A monthly focus on the profound impact of film. Artist Conie Vallese selects her five titles
FILM PICKS WITH
CONIE VALLESE
"The films below are ones I saw more than four times in my life for different reasons.
They are all strongly philosophical about the vicissitudes of human condition and their behaviour, these kind of films are the ones that stay with me hence they are visually beautiful and are by the best film directors of all time in my eyes and heart" (Conie Vallese)
Cleo from 5 to 7 (1961) Agnes Varda
"Try freezing any frame of the scenes in her apartment and you will find perfect composition--perfect, but not calling attention to itself. In moving pictures, Varda has an ability to capture the essence of her characters not only through plot and dialogue, but even more in their placement in space and light. While many early New Wave films had a jaunty boldness of style, Varda in this film shows a sensibility to subtly developing emotions." (Roger Ebert)
Solaris (1971) Andrei Tarkovsky
"The films of Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky are more like environments than entertainments. It's often said they're too long, but that's missing the point: He uses length and depth to slow us down, to edge us out of the velocity of our lives, to enter a zone of reverie and meditation. When he allows a sequence to continue for what seems like an unreasonable length, we have a choice. We can be bored, or we can use the interlude as an opportunity to consolidate what has gone before, and process it in terms of our own reflections." (Roger Ebert)
Teorema (1968) Pier Paolo Pasolini
“What felt most miraculous to me were the striking images Pasolini found to make his strange story so persuasive. Stamp seemed like some Apollo or Dionysus, and those falling under his spell appeared, very plausibly, to be utterly possessed. Theorem felt like a film which dealt – both seriously and semi-comically at the same time – with the spiritual and sensual, the physical and metaphysical. (Geoff Andrew BFI)
"Made not long before the fall of the Berlin wall, this stunning tapestry of sounds and images, shot in black and white and colour by the legendary Henri Alekan, this is movie poetry." (Criterion)
Wings of Desire (1987) Wim Wenders
"Cassavetes has made the most impressive female portraits, and Gena Rowlands, who was always so incredible, intimate, explosive, and vibrant, has been an inspiration. A Woman Under the Influence has one of the most incredible female performances in modern cinema; it feels so real that it hurts. She is so vulnerable, it feels like you’re watching someone’s actual existence. Everything seems so free and wild and organic. It’s like looking at a Fauvist painting—it looks easy and natural, but the amount of energy that’s in the film is something that’s hard to capture. Anyone who has been involved in filmmaking knows that it is almost impossible to get to those levels of truth." (Sebastián Lelio)
A Woman Under the Influence (1974) John Cassavetes