Suggested by
Nicky Smith
Extracted from
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0002/hoberman.shtml
The Nation
Stuart Klawans
More exotica: Michael Powell's craggy, taciturn The Edge of the World
, the 1937 feature the late British director considered a defining event
in his career, is among the most stylized of expeditionary films. Newly
restored-a sold-out attraction at the last New York Film Festival, now showing
for a week at Film Forum-this heroically montage-driven quasi ethno-doc
suggests a synthesis of Robert Flaherty (whom Powell knew) and Sergei Eisenstein.
Powell was inspired by the 1930 evacuation of the Hebrides island St.
Kilda. Denied permission to shoot a movie there, however, the 32-year-old
director made his movie even farther north, in the remote and impressively
bleak Shetlands-a realm less Gaelic than Norse in its culture-where he and
his crew spent five months filming. Their tight-knit group mirrored that
of the island's inhabitants, a strict religious community divided by the
desire of certain members to leave for the "mainland."
Scarcely less stark than the foreboding landscape, The Edge of the
World's narrative pivots on a ritual cliff-climbing contest between
two estranged friends, restless Robbie and complacent Andrew, the latter
engaged to the island's lone nubile girl (and Robbie's twin sister), Ruth.
One plunges to his death-in a long, dizzying blitz of close-ups, reaction
shots, and panoramic vistas-and the other, cast out by an implacable father,
leaves for Scotland with the image of pregnant Ruth superimposed on the
sea.
Its ballad structure reinforced by keening choruses and interludes of
fiddle-dancing, The Edge of the World was chosen the year's Best
Foreign Film by the New York Film Critics Circle in 1937 (and might well
have been again today). This discreetly adventurous movie looks back at
the great Flaherty-Murnau South Seas debacle Tabu and forward to
the cracked grandiosity of Lars von Trier's Breaking the Waves.
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