Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

This is an incredibly slow moving film but the lack of events is the statement of the film; how dull life can be when put into bad circumstances. Jeanne Dielman is a woman taking care of her son, her husband having died years earlier. She spends most of her day at home, either prostituting herself or briefly taking care of a neighbor’s baby. Extended scenes find her either preparing food or simply staring off. There is nothing for her to really do in her life. It is a miserable journey to watch, but it’s easy to see that it is the director’s purpose to question mundane living. The slow crawl of the film is only a fraction of the boredom and misery that Jeanne must be in. It is unrelenting in everything it does. Some scenes simply consist of a single take for over ten minutes, only showing Jeanne preparing a meal. What the film lacks in action, it makes up for in cinematography. The shots are incredibly beautiful even with the dull coloring of all the walls and surroundings.

The Thin Blue Line

In this documentary by Errol Morris that argues that Randall Adams, a man accused of murdering a police officer, is innocent, and that the truly guilty party is David Harris, a young man with a long criminal history.  This documentary is very interesting due to its reflexive style, its focus on the difference between perception and truth, and its omission of information in service of its politics. There’s a huge difference between perception and truth.  The parts of this movie that make this point most powerfully are the crime scene reenactments.  Each reenactment shows the even happening as the subject being interviewed describes it, and each reenactment is different.  In one reenactment, as the other police officer at the scene of the crime recalls that the make and model of the car were different than she originally remembered, the audience actually sees the car morph in mid-shot to a different type of car. This movie shows us  how justice is denied in our system because people rely upon what they wanted to have happened, rather than what actually happened.  People had an easier time perceiving Adams as a killer than they did Harris, and so they wrongfully convicted Adams.