410. Mediterranee (1963)

Running Time: 43 minutes
Directed By: Jean-Daniel Pollet, Volker Schlondorff
Written By: Philippe Sollers

Note: For the first time in my journey I was forced to take a shortcut that I didn't want to take. The impossible to find #410 - "Mediterranee", popped up on YouTube, with promises of English subtitles, a few months ago. When I sat down to watch it, I discovered that the subtitles were either severely out of sync or just missing altogether. I stopped the video, watched something else and continued my journey, vowing to find a complete copy of the film, with a full set of of correct English subs. Well, after looking and looking...and looking, I simply cannot find another copy and fearing that the YouTube version would eventually be taken down, I decided to bite the bullet and just watch it. The good news is that the narration seems to repeat a lot and that seemingly the images are the important part of the film and not necessarily what is being said over the images. Again, it was a shortcut I DID NOT want to take, but determined to finish the "1001" book, I really had no other choice.

IT CAME FROM YOUTUBE

So now that we got the official disclaimer out of the way, lets get down to brass tax and talk a little bit about this movie. When I say "a little bit", I do mean a little bit, because a review of this forty-three minute piece will not take long, I suspect.

Plot synopsis here is completely unnecessary, because as I said above, the film is simply more a collection of images than anything else. Images include a young girl on a metallic, eerie operating table, an old man rowing an old boat, various images of what seem to by ancient Egyptian ruins, an overripe orange hanging from a tree and various bloody images of a bull fight. There's also a soundtrack, which includes sometimes creepy music and the sound of a buzzing fly, as if the insect were lost inside your ear. According to THE BOOK, this film had a great impact on Godard's "Contempt", but I'll be damned if I see the similarities.

Instead of writing this one off as yet another piece of pretentious, mind-numbing experimental garbage, I actually found a hint of something in this one. Sure, I couldn't understand the words that were being said, but while I was forced to watch the film without any knowledge of what was being said, I used the free time to let my mind open up a little bit and wander, letting the images on the screen take my thoughts wherever they may. And since there's no right or wrong answer when interpreting art (and I may be using that term loosely when referencing this film), I'm even more eager to share what I took away.

To me, the film played out like shards of a dream. I'm a pretty heavy dreamer when I sleep, so I understand how odd the images that circle your brain when you sleep can be. Sometimes I wake up and have to take a few moments to ponder what in the world was just going through my head. The way all of the images seemed to repeat, in reverse order and in a different rotation than we saw them previously, only reminded me of the erratic nature of dreams even more. Would it be silly to suggest that the film was meant to play out like a dream and that perhaps the images were really playing out inside the head of the little girl on the operating table? I'm probably giving the filmmaker's more credit than they deserve, but a man can ponder, can't he?

RATING: 3/10  I'll give it a few points for allowing me to think a little more deeply than I would've without the movie, but in the end, it honestly wasn't anything worth labeling a "must see" and should be accused of stealing a spot from another, more well deserved film.

MOVIES WATCHED: 636
MOVIES LEFT TO WATCH: 365

March 16, 2013  12:31am