The world is abuzz with talk of Black Swan; I haven’t seen it yet. I plan on seeing it, even though I hate everything else Darren Aronofsky has made; and I mean really hate. But the allure of a movie about ballet, that even from people who thought it was pretty dreadful admit the dance sequences were nice, well… it’s too strong of an allure.
Of course, reviews that have mentioned The Red Shoes have already set up what will assuredly be an unfavorable comparison in my mind, when I finally do get around to seeing it — while I am visiting my family for Christmas. Speaking of The Red Shoes, which I think I have already written about on here, I am so happy of course to see the beautiful, lovingly restored version available on DVD via Criterion. A million thanks is an infinite amount short of what Bob Gitt and everyone at the UCLA Film and Television Archives deserves for working on this — and anyone else who may have had a hand in restoring it.
I think I also wrote about Frederick Wiseman’s film La Danse: the Paris Opera Ballet when I wrote of The Red Shoes. Well, I saw Wiseman’s newest work, Boxing Gym, recently while I was in New York. My friend relayed to me that critics kept referring to it as the perfect companion film to La Danse. Well, I can’t really expand upon that idea, but it is a really wonderful work. If you’ve seen any of his films before you can guess what the style will be… a carefully edited collection of images and sounds recorded over a vast period of time, as unobtrusively as possible, in and around a particular boxing gym in Texas. He avoids making any real statement about the subject, though there is a rather sickening sense by the end of it of a relentless build-up of violence, which becomes increasingly intense. I left the theater with this vague feeling of dread, imagining a world of these spaces, full of people training themselves to fight. Of course, that is at least one reality of the world we find ourselves living in.