Time warp

How else to explain a shock such as this? In the middle of Der Mörder Dimitri Karamasoff (which is astonishing for how much of the original novel it maintains to capture, despite butchering absolutely key elements and one of the three brothers of the title, on top of all the other reasons), marked by its debts to Dostoevsky (i.e. the Russian 1870s), formalist strategies partly inherited from the Russian montage school (the Russian 1920s) and sound experiments of Weimar Germany, a shot suddenly materializes which could come straight out of an American film of the 1970s, or maybe rather a French or Czech film of the mid-1960s, or some such miraculous (post-Anna-Karina-in-Vivre-Sa-Vie) period. Gruschenka gives herself up to the music, swirls around with the other gypsies at the inn, Dimitri watches her as very few men have watched a woman, the camera follows the gypsies, the gypsies look at the camera, as the music rises to a crescendo... The camera is drunk.