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Jemima Bucknell

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Tag Archives: 3d

Life Of Pi

12 Saturday Jan 2013

Posted by Jemima Bucknell in 2012, Film

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3d, Ang Lee, baboon, Catholicism, cgi, Eyes Wide Shut, Holy Motors, india, Jemima Bucknell, Jurassic Park, Kiarostami, Leos Carax, life of pi, ocean, raft, religion, shipwreck, spirituality, starvation, tiger, Truth, vegetarian, whale

Life-of-Pi-01

Life Of Pi begins in a zoo, with the candid images of its inhabitants climbing trees, eating, napping, flirting. Initially, each colourful creature is flesh and blood, but a large CGI elephant lumbers into frame, followed by an ape so magnificent looking, it couldn’t be real, then another digital creation – or, maybe, it is real? Were any of them? Real or not, they’re exquisite.

Pi (Irrfan Khan) recalls his survival story to a journalist (Rafe Spall) looking to write it. He begins with his childhood, his unusual namesake and how he to came to believe in God(s). For Pi, spirituality and ritual are exponential and secure in this belief, he is able to live within the customs of multiple faiths at once, becoming a Hindu-Muslim-Catholic, uninterested in a singular religious “truth”.

His family decide to migrate their zoo from India to the United States via ocean liner. A storm hits, and the ship is sunk. After a traumatic sequence of events unfolds between Pi and the other survivors on a life raft, he awakens to a sea so still that it mirrors the sky. The horizon is indiscernible were it not for the upright position of the raft in the water, and he is met with a ferocious Bengal tiger. The tiger’s name is Richard Parker, a human name given him by mistake. Although we can see that this is a post-production creation, there hasn’t been such a realised carnivore since Spielberg’s velociraptor in Jurassic Park. Audiences will be divided between the drama, and the spectacle of just how close digital animation has come to creating life.

Where 3D technology has done little to enhance anything outside of Avatar, it is part and parcel to Pi’s intrinsic ideas about perception and reality. It is used to astonishing effect in a deeply spiritual scene where Pi looks into the mouth of the universe, where the water and sky blend into a tunnel of imagery that rushes and blooms onscreen.

The journalist is a troublesome but necessary component to Pi’s story that undoes Pi’s analogy with a single, delineating sentence. He speaks for the audience, which is unfair, but reinforces to us that the film has such a sumptuous symbolic trajectory that it does it little justice to yield a single truth from it. The result is something like Jonathon Glazer’s Birth. Pi’s fear conjures an existence within which he can survive, as Kidman’s grief gives birth to the ghost of her lost love. Where the ocean represents pre-existence, the sky opens up to the afterlife, and where Kidman stands devastated in the surf, Pi’s life begins again on the shore.

Life Of Pi is a picturesque production of cinematic rhetoric. Recent work from Kiarostami and Leos Carax’ Holy Motors explore much of the same meditations on truth and cinema. It also uses a principle of Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut: that the truth lies in the telling. Though its alchemy won’t turn atheists to Catholics, it speaks volumes on the human experience using the same mirror tricks that have historically furnished the cinema in its simulacrum­ purpose, the imitation of life.

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Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake

29 Thursday Nov 2012

Posted by Jemima Bucknell in 2012, Film

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3d, art, ballet, dance, Matthew Bourne, prince, richard windsor, Swan Lake, tchaikovsky

Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake is a visceral modern retelling of the famed tragedy. It begins, as the young Prince is vexed from his sleep by a haunting vision. The queen, a meticulous matriarch, enters to hush him but is repelled by his plea of affection, unable to embrace or console her frightened child. When he awakes in the morning, there is a light-hearted shift to the everyday operation of royalty, as though this neglect is commonplace.

As the melancholic Prince arrives at the lake – depressed by a brush of affection from a flapper in a cocktail dress – the dance is no longer limited by routine domestication (getting dressed, waving to your subjects) or shaped to fit its modern surroundings (clubbers bopping their heads to disco music) and the production shifts to adopt ballet as its sole expression – the ballet belongs to the swans where in the palace, all physical countenance is to be controlled, suppressed.

The duality of the socially lavish palace and the anonymous refuse of the lake tempt two beings to tread both worlds. The Prince is ecstatic at his liberation from his dutiful commitments, and is delivered by the tenderness and freedom with which he interacts with the lead swan/Stranger (the irresistible Richard Winsor) who is likewise drawn to the world to which the Prince belongs. The two wish to possess each other, but in both cases, are not made to survive beyond the restrictions of their own environments.  This cataclysmic push/pull of tame and wild is gloriously expressed through a series of dances at the ball, each with a stronger Latin influence than the last and an escalating sexuality.

Bourne’s ballet is largely different from the traditional production and it is fitting that this recent cinematic release reflects its bold reimagining in digital 3D. In most cases 3D boosts the price of hundred-million-dollar blockbuster admissions, but here art makes use of a potentially heightened cinematic experience. The dance at Swan Lake that captivates the Prince and delivers him from near death is the scene in which the 3D device enhances the viewing. A ballet – best viewed live on the stage in any case – ought to benefit from an extra dimension when confined to a screen but the performance would have been just as dazzling and tragic thanks to impeccable choreography, that eminent Tchaikovsky score and an extremely handsome cast. This production is an unforgettable cinema experience.

* a version of this post originally appeared at filmblerg.com

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