« Paul T. Anderson: Note to self | Main | NSFW: Borat in Cannes »
June 01, 2006
Overlord (1975, ****)
Does the man dream the machine or the machine dream the man? American-born director Stuart Cooper’s epic, stoic, willfully peculiar Overlord (1975) is a hybrid of fiction and fact, of the Futurist and the post-modern, tracking the preparations of one supremely ordinary 20-year-old soldier, Tom Beddow (Brian Stirner), one Tom among tummies, as he trains to become part of Operation Overlord, or D-Day. What’s most striking about Cooper’s film is the extensive use of archival footage (from 3,000 hours viewed by Cooper from UK's Imperial War Museum) in a jagged yet forceful admixture, such as a montage of sustained aerial views of steam trains being strafed. Is the movie about young Tom or about the entire war effort hurtling toward that assault on the beach? Cooper makes dozens of brilliant juxtapositions that do not jar but awaken the senses, but the movie is elusive, neither Zelig nor Saving Private Ryan, but with worthy parallels to movies like Kevin Brownlow’s It Happened Here and Pontecorvo's Battle of Algiers. Philosophically, it’s more like film essayist Patrick Keiller (London) meeting Stanley Kubrick (and the fictional portions 
were shot by Kubrick’s favored cinematographer John Alcott). One standout among so many: there's a beautiful shot of Tom writing a letter in a wood, the camera moving back from stands of skinny trees, brightly backlit, the letter being read aloud: “It’s like a part of a machine that grows larger and larger while we get smaller and smaller until there’s nothing left.” Radically, Overlord is a narrative that sees forest and trees. 88m. [Cooper's film was rediscovered via Xan Cassavetes' Z Channel documentary, and after several festival runs, debuts theatrically in Chicago this week with Janus Films releasing across the country in the months to come.]
Posted by Ray Pride at June 1, 2006 11:02 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.mcnblogs.com/movabletype/mt-tb.cgi/1097
Comments
Post a comment
Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)
(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)