The
benshi of Japan were live narrators of silent films.
"To many 'silent' cinema fans in Japan,
benshi were a major attraction. It was usually the film that drew people to the theater, but it was often the
benshi which determined which theater a person would attend.
Benshi were huge cultural stars of the time, with
benshi earning as much, if not more, than many actors."
[more inside]
posted by Paragon
on Feb 27, 2011 -
17 comments
M. Sartre goes to Hollywood. In 1958, John Huston asked Jean-Paul Sartre to write a biopic of Sigmund Freud. "The
Huston-Sartre collaboration fell apart in 1959, when Sartre travelled to Huston's home in Ireland to work on the script. The two didn't work well together. 'There was no such thing as a conversation with him,' Huston later recalled. 'He talked incessantly, and there was no interrupting him. You'd wait for him to catch his breath, but he wouldn't.' Meanwhile Sartre, in his letters to Simone de Beauvoir, described Huston as 'perfectly vacant, literally incapable of speaking to those whom he has invited.'"
[
via Bookslut] [more inside]
posted by Paragon
on Mar 1, 2010 -
27 comments
He invented or popularized a startling array of the fundamental elements of film: the dissolve, the fade-in and fade-out, slow motion, fast motion, stop motion, double exposures and multiple exposures, miniatures, the in-camera matte, time-lapse photography, color film (albeit hand-painted), artificial film lighting, production sketches and storyboards, and the whole idea of narrative film.
By 1897, in a studio of his own design and construction – the first complete movie studio – his hand forged virtually everything on his screen. Norman McLaren writes, "He was not only his own producer, ideas man, script writer, but he was his own set-builder, scene painter, choreographer, deviser of mechanical contrivances, special effects man, costume designer, model maker, actor, multiple actor, editor and distributor." Also, his own cinematographer, and the inventor of cameras to suit his special conceptions. Not even auteur directors such as Charles Chaplin, Orson Welles, John Cassavetes, and Stanley Kubrick would personally author so many aspects of their films."
Inside: 57 films by Georges Méliès, the
Grandfather of Visual Effects.
[more inside]
posted by Paragon
on Feb 3, 2010 -
31 comments
