Casanova meets a new servant who will witness his last moments in life, from a castle with its libertine 18th century atmosphere to the poor, shadowy Northern lands. There, his rationalist way of thinking and mundane world will succumb to a violent and romantic force, represented by Count Dracula.
Histoire de ma mort, Geschichte meines Todes, Historia de mi muerte, Historia mojej śmierci, 我的死亡纪事, 내 죽음의 이야기
France
France
One of the most beautifully paced films I've ever seen, and gets to the heart of why Serra is so fascinating, so interesting and provocative. And dare I say, brilliant and way ahead of his time: he's a communist obsessed with being an aristocrat. The aristocrat has time to learn, time to think, time to do nothing, time to waste time, time to pursue both knowledge and hedonism simultaneously. So attuned to its period with it's beautiful sets and gorgeous natural (and low) light digital photography - it looks like a Michael Mann art film period piece at times (if not for its pacing). A great example (but aren't they all?) of why Serra is so special - he's one of the few modern artists who are willing to pursue pleasure with no hesitation.
Story of My Death takes as is premise the violent meeting of seventeenth century Enlightenment with the ideals of Romanticism. Serra utilizes two emblematic figures (Casanova and Dracula), as well as several styles and motifs from fine art of both eras, to embody and represent these movements and to allow this confrontation to play out in a figurative space. To this end, the film is divided into two distinct parts. The first half is set in a Rococo chateau where Casanova spends a good deal of time frivolously idling away his days discussing poetry with his manservant, entertaining prestigious writers as guests, and (true to his historic reputation) pursuing women.
The film takes a dramatic shift at about the halfway…
This film was [shot in the aspect ratio] 4:3 originally, it’s a beautiful thing. In the middle of the shooting – by chance, also, always – I had some problems with the cameras. I never look at the images in the cameras during the shooting – never. I don’t check the monitors, the computer, nothing, nothing, nothing.
(...)
So, in the middle of the shooting we checked for the texture of the camera problems and I said “I don’t like this 4:3.” It was the same time Miguel Gomes was shooting Tabu in 4:3, and there was another film shot in 4:3, so I said “Fuck! I hate this,” for this and technical reasons. And by chance a friend of…
He was a man of his time (extremely fucked up). no matter how funny it is, it is really wrong to kill rich people
Really, truly, unlike anything else. In awe at the use of music in this, and the way darkness takes hold of the frame in such vital moments. Serra once again proves his mastery of the historical period drama “genre” by spitting on it, shitting on it, and turning it into gold (quite literally in this one). The slow rotting death of a predictable type of evil (misogynistic patriarchy in which women are playthings) as it loses out to one much more ambiguous in its wickedness (the men pay for their sins, but the new structure that allows it comes at a price for the women too). Definitely among the best in the “2 hour 30 minute movies with little to no plot to speak of” category of film
rationalism giving way to romanticism, yeah, and crucially the philosophical and moral systems of control stay mostly intact (especially for the women). one decadent libertine replaced by another. i kind of wish Jess Franco had made this though.
Reviewed on The Geek Show.
Hard to really assign a star rating to this, because lol wtf even is a story of my death. It's definitely something wildly, bafflingly new - it wouldn't even exist without hi-def cameras - and it has a philosophical underpinning that makes it fun to unpick and turn over days after you've seen it. Serra deserves massive credit for finding a new cinematic version of Dracula that defamiliarises the character while feeling completely true to Stoker's original novel.
Em certo momento do filme, quando um animal é desmembrado na floresta, ouvimos Casanova dizer "Estamos cansados de alegorias. Isso tem uma presença verdadeira", em referência ao ritual bruto que vemos na tela. É claro que os personagens de Serra, por sua natureza mitológica, nunca deixarão de ser alegorias, mas mesmo assim seu cinema parece que almeja uma proximidade quase inocente, uma presença trivial, coloca essas figuras em um plano que, sim, é mitificador pela sua simples representação, mas possui uma serenidade cotidiana que os desloca para uma dimensão mais palpável, quase distraída, uma qualidade fabular singela. História da Minha Morte ainda consegue compor um tom agressivo, começa seu segundo ato com um paralelo lírico entre essa carga trivial e…
48/100
Went in tabula rasa, as usual, and nobody says "Casanova" for nearly two hours, so I had no clue which historical or literary figure Serra was riffing on this time. (Dracula I got, however.) Doubt it would've made much difference, as this is neither as beautifully austere nor as unexpectedly funny as Birdsong, and functions as little more than a curiosity until it finally goes batshit (kind of literally) in the last half hour or so. "I feel out of touch," Lee Walker said to me as the lights came up. You and me both, brother.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Apparently a masterpiece, oblivious to my eyes. Most of the stylistic choices felt like affect instead of authentic choices, like seeing the worst of contemporary art cinema finally reaching its unfortunate extreme. Like Theo, I doubt Serra's claim that he told his DP to frame for 4:3 and then edited in 2.35 - there are enough frames to show he clearly intended for the frames to look awkward as hell, though the negative space of his frames is often monotonous, so any new textures that wouldn't be apparent in the 4:3 frame is his own business. I certainly felt the issues that maybe Serra was approaching with "the 18th-century passage from rationalism to romanticism" through two polar figures, both…
Long, slow, abstract, one of those movies that uses 18th century culture for arty/experimental purposes -- closer to de Oliveira than Ruiz. I really liked the Giovanni/Leporello vibe between the two male characters, and the narrative constantly found unexpected tangents to explore, often very funny ones... but did I fail to apprehend the core of what was going on here? I didn't eeeeeeven realize until the final credits that one of the characters was Count Dracula... or that the main guy was Casanova.
Observational early, everything made rational within the frame by a plain narrative, Story of My Death becomes increasingly abstract and elliptical late in its metaphysical shift to romanticism, the world now inexplicable. Shit turns to gold, everyone's behavior becomes more and more inscrutable both as a reaction to loss of coherence and as a result of Dracula, who shows up to embody the romantic's, influence. The frames may be rational, but they are far from banal; the compositions are utterly bizarre, where a character interacting with their environment becomes a nebulous, "unfuckable" act. Man's interaction with the universe appears rational to him but within the empiricism of the naturalistic cinematic image, the interaction is muddied.
This carries over to nuance…
