Tag: journey
017 – not all who wander are lost
0013 – dear esther 2012 (video game)
“A deserted island… a lost man… memories of a fatal crash… a book written by a dying explorer.”
Dear Esther is a first-person video game developed by The Chinese Room for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Spurning traditional game design, Dear Esther features virtually no puzzles or tasks. The player’s only objective is to explore an unnamed island in the Hebrides
system requirements: (minimum)
- OS:Microsoft Windows XP / Vista / Vista64.
- Processor:Intel core 2 duo 2.4GHz or higher.
- Memory:1GB XP / 2GB Vista.
- Graphics:DirectX 9 compliant video card with Shader model 3.0 support. …
- DirectX®:9.0c.
- Hard Drive:2 GB HD space.
- Sound:DirectX 9.0c compatible sound card.
“Dear Esther is a ghost story, told using first-person gaming technologies. Rather than traditional game-play the focus here is on exploration, uncovering the mystery of the island, of who you are and why you are here. Fragments of story are randomly uncovered when exploring the various locations of the island, making every each journey a unique experience. Dear Esther features a stunning, specially commissioned soundtrack from Jessica Curry.” http://dear-esther.com/ steam
009 – Kingdom of Heaven 2005 (director’s cut)
spacetime coordinate: 1184 France, the Holy Land
The story is set during the Crusades of the 12th century. A French village blacksmith goes to aid the Kingdom of Jerusalem in its defence against the Ayyubid Muslim sultan Saladin, who is battling to claim the city from the Christians leading to the Battle of Hattin. The film script is a heavily fictionalised portrayal of the life of Balian of Ibelin (ca. 1143–93).
006 – El abrazo de la serpiente 2015
spacetime coordinate: 1909 / 1940 the amazon rainforest
Embrace of the Serpent is a 2015 internationally co-produced adventure drama film directed by Ciro Guerra and shot in black-and-white.
The film tells two stories thirty years apart, both featuring Karamakate, an Amazonian shaman and last survivor of his tribe. He travels with two scientists, firstly with German Theo von Martius in 1909 and American named Evan in 1940, to look for the rare yakruna, a (fictional) sacred plant.
Evan: It’s a lot of money. Chullachaqui: Ants like money. I Do not. The taste is bad.
ooo4 – Room and a Half (2009)
(Полторы комнаты или сентиментальное путешествие на родину)
spacetime coordinate: 40’s > 90’s, Saint Petersburg > New York
When asked in an interview whether he ever intended to return to his Motherland, Joseph Brodsky replied: “Such a journey could only take place anonymously…”
The creators of this film imagined that the journey in question was undertaken after all, selecting the genre of an ironic fairytale. The poet sails to the country of his childhood, and with him we traverse not only geographical expanses, but travel through time as well; stringing together a number of facts from the Nobel Prize Laureate’s biography, we return to the USSR of the 50s and early 60s, soaking up the atmosphere of the “European” city of Petersburg, to this day Russia’s cultural center. Along with live-action sequences, the film features animation, as well as documentary footage concerning Brodsky and his milieu.
Some of the animated sequences — of winged horses and flying sleds, of Brodsky as a farm animal on all fours drawing a cart — suggest Chagall. Other, more elegant pictures — of pianos and other musical instruments flying in formation while framed against the heroic architecture of St. Petersburg — are closer to Magritte’s surrealism. Visually, it is an ode to St. Petersburg (its museums, architecture and statuary are lovingly photographed), and to the Neva River, which runs by the city.
With its unabashedly nostalgic glow, the film belongs to what might be called the “rosebud” school (after “Citizen Kane”) of film biographies that locate the essence of a life in childhood memories. Recurrent images in the film are visual representations of the family’s house cat. The youthful Brodsky (Evgeniy Ogandzhanyan) is shown conversing with his father in meows and later subverting the solemnity of a school anthem sung by a chorus by substituting cat cries for words. He later confides to a friend that he wants to be reincarnated as a cat in Venice.
0003 – Time Bandits 1981
spacetime coordinate: from Napoleonic times to the Middle Ages to the early 1900s, to the time of Legends and the Fortress of Ultimate Darkness
Gilliam has referred to Time Bandits as the first in his “Trilogy of Imagination”, followed by Brazil (1985) and ending with The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988). All are about the “craziness of our awkwardly ordered society and the desire to escape it through whatever means possible.” All three films focus on these struggles and attempts to escape them through imagination: Time Bandits through the eyes of a child, Brazil through the eyes of a man in his thirties, and Munchausen through the eyes of an elderly man.
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TimeSpace Warps 