Composer · 1813–1883

Richard Wagner

4: briefs
13:00: average
52 min: in total

On film.briefs4

Patriotism

Yukio Mishima, Masaki Dōmoto · 1965

Patriotism (1966) is a thirty-minute silent black-and-white short directed by Yukio Mishima and Masaki Dōmoto, adapting Mishima’s 1960 story. It depicts the final hours of a young army officer and his wife after the 1936 Tokyo coup attempt, culminating in their joint suicide. Shot in two days with stark Noh-influenced staging, it uses static frames, high-contrast cinematography by Kimio Watanabe, and intertitles to render devotion, ritual, and mortality as inseparable. Richard Wagner’s music accompanies some screenings, though the film itself is silent. Rediscovered in 2005 after Mishima’s widow ordered its destruction, it remains a singular, uncompromising work of formal and philosophical austerity.

13:00

Melancholia

Lars von Trier · 2011

Lars von Trier’s 2011 science fiction drama Melancholia uses an inevitable planetary collision to examine how two sisters—one depressive, one anxious—respond when all future is cancelled. Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg anchor its two-part structure, supported by Manuel Alberto Claro’s restrained cinematography and Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde prelude, which dictates the film’s rhythm. Made by Zentropa with co-producers across Europe, it premiered at Cannes, where Dunst won Best Actress. Its power lies in tonal certainty, not plot mechanics: it asks how consciousness persists when meaning has no horizon.

13:00

That Obscure Object of Desire

Luis Buñuel · 1977

Luis Buñuel’s 1977 swan song adapts Pierre Louÿs’s novel into a stark, absurdist study of erotic fixation. Fernando Rey plays Mathieu, a wealthy Frenchman obsessed with Conchita — portrayed interchangeably by Carole Bouquet and Ángela Molina. Framed as a train confession and punctuated by unexplained terrorist violence, the film refuses psychological coherence, using repetition, structural disjunction, and deadpan tone to embody desire as irrational, inescapable, and faintly ridiculous.

13:00

Un Chien Andalou

Luis Buñuel · 1929

A 1929 French silent short co-written and directed by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, Un Chien Andalou rejects narrative, chronology and symbolism in favour of dream-logic assembled from two shared dreams. Filmed in black-and-white over ten days, it deploys stark imagery — a sliced eye, ants from a hand, pianos dragging dead donkeys — with clinical precision. Its sixteen minutes offer no resolution, no character psychology, no moral framework: only a sustained, principled refusal of sense.