Day 321
Thursday 17 May 2018 3.54am
‘Hyenas are People, Too’ 2018
If this project has done just two or three relevant things for my life in the last 46 weeks, it was to introduce me to ‘Spirit of the Beehive’, David Stratton and ‘Touki Bouki.’ All three are worth the time and effort to get to know.
– Philip Powers, May 2018
Having disposed of three films on the Top 100 list yesterday (the David Niven one about the pilot, the Dali/Bunuel film and the Russian revolution film with all the stairs) I chose to take a breath today. I tried to find something someone with some credibility had written about Touki Bouki but couldn’t. I find myself drawn back to this confounding film despite my desire to move on.
I found references to the Criterion disc I own and watched and it didn’t help. And almost everything else seemed to be from amateurs who came across this film by accident or, at least, without meaning to.
I started writing an essay about Touki Bouki tonight. I’ve not been able to find anything about the scenes with tying Mory up as if he were a cow. I’ve tried to understand more about what those sequences could mean, and I’ve gone back to the well – the film – for a third time at 3.30am. As I have started my essay about the film, things have become clearer.
