USA
, 97 min
Shown in 1967
CREDITS
- dir
-
Robert Carlisle
- prod
-
Robert Carlisle
- scr
-
Don Eitner, Tom Troupe
- cam
-
Alfred Taylor
- editor
-
Robert Grant
- cast
-
Tom Troupe
- source
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Robert Carlisle Productions, Los Angeles
-
COMMENTS
Shown as part of the New Directors program.
OTHER
The accomplishment of a tour de force in one's first feature rarely occurs in the American cinema. This initial work by Robert Carlisle was inspired by Nikolai Gogol's The Diary of a Madman, and as a film, this study of frustration and madness proves to be an unconventional, experimental adventure. Carlisle and his leading performer had presented the story as a dramatic production in Southern California with great success, and confronting the problems of their controlled , claustrophobic play, with its dramatization of solitary derangement, was a formidable task, indeed. Sofi observes an introverted clerk's struggles with impossible dreams and longings; in the nineteenth-century bureaucracies of his job, the clerk is bullied by his immediate superior, and desperately infatuated with his boss's daughter (the Sofi of the title). One must imagine that picturesque, sad European world of eternal twilight and close-packed, smoking chimneys that characterizes the realm of Gogol and Kafka in literature or Kollwitz and Munch in art. The visual style of the film evokes this sort of frustrating atmosphere, and its gradual move from illusion to insanity has all the nuances, the quicksilver leaps and hesitations of hypnotic trance. Here is a film for character-and-audience to which enormous creative skills have been given; Sofi illustrates the achievement of a new director, seizing the challenges of psychological cinema and creating a work of emotional excitement.
—Albert Johnson
FACTOID #85
In 1996, Harvey Keitel was the first recipient of the Peter J. Owens Award, honoring “brilliance, independence and honesty” in acting. Honest he was. During the clip show at his tribute Keitel, unhappy with one of the clips, began waving his arms and shouting until the screen went black. The screen lit up with a new clip and the tribute continued.
