LIFE AND DEBT, MAN OF MARBLE, ADAM RESURRECTED
by Andre Soares
Review of Stephanie Black’s 2001 documentary Life and Debt, about the effects of globalization on the Jamaican economy, at Anarchy and Imagination:
"The film’s voice-over written by Jamaica Kincaid is mainly directed towards Jamaica’s many tourists: ‘You see natives. You marvel at the things they can do with their hair.’ There’s more than an edge of blame and guilt directed at the tourists who visit Jamaica, and have a great time — or so it seems from all the beer drinking, dances and eating contests we see the tourists engage in–seemingly oblivious to the squalor and poverty-stricken life of the average Jamaican. The tourists don’t exactly come off well in the film, and the voice-over’s note of accusatory blame creates a bitter edge to the film."
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Danny Leigh in The Guardian film blog:
"It was with an instinctive wince and a small, sharp breath that I read recently that one of cinema’s stranger sub-genres is to be revived. To be specific, the Observer reported last week that Paul Schrader is to direct Adam Resurrected — a ‘tightrope walk’ adaptation of Israeli author Yoram Kaniuk’s 1968 novel about Adam Stein, a former circus clown forced to perform for his fellow Jews in the concentration camps of the Holocaust.
"The raw obscenity of the juxtapositions still, of course, carry the power to shock. Even more startling, however, is the fact that the project will be the third major film to concern itself with slapstick amid the gas chambers — that queasy union apparently serving as irresistible bait for certain film-makers."
Leigh goes on to mention Jerry Lewis’s 1971 "trainwreck" The Day the Clown Cried and, inevitably, Roberto Benigni’s Academy Award-winning 1997 comedy-drama Life Is Beautiful (top photo). ("Hovering between the glutinous and the grotesque, the film turned genocide into the inane backdrop of an ode to the art of the teary-eyed Pierrot.")
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Matilda Mroz discusses Andrzej Wajda’s Man of Marble in Senses of Cinema:
"This was politically explosive content in 1979, when the repressive administration of Edward Gierek was characterised, as Wajda notes, not so much by terror but by a gigantic manipulation of people and reality. Under communism, artists were creatively disenfranchised and recruited into the régime to produce Socialist Realist documentaries, an occupation which Wajda himself undertook and which he acknowledges in the film by appending his name to the credits of one of Burski’s documentaries. The script, written by Aleksander Scibor-Rylski, had in fact been shelved by the government for twelve years before a slightly more progressive state film producer in the late 1970s granted permission for the film to be made. When the film went before the censors again after its completion, however, all attempts were made to restrict its release, and positive reviews of the film were suppressed. Having already approved the content of the screenplay, the reaction of the government suggests the presence of an element fundamentally more subversive than what could be contained in a script, an ‘impalpable something,’ Wajda suggests, ‘which renders inoperative the rules of censorship.’"
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