ESSAYS
Art of Omnibus Film
As part of the International Festival of Films Shot in One Take (One Take Film Festival, Zagreb, November 2006), an extremely important side-program of omnibus films was presented. The film Tickets (2005) was the best in quality. It was made by three big contemporary film authors — an Italian, Ermanno Olmi, an Iranian, Abbas Kiarostami, and a British, Ken Loach. However, before starting the analysis of this film, the author of the text tells us about the historical dimension of omnibus films that can already be found in the film made by David Wark Griffith in 1916, Intolerance, which later inspired Carl Theodor Dreyer to make Blade af Satans bog in 1921. This film is a purer version of the omnibus film. Some omnibus films, similar to the British film Dead of Night (1945), by Basil Dearden, Charles Crichton, Robert Hammer and Albert Cavalcanti, are programmatically conceived performances by a certain number of ”new” directors. On the other hand, Paisŕ by Robert Rosselini (1946) — based on magazine stories — reconstructs six episodes related to the incursion of American soldiers to the north of the Apennines.
For many reasons that can not be definitely determined, the 1960s brought a whole series of omnibus films, primarily influenced by Italian and French cinematography (in which Neorealism and New wave dissolved the firm structure of classical narrative poetics). The author of the review gives a detailed description of (mainly modernist) omnibus films from that period. He also reviews omnibus films in Yugoslavia and other Eastern European countries as well as Western Europe. Furthermore, he studies omnibus films by Jim Jarmusch (Night on Earth, 1992) and other authors. He compares omnibus films presented at One Take Film Festival — Three Seasons (Zui hao de shi guang, 2005), by the Taiwanese Hou Hsiao-hsien, Three Extremes (Saam gang yi, 2004) by the Japanese Takashi Miike, the Chinese Fruit Chan and the South Korean Park Chan-wook and Eros by Wong Kar-wai, Steven Soderbergh and Michelangelo Antonioni — to the film Tickets mentioned in the introduction.
Petar Krelja |
