"I would like to do better, to be better than I am". He's the French New Wave
maverick and Academy Award winner (
at 26, for his first short) who, to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz -- with considerable personal pain and the admission that "
no description, no picture can reveal the true dimension" of what happened in the camps -- made what François Truffaut called "
the greatest film ever made", duly
censored by French authorities. Four years later he baffled audiences with "
the first modern film of sound cinema",
shattering the rules of chronology to describe the “anguish of the future”: even if all he ever wanted was "
to stop death in its tracks"
(French language link),
only for one minute. But he is also the unabashed lover of
la bande dessinée who
learnt English by reading comic books and
in the Seventies dreamed (French language link) of making
"Spider-Man" into a movie (the Hollywood studios were not convinced), the
MGM old-school musical and
operetta nut so in love with design that "
half of the fashion photography of the past 40 years owes a debt" to him. Now,
Alain Resnais' new
work, just shown
at the Venice Film Festival where
his buddy David Lynch was awarded a lifetime achievement Golden Lion, is a French film
inspired by an
English play with 54 short scenes, music by the X-Files's Mark Snow. (more inside)
posted by matteo
on Sep 8, 2006 -
20 comments
«The silent queen of all that is snowy and pure» (.pdf) I will never forget the first time I saw Giovanni Pastrone’s
extraordinary Cabiria... I wasn’t quite
prepared for the sheer scope and beauty of this film. And I was
completely unprepared for having my sense of film history re-aligned. There are so many elements that we took for granted
as American inventions – the long-form historical epic, the
moving camera, diffused light. Suddenly, here they were in a
picture made two years before Griffith’s Birth of a Nation.
-- Martin Scorsese
It was the first film to be over three hours long, the first to use a moving camera, the first to cost 20 times the average cost of a motion picture; Pastrone took several elephants and hundreds of extras to the Alps, in the dead of winter, to film scenes that only lasted a couple of minutes
onscreen. He hired an ex-dockworker and
turned him into one of the first action movie heroes,
Maciste. And, he also created
the first international marketing campaign of the history of cinema. The Americans were so impressed that Cabiria became
the first film to be ever shown on White House grounds. Last week, at the Cannes Film Festival,
a beautiful, painstakingly restored version of this forgotten masterpiece has just been shown to the public.
posted by matteo
on May 29, 2006 -
13 comments
Drama is impossible today. I don't know of any. Drama used to be the belief in guilt, and in a higher order. This absolutely cruel didactic is impossible, unacceptable for us moderns. But melodrama has kept it. You are caged. In melodrama you have human, earthly prisons rather than godly creations. Every Greek tragedy ends with the chorus — "those are strange happenings. Those are the ways of the gods". And so it always is in melodrama.
His career as a film director lasted more than 40 years, but
Douglas Sirk (1900-1987) is remembered for the melodramas he made for Universal in Hollywood between 1954 and 1959, his "
divine wallow":
Magnificent Obsession (1954),
All That Heaven Allows (1955),
Written on the Wind (1956),
The Tarnished Angels (1958, William Faulkner considered it the best screen adaptation of one of his novels),
Imitation of Life (1959) -- all considered for decades
little more than a camp oddity. Now audiences are beginning to look deeper at the films of Douglas Sirk, at how, in megafan Todd Haynes' words, they are "
almost spookily accurate about the emotional truths". Now, lucky Chicagoans can enjoy "Douglas Sirk at Universal",
matinees at the Music Box. More inside.
posted by matteo
on Apr 29, 2006 -
14 comments
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
I first read "Ask the Dust" in 1971 when I was doing research for "Chinatown". I was concerned about the way people really sounded when they talked, and I was dissatisfied with everything else I had read that was written during the '30s. I wanted the real thing, as Henry James would say. When I picked up Fante's "Ask the Dust," I just knew that was the way those kids talked to each other—the rhythms, cadences, racism.
Robert Towne on
adapting John Fante's novel
for the big screen. More inside.
posted by matteo
on Mar 4, 2006 -
17 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 German invasion of Britain took place in July 1940, after the British retreat from Dunkirk". We see, documentary-style, members of the Wehrmacht trooping past Big Ben and St Paul's Cathedral, lounging in the parks, having their jackboots shined by old cockneys, and appreciatively visiting the shrine of that good German,
Prince Albert, in Kensington Gardens.
Kevin Brownlow and
Andrew Mollo's film "
It Happened Here", with its
cast of hundreds (.pdf), imagines what a Nazi occupation might have been like — complete with underground resistance, civilian massacres, civil strife, torch-lit rallies, Jewish ghettos, and organized euthanasia. Shot on weekends, eight years in production, made for about $20,000 with nonactors and borrowed equipment and Stanley Kubrick's help, "It Happened Here" was originally envisioned by
Brownlow as a sort of Hammer
horror flick about a Nazi Britain. Thanks in part to
Mollo's fanatical concern with historical accuracy, however,
it became something else. The most remarkable thing about this account of everyday fascism is that it has no period footage.
Brownlow's 1968 book about the film's production, "
How It Happened Here", has recently been
republished. More inside.
posted by matteo
on Feb 12, 2006 -
16 comments
And suddenly, in my memory, everything turns real: the summer breeze of Izu, the lazy sun of an early afternoon, the stale smell of water standing in the rice fields. For a moment it is that day in 1956, 37 years ago, and I am standing there, 33 years old myself. See—just to the left of the camera, just out of range. Here comes Mifune running, and there stands my younger ghost, right of that pillar, just off screen... And the summer sun beats down and the fresh breeze of Izu bathes my face, and then the story continues and the film ends and the lights go up and the students open their notebooks and I stand up and began talking about the influence of the Noh.
Donald Richie (previous post), the worldwide authority on Japanese film,
shares his movie memories.
posted by matteo
on Feb 1, 2006 -
9 comments
"... 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
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
For lovers of the hard-boiled crime story, life began with the black bird. It's a tale of greed and a wisecracking gumshoe. The femme fatale is a liar. The object of the hero's search is a statuette of a falcon.
Published exactly 75 years ago on Valentine's Day,
Dashiell Hammett's private-eye novel "
The Maltese Falcon"' immediately won critical acclaim. And
when it was made into a 1941 movie starring
Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre (and directed by a
rookie), Hammett's story found a
worldwide audience and his hero,
Sam Spade, became a household name.
Now, three-quarters of a century later,
that's still the case. More inside.
posted by matteo
on Feb 14, 2005 -
33 comments
Into the realm of Henry Darger When
Henry Darger died in Chicago on April 13, 1973, he was a destitute man whose final days were spent at a home for the elderly. Now, 30 years later, Darger ranks among the
greatest outsider artists America
has ever seen.
Found in the astounding clutter of Darger's one-room apartment was a 15,000-page fantasy epic, bound by hand in 15 volumes, titled "
The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by
the Child Slave Rebellion." Along with this were three separate volumes filled with
300 drawings, including 87 multi-sheet horizontal panels, some 12 feet long with
drawings on both sides.
The discovery of
Darger's NSFW work spawned numerous books, a play, a British rock band (the
Vivian Girls), and an
excellent y2karl MetaFilter post. And now there's also
Jessica Yu's documentary "
In the Realms of the Unreal: The Mystery of Henry Darger," a
portrait of the reclusive artist that has been
shortlisted for the upcoming Academy Award nominations. Again, Darger's art can be disturbing and must be considered not safe for work
(more inside)
posted by matteo
on Jan 14, 2005 -
30 comments
"When one is in prison, the most important thing is the door". The precise coordination of
every element of filmmaking --
camera distance,
sound,
theme,
narrative,
motion,
color,
human action -- so that it functions with rhythmic clarity: that is the cinema of
Robert Bresson, who
died five years ago aged 98. A "
Christian atheist" by his own description, he made
only 13 films (and a short) and created
a cinema of paradox, in which "the denial of emotion creates emotionally overwhelming works,
the withholding of information makes for narrative density, and attention to '
the surface of the work' produces inexhaustible depth".
Paul Schrader, the
most famous among
Bresson scholars, wrote
that "Bresson has seemed like God himself; distant, beyond communication. Now, like God, Bresson is dead". More inside.
posted by matteo
on Dec 13, 2004 -
12 comments
“The real glory of war is surviving.” One of Hollywood's biggest crimes of the last quarter-century is being set right this week with the release of "
The Big Red One: The Reconstruction", a
beautifully restored version of
Samuel Fuller's butchered
1980 masterpiece. The stunning new version
restores some 15 scenes and more than 40 minutes of footage to Fuller's grittily autobiographical film about his World War II stint as a GI with the Army's First Infantry Division. Filmed in Israel, the film stars Lee Marvin in his greatest performance. The cut version of the film flopped, and
Fuller went to his grave in 1997 bemoaning the fate of "The Big Red One," telling every journalist he met that he dreamed of seeing his original vision up on the big screen.
Richard Schickel, critic and documentary filmmaker, printed 70,000 feet of film from negatives stored in a vault in Kansas City and supervised the editing according to Fuller's original shooting script. "What they released in 1980 wasn't a bad movie," Schickel said. "What the studio wanted was a gung-ho war movie. What we've added is the real Sam stuff: the boredom, the absurdity of an ordinary soldier caught up in a vast war".
More inside.
posted by matteo
on Nov 12, 2004 -
24 comments
Discovering Japan. As a
perennial outsider at loose in Japan,
writer Donald Richie captures the
joyous freedom of being foreign. The foreign observer is likely to be happy only if he sees his foreignness as an adventure, and recognizes that he has given up a sense of belonging
for a sense of freedom, traded the luxury of being understood for that of being permanently interested.
Richie, the philosopher-king of expats in Asia for the past half-century, arrived in Tokyo in 1947 as a typist with the U.S. government and never really left,
writing dozens of books ,
on Japanese movies,
temples, history and
fashion, while enjoying himself as an actor, musician, filmmaker and painter.
The Japan Journals: 1947-2004 is a monument to the
pleasures of displacement. Richie watchers can observe, more intimately than ever, a man who is generally happiest observing. More inside.
posted by matteo
on Nov 9, 2004 -
12 comments
Detailing the impossible. Louis Feuillade made
more than 800 films covering
almost every contemporary genre: historical drama, comedy, realist drama, melodrama, religious films. However, he was most famous, or infamous, for his crime serials:
Fantômas (1913-14),
Les Vampires, Judex (1916), La Nouvelle Mission de Judex (1917),
Tih-Minh (1918) and Barrabas (1919).
Critics panned his
crime films, often savagely, because the preoccupation of French critics and film-makers in the 1910s and 20s was to elevate cinema -– and, ironically, back then the French saw their own films as lacking the artistry and sophistication of American ones, by Griffith or DeMille – to the level of art. It was years before
Feuillade's films escaped the label of aesthetic backwardness. Now,
critics have realized that what Feuillade has done is to offer us an alternative cinematic mode to Griffiths', one that continues in updated variants throughout cinema. It is predicated on a principle of uncertainty, that questions our understanding of the real. It is
as fluid and elusive a tradition
as a cat burglar,
dressed in black on a night-time rooftop.
posted by matteo
on Nov 8, 2004 -
7 comments
Love in a cage. All Iranian filmmakers working in their homeland have to face the trials of the
censor, but if
the subject matter includes abortion, adultery and lesbianism, the chances of
gaining official approval in the
Islamic republic are all but zero. Actress
Mania Akbari, the lead of
Abbas Kiarostami's
"10", explores this territory in her first feature film as a director, "
20 Fingers", which
unspooled in the new "Digitale" section at the
Venice Film Festival (.pdf file) and
won the first prize as Best Movie Shot On Digital. The film's use of digital video was also invaluable in getting around censorship: the only way to shoot in Iran on 35mm is to hire equipment from the central authorities, which means script approval and a government minder attending the shoot. Shooting on digital video requires script approval, but no minder is sent along. So 29-year-old Akbari, in an amazing display of courage, gained approval for one script and then duly shot another (she could now be barred from working or from screening her films or from even leaving the country, but she insists on working in Iran, to challenge the system from there and not from abroad). The film is
coming soon at the
Vancouver Film Festival. More inside.
posted by matteo
on Sep 24, 2004 -
5 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
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
"Whadyawant, motherf*ck?" These are the first words
Charles Bukowski speaks in
John Dullaghan's
documentary about the
poet and
novelist,
famous for his writing and infamous for his
drinking and
brawling and
screwing. The audience member might respond, "To hear your story,
Hank, that's what I want."
The movie opens with friends (Sean Penn, Harry Dean Stanton, Bono) and colleagues and lovers and fans
recounting the myth; theirs are stories of blades pulled on the maitre d' of the swanky
Polo Lounge in Beverly Hills, of dangling dicks revealed in public, of
a drunk who'd just as soon crack his bottle over your head than share its contents.
(more inside)
posted by matteo
on May 28, 2004 -
26 comments
"What did you think of Seabiscuit?" the young man added helpfully. Even the deadpan Jarmusch laughed.
Jim Jarmusch's new movie (the first feature-lenght after 1999's
Ghost Dog),
"Coffee And
Cigarettes", is "
a droll, ironic look at two of our favorite addictions". The black and white movie (trailer
here) has a strange (or
Stranger than Paradise?) cast: Roberto Benigni, Steven Wright, Steve Buscemi, Iggy Pop, Tom Waits, Cate Blanchett, Meg White, Jack White, Alfred Molina, Steve Coogan, GZA, RZA, Bill Murray, ... Jarmusch's philosophy: "When you're watching movies, the guy's girlfriend calls him, she's having something bad happening, and he says, 'I'll take a cab. I'll be right over.' Cut to him getting out of the cab. And my brain always says,
what about the cab ride? The incidental thing, the thing that's not the destination?". (more inside)
posted by matteo
on Mar 28, 2004 -
18 comments
"We were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why."
In
The Fog of War, a revelatory new documentary about his life and times, a disquieted
Robert McNamara implores us to understand why he did the things he did as an Air Force lieutenant colonel who helped
plan the
firebombing of Japanese cities in
World War II, and, later, as a secretary of defense and pivotal decision-maker during
Vietnam, which some Americans came to call
"McNamara's War."
One of the movie's most powerful passages covers McNamara's little-known service in World War II, when he was attached to Gen.
Curtis LeMay's 21st Bomber Command stationed on the Pacific island of Guam.
LeMay's B-29s showered 67 Japanese cities with incendiary bombs in 1945, softening up the country for the two
atomic blasts to come. McNamara was a senior planning officer. Story by
"Killing Fields"' Sydney Schanberg in the
American Prospect
(more inside)
posted by matteo
on Nov 12, 2003 -
83 comments
