[The Miscarried Might-Have-Been] on Truffaut's [Two English Girls, 1971]

by Dontrell Lovet't
from, [PsychoNeuroFilmography]







In the stylism so akin to the French New Wave Film revolution, Truffaut's 1971 romantic drama, [Two English Girls] is a film adaptation of Henri-Pierre Roche's 1956 novel of the same title.

The film sets in Paris around the turn of the 20th century, when Claude, the male lead portrayed by Truffaut's "artist fetish" Jean-Pierre Leaud, is invited by Anne (Kiki Markham), an old family friend to spend the summer with her family on the coast of Wales. But in quick succession and turn of events, Anne is not interested in Claud as a lover for herself, rather one for her introverted, bashful sister Muriel (Stacey Tendeter). The match becomes a fit, Claud and Muriel becomes closer, begins to grow on one another and with hopes of being married, both Muriel and Claud's mother agree that the couple should spend a year apart, Claud returning to Paris and Muriel remaining in Wales.

Now this is where Truffaut takes shape with his adaptation, do due-in-proper justice to Henri-Pierre Roche. Claud begins to meet very attractive women and begins to stray, which eventually led him to the bed of Muriel's older sister Anne, who came to Paris to study art. Claud then becomes hopeful of a relationship with Anne, until she leaves him for a publisher, going on a vacation with him to Persia. Muriel then learns about the betrayal of her fiance and her older sister (the responsible party which introduced the two initially), which whom Muriel forgives, once Anne is returned home by the publisher, as she dies in Wales.

Muriel, who had since accepted a job in Belgium, spends a night with Claud and upon waking, revealing to him that now they must part forever, only to later write of her pregnancy. Claud, believing now the door for a happy life with Muriel again open, is shocked and despondent when a second letter arrives from Muriel, confessing of the miscarried fetus and that she would not be returning to him again.

The film leaves Claud, just Claud, no wife, no child, a writer with only dreams, shattered ideals, scuttled hopes and fanciful fantasies never to have bore fruit. He, Claud, is a representation of all of humanity, of most who have lost and wondered on the "What ifs."

For Claud, as is for most today, the sunken dream is one swallowed by irreversible timescapes, scientifically improbable revivals. A single mistake by Claud set off the chain reaction, a rattle of senses to once and for all set in stone Muriel's aforementioned disposition of introverted aloneness, untrusting of anyone other than her own interior.

Truffaut, together with Roche, are two artist brought together by novel and by film, by sentiments and by personal experience, the Auteur Theory in full measure as the pen of the writer in full, broad stroke. What cannot be taken from the experience, the love triangle and deception between Claud, Anne and Muriel? One thing we can truly count on is that our actions tend to inflict upon us consequences we are seldom ready for and most of which we spend the entirety of our lives yet trying to endure.

[Composites] on the Documentary & Documentarian

by Dontrell Lovet't
from, [PsychoNeuroFilmography]






 Nothing in history escapes memory; misadventure, happenstance, mirrored-images, bliss- this is the stain upon memory in which we want to escape, or savor. But the human brain, as effective as it is in its 10% functional capacity, it is fragile, plagued by degenerative disease, fractured by communicable disease, compromised by retrograde amnesia. So we photograph every inch or moments that are memorable to us, those we know we may never forget and those we know we may and in someday, be in need of a reminder. The Documentarian is the photographer evolved....and their art,doomed star-crossed lovers, destined to wonder for eternity.


....this evolved artist has gone from the still images formed in our minds far before the camera has capture an instance and transmogrified the stillness into motion, transgressed the black and white to color and regressed once again to black and white. As an adult in stress of their lives, regression is pertinent to the origin as the origin is the axis of the celestial sphere of art itself.

Subtle art demands only subtle attention; art must become radical if its demands is to be the same. With the documentarian, everything exists around memory, around what happens in our human history that needs to be remembered and brought to light. Figurative or abstract, it painstakes its claim to the documentarian in a haunting manner, until no longer they can ignore that the dream demands to be born from idea, from ideal.

 We confront time as we do the object, and the independent , intervening distances flowing from event into lens is not missed; every moment capture is captured intentionally, as in the dream, nothing is a mishap. If the documentary is to capture what the dream has, then both the composition and the documentarian must become a double of it, the devout agent who carries out a task and analyzes and asks not why it must be undertaken. In one form or another, silence comes over the auteur, a disquieted spell that removes them from actual time. The dream then is no longer the dream, there is no more dream. It has now become, stained itself in motion for the next thousands years. If it is not dreamed then it is no recorded, if it happens in the dream, then it is from an authentic, aesthetic stance that it must become, upright past the crawl, an embryo develops without chromosomes. The documentarian who lives in art is privy to the beginning and end of a dream, a specific dream, as one who lives in art becomes aware of their own demise.

 It is not clear whether the documentarian can explain the dream or the documentary can fully capture the dream as it becomes reality; what is clear is that the documentary is savors the integrity lost upon the major motions film. And slowly, a cult audience is eroding the mainstream zealous, bringing limelight
to a truth that some embrace while most deny and prefer their complacency in denial.

[Ciao Manhattan, 1972] film review

[Ciao Manhattan, 1972]




by Dontrell Lovet't
from, [PsychoNeuroFilmography]








Director John Palmer & David Weisman







Perhaps the most chilling account of a downfall, told in the voice of Edie Sedgwick herself, the 1972 short film "Ciao Manhattan" is a haunting prologue just before a fatal addiction would take the life of perhaps the greatest underground actress of the 60's and 70's. With accounts of a unadvised pregnancy, inhibitions from the time of losing her virginity, to hospitalization in psychiatric treatments, falling love and giving energy to what led to a mere insanity.

 Sedgwick, who derived from a prestigious family, desired to live, live the pulse of the people, the cause of the time. Her black and white portrait given in Ciao Manhattan, partial documentary, partial interview, known sieges laid to her during many of her films with Andy Warhol, notably, [Poor Little Rich Girl, ]. A beautiful girl who never knew she was beautiful, she hid herself under addiction and club dim lights and the subculture of homosexuality to feel the beauty she yearned for. Footage of her displays a woman alive during the days, radical in the nights, vague sleep and the days return in their monotonous, viral ways. Amongst her liveliness, was the haunts of the suicide of two of her brothers which gave over to Sedgwick's eventual self-destruction. Her quote about blossoming into the scene, into a "healthy young drug addict," gives the account of a woman who wasn't interested in her own self-destruction though it was the scene and she who imposed it on herself.

 Sporadically, the interviews return, followed by silent moments of her responses muted out, only her body language and lips telling the tale as that of the orient theatre. Darkness of the reel also is used to tell the tale of Sedgwick, her discussions with photographers and filmmakers reveals Edie's very versed knowledge of filmography and had she lived on, she could have made more of what her family believed was a terrifying ideal. Though she mentioned that her family would "endorse modeling 100 times over before entertaining the idea of her in films," Edie loved the Warhol idea of people buying her life in motion. There was no need for scripts, no need for ideas, nor need for scenes; Edie had grown out of what most actresses would need to appeal to the public- her life within itself was an unrehearsed script given over to the desires, the curiosities of the movement, of the public's rendering at the time. It was Warhol who gave her the true notion that if her life was interesting enough, people would go on and believe in her, that very life and continue to be influence and magnetized to her condition. That very idea came with a drastic price, an exact price that Edie would have to pay and many stars before and after her had also been in debt to.

 If the relationship with Warhol went sour, severed on bad terms, it was because Warhol took advantage of her love to make art with her life, with her body and her blossoming day's over. It was from Warhol that she grew out of as well as she did scripts (that she still felt she needed.) Warhol experimented, and as he did, Sedgwick continued to reach and grasp. Her use of drugs gave her the notion to trip out of many life and begin to live another after the binge ended its distortion. "You live alone, creating your life as you go. You only contend with two things; yourself and other people."

Sedgwick's life was a tiresome, fanciful one, living in a dream can be an exhausting plight for the dream world isn't our world- there is a cost to live there. Drugs were the channels to reach the nirvana she believe would take her from one life to the other, from one day to the next. If any fault lied in the life of Edie Sedgwick, it was her mishap of overdose, forfeiting the world of her beauty and brilliance.

[Beauty No.2] Andy Warhol & the Posthumous Acclaim to Fame

by Dontrell Lovet't

from, [PsychoNeuroFilmography]

Warhol never penetrated Hollywood in the way that he would have preferred, instead, he was the dominate whale in the small pool of indie film. A dapper dandy, the "Good-Time Charlie" of his era, film invited invited him nor his art, despite its unorthodox stylism of pop art. Artistic expression came alive as never before under his experimentation with film. The pioneer of Interview Magazine and author of "The Philosophy of Andy Warhol and Popism; The Warhol Sixties," his openly gay lifestyle, bohemian trysts with intellectuals, the term "15 minutes of fame," was coined; in a Warhol film, that was all he needed to solidify his diversity.

Why in all of his charismatic artism did Andy Warhol fail to make it to mainstream prominence?

It is irrefutable that most of Warhol's collections are highly valuable. A 2009 article in the Economist described Warhol as "the bellweather of the art market;" his works are considered some of the most expensive paintings ever sold. Of his numerous works of art, his filmography details the visual scrapbook of genius, notably the films "Beauty No. 2 and Poor Little Rich Girl, both of which starred the most popular underground film actress, the late Edie Sedgewick.

Both display an instrumental demise to Sedgewick, a siege of personal and derogatory questions whilst she is in bed with another man, then the subsequent crime of passion, the strangulation. In the admixture of both film, we see that Warhol was partial to not only Sedgewick but to female characters in general. The chauvinistic manner blanketed over the seemingly internal Sedgewick in unleashes in an unforgiving climax, a foreign object embedded into the skin of a sufferer imprinted with a slave's mentality. There is a seemingly hidden desire, an inalienable desire, to completely dispose of the fragilly intact character and scatter its remnants completely, severe it from its only source of metastasizing confidence, dismember the source at almost an identical desire. There is no question nor debate as there is in Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina," whether Warhol loves or hates his characters in these two films, his loathing spills over from film to reality as evident in his split from Sedgewick personally and professionally.

The pathology of the filmmaker is that the true desire itself cannot be contained; it shifts and varies itself through the dimension that separates film and life, fiction and non; the only pretension is that it allows them to breathe and bare the brunt of true life. A filmmaker discovers the world only because they must and for the reason that art depends on it.  But before there is anything at all, the desire must embed itself, the bliss of the desire when finally expelled and placed upon the reel. It is a mutual encounter, as the parasite and the host, the degradation of one and the life of another, portraiture of the artist at the limits of themselves.

Warhol's desire was of a deeper pathology than some pundits may believe; he revised and pioneered a world of his own in spite of one that would not accept him rightfully. One traces the movements of the desire a thousand times over but desire cannot live if it too has not the opportunity to breath. Warhol created that opportunity, created his world, now scattered and displayed on the walls of wealthy connoisseurs.

[Etcetra] A study on the Short film II

by Dontrell Lovet't

from, [PsychoNeuroFilmography]

We has been said has been said; now let's make the painful plight to say the truth.........



There purpose of life is that there is no definite purpose other than to be and become. The film, made in the image of man, is on that purpose of becoming, ever-becoming, yet it still stumbles and trips on the straights of its own creation. Being that film is made in the image of man, it too holds the imperfections of man, so beyond the interstitial, it is said that film was created to construct the future of humanity- upon its conclusion, the mind is set to wander, wonder and sequence what can become of the human race.

Actors are artist and as such able to grasp all cruelties that transpires and transfigure the mode of a film, whether consistent or shifting; it is with the compound that has become their life that details the rhythm of a film, moreover, a fiction so telling, so emphasizing, so captivating, that in a matter of moments, the moment teir physical language begins to speak, that fiction then becomes a reality corrosive to the life of audience, rekindles a flame that is reminiscent to pain perhaps most have felt. To be placed in the language, whether bliss, rather melancholy, rather terror or lustful desire, the momentous captivity that carries the eyes of viewers through the body of the film as blow flow through the arteries, cements a purpose, decimates the limitations of the filmmaker imposed by the filmmaker. In the short film left to its seemingly vague being, a conclusion is written in the hearts of the audience, and it is the heart that determines an "happily ever after" or a "tragic" ending, the filmmaker has no true control over this sequence. The actor is only the intermediary that drafts what cannot be forged by the novice mind, by the vacu
um void of any pride of its own tale of emptiness.

It must be said that film in itself is a viral manifestation upon the human condition, the sweetest and most detriment of vices that plagues. But as an image of man, the day film was created, the very next day, it was being perverse as man came about, the preceding day, he enslaved his fellow. If film has not sought freedom to live freely, it is because man has not, serves itself in a platter as an indigent example to ignite a subsidiary revolution, planted a kernal in an unsown soil that cannot take fruit, a wingless bird that dreams of the sky but cannot take flight.

The disharmonious endeavor is a definite symptom of decay, a malignancy along the vertebrae ignoring the anatomical structure of uprightness and refuses the plight of both feet upon the earth. Bygone filmmakers were aware of this malignancy, aware of the disarticulation that follows in a sole effort to save the body from the spread of infection. Major film is bleeding but it has not yet been bled dry of its metaphysical inaccuracies, its ignorance and ignoring of opportunity to introduce this world that those who know not of its splendor, its pains, its wanders, its mysteries. Furthermore to solve the intricate wound that art has been inflicted upon the artist, a greater understanding of the artist's desire, depravities, past and constructed worlds must be documented accurately, else it is left upon us as a confounded event.

[Ana, 2014] film review

[Ana, 2014]

by Dontrell Lovet't

from, [PscyhoNeuroFilmography]

Based on "Autopsicografia" by the portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa


As one would expect from any film or production based on a poem, [Ana] opens with a profound depth- a woman confessing her love of another, to what is seemingly a therapist. She confesses that she cannot live without the "perfect" love of her life nor she could without her. In a devil's avocation, her therapist tells her that humans love perfection because we can't have it and to describe her lover as "perfect" is an idealizing standard; all relationships have problems and as such, it is all in her imagination. In a turn of events, the film turns to see from the therapist point-of-view- she understands her perfectly, even goes so far as to live vicariously through her words about her lover. But even so, this woman who she loves is truly only a figment of her imagination, a being so frail yet holds so much significance in not only her life and mind but the life and mind of the therapist.

In an effort to free this woman from her figmented, perfect lover (and perhaps himself as well), he wants her to think of her as someone she once had who has left her life. This then leads the film to see the woman's lonesome and destructive life without her feminine figment, a treacherous trial where one is set free by their peers and convicted by the judge's render alone. Though with an unvarying endeavor, the woman, though she knows her figment is just that, she has declared her life empty without her, that if her life has any worth, it would be better to live with the figment than without it, that she would prefer "to continue insane but keep her by my side." 

It is in her refusal to relinquish her figment that in her sincerity, the therapist begin to be endeared by her "inhumane devotion," which his identification with her leads him to believe he may be insane as well. He feels envious of a woman created "in delirium," envying her madness, contemplating if we in our human imperfection are capable of creating such a perfect design if we ourselves have never known it. 

It is then that we see the therapist return home alone, grab a bottle of wine and two glasses, sits in chair, across from the figment in his patient's mind and tells her that he loves her.

[Ana] is a film under the influence of perfection so much so it itself is perfection, its poetics mirrors the poetry of Pessoa, where one "insane" patient deliriums are so robust, so fruitful in their dream life as to be taken in by someone who is "sane" and of this world. 

[The Film & its Double III] Fellini, [La Strada] & the Likes of Humanity

By Dontrell Lovet't
from, [PsychoNeuroFilmography]


 If one is to stop and look behind them, they may find similarities when their attention is returned forward; the cliche of the past having nothing for is timeless, though the artist, while anticipating establishing their immortality through the medium of art, must rely on the past, on memories, fortunes, misfortunes, adventures and misadventures all the same.


  Federico Fellini was a master of giving an audience a widen view of humanity within a session of his films. The Maestro's 1954 film, [La Strada], gives us an eartly feel of things most of us may have felt, and if not encountered, are bound to. Gelsomina, a woman whose intellect is nothing special to speak of, is purchase from her mother by Zampano, a primitive who takes her on the road in an almost mythical and harsh tale, where delays can be viewed as gifts, even in a ragtag traveling circus, which gives us the epitome of what we believe would be the Italian personality. Gelsomina becomes a percussionist alongside of Zampano street performing, giving little to the modest living they are making as a patchworked and purchase-couple, though Zampano wants nothing of a marriage with Gelsomina, who offers her hand out of the planted idea of a nun.

  Il Matto, a man who too is a member of the circus, appears and fixes himself as a tormentor of Zampano, though we never discover why and when Zampano is at his wit's end, he pulls a knife and chases Il Matto, which causes him to get arrested, where he is jailed soon after for the offense. When Zampano is released, he and Gelsomina sees Il Matto on side of the road changing a tire. Zampano stops the car, kills the clown Il Matto and attempts to conceal the body in the car, which goes into flames as Zampano pushes it off the road. But the killing of Il Matto causes Gelsomina to come apart and her coming apart causes Zampano to abandon her while she sleeps, awakening to her clothes, money and her trumpet, one of the other instruments she played on occassions when she and Zampano would perform in the streets to make their modest and almost meager living.

  The story only comes to a close when Zampano encounters Gelsomina year's later, having been taken in by her father, well-wasted away till the point she inevitably dies and Zampano finds a beach and breaks down in tears. Is his crying out of regret for never having loved Gelsomina or for not having taken care of her properly? Is it because he bought her from her mother who could have given her a bit more love then he had shown her? Or was it empathy for her having to have to witness and live with the haunting memory of watching him kill Il Matto?


  Any conclusion can be made by anyone who has the care to offer their perspective of [La Strada], but all we do know and what many can agree on, is the depiction of [La Strada] gives us an almost tragic-comedy of humanity, terrifying but not all the way, as smiles can be invoked from the views and scenes of performing clowns, and the chuckles we humans tend to take on when we observe misfortune familiar and unfamiliar to us.

  Fellini is the ultimate misfit of film, a true maestro of embracing this human condition for all it is, reserving judgement, forfeiting any such altruism for endeavors to shapeshift it, rather give human kindness, human darkness and human existence its benefit of a doubt for a due in proper.

[The Integrity Cell] on the Decadence of the Short Film

by Dontrell Lovet't
from, [PsychoNeuroFilmography]

The short film has long been the most transparent form of film in America; neither major production nor aphorism, it projects the most potent apex that is diluted over a longer time extent than the major motion picture. Lost in its own resplendence, reduced by its own significance, fed only by a metaphysical hunger, it is a body that must empty itself of the most mainstream cliches and rediscover the origins the moment the reel begin to turn. Man has long dwelled in its own reduction, in its own illusion of grandeur; it is in film, namely the short, that imperfection isn't hidden in a slow anticipation to something predicted, but a truth willing to come out of thin air to risk everything.

The film can bring the sun into a focal and reduce it in the same manner, create a deep chasm of deceit, cleverly hoist darkness from its association and disassociate it. More often than not, the footage will fail, and if it does not, it will do no more than to create the shell of its own disquiet. Because the mainstream film is littered with brand and popular names, it prevents the perspective of one seeing it as the dismemberment, as unoriginal, a stolen thing from the past which Artaud believe masterpieces must remain. To resurrect these masterpieces are not a stroke of genius, but a retreat of the auteurs into the darker corners of themselves. Truffaut believed that the filmmaker is the author of the film and thus exposes their own perceptions. The perception is major motion picture has been compromised, an impossible compromise tainted with incapability, borrowed visions from bygone greats, brought into modern, is inane when it has not become from a dream in utero.

If there is no risk, no outrage, no shock or awh, then there is no need to compose. Silence will claim us as a vast mist descending from the nothingness that has become. In the short film, there is an opportunity to reclaim the light we've lost in film today, reconcile with what was, bury it, say our peace and never again feel the need to exhume it. Exhumation means that art as we know it has not evolve but devolved. Embarking on a journey means to decimate even the ideal of the loiter, not to declare who we are because we do not know until the reel stops once and for all. In our mind is the draft, the unseen, to create, the instrument of the seen is then projected, and not only on us to meet the dream we once dream, but onto the whole of the audience, who is the dreaming world awaiting movement, awaiting the initial reason to be moved.

Perhaps Chapman knew this dream, perhaps Bunuel, perhaps Truffaut in bed with all whom he fancied and fetished; it is impossible to doubt the world that has plunged into mimicry and mockery, into the pseudo-placental depth that all artist must plummet into if their art is to ever become. The events of a film must speak for themselves, as Samuel Beckett's art, introducing nothing, giving nothing; and from that nothingness, everything is translated, transferable, transmuted and transmutated. These events must not be manipulated but nurtured, as a child who first begins to walk, and from this walk, this child must fall, as man must first fall, to know that he is able to stay upright. The human perspective, the human walk, has thus nowadays been narrowed, its path narrowed, rudimentary thought suspended by capital and advertisement to cajole artist and hypnotize a somnambulate public.

Think of the scientific method in which scientist use to test disease. First, they begin with a lesser life form, rodents, then an advancement to larger mammals and then, the human cell is brought into a petri-dish. With film, the disease is taken directly into the human cell via histrionics, in a myopic manner where the moral and the box office is the true means to an end. Though man makes films, it cannot be in the image of him, for man is awaiting death and the film is made to be immortal.

The desperate straights taken in a flawed thesis is now showing its arrogance, its fits of sequels, borrowings from the posthumous. There then is a scorn in the discourse for all interest other than self-interest, a waltz around the subcultural and subterranean, self-reassurance via acknowledgement and annual award validation. Film has found itself in a perilous, revolving vanity, a mirror of said and stymied petulance, the lack of a visceral and cerebral capability, adrenal possibility. If it continues on its present course, it will again be a twofold image of man, headed for an inevitable doomsday plague.

A short film is a pretext to evolution from revolution, filmmakers unknown to the mainstream, ignored, blacklisted and ousted motion artists. As a cell splits and reproduces, the body, which is it represented shell, too reproduces, its function a reproduction of that splice, its genetics nonethesame. What can be altered must be manipulated, what can be changed only can undergo a gradual shape-shift, though it too, as the human personality, remains constant. The body as we know it is intricate and diverse but the cell always is true, functions to its own truth, cadence and tandem flow. In this, its integrity maintains. If film is to ever rediscover its integrity, it will be through the short film, the first cell before its split, that growth must begin, be nurtured with a mirrored truth, until such time it divides and meets its double.

[The Film & its Double II]

 Mainstream film today can be said to have hit an impasse; that is, the cheap, careless, profit-hungry recreations overwhelmed with special effects and graphics as opposed to the depth of story and creation. A film loses its soul when an artless suit ahead of a studio company has the ability to alter a story line and thus spit in the face of art. A solid mainstream film is a far and between phenomena to encounter nowadays but in independent film, much is underrated and that much makes all the difference between a film and an imitation of it.

  To "speak" a language is to use it, but to "speak" cinematographic language is to a certain extent to invent it. This invention, as something viable, something effectively and vitally mechanically fixed, because ineffectual if tampered with, a liability bound to backfire and injure its user. It seems the art critic is the only species of humans aware of most of this, printing reviews that seemingly go unread, spouting monologues to closed ears in awe of diluted tales in which are not privy to the originals. It has be theorized that sequels endanger originals but it is only in modern film, where the sequels are forfeited their origin in place of blood, gore and predictable outrage and disaster, that originals are truly endangered of poor rewrites. It is not the filmmaker who must remain true to a promising tale but the audience must become more keen to demand that that very tale is given wholly, not just breadcrumbs swept to the floor.

An example of how the tale losses its purpose can be seen in the Grimm's tales; where Cinderella is seen as a beauty becoming, Snow White a woman waking to her dream, and Hansel and Gretel beating the odds through a dark, perilous and enchanted forest; Cinderella's sisters had their feet cut off to feet properly into set-sized shoes, Snow White was raped in her sleep by her royal lover and Hansel and Gretel were held captive by blind cannibals. In dilution we find treason, a mutiny, a lie served on a hot platter with cheap wine that gives us momentary thrills and blinding, regrettable headaches the morning after.

There most respectable thing about Rotten Tomatoes is their ranking of audience approval, giving voice to not only the film critic but the people, the consumers, the many who are pulled up by film trailers of upcoming major films, planning their lives around it. It is then recognized that if life is about seeking a happiness with the likeness of the womb, or effectively a "paper womb," they deserve to walk into a theatre and be pulled from reality, into art, return to reality with a greater idea of their life.

A film is meant to bring one closer to oneself, even in spite of self

Dontrell Lovet't

from, [PsychoNeuroFilmography]

[The Film & its Double] The Auteur + Truffaut's [The 400 Blows]

[The Film & its Double] The Auteur + Truffaut's "The 400 Blows"

 A film must be a balanced creation as the mind of the filmmaker/writer must be a terrible thing. Art is inspired by life all around us, by the very horrendous truth in dead sight in front of our eyes that we refused to see. It is those dreads, those joys, those dramatics that the filmmaker must exploit in a phosororescent manner, they must be willing to release all things that have found the charter outwards unafraid, apologize to none and leave an audience in utter awe.

The desires, the very fantasies of the filmmaker must not be purposely latent else to leave critics conflicted as to which face is the true. Aronfosky displayed his very fearlessness with the unfettered approach to his 2010 film "Black Swan," which was followed by controversy, and even though obscenity laws have been repelled in this country for over 40 years, "Black Swan" was released only in select theatres. But this modern-day obscenity end run did not dilute what Aronofsky wished to display, the tale he wished to tell. Aronfosky, after the release of "Black Swan" was no longer a filmmaker but an Auteur.

In the 1940's Francois Truffuat devised the "Auteur Theory" a theory in filmmaking in which the filmmaker is seen as the creative force in a motion picture. Jean Luc-Godard, along with Truffaut, followed the notion of the Auteur Theory, which in turn made them the greatest momentum of the French New Wave era. Because they were experimenting with a new art form and dismantling the art of their time to allow rebirth, obscure literature little known by the world or banned by the conservative suits of the modern nations, became their inspiration. In Truffaut's 1959 debut film "The 400 Blows," we saw the troubled adolescent Antoine Doinel (portrayed by Jean-Pierre Leaud) whose parents believed him to be atypical as does his schoolmaster. This leads to all odds against the youth, forcing him into a youthful rebellion of fleeing both home and school. After plagarizing Balzac, he is finally expelled from school for good. His theft of a typewriter and his guilt in trying to return it leads his stepfather to throw him to the police, where he is held in confinement with criminals elements of the Parisianne sort. While in custody, it comes to light that Antoine's father isn't his biological one, turning a tide of rebellion even further. When he is released, he plays football with a group of boys until he sees his opportunity to flee once again. Antoine makes his way to the ocean, where in the end, the camera catching his run and probably plunge into it.

The "400 Blows" was one of five semi-autobiographical films based on the life of Truffaut himself; troubled youth, kick out of school, his father not his biological, a known runaway. Truffaut drove the cadence of the film so much so he begin to relive the life he once lives as that youth portrayed by Jean Pierre Leaud, who Truffaut chose to continue to portray him in the following films.

There may have been a deep desire within Aronfsky, tragedy and brilliance meshed with beauty, to illicit not only an adaption of Tchaikovsky's "White Swan" but to bring to cinema a fundamental article of blood that made the fallen swan her hideous yet genius self. There were conflicts during the filming of "Black Swan" that Aronfosky himself resolved with his own resolve; he was incorrigible, refused to stray from a narrow path constructed by something he himself may not have know, or may never.

Films built from blood are rare in the mainstream; we see scenes wholly dramatic and the overcompensation of special effects as opposed to wholly psychological ones designed to not cater to an audience, or vaguely speak to an audience, but those meant to bring the audience to themselves.

May the Auteur's courage and wanderlust live forever

Dontrell Lovet't

from, [To Whom All Humanity is Dreaming]