‘Exploring’ features the filmographies of filmmakers that I’ve largely completed and celebrates them on the week of their birthdays.
Exploring #4: Angela Schanelec
Author / Eternality Tan
Tale of Cinema (2005)
A more melancholic piece than some of Hong’s breezier offerings as he explores fictive ideals and sad realities through the idea of cinema as a mirror image.
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Short Sharp Shock (1998)
Akin’s entertaining debut feature about gangsterism, brotherhood and petty crime may be raw and occasionally uneven, but it possesses a spirit so vital to the portrayal of multiculturalism in late ‘90s German filmmaking.
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Ludwig (1973)
Visconti’s screen treatment of the Wagner-obsessed King of Bavaria is inevitably tragic and melancholic, as this 4-hour epic charts his rise and downfall into madness.
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Tar (2022)
This could be the ‘Mulholland Drive’ for this generation—a deliberately-paced hallucinatory deep dive into the physical and psychological realities of a world-famous (if fictional) composer-conductor that sees Todd Field and Cate Blanchett in extraordinary form.
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One-Eyed Jacks (1961)
Brando’s only directorial effort is truly exceptional—a soulful revenge Western with stunning picturesque imagery and a commitment to exploring and subverting the ethos of the genre.
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Fabelmans, The (2022)
Spielberg’s polished, but rather underwhelming workmanlike by-the-numbers tale of his formative years as a child and teenager chronicles the tension between family disputes and his passion for filmmaking.
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Boat People (1982)
It’s tragic and overly melodramatic for sure, but Ann Hui’s then-controversial work about the sufferings of the Vietnamese post-Vietnam War remains a significant entry of the burgeoning Hong Kong New Wave.
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#LookAtMe (2022)
Even when it falls back into a kind of televisual style, Kwek’s work is always engaging as it tackles the thorny local LGBT issue with a kind of reactionary bite that is rare in Singapore cinema.
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4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007)
A masterwork of post-2000s East European cinema, this is an intense and uncompromising Romanian drama about illegal abortion that draws power from its stark visuals and ultra-long takes.
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