an appetite for more nuanced and positive portrayals of trans life. A more fair and accurate representation of transgender people is not only more entertaining, but it also endears the audience to trans characters and informs them of trans issues.
The entertainment and news media play an important role in shaping society’s viewpoint on the LGBTQ+ community, but in truth, it is up to all of us to analyze the content we consume and do our part to unlearn our socialized prejudices. Even as anti-LGBTQ bills pass through state legislatures, the public outcry against such discrimination offers hope to trans youth currently living in states like Arkansas that people do care about them. Their lives, and the telling of their stories, can help stir compassion in and win hearts. They can help change minds.
Magaluf Ghost Town: Dropping the Curtain on Low-Cost Tourism
Magaluf Ghost Town, from Director Miguel Ángel Blanca, explores the inner workings of an island town with a reputation as a wild party destination for foreign tourists. Blanca points his camera at the locals who live in Magaluf year-round, and defies the rules of documentary by blending fact and fiction.
Written by Marisa Bianco
Photo Credit Catalan Films
On the island of Mallorca, the Spanish beach town Magaluf has an extravagant reputation in both Spain and the UK. As an American living in Spain, I had never heard of it, but my British friends immediately recognized Magaluf. They could speak to its infamy as a cheap, revelrous destination for young Brits. Magaluf has been the subject of British reality shows such as “Geordie Shore” (a variation on Jersey Shore) and sensationalized news stories that have created a self-fulfilling prophecy in the town. The TV cameras flock there because of its reputation for wild and uninhibited tourism. In turn, the airing of the news stories and reality shows further increases its notoriety, attracting more foreigners who are inclined to public debauchery.
Director Miguel Ángel Blanca subverts this expectation for derangement. Instead, he points the camera toward the Magaluf locals in his new documentary Magaluf Ghost Town, which premiered at the 2021 Hot Docs Festival. Blanca casts an array of Magaluf locals from different places and generations who he films reenacting events in their lives as well as their dreams and fantasies. These characters are shown inside their homes, close-up and intimately. We never see tourists like this. Instead, we see them as the locals see them—from afar, in the background, seemingly from another planet. In this way, the film invites us to question our perspective. Why are we drawn to, at least in part, the sensationalization of the revelry and fornication? The news stories and reality TV specials wouldn’t exist without a willing audience who wants to see these tourists’ uninhibited escapades. The film confronts us with this. We want the camera to zoom in, to look closer at the tourists. Instead, they are lurking around the characters. When the camera finally points to them, the score changes to something resembling a horror soundtrack.
The film’s narrative is both circular and linear. The first thing we hear is children whisper-singing a song, in English, about Magaluf. The lyrics are bright and optimistic (“The sun is always high down here in Magaluf”), but the whispers are thoroughly chilling. While the song plays, we see the manufacturing of an aerial model of Magaluf that becomes a motif throughout the film. The camera keeps returning to the model’s tiny hotels and golf courses between scenes. After the model is built, the film opens to the real Magaluf, empty before the high season, with scenes of a quiet beach accompanied by a lullaby-like score. As the tourists arrive, the lullaby shifts to the horror music.
The film ends when the tourists leave. It’s a complete circle—the hotels are quiet once again, and the lullaby soundtrack returns. When the visuals fade to black, we again hear the whisper-singing children. As the credits roll, the children’s voices disappear into the 1987 cult hit “Come to Magalluf” by Brios. The seamless transition from a silent accompaniment to 1980s disco-pop is eerie, as we realize the children were singing the pop song all along.
Photo Credit Catalan Films
The main characters are Tere, an older woman mourning her late husband who, out of economic necessity, takes in a Malian flatmate, Cheickne, and Rubén, a young gay student who aspires to be an actor, but feels trapped by Magaluf. Blanca introduces the characters with immediate life and death stakes. Tere is trying to quit smoking after a month-long stay in the hospital; she says that she must choose between smoking and her life. Rubén is doing a photoshoot with friends in a creepy shed where a man was allegedly burned alive. They take photos of each other playing dead, laughing with a disturbing levity.
With these characters, we see that Magaluf isn’t just a “ghost town” when the tourists are gone. Magaluf and its residents have an unmistakable supernatural sensibility. Tere tells Cheikne about her nightmares. She says, “I can feel it in my bones, something is going to happen here...What is it? I don’t know. But there’s something.” Meanwhile, Rubén says that people in Magaluf are “excited that something incredible could happen.” This idea of premonition is felt differently among the two generations, but the expectancy is there nonetheless.
The film’s climax revolves around a culmination of the supernatural within the characters. Rubén and his boyfriend kidnap a British tourist and take him to an uninhabited island just off the coast of Magaluf, where they take his clothes and abandon him. This abduction is interrupted by a scene of Tere seeing a medium, who tells her that her late husband has not yet crossed from our world. Another character, Russian real estate agent Olga, talks to her daughter about how she can feel the presence of people who have died. She says “don’t be afraid” that someone is with us, but unnerving music plays in the background. Despite her assurance, I am very much afraid.
Just as the characters explore the boundary between our world and the world of fantasmas (ghosts and spirits), the film explores the boundary between fiction and reality. The kidnapping scene is made to look real, as Blanca intersperses his footage with clips of the boys’ Instagram or Snapchat stories with messages like “Buscando víctimas.” I almost wondered whether I was watching an actual abduction. This confusion is intentional—everything we see is meant to be uncertain. With Blanca’s camera, nightmares and fantasies are made real.
Photo Credit Catalan Films
There is a constant sense throughout the film that Magaluf is a paradox. Rubén feels trapped; he expresses that their destiny is to go to school to learn to serve “guiris” (pale-skinned foreigners) and make guiris happy. At the same time, he feels that anything can happen in Magaluf, even something “magical.” Furthermore, the film portrays tourists like foreign invaders, wreaking havoc on the locals’ lives with their drunken exploits. But without the tourists, Magaluf wouldn’t have an economy. The locals wouldn’t be able to live. Is the solution then with Olga, the real estate agent who wants to clean up the town’s party strip and attract wealthier Europeans over the young vacationers? The mansion she shows contrasts so strikingly to Tere and Rubén’s cramped quarters. Her vision doesn’t necessarily seem like a more attractive option.
I watched Magaluf Ghost Town twice, before and after a weekend on the beach. I was in Fuengirola on Spain’s Costa del Sol, another popular Mediterranean destination among British tourists and retirees. Fuengirola is the type of town built for holiday-makers, full of hotels and apartment rentals with balconies and terraces looking towards the sea or the mountains. It lacks the Spanish character found in other towns in the region. Watching the film’s dichotomy between the “guiris” and the locals was strange because I felt like I didn’t belong in either box. Despite being considered a “guiri” for speaking English, I am not necessarily a tourist. Am I blending into the town’s fabric of locals, or am I a tourist invader? I don’t know the answer, but I know that Blanca’s perspective has made me look at myself and this country I call my second home in a new way.
Magaluf Ghost Town is the type of documentary that is not only beautifully shot but also defies the rules of documentary filmmaking, making it even more memorable and emotionally stirring.
Title: Magaluf Ghost Down
Director: Miguel Ángel Blanca
Running Time: 93 minutes
Year: 2021
Film as Poetry: When Art Intersects
Over the years, several independent filmmakers have married visual storytelling with poetic rhythm, be it through form, subject matter, or concept. This piece details three short films whose poetic elements amplify the complicated and mundane meaning of their characters' lives.
Written by Kennedy McCutchen
The intersection of two art forms into one creative entity has the potential to breed a magical and idiosyncratic experience; all the more so when those two art forms prioritize a kind of rhythmic sensory aesthetic that makes one treasure the budding trees of springtime or reexamine a kiss from a loved one. Over the years, several independent filmmakers have taken advantage of such artistic marriages in powerful and innovative ways. Poetry and its typologies have emerged as one medium on-screen as a subject, as an identity, and as an idea. The list of short films below consists of filmmakers whose poetic identities and interests reveal themselves as intricate and palpable stories.
Film as Haiku: Nettles (2018)
Photo Credits: Aaron Jaker, via Nettles - Chapters
A Bushwick Film Festival competitor and prize-winner, this short film written and directed by Raven Jackson exudes a haunting elegance characteristic of many women’s most subtle and traumatic moments in life. Composed of six nearly silent chapters, viewers are taken from body part to body part, both literally and figuratively. A little girl’s eye watches a father figure let his wet towel fall to the floor in what feels like a vacant home. An older woman’s back is quietly swept away in the currents of a muddied river. These little instances of difference and the liminal reminded me—and I’m sure many others—of my own intimate moments with fear, grief, healing, and sexuality.
Jackson is a published poet (her most recent work is a chapbook titled little violences), but her film does not prioritize nor celebrate poetry directly. Rather, it is the delicate haiku-like audiovisual experience that resembles something of an atmospheric slam session. The film’s short stories mimic the length and precision with which Jackson writes her poems. An excerpt from her poem “i watch papa bury our dog in a grave the size of a pond” strikes the same tone as her bodily Nettles chapters: “my jaws lock in mid-sentence and hands cover your last white leg with dirt.” Just as a haiku emphasizes the beauty of nature or the simple moments of life in only three lines, Jackson needs only the skip of a small girl’s jump rope over crunching leaves to foreground links between innocence, femininity, and the earth.
The fourth chapter, Throat, further displays the ephemeral and complex moments of a woman’s life. The audience watches the protagonist unflinchingly gut a chicken as the camera closes in on the innards of the bird, refusing to cut away. Confronting the uncomfortable while nevertheless carving a familiar ambience, the chapter continues to explore necessity and desire as we begin to watch the same woman masturbate. The director’s choice to juxtapose the scenes embodies the direct and often provocative nature of the well-known three-line poetic structure. Singularly evocative and desperately poignant, Jackson’s knack for stinging the viewer with an efficient, transient aesthetic keeps the tension high. Shot with 16 mm film and with little to no dialogue, Jackson’s work indeed reminds one of a rich haiku: short, intentional, and surprising.
Stream on The Criterion Channel
Film as Freeverse: How to Be at Home (2020)
Photo Credits: Andrea Dorfman’s YouTube Thumbnail
Directed by Andrea Dorfman in collaboration with songwriter and poet Tanya Davis, How to Be at Home is an endearing and timely short film made via still-shot animation. A narrator’s melodic voice recites a poem, a sequel to the pair’s first film How to Be Alone (2010), as Dorfman turns the pages of an illustrated book, each new leaf revealing a depiction of the words spoken. Made in the throes of the recent pandemic, How to Be at Home both comforts and mourns alongside our isolated bodies that are still coping after more than a year of living in the era of coronavirus. Kind suggestions of healing greet you at every corner. “Appreciate the kindness in the distance of strangers,” we’re told; “lean into loneliness and know you’re not alone,” our invisible friend says as hands hold along the bind.
“Feed your heart - if people are your nourishment, I get you. Feel the feelings that undo you while you have to keep apart.”
The film serves as a stylistically rhythmic lullaby, not abashing our self-pity nor ignoring the triggers that grind themselves against our identities and loved ones at every fresh news notification. It’s a short film about the familiar. It’s a two-dimensional pot clanging against a two-dimensional spoon. It’s a seagull beating above waves that can resemble our calmest spaces. It’s a poem, spoken and seen, reminding us that spaciousness in solitude can create a more holistic individual, one that can find connectivity and “truth” in the murk of death and isolation.
Stream on YouTube
Film as Elegy: The Poet and Singer (2012)
Photo Credits: Cinema on the Edge
“Hell subverting hell becomes heaven,” recites the poet of The Poet and Singer, a 21-minute short film directed by Bi Gan. The film follows an artistic pair along their casually murderous trek. Two men contemplate ambition, the Diamond Sutra, and toothaches in transitory non-places, all points from A to B: a river, a cave, a path along a field. Lightning bolts flash sporadically, cloaking the film with a sense of unexpected danger while maintaining voyeuristic awe regarding the extraordinary capabilities of nature. The poetry reveals itself out of the aforementioned toothache, out of meeting the father of a man they were paid to kill. A knife lingers from scene to scene; it doesn’t seem to surprise.
“Hell subverting hell becomes heaven.”
The lack of shock value is precisely why the melodrama of the film feels relatively unimportant. What does hold import is the contemplative and serene nature of Bi Gan’s artistic vision. For this reason, even given the abstract nature of the piece, The Poet and Singer best embodies that of an elegy, a reflection on a serious subject matter. A murder occurs along the river, but the philosophizing and ambition of the main characters’ are not limited to their callous act; in fact, they seem hardly troubled by it at all. Just as “the old man” claims the singer’s toothache “doesn’t matter,” neither does their crime. Instead, the political and spiritual realizations, as disguised as they may be in the film, are lamented with the poignancy of a silent paddle upstream.
Stream on The Criterion Channel
