"... we are sweeping everything under the carpet, but the oddness is cropping up all over the place. And then, the carpet starts to move…".
Michael Haneke, "le manipulateur" who introduced his latest film,
Caché, at Cannes with a half-amused “
I wish you a disturbing evening”, is the proponent of a "
cinema of disturbance". A cinema of
loving self-mutilation, where
time is non-linear and everything happens in
long take shots; in Haneke's world, guilt destroys lives
decades after the original sin. All his male characters are "Georges" and his female characters are either "Evas" or "Annas", "
because I lack fantasy". Unsurprisingly, he is a
Bresson and Tarkovsky fan. He'll direct
"Don Giovanni" at the Paris Opera in early 2006: "In 20 years of working in the theater, I only staged one comedy, and that was my single failure".
posted by matteo
on Nov 18, 2005 -
19 comments
Music is nothing.
Sound could become music.
The end must be in the beginning,
and the beginning in the end.
I am here because I am not here.
Music lives in the eternal now.
Music is the now becoming now.
What I learned from
Sergiu Celibidache, by
Markand Thakar. More inside.
posted by matteo
on Oct 14, 2005 -
6 comments
"If time has to end, it can be described, instant by instant," Mr. Palomar thinks, "and each instant, when described, expands so that its end can no longer be seen." He decides that he will set himself to describing every instant of his life, and until he has described them all he will no longer think of being dead. At that moment he dies.
In memoriam of
Italo Calvino, who
died exactly 20 years ago.
"Calvino's novels" by his friend Gore Vidal.
Calvino's obituary by Vidal, il maestro
William Weaver's essay
on Calvino's cities, Jeanette Winterson on
Calvino's dream of being invisible, and
Stefano Franchi's philosophical study on
Palomar's doctrine of the void. More inside.
posted by matteo
on Sep 18, 2005 -
18 comments
Just in time, you’ve found me just in time. Richard Linklater, like
Wong Kar-
wai, is a lyrical and elegiac filmmaker. In many of his films, as in many of Wong's (and as in
Ming-liang Tsai's
What Time Is It There?), the subject is
time -- the
romance and poetry of
moments ticking by, the wonder and anguish of living through and then remembering an hour or a day.
In 1995 Linklater made
Before Sunrise, the story of
the chance encounter of two strangers (an American young man and a French young woman) on a European train and their sleepless night in Vienna. Now ten years have passed, and they meet
again in Paris: they -- and the audience -- only have 80 minutes to make up for the time they lost,
Before Sunset. Linklater's new film,
shot in uncut Steadycam takes (the longest clocks in at 11 minutes), in a sense
is about how we create selves just by talking. But it’s also about how we become prisoners of time.
Towards the end of the movie,
Celine, sitting in the backseat of a car with
Jesse, starts to caress his head while he isn't looking, then suddenly pulls back, and that simple curtailed gesture carries in it a sense of tragedy,
the consequence of the weight of time...
(more inside, with Nina Simone)
posted by matteo
on Jul 20, 2004 -
22 comments
"Time passes, or rather doesn't pass. It is just there,
solid as a coffee mug on the
diner's counter. Time
hangs like the reek of old tobacco
in the hotel furniture". We all think we know
Edward Hopper's images, even if we've never
seen his paintings. Somehow
the solidity of the world -- even
the sky is like a wall -- is at odds with the
transience of the
people in it, however long they
sit and
stand and
wait. Hopper's people, like
Manet's
figures, often appear consumed by
the irreducible business of being.
Hopper, too,
would descend into his own silences, would delay himself in self-doubt...
(more inside)
posted by matteo
on May 25, 2004 -
19 comments
