Week of 11/3 - Mother and Son

1) I loved the mildly-surreal formal innovations in Mother and Son. I noticed the painting on the glass immediately and found myself looking for its effect in every shot. The warping effect I liked less, in that I felt that the blurry vignette effect was much more tonally effective--almost felt like watching the film with your eyes welled up with tears--than the structural distortion, which for me didn't add much to the piece. The sound was also great; I remember while watching the scene near the end where the son is alone in the forest and thinking about how clear every step he took was, but there was no noise besides that, and thought that moment in many ways articulated the experience as it was taking place inside his head.
2) I had to pee really badly when I was watching this film, so focusing on the ways that it formally experimented kept me excited. One shouldn't have to feel the need to be excited or entertained while watching a film like this, but it kept me a little bit more still in my seat when I was really squirming. That being said, I didn't want to just get up and go: for one, I had completely lost perception of time while watching this film, and I didn't know if time was moving really quickly or really slowly but every time I thought about getting up and going I thought that perhaps it was almost the end and that I would miss it. Again, not that the entertainment or the plot structure was vitally important, but I ultimately wanted the full experience and opted to be uncomfortable and a little distracted rather than missing part of the "journey" the film takes you on.
3) I'm not totally sure, after reading Schrader's piece, that I could identify if a film was or was not connected with the transcendental; though I appreciate his philosophy on the essence that filmmaking can articulate in a very special way. When he discusses style, I feel that Mother and Son gives a very heartfelt and genuine illustration of the things that he said these films contemplate, such as the mystery of existence and questioning "conventional interpretations of reality." There was a lot of mystery in this film, but not in the way we usually think of mystery as something ominous or to be solved. Rather, it waded in this mystery of intense spiritual connection with another person, and how that can be "isolating" in a way that is difficult to think analytically about, difficult to reduce down to words like "good" or "bad." Navigating into these connections is kind of magical; the world can truly melt away into one landscape, one color palette, one dialect, etc. when you invest your self toward the wellbeing of someone else.