the groundhog day project

...the legend of Arturo, who was a Portuguese fisherman. He met this beautiful girl his first night in town--Catarina. And eventually they fell in love. But the problem was that Catarina's father was the territorial governor. He didn't want his only little girl running around with a lowly fisherman. So he told Arturo that he'd have to ship off. Which he did, but not before he told Catarina he'd be back for her. And when he came back, he'd signal with three long blasts, So she could dive off the rocks and swim to the boat, And they'd be on their way. So, a year later, everything went as planned. But when she was swimming out to the boat, The fog got so thick that she couldn't find the boat. Arturo panicked and he called out, "Catarina! Catarina!" Catarina yelled back, "Arturo!" With that, he just dove right off the boat into the icy waters, And they never found each other, And they both drowned. The legend is, They reu...

I don't want to talk about Son of Saul as a holocaust film. Not just because the director and star have been quoted in articles about how it isn't your usual holocaust film. They talk about the content. The content is good, sure. But, I'm more interested in the style, the format. In the same year that Tarantino, explicitly, and Inarritu, implicitly, (just to take two examples) are promoting filming out in the great wide open, with Son of Saul director Lazlo Nemes quite deliberately frames everything as small. We are forced by a narrow aspect ratio and a camera that never ventures far from our protagonist (until the end of the film, as it follows a child then leaves us alone in the woods). We look on the world of Son of Saul . From just behind or next to Saul Auslander (Geza Rohrig). When we look away, it is Saul's POV we take. If it isn't obvious, this positions us in the audience firmly into the situation with Saul. There are no wide shots, no establishing shots...