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6701
From:
Date: Thu Jan 15, 2004 5:31am
Subject: Re: The Fearmakers
Actually, "The Fearmakers" seems to be an inventive and creative movie. It
shares a lot of imagery in common with Tourneur's "Berlin Express". Both deal
with centers of political power in the post war world; both end at symbolic
locations (The Brandenburg Gate, The Lincoln Memorial), both deal with that new
horror, bombing of cities from the air; both look at how modern society is run;
both give a strange cross section of people of their time; in both, characters
are often different from what they first seem to be, with secret lives and
identities. It also continues Tourneur's strong personal interest in illness,
with a sick hero like that of "Easy Living".
Mike Grost
Who always tries to carry the auteur theory too far.
"Leather Jackets" (Lee Drysdale, 1991) might be an indifferent crime
thriller. But it has a great tag line:
"They went too far, then they kept right on going!"
6702
From: jaketwilson
Date: Thu Jan 15, 2004 11:05am
Subject: Re: The Fearmakers
What's wrong with Mel Torme?
JTW
6703
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Thu Jan 15, 2004 3:06pm
Subject: Re: Re: The Fearmakers
Nothing --when he's in "Good News."
--- jaketwilson wrote:
> What's wrong with Mel Torme?
>
> JTW
>
>
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Hotjobs: Enter the "Signing Bonus" Sweepstakes
http://hotjobs.sweepstakes.yahoo.com/signingbonus
6704
From: jess_l_amortell
Date: Thu Jan 15, 2004 4:30pm
Subject: Re: Stars in My Crown question
For those who've seen Stars in My Crown recently, a possibly dumb question.
***For others, possible epidemic SPOILERS***
Even though I'm not especially strong on narrative plausibility in general (and not that great at simply following plots - which may be part of the problem), one thing did puzzle me the last time I saw it (when it was blessed, by the way, with an introduction by Chris Fujiwara, whose chapter on the film is so wonderful): Why don't they ever check out the well? Even the wise Uncle Famous rules it out as the source of the epidemic because he's sure it would have been tested by then. But it seems that it hasn't been, and apparently only because Joel McCrea *assumed* that the boy wouldn't have drunk from it before school started ... although Tourneur makes sure that *we've* seen children playing there. (The boy himself presumably being as yet too sick to be interrogated.) Is this some sort of comment on civic and medical negligence or is it a hole in the plot, or most likely, is there something else I'm neglecting, perhaps key to Tourneur's often curious, convoluted yet understated approach to narrative.
Mike Grost, actually, seems to be referring to this on his Tourneur page when he calls attention to Tourneur's "deluded" characters: "In several Tourneur films, Something Bad is going on. The audience knows this, but the good characters are either in ignorance or denial. The Bad activity is often quite destructive. Eventually the Bad activity can locate itself near water: the sea ships here, the swimming pool in Cat People, the aquariums in Experiment Perilous...." What seems so odd in Stars is that much is made of the McCrea character being accused, and eventually cleared, of one delusion -- his alleged denial that he may be transmitting the disease -- but (as far as I recall) he's completely let off the hook where it matters: the film never seems to make a point of, or even especially notice, the actual delusion inherent in his curiously automatic and unthinking assumption about the well...
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, MG4273@a... wrote:
> The story of "Stars in My Crown" shows how difficult it is for people to
> arrive at truth. People eventually discover the true source of the epidemic, and
> how to defeat it, but only after a titanic struggle. They have to abandon all
> their cherished beliefs, re-learn reality from the ground up, and struggle and
> struggle to arrive at the truth.
6705
From: programming
Date: Thu Jan 15, 2004 5:11pm
Subject: Thanks Filipe / Peleshian films
Thanks Filipe,
I did find the other home page as well, but neither of them seems to have an
order form. I did just email an inquiry as you suggested.
Can you tell me if "Legendas: Port." means subtitled in Portuguese?
And for everyone: if you ever have the chance to see the films of Artavazd
Peleshian (also Pelechian), definitely do. A remarkable filmmaker from
Armenia whose work is very hard to see. Something in the grey area between
documentary, essay film, experimental film. See a brief section on him in
Scott MacDonald's "A Critical Cinema 3"
Best,
Patrick F.
On 1/14/04 11:24 PM, "filipefurtado" wrote:
> Patrick, as far as I can tell there's no purchase link there.
> But I get into the distributor's home page. Their mail is
> info@c... From what I get, you can buy for it.
>
>
> Filipe
>
>
>
>> Hi All,
>>
>> Are there any Portuguese speakers out there who can assist m
> e with figuring
>> out HOW to purchase the following:
>>
>> http://www.dvdpt.com/o_p/obras_documentais_de_artavazd_pelec
> hian.php
>>
>>
>> Any help most welcome.
>>
>> Best,
>>
>> Patrick Friel
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Yahoo! Groups Links
>>
>> To visit your group on the web, go to:
>> http://groups.yahoo.com/group/a_film_by/
>>
>> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
>> a_film_by-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
>>
>> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
>> http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
>>
>>
>>
>
>
> ---
> Acabe com aquelas janelinhas que pulam na sua tela.
> AntiPop-up UOL - É grátis!
> http://antipopup.uol.com.br
>
>
>
> Yahoo! Groups Links
> * To visit your group on the web, go to:
> * http://groups.yahoo.com/group/a_film_by/
> *
> * To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
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> *
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> <http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/> .
>
6706
From: filipefurtado
Date: Thu Jan 15, 2004 5:19pm
Subject: Re: Thanks Filipe / Peleshian films
> Can you tell me if "Legendas: Port." means subtitled in Port
uguese?
Yes.
Filipe
---
Acabe com aquelas janelinhas que pulam na sua tela.
AntiPop-up UOL - É grátis!
http://antipopup.uol.com.br
6707
From: hotlove666
Date: Thu Jan 15, 2004 5:29pm
Subject: Style and Morality: The Tracking Shot in Kapo
For those who followed the bruising early debte here about morality
and style, here's a key article - his last - that has been translated
and is being circulated by the organizers of the Daney conference. I
favor a more colloquial style in translating, but this one is
accurate "Jean-Louis S" at the end means "Jean-Louis Schefer."
The Tracking Shot in Kapo
by Serge Daney
First published in Trafic #4, P.O.L. Editions, 1992 (also published
in Perséverance: Entretien avec Serge Toubiana, P.O.L. Editions,
1994). Translation by Laurent Kretzschmar.
Among the movies I have never seen there is not only October, Le jour
se lève and Bambi, there is also the obscure Kapo. A movie about
concentration camps shot in 1960 by the Italian Gillo Pontecorvo,
Kapo wasn't a landmark in the history of cinema. Am I the only one
who has never seen this movie and yet hasn't forgotten it? For I
haven't seen Kapo and at the same time I have seen it. I have seen it
because someone has shown it to me - with words. This movie, whose
title like a password has accompanied my life of cinema, I only know
it through a short text: the review written by Jacques Rivette in
June 1961 in Cahiers du cinéma. It was the 120th edition and the
article was entitled "Of Abjection". Rivette was 33 years old and I
was 17. I had probably never pronounced the word "abjection" in my
life.
In his review, Rivette did not tell the story of the movie. He merely
described one shot in one sentence. The sentence, engraved in my
memory, said this: "Look however in Kapo, the shot where Riva commits
suicide by throwing herself on electric barbwire: the man who decides
at this moment to make a forward tracking shot to reframe the dead
body - carefully positioning the raised hand in the corner of the
final framing - this man is worthy of the most profound contempt."
Thus a simple camera movement was the one movement not to make. The
movement you must - obviously - be abject to make. As soon as I read
those lines I knew the author was absolutely right.
Abrupt and luminous, Rivette's text enabled me to give words to this
particular type of abjection. My revolt had found words to express
itself. But there was more. This revolt came along with a less clear
and probably less pure feeling: the relieved recognition that I had
just acquired my first conviction as a future movie critic. Indeed
throughout the years, "the tracking shot in Kapo" would become my
portable dogma, the axiom that could not be discussed, the breaking
point of any debate. I would definitely have nothing to do, nothing
to share with anybody who wasn't immediately upset by the abjection
of "the tracking shot in Kapo".
This kind of refusal was common at the time. Looking at the raging
and exasperated style of Rivette's article, I felt that furious
debates had already taken place and it seemed already evident to me
that cinema mirrored every debate. The war in Algeria was ending, and
because it hadn't been filmed, it had brought suspicion upon any
representation of history. Everyone seemed to understand that there
were such things as taboos, criminal facilities and forbidden
editing - especially in cinema. Godard's famous formula about a
tracking shot being "a moral issue" was in my eyes one of those
truths which one could no longer question. Not me anyway.
* * *
The review had been published in Cahiers du cinéma, three years
before the end of the yellow cover period. Did I feel that it
couldn't have been published in any other magazine, that it belonged
to Cahiers just as I would belong to them later? In any case I, who
had so little of a family, had found mine. Thus it wasn't by pure
snobbery that I had been buying Cahiers for the last two years and
that I had shared my amazed comments with a friend - Claude D. - from
the Voltaire High School. It wasn't pure fancy if at the beginning of
every month I was pressing my nose to the window of the modest
bookshop on Avenue de la République. Just noticing that beneath the
yellow border, the black and white picture on the cover of Cahiers
had changed was enough to set my heart racing. However I didn't want
the storekeeper to tell me whether or not a new edition was out. I
wanted to find out by myself and buy the magazine coldly, with a
neutral voice, as if I was buying a blank copybook. Subscribing never
even crossed my mind: I liked this anxious wait. Whether to buy, to
write, or to edit Cahiers, I could stay at its doorstep since it
was `my home'.
At the Voltaire High School we were a few who had surreptitiously
entered into cinephilia. The event has a date: 1959. The word
cinéphile was still joyful although it already had the pathological
connotation and the rancid aura that will discredit it. As for me, I
despised straight away those who, too normal, were already sneering
at the "cinematheque rats" that we were about to become for several
years - guilty to live cinema as a passion and life by proxy. At the
dawn of the 60s, cinema was still an enchanted world. On the one hand
it had all the charms of a parallel counter-culture. On the other it
had the advantage of being somewhat developed with a heavy history,
recognised values, the typos in Sadoul's insufficient bible, jargon,
persistent myths, battle of ideas and war between magazines. The wars
were almost over and we were arriving a bit late, but not too late to
nourish the tacit project of making all this history, which wasn't
even as old as the century, our own.
To be a cinephile was simply to devour another education in parallel
to high school, with the yellow Cahiers as the common thread and a
few `adult' passeurs (2) who, with the discretion of conspirators,
signalled to us that there was indeed a world to discover, and maybe
nothing else than the world to live in. Henri Agel - literature
teacher at the Voltaire High School - was one of these peculiar
passeurs. To spare himself as well as us the burden of Latin lessons,
he would put to a vote the following choice: either spend an hour on
Titus Livius or watch movies. The pupils who chose the movies often
left the decrepit cine-club wondering and feeling tricked. Out of
sadism or probably because he had the film rolls, Agel projected
small movies meant to make teenagers lose their innocence. They were
Franju's Le sang des bêtes and especially Resnais' Nuit et
brouillard. So it is through cinema that I learned that the human
condition and industrial butchery were not incompatible and that the
worst had just happened.
I suppose today that Agel, who wrote Evil with a capital E, enjoyed
watching the effects of this peculiar revelation on the teenagers'
faces. There must have been some voyeurism in his brutal way of
transmitting through cinema this gruesome and unavoidable knowledge
that we were the first generation to inherit fully. Christian but not
proselytising, a rather elitist militant, Agel too was showing. He
had this talent. He was showing because it was necessary. And because
the cinematographic culture at the high school, for which he was
campaigning, also meant a silent selection between the pupils who
will never forget Nuit et brouillard and the others. I wasn't one of
the `others'.
* * *
Once, twice, three times, depending on Agel's mood and the number of
sacrificed Latin lessons, I watched the famous piles of dead bodies,
hair, spectacles and teeth. I listened to Jean Cayrol's commentary
recited by Michel Bouquet and to Hanns Eisler's music, which sounded
guilty of existing. Strange baptism of images: understanding at the
same time that the camps were real and that the film was just. And
understanding that cinema (alone?) was capable of approaching the
limits of a denatured humanity. I felt that the distances set by
Resnais between the subject filmed, the subject filming and the
subject spectator were, in 1959 like in 1955, the only possible ones.
Was Nuit et brouillard a `beautiful' film? No, but it was just. It's
Kapo that wanted to be beautiful and wasn't. And it's me who would
never quite see the difference between what's just and what's
beautiful - hence my boredom in front of beautiful images.
Captivated by cinema, I didn't need – as well - to be seduced. No
need either for baby talk. As a child I had never seen any Disney
movies. In the same way that I went directly to communal school, I
was proud to have avoided the childish sessions at squalling maternal
schools. Worse: for me animated movies would always be something
other than cinema. Even worse: animated movies would always be a bit
the enemy. No `beautiful image', especially drawn, would match the
emotion - fear and trembling – in front of recorded things. And all
this which is so simple and took me years to formulate in a simple
way began to come out in front of Resnais' images and Rivette's text.
Born in 1944, two days before D-Day, I would discover at the same
time my cinema and my history. Strange history that for a long time I
thought I was sharing with others, before realising – rather late -
that it was well and truly mine.
* * *
What does a child know? And especially that child - Serge D. - who
wanted to know everything except what was about him? What absence
from the world will later make being present in front of the images
of the world necessary? I know of few expressions more beautiful than
the one coined by Jean-Louis Schefer when, in L'homme ordinaire du
cinéma, he speaks about the "films that have watched our childhood".
Because it is one thing to learn to watch movies as a `professional' -
only to verify that movies concern us less and less – but it is
another to live with those movies that watched us grow and that have
seen us, early hostages of our future biographies, already entangled
in the snare of our history. Psycho, La Dolce vita, The Indian Tomb,
Rio Bravo, Pickpocket, Anatomy of a Murder, The Sacrilegious Hero or
precisely Nuit et brouillard are not for me movies like any other. To
the brutal question "Is this watching you?" they all answer yes.
The dead bodies of Nuit et brouillard and two years later those in
the first frames of Hiroshima mon amour are among those `things' that
have watched me more than I have seen them. Eisenstein attempted to
make such images but Hitchcock succeeded. Just as an example: how can
I ever forget the first encounter with Psycho? We snuck into the
Paramount Opera theatre without paying and the movie was very
ordinarily terrorising us. But then, towards the end, there is a
scene on which my perception slides, slapdash editing from which
emerge only grotesque props: a cubist dressing gown, a falling wig, a
brandished knife. And from the fear shared with the rest of the
audience follows the calm of a resigned solitude: the brain functions
as a secondary projector that would keep the image going, leaving the
film and the world continuing without it. I cannot imagine a love for
cinema that does not rest firmly on this stolen present: `to continue
without me'.
* * *
Who hasn't experienced this state? Who hasn't known those screen-
memories? Unidentified images are printed on the retina; unknown
events happen fatally; spoken words become the secret code of an
impossible self-knowledge. These private moments are the primitive
scene of the cinephile, the scene in which he wasn't present although
it was exclusively about him. In the way Paulhan speaks about
literature as an experience of the world "when we are not there" and
Lacan speaks about "what is missing from its place". The cinephile is
the one who keeps his eyes wide open in vain but will not tell
anybody that he could not see a thing. He is the one preparing for a
life as a professional `watcher', as a way to make up for being late,
as slowly as possible.
My life thus had its zero point, its second birth. And it was lived
as such and was immediately commemorated. The year is known: once
again 1959. It is - coincidently? - the year of the famous "you saw
nothing at Hiroshima" by Marguerite Duras. My mother and I were
leaving the theatre after Hiroshima mon amour, staggered - we were
not the only ones - because we never thought that cinema was capable
of such a `thing'. On the platform of the metro station I finally
realised that to the fastidious question I could never answer - "what
are you going to do in life?" - I had just found a response. `Later',
one way or another, it will be cinema. Thus I have never been sparing
of the details of this cinema-birth to myself: Hiroshima, the
platform of the metro station, my mother, the now closed movie
theatre and its seats will often be remembered as the legendary set
of the good origin, the origin one chooses for oneself.
* * *
Resnais is the common thread of this primitive scene in three parts
over two years. It is because Nuit et brouillard had been possible
that Kapo was born outdated and that Rivette could write his article.
However, before becoming the archetypal `modern filmmaker', Resnais
was for me another passeur. He was revolutionising
the "cinematographic language" (as we used to say) because he took
his subject seriously and because he had the intuition, almost the
luck, to spot this subject among all the others: nothing less than
the damaged and disfigured human species right after the Nazi camps
and the atomic trauma. So there has always been something strange in
the way that I later became the rather bored spectator of
Resnais' `other' films. His attempts to revitalise the world - the
world whose disease he alone had recorded in time - seemed doomed to
produce nothing but uneasiness.
It is therefore not with Resnais that I will make the journey
of `modern' cinema but with Rossellini. It is not with Resnais that
the moral lessons will be learnt by heart and conjugated but always
with Godard. Why? First, because Godard and Rossellini spoke, wrote,
and thought out loud while I got irritated at the image of Saint
Alain Resnais freezing in his anoraks and begging - rightly but to no
avail - to be believed when he said that he was not an intellectual.
Did I avenge myself for the importance of two of his movies at the
opening of my life? Resnais was the filmmaker who had taken me away
from childhood or rather who had for three decades made me a serious
child. And he is precisely the one with whom, as an adult, I would
never share anything. I remember that at the end of an interview -
for the release of La vie est un roman - I thought useful to tell him
about the shock of Hiroshima mon amour in my life. He thanked me,
courteous and distant, as if I had said something nice about his new
raincoat. I was upset but I was wrong: the movies that have watched
our childhood cannot be shared, even with their author.
* * *
Now that this history has looped back and I've had more than my share
of the `nothing' that there was to see at Hiroshima, I inevitably ask
myself: could it have been different? Was there, in front of the
camps, another possible justness than the anti-spectacular way of
Nuit et brouillard? A friend recently mentioned George Stevens'
documentary made at the end of the war, buried, exhumed, and recently
shown on French television. First movie to record the camps in colour
and the colours transform it with no abjection whatsoever into art.
Why? Is it the difference between colour and black and white, between
America and Europe, between Stevens and Resnais? Stevens' movie is
magnificent because it's the story of a journey: the daily
progression of a small group of filming-soldiers and wandering-
filmmakers across destroyed Europe, from ravaged Saint-Lo to
Auschwitz that nobody expects and which overwhelms the crew. And
then, my friend tells me, the piles of dead bodies have a strange
beauty which make her think of the great paintings of this century.
As always Sylvie P. was right.
What I understand today is that the beauty of Stevens' movie is due
less to the justness of the distance than to the innocence of the
gaze. Justness is the burden of the one who comes `after'; innocence
is the terrible grace granted to the first arrived, to the first one
who simply makes the gestures of cinema. It wasn't until the mid 70s
that I recognised in Pasolini's Salo or even in Syberberg's Hitler
the other meaning of the word `innocent': not so much the non-guilty
one but the one who filming evil doesn't think evil. In 1959, young
boy stiffened by his discovery, I was already caught in the sharing
of the collective guilt. But in 1945, it was perhaps enough to be
American and to witness, like George Stevens or Corporal Samuel
Fuller at Falkenau, the opening of the real gates of the night while
holding a camera. You had to be American - i.e. to believe in the
fundamental innocence of the show - to make the German population
walk by the open tombs, to show them what they were living next to,
so well and so badly. It took ten years before Resnais began editing
and fifteen years before Pontecorvo made one move too many that
infuriated us, Rivette and I. Necrophilia was therefore the price of
this `delay' and the erotic body double of the `just' gaze - the gaze
of guilty Europe, Resnais' gaze and consequently mine.
This is how my history began. The space opened by Rivette's sentence
was truly mine as was already the intellectual family of Cahiers du
cinéma. But this space, I had to realise, was less a vast field than
a narrow door. On its noble side was the pleasure of the just
distance and its reverse, the sublimation of necrophilia. On the not
so noble side was the possibility of a pleasure of a very different
nature that could not be sublimated. It is Godard who, showing me
videotapes of `concentration camp porn' in a corner of his video
collection in Rolle, was surprised that nothing had been said about
such films and that no interdiction had been pronounced. As if the
coward intentions of their makers and the trivial fantasies of their
viewers `protected' them in a way from censorship and outrage. Proof
that in the domain of sub-culture, the silent claim of a compulsory
interlacing between the victims and the torturers was persisting.
Indeed the existence of these films had never troubled me. I had for
them - as for any openly pornographic cinema - the almost polite
tolerance one has for the expression of fantasy when this one, naked,
only claims the sad monotony of its necessary repetition.
It is the other pornography - the `artistic' pornography of Kapo, of
The Night Porter and other retro 70s movies - that has always
revolted me. To the consensual attempts to create post-aesthetics, I
would prefer the stubborn return of the non-images of Nuit et
brouillard or even the flowing desire in Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS
that I would not see. These films at least had the honesty to
acknowledge an impossibility to tell a story, a stopping point in the
course of history, when storytelling is stilled or runs in neutral.
So we should not speak about amnesia or repression but rather about
foreclosure. I would later learn the Lacanian definition of
foreclosure: hallucinatory return into the real of something upon
which it had not been possible to produce a "judgement of reality".
To say it differently: since moviemakers had not filmed the policies
of the Vichy government at the time, their duty 50 years later was
not to imaginarily redeem themselves with movies like Au revoir les
enfants but to draw today's portrait of this good people of France
who from 1940 to 1942 (and that includes the Vel' d'Hiv raid) did not
move. Cinema being the art of present, remorse is of no interest.
This is why the spectator that I was in front of Nuit et brouillard
and the moviemaker who tried to show the impossible with this film,
were linked by a complicit symmetry. Either it is the spectator who
is suddenly "missing from its place" and stops while the movie
continues. Or it is the movie which, instead of `continuing', folds
back onto itself and onto a temporary definitive `image' allowing the
spectator to continue believing in cinema and the citizen to live his
life. Stop of the spectator, stop on the image: cinema entered
adulthood. The sphere of the visible had ceased to be entirely
available: there were gaps and holes, necessary hollowness and
superfluous fullness, forever missing images and always defective
gazes. The show and the spectator stopped playing all the balls. And
having chosen cinema - allegedly "the art of moving images" - I began
my cinephile life under the paradox of a first stop on the image.
This stop protected me from strict necrophilia and I never saw any of
the rare films or documentaries `about the camps' after Kapo. For me
the matter was settled by Nuit et brouillard and Rivette's article.
For a long time I have been like the French authorities who, still
today, in front of any resurgence of anti-Semitism urgently broadcast
Resnais' movie as if it was part of a secret arsenal which, whenever
evil was back, could time and again apply its virtues of exorcism.
And if I didn't apply the axiom of the "tracking shot in Kapo" only
to the movies which were exposed to abjection by their subject, it
was because I was tempted to apply it to all the movies. "There are
things - wrote Rivette - that must be approached with fear and
trembling. Death is such a thing and how could someone film such a
mysterious thing without the feeling of being an impostor?" I agreed.
And because there are only a few movies where nobody dies, there were
numerous occasions to fear and tremble. Some moviemakers were
certainly not impostors. In 1959, Miyagi's death in Ugetsu literally
nailed me, staggered, to the seat of the Studio Bernard theatre.
Mizoguchi had filmed death as a vague fatality that you were able to
see could and could not not happen. One can remember the scene: in
the Japanese countryside travellers are attacked by greedy bandits
and one of them kills Miyagi with a spear. But he does it almost
inadvertently, tumbling around, pushed by a bit of violence or by a
stupid reflex. This event seems so accidental that the camera almost
misses it. And I am convinced that any spectator of that scene has
the same superstitious and crazy idea: if the camera had not been so
slow, the event may have happened off-camera and - who knows - may
have not happened at all.
Shall the camera be to blame? By dissociating the movement of the
camera from the movements of the actors, Mizoguchi did the exact
opposite of Kapo. Instead of a pretrifying glance, this was a gaze
that `seemed not to see', that preferred not to have seen and thus
showed the event taking place as an event, ineluctable and
indirectly. An event that is absurd and nil, absurd like any accident
and nil like war - a calamity that Mizoguchi never liked. An event
that doesn't concern us enough for us not to carry on, shameful. For
I bet that at this precise moment, every spectator knows absolutely
what the absurdity of war is. It doesn't matter that the spectator is
a westerner, the movie Japanese and the war medieval: it is enough to
shift from pointing with the finger to showing with the gaze for this
knowledge - furtive and universal, the only knowledge cinema is
capable of - to be given to us.
Taking the side of the panoramic shot in Ugetsu against the tracking
shot in Kapo so early, I made a choice whose consequences I would
only measure ten years later, amidst the late and radical
politicisation of Cahiers after 1968. If Pontecorvo, future director
of The Battle of Algiers, is a courageous moviemaker with whom I
share broadly the same political convictions, Mizoguchi seemed to
have lived solely for his art and to have been an opportunist in
regard to politics. Where is the difference then? In the "fear and
trembling". Mizoguchi is scared of war because, unlike Kurosawa, he
is appalled by little men slaughtering each other for some feudal
virility. It is this fear, this desire to vomit and flee, that
triggers the stunned panoramic shot. It is this fear that makes this
moment just and therefore able to be shared. Pontecorvo neither
trembles nor does he feel fear: the concentration camps revolt him
purely on an ideological level. This is why he can make his presence
felt in the scene with an extra pretty tracking shot.
I realised that cinema oscillated most of the time between those two
poles. Even with more substantial directors than Pontecorvo, I often
stumbled onto this smuggler's way of adding an extra parasitic beauty
or complicit information to scenes that did not need it. The wind
that blows back, like a shroud, the white parachute over a dead
soldier's body in Fuller's Merrill's Marauders troubled me for years.
Less though than Ana Magnani's revealing skirt after she is shot dead
in Rome Open City. Rossellini too was hitting `below the belt', but
in such a new way that it would take years to understand towards
which abyss it was taking us. When is the event over? Where is the
cruelty? Where does obscenity begin and where does pornography end? I
knew these were questions constitutive of cinema `after the camps'.
And for myself, because I was the same age, I began to call this
cinema `modern'.
This modern cinema had one characteristic: it was cruel. We had
another: we accepted that cruelty. Cruelty was on the `good side'. It
was cruelty that said no to academic `illustration' and destroyed the
hypocritical feelings of a wordy humanism. Mizoguchi's cruelty for
instance showed two irreconcilable events together, producing an
unbearable feeling of "non assistance to person in danger". A modern
feeling par excellence presented fifteen years before the long
tracking shots in Week-end. An archaic feeling as well since that
cruelty was as old as cinema itself, like a clue revealing what was
fundamentally modern in cinema, from the last shot in City Lights to
Browning's The Unknown through to the ending of Nana. How could one
forget the slow and shaky tracking shot that the young Renoir hurls
towards Nana laying on her bed, dying of small pox? How can some
people see Renoir as a singer of the happy life when he had been one
of the few filmmakers capable of finishing off someone with a
tracking shot?
Actually, cruelty was within the logic of my journey at Cahiers.
André Bazin, who had already theorised cruelty, had found it so
narrowly linked to the essence of cinema that he almost made it `its
thing'. Bazin liked Louisiana Story because you could see a bird
eaten up by a crocodile in real time and in one shot: proof through
cinema and forbidden editing. To choose Cahiers was to choose realism
and, eventually, a certain contempt for imagination. Lacan's
formula "so you want to look? Then look at this" was already
substituted by this other formula "Has it been recorded? Then I must
watch it", even and especially when `it' was painful, unbearable or
totally invisible.
For this realism had two sides. If modern filmmakers were saving
cinema with realism, it was with an altogether different realism - as
in `realistic' - that movie propaganda in the 40s had collaborated
with the lies and foreshadowed death. This was why, after all, it was
fair to call the former, born in Italy, `neo'-realism. It was
impossible to love the "art of the century" without seeing this art
to be about the madness of the century and being shaped by it. To the
contrary of theatre with its collective crises and cures, cinema with
its personal information and mourning had an intimate relation with
the horror from which it was barely recovering. I inherited a guilty
convalescent, an aged child, a narrow hypothesis. We would grow old
together but not eternally.
* * *
Conscientious heir, exemplary ciné-fils (3), with "the tracking shot
in Kapo" as protecting charm, I did not let the years go by without
some apprehension: what if the charm lost its power? Lecturing at a
Paris university, I remember distributing Rivette's text to my
students and asking for their impression. It was still a `red' period
where some students were trying to grasp a bit of the political
radicalism of 1968 through their professors. It seemed that out of
consideration for me the most motivated of them agreed to see in "Of
abjection" an interesting historical document although slightly
dated. I did not get upset and if I repeated the experience with
students today, I wouldn't worry whether they understood the tracking
shot but I would want to make sure that there is for them some hint
of abjection. To be honest I am afraid there wouldn't be any. A sign
that tracking shots are no longer a moral issue and that cinema is
too weak to entertain such a question.
Thirty years after the repeated projections of Nuit et brouillard at
the Voltaire High School, concentration camps - which served as my
primitive scene - are no longer holding up in the sacred respect
where Resnais, Cayrol and many others maintained them. Handed back to
the historians and the curious, the question of the camps is now in
line with their work, their divergences and their madness. The
foreclosed desire that returns "as a hallucination into the real" is
evidently the one that should never have returned. It is the desire
that no gas chambers, no final solution and eventually no camps ever
existed: various revisionisms. Along with the tracking shot in Kapo
today's film students would also inherit an uncertain transmission, a
taboo not clearly identified, in a word just another round in the
history of tribalism of the same and the phobia of the other. The
stop on the image has ceased to operate; the banality of evil can
launch new, electronic images.
In recent France there are now enough symptoms for someone of my
generation to look back to what was given to him as History and to
take notice of the landscape he has grown in - a tragic and at the
same time comfortable landscape. Two political dreams - American and
communist –had been defined by Yalta. Behind us was a point of no
return, morally symbolised by Auschwitz and the new concept of "crime
against humanity". Ahead of us was the unthinkable nuclear
apocalypse, almost reassuringly. What just ended lasted for forty
years. I belonged to the first generation for which racism and anti-
Semitism had definitely fallen into the `rubbish bin of history'. Was
this first generation the only one? It was the only one anyway that
shouted so easily against fascism ("fascism-will-not-pass!") because
it seemed a thing of the past, null and void. It was a mistake of
course, but a mistake that did not prevent us from living very well
during the `post-war economic growth'. We were naive as well to act
as if, in the field of aesthetics, Resnais' elegant necrophilia would
eternally keep any intrusion `at a distance'.
"No poetry after Auschwitz" said Adorno before going back over this
now famous formula. "No fiction after Resnais" I could have echoed
before abandoning this slightly excessive idea. `Protected' by the
shockwave of the discovery of the camps, had we thought that humanity
had fallen into the non-human only once with no prospect of it
happening again? Had we really bet that for once the worst was over?
Had we hoped so much that what wasn't called the Shoah yet was the
unique historical event `thanks' to which mankind as a whole
was `walking out' of history to look at it from above and recognise
in an instant the worst face of its possible destiny? It seems we had.
But if `unique' and `as a whole' were too much and if mankind did not
inherit the Shoah as the metaphor of what it has been and is still
capable of, then the extermination of the Jews would only be a Jewish
history and also - in order of decreasing importance in regard to
guilt, by metonymy - a very German history, a French history, an Arab
history by way of consequence, but not a very Danish history and
almost not Bulgarian at all. It was to the possibility of the
metaphor that responded within cinema the modern obligation to
pronounce the stop on the image and the embargo on fiction. The aim
was to tell another story differently where mankind was the only
character and the first anti-star. The aim was to give birth to
another cinema `which would know' that to give the event back to the
fiction too early is to remove its uniqueness, because fiction is
that freedom which disperses and which opens itself in advance to the
infinity of the variation and to the seduction of the true lies.
In 1989, while visiting Phnom Penh and the Cambodian countryside for
Libération I had a glimpse of what a genocide – an auto-genocide –
`looked like' when left with no images and almost no traces.
Ironically, I saw the proof that cinema was no longer intimately
linked to the history of men by the fact that, contrary to the Nazi
torturers who had filmed their victims, the Khmers had left behind
only photographs and mass graves. And it is because another genocide
was left both without images and without punishment that by a
retroactive effect of contagion, the Shoah itself was now relative.
Return of the blocked metaphor to the active metonymy and return of
the stop on the image to the viral analogue. It went very quickly: as
of 1990 the `Romanian revolution' was frivolously prosecuting obvious
murderers for "illegal possession of weapons and genocide". Does
everything need to be done again? Yes everything, but this time
without cinema - hence the mourning.
For we had believed in cinema, which means we had done everything not
to believe it. This is the whole story of Cahiers after 1968 and
their impossible rejection of Bazinism. Of course, it wasn't a
question of "sleeping in the frame like in a bed" or to appal Barthes
by confusing reality and representation. We were too knowledgeable
not to place the spectator in the signifying concatenation or not to
notice the tenacious ideology under the false neutrality of
technology. We were even courageous, Pascal B. and myself, in front
of an amphitheatre crowded with excited leftists, shouting that a
film could no longer be `seen' but had to be `read'. These were
laudable efforts to be on the side of the non-naives, laudable but in
my case to no avail. The time always comes when one has to pay one's
debt to the fund of sincere belief and has to dare to believe in what
he sees.
Of course one is not forced to believe in what one sees - it can even
be dangerous - but one is not forced to hold on to cinema either.
There must be some risk and some virtue, in a word some value, in the
action of showing something to someone able to look at it. What would
be the use of learning how to `read' the visual and to `decode'
messages if there was not still the deep, minimal conviction that
seeing is superior to not seeing. And the conviction that what hasn't
been seen `in time' will never really be seen. Cinema is an art of
the present. If nostalgia does not suit it, it is because melancholia
is its instant double.
I remember the vehemence with which I said this for the first and
last time. It was in Teheran, in a film studies school. In front of
the guest journalists, Khemais K. and myself, were rows of boys with
budding beards and rows of black sacks - probably the girls. The boys
were on the left and the girls on the right in accordance with the
apartheid in place in this country. The most interesting questions –
coming from the girls - came written on furtive little papers. And
seeing these girls so attentive and so stupidly veiled I let loose an
anger with no particular object which targeted less them than all the
powers that be for who the visible is primarily what is read, i.e.
what is permanently suspected of betrayal and reduced by a chador or
by a police of signs. Encouraged by the unusual moment and place, I
let myself preach in favour of the visual in front of a veiled
audience who agreed.
Late anger, last anger. For the era of suspicion is well and truly
over. One can only be suspicious when a certain idea of the truth is
at stake. No such thing exists today except among the integrists and
the bigots, those who attack Scorsese's Christ or Godard's Marie. The
images are no longer on the side of the dialectical truth of `seeing'
and `showing'; they have entirely shifted to the side of promotion
and advertising, the side of power. It is therefore too late not to
begin to work out what is left: the golden and posthumous legend of
what cinema once was, of what it was and what it could have
been. "Our job will be to show how individuals, gathered in the dark
as people, were burning their imaginary to warm up their real - this
was silent cinema; and to show how they have let the flame extinguish
itself at each social conquest, satisfied to maintain only a very
small flame - and this is talking cinema and the television in the
corner of the room." When the historian Godard drew this program –
yesterday, in 1989 - he added "Alone, at last!"
As for me, I remember the precise moment when I knew that the axiom
of the tracking shot in Kapo should be revisited and the homemade
concept of `modern cinema' revised. In 1979, the French television
broadcasted Holocaust, the American series by Marvin Chomsky. The
loop looped back, sending me back to all the square ones. If in 1945
the Americans allowed George Stevens to make the astonishing
documentary mentioned earlier, they never broadcasted it due to
reasons of the cold war. Incapable of `dealing' with that history
which after all is not theirs, the American entrepreneurs of
entertainment had temporarily abandoned it to European artists. But
on that history, like on any story, they retained a right of pre-
emption, and sooner or later the Hollywood and television machine
would dare to tell `our' story. It would tell it very carefully but
it would sell it to us as another American story. Holocaust would
therefore be the misfortunes that tear apart and destroy a Jewish
family: there would be extras looking too fat, acting performances,
generic humanism, action and melodramatic scenes. And we would
sympathise.
Thus it would only be in the form of the American documentary-drama
that this history could escape the cine-clubs and could, via
television, concern this servile version of the `entire mankind' that
is the global TV audience. The simulation-Holocaust was certainly no
longer confronting the strangeness of a humanity capable of a crime
against itself but it also remained stubbornly incapable of bringing
out from that story the single individuals, each with a story, a face
and a name, that once were the exterminated Jews. It would rather be
drawing - Spiegelman's Maus - that would later dare make this
salutary act of re-marking out singularities. Drawing and not cinema
since it is so true that American cinema hates singularity. With
Holocaust, Marvin Chomsky made our old aesthetical enemy return,
modest and triumphant: the good old sociological program with its
well-studied cast of suffering specimen and its light show of
animated police sketches. The loop had looped back and we had lost.
The proof? This is the time when a fresh wave of revisionism started
in France.
* * *
It took me twenty years to go from my "tracking shot in Kapo" to this
irreproachable Holocaust. I took my time. The `issue' of the camps,
the very issue of my prehistory, would still and forever question me
but no longer really through cinema. But it was with cinema that I
had understood in what respect this history concerned me and in which
form - a tracking shot too many - it had appeared to me. One must be
loyal to what has once transfixed him. And every `form' is a face
looking at us. This is why, even if I have feared them, I have never
believed those at the High School cine-club who were attacking with
condescension these poor `formalist' fools, guiltily preferring the
personal pleasure of the `form' to the actual `content' of the films.
But only the one who has been struck early enough by formal violence
will end up realising – at the end of his life - how this violence is
also `content'. And the moment will always come early enough for him
to die cured, having traded the enigma of singular figures of his
history for the banalities of a "cinema-mirror-of-society" and other
serious questions with no answers. The form is desire; the content is
only the background when we are gone.
These were my thoughts a few days ago while watching on television
images of very famous singers and very starving African children. The
rich singers ("We are the world, we are the children!") were mixing
their image with the image of the skinny children. Actually they were
taking their place; they were replacing and erasing them. Mixing
stars and skeletons in a typical fast editing where two images try to
become one, the video elegantly carried out this electronic
communication between North and South. Here I am, I thought, the
present face of abjection and the improved version of my tracking
shot in Kapo. These are the images I would like at least one teenager
to be disgusted by and ashamed of. Not merely ashamed to be fed and
affluent, but ashamed to be seen as someone who has to be
aesthetically seduced where it is only a matter of conscience – good
or bad - of being a human and nothing more.
I realised that all my history is there. In 1961 a movement of a
camera aestheticized a dead body and thirty years later a dissolve
makes the wealthy and the starving ones dance together. Nothing has
changed, neither me, forever incapable of seeing in all this a
carnivalesque dance of death, medieval and ultra-modern, nor the
predominant conceptions of consensual beauty. The form has changed a
bit though. In Kapo, it was still possible to be upset at Pontecorvo
for inconsiderately abolishing a distance he should have `kept'. The
tracking shot was immoral for the simple reason that it was putting
us - him filmmaker and me spectator - in a place where we did not
belong, where I anyway could not and did not want to be, because
he `deported' me from my real situation as a spectator-witness
forcing me to be part of the picture. What was the meaning of
Godard's formula if not that one should never put himself where one
isn't nor should he speak for others?
Imagining Pontecorvo's gestures miming the tracking shot with his
hands, I am even more upset with him because in 1961 a tracking shot
still meant rails, personnel and physical effort. I imagine with less
clarity the movements of the person responsible for the electronic
dissolve of "We are the children". I imagine him pushing buttons on a
console, with the images at his fingertips, definitely cut off from
what or who they represent, incapable of suspecting that someone
could be upset with him for being a slave with automatic gestures.
That person belongs to a world - television - where, otherness having
more or less disappeared, there are no good or bad ways to manipulate
images. These are no longer `images of another' but images among
others in the market of brand images. And this world that no longer
revolts me is precisely the world `without cinema', meaning without
this sense of belonging to humanity through a supplementary country
called cinema. And then I see clearly why I have adopted cinema: so
it could adopt me in return. So it could teach me to tirelessly touch
with my gaze the distance from me at which the other begins.
This history of course begins and ends with the camps because they
are the limit that was waiting for me at the beginning of my life and
at the end of my childhood. Childhood: it will have taken my whole
life to reconquer it. This is why (message to Jean-Louis S.) I will
probably see Bambi.
Endnotes
1. This translation would not have been possible without Paul
Grant's detailed review and insightful comments on Daney's concepts.
Thank you Paul.
2. Passeur: a person who helps to cross a river with a small
boat and, by extension, a person who helps to go clandestinely
through a border or a "no-trespassing" area. There is also the idea
of passing something to someone. Daney explained the term in an
interview when asked how he would define himself: "I like this small
word: passeur. I remember a fantastic article by Jean-Louis Comolli
about Eric Dolphy entitled `the passeur'. (…) The passeurs are
strange: they need borders but only to challenge them. They don't
want to be alone with their treasures and at the same time, they
don't really care about those to whom they pass something. And
since `feelings are always reciprocal', we don't really care about
them either, we don't pass anything to them and we often empty their
pockets". Devant la recrudescence des vols de sacs à main, 1997.
3. Ciné-fils: wordplay with cinéphile; literally: son of cinema.
6708
From: Elizabeth Nolan
Date: Thu Jan 15, 2004 5:32pm
Subject: digital screenings at Sundance
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/040115/sfth052a_1.html
6709
From: hotlove666
Date: Thu Jan 15, 2004 5:35pm
Subject: Peleshian
Did he do a film with slow tracking shots over pottery in the rain,
etc? Incredible film. I saw it at Amiens and again at a fund-raiser
in LA, both times w. Millie Perkins, who was also bowled (no pun
intended) over by it. I've been wondering what became of it, and
where I could see it again.
6710
From: Frederick M. Veith
Date: Thu Jan 15, 2004 8:15pm
Subject: Jean Louis Schefer
On Thu, 15 Jan 2004, hotlove666 wrote:
> For those who followed the bruising early debte here about morality
> and style, here's a key article - his last - that has been translated
> and is being circulated by the organizers of the Daney conference. I
> favor a more colloquial style in translating, but this one is
> accurate "Jean-Louis S" at the end means "Jean-Louis Schefer."
Once upon a time (for no especial reason) I compiled a list of Schefer's
writings that have been translated into English. In the odd event that it
should be useful to anyone else, I append it below. So far as I know it's
comprehensive (unfortunately). If anyone is aware of anything else, please
let me know.
Also, unless I'm mistaken, there's no hyphen in 'Jean Louis'. Amazon.fr
seems to (inconsistently) disagree, but the covers of (without actually
checking) all but one of his books (I think the Oe Kenzaburo book has
him 'Jean-Louis') would have it otherwise. Can anyone (J-P? Maxime?)
explain the broader principle here? Are these forms interchangeable? This
question has nagged at me for some time.
Fred.
Jean Louis Schefer in English:
"Our Written Experience of the Cinema: An Interview with Jean Louis
Schefer," enclitic v. 6 n. 2 (Fall 1982): pp. 39-43.
"On the Object of Figuration," SubStance 39 v. 12 n. 2 (1983): pp. 26-31.
"Schefer on Cinema," Wide Angle v. 6 n. 4 (1985): pp. 54-63
"The Bread and the Blood," in Frankenstein, Creation and Monstrosity,
Stephen Bann, ed., pp. 177-192. London: Reaktion Books, 1994.
The Deluge, the Plague: Paolo Uccello, Tom Conley, trans. University of
Michigan Press, 1995.
The Enigmatic Body: Essays on the Arts, Paul Smith, ed. and trans.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
"Critical Reflections," Artforum v. 35 (March 1997): pp. 72-3, 107, 112.
"Prehistoric Art Today," Art Press 237 (July/August 1998): pp. 47-53.
"Jean Louis Schefer: Thinking Anthropomorphically," Art Press 248
(July/August 1999): pp. 20-25.
"Hitchcock's Female Portraits," in Hitchcock and Art: Fatal Coincidences,
Dominique Paini and Guy Cogeval, eds., pp. 101-109. Milano: Edizioni
Gabriele Mazzotta, 2000.
"Art as a tightrope act," in Sarah Sze. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2000.
Two of the chapters of The Enigmatic Body are also available elsewhere:
"Thanatography, Skiagraphy," Word and Image v. 1 n. 2 (1985): pp.
191-194.
"On La Jetée" http://osf1.gmu.edu/%7Epsmith5/jetee.html
Finally, with absolutely no pretension to comprehensiveness, the following
are writings about Schefer in English:
Smith, Paul. "The Unknown Center of Ourselves: Schefer's Writing on
the Cinema," enclitic v. 6 n. 2 (Fall 1982): pp. 32-38.
Corrigan, Timothy and Judovitz, Dalia. "The Figure in the Writing,"
SubStance v. 12 n. 2 (1983): pp. 32-36.
Smith, Paul. Review of L'Homme ordinaire du cinema, SubStance 39 v. 12
n. 2 (1983): pp. 119-121.
Conley, Tom. "Reading Ordinary Viewing," diacritics (Spring 1985): pp.
4-14.
Mandoki, Katya. "An Enigmatic Text: Schefer's Quest upon a Thing
Unknown," Film Philosophy v. 2 (1998):
http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol2-1998/n8mandoki
6711
From: jpcoursodon
Date: Fri Jan 16, 2004 0:08am
Subject: hyphenation
All those double-barrelled French first names are always hyphenated.
If they are not, then it must be on the request of the person, and
for some personal reason. It could be that his first name was not
Jean-Louis but just Jean, with Louis being a second first name (most
French people have at least one second one -- mine is Francois, like
Truffaut...)Or just an idiosyncratic way of distinguishing oneself.
A famous precedent in film criticism is Jean George Auriol who
created "La Revue du Cinema" in the late twenties. In addition to
dropping the hyphen he insisted on spelling "George" the English way,
without the final "s" that it always takes in French.
JPC
6712
From:
Date: Thu Jan 15, 2004 7:33pm
Subject: Re: Stars in My Crown question
I'll have to re-watch "Stars in My Crown" for a definite answer. But memory
is this:
People in the film think they "know" how the epidemic is being spread. They
do not. And this "knowledge" blinds them and makes it almost impossible for
them to learn the truth. The same thing is true in "The Magic Alphabet", a
recreation of the discovery of vitamins. The scientist in that film "knows" why
people are dying of disease. It is caused by a germ - like other diseases. He
does all the "right" things to look for the still unknown germ. And he never
finds it. Meanwhile, people are dying like flies all around him. Eventaully,
chance and humbling experiences and great effort slowly make him realize the truth
- there is no germ. In fact, people are dying because they are not getting an
essential ingrediant in their food. Once he learns this, he can immediately
start saving lives. And he has discobvered the "vitamin principle" - that people
need to eat vitamins to stay healthy.
Both of these films give a terrifying look into the scientific process. The
people in them are confronted with genuine mysteries. And they have to unlearn
all their bad ideas first. This is an authentic portrait of real science and
real scholarship - but you don't often see it in the movies outside of Tourneur!
Tourneur's short films are amazingly complex in terms of plot and
characterization. And his long films are correspondingly even more complicated in plot
and character! There is an especially good discussion in the fujiwara book of
the fabulous complexities of "I walked With a Zombie". (And I hope my discussion
above about science in Tourneur is not just lifted from somewhere in
Fujiwara's excellent book. If so, my apologies!)
Mike Grost
6713
From: Raymond P.
Date: Fri Jan 16, 2004 2:45am
Subject: Bangkok Int'l Film Festival
Anyone attending this?
Due to scheduling conflicts, I am only going to be attending the
beginning of the festival. Hopefully some good films will be
scheduled during the first 3 days. I have never seen tickets that
cheap - 100 baht per film (or about US$2.50)! And the hotels are
quite cheap. Wish I could stay for the whole thing....
6714
From: hotlove666
Date: Fri Jan 16, 2004 6:25am
Subject: Scandinavian Film Festival/Iranian Series
Besides Kim Novak Q&A'ing on Vertigo et al. and Paradjanovs on the
big screen, this week in Tinseltown boasts a Scandinavian Film
Festival and the start of an Iranian series at UCLA. Any
recommendations anyone?
Scandinavian: Evil, Elina, Save the Children, Noi Albinoi,
Reconstruction, Kitchen Stories (Salmer fra kjokennet), My Body
(Kropon Min), A.N.I., Upswing, Buddy, Blue Caviar, Kops, The Green
Butchers.
Iranian: Crimson Gold, already highly recommended by two members,
Letters in the Wind, Deep Breath, Black Tape - A Tehran Diary,
Tehran, Dancing in the Dust.
I won't list the Pabsts and Anna May Wongs at UCLA, but I am planning
to catch Mistress of Atlantis, the film Borzage was remaking when
Ulmer was asked to step in.
Next week, of course, Playtime in 70. Los Angeles is a film festival!
6715
From:
Date: Fri Jan 16, 2004 9:34am
Subject: Re: Scandinavian Film Festival/Iranian Series
Bill K:
>
> Scandinavian: Evil, Elina, Save the Children, Noi Albinoi,
> Reconstruction, Kitchen Stories (Salmer fra kjokennet), My Body
> (Kropon Min), A.N.I., Upswing, Buddy, Blue Caviar, Kops, The Green
> Butchers.
A variation of this is currently playing NY, at the Scandinavia
House (which is a great place, by the way, although the seats are a
bit uncomfortable in the theater). I saw NOI ALBINOI today, liked
it -- though I can't *quite* see what the big fuss is about. A great
central performance and a pretty enchanting visual style. Muddled in
other sorts of ways, but your mileage may/will vary. KITCHEN
STORIES put me right to sleep. Most of the others have yet to play.
>
> Iranian: Crimson Gold, already highly recommended by two members,
> Letters in the Wind, Deep Breath, Black Tape - A Tehran Diary,
> Tehran, Dancing in the Dust.
>
Yeah, CRIMSON GOLD is worth seeing. I'd skip DEEP BREATH. It had a
fairly positive reaction at the London Film Festival when I was
there, but it felt like a fairly rote examination of disaffected
youth to me. As one person pointed out, "Would we even *consider*
watching this movie if it wasn't from Iran?" I wouldn't go that
far; there are some nice cultural insights in it. But I got an
intense feeling of deja vu throughout. Likewise, I was somewhat
unimpressed by BLACK TAPE, but it has *many* admirers, so I'd
recommend a look. It's certainly an interesting gambit, purporting
to be a home video, yet quite visually eloquent and often lovely to
look at. I saw it at the San Jose Cinequest, where it won the big
prize. In retrospect, I was pretty riveted for a good half of the
film, but it really fell apart near the end for me. Interestingly,
the Iranians -- unlike, say, the Italians or the Russians -- don't
seem to do melodrama all that well, although they do keep trying.
-Bilge
6716
From: Henrik Sylow
Date: Fri Jan 16, 2004 11:11am
Subject: Re: Scandinavian Film Festival/Iranian Series
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "hotlove666"
wrote:
> Besides Kim Novak Q&A'ing on Vertigo et al. and Paradjanovs on the
> big screen, this week in Tinseltown boasts a Scandinavian Film
> Festival and the start of an Iranian series at UCLA. Any
> recommendations anyone?
>
> Scandinavian: Evil, Elina, Save the Children, Noi Albinoi,
> Reconstruction, Kitchen Stories (Salmer fra kjokennet), My Body
> (Kropon Min), A.N.I., Upswing, Buddy, Blue Caviar, Kops, The Green
> Butchers.
As a Dane I bow my head in shame, as these films are as representive
of "Scandinavian" cinema as if one took Elephant, Brown Bunny and Kill
Bill to represent American cinema.
"Noi Albino" gets alot of attention because its one of the few
Icelandic films made these days. It is not particular good and I dare
say, that alot of the sympathy which it has gotten comes from the fact
that its so alone in the big world. Watch it if nothing better to do.
"Salmer fra kjøkkenet" is a little gem of a film. Hamer has a
wonderful eye for absurd situations. He reminds me alot of Kaurismäki.
I would say this one is a must see.
"Reconstruction" is one of the two Danish films. For a debut film its
damn impressive and also a must see. There is a touch of Dogme and
Lynch, but its very Danish. We have so few truly great actors, so many
of our films "look" alike. Thus, we rave when something as original
and great as this one comes along. I would also say this is a must
see.
"Kopps" is a little sweet comedy from Sweden. It is a huge hit here.
Its a good laugh that warms the heart and then nothing more. Watch it
eventually.
"De grønne slagtere". This is the other Danish film. It's by Anders
Thomas Jensen, one of todays best, most original and most productive
Danish writer / directors. Ever since he won an oscar for his short
(Election Night), his unique humour got in demand and he has been
involved in most Danish hits ever since. This is a little wonderful
comedy, which reminds one alot of "Eating Raoul". Its no masterpiece.
Its a little, incredibly danish, comedy, with alot of heart. Watch it
to understand our humor, which is very dark and cynical, and to have a
good time.
I've not seen anything else on the list. But I pity that films as Per
Fly's masterpiece "Arven" (I consider it the best Danish film since
"Festen") or Nils Malmros's "At Kende Sandheden" arent represented.
Henrik
6717
From: joe_mcelhaney
Date: Fri Jan 16, 2004 1:29pm
Subject: Style and Morality: The Tracking Shot in Kapo
Many thanks, Bill, for posting this essay which I've been slowly
going over since yesterday. But could I start by asking something
very simple and in relation to the first sentence?
Daney never saw OCTOBER? Why not? Was this a conscious decision on
his part or just one of those things? My question is not a purely
cinephilic one, like being outraged that he never saw SINGIN' IN THE
RAIN or something. I'm just surprised that, in a body of writing so
concerned with the ethics of the image, with politics, history, etc.,
he never saw one of the most famous and self-consciously political of
all Soviet montage films -- and this from a critic who has claimed
that only Mizoguchi made truly Marxist films. It's especially
surprising since he does invoke the name of Eisenstein, both in this
essay and elsewhere. Unless I'm missing something here...
6718
From: Craig Keller
Date: Fri Jan 16, 2004 3:12pm
Subject: Daney / Millennium Mambo
Yes Bill, many thanks for posting this essay to the list; I've always
wanted to read it. It was exceptional, and very, very moving. Reading
it has been the highlight of my week.
I saw 'Millennium Mambo' again yesterday. I still think it's an
excellent film: it's a chamber-piece in comparison to 'Flowers of
Shanghai' or 'Goodbye South Goodbye,' but nothing minor or
inconsequential. As a sustained portrait of a young woman putting
herself out to dry -over- and -over- again (fuck "portrait of youth
culture"), it seems absolutely complete; the scenes between Vicky and
Hao-hao in that (now unforgettable) apartment are the most magnificent
things in a film of extraordinary sequences. I don't think I'd fully
digested until now the power of Hou's back-and-forth pans within the
single takes -- they search, but their revelations seem nearly
incidental -- no jerry-rigged aestheticization of the dramatic: the
dramatic occurs in spite of the camera.
And not to reignite the debate (certainly not), but Shu Qi's
performance is wholly commendable; to call her acting here "bad" is
tantamount to introducing oneself as Norman McLaren.
craig.
6719
From: Elizabeth Anne Nolan
Date: Fri Jan 16, 2004 3:46pm
Subject: Re: Scandinavian Film Festival/Iranian Series
EVIL certainly held my attention (as did RAJA).
Will see CRIMSON GOLD tomorrow
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "hotlove666" wrote:
> Besides Kim Novak Q&A'ing on Vertigo et al. and Paradjanovs on the
> big screen, this week in Tinseltown boasts a Scandinavian Film
> Festival and the start of an Iranian series at UCLA. Any
> recommendations anyone?
>
> Scandinavian: Evil, Elina, Save the Children, Noi Albinoi,
> Reconstruction, Kitchen Stories (Salmer fra kjokennet), My Body
> (Kropon Min), A.N.I., Upswing, Buddy, Blue Caviar, Kops, The Green
> Butchers.
>
> Iranian: Crimson Gold, already highly recommended by two members,
> Letters in the Wind, Deep Breath, Black Tape - A Tehran Diary,
> Tehran, Dancing in the Dust.
6720
From: hotlove666
Date: Fri Jan 16, 2004 3:56pm
Subject: Re: Style and Morality/The Tracking Shot i Kapo
Joe, you could've knocked me over with a feather when I first read
it, but that's what he said. With Biette gone, the only person I can
ask why is Sylvie Pierre (who certainly knew October), but she's away
on vacation at the moment.
6721
From:
Date: Fri Jan 16, 2004 4:27pm
Subject: Two Danish Short Films
Two 2002 short films from Denmark have recently been shown on cable TV here in Detroit. They have nothing in common but quality and length - each is around 30 minutes.
Der er en yndig mand / This Charming Man (Martin Strange-Hansen)
This is a fictional film, with plot, characters etc. It is essentially an old fashioned farce, combined with Preston Stuges-like social satire and commentary. The plot is highly rich and creative - much more elaborate than many feature films today. A work of real charm. Oscar winner - Best Live Action short.
Nye scener fra Amerika / New Scenes From America (Jørgen Leth)
Documentary. A series of brief, Lumiere like vignettes - encounters with famous artists, pretty scenery - colorful shots of the Southwest. Simple, deliberately plain technique, unexpectedly pleasurable and interesting. This seems to be a sequel to his:
66 scener fra Amerika (1982)
done in a similar style.
I enjoyed both of these!
Mike Grost
6722
From: samfilms2003
Date: Fri Jan 16, 2004 5:01pm
Subject: Re: Daney / Millennium Mambo
> And not to reignite the debate (certainly not), but Shu Qi's
> performance is wholly commendable; to call her acting here "bad" is
> tantamount to introducing oneself as Norman McLaren.
This is the oddest analogy I've heard in a long time,
what am I missing ?
-sam
6723
From:
Date: Fri Jan 16, 2004 6:22pm
Subject: Re: What is a Cineaste
Here is an excerpt from a mass mailing about a new movie:
Hi, my name is *** and I work at Special Ops Media, a
promotion agency based in New York City. On behalf of Fox Searchlight, I
wanted to let you know about their upcoming release, Academy Award
winner Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers. The tumultuous political
landscape of Paris in 1968 is the backdrop as three young cineastes are
drawn together through their passion for classic films.
Do you think Bertolucci should send these people a letter?
At least these three "cineastes" (sic) are apparently going to have a Really
Good Time, if all the hype about this new film is true...
Mike Grost
Feeling "Besieged" in Detroit
6724
From: jpcoursodon
Date: Fri Jan 16, 2004 11:30pm
Subject: Re: Style and Morality: The Tracking Shot in Kapo
Mizoguchi could be described as the antithesis of Eisenstein.
In a sense his aesthetic/didactic montage style was doing, although
through different means, something ethically not so different from
what the infamous Kapo tracking shot is doing. This is just a
suggestion. Maybe Daney never got a chance to see OCTOBER or was not
motivated enough to seek it out (he surely had seen POTEMKIN,
probably STRIKE -- also decidedly un-Mizoguchi movies).
JPC
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "joe_mcelhaney"
wrote:
?
>
> Daney never saw OCTOBER? Why not? Was this a conscious decision
on
> his part or just one of those things? My question is not a purely
> cinephilic one, like being outraged that he never saw SINGIN' IN
THE
> RAIN or something. I'm just surprised that, in a body of writing
so
> concerned with the ethics of the image, with politics, history,
etc.,
> he never saw one of the most famous and self-consciously political
of
> all Soviet montage films -- and this from a critic who has claimed
> that only Mizoguchi made truly Marxist films. It's especially
> surprising since he does invoke the name of Eisenstein, both in
this
> essay and elsewhere. Unless I'm missing something here...
6725
From: Craig Keller
Date: Sat Jan 17, 2004 0:24am
Subject: Re: Re: What is a Cineaste
>
> Do you think Bertolucci should send these people a letter?
> At least these three "cineastes" (sic) are apparently going to have a
> Really
> Good Time, if all the hype about this new film is true...
I saw the trailer for 'The Dreamers' the other night before 'The
Triplets of Belleville' (which incidentally was outstanding), and
having seen this thing in motion I can now assert that Bertolucci's
film looks offensively bad. I had no idea until then that that Michael
Pitt kid was in it, but it was pretty shocking to find out, because his
performance in Larry Clark's 'Bully' was so tragically awful I thought
for sure he wouldn't work in movies again. How foolish I am!
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
6726
From: Gary Tooze
Date: Sat Jan 17, 2004 1:03am
Subject: Re: Daney / Millennium Mambo
> I saw 'Millennium Mambo' again yesterday. I still think it's an
> excellent film: it's a chamber-piece in comparison to 'Flowers of
> Shanghai' or 'Goodbye South Goodbye,' but nothing minor or
> inconsequential. As a sustained portrait of a young woman putting
> herself out to dry -over- and -over- again (fuck "portrait of youth
> culture"), it seems absolutely complete; the scenes between Vicky
and
> Hao-hao in that (now unforgettable) apartment are the most
magnificent
> things in a film of extraordinary sequences. I don't think I'd
fully
> digested until now the power of Hou's back-and-forth pans within
the
> single takes -- they search, but their revelations seem nearly
> incidental -- no jerry-rigged aestheticization of the dramatic: the
> dramatic occurs in spite of the camera.
>
> And not to reignite the debate (certainly not), but Shu Qi's
> performance is wholly commendable; to call her acting here "bad" is
> tantamount to introducing oneself as Norman McLaren.
>
> craig.
I think 'Millennium Mambo' is my favorite... and I have now seen all
including the 4 from the DVD Boxset:
THE BOYS FROM FENGKUEI
A SUMMER AT GRANDPA'S
A TIME TO LIVE, A TIME TO DIE
DUST IN THE WIND
Which are all wonderful... it is hard to state categoric reasons as
to fav's as all his films are so personal...
From 'Millennium Mambo' - Young girls, like flowers, are fading
almost immediately upon blooming.
Yes Craig... Shu Qi was superb!
Gary
6727
From: Gabe Klinger
Date: Sat Jan 17, 2004 1:22am
Subject: Bully / Michael Pitt
Craig Keller wrote:
> I had no idea until then that that Michael Pitt kid was in it, but it
> was pretty shocking to find out, because his
> performance in Larry Clark's 'Bully' was so tragically awful I thought
> for sure he wouldn't work in movies again. How foolish I am!
Dude... Michael Pitt was the best thing about BULLY. Leo Fitzpatrick I
would call "bad" (even if his character goes the furthest in touching
on the film's elements of irony, not to mention the best line in the
movie: "Nature sucks!"), but I thought Pitt could actually act. I mean,
what did you want from an acid-dropping loafer such as the one he
plays? The comparisons between Larry Clark and Gus Van Sant don't work,
I think, because Larry Clark is single-mindedly committed to his work
with actors. It shows in BULLY, and even more so in KEN PARK, and the
final scene in the latter film is the ultimate expression of this ideal.
Gabe
6728
From:
Date: Sat Jan 17, 2004 1:22am
Subject: Re: What is a Cineaste
Craig:
>
> I saw the trailer for 'The Dreamers' the other night before 'The
> Triplets of Belleville' (which incidentally was outstanding), and
> having seen this thing in motion I can now assert that
Bertolucci's
> film looks offensively bad.
I happen to think the film itself is realy good. (QUALIFIER: I think
Bertolucci is one of the 2 or 3 greatest filmmakers ever, which I'm
sure will make me no friends round these parts.) It's actually an
extremely personal work, and rounds out what's been a series of
films by him about isolation, in the wake of the shattering of his
political beliefs in the late 80s and early 90s. I think of
BESIEGED, STEALING BEAUTY, and this one as a sort of trilogy, with
all three featuring expatriates who have isolated themselves from
the world at large, often in large, rambling villas, which become
metaphors for the psyche -- despite their (usually youthful)
protagonists, they are films about profound disillusionment and
longing. But this time, he heads back into a very pivotal time for
him (68 Paris, and the Cinematheque) and teases out what I think are
some fairly disturbing truths about his own past.
I could go on, but I won't, seeing as how the film hasn't opened
yet; I'm seeing it again next week and migth have more to say. But
with Bertolucci, I find that a lot of people made up their minds
about his later work a long time ago and just go to see the movies
to confirm their beliefs. Which is fine, cause that's probably what
I do sometimes myself.
-Bilge
6729
From: joe_mcelhaney
Date: Sat Jan 17, 2004 1:27am
Subject: Re: Style and Morality: The Tracking Shot in Kapo
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "jpcoursodon"
wrote:
>Mizoguchi could be described as the antithesis of Eisenstein.
> In a sense his aesthetic/didactic montage style was doing, although
> through different means, something ethically not so different from
> what the infamous Kapo tracking shot is doing. This is just a
> suggestion.
Although it's not Mizoguchi who is directly contrasted to Eisenstein
in the essay but the Hitchcock of PSYCHO -- this idea of creating
images which look at us even more than we look at them. (Godard said
virtually the same thing about Hitchcock -- citing NOTORIOUS rather
than PSYCHO--in his interview with Daney in 1988.) For Daney, the
Hitchcock of PSYCHO succeeds in creating this kind of cinema whereas
with Eisenstein there is only the attempt. I find the last section
of this paragraph a little unclear, perhaps because I wouldn't mind
seeing (tight-assed academic that I am) at least one example from an
Eisenstein film illustrating what Daney means.
I find it especially interesting and strange that Daney glosses over
Eisenstein in all this discussion of HIROSHIMA and KAPO and Rivette
since Rivette was the first member of the CAHIERS group in that round-
table discussion of HIROSHIMA to note that Resnais's film is, in many
ways, a re-thinking of the practices and implications of
Eisensteinian montage. I wonder to what extent Daney's apparent lack
of real interest in Eisenstein relates to the fact that Eisenstein
was, in a sense, a political filmmaker "before the camps," constantly
creating ecstatic and often erotic images of political/social
violence and conflict -- the workers getting hosed down in STRIKE,
for example. Perhaps Daney did not fundamentally need Eisenstein
since he had Resnais who implicitly moves beyond the kind of pre-war,
pre-Hiroshima, pre-Auschwitz approach to the image which so strongly
determined Eisenstein's thinking.
6730
From: jpcoursodon
Date: Sat Jan 17, 2004 1:52am
Subject: Re: What is a Cineaste
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, ebiri@a... wrote:
> Craig:
.
>
> I happen to think the film itself is realy good. (QUALIFIER: I
think
> Bertolucci is one of the 2 or 3 greatest filmmakers ever, which I'm
> sure will make me no friends round these parts.)
>
> > -Bilge
Bilge, please let us know who in your opinion is the other
greatest filmmaker, or who are the two other greatest. It's always
fun to hear extreme opinions. After all, that's what auteurism was
all about (at least in its infancy).
JPC
6731
From: Chris Fujiwara
Date: Sat Jan 17, 2004 2:05am
Subject: Re: Stars in My Crown question
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "jess_l_amortell"
wrote:
>>>Why don't they ever check out the well? Even the wise Uncle Famous
rules it out as the source of the epidemic because he's sure it would
have been
tested by then. But it seems that it hasn't been, and apparently only
because
Joel McCrea *assumed* that the boy wouldn't have drunk from it before
school
started ... although Tourneur makes sure that *we've* seen children
playing
there.<<<
The other reason, which is stressed more strongly in the novel than
in the film, is that the town's one doctor - blinded by envy - is
absolutely convinced that the parson is the carrier. (To the point
where, in the novel, the parson feels he must bring a sample of the
well water to another town to be tested, because he thinks the doctor
will just laugh at his suspicion that the well is infected.)
In the film, the handling of this part of the plot somewhat lessens
the blame to be attached to the doctor (even at the risk of making
the parson seem negligent, as Jess's reaction proves), making it
possible for us to see him as a more sympathetic, though still
misguided, character (while making the parson more complex).
Also, the failure to test the well, if we see it as questionable,
heightens the emphasis throughout this section of the film on the
irrational, fear, and doubt. And by showing the two white adult male
authority figures as unable to see the truth, the film sets things up
for the realization to come from the boy, inspired by Uncle Famous's
chance remark: another critique of institutional power and knowledge
(as in the Tourneur-Lewton films) and another case of the socially
marginal character becoming central to the story, as happens in
several Tourneur films.
6732
From: filipefurtado
Date: Sat Jan 17, 2004 2:45am
Subject: Re: Re: Style and Morality: The Tracking Shot in Kapo
I wonder to what extent Daney's apparent lack
> of real interest in Eisenstein relates to the fact that Eise
nstein
> was, in a sense, a political filmmaker "before the camps," c
onstantly
> creating ecstatic and often erotic images of political/socia
l
> violence and conflict --
the workers getting hosed down in STRIKE,
> for example. Perhaps Daney did not fundamentally need Eisen
stein
> since he had Resnais who implicitly moves beyond the kind of
pre-war,
> pre-Hiroshima, pre-
Auschwitz approach to the image which so strongly
> determined Eisenstein's thinking.
>
You're right. Daney actually regard Eisenstein as the perfect
example of an early cinema that was killer by the war.
Filipe
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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>
---
Acabe com aquelas janelinhas que pulam na sua tela.
AntiPop-up UOL - É grátis!
http://antipopup.uol.com.br
6733
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Sat Jan 17, 2004 4:22am
Subject: Gavin Lambert
Just in from interviewing Gavin Lambert about his new
Natalie Wood biography, Hollywood, the British
emigrees, et. al.
He says that he's been in touch with Tab Hunter and he
expects Tab's memoir will be excellent. Farley Granger
is also working on his memoirs -- so we'll get a side
of the story that's quite different from what Arthur
Laurents wrote in "Original Story By."
Gavin is quite taken with Scarlet Johanssen and Cate
Blanchett, among today's crop of actresses.
I told him that if he hadn't been brought over by Nick
Ray he would have come over one way or another. "Oh
yes. And whenever I go to a BAFTA [British Film and
Television Association] event I'm reminded of
precisely why I left!'
We talked about Huxley and I told him how fond I am of
"After Many a Summer Dies the Swan." Imagine my
surprise when he said "Well frankly I think that's his
best novel. The best of all of them."
Other Major Gossip: He thinks that Ray and Dean did
the deed.
He's delighted that Cukor is thought so well of these
days. Thanks to home video "Those films are still
alive." He's as puzzled as I am by Cukor's antipathy
to Anouk Aimee -- which is quite exceptional as he
loved all manner of actresses and prided himself on
his ability to get along with people. Gavin figures it
was just one of those really one-in-a-lifetime things
were two people REALLY didn't get along In fact he
said that years later Cukor ran into Albert Finney at
a party a bit after Finney and Anouk Aimee had
divorced and Cukor said "Well I must say I'm very
happy to hear you're through with that bitch!" and
then went on for several minutes more about how much
he hated her.
Finney didn't know what to say.
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Hotjobs: Enter the "Signing Bonus" Sweepstakes
http://hotjobs.sweepstakes.yahoo.com/signingbonus
6734
From:
Date: Sat Jan 17, 2004 4:39am
Subject: Re: What is a Cineaste
Me, then JPC:
> >
> > I happen to think the film itself is realy good. (QUALIFIER: I
> think
> > Bertolucci is one of the 2 or 3 greatest filmmakers ever, which
I'm
> > sure will make me no friends round these parts.)
> >
> > > -Bilge
>
> Bilge, please let us know who in your opinion is the other
> greatest filmmaker, or who are the two other greatest. It's always
> fun to hear extreme opinions. After all, that's what auteurism was
> all about (at least in its infancy).
Well, they're not that extreme, but those around here that know me
know that I am (sorry Fred) a very big Stanley Kubrick fan. The
other one would be Godard...I guess you can argue that Godard and
Kubrick occupy opposite poles of the cinematic spectrum, and that's
part of what appeals to me about them (with Bertolucci sort of
occupying a middle ground, somewhere between introspective
playfulness and studied traditionalism). I think Kubrick also gets
kind of a bad rap vis-a-vis the impersonal nature of his projects,
with various accusations that all he did was mount big, elaborate
prestige pictures. But on some very fundamental level, all of
Kubrick's films are about acceptance and alienation, and there are
plenty of parallels with his life when you look closer at it.
But coming up very close behind them would be Visconti, Murnau,
Michael Powell, Terrence Malick (who I'm always wary of mentioning
cause he's only got three films out there [great though they are]),
Jean Renoir, John Ford, and Jack Clayton. So you don't have to kick
me off a_film_by just yet! Though as you might have imagined, I have
something of a love-hate relationship with Sarris.
-Bilge
6735
From: Fred Camper
Date: Sat Jan 17, 2004 5:29am
Subject: Re: Re: What is a Cineaste (group business)
ebiri@a... wrote:
>.... So you don't have to kick me off a_film_by just yet! ....
>
I know Bilge is joking, and I'm sure Bilge knows I know he's joking, but
still, there are lots of people here, including new members, so:
Yeah, I'm polemical about my personal tastes, I have a *very* refined
aesthetic, I'm right, you're all wrong, etc. But I'm just one member
here and my tastes are not going to affect my role as co-moderator, and
people shouldn't feel hesitant about expressing
out-of-the-auteurist-mainstream tastes, not that Bilge's are out of the
mainstream at all.. Indeed, there are many films that have been praised
since we started this group that have had me rolling my eyes, but almost
always without posting a reply (though I actually am getting ready to
post something about that Daves film Zach recommended weeks ago).. And
if someone applied who loved Wyler, Kramer, Zinneman de Sica, and
Delannoy and hated Hawks, Ford, Welles, Rossellini, and Bresson, if his
or her writing were interesting and intelligent we'd let him in. If our
intention had been otherwise we would have put director names into our
statement of purpose, and you'll notice that we did not. (Just don't
y'all go looking for such a prospective member, OK?)
Also, for the record, though we do have the power to expel, to date no
one has been banned or suspended or threatened (whic would come before
any suspension -- no one would just get kicked off), nor have we two
moderators ever felt the need to discuss that possibility..Speaking for
myself, nothing anyone has done in our group has caused me to even think
about that.
As long as I'm running on at the mouth about a_film_by, I'd like to
remind people to post bios (send them to me and I'll post on our bio
page; if you know basic html include the paragraph break, italic and
boldface tags). A bio would be a good place for a favorite director
list, not that there's anything wrong with putting it into a post too. I
ran off at the mouth in my bio too, but 50 or 100 words of the basics is
just fine
- Fred
6736
From: Craig Keller
Date: Sat Jan 17, 2004 5:47am
Subject: Re: Re: What is a Cineaste
> I think Kubrick also gets
> kind of a bad rap vis-a-vis the impersonal nature of his projects,
> with various accusations that all he did was mount big, elaborate
> prestige pictures.
Wha...? Bilge, Stanley Kubrick is my favorite filmmaker in all of
cinema, but I must say I've never heard this -- accusations that all he
did was mount prestige pictures? One would think the accuser better
off crapping on Ron Howard or Ed "There Are No Bounds to My Sense of
Self-Importance" Zwick, obviously, or simply rework his conception of
"prestige picture."
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
6737
From: hotlove666
Date: Sat Jan 17, 2004 6:18am
Subject: Re: Style and Morality/The Tracking Shot in Kapo
He loved Eisenstein - on a trip to Moscow (he spoke Russian fluently)
he devoted a couple of pages in Libe to his visit to Eisenstein's
apartment, the only historical site in Moscow where there were no
lines. (The Russian filmmakers, he noted, had turned their back on
SME.) He describes SME's library as a montage in itself, noting that
books on St. Ignatius of Loyola, bird migration and Diderot in
Russian were side by side -- all essential, he adds, to Eisenstein's
idea of mise-en-scene.
But it is probably true that he saw Eisentein as a pre-Holocaust
filmmaker. In another passage reproduced in Cine-Journal (the Libe
years), he notes that Glauber Rocha was of course obsessed with SME
because any filmmaker in a country where cinema was being born would
be: "Nothing political in that. Eisenstein brings back cabaret, the
circus, travesties, joyful paranoia, and a taste for forms and their
metamorphoses, from large to small, from micro to macro -- an
encyclopedic culture and sambas danced before idols. The idea of
producing from things an impure beauty, a beauty of mixed blood..."
He adds that he considers The Age of the Earth to be a kind of third
part of Ivan the Terible for the era of video, zooms and over-
saturated color.
6738
From:
Date: Sat Jan 17, 2004 6:24am
Subject: Re: What is a Cineaste
Me, then Craig:
> > I think Kubrick also gets
> > kind of a bad rap vis-a-vis the impersonal nature of his
projects,
> > with various accusations that all he did was mount big, elaborate
> > prestige pictures.
>
> Wha...? Bilge, Stanley Kubrick is my favorite filmmaker in all of
> cinema, but I must say I've never heard this -- accusations that
all he
> did was mount prestige pictures?
Eh, I was writing hastily and probably used the wrong expression.
You're right - he wasn't regarded in the same light as, say,
Zinnemann was (though I'm not all that up-to-date on how FZ was
regarded, so forgive me if I'm wrong there). I guess what I mean is
that he took a lot of crap from the initial wave of auteurists
(though a handful, including Sarris to a certain extent, later
changed their minds) for taking Big Subjects and making Big Films
about them. One senses it in a lot of writing about him during this
time; Robin Wood's piece in Roud's dictionary virtually turns the
word "ambitious" into an insult, repeating it over and over again.
In '68 Sarris repeated and reaffirmed his 1963 write-off, "His
metier is projects rather than films, publicite rather than cinema.
He may wind up as the director of the best coming attractions in the
industry, but time is running out on his projected evolution into a
major artist." (My hands are shaking even as I write this -- Dan,
Pete, Fred, and others will know how I get when it comes to Kubrick
& some of his critics.) So, maybe not "prestige pictures," but
something along those lines. Or maybe just the category Sarris
placed him in: "Strained Seriousness"...
And allow me to restate unequivocally that I consider this to be an
utterly crack-headed notion, but let's not go there.
-Bilge
ADVERTISEMENT
6739
From: hotlove666
Date: Sat Jan 17, 2004 6:33am
Subject: Re: The Fearmakers
Darwin L. Teilhet's novel is one of many from the Golden Age of
mysteries that has more to it than just a mystery, like The Big Clock
by Communist poet Kenneth Frearing. The hero, back from WWII,
discovers that a poll his company is administering is full of loaded
questions designed to undercut labor unions: "For example, the first
one asked, 'Are you favorable or unfavorable to unions, in politics?'
with those last two words, 'in politics,' supplying the heat. A guy
might be favorable to unions, for that matter be in the AFL, and
still sizzle around the collar at Sidney Hillman's Political Action
Committee of the CIO."
Later, the new boss levels with him. "Anyone in our business knows
right now is the time favorable to combine finding out what people
want and think by polling them, with smart propaganda to make them
think and want what we want them to -- or can get paid to make them
want. People's reaction's set in against many of the labor grabs.
Okay. Your dough-foot overseas is burned at guys staying home and
keeping production going. Right?...
"From our 1941 study for the James Knowlton Foundation we learned for
the first time income divisions don't necessarily determine cleavages
of opinion...We found families of low incomes weren't at all cohesive
on subjects of religion or race...It was very smart work. The low
income man is ripe to be worked on with the Jew question. That's one
place where labor is weak, with so many Jews at the top." 1945.
I know how the film turned out, but I'd love to see the paper trail
on that.
6740
From: joe_mcelhaney
Date: Sat Jan 17, 2004 2:08pm
Subject: Re: Style and Morality/The Tracking Shot in Kapo
Speaks Russian fluently, goes to visit Eisenstein's apartment, writes
brilliant essay on that visit, loves Eisenstein's work, refers to it
frequently in his essays...then doesn't bother to see OCTOBER.
Strange.
6741
From: joe_mcelhaney
Date: Sat Jan 17, 2004 2:19pm
Subject: Gavin Lambert
If Ray and Dean "did the deed," REBEL sounds like it was a wild set.
According to Gore Vidal, Ray and Sal Mineo were also engaged in
sordid activities together. And Ray is supposed to have slept with
Natalie Wood. Dennis Hopper also lays claim to Wood. And God only
knows what Jim Backus and Ann Doran were doing.
Eisenschitz's bio of Ray seems quite timid in dealing with Ray's
sexuality.
6742
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Sat Jan 17, 2004 3:50pm
Subject: Re: Gavin Lambert
--- joe_mcelhaney wrote:
> If Ray and Dean "did the deed," REBEL sounds like it
> was a wild set.
> According to Gore Vidal, Ray and Sal Mineo were also
> engaged in
> sordid activities together. And Ray is supposed to
> have slept with
> Natalie Wood. Dennis Hopper also lays claim to
> Wood. And God only
> knows what Jim Backus and Ann Doran were doing.
>
> Eisenschitz's bio of Ray seems quite timid in
> dealing with Ray's
> sexuality.
Eisenschitz is indeed exceedingly timid. Wim Wenders
even more so, needless to say.
In "Mainly About Lindsay Anderson" Gavin goes into his
affair with Ray in detail. And in the new book he
establishes the fact that Wood lost her virginity to
Ray. Then came Dennis Hopper (another bisexual.)
Yes I'm just as troubled by Jim Backus and Ann Doran
as you are.
>
>
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6743
From: jess_l_amortell
Date: Sat Jan 17, 2004 4:30pm
Subject: Re: Style and Morality/The Tracking Shot in Kapo
> Speaks Russian fluently, goes to visit Eisenstein's apartment, writes
> brilliant essay on that visit, loves Eisenstein's work, refers to it
> frequently in his essays...then doesn't bother to see OCTOBER.
> Strange.
Just browsing the essay (prior to printing it out) but wonder if this is me=
taphorical and could be explained by such lines as "...the conviction that w=
hat hasn't been seen `in time´ will never really be seen"? (That he could h=
ave possibly avoided Le jour se leve seems almost as strange, if probably mo=
re understandable.) And admittedly getting ahead of myself here, but jumpin=
g to the last sentence, should it be "...why I will probably NEVER see Bambi=
"?
6744
From: jpcoursodon
Date: Sat Jan 17, 2004 4:32pm
Subject: The Great OCTOBER Mystery
Perhaps Raymond Bellour knows...
6745
From: jpcoursodon
Date: Sat Jan 17, 2004 4:44pm
Subject: Re: Gavin Lambert
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, David Ehrenstein
wrote:
>
> > sexuality.
>
> Eisenschitz is indeed exceedingly timid. Wim Wenders
> even more so, needless to say.
>
> In "Mainly About Lindsay Anderson" Gavin goes into his
> affair with Ray in detail.
>
>
> > "his affair": is that Gavin's affair? Or Anderson's? Or Wenders?
Or Dean? I'm getting confused. Is ANYBODY not gay or bi?
JPC (hopeless hetero)
> >
>
>
> __________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Yahoo! Hotjobs: Enter the "Signing Bonus" Sweepstakes
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6746
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Sat Jan 17, 2004 4:54pm
Subject: Re: Re: Gavin Lambert
--- jpcoursodon wrote:
> >
> > > "his affair": is that Gavin's affair?
Gavin's affair with Nick Ray.
Or
> Anderson's?
Lindsay Anderson was hoplessly fixated on straight men
he could never have. "Mainly About Lindsay Anerson"
deals with the entire "British new Wave" generation
with Anderson as a central figure. Gavin, being
friends with them all, tells his own story as well.
Or Wenders?
Lasttime I looked he was a "Born Again" Christian. I
was referring to "Lightning Over Water" -- the "Ciao!
Manhattan!" of the German New Wave. It's not somuch
about Nick Ray as it as about Wenders fascination with
the Nick Ray he's created and Nick Ray's fasciantion
with the Nick Ray he himself has created.
> Or Dean?
Have you seen Dennis Stock's pictures of Dean? Giant
bags under his eyes -- and only 26!
I'm getting confused. Is ANYBODY not gay or
> bi?
Ed Zwick.
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6747
From: hotlove666
Date: Sat Jan 17, 2004 4:54pm
Subject: Re: Tracking Shot in Kapo (will be: Great Films Members Haven't Seen)
I'll ask Sylvie when she gets back. Look, I've never seen Utamaro and
his Five Women OR Life of O'Haru, and I think Mizoguchi is the bee's
knees. We all have our gaps.
6748
From: hotlove666
Date: Sat Jan 17, 2004 4:56pm
Subject: Re: Gavin Lambert
to Ray.>
Oh man...
6749
From: joe_mcelhaney
Date: Sat Jan 17, 2004 7:35pm
Subject: Re: Tracking Shot in Kapo (will be: Great Films Members Haven't Seen)
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "hotlove666"
wrote:
> Look, I've never seen Utamaro and
> his Five Women OR Life of O'Haru, and I think Mizoguchi is the
>bee's knees. We all have our gaps.
Stop belaboring the point and just get over it, is that what you're
trying to tell me? Anyway, I've probably seen too many films,
including UTAMARO and OHARU. But my life is very dull and I
compensate for this by seeing a ton of movies. Daney went to Tehran,
Southeast Asia, Moscow, learned Russian. I sit in my apartment in
Brooklyn and watch MY SISTER EILEEN.
6750
From: Tosh
Date: Sat Jan 17, 2004 9:17pm
Subject: Pierre Kast
In my never-ending research on Boris Vian and his world, I found the
name Pierre Kast. There is also a nice mention of him in the new
Godard bio (by Colin MacCabe - which by the way so far is great).
Kast made a film with Vian in it called 'Le Bel age.' Kast's last
film was a version of Vian's novel 'L'Herbe rouge,' made for European
TV in 1985.
Has anyone on this list seen these two films - and if so, any thoughts on them?
And to push my luck even farther, does anyone know where I can either
get a VHS or DVD copy of the above films?
--
Tosh Berman
TamTam Books
http://www.tamtambooks.com
6751
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Sat Jan 17, 2004 9:42pm
Subject: Re: Pierre Kast
I've never seen it, but Raymond Durgnat wrote about it
in his long-out-of-print monograph "The New Wave":
"Kast's film explains itself -- the film was written
after the commentary, and there exists no better
commentary than passages of "Le Bel Age" for its first
cousin "L'Eau a la Bouche." To criticize Kast's film
for its artificiality and stylization is rather like
attacking "Erewhon" for eing intellectual extrapolaion
rather than neo-realistic psycho-sexual Utopia."
and so forth.
--- Tosh wrote:
> In my never-ending research on Boris Vian and his
> world, I found the
> name Pierre Kast. There is also a nice mention of
> him in the new
> Godard bio (by Colin MacCabe - which by the way so
> far is great).
>
> Kast made a film with Vian in it called 'Le Bel
> age.' Kast's last
> film was a version of Vian's novel 'L'Herbe rouge,'
> made for European
> TV in 1985.
>
> Has anyone on this list seen these two films - and
> if so, any thoughts on them?
>
> And to push my luck even farther, does anyone know
> where I can either
> get a VHS or DVD copy of the above films?
>
>
> --
> Tosh Berman
> TamTam Books
> http://www.tamtambooks.com
>
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6752
From: jpcoursodon
Date: Sat Jan 17, 2004 10:13pm
Subject: Re: Tracking Shot in Kapo (will be: Great Films Members Haven't Seen)
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "joe_mcelhaney"
wrote:
> --- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "hotlove666"
> wrote:
>
> > Look, I've never seen Utamaro and
> > his Five Women OR Life of O'Haru, and I think Mizoguchi is the
> >bee's knees. We all have our gaps.
>
> But my life is very dull and I
> compensate for this by seeing a ton of movies. Daney went to
Tehran,
> Southeast Asia, Moscow, learned Russian. I sit in my apartment in
> Brooklyn and watch MY SISTER EILEEN.
You call watching MY SISTER EILEEN having a dull life?! I'd rather
watch MY SISTER EILEEN (even in your Brooklyn apartment) than
visiting EISENSTEIN's apartment in Moscow. At least you can sing
along "I wish I could dream and philosophize with someone who knows
what I mean."
JPC
6753
From: joe_mcelhaney
Date: Sat Jan 17, 2004 11:48pm
Subject: Re: Tracking Shot in Kapo (will be: Great Films Members Haven't Seen)
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "jpcoursodon"
wrote:
>
> You call watching MY SISTER EILEEN having a dull life?! I'd rather
> watch MY SISTER EILEEN (even in your Brooklyn apartment) than
> visiting EISENSTEIN's apartment in Moscow. At least you can sing
> along "I wish I could dream and philosophize with someone who knows
> what I mean."
Jean-Pierre, thank you so much. Now I am almost convinced that my
life is not as horrendously dull as I had imagined. And you know,
had Eisenstein lived he might have been a fan of MY SISTER EILEEN. He
loved Judy Garland, after all.
6754
From: Brian Darr
Date: Sat Jan 17, 2004 11:48pm
Subject: Re: Bangkok Int'l Film Festival
> Anyone attending this?
I wish. When I was living in Thailand (1999-2000) there was a Bangkok
festival in the fall which seemed pretty weak overall, but ever since
the January festivals began a few years ago the line-ups have seemed
particularly strong.
If it were me, I'd consider checking out the following films, all
playing in the first few days of the fest:
films from directors I'm already familiar with:
The Flower Of Evil (La Fleur du Mal) -Chabrol
The Saddest Music in the World -Maddin
Goodbye Dragon Inn -Tsai
Last Life in the Universe (Ruangrak Noinid Mahasan) -Pen-ek
A Place Among The Living (Une Place Parmi Les Vivants) -Ruíz
S21, The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine -Rithy Panh
films from directors I don't know, but sound interesting to me:
One Night Husband (Kuen Rai Ngao)
Crimson Gold (Talaye Sorgh)
Blind Shaft (Mang Jing)
Ford Transit
Two Friends (Due Amici)
To the Bracken Fields (Warabinokou)
1/2 the Rent (1/2 Miete)
Free Radicals (Böse Zellen)
Zhou Yu's Train (Zhou Yu De Huoche)
15
A Nation Without Women (Matrubhoomi)
My Girl (Fanchan)
Snow Walker
Maqbool
The Big Durian
films I've already seen and would consider re-watching:
Eliana, Eliana -Riza
Madame Sata -Ainouz
Midnight Cowboy -Schlesinger
And it looks like they're also showing Pesonji's "Country Hotel" in
the first three days as well. Though I haven't seen any of Pestonji's
films, I've been wanting to see one for quite a while, ever since I
saw Wisit's "Tears of the Black Tiger" which is a tribute to Pestonji.
6755
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Sun Jan 18, 2004 0:05am
Subject: Re: Re: Tracking Shot in Kapo (will be: Great Films Members Haven't Seen)
--- joe_mcelhaney wrote:
> And you know,
> had Eisenstein lived he might have been a fan of MY
> SISTER EILEEN. He
> loved Judy Garland, after all.
>
Too bad he didn't live to see"Summer Stock." She's
dirving a tractor in the "Happy Harvest" number --
obviously Charles Walters' tribute to "The General
Line"
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6756
From: jerome_gerber
Date: Sun Jan 18, 2004 0:29am
Subject: Re: Tracking Shot in Kapo (will be: Great Films Members Haven't Seen)
Pontecorvo's KAPO for anyone who does care to see it, is
available on dvd online in Italy...billed with english subs.
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, David Ehrenstein
wrote:
>
> --- joe_mcelhaney wrote:
>
> > And you know,
> > had Eisenstein lived he might have been a fan of MY
> > SISTER EILEEN. He
> > loved Judy Garland, after all.
> >
> Too bad he didn't live to see"Summer Stock." She's
> dirving a tractor in the "Happy Harvest" number --
> obviously Charles Walters' tribute to "The General
> Line"
>
>
> __________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Yahoo! Hotjobs: Enter the "Signing Bonus" Sweepstakes
> http://hotjobs.sweepstakes.yahoo.com/signingbonus
6757
From: jpcoursodon
Date: Sun Jan 18, 2004 1:23am
Subject: Great Films Members haven't Seen
I thought Bill's suggestion was that each of us should "confess" to
not having seen some Important film (sounds a bit Maoist to me but
why not?)
I'll show you mine if you show me yours.
JPC
6758
From: apmartin90
Date: Sun Jan 18, 2004 1:54am
Subject: KAPO seen and unseen
Dear team - It was to great to read the posting of Daney's terrific KAPO text. I think
it's important to add, though, that there's a big debate around Daney's
'immortalisation' of what Rivette wrote about this film, and its subsequent further
immortalisation by an entire generation or two of post-Daneyites who take this as
THE symbol of an 'ethics of cinema'. POSITIF has made a few good jokes about it down
the years, for instance. But most solidly there is a book (I don't have it in front of me)
by Laurent Jullier, devoted to the methodology of film analysis, in which Jullier does
something few have apparently bothered to to do - he actually studies Pontecorvo's
film, complete with frame enlargements of the (in)famous scene/moment Rivette
described. And, without me being able to recall every detail right now, he establishes
very persuasively that Rivette misdescribed and misinterpreted what the camera
movement in that film was doing - that it's not a matter of a grotesque
'aestheticisation' of death & suffering at all.
Jullier is a major brain - I saw him at the London Godard conference of 2001 giving a
brilliant paper on Godard's relationship to the CD label ECM. And also there I
witnessed a rather explosive little exchange on the KAPO question between Raymond
Bellour on stage - it was a session about Daney and Godard - and Jullier in the
audience. Jullier briefly rehearsed the argument from his book about the Rivette/
Daney/KAPO complex, and Raymond pretty much cut him off dead, declaring
something along the lines of 'I side with Serge!' The show of loyalty was touching, but
the intellectual debate could maybe have gone a little further!
Actually - another side of this coin - it would be interesting to think about moments
in critical history when misdescriptions create their own 'momentum' - which, as
some people have suggested down the years, is in a way its own creative activity, if
not 'empirically' perfect! There is a lot of detail about scenes, shots, etc, in Farber,
Durgnat and early Burch, for example, which is way off-beam, almost entirely
imagined or re-invented in a strictly descriptive sense - but that doesn't mean we
can't be inspired by and learn from what they imagined! On the other hand, a
Bordwell/Jullier-type approach abhors this kind of 'imprecision'. Thoughts from the
group members?
Adrian
6759
From:
Date: Sun Jan 18, 2004 2:06am
Subject: Re: Great Films Members haven't Seen
There are so many famous films I haven't seen that extra bandwidth would be needed to list them all. But soon can actually do something about a film I've wanted to see for 30 years. In a few weeks, the Detroit Institute of Arts is showing a restored version of "Au hasard, Balthazar" (Bresson). I'm planning on going even if I have to crawl there on my hands and knees.
We are also getting 10 rare Ozu's on Monday nights. Even "Dragnet Girl", Ozu's gangster movie.
Many posts back, Fred Camper asked if I'd seen Bresson's "The Trial of Joan of Arc". Answer: I have, but around 1977, and with totally faded memory of anything in it.
Mike Grost
6760
From: Gabe Klinger
Date: Sun Jan 18, 2004 2:13am
Subject: Re: Great Films Members haven't Seen
JP:
> I thought Bill's suggestion was that each of us should "confess" to
> not having seen some Important film (sounds a bit Maoist to me but
> why not?)
Uh-oh... I predict the longest, most exhaustive thread since
fetishism/etc.
To Serge: I've seen OCTOBER, but not STRIKE!
To David Ehrenstein: QUEEN MARGOT, but no THOSE WHO LOVE...
To Adrian: THE BIRTH OF LOVE but no L'ENFANT SECRET
To Fred: THE LIFE OF OHARU but no THE LOYAL 47 RONIN
And most importantly, to myself: I don't believe I have ever seen
SUNRISE in its entirety.
There!
6761
From: Tosh
Date: Sun Jan 18, 2004 3:12am
Subject: Re: Great Films Members haven't Seen
I have a bootleg copy of Louis Feuillade's Fantomas on video - but I
want to see it on a big screen. Come to think of it I want to see
the entire Louis Feuillade catalogue. Some years back (not too long
ago) I did see Judex and Les Vampires. That was a pair of remarkable
film showings - but when is the ultimate Feuillade retro going to
happen in L.A.?
--
Tosh Berman
TamTam Books
http://www.tamtambooks.com
6762
From: jpcoursodon
Date: Sun Jan 18, 2004 3:10am
Subject: Re: Great Films Members haven't Seen
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Gabe Klinger wrote:
> JP:
> > I thought Bill's suggestion was that each of us should "confess"
to
> > not having seen some Important film (sounds a bit Maoist to me but
> > why not?)
>
> Uh-oh... I predict the longest, most exhaustive thread since
> fetishism/etc.
>
> To Serge: I've seen OCTOBER, but not STRIKE!
> To David Ehrenstein: QUEEN MARGOT, but no THOSE WHO LOVE...
> To Adrian: THE BIRTH OF LOVE but no L'ENFANT SECRET
> To Fred: THE LIFE OF OHARU but no THE LOYAL 47 RONIN
> And most importantly, to myself: I don't believe I have ever seen
> SUNRISE in its entirety.
>
> There!
Are you confessing you fell asleep?
Another possible thread: "Great Films I Confess I Fell Asleep
Through".
6763
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Sun Jan 18, 2004 5:14am
Subject: Re: KAPO seen and unseen
--- apmartin90 wrote:
>
> Actually - another side of this coin - it would be
> interesting to think about moments
> in critical history when misdescriptions create
> their own 'momentum' - which, as
> some people have suggested down the years, is in a
> way its own creative activity, if
> not 'empirically' perfect! There is a lot of detail
> about scenes, shots, etc, in Farber,
> Durgnat and early Burch, for example, which is way
> off-beam, almost entirely
> imagined or re-invented in a strictly descriptive
> sense - but that doesn't mean we
> can't be inspired by and learn from what they
> imagined! On the other hand, a
> Bordwell/Jullier-type approach abhors this kind of
> 'imprecision'. Thoughts from the
> group members?
>
>
In many ways the history of film criticism can be
divided into Pre-Video and Post-Video. Many of my
favorite pieces of criticism are rife with erros
simply because the critic in question had to rely on
his or her own memory -- and only the most dedicated
film follower would be moved to check up on it. I
became a critic in an era where going to see a movie a
secodn time was considered radical. Kael prized
herself on her ability to pronounce judgement on a
one-time-only basis. I once mentioned that I'd seen
"Le Mepris" 10 times and she shuddered visibly. (I
have by now seen it at least60 times -- in a theater.)
Now on DVD we experience a film not only in order but
in pieces -- repeatedly. Even the tiniest detail (like
the butterfly tattoo just above Vigo Mortensen's butt
crack in "Psycho") is available to us as never before.
I have yet to see all of "Les Enfants du Paradis."
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6764
From: jpcoursodon
Date: Sun Jan 18, 2004 5:15am
Subject: KAPO seen and unseen
This was a great post by Adrian (#6758) and I hope it won't pass
unnoticed. An enormous amount of old film criticism is based on
shaky, inaccurate memories and interpretations of what actually
exists on film, and the stuff is taken as gospel truth by
generations. It is fashionable to sneer at what Barthes calls the
Doxa, but the sneerers always have their own doxa they cling to. Like
Daney I never saw KAPO. Unlike Daney I never felt that Rivette's
pronoucement -- establishing a new cinephilic doxa -- was necessarily
the ultimate truth. The least I could do was to see the film and, for
any number of reasons, I never did. We can only applaud to anybody
going back to the actual text and finding out what it actually
says/shows. I am sad to hear that such a major critic and film lover
as Bellour should dismiss such an endeavor and retreat behind the
gospel according to Daney.
JPC
6765
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Sun Jan 18, 2004 6:14am
Subject: It's Spinach and to Hell with It!
While we'rebusy composing our confessions of classic
films we haven't managed to see for one reason or
another, I'd like to propose another category :
classics we don't like.
I thought of this the moment my eyes alighted on an
article in this Sunday's "New York Times" on the new
DVD of "The Rules of the Game." Terence Rafferty calls
it "the film of films."
Well it's not.
It's not even the "Renoir of Renoirs."
Oh it's OK as movies go, but pretty damned weak when
compared to "Le Crime de M. Lange" or "The Golden
Coach" or even "Le Testament du Dr. Cordelier."
It's a "masterpiece" for middle-brows.
There -- I've said it and I'm glad!
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6766
From:
Date: Sun Jan 18, 2004 1:51am
Subject: Renoir and The Rules of the Game
David Ehrenstein wrote:
>It's a "masterpiece" for middle-brows.
I think "Rules of the Game" is wonderful, though not as wonderful as "The
Little Theater of Jean Renoir," my admittedly eccentric pick for his greatest.
While we're at this, I'll confess that the canonized Renoir I've never quite
loved is "Grand Illusion," but it must be my failing because Orson Welles and
John Ford - to name but two - would strenously disagree with me.
Peter
6767
From:
Date: Sun Jan 18, 2004 7:12am
Subject: Re: Renoir and The Rules of the Game
David, Peter:
>
> >It's a "masterpiece" for middle-brows.
>
> I think "Rules of the Game" is wonderful, though not as wonderful
as "The
> Little Theater of Jean Renoir," my admittedly eccentric pick for
his greatest.
>
Although I've always liked it quite a bit, I convinced myself some
yers ago that there were Renoir films that were much better than
RULES (THE RIVER is probably my favorite overall, and LA BETE
HUMAINE and DAY IN THE COUNTRY would be close behind), but I had to
write a piece on this DVD myself last week...and I can't stop
watching this film. It's fucking amazing.
As for it being a "masterpiece for middlebrows"...I suspect one can
say that about any film that eventually achieves an obscenely big
reputation. (I've heard variations of this pointed at everything
from 8 1/2 to THE SEVENTH SEAL to CITIZEN KANE to CHILDREN OF
PARADISE.) After all, the French middle-brows who saw RULES in 1939
almost burned the theatre down.
-Bilge
6768
From: hotlove666
Date: Sun Jan 18, 2004 7:20am
Subject: Re: Morality and Style/The Tacking Shot in Kapo
Serge says he never saw Kapo, and that the common opinion about it
was purely an article of faith for him. But do let me urge anyone
interested in the doxa about morality and style and challenges to it
to look back at a very meaty discussion of these questions in the
early days of a_film_by.
I wouldn't be surprised if Rivette got Kapo wrong - reading his pan
of Titanic based on Kate Winslet's body took me back to the glory
days of John Simon. I had a similar experience to what Adrian
describes with JR's famous article on Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, when
I was putting together comments by directors on neglected
masterpieces for Locarno's 50th. Bernard Eisenschitz, who was
translating and - as he now insists on doing if he translates,
apparently - editing, although no one told me that, decided at the
last minute not to run the introduction I wrote to the book. I think
it was a decision of convenience, because we were under the gun and I
was running behind because of the hassle of roping in people like
Allen and Coppola and Spielberg, but I do recall that he was
incensed that I was comparing Rivette's article on BARD - which is so
abstract that it doesn't bother to describe the movie per se - with
what Joe Dante had said about it when I brought it up re: The Big
Clock, his pick -- references to "those cheap Columbia sets" and "the
biggest number of cigarete gags in one film ever." Bernard could not
understand how I could even put Joe's remarks on the same page with
what he described (accurately, IMO, by the way) as maybe one of the
ten greatest pieces of film criticism ever written.
The French have every right to be proud of their film critics -
they're the best in the world - but you have to be careful to show
the proper respect. I told Michael Wilson what I had done, in my
innocence, and he said I obviously had no idea how subversive it
would have appeared in a French context.
BTW, I wasn't inviting people to confess - I was saying that, given
the highly spiritual nature of our group, I knew that confessions
would be forthcoming.
If someone does want to join me in purging his soul, let me start off
by admitting that, like much of Serge's writing for Trafic, the
article on the tracking shot in Kapo is only partially comprehensible
to me. He was like that in person, too. When we'd see a movie
together and he'd start in afterwards (or during), I'd just nod and
try to look intelligent, then throw in my pathetic 3 cents. Very
gnomic stuff. On the whole I prefer his CdC period, where the ideas
are difficult, but the style is clearer. I don't find that a problem
very often with Biette. It was never a problem with him in person.
That's why I think great care has to be given to translations and
notes if Daney's work ever appears in book form here - there's not
much point in it appearing just for the sake of appearing.
6769
From: Fred Camper
Date: Sun Jan 18, 2004 7:27am
Subject: Re: Daves - 3:10 to Yuma (vague, mild spoilers)
Back some three thousand posts ago in our group's Olden Days,
specifically in post 3814 on November 7, Zach sang the praises of a
certain Delmer Daves film. Since a good print of it was shown soon
after, I went. I wrote some notes about it right after seeing it, but
never got around to posting them, so I've written them up now.
I thought the film was awful. Still, I was glad I went. I've seen too
little of the classical narrative cinema by directors not on my own
favorites lists, and I kind of enjoyed the film in some ways and thought
I learned from it too, if only by counter-example.
Zach had praised the film's "complex characterizations leading to
nuanced understanding of human motivations and interactions," which
doesn't strike me as either overly true or especially wrong; in other
words, I could at least see how he thought that and wouldn't want to
argue the point.
He also liked the photography and camera movemets. The photography
itself isn't bad, as it goes, but I don't see much point in separating
photography from editing, since the latter filters our perception of the
former. Very early in the film, when we cut from John Ford style a shot
of the porch of "home" taken from behind the wife looking out on the
landscape to a high angle reverse shot looking at the same scene from
high up, I knew we weren't in Shinbone anymore. I thought the cut was
spatially and visually awful, the kind of incoherent thing I'm used to
seeing from a visually incompetent director.
Throughout the film, the changes in angles, the cuts between level and
high shots, the way compositions are framed through foreground objects,
continue this lack of spatial coherence. Gerd Oswald frames compositions
through objects in his three Westerns to great effect: foreground
objects establish a kind of hard, confrontational, brutal physicality,
as if one's eye were always butting against or even colliding with
things, creating a kind of perceptual violence. In the Daves film such
compositions just seem like mannerisms, a photographer's attempt to add
detail or interest. Pound defined mannerism as style used with no
connection to meaning, and that sure seemed to be the case here.
When a film seems to me bad visually, I fall back on the acting and
plot. Glenn Ford is very good, to be sure. The plot is mildly engaging
in the way it "hooks" you, but the manipulativeness of such hooks has
always bothered me in Hollywood films that have nothing to offer
aesthetically. I guess the ethos behind the idea of providing substitute
emotional worlds for the viewer to escape into seems to me one to argue
with, not encourage, while by contrast I begin with a positive attitude
toward the idea of making out of focus or hand painted abstract films
that will be worthy of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, and then
react against them only when they turn out to be bad Brakhage imitations
rather than the real thing.
Anyway, this is a long way of getting around to saying that while I was
somewhat engaged by the plot, I was repulsed by the ending (spoilers
follow). Though the Ford character is presented as an honorable villain,
his sudden turn to "real" self-sacrificing honor at the end makes little
sense in terms of his character, though a lot of sense to those of us
who want to believe in the inherent goodness of the guy we've been
watching. It seemed cheap. Things got cheaper with the schmaltzy staging
of Kennedy's character seeing his wife as the train passes, and in just
in case you were wondering if you were really right that things were
getting cheap and manipulative, rain comes along to confirm everything
you were guessing in spades: the Kennedy character doesn't just get the
money he needs, he gets rain too, whereas the film had posited he needed
money *or* rain. Not only that, but even the "good" villain (he killed
someone in a holdup, but of course it was just self-defense on his part)
is going to be OK: "I've broken out of Yuma before." Even the editing
fails here: the intercutting of Kennedy and his wife is just plain
stupid, in my view.
Oh, well, sorry, Zach, but you did ask for reactions.
- Fred
6770
From: Andy Rector
Date: Sun Jan 18, 2004 7:29am
Subject: KAPO seen and unseen/Bellour/Daney/Godard/Rivette
Glad to know you all,
I am a new member and I am moved to transcribe a piece of the
discussion from the FOR EVER GODARD conference after reading the
Daney article that Bill so generously posted. Just now, I'm seeing
Adrian Martin's post which contains several problems for us.
(My recording of the Bellour on Daney/Godard segment of the
conference is piecemeal due to a faulty tape recorder and running
translation. As to how exactly the morality of tracking shots in
general and the tracking shot from KAPO in particular was brought up,
what the context was, I do not remember, and it is cut out of my
recording, regrettably. Nor do I know who during the Q & A asked
these particular questions and comments of Bellour. It is quite
possible that it is Laurent Jullier.)
Laurent Jullier, possibly:
You talked about the traveling shot in KAPO, Pontecorvo's tracking
shot on Emmanuelle Riva who's dying in a concentration camp. Would
you say that this is something immoral compared to the use by Godard
of a long excerpt from a pornographic film where someone urinates in
the actress' mouth? In the ORIGINS OF THE 21st CENTURY of course it
would be something moral since in this case you would be denouncing;
so can you oppose these two types of images or would you think
perhaps there isn't that much of a distinction to be drawn?
Raymond Bellour:
That's clearly a difficult question. Well I share with Daney the fact
that I've never seen the film KAPO. So I only know what this is via
Rivette's article. But let's assume that they're right and that the
track shot moves along Riva's body and that it is an obscene shot.
Personally I don't really know what to think of the image in the
ORIGINS OF THE 21st CENTURY. If I don't know what to think about it
that's because it's too quick. Actually this has its importance. I
think that a lot of the things that renders associations extrememly
audacious and can be condemned in Godard is the fact that you have to
react so quickly, instantaneously I would say, to the style. In KAPO,
that tracking shot, what is unbearable is that movememnt, "I am
moving forward with the camera and I can tell you what the truth is
on this body," unbearable violence in this case, and perhaps
elliptical violence (in ORIGINS...), the fact that it happens so
quickly makes it bearable, acceptable perhaps, I don't know...
Laurent Jullier, possibly:
Well I saw KAPO. I think this tracking shot is a stylistic metaphor.
It enables the director to frame Emmmanuelle Riva's face and nothing
else. Saying in this way that through death she is able to escape her
surroundings, she's able to exit the camp alone, her face framed by
the sky alone behind her. Perhaps it's a little bit unwieldy, I don't
know.
Raymond Bellour:
It's become a historical icon now, actually it goes well beyond
analysis.
London, 2001
In Godard's defence the pornographic clip (from ORIGINS) comes off
like war footage, as it should, a documented atrocity, brought up
because it must be (not only ideologically but as human beings).
Godard uses this clip again in DANS LE NOIR DU TEMPS. Daney:
"Of course one is not forced to believe in what one sees - it can even
be dangerous - but one is not forced to hold on to cinema either.
There must be some risk and some virtue, in a word some value, in the
action of showing something to someone able to look at it".
Is Godard asking us if we've seen it yet?
Like most the others, I've never seen KAPO. I may never see it. I'm
not terribly concerned about the faithfulness of Rivette's
assessment. We all know what sort of move Rivette and Daney are
condemning, and it is condemnable (Daney: "...ashamed to be seen as
someone who has to be aesthetically seduced where it is only a matter
of conscience – good or bad - of being a human and nothing more."
This is rather precise).
I believe that the lesson of justice and morality that Daney gives us
through the example of KAPO, and Rivette's article (which he
repeatedly delineates as a PERSONAL event) is much more valuable in
addressing problems of the image and the world that remain unsolved,
largely unaddressed (more relevant than ever), than the "generic
humanism" that KAPO is "surely" a part of (if the above transcription
is any indication). On the other hand, to follow Godard, one
should "bring in the evidence". Daney:
"I did not get upset and if I repeated the experience with
students today, I wouldn't worry whether they understood the tracking
shot but I would want to make sure that there is for them some hint
of abjection. To be honest I am afraid there wouldn't be any. A sign
that tracking shots are no longer a moral issue and that cinema is
too weak to entertain such a question."
To JPC I would say that there wasn't a retreat of any kind by Bellour
at the conference. If he did side with Daney, it's not an
intellectual retreat but solidarity with the cause for which Daney
carries the banner. Bellour was perfectly obliging.
What can one do about the state, if one listens to the gospel of
Daney, of the image and imagemaking? Do we continue our usual pockets
of resistance thing? I think Daney is most useful. We should take
responsibility and talk about it when it's not there.
Due propers,
andy r.
ps- to the Eloge discussion I excerpt Daney again, in case you missed
it:
"If in 1945 the Americans allowed George Stevens to make the
astonishing documentary mentioned earlier, they never broadcasted it
due to reasons of the cold war. Incapable of `dealing' with that
history which after all is not theirs, the American entrepreneurs of
entertainment had temporarily abandoned it to European artists. But
on that history, like on any story, they retained a right of pre-
emption, and sooner or later the Hollywood and television machine
would dare to tell `our' story. It would tell it very carefully but
it would sell it to us as another American story. Holocaust would
therefore be the misfortunes that tear apart and destroy a Jewish
family: there would be extras looking too fat, acting performances,
generic humanism, action and melodramatic scenes. And we would
sympathise."
6771
From: Jonathan Rosenbaum
Date: Sun Jan 18, 2004 8:15am
Subject: Re: KAPO seen and unseen
I'd like to respond with not exactly a misreading of a film but an
apparent nugget of misinformation I've just discovered while doing
an article about Sunrise for the Guardian. Since the 60s, I've been
hearing that Sunrise was a commercial flop when it came out, or at
the very least an extreme commercial disappointment, and I've even
contributed to this notion myself by repeating it in a piece I did
for the National Society of Film Critics collection, The A Team. But
in a piece about the recent restoration of Sunrise posted on the BFI
web site, David Pierce, curator at the National Film Archive,
writes, "Sunrise was Fox's third highest grossing film for 1928,
surpassed only by Frank Borzage's 7th Heaven and John Ford's Four
Sons."
Part of what I find mind-boggling about this new bit of information,
assuming that it's true, is a certain ideological imperative that's
seemingly been operative about the American movie audience,
according to which the mass public is so uncouth and anti-art that
to imagine them rushing off to an art movie is inconceivable. So
maybe it's the latter notion that's been preventing us from seeing
that Sunrise was actually a money-maker--unless we wind up
concluding that it cost so much money that it wound up in the red in
spite of being the third highest grossing Fox film of 1928.
Anyway, food for thought...
As for the confessional exercise regarding classics one has never
seen: I'm still looking forward to catching up with WAY DOWN EAST
and FANNY AND ALEXANDER.
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "apmartin90" wrote:
> Dear team - It was to great to read the posting of Daney's
terrific KAPO text. I think
> it's important to add, though, that there's a big debate around
Daney's
> 'immortalisation' of what Rivette wrote about this film, and its
subsequent further
> immortalisation by an entire generation or two of post-Daneyites
who take this as
> THE symbol of an 'ethics of cinema'. POSITIF has made a few good
jokes about it down
> the years, for instance. But most solidly there is a book (I don't
have it in front of me)
> by Laurent Jullier, devoted to the methodology of film analysis,
in which Jullier does
> something few have apparently bothered to to do - he actually
studies Pontecorvo's
> film, complete with frame enlargements of the (in)famous
scene/moment Rivette
> described. And, without me being able to recall every detail right
now, he establishes
> very persuasively that Rivette misdescribed and misinterpreted
what the camera
> movement in that film was doing - that it's not a matter of a
grotesque
> 'aestheticisation' of death & suffering at all.
>
> Jullier is a major brain - I saw him at the London Godard
conference of 2001 giving a
> brilliant paper on Godard's relationship to the CD label ECM. And
also there I
> witnessed a rather explosive little exchange on the KAPO question
between Raymond
> Bellour on stage - it was a session about Daney and Godard - and
Jullier in the
> audience. Jullier briefly rehearsed the argument from his book
about the Rivette/
> Daney/KAPO complex, and Raymond pretty much cut him off dead,
declaring
> something along the lines of 'I side with Serge!' The show of
loyalty was touching, but
> the intellectual debate could maybe have gone a little further!
>
> Actually - another side of this coin - it would be interesting to
think about moments
> in critical history when misdescriptions create their
own 'momentum' - which, as
> some people have suggested down the years, is in a way its own
creative activity, if
> not 'empirically' perfect! There is a lot of detail about scenes,
shots, etc, in Farber,
> Durgnat and early Burch, for example, which is way off-beam,
almost entirely
> imagined or re-invented in a strictly descriptive sense - but that
doesn't mean we
> can't be inspired by and learn from what they imagined! On the
other hand, a
> Bordwell/Jullier-type approach abhors this kind of 'imprecision'.
Thoughts from the
> group members?
>
> Adrian
6772
From: Andy Rector
Date: Sun Jan 18, 2004 9:24am
Subject: Morality and Style
I'm wondering if someone can point out where the early discussions of
morality and style appear in the group postings. I'm not able to find
it.
Thanks and Best,
andy r.
6773
From: hotlove666
Date: Sun Jan 18, 2004 0:42pm
Subject: Re: Morality and Style
Fred started a thread with 637. I started another with 937 that went
on quite a while, I believe. The whole French thing about morality
and tracking shots comes up in the second thread, which is why I
posted the Daney piece yesterday - it's part of that long-ago
discussion.
6774
From: hotlove666
Date: Sun Jan 18, 2004 0:44pm
Subject: Re: Morality and Style - Erratum
Correction: The second thread started at 923 (varia).
6775
From: Henrik Sylow
Date: Sun Jan 18, 2004 1:48pm
Subject: My Auteurism
When I began to study film, one of the first terms I encoutered was
"Hitchcockian", and before I even had grasphed the meaning of it, I
was suckerpunched by "Capraesque" and "Eisensteinian".
What these terms meant was, that the films by this particular director
had something in common, a signature, by which one could identify him.
To me, to this day, that is what Auteurism is. I love the name Fred
gave this group, a_film_by, as this embraces the directorial
signature. As Truffaut said: An auteur brings his vision to the
screen, while an ordinary director brings the vision of others to the
screen.
I have followed the recent discussion about what auteurism and the
only thing it did for me was to alienate me.
In my opinion, where auteurism originally arose by taking a huge bulk
of work and finding the unique signature from a director, todays
auteurism tries to make up definitions and adapt/change already
existing rules, so that directors one want to be auteurs can be so.
Worse, I can't understand nor follow the "logic" of why a film should
be good or why a director should be important anymore. I come from
literature and semiotics. I was trained to pick a text apart and then
hold it up against classic and contemporary ideas and motifs. But I
fail to see by what set of standard people approach a film and
director, in their search for auteurism.
Thus I distance myself from the idea to apply the term auteur to a
first time director; How can one demonstrate a signature, a style, a
leitmotif unless you have at least three films to examine? I dont
remember who said it, but about Jonathan Mostow it was said, that he
began as an auteur, but now he is merely a director (using Biette's
notions). To me this clearly demonstrates that one should not apply
auteur theory of any sort to a director which doesnt have a body of
work behind him big enough for one to extract a signature.
I don't know Biette's theory fully. I have read some, I have read what
has been said on this board. But where the original notion of
auteurism gave me something to work with, these new ideas alienate me
both from theory and worse, from the film itself.
I honestly don't care if my favorite directors are auteurs or not.
What is important is, that they give me something of value. A theory
should improve the experience of watching film, not alienate you from
it.
Henrik
6776
From: Tosh
Date: Sun Jan 18, 2004 2:19pm
Subject: Re: It's Spinach and to Hell with It!
Not to be anal about it, but I think Rafferty is quoting Truffault.
But nevertheless, Rafferty agrees that this is 'the film of films.'
Actually I think I saw it as a young teenager and I fell asleep.
That's a sure sign that it is a masterpiece!
> Terence Rafferty calls
>it "the film of films."
--
Tosh Berman
TamTam Books
http://www.tamtambooks.com
6777
From: Henrik Sylow
Date: Sun Jan 18, 2004 2:30pm
Subject: Re: It's Spinach and to Hell with It!
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, David Ehrenstein
wrote:
> While we'rebusy composing our confessions of classic
> films we haven't managed to see for one reason or
> another, I'd like to propose another category :
> classics we don't like.
To me its "L'Annèe dernière à Marienbad". I dont get it, I never will
get it, I doubt anyone gets/got it. To me, its empty, pointless and
pretentious.
Henrik
6778
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Sun Jan 18, 2004 2:36pm
Subject: Re: Re: It's Spinach and to Hell with It!
--- Henrik Sylow wrote:
> To me its "L'Annèe dernière à Marienbad". I dont get
> it, I never will
> get it, I doubt anyone gets/got it. To me, its
> empty, pointless and
> pretentious.
>
> Henrik
>
>
Oh I got it -- but please feel free to dislike it as
much as you want, Henrik.
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6779
From: Tosh
Date: Sun Jan 18, 2004 2:50pm
Subject: Re: Re: It's Spinach and to Hell with It!
>This is actually one of my favorite films!
- Tosh
>-- Henrik Sylow wrote:
>> To me its "L'AnnËe derniËre ý Marienbad". I dont get
>> it, I never will
>> get it, I doubt anyone gets/got it. To me, its
>> empty, pointless and
>> pretentious.
>>
>> Henrik
> >
>>
>
>__________________________________
>Do you Yahoo!?
>Yahoo! Hotjobs: Enter the "Signing Bonus" Sweepstakes
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>
>
--
Tosh Berman
TamTam Books
http://www.tamtambooks.com
6780
From: Adrian Martin
Date: Sun Jan 18, 2004 3:56pm
Subject: re: KAPO seen and unseen
Thanks, Andy, for those transcriptions from London in 2001. But were you
actually there? If not, maybe you missed Raymond Bellour's body language
when he answered Jullier (it's definitely Jullier you have transcribed) - I
am not the only person in the crowd that day who thought that was a tense
exchange, and that it ended rather abruptly.
Andy, I agree with almost everything you say, and I have enormous regard for
Daney's thoughts, and of course the issues he raised are still incredibly
important and relevant. But do you really think it's so immaterial whether
or not Rivette misdescribed KAPO in the first place? After all, Pontecorvo
went on to make some incredibly important political films, he wasn't just
some mainstream hack cashing in on the Holocaust! I haven't see KAPO either
yet, but dismissing it out of sight as 'humanist' waffle seems to me a bit
strong ... (I also get nervous when people start using 'humanist' as a
reflex term of abuse!!! At the every least we need to define: humanism as
distinct from/opposed to what, exactly?)
On the other hand, there's what you rightly insist on: reading Rivette was a
personal experience for Daney, not a matter of 'empirical' film criticism.
Nonetheless, like Jean-Pierre, I do salute Jullier for actually going back
to the film in order to question the 'doxa' around this issue.
On another, more general Daney matter: when he talked about 'missing'
certain films (like OCTOBER, BAMBI, etc) wasn't he also evoking (alongside
standard human problems of time, opportunity, money to buy tickets or
videos, the country you happen to live in, etc) something a bit more
mysterious and psychoanalytical? - such as: the strange RESISTANCE we all
feel about finally watching certain films (even ones we have on our shelves
for years ... ), as if we are either preserving a myth or protecting
ourselves from a potential 'bad encounter', and then how (this is what
Daney's essay is all about, to me) each of our interior cinephilici
autobiographies is constructed precisely AROUND or UPON these absences and
the weird, mythic, irrational-yet-charged significances they assume ...
Adrian
6781
From: joe_mcelhaney
Date: Sun Jan 18, 2004 3:14pm
Subject: Re: inaccurate analysis
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "apmartin90" wrote:
> Actually - another side of this coin - it would be interesting to
>think about moments in critical history when misdescriptions create
>their own 'momentum' - which, as some people have suggested down
>the years, is in a way its own creative activity, if
> not 'empirically' perfect! There is a lot of detail about scenes,
>shots, etc, in Farber, Durgnat and early Burch, for example, which
>is way off-beam, almost entirely imagined or re-invented in a
>strictly descriptive sense - but that doesn't mean we
> can't be inspired by and learn from what they imagined! On the
>other hand, a Bordwell/Jullier-type approach abhors this kind
>of 'imprecision'. Thoughts from the group members?
Well, my feelings about this depend on the scale and implications of
the inaccuracies. Bordwell's objections to Burch on Ozu are quite
solidly based on the fact that Burch's misdescriptions of shots and
sequences in Ozu are fundamental to the arguments that Burch wants to
make about Ozu's style. Burch performs inaccurate close analysis and
in the process creates a somewhat different kind of director than is
actually up there on the screen, the kind of director Burch wants Ozu
to be.
On the other hand, when Bazin describes the camera movement near the
end of CRIME OF M. LANGE as a 360-degree pan around a courtyard, this
is inaccurate (it is two shots, a crane up, over and down and then a
separate shot of the pan around the courtyard) but the gist of
Bazin's argument about this type of movement being "the pure spatial
expression of the entire mise-en-scene" still holds and is a very
provocative way of interpreting these movements. And Thomas
Elsaesser's essay on Minnelli contains a number of inaccuracies
(including getting the order of the plot of BRIGADOON completely
wrong)but it remains far and away the best general essay on Minnelli
on English due to the strength of the basic arguments.
As I'm sure you all know, Durgnat was really the Crown Prince of
getting things wrong: Los Angeles as the setting for VERTIGO,
objecting to Hawks and then using a scene from THE PHILADELPHIA STORY
as an example, etc. And yet Durgnat is almost continually
stimulating and his book on Hitchcock, for all of its dozens of
inaccuracies and and for all of its opinions I completely disagree
with, is a book I constantly return to.
6782
From: joe_mcelhaney
Date: Sun Jan 18, 2004 3:35pm
Subject: Re: great films unseen
I honestly haven't been able to think of any canonical films I
haven't seen: WAY DOWN EAST, OHARU, FANNY AND ALEXANDER...seen 'em.
And I've repeatedly stayed awake for SUNRISE and RULES OF THE GAME.
Call me old-fashioned. There are major films by major directors I
haven't been able to see due to their rarity: DUELLE and OUT 1, some
Straub/Huillet, some Borzage, etc. But that's not from lack of trying
or lack of desire. Obviously, we could go on and on with our lists
and it's certainly fun to see them. But I just want to remind you
that my original amazement at Daney at not having seen OCTOBER was
based on the nature of Daney's film criticism and not on the fact
that he hadn't seen a famous film. I did not express amazement that
he hadn't seen LE JOUR SE LEVE or BAMBI.
Having said that, I have a confession to make: I just finished a
book on THE THOUSAND EYES OF DR. MABUSE, MARNIE and TWO WEEKS IN
ANOTHER TOWN. The only trouble is I haven't seen these films. I've
been reading about them for years and the descriptions of them are so
powerful that they have functioned for me as a cinema of the
imaginary, too powerful, too beautiful to see. If I saw them, I
would probably just go out and commit suicide. It has to do with my
childhood. I didn't get enough love and when I read about these
three films during my teenage years I realized that each of them WAS
my life. So even though I do a fair amount of close analysis in the
book please keep in mind that I haven't the slightest idea what I'm
talking about.
6783
From: samfilms2003
Date: Sun Jan 18, 2004 4:53pm
Subject: Re: Renoir and The Rules of the Game
> Although I've always liked it quite a bit, I convinced myself some
> yers ago that there were Renoir films that were much better than
> RULES (THE RIVER is probably my favorite overall, and LA BETE
> HUMAINE and DAY IN THE COUNTRY would be close behind), but I had to
> write a piece on this DVD myself last week...and I can't stop
> watching this film. It's fucking amazing.
I don't really know why its critical reputation has slipped (or care).
It's good enough, I think it will survive.
Nor can I see how it's "middle brow" but "The Golden Coach" is not.
One thing it is to me. it's a filmmaker's film - not a shot wasted, no
shots uneccessary. And like the best Renoirs of the sound era, it
lifts the composition / mise-en-scene out of what I'd call the soundstage
box.
Again it amazes me how the writers on this list use certain directors'
own films as ammunition against them. As obsession with ratings that
puts ABC and Fox TV to shame.
-Sam
6784
From: Zach Campbell
Date: Sun Jan 18, 2004 5:11pm
Subject: Re: Renoir and The Rules of the Game
Peter:
> While we're at this, I'll confess that the canonized Renoir I've
> never quite loved is "Grand Illusion,"
Though I like GRAND ILLUSION very much, it's probably the Renoir
I've seen with the biggest negative gap between its reputation and
my affection. THE RULES OF THE GAME is my favorite Renoir
("middlebrow," hmph) but I saw it too long ago to discuss in any
substantial detail.
Bilge:
> As for it being a "masterpiece for middlebrows"...I suspect one can
> say that about any film that eventually achieves an obscenely big
> reputation. (I've heard variations of this pointed at everything
> from 8 1/2 to THE SEVENTH SEAL to CITIZEN KANE to CHILDREN OF
> PARADISE.)
I'd say THE SEVENTH SEAL deserves it, though if anyone here likes
the film I'd be happy to hear their thoughts. Maybe CHILDREN OF
PARADISE too, but that's a more complicated case -- I always wonder
if that film is as great as a movie can get without having great
direction.
--Zach
6785
From: jpcoursodon
Date: Sun Jan 18, 2004 5:12pm
Subject: Re: KAPO seen and unseen
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Adrian Martin wrote:
.
>
> On another, more general Daney matter: when he talked
about 'missing'
> certain films (like OCTOBER, BAMBI, etc) wasn't he also evoking
(alongside
> standard human problems of time, opportunity, money to buy tickets
or
> videos, the country you happen to live in, etc) something a bit more
> mysterious and psychoanalytical? - such as: the strange RESISTANCE
we all
> feel about finally watching certain films (even ones we have on our
shelves
> for years ... ), as if we are either preserving a myth or protecting
> ourselves from a potential 'bad encounter', and then how (this is
what
> Daney's essay is all about, to me) each of our interior cinephilici
> autobiographies is constructed precisely AROUND or UPON these
absences and
> the weird, mythic, irrational-yet-charged significances they
assume ...
>
> Adrian
Right on! I have been thinking about just this a lot and I think
it's a fascinating subject to explore, even if it's just
a "psuchological" issue -- because after all the psychology of the
viewer has A LOT to do with the way films are received, experienced,
understood and evaluated.
JPC
6786
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Sun Jan 18, 2004 5:22pm
Subject: Re: Re: Renoir and The Rules of the Game
--- samfilms2003 wrote:
> Nor can I see how it's "middle brow" but "The Golden
> Coach" is not.
It's the "The terrible thing is everyone has his
reasons" meme -- ceaselessly repeated as a means of
stifling serious critical discussion.
The film's view of "masters" and "servants" is less
Marivaux than boulevard farce.
>
> One thing it is to me. it's a filmmaker's film - not
> a shot wasted, no
> shots uneccessary. And like the best Renoirs of the
> sound era, it
> lifts the composition / mise-en-scene out of what
> I'd call the soundstage
> box.
And on that level I find "Boudu Saved From Drowning"
superior in every way.
>
> Again it amazes me how the writers on this list use
> certain directors'
> own films as ammunition against them. As obsession
> with ratings that
> puts ABC and Fox TV to shame.
>
Oh pish-tush! Renoir's importance as a filmmaker is
beyond dispute. What I was simply trying to get at
here was calcified critical attitudes.
Irrespective of "value judgements" much work needs to
be done on recieved wisdom vis-a-vis cinematic
history.
Eisenstein, to give but one example, has yet to be
seriously analyzed in depth.
>
>
>
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6787
From: jpcoursodon
Date: Sun Jan 18, 2004 5:42pm
Subject: Renoir et La Regle du jeu
Let's have a bit of French for a change. After all it IS a French
film (has anyone ever pondered why "Rule" is singular in French and
plural in English in the title?)
David is an intellectual terrorist who loves to throw molotov
cocktails into the cinephilic crowd. There may be a bit of the
suicide bomber in him, too...
If "La regle" (as French cinephiles -- not cineastes -- call it) is a
film for "middle-brows" how come the middle-brow French audiences
hated it so much when it came out that it had to be withdrawn?
When a film become universally admired, of course, it becomes
fashionable for some people to put it down.
When i was young (and, if not foolish, at least excessive) I used to
say that pre-New Wave French cinema had produced only three great
films: Bubuel's L'AGE d'OR, Vigo's L'ATALANTE and Renoir's LA REGLE
DU JEU. I have seen all three dozens of times and have not wavered as
to their greatness.
(my only problem with the Renoir is that I have never seen a really
good print of it. Maybe now at last...)
JPC
6788
From: Zach Campbell
Date: Sun Jan 18, 2004 6:21pm
Subject: Re: Daves - 3:10 to Yuma (spoilers)
Sorry to hear, Fred, that you weren't impressed by the film, but we
can agree on one thing I'm sure: if you ever by chance see it again,
we'll both hope you like it more next time around.
> Very early in the film, when we cut from John Ford style a shot
> of the porch of "home" taken from behind the wife looking out on
> the landscape to a high angle reverse shot looking at the same
> scene from high up, I knew we weren't in Shinbone anymore. I
> thought the cut was spatially and visually awful, the kind of
> incoherent thing I'm used to seeing from a visually incompetent
> director.
Except that in 3:10 TO YUMA these visual principles are
not 'incoherent.' The film is organized around a transcience
between the phenomenal and the spiritual, the earthy and the heady.
As I asserted in that earlier post, "this film isn't blurring the
boundaries between dichotomies so much as it's declining to worry
about dichotomies much in the first place." The characters exist
between good and evil, the storytelling exists between cool
omniscience and heated subjectivity, and the visuals exist between
matter-of-factness and exultation. I suppose that if the film
succeeds for you, that "between" turns into "beyond."
The "lack of spatial coherence" you saw is, to me, *precisely* an
example of spatial coherence because the initially jarring nature of
the level shots and high shots speaks to a worldview rootless and in
motion, its players in search of an absolution that comes by the end-
-in the form of rain and redemption--but even in resolution can't be
pigeonholed as either an act of God or a stroke of luck.
> I guess the ethos behind the idea of providing substitute
> emotional worlds for the viewer to escape into seems to me one to
> argue with, not encourage,
To some extent, this is true of any Hollywood film, even the
greatest: it's a machinery of culture that no auteur can fully
overcome. What struck me as different about 3:10 TO YUMA in this
respect is that Daves and his cast don't try to resist or subvert
the emotional identification but instead perform a bit of jiu jitsu
on it, using its own great momentum to wrestle it into submission to
be used in an interesting way. (I admit emotional identification
may have been--no, it *has* been--cheapened and erected into an
unnecessary idol of bland 'artistry,' but it is in and of itself not
a bad thing a priori, I would say. A catholic and flexible taste
should handle it without many problems.) This is to say that unless
we trustingly slip into (it needn't be an "escape") the emotional
worlds of the characters, the film will not work as well. I also
can't imagine watching a Mulligan film without the same kind of
investment (even though Mulligan is of course a very different
director than Daves in 3:10).
I think that I understand your reluctance to embrace emotional
identification, and your willingness to approach "out of focus or
hand painted abstract films." I sympathize because I think that art
should keep us aware of our time in the world and in front of a
screen; I do not go to films (or read books or listen to music)
to 'escape.' But emotional identification is what it is, and we can
approach it as such without morals and moralism even if it is up to
us to critique its applications.
> Though the Ford character is presented as an honorable villain,
> his sudden turn to "real" self-sacrificing honor at the end makes
> little sense in terms of his character, though a lot of sense to
> those of us who want to believe in the inherent goodness of the
> guy we've been watching.
You're absolutely right. Ford's willingness to sacrifice in the
name of honor does not make much sense. But this is precisely the
point the film has been building up to: because we're following Van
Heflin's character and his pool of doubts, anxieties, hopes, we are
meant to experience the ending in the same way he is. It defies
reason but happens anyway: a miracle with nary a mention of God. Is
it luck? Is it a change of heart? Is it, in fact, a higher power?
The experience overwhelms the abstractions.
Hopefully I can revisit the film in the next few months and go into
greater detail: I'd love to write about it. I just hope that the
Daves films I see from here on out are more like it and less like
THE BADLANDERS.
--Zach
6789
From: Maxime
Date: Sun Jan 18, 2004 6:29pm
Subject: The movies I dream
For years I was referring to a scene from a Melville's movie, which,
for obscure and anecdotal reasons, made quite an impression on me.
Some friend of mine convinced me that this scene was a pure product
of my imagination.
It may be he was true. But I miss the scene now.
Orphan scene, this fragment is now struggling to coexist with the
legitimate pieces.
I'm hunted by movies that merely exist though abandoned fragments of
my memories. Seen years ago, it may be that I won't have a chance to
see them once again.
If I have some idea of what I may desire, expect from cinema, this
idea lives on both sides of my memories.
I can't deny the dreamed one.
6790
From: Fred Camper
Date: Sun Jan 18, 2004 6:31pm
Subject: Re: Re: It's Spinach and to Hell with It! (classics we don't like)
Henrik Sylow wrote:
>To me its "L'Annèe dernière à Marienbad".
>
Oh, I agree. MAD magazine's short parody, "Last Year at Marion's Pad,"
was much better. A bunch of hipsters were wondering who Marion was and
where she might have vanished to, or something like that.
I'll add a couple of classics I don't like but that it's been too long
since I've seen for me to debate properly: "The Cabinet of Dr.
Caligari," "Wild Strawberries," "8-/2." The last actually does have a
consistent style that's connected to its meaning -- I just don't like
the style. The first two seemed to me to be almost unwatchably
uncinematic messes long ago when I was first discovering Mizoguchi and
Ford and Brakhage.
Of course, as I may have posted before, in the early years of American
auteurism if there was an established view of what "film art" was it was
Bergman, Fellini, and Antonioni, plus official classics such as
"Caligari," with almost everything from Hollywood other than some
silents and "Citizen Kane" considered garbage, so there was a natural
tendency to react against the "classics." I mean, I think I went into my
first Bergman, "Wild Strawberries," hoping to dislike it. I have to
admit that I'm not very fond of the Bergmans I saw later but I couldn't
be so harsh on "Persona" as to call it an "uncinematic mess."
- Fred
6791
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Sun Jan 18, 2004 6:47pm
Subject: Re: Renoir et La Regle du jeu
--- jpcoursodon wrote:
>
> David is an intellectual terrorist who loves to
> throw molotov
> cocktails into the cinephilic crowd. There may be a
> bit of the
> suicide bomber in him, too...
>
Well I'm not about to blow myself up along with such
French faves of mine like Demy, Chereau, Godard,
Rouch, Resnias and Sacha Guitry. But I think the
proverbial "last straw" fell when my nemesis Amy
Taubin called "Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train" a
"Gay more operatic Rules of the Game." And while I
know what she means my first thought was "Can we have
a moratorium on Rules of the Game analogy?" I'm sure
you recall that Altman's "Nashville" was decreed (by
Kael I believe) to be another "Rules of the Game," and
I'm know others on the list can cite further
rhetorical analogies. "La Regle du Jeu" not the sine
qua non of cinema. It's a good movie. I enjoyed it.
But I enjoyed other Renoirs more. And there are
certainly any other films more deserving of such
monumental regard --"Psycho" being an obvious
example,IMO.
By contrast,the canonical status of "Citizen Kane" has
never annoyed me in that despite repeated viewings (I
know I've sat through it at least 75 times) it retains
its freshness. And I say that as someone who prefers
"Touch of Evil" and "F For Fake."
I trust strapping dynamite to my chest (or around my
head like Belmondo in "Pierrot le Fou") wasn't
required to make such a statement.
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6792
From: samfilms2003
Date: Sun Jan 18, 2004 6:50pm
Subject: Re: Renoir and The Rules of the Game
Then again, everyone does have his reasons, Bush and Chirac
alike...
> And on that level I find "Boudu Saved From Drowning"
> superior in every way.
Boudu is wonderful. So is "The Little Match Girl" (I've NO
idea what brow *that* is...
> Irrespective of "value judgements" much work needs to
> be done on recieved wisdom vis-a-vis cinematic
> history.
Couldn't agree more.
> Eisenstein, to give but one example, has yet to be
> seriously analyzed in depth.
Now THAT is a provactive statement ! Get going ;-)
-Sam
6793
From: jpcoursodon
Date: Sun Jan 18, 2004 7:18pm
Subject: Re: Renoir et La Regle du jeu
David, critics are lazy and they have to write so much, it's not
surprising that they'll fall back on the same phrases and analogies
whenever they can (in the December issue of Harper's Magazine an
editor of The New Leader quotes more than thirty sentences by New
York Times book reviewer Michiko Kakutani that include the
verb "limn" in a wide multiplicity of contexts). The current
fashionable term for what Chereau does in your favorite film of all
times and Altman did in NASHVILLE and Renoir to a more modest scale
in RULES is "choral".
PSYCHO enjoys as much "monumental regard" as RULES OF THE GAME does,
perhaps even more (at least more people have seen it and love it) so
I don't think that's a very good example.
And you haven't explained why RULES is a film for middle-brows, or
answered my question about why the French middle-brows who should
have loved it hated it so much in September 1939. Perhaps it was a
film for post-war middle-brows...
JPC
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, David Ehrenstein
wrote:
>
> --- jpcoursodon wrote:
>
> >
> > David is an intellectual terrorist who loves to
> > throw molotov
> > cocktails into the cinephilic crowd. There may be a
> > bit of the
> > suicide bomber in him, too...
> >
> Well I'm not about to blow myself up along with such
> French faves of mine like Demy, Chereau, Godard,
> Rouch, Resnias and Sacha Guitry. But I think the
> proverbial "last straw" fell when my nemesis Amy
> Taubin called "Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train" a
> "Gay more operatic Rules of the Game." And while I
> know what she means my first thought was "Can we have
> a moratorium on Rules of the Game analogy?" I'm sure
> you recall that Altman's "Nashville" was decreed (by
> Kael I believe) to be another "Rules of the Game," and
> I'm know others on the list can cite further
> rhetorical analogies. "La Regle du Jeu" not the sine
> qua non of cinema. It's a good movie. I enjoyed it.
> But I enjoyed other Renoirs more. And there are
> certainly any other films more deserving of such
> monumental regard --"Psycho" being an obvious
> example,IMO.
>
> By contrast,the canonical status of "Citizen Kane" has
> never annoyed me in that despite repeated viewings (I
> know I've sat through it at least 75 times) it retains
> its freshness. And I say that as someone who prefers
> "Touch of Evil" and "F For Fake."
>
> I trust strapping dynamite to my chest (or around my
> head like Belmondo in "Pierrot le Fou") wasn't
> required to make such a statement.
>
> __________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Yahoo! Hotjobs: Enter the "Signing Bonus" Sweepstakes
> http://hotjobs.sweepstakes.yahoo.com/signingbonus
6794
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Sun Jan 18, 2004 7:29pm
Subject: Re: Re: Renoir et La Regle du jeu
--- jpcoursodon wrote:
> And you haven't explained why RULES is a film for
> middle-brows,
I think I have, vis-a-vis the "Everyone has his
reasons" meme, and comparasion to boulevard farce. I
don't find it to be a particularly deep analysis class
relations or politics. It does what it wants to do and
no more. Yet it has been seen as so much more --
because of its very limitations. By contrast there's
no way to escape the fact that Warren Beatty means
very serious political business in "Bulworth" --
except to ignore the film entirely.
or
> answered my question about why the French
> middle-brows who should
> have loved it hated it so much in September 1939.
They hated it because he cast Dalio as an aristocrat.
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6795
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Sun Jan 18, 2004 7:31pm
Subject: Re: Re: Renoir and The Rules of the Game
--- samfilms2003 wrote:
>
>
> > Eisenstein, to give but one example, has yet to be
> > seriously analyzed in depth.
>
> Now THAT is a provactive statement ! Get going ;-)
>
> -Sam
>
Well Nestor Almendros fired the first shot on that
score. Still waiting for some reaction. Maybe I'll
take SME up sometime soon. Rather hard to do in that
there's so much information about life under Stalin
that's unavailable.
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6796
From: joe_mcelhaney
Date: Sun Jan 18, 2004 8:07pm
Subject: Re: It's Spinach and to Hell with It! (classics we don't like)
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Fred Camper wrote:
>
>
> Henrik Sylow wrote:
>
> >To me its "L'Annèe dernière à Marienbad".
> >
> Oh, I agree. MAD magazine's short parody, "Last Year at Marion's
>Pad," was much better. A bunch of hipsters were wondering who Marion
>was and where she might have vanished to, or something like that.
I hope that I do not stand alone among this group in thinking that
MARIENBAD is not only a great film but, if anything, underrated
rather than overrated.
I have MAD's parody of THE BIRDS entitled FOR THE BIRDS, directed by
Alfred Hatchplot and starring "a Hitchcock mistake," Tipsy
Headrinse. It's funny but it's not better than its source.
6797
From:
Date: Sun Jan 18, 2004 5:14pm
Subject: Classics We Do and Don't Like; Resnais; Bergman; Welles
Joe McElhaney wrote:
>I hope that I do not stand alone among this group in thinking that
>MARIENBAD is not only a great film but, if anything, underrated
>rather than overrated.
I like "Marienbad," though not as much as some other Resnais films: "Night
and Fog," "Hiroshima, mon amour," and especially, >especially< the amazing "Je
t'aime, je t'aime." I wonder aloud if anyone here besides Jonathan and myself
have seen his wonderful "late film" "I Want To Gome Home"? A delightful
clash-of-cultures comedy with a script by Jules Feiffer. (I know Jonathan's seen
it because he's written about it.)
As Fred says, it was perfectly understandable how the early auteurists
reacted (perhaps overreacted) against the classic staples of "film art" in order to
emphasize the great films which existed outside of museum culture. (Even as
recently as 1997, Bogdanovich was still talking about the discussions he and
Sarris had in the early '60s about the superiority of Hitchcock to Antonioni!)
But I think that we can now see that at least some of the museum culture guys
had something. I don't like "The Seventh Seal" at all, but some of the later
Bergmans - particularly "Persona" and "Cries and Whispers" - are actually
really great. Fellini is another matter. I guess you just have to take them one
by one.
"Classics I don't like" is not a category I'm entirely comfortable with
because I much prefer talking about great films than poor ones (or rather: films
which I think are great rather than films which I think are poor). But
sometimes it can help to make a point, I suppose. For example, I think "Citizen Kane"
is great, but it's also highly overrated, in my opinion, and I'd name it in a
"classics I think are overrated" poll in order to draw attention to other
Orson Welles films which I think are far greater. Ballot-stuffing can be a
useful activity; placing Robert Aldrich's "...All the Marbles" at the top of a list
will bring the film attention.
Peter
6798
From:
Date: Sun Jan 18, 2004 5:20pm
Subject: Which Way to the Front? Aspect Ratio
Does anyone here know the aspect ratio of Jerry Lewis's "Which Way to the
Front"? The IMDB is of no help.
Thanks in advance,
Peter
6799
From: samfilms2003
Date: Sun Jan 18, 2004 10:31pm
Subject: Eisenstein revisited (Re: Renoir and The Rules of the Game)
-> Well Nestor Almendros fired the first shot on that
> score. Still waiting for some reaction.
I haven't read that, although I've heard of it. In Film Comment ?
Is it available online anywhere ? (I tried google once, didn't find it)
-sam
6800
From: jpcoursodon
Date: Sun Jan 18, 2004 10:57pm
Subject: Re: Renoir et La Regle du jeu
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, David Ehrenstein
wrote:
>
> --- jpcoursodon wrote:
or
> > answered my question about why the French
> > middle-brows who should
> > have loved it hated it so much in September 1939.
>
> They hated it because he cast Dalio as an aristocrat.
>
> _______Sure, most French people were anti-semitic at the time,it
seems, but surely it was not quite enough to create riots and general
rejection of the film as "un navet."
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