“Barton Fink”, directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, running time: 112’, 1991.
“Barton Fink” – for more than two decades the Coen Brothers have not only been at the forefront of high-quality cinema but have been two of the most influential voices (and visions) on the North American film industry. Frequently, theirs are the voices informed by in-depth criticism and insightful critique expressed by means of the grotesque, satire as well as pastiche that Joel and Ethan Coen employ to masterfully depict and chastise the darker - less salubrious and more shady - sides of contemporary America.
As part of Miasto Movie’s December installment, we have opted to screen one of their most celebrated and widely recognised films, the 1991 Cannes Film Festival Palme d'Or Prize Winner, namely “Barton Fink”.
Cloistered away in a run-down and claustrophobic hotel room and tied to a pressing deadline, the writer is commissioned to create a B-movie script by the producers of a shamelessly low-brow wrestling flick. By doing so, the writer is forced to give up high art and commit himself to commercial entertainment, to writing potboilers that he whole-heartedly despises.
The Coen Brothers, a fact not easily overlooked by the film audiences worldwide, seem to be clearly enjoying the entanglement and dilemmas of their protagonist, who in turn appears to be echoing Goethe’s Doctor Faustus. The writer inks a deal with a major film studio, which serves as the embodiment of all evil and corruption, and the hotel, in which he is supposed to work on the commissioned script, bears a lot of relation to a corridor leading straight to hell.
“Barton Fink” is a movie that effectively fuses a number of cinematic conventions: caustic satire aimed at the film industry is laced with nostalgia for the cinema of yore; the heart-wrenching drama of an alienated human, struggling on his own with life is mixed with an absurd comedy underpinned by the surreal. Films written and directed by the Coen Brothers have indeed made an impact on world cinema so it is all the more worth re-visiting one of his contemporary classics, one of his earliest triumphs as cinematographers.
Free admission