2nd of January, 2019
This piece was first left as a review on the website RateYourMusic.com. I was reviewing Angels Egg, the Mamoru Oshii film. As the post title suggests, I was drunk when I wrote this. It's as good as can be expected given my state I think.
The story to Angel's Egg doesn't matter. I like to think of it as a sort of visual poetry, because the actual narrative substance of this film comes from its casual arrangement of ostensibly profound symbols in a way that doesn't suggest any kind of traditional story. If that sounds pretentious let me dispel that notion: This film is actually pretty simple and isn't "deep" in the way that a one would expect a layered/meta-textual narrative to be.
(Montage in film is the idea that you arrange various images together to create a collage of shots, so that the images all come together to create a composite work of art. A controversial take on this practise (and one I agree with in most cases but not quite all) is that it is a failure to create a spiritually rich art, because it reduces """"poetry"""" to a formalistic exercise in concise storytelling. Poetry is similar to montage because words, like images, have some kind of inherent meaning to them from the outset, and then when you combine them a composite art appears. With this in mind...)
This film uses traditional montage but it's a much less coherent affair than anything that Sergei Eisenstein would consider effective. The thing that really interests me is that way that it emulates poetry, non-formalistic use of montage. If any given twenty minute segment of this film is looked at we might see:
Man ............ Fear ................ Fish .........
Food ........... Water ..............War ..........
Sleep .......... Shelter..............Religion......
Which are all essentially perennial ideas that permeate through all of human culture, but the art of suggestion in this film is that you can combine them how you like. It's like a fuzzy-felt fable. Anyone can watch it and get whatever they like out of it - religious stuff, gender stuff, motherhood stuff, pulpy post apocalypse story stuff, inconsequential visual spectacle because it's by Yoshitaka Amano and Mamoru Oshii so of course it looks gorgeous.
It might seem like it takes itself too seriously for this interpretation, but in light of all I have just said I choose to ignore that and just think of it how I want to. The film of affirmation!