It's still about the means of production, you see — but in the overdeveloped world, at least, it's not about the production of goods and services anymore. Today's virtual revolutionary is happy to leave all that to capitalists. The virtual revolutionary wants to control the production of meaning — representations of herself and her world as she wants them to seem. Or be. Or whatever.
That's all she asks.
Or, rather, takes.
Thomas de Zengotita welcomes the big world of the small screen. Peter Bogdanovich, instead,
still mourns that last picture show.
posted by matteo
on Mar 26, 2006 -
22 comments
"He was someone who acted out our psyches ... He somehow got into the shadows inside our bodies; he was able to nail down some of our secret fears and put them on-screen... the history of Lon Chaney is the history of unrequited loves. He brings that part of you out into the open, because you fear that you are not loved, you fear that you never will be loved, you fear there is some part of you that's grotesque, that the world will turn away from."
A Valentine for Lon Chaney, the
Man of a
Thousand Faces.
(BugMeNot for the first link; more inside)
posted by matteo
on Feb 18, 2006 -
14 comments
The Emperor's Bunker. "The Japanese, with sadness and irony, stressed that Hirohito couldn't even speak properly. This was partly to do with the fact that he didn't have to speak - people spoke in his name and he was isolated from real life".
"
The Sun", the third part in
Russian director Aleksandr Sokurov's 'Men of Power'
tetralogy after the gloom of
Moloch (1999), about Hitler and Eva Braun, and the despairing tones of "
Taurus"
(2001), focused on the wheelchair-bound Lenin in his death throes, "The Sun" seems almost upbeat. This, after all, is a film about reconciliation. More inside.
posted by matteo
on Sep 13, 2005 -
21 comments
David Lynch's secret movie (site with annoying, loud sound, sorry) "It's about a woman in trouble, and it's a mystery, and that's about all I want to say about it". Titled "INLAND EMPIRE" (all caps, though Lynch doesn't explain why), it stars Laura Dern, Justin Theroux, Harry Dean Stanton, Jeremy Irons.
Lynch has shot much of his latest film in Poland, after making friends with the organizers of the Camerimage festival in Lodz. He's now back shooting in and around Los Angeles. Even at this relatively advanced stage of production, Lynch is cagey about when it will be finished. It was shot entirely in DV: "I started working in DV for my Web site, and I fell in love with the medium. For me, there's no way back to film. I'm done with it".
posted by matteo
on May 12, 2005 -
36 comments
The poet of nightfall Twentyfive years ago,
film director
Nicholas Ray died in New York. Like
Jacques Tati and
Samuel Fuller, Ray
did a lot of living before he ever
got around to filmmaking: he was of part of
Frank Lloyd Wright's
Taliesin Fellowship, a devotee of southern
folk music, an avant-garde theatre director. He had made
Rebel Without a Cause and survived
James Dean, and the title of the film seemed to dramatise his terrible, self-destructive battles with Hollywood. His films (
They Live By Night,
In a Lonely Place,
On Dangerous Ground,
Johnny Guitar,
The Savage Innocents,
King of Kings) were in love with
imprisoned life, but the dark edge of mourning was always there, too. He was idolised by the young
Cahiers du
Cinema critics who would become the directors of the New Wave.
François Truffaut once noted: "There are no Ray films that do not have a scene at the
close of day; he is the poet of nightfall, and of course everything is permitted in Hollywood except poetry." Contrasting Ray and Howard Hawks, he added: "But anyone who rejects either should never go to the movies again, never see any more films".
Jean-Luc Godard offered another sweeping panegyric: "There was theatre (
Griffith), poetry (
Murnau), painting (
Rossellini), dance (
Eisenstein), music (
Renoir). Henceforth there is cinema. And
cinema is Nicholas Ray. These days,
lucky Chicagoans can admire one of Ray's greatest works,
Bitter Victory -- the film about the dangerous games men play with macho self-images...
(more inside)
posted by matteo
on Jun 18, 2004 -
16 comments
