HIROSHIMA
dir. Pablo Stoll, 2009
Uruguay. 80 mins.
Silent with English intertitles.
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 2 - 7:30 PM
MONDAY, APRIL 7 - 7:30 PM
SATURDAY, APRIL 12 - 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, APRIL 18 - 10 PM
Like 25 WATTS, Stoll’s first solo credit as director takes place over the course of one 24-hour period. But it would be too easy to call HIROSHIMA a synthesis of that film’s slacker vibes and WHISKY's mimetic tragicomedy, anchored by the filmmaker casting his real-life family—chiefly his brother Juan Andres Stoll as the protagonist, also named Juan. This Juan struggles to communicate with the people around him; Stoll subtracts human (and animal!) voices from the film's equation, making HIROSHIMA a "silent musical." The only audio is the music piped in through Juan's discman as he makes his way from morning (working a joyless bakery gig) to night, where performing with his punk band The Genuflexes may offer an outlet.
While HIROSIHIMA does not explicitly reference Rebella's death, its funereal atmosphere and trance state will resonate with anyone dumbstruck by grief. But Stoll's film is also a game (and often hilarious) homage to pre-verbal cinema, using intertitles for spoken dialogue. This approach reveals a cinephilic love of experimentation wholly consistent with the earlier films, despite the almost neorealist trappings of the long takes and forlorn vistas, all building toward a payoff gag that must be seen to be believed.
"Actually nothing happens in this movie. But I was never bored throughout the screening. Makes me wonder..." — JvH48, IMDb
"...A wacky version of a certain kind of hybrid movie from cinema’s transition era from silence to sound, films in which sound was used expressively (even perversely) by the likes of Rene Clair and Alfred Hitchcock… We all see, a hundred times a week, examples of mainstream editing seamlessly, invisibly reinforcing the illusion of dialogue between characters, each of whom occupies his or her own close-up. By contrast, Stoll reminds us how dialogue was typically cut during the silent age, indistinguishable from visual force... HIROSHIMA is nothing less than trippy classicism." — Tom Keough, The Seattle Times