Dead People1983

With scary precision Deutsch anatomizes and illuminates the way we invent the characters we live out, and the people we surround ourselves with. Here is a very young man falling in love with the image of an old man who, by virtue of wrinkles and drunkenness and lively wit and verbal skill and being black, seems to embody an authenticity the young man lacks. And here is the young man grown up, studying the pretenses of his younger days, and of the noble old role-player himself. With images that continue to haunt me, and the sense of the spaces of a life lives, he probes for the essences of our invented selves, our devious and glittering accomodations. I keep talking to the film, and have since I first saw it: it is a life invented, dignified and finally demystified. Yet the last stripping away seems itself a marvel of enrichment; the austere images and lushly ascerbic music that end the film make, in a direct, filmic, non-discursive way, the realist sense of person: our dramatic behaviours are absurd forgivable turbulance in a sea of presence. Deutsch does the hardest thing: he forgives even the forgiver."–Rober Kelly