Saw Stellet Licht. My god, what a tedious movie. Every scene is a creeping pan, a crawling zoom, or an arid static shot. Characters spend entire minutes on end stuck in pregnant pauses, regarding each other. Eventually the scene changes. What story there is is as follows: a Mennonite farmer falls in love with a woman who is not his wife. He is tormented by this, but open with his wife about his feelings. His father, a preacher, preaches fortitude. Eventually things come to a head, his wife dies of a literally broken heart (which is a cute touch) and then the only lyrical or at-all-interesting thing in the entire movie happens. Unless you have a strong stomach for endless shots of nature, or a large pot of coffee, it's not worth it.
My viewing of this film had a lot going against it. I was extremely tired and thus not up to these very long takes. At one point, I found myself wondering why the protagonist didn't fire his blast lasers at his mistress thereby breaching her hull because I was falling asleep while watching this. Also, I had no idea until I looked it up that the characters were Mennonites and I have no idea what Mennonites are exactly. So there's that source of drama and symbolism gone. There's many vistas of lush nature and gorgeous skies which were unfortunately jpg-ed into mushy blurs by my copy. Such are the dangers of movie-watching. To be honest, I think I missed the boat on this one. It does itself no favors by being so austere, so I semi-excuse myself.
The long takes, I believe, are intended to force us to regard and consider the characters, getting us to wonder about them and getting us inside their heads a bit. I just felt sleepy. I kept nodding off at the beginning which makes me worry that I missed some of the visual poetry I noticed at the end. I may well have, but I now have an almost hysterical disinterest in seeing this film ever again. I found it very oppressive and very dry.
Edit: a review I read connects this film to Terrence Malick whom I find more accessible and also Carl Dreyer, which comparison I think is dead-on.
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