Lyrical Nitrate/Forbidden Quest dvd movie.|
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List Price: $29.99 Our Price: $28.49 You Save: $1.5 Features • Black & White • Color • Silent • NTSC |
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| ♥♥♥♥♥ | Ancient images |
| A pair of films from Dutch director Peter Delpeut. LYRICAL NITRATE (1991) is a 50-minute compilation of old (1905-1915) silent films, not quite a documentary, not quite a coherent narrative, with a soundtrack comprised of songs recorded during the same period. The film contains short scenes and shots from feature films and documentaries from that period. According to the dvd jacket information, the movie was compiled with "nitrate films found deteriorating in the attic of an Amsterdam cinema." Like all found art this will knock some peoples' sock off, leave others completely cold, and moderately interest the rest of us. I'm one of the moderately interested ones. Much of what we see is too short to make much sense of - children smiling for the camera, traveling shots of Amsterdam - or some European city - taken from a boat or a car. There are some longer scenes - a color-tinted Passion Play, a deteriorating sequence featuring Adam and Eve, a four-or-five minute mini-movie about a man and a woman castaway on a deserted island - but for the most part there isn't much story here.
FORBIDDEN QUEST (1993) is a little more ambitious. It's a fictionalized account of a doomed voyage to the South Pole, recounted in 1941 by an Irish ship-carpenter who is still haunted by the event. Irish character actor Joseph O'Conor plays the now old man with the bad memories. The movie is build like one of those head-on interviews with an off-camera interviewer. The gag here is that the old man's narrative is framed by period (circa 1910) documentary film of Eskimos and polar bears and tall-masted ships stuck in ice. For the most part FORBIDDEN QUEST works a lot better than the other film on this disk. The plot is an adventure story in the style of Jack London, Joseph Conrad and Jules Verne. The ending's a little confusing, and there's disturbing footage of a polar bear hunt, and the momentous puzzlers (human's living on the South Pole, polar bears in the Antartic) don't quite come off as they should. O'Conor is quite good as the old carpenter, though. Had me convinced, anyway. Both LYRICAL NITRATE and FORBIDDEN QUEST were more interesting than entertaining. The found' footage in each is pretty mundane, for the most part, and Delpeut probably dresses it up as much as anyone might. Much more entertaining are the "Treasures" and "More Treasures from the American Archives" boxed sets of complete movies from this era. |
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