cup2020 | round 3 | Khitruk v Belson

[Curtis, baby]

Story of One Crime (Fyodor Khitruk, 1962) vs. Samadhi (Jordan Belson, 1967)

Vote for either xKhitruk or xBelson

Round ends: April 1, 2020

[greennui]

Belson trivia, Pauline Kael namedropped him in her infamous review of 2001:

Is a work of art possible if pseudoscience and the technology of movie-making become more important to the “artist” than man? This is central to the failure of 2001. It’s a monumentally unimaginative movie: Kubrick, with his $750,000 centrifuge, and in love with gigantic hardware and control panels, is the Belasco of science fiction. The special effects—though straight from the drawing board—are good and big and awesomely, expensively detailed. There’s a little more that’s good in the movie, when Kubrick doesn’t take himself too seriously—like the comic moment when the gliding space vehicles begin their Johann Strauss walk; that is to say, when the director shows a bit of a sense of proportion about what he’s doing, and sees things momentarily as comic when the movie doesn’t take itself with such idiot solemnity. The light-show trip is of no great distinction; compared to the work of experimental filmmakers like Jordan Belson, it’s third-rate. If big film directors are to get credit for doing badly what others have been doing brilliantly for years with no money, just because they’ve put it on a big screen, then businessmen are greater than poets and theft is art.

[Mario Gaborovic]

xBelson

[Holymanm]

belson - good... but not enough monkeys

xkhitruk - great!

[mesnalty]

xKhitruk

I liked this Belson more than the last one; there were enough images that felt organic and real, while remaining cosmic, to keep me mostly engaged. But while I thought the Khitruk was considerably longer than it needed to be, I really liked the minimalist animation style in many segments of the apartment sequence.

[john ryan]

xKhitruk

[ofrene]

xBelson
like Khitruk's animation style so much, though

[augusto]

xKhitruk

[Curtis, baby]

Khitruk wins