- The Grand Budapest Hotel
“What in the world is Noah doing outside the ark while it’s raining?” asked one reader, Daniel Cristancho, in his comment on my recent essay about Darren Aronofsky’s Noah. “The bible clearly tells us that Noah and his family were locked into the ark 7 days before the flood began.” This statement is typical of many negative responses to the film, which are quick to point out Aronofsky and cowriter Ari Handel’s departures from the Biblical text. I have no doubt that Noah is filled with such “inaccuracies,” yet I don’t find this problematic because Aronofsky and Handel have made it clear that their film is not a definitive reading of scripture, or even a literal one. Rather their film is a personal reflection on the Torah, written after the fashion of midrashic texts.
Noah represents one version of what midrashic cinema might look like, but there could be many others. Another approach might look like Jean-Luc Godard’s late-period films—both narrative works like Nouvelle Vague and In Praise of Love and essay works like Histoire(s) du cinéma (a most midrashic title, come to think of it)—in which most of the dialogue consists of quotations and every shot contains references to films or visual artworks that have inspired Godard. The Chilean-born filmmaker Raul Ruiz provided yet another with such cerebral fantasies as City of Pirates and Mysteries of Lisbon, in which stories give way to other stories and so on.
- In Praise of Love
