4 replies on “Homage to my cell mates”

  1. Glad you’re out of quarantine, Mazen! Welcome home! And greetings to the family!
    I see that you watched Shock Corridor, which is sort of a favorite of mine (in a strange way). What did you think?

    1. thank you andrea!
      shock corridor was the first movie of samuel fuller i see. i enjoyed many aspects of it, especially formal ones. i really liked his low-key “effects” and the various original solutions he proposes all along. his use of black and white and color is almost as refreshing as tarkovsky’s! i didn’t like much the story though; i felt it stays very much faithful to the good old formatted hollywood formula, with all the cliches that this implies. but i am very glad i saw it and will definitely see other ones from him in the future. i read that he could be very controversial on some subjects. i will try to find those movies.
      hope to see you soon!

  2. Hey there! You watched DIE BLEIERNE ZEIT twice? Wow! Was watching it too, btw. Would love to hear your thoughts on it. The main actors were some of the greatest at that time… Jutta Lampe was connected to the founding group of the SCHAUBUEHNE.
    Anyways, one other thing came to my mind when remembering 2020: feeling like a survivor and as a part of the Covid19 statistics… I was tested positive yesterday (Happy New Year!) and have had severe flu symptoms since Sunday… Someone in my family fucked it up, so there went all my precaution mesaures of the last 9 months and my first test, which was negative last week only… So, yes, this was 2020. A great year indeed. It can only get better. Hopefully. All my best to you and la famille!

    1. ow no! that’s such bad news.
      i am sorry to hear that, and i hope you are coping with it, and that the symptoms are mild.
      for the movies, i actually saw die bleierne zeit only once (but put it twice by mistake. i will definitely see it again though. great movie. i have a weird relation to the german movie makers of that period. i love some of them (fassbinder for example and some movies of herzog) and i hate some others (schlondorf or most of wenders movies). i am glad to discover that von trotta did some great movies. i hope her other moves are good too.
      one thing about movies and corona: do you know the criterion channel? it is a kind of anti-netflix; it works more or less the same, but it has a much higher percentage of good (or at least interesting) movies than netflix (where i spend sometimes half an hour just to find something “watchable”). the criterion channel helped a lot during my isolation days. now the problem is that they do not have an option to join from germany, so the way to go around that is to find a good friend in the USA, canada or the UK, and to share a membership with him/her. each membership allows up to three simultaneous computers on which you can stream the movies. i hope this helps to make the time pass faster!
      gute besserung cristina.

Comments are closed.