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Crash Course

Sidney Poitier's pedantic first film tackles race and class.

Add Comment | Comments: 0 | Posted Mar. 15, 2006

Tarr uses long takes with little or no editing, as if watching life unfold from God's point of view, immersing us in the whole variety of species and duration of time. The movie opens with people acting out the solar system in a bar, a joke about the smallness of humans in the universe that reverberates throughout the story's petty power plays, arcane disputes and scholarly minutiae.

With long stretches of empty action (like numerous shots of people silently walking), Tarr pays microscopic attention to the things-the "unimportant" human behaviors-that other filmmakers cut out. It's as if he wants to say about the world itself, as his hero notes about the whale, "All a man can do is look upon it and see how great is the Lord's creative impulse and power." A

Includes: Booklet of essays and information.
You'll Like It If You Like: European art cinema, stunning images, political allegories.

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