by William Thomas Published on 02 11 2009 Release Date: 31. Fragments of Paradise begins with the raw, never-before-seen footage shot by an elderly Mekas who wails to the camera, “What is me?” It is a complex and difficult question that the film is ultimately reluctant to fully interrogate, on both formal and analytical levels.įragments of Paradise is released on 2 June on digital platforms. Shot in Kubelka’s Vienna apartment and at assorted public appearances over a four-year span, the movie offers many angles on his theories of cinema and gets him to contextualize films that each. Fragments Review Traumatised by a random shooting, a group of strangers react to the experience in a variety of life-changing ways. More seriously, this essentially hagiographic account fails to mention assertions by historian Michael Casper, who argued that Mekas had misrepresented his wartime activities, and that he had written for collaborationist magazines in Lithuania. Fragments is both deeply self-serious and essentially meaningless, the sort of were-all-connected tragedy in which birds fly free while humans remain stuck in. Compared to the moral complexity of Kobayashi’s film, this is tame stuff, but if you’re looking for heartwarming holiday viewing, you could do far worse. While Mekas’s camera moves with the jagged energy of New York streets, this documentary boxes its array of starry interviewees – including luminaries such as John Waters and Martin Scorsese – in static, talking-head shots. Buy Tickets New Movies Movies In Theaters Upcoming Movies Movies on Digital Movie Reviews Latest Trailers Movie News. The movie uses a split-screen technique that at first threw me off. While Leunig is interviewed for the doco and family photos shown, reconstructions of his childhood come from actors and are cleverly woven into the narrative. Besides his fostering and championing of an alternative film culture in New York, Fragments of Paradise also highlights his legacy as a pioneer of the “diary film” unfortunately, compared with the fractured yet intimate spirit of Mekas’s best-known works such as Walden (1968), the conventional style of KD Davison’s direction is painfully apparent. The first 10-ish minutes of this movie were a little slow, but after that, I was enthralled.
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