FEATURES: Melancholia and the Comedy of Abandon; The Hunger Games and other Precarious Dystopias; the Arts of Imitation, Information Managers, and Several Sides of Errol Morris.
READ: Interview with Manuel Alberto Claro, Paul Julian Smith on Cabin in the Woods, a review of the book Film: A Very Short Introduction, and a tribute to Film Quarterly founding editor Ernest “Chick” Callenbach.
“The idea at the basis of the project can be summarized in this way: in 1989, a hundred cameras followed what was happening in Romania; history is no longer divided into theatrical scenes, nor into literary chapters—it is perceived as a sequence; and the sequence demands a film.”
Aurora, the outstanding new film by the director of The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, begins as the lead character, Viorel, wakes up before dawn in an apartment in Bucharest, Romania. Played brilliantly by Cristi Puiu himself, Viorel has a quiet intensity that is immediately troubling.