Poto and Cabengo
United States, West Germany
1980
77 Min
Color
1.33:1
English
Synopsis
Gracie and Ginny are San Diego twins who speak unlike anyone else. Living largely cut off from the world, the two little girls have created a private form of communication that’s an amalgam of the English and German they hear at home. Jean-Pierre Gorin’s free-form, polyphonic nonfiction investigation into this phenomenon looks at the family from a variety of angles, with the director casting himself as a sociological detective of sorts. It’s a delightful and absorbing study of words and faces, mass media and personal isolation, and America’s odd margins. –The Criterion Collection
Director
Jean-Pierre Gorin
One of the most intelligent and original minds in cinema today, Jean-Pierre Gorin has carved a unique and important niche in the tradition of documentary film. His ‘journey’ has taken him from philosophy and journalism through to the founding of the radical Dziga Vertov Group with Jean-Luc Godard in 1968. Born in Paris in 1943, Gorin was an ardent cinéphile since his youth.
He received his baccalaureate in Philosophy in 1960, subsequently enrolling at the Sorbonne. Here he took part in the seminars of Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault. In addition, from 1965 to 1968, Gorin was an editor at Le Monde newspaper, helping create its weekly literary supplement, Le Monde des livres. He wrote dozens of articles, contributing to the political and esthetic debates that would lead eventually to the upheaval of May 1968 and to his partnering with Godard as co-director on some of the most radical and influential political films of that period.
Long fascinated by the… read more
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brotherdeacon
11May12
The film has been with me, the girls have been with me. I can't think of a more balanced documentarian approach, not intellectually, but emotionally--which made the viewing (and its after-taste) that much richer. Those dear little weird twins and their ektachrome world together (DK mentioned Darger-directed Godot) wasn't merely informative, but inviting. We all know their language, not linguist's terrain, but love's.
DK and ruby stevens like this
DK
19Apr12
Really splendid and heartbreaking. The use of freeze-frame, and text, and multiple narrators, fell fascinatingly somewhere between Marker and a Godard with heart. Some lovely camera work too from Les Blank (Burden of Dreams). The film itself seems like a reprieve in a story of sadness that you can only imagine gets much sadder afterwards. Someone said the girls' interaction was like a Darger-directed Godot.
ruby stevens likes this
Wu Yong
31Mar12
“Words are never 'only words'; they matter because they define the contours of what we can do.” ~Zizek* The dismissal of shared communication as the guise of a forced autonomy and the importance of "individuality." What is the worth of a language that forces systemic adherence? "Chris told me she wished miracles would grow on trees."
Yuki Aditya likes this
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DVDs. Pialat, von Sternberg, Laloux, More
By David Hudson on August 17, 2010
In the Los Angeles Times, Dennis Lim writes that Maurice Pialat's first feature film, L'enfance nue (Naked Childhood, 1968), "out on DVD
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