Updates, Live: A Black Country Sonata

(A Black Country Sonata, video created by jovossuck123)

This video is amazing. It's created by jovossuck123, a young Briton who has a deep passion for art movies. The real name of jovossuck123 is Matt; friends call him Mat for short.

His videos are all about this kind of movies. Mat has lists of preferences and created videos commenting his choices. His number one is Ozu's Late Spring: I always come back to this movie, it astonishes me.

What makes Ozu such a great film director? He is really one of the few who could be considered the greatest. There are a lot of books about his art, written by big shots, like Bordwell, like Richie, like Schrader, like Vick. Every aspect of Ozu's movies was scrutinized.

I believe his greatest gift was the way he was telling his stories. Each of his movies has a simple story, told with decency and economy, but with such grace!

Let's come back to the list of preferences of Mat. You'll find there Kiarostami's The Wind Will Carry Us, and Hou's Dust in the Wind, and Ray's Pather Panchali, and other great names.

My number one is Pather Panchali, no question about it, but I'm talking now about Mat's preferences, and Ozu is really a great master and a great wizard.

Let's talk about Mat's video, about his Black Country Sonata. He created it as a tribute to Ozu, and it's made with exquisite finesse. Each image is a gem. As you watch the video, you feel the mastership of the author, as well as his deep love for Ozu's movies. I was so captivated that I captured some stills from the video.

Some images reminded me also some other great film directors. Take this image for instance:

It's just the first of the video: it recalled in my memory a movie from 1930, Alexander Hammid's Bezucelná procházka (Aimless Walk). I had the chance to find the movie on the web and to watch it a few times. It's no more available and it's a pity: a stroll towards the outskirts of Prague, following freely your own thoughts, distracted by buildings and landscape at random.

There is then by the end of the video an image with a pair of scissors; its elegance in simplicity reminds me the photos of Josef Sudek (who was believing in the love of art for banal objects)

Now look at the image below:

(still from Mechanics of Love)

It's from Mechanics of Love, made in 1955 by Willard Maas and Ben Moore. Well, I promise to tell you soon about this five minutes jewel, you'll not find it on the imdb.

The image from the video recalls for me also another image, from Meshes of the Afternoon, the masterpiece of Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid:

(still from Meshes of the Afternoon)

This image is so exquisite: the minuscule leaves on the contortionated stem shaping a hieroglyph, bringing a plus of fantasy to the elegant geometry of the whole.

The moving clouds appear often in Ozu's movies, to bring the short moments of stasis during the development of the plot (or the final stasis); they recall also scenes from Bresson's movies (creating also the short stasis to support the development of the story).