Carlos – 2010, Olivier Assayas

 

by Allan Fish

(France 2010 330m) DVD1/2

Aka. Carlos the Jackal

This is the time for action

p  Jens Meurer, Daniel Leconte  d  Olivier Assayas  w  Olivier Assayas, Dan Franck  ph  Denis Lenoir, Yorick le Saux  ed  Luc Barnier, Marion Monnier  art  François Renaud Labarthe

Edgar Ramirez (Ilich ‘Carlos’ Ramirez Sanchez), Alexander Scheer (Johannes Weinrich), Alejandro Arroyo (Dr Valentin Hernández), Ahmad Kaabour (Wadie Haddad), Juana da Costa (Carlos’ lover), Talal-El-Jordi (Ali), Christoph Bach (Angie), Nora von Waldstätten (Magdalena Kopp), Rodney el Haddad (Khalid), Julia Hummer (Nada), Antoine Balabane (Général-al-Khouly), Katharina Schüttler (Brigitte Kuhlmann), Susanne Wuest (Edith Heller), Anna Thalbach (Inge Viett),

There’s something about Assayas’ biopic of infamous revolutionary terrorist Carlos that could not help but recall Steven Soderbergh’s Ché (he even gets a mention in the opening exchanges).  It’s understandable considering Carlos saw himself as another Ché and was pretty much the most wanted man on the planet for a time.  Assayas’ film follows him from 1973, starting out working for the PFLP in London and Paris working for an intermediary taking orders from Iraq, through infamous attacks in Germany and France, taking hostages at the OPEC conference in Vienna in 1975, through to setting up his own group of renegades and their slowly drifting into obscurity prior to capture in 1994. 

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48. Sleeping Beauty

(USA 1959 75 min)

Director Clyde Geronimi; Screenplay Erdman Penner (adaptation), Charles Perrault (original story);

by Stephen Russell-Gebbett

Through the ages an animated image or creation has been equated to the illustrations in a book. To complete the passage from the flat representation of the other world to complete immersion within its animated counterpart is normally achieved in one of two ways; through the camera melting into the world of the page or through the page transforming itself to make its presence felt in our world.

There are too a vast number of animations that show the creator or the moment of creation, at the rock-face when a diamond first glimmers from the dust. Is there an added artificiality and inherent alien-ness in animation that needs to be acknowledged and mitigated against by these ‘before the curtain parts’ interjections? Is it mere playfulness? Well, that’s the way Sleeping Beauty begins – a book, a voice, a story.

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