Fallen Leaves (Aki Kaurismäki). What do we mean by “late films”? For Theodor Adorno, the maturity of late works of art did not resemble the kind one finds in fruit: “they are, for the most part, not round, but furrowed, even ravaged.” Granted, Adorno was writing about Beethoven, but this idea of contrarian lateness still survives in debates around the term’s use in cinema. Intransigent and confrontational, late films are both a summation of a filmmaker’s oeuvre and a stripping down of their style. They’re masterful distillations of decades of craft, sheared, in a senescent bid for simplicity, until whatever’s left is honed and impenetrable to the point of alienation.I was thinking of this on my last days in Cannes, as the festival kept yielding new works by august masters: Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s About Dry Grasses, Marco Bellocchio’s Kidnapped, Catherine Breillat’s Last Summer,...
- 5/31/2023
- MUBI
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