Jonathan Romney wrote an article on Eugene Green in Film Comment, Nov-Dec 2006. Since THE LIVING WORLD (LE MONDE VIVANT) (2003, Eugene Green) will be shown at Alliance Francaise on Jan 14, I think I should post an excerpt from Romney’s article here, so that more people may go to see this film:
“Language both fragments and reassembles: the act of naming turns a smashed pot into a puzzle or, in THE LIVING WORLD, transforms a man in jeans into a medieval knight, and a labrador into his attendant lion.”
“While such illusion-by-consensus suffices to persuade us that we truly are in the Middle Ages, the dialogue reminds us that we have never left the present day, by means of gently facetious anachronisms including references to fridges and Lacan. The special effects are bargain-basement Brechtian: the local Ogre is a man in goatskins (we never see his face, only a several rubber head when he is slain); an enchanted tree a la Cocteau is just a tree, a voiceover, and an actor’s arm. We never believe that we are seeing anything but photographed elements (people, buildings, forested landscapes) of a world that concretely exists. Yet Green’s staging achieves the magical plausibility of open-air children’s theater: it elicits our faith, and the medieval atmosphere becomes as palpably authentic as that of LANCELOT DU LAC or Borowczyk’s BLANCHE.”
You can buy this issue of Film Comment from this website:
http://filmlinc.com/fcm/nd06/novemberdecember.htm
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