Home Film
Art
Other: (Travel, Rants, Obits)
Links About
Contact
a_film_by Main Page
Posts From the Internet Film Discussion Group, a_film_by
This group is dedicated to discussing film as art
from an auteurist perspective. The index to these files of posts can be found at http://www.fredcamper.com/afilmby/ The purpose of these files is to make our posts more accessible, for downloading and reading and to search engines.
Important: The copyright of each post below is owned by the
person who wrote the post, and reproducing it in any form requires
that person's permission.
It is possible to email the author of any post by finding a post
they have written in the a_film_by archives at
http://movies.groups.yahoo.com/group/a_film_by/messages and
emailing them from that Web site.
21601
From: Adrian Martin
Date: Fri Jan 21, 2005 1:43pm
Subject: re: Mulligan (avant-garde postscript)
Jean-Pierre asked:
"Why were people so enraged by the film, exactly? It would have
been interesting to interview some of them. It was an unusual
experience, because audiences these days are SO passive.... Maybe
they had never seen anything "avant garde" -- which i suspect is the
case for most general audiences."
Indeed, it was probably the FIRST avant-garde film many of these people had
been exposed to - and what a way to be de-virginised on this score!!! It is
an incredibly aggressive film (unless you already love this kind of hardcore
'materialist' cinema) in that it seems to be 'jammed' - indeed, people were
yelling out comments like 'fix the projector!', thinking it was like a stuck
CD player !!! And then when people realised this was all they were going to
get - the stuttering images and sounds back and forth - they didn't and
couldn't relax; they got MORE mad! I don't know about American audiences,
but in Australia and England (at least) I know that there can be a very
violent reaction against avant-garde screening experiences (especially when
completely unannounced and unexpected, as was the case here - the whole
crowd except me was waiting for the human-realist indie movie about Chinese
immigrants in USA to begin) - the reaction seems to express (and I have
heard this explicitly from students) 'does this film think it's smarter than
me or something? Is it trying to go over my head? Well, then, fuck off!' -
hence the yelling, throwing, banging the projector booth, etc. (There was an
avant-garde event at a DRIVE-IN in Melbourne in the '80s - true story - in
which the angry crowd actually ROCKED THE PROJECTOR BOOTH BACK AND FORTH on
its moorings to stop the film!!!).
I may have told this part before in this group, but there is one other movie
I saw which turned a crowd of polite Melbourne arthouse patrons into
bloodthirsty anti-cinema commandos, even to the point of obscenely defacing
the poster outside the theatre - that was Manoel De Oliveira's THE CONVENT,
released commercially because it starred Deneuve and (uh oh, here he comes)
Malkovich!! Yes, there is a way for the heroic avant-garde to wake up the
passive audience - even today !!!!! And old Manoel did it ...
Adrian
21602
From: Yoel Meranda
Date: Fri Jan 21, 2005 1:39pm
Subject: Re: Neutral Style
Question # 3:
If I record sounds from the street or the nature without editing
them, would that be "neutral" music?
Which leads me to another thing... what if I edit the sounds? Would
that still be neutral music? Isn't this really close to the nature of what you call the "neutral"
cinema?
Comment #1:
I don't think the concept of "neutralism" helps us in understanding
aesthetics. I believe aesthetics is personal expression and therefore what matters is how
the individual uses or shapes the reality. "Personal" expression is not possible without
shaping. And if someone chooses not to shape, that is simply bad art.
Obviously there are filmmakers who uses the "recorded" as an integral
part of their expression but they should shape it in some way (consciously or
unconsciously).
I love Chris Welsby's films. For those who haven't seen it "The Tree"
consists of one shot (I believe) where a camera tied to a tree branch keeps recording. Is
this "neutral"? Or how is this "not neutral"? I love the film because it forces you to conclude
that it is not "neutral". Someone used the words "it is both art and theory of its art" here a
few days ago. The same is true for "The Tree".
Comment #2:
Andy Warhol's art is as formalist as it gets. I thought people used the word realism for his
films but I had never met someone who called his paintings "neutral" or anything like that.
Silk-screening totally formalizes the reality. What you see has nothing to do with Marlyn
Monroe's face and I think that is one of the most amazing things about Warhol's art
(maybe even the point of it?).
From his films, I have only seen "Blow Job" and I am in love with the film. What makes it
great is not that it is "neutral", it actually is the exact opposite.
It is extremely sensual, the film asks you to watch the movement of the lights on the
screen and it asks you to feel the lack of depth, etc.
Comment #3:
I'm not even sure there can be anything "neutral" even if it is not art. The moment you
choose to be recording reality, and start making decisions on which reality to record,
when, how, which film stock, or is it video, digital?, how are we lighting this? are we not?
You can't be neutral.
The first filmmakers, the Lumieres, felt this and proved it with
their films that might seem to be "neutral".
Yoel
21603
From: thebradstevens
Date: Fri Jan 21, 2005 1:40pm
Subject: Re: Mulligan (avant-garde postscript)
"the reaction seems to express (and I have heard this explicitly from
students) 'does this film think it's smarter than me or something? Is
it trying to go over my head? Well, then, fuck off!' -"
I haven't seen the film in question, but from your description, it
would seem that the director was attempting to show how superior he
was to Robert Mulligan's film, and to that entire brand of humanist
filmmaking it represented - hence also to everyone naive enough to
believe that Mulligan is a filmmaker deserving of serious attention!
Perhaps the students' reaction was justified.
21604
From: jpcoursodon
Date: Fri Jan 21, 2005 1:56pm
Subject: Re: Mulligan (avant-garde postscript)
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "thebradstevens"
wrote:
>
> "the reaction seems to express (and I have heard this explicitly
from
> students) 'does this film think it's smarter than me or something?
Is
> it trying to go over my head? Well, then, fuck off!' -"
>
> I haven't seen the film in question, but from your description, it
> would seem that the director was attempting to show how superior
he
> was to Robert Mulligan's film, and to that entire brand of
humanist
> filmmaking it represented - hence also to everyone naive enough to
> believe that Mulligan is a filmmaker deserving of serious
attention!
> Perhaps the students' reaction was justified.
I haven't seen the film either but I suspect it is intended as a
work of deconstruction of a typical product of American mainstream
cinema, without any judgement intended of the quality of the film or
talent of its director. Am i wrong? JPC
21605
From: Gabe Klinger
Date: Fri Jan 21, 2005 2:17pm
Subject: Re: Mulligan (avant-garde postscript)
> I haven't seen the film either but I suspect it is intended as a
> work of deconstruction of a typical product of American
mainstream
> cinema, without any judgement intended of the quality of the
film or
> talent of its director. Am i wrong? JPC
From an interview with Martin Arnold in Film Quarterly:
How did you choose this particular scene from To Kill a
Mockingbirgd?
I had two requirements. First, I wanted another domestic
moment [after the first, Piece Touchee]. Second, because I
wanted to integrate the synch sound into my repetitive patterns,
the scene had to have a certain density on the auditory level: to
put simply, it had to be loud and eventful.
Those points of departure soon merged in the idea of choosing
a scene of a family at the dining table, where the family, home,
and gender themes could pair best with my formal ambition to
work with the repetitions of douns. There would be a lot clatter
and scraping at the table, the shrill voices of the kids, and the
lower voices of the grown-ups who "educate," that is, repeat
certain orders, to furnish the kids with a decent behavorial
repertoire.
and:
It's true, that if somebody knows To Kill a Mockingbird, he could
associate the rest of the film to what I am doing. But that wasn't
my intent.
...And he goes on. You can find the rest in the fall '94 (vol. 48, no.
1) issue.
Gabe
21606
From:
Date: Fri Jan 21, 2005 9:42am
Subject: Badham and Hyams (Was: Films of the 00's (very Obsessed)
I appreciate the feedback on Badham, Bill, Dan, and JP, and I even more
appreciate the ensuing thread on neutrality and film style! Very interesting
reading.
Bill wrote about Peter Hyams in a post on Badham:
>Peter Hyams, on the other hand, had a little
>something for a while, back in the late 70s and early 80s. But not a
>lot!
Hyams is another guy I was asking about over the summer. Based on some
suggestions by Dan, Michael Worrall, and others, I checked out some of his films.
I thought some of the early ones, particularly "Hanover Street," were simply
superb. I haven't seen everything yet, but I'd venture to see Hyams' 80s work
is less interesting - though more interesting than his output in the 90s. The
most recent really good one that I've seen is "Narrow Margin." I thought
that Michael Worrall summed up Hyams well when he wrote (sorry, I don't have the
post number handy), "I do not see Hyams as an auteur but a craftsman whose
work I get pleasure from watching. (As I had written before, excellent
cinematography and use of the Panavision frame.) That may not cut it on an auteurists
board, but solid craft has become so rare in Hollywood filmmaking in the past
24 years that can appreciate Hyams."
On the basis of "Hanover Street" alone, you probably could have gotten me to
say that he's a real auteur. But Michael's comments ring true when one looks
at his subsequent work - which is not a putdown necessarily. If he made a new
film, I'd probably see it.
Peter
21607
From:
Date: Fri Jan 21, 2005 9:46am
Subject: Re: Re: Pollack (Was: Neutral Style)
Brad Stevens wrote:
>No way! His best work is CASTLE KEEP. Nothing else in Pollack's
>oeuvre even comes close.
This one has a real following, I gather. I haven't seen it yet (or, indeed,
many Pollack films), but Jean-Pierre's "American Directors" entry on Pollack
interests me because it would seem to indicate that Pollack does have general
themes and styles throughout all of his films, that "Castle Keep" is not just a
one-off. I don't have his essay in front of me, but I believe JP argued very
persuasively on behalf of "Bobby Deerfield."
Peter
21608
From: Aaron Graham
Date: Fri Jan 21, 2005 3:02pm
Subject: Re: Pollack (Was: Neutral Style)
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, ptonguette@a... wrote:
> Brad Stevens wrote:
>
> >No way! His best work is CASTLE KEEP. Nothing else in Pollack's
> >oeuvre even comes close.
>
> This one has a real following, I gather.
I haven't seen "Castle Keep" yet, but I'll keep an eye out. But for
my money, "They Shoot Horses, Don't They" remains his best work --
probably his strongest in the visuals sense. "Bobby
Deerfield", "Jeremiah Johnson", "Three Days of the Condor" are all
personal favorites -- his latest with Sean Penn and Nicole Kidman,
the title of which escapes me now, also looks to be a winner
according to the trailer.
21609
From:
Date: Fri Jan 21, 2005 10:07am
Subject: Re: Re: Neutral Style
This discussion originally had something to do with TV directors and their
preference for a neutral style. Just for the sake of mixing things up, I'd like
to point to at least two who have worked in television whose style I'd never
describe as neutral: Paul Wendkos and Peter Bogdanovich. Bogdanovich's work
on TV (even including his episode of "The Sopranos") contains the same
signature mise-en-scene as do his theatrical features. I've never tested this by
running, say, "To Sir, with Love II" or "The Mystery of Natalie Wood" on film next
to "The Last Picture Show" or "Paper Moon" on film, but I'd venture to say
I'm correct. There's the same use of POV, the same editing rhythms, the same
type of camera moves, and so forth. And the one or two Wendkos TV movies I've
seen definitely resemble a Wendkos film like "The Mephisto Waltz." Indeed, the
one Wendkos with a "neutral" style that I've seen is the >feature< "Gidget"!
Peter
21610
From:
Date: Fri Jan 21, 2005 10:22am
Subject: Re: Re: Robert Mulligan on Netflix
Jean-Pierre Coursodon wrote:
>"The Other" (perhaps his most ambitious
>film)
As I posted, it's my current favorite of Mulligan's work. As you know, JP,
John Belton has a great discussion of "The Other" in his Mulligan essay, which
was reprinted in our feature at The Film Journal. I recommend both the film
(and the essay) very highly!
>and "The Nickel Ride" (the latter was discussed here a few
>months ago I think.)
"The Nickel Ride" we discussed about a year ago. A bit more recently there
was a brief discussion of "Blood Brothers." Both films are great, though I
prefer "Blood Brothers," I think. The scenes with Stony at the construction site
are particularly impressive because of the great way he uses the location and
the equally interesting way he uses time. As I wrote in a previous post,
time feels "prolonged to emphasize Stony's (Richard Gere's) ill-at-easeness on
the job when he's rushing up the stairs with cable, and down (and back up again)
the stairs several minutes later to fetch coffee for the crew."
Mulligan is a master.
Peter
21611
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Fri Jan 21, 2005 3:27pm
Subject: Re: Re: Pollack (Was: Neutral Style)
--- Aaron Graham wrote:
But for
> my money, "They Shoot Horses, Don't They" remains
> his best work --
> probably his strongest in the visuals sense.
A film that would never be made today-- and it's a
miracle it was made then.
Before Pollack took over the project screenwriter
James Poe was supposed to direct and the role Susannah
York played was set to go to Mrs. Poe:
http://ehrensteinland.com/htmls/g008/barbarasteele.html
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - Find what you need with new enhanced search.
http://info.mail.yahoo.com/mail_250
21612
From: Robert Keser
Date: Fri Jan 21, 2005 3:38pm
Subject: Re: Robert Mulligan on Netflix
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, ptonguette@a... wrote:
> Mulligan is a master.
The one Mulligan film that I couldn't shoehorn into my
CLARA'S HEART piece – although god knows, I tried! – is
THE GREAT IMPOSTOR. In some ways this is the most impressive
demonstration of Mulligan's range yet problematic in determining
his themes, but it is also quite instructive as generous chunks
later turn up "adapted" into Spielberg's CATCH ME IF YOU
CAN (by accident, no doubt!).
The film catches Tony Curtis at the absolute top of his energy and
skill, coming off of SOME LIKE IT HOT and OPERATION PETTICOAT,
while Mulligan successfully stages a thrillingly tense stand-down
and fight in a penitentiary—-a scene that could be used as a
model of visual economy—-then somewhat later a long, elaborate
and hilarious sequence of impromptu dentistry, done as silent comedy
without so much as a note of music (Edmond O'Brien makes an
amazingly game stooge here). Finally, Mulligan sketches out a brief
but luminous romance that manages to be touching with only four or
five scenes of development. All this and crisp b/w work from
Hitchcock's photographer too (apparently Robert Burks was working
with Mulligan on THE RAT RACE and/or THE GREAT IMPOSTOR while Hitch
was using his TV crew to make PSYCHO).
Apparently, if you believe IMDb, VHS copies are still available of
THE GREAT IMPOSTOR and BLOODBROTHERS (one word!) and THE PURSUIT OF
HAPPINESS and the first-rate THE STALKING MOON, but not of THE RAT
RACE or THE NICKEL RIDE (two I've never seen).
--Robert Keser
21613
From: Jim Healy
Date: Fri Jan 21, 2005 7:19pm
Subject: Re: Re: Robert Mulligan on Netflix
Hi everybody,
I'm a programmer at George Eastman House in Rochester, NY. I've been
lurking the last several weeks and wanted to come out in order to join
the (small) chorus of praises for one of my favorite films, "The Other",
which is my favorite Mulligan too. I wanted to chime in on Blake
Edwards' "Wild Rovers" a few weeks ago, but it didn't seem to catch fire
as a topic here. That's another favorite of mine.
ptonguette@a... wrote:
> As I posted, it's my current favorite of Mulligan's work. As you
> know, JP,
> John Belton has a great discussion of "The Other" in his Mulligan
> essay, which
> was reprinted in our feature at The Film Journal. I recommend both
> the film
> (and the essay) very highly!
Can you tell me where I can find this essay?
I can't think of a more chilling movie from its era and it might be the
best of a small, but nasty genre subsection: bad seed thrillers. It's
definitely scarier than "The Exorcist". What's most effective and
disturbing is that Mulligan takes the reassuring parent-children and
sibling relationships from "Mockingbird" (a film I have to admit liking
quite a bit) and turns them upside down even more effectively than
Martin Arnold did. As in "Man In the Moon", the midwestern farm is a
place fraught with dangers and loneliness. Fox is making a new print of
"The Other" for a screening we're having in May, which usually means
they're remastering the elements for dvd too. Hopefully, it will turn up
at a cinematheque (or netflix) near you. Don't miss it if you haven't
seen it.
>
> Mulligan is a master.
Agreed. Anybody else here a fan of "The Rat Race" like me? I saw it on
AMC in the 90s at some point. "Love With a Proper Stranger" might be my
next favorite Mulligan, but I find the ending too abrupt. I was
disappointed in "Bloodbrothers" when I saw it years ago after reading
the Richard Price novel, which I loved. But I'm ready to give it a
second chance. I always assumed the Tom Tryon novel on which "The Other"
is based was bestseller schlock that Mulligan turned into a work of art,
but I never read it. Anyone have a different opinion on this?
Anyway, good to be here.
Jim Healy
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
21614
From: filipefurtado
Date: Fri Jan 21, 2005 4:23pm
Subject: Re: Re: Robert Mulligan on Netflix
Noel, the best films on this list are
The Man in the Moon and Baby, the rain
must fall, but all of the others are
good too. I do agree that some of
Mulligan's best films like Love with a
Proper Stranger and Stalking Moon are
absent.
Peter, I think Come September is a
good film, but I must add that's
indeed a minor one where Mulligan had
to work with very poor material. That
he made it work is proof of how good
Mulligan could be, most people (even
some good ones) would had simple throw
the towel on that one very early on.
And let me congratulate you and Rick
for the great Mulligan issue of Film
Journal.
Filipe
__________________________________________________________________________
Acabe com aquelas janelinhas que pulam na sua tela.
AntiPop-up UOL - É grátis!
http://antipopup.uol.com.br/
21615
From: filipefurtado
Date: Fri Jan 21, 2005 4:34pm
Subject: Re: Badham and Hyams (Was: Films of the 00's (very Obsessed)
> On the basis of "Hanover Street"
alone, you probably could have gotten
me to
> say that he's a real auteur. But
Michael's comments ring true when one
looks
> at his subsequent work - which is
not a putdown necessarily. If he made
a new
> film, I'd probably see it.
He has a new one called A Sound of
Thunder based on a Ray Bradbury short
story. Warner is delaying the release
for a long time (the original release
date was September, 2003), so I'm
pretty sure when it show up it will be
dumped and forgotten in a couple of
weeks (so if you really want to see a
Hyams film on theatres, I'd recommend
trying to see it on openming weekend).
As for Badham he has done enough good
films (Saturday Night Fever, that one
with Dreyfous and Cassavetes, War
Games - but not Blue Thunder -, the
first Stakeout, Nick of Time) to be
put onthe Lightly Likable category. I
haven't seen his early TV work.
Filipe
__________________________________________________________________________
Acabe com aquelas janelinhas que pulam na sua tela.
AntiPop-up UOL - É grátis!
http://antipopup.uol.com.br/
21616
From: filipefurtado
Date: Fri Jan 21, 2005 4:44pm
Subject: Re: Re: Pollack (Was: Neutral Style)
Castle Kreep is really a very good
film and The Property is Condemed
isn't far behind. Pollack did seem to
have potential to be a very good
filmmaker in the 60's, then at early
70's something happened and he become
satisfied in being an able hack and
his carrer become very uneven. Still
he is very good with actors and when
he connects with the material, the
film usually turned out quite good.
Filipe
__________________________________________________________________________
Acabe com aquelas janelinhas que pulam na sua tela.
AntiPop-up UOL - É grátis!
http://antipopup.uol.com.br/
21617
From:
Date: Fri Jan 21, 2005 11:43am
Subject: Re: Re: Robert Mulligan on Netflix
Welcome, Jim.
>I wanted to chime in on Blake
>Edwards' "Wild Rovers" a few weeks ago, but it didn't seem to catch fire
>as a topic here.
I love "Wild Rovers" second only to "Darling Lili"!
>Can you tell me where I can find this essay?
John Belton's essay may be found at the link below; as mentioned, it's part
of our Mulligan symposium at The Film Journal:
http://thefilmjournal.com/issue11/adrobertmulligan.html
I agree with your thoughts on "The Other," Jim, and am glad to hear that Fox
is making a new print. I'd absolutely love to see it on celluloid after all
these years.
>I always assumed the Tom Tryon novel on which "The Other"
>is based was bestseller schlock that Mulligan turned into a work of art,
>but I never read it.
I have it, but I've never read it. Another Tryon novel (which I also haven't
read) was the basis for Billy Wilder's great "Fedora," so at the very least
we can say that his work formed the basis for some great films by some major
auteurs.
Peter
21618
From: filipefurtado
Date: Fri Jan 21, 2005 5:15pm
Subject: Re: Re: SHALLOW HAL (Was: The Farrelly Brothers)
I agree with everything Gabe said and
I should add that a fat actress would
simple serve to flatter part of the
audience. And the film does stars the
most overweight leading actor working
in Hollywood today.
Filipe
__________________________________________________________________________
Acabe com aquelas janelinhas que pulam na sua tela.
AntiPop-up UOL - É grátis!
http://antipopup.uol.com.br/
21619
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Fri Jan 21, 2005 5:50pm
Subject: Re: Re: Pollack (Was: Neutral Style)
--- filipefurtado wrote:
> Castle Kreep is really a very good
> film and The Property is Condemed
> isn't far behind. Pollack did seem to
> have potential to be a very good
> filmmaker in the 60's, then at early
> 70's something happened and he become
> satisfied in being an able hack and
> his carrer become very uneven. Still
> he is very good with actors and when
> he connects with the material, the
> film usually turned out quite good.
>
Andre Techine gave "This Property is Condemned" four
stars when he was writing for Cahiers. I think it
greatly influenced his subsequent filmmkaing.
Pollack is an occasionally interesting director but an
absolutely first-rate actor.
There are two great line readings in Hollywood
history.
1) Peter Lawford saying "They sure are blue" to June
Allyson in "Good News"
and
2) Sydney Pollack saying "Of course all rumors are
true," to Tim Robbins in "The Player."
Most critics cited his work in "Husbands and Wives."
But as nice as that is it doesn't compare to his
surgically precise villain in "Eyes Wide Shut."
My God -- this man can make a meal of a guest shot on
"Will & Grace"!
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com
21620
From: hotlove666
Date: Fri Jan 21, 2005 5:59pm
Subject: Re: neutral style
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "Aaron Graham"
wrote:
>
> As Bill recommended in an earlier post as a supreme example
> of "neutral style", I took another look at William A. Graham's "The
> Amazing Howard Hughes" (admittedly, I viewed the truncated version
> put out by Anchor Bay, but I think I've got the idea) and would
> recommend it to anyone having a hard time grasping what Bill meant
by using "neutrality" to discuss the visuals of this film.
>
I would too. Glad to hear that some version of it is available. And I
would add to it a strong recommendation of the Jim Jones film, if
that's available - a remarkable one-two punch from a genuine oddball
at the height of his powers.
At the same time, feature directors have emulated the style of
telefilms. King of Comedy is certainly an example, although not a
pure one - Scorsese will have a long way to go before he can make
something like Beyond a Reasonable Doubt!
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt is an example of neutral style at its most
incandescent -- Lang really got rid of all the curlicues on that one.
A question that has never been raised: Was he thinking of tv when he
made it? Or more answerably: Does it resemble what one would have
seen in certain tv series of that era? (Graham was directing series
then.)
Adrian's post certainly is going in the direction of what I'm talking
about, and so is his post-within-a-post. Directors like Cahn - who
inexplicably began his career with a very good film, then gave up -
are a useful point of reference for neutral style, but Jack Arnold
would be a better one, because he is an artist. The first Cahiers
review of The Incredible Shrinking Man dismissed it as a film made in
a "tv style." Today we see its beauty, because we see through all the
esthetic experiments with neutral vision that have come after it.
But I'll freely admit that my love for that gray Universal style used
in so many horror and scifi films of the 50s - the opposite of the
Universal expressionist style of the 30s and 40s - is part of my love
of neutral style, and Cahn certainly is right up there in that
bizarre pantheon.
As for the idea of pure denotation, that's what I was getting at in
my two most recent articles for Trafic - recent with a big hiatus:
One on My Kingdom For (Boetticher) and one on the more accessible
Stuck on You (available in English to those who e-mail me). Both of
those articles refer back to Bazin's article on Seven Men from Now
as "An Exemplary Western," and both question the idea of pure
denotation, which seems to have been a utopian notion for Bazin -
even though he held it in a very complex way, as was his wont.
McNaughton and his heirs in the made-for-video serial killer genre -
again, I recommend Ed Gein and Ted Bundy for those with strong
stomachs - show the value of neutral style - whatever that is - as a
lens for looking at aberrant behavior. Graham's Hughes and Jim Jones
films are predecessors of those films.
But I also believe that something of the idea of neutral style can be
seen in the work of great filmmakers - not Mulligan, who is too
lyrical, and perhaps not Truffaut (Small Change) or Cukor (Rich and
Famous), although I see affinities with television in both the films
cited - but certainly Eustache.
More generally, the existence of television for 50 years has had a
big influence on all sorts of filmmakers, including some of the best.
That comes out in all sorts of ways, but I'm floating the idea of
neutral style because I believe that there may be some virtue in
looking at that particular way that the "glass eye" has been absorbed
by the Seventh Art, and turned into something rich and strange.
21621
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Fri Jan 21, 2005 6:25pm
Subject: Re: Re: neutral style
--- hotlove666 wrote:
>
> Beyond a Reasonable Doubt is an example of neutral
> style at its most
> incandescent -- Lang really got rid of all the
> curlicues on that one.
> A question that has never been raised: Was he
> thinking of tv when he
> made it?
Well of course, because the film he made ust before
was the sublime "While the City Sleeps" which is
entirely about TV and its growing power and authority.
His last film "The Thousand Eyes of Dr.Mabuse" unfolds
via secret network of TVs within the hotel in which
the film is set.
I believe I've already mentioned Rivette's famously
bizarre review of "Beyond a Reasonable Doubt" entitled
"The Hand."
The
> first Cahiers
> review of The Incredible Shrinking Man dismissed it
> as a film made in
> a "tv style." Today we see its beauty, because we
> see through all the
> esthetic experiments with neutral vision that have
> come after it.
>
The very best writing on "The Incredble Shrinking Man"
is by J.G. Ballard. His collection of essays "A User's
Guide to the Millennium" often touches on film. "La
Jetee" is a favorite of Ballard's as well.
> But I'll freely admit that my love for that gray
> Universal style used
> in so many horror and scifi films of the 50s - the
> opposite of the
> Universal expressionist style of the 30s and 40s -
> is part of my love
> of neutral style, and Cahn certainly is right up
> there in that
> bizarre pantheon.
>
> As for the idea of pure denotation, that's what I
> was getting at in
> my two most recent articles for Trafic - recent with
> a big hiatus:
> One on My Kingdom For (Boetticher) and one on the
> more accessible
> Stuck on You (available in English to those who
> e-mail me). Both of
> those articles refer back to Bazin's article on
> Seven Men from Now
> as "An Exemplary Western," and both question the
> idea of pure
> denotation, which seems to have been a utopian
> notion for Bazin -
> even though he held it in a very complex way, as was
> his wont.
>
> McNaughton and his heirs in the made-for-video
> serial killer genre -
> again, I recommend Ed Gein and Ted Bundy for those
> with strong
> stomachs - show the value of neutral style -
> whatever that is - as a
> lens for looking at aberrant behavior. Graham's
> Hughes and Jim Jones
> films are predecessors of those films.
>
> But I also believe that something of the idea of
> neutral style can be
> seen in the work of great filmmakers - not Mulligan,
> who is too
> lyrical, and perhaps not Truffaut (Small Change) or
> Cukor (Rich and
> Famous), although I see affinities with television
> in both the films
> cited - but certainly Eustache.
>
> More generally, the existence of television for 50
> years has had a
> big influence on all sorts of filmmakers, including
> some of the best.
> That comes out in all sorts of ways, but I'm
> floating the idea of
> neutral style because I believe that there may be
> some virtue in
> looking at that particular way that the "glass eye"
> has been absorbed
> by the Seventh Art, and turned into something rich
> and strange.
>
>
>
>
>
>
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - now with 250MB free storage. Learn more.
http://info.mail.yahoo.com/mail_250
21622
From:
Date: Fri Jan 21, 2005 1:47pm
Subject: Re: Re: Re: SHALLOW HAL (Was: The Farrelly Brothers)
In a message dated 01/21/2005 5:12:39 PM, filipefurtado@u... writes:
<< I agree with everything Gabe said and I should add that a fat actress would
simple serve to flatter part of the audience. >
Yes, and that's part of the film's counterintuitive cleverness. "Let's make a
film about fat people where we won't NEED to cast a fat actress." Antidote?
Make another goddamned movie...one which WON'T flatter us!
<
Hollywood today. >>
Duly noted. But Jack Black's career isn't exactly sagging. Can we think of a
current female star today as major as Jack Black AND as fat? And even if we
CAN think of one, it's almost besides the point since women have INIFINITELY
more pressure on them to be thin (and please, I know men DO have that pressure
too but come on...nowhere near as much...did y'all happen to check out the new
season of AMERICAN IDOL?).
Kevin John
21623
From: hotlove666
Date: Fri Jan 21, 2005 6:51pm
Subject: Re: neutral style
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, David Ehrenstein
wrote:
> > I believe I've already mentioned Rivette's famously
> bizarre review of "Beyond a Reasonable Doubt" entitled
> "The Hand."
Which could only have been written by someone who had imbibed the
utopia of "pure denotation" at Bazin's knee. There you have, at the
outset of the New Wave, a hymn to neutral style - one that is still
considered by Bernard Eisenschitz to be "one of the five greatest
articles on film of all time."
He said that in a rage when I wanted to compare Joe Dante's take on
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt to Rivette's in the introduction I wrote to
a book Bernard and I were doing for Locarno: "lots of great cigarette
gags - those cheap, blank Columbia sets..." The sacrilege so offended
him that he suppressed the introduction.
Incidentally, the film came up talking to Joe about The Big Clock, a
film he selected for Locarno's 1995 retrospective of overlooked
American masterpieces (the subject of the book). Joe considers the
way that everything in Big Clock serves the plot - cause and effect
with no pauses - to be ne of the film's virtues. That's also
something Rivette says about BARD.
But I wouldn't call a film where the camera rides up four floors on a
department store elevator and films each of the floors as people get
out an example of neutral style. Nor would I consider it devoid of
religious and political connotations, having been made by a fanatical
Catholic from a novel written by a Communist poet!
21624
From: hotlove666
Date: Fri Jan 21, 2005 6:54pm
Subject: Re: Re: SHALLOW HAL (Was: The Farrelly Brothers)
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, LiLiPUT1@a... wrote:
Can we think of a
> current female star today as major as Jack Black AND as fat? And
even if we
> CAN think of one, it's almost besides the point since women have
INIFINITELY
> more pressure on them to be thin (and please, I know men DO have
that pressure
> too but come on...nowhere near as much...did y'all happen to check
out the new
> season of AMERICAN IDOL?).
Nope - Vero moved back to France, so I'm doubly bereft. But Fantasia
wasn't exactly svelte. Of course, Roseanne Barr became a big star
despite girth, but like Oprah, she seems to have shed it, judging
from the tres cute shot of her in the current LA City Beat.
21625
From: filipefurtado
Date: Fri Jan 21, 2005 7:07pm
Subject: Re: Re: The adventurous ten-best film list of Contracampo in 2004
>And, well, not having Eternal
Sunshine and Dogville on our
>best-list will be pretty much an
adventure for some here in >Brazil
that will send us countless emails
bragging about how >much we don't have
taste for the art.
Yes, Ruy, but it's also good to point
out that those films aren't without
support inside the magazine. Actualy,
the Eternal Sunshine review was very
positive and we have a positeve and a
negative one on Dogvile.
Filipe
__________________________________________________________________________
Acabe com aquelas janelinhas que pulam na sua tela.
AntiPop-up UOL - É grátis!
http://antipopup.uol.com.br/
21626
From: jpcoursodon
Date: Fri Jan 21, 2005 8:52pm
Subject: Re: neutral style
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Adrian Martin
wrote:
> Bill, A FILM BY is going to have to pull together and organise a
World Tour
> - equal priority with establishing the English-language edition of
50 ANS DE
> CINEMA AMERICAIN - so you can give us the illustrated version of
your
> lecture "What is Neutral Style in Cinema?" Because, like Godard
says, it's a
> case of needing to "bring in the evidence" - show us the clips!
Adrian, I am flattered. The English-language of "50 ans" has been
discussed with a number of publishers over the years, and it is very
clear that it never will happen. they all felt that they couldn't
sustain the cost of translation (one well-known publisher offered a
tranlating fee so ridiculously low that it was way way below minimum
wage, or even below 1930's sharecroppers wages). Columbia U. Press
gave us the funniest rejection, saying that the book was too
intellectual for their readership (I'm quoting from memory but I
swear i'm not overdoing it). I had offered to tackle the translation
myself, although it would be a very thankless task, but I wasn't
going to do it for peanuts, even if I liked peanuts, which I don't.
JPC
21627
From: Damien Bona
Date: Fri Jan 21, 2005 9:09pm
Subject: Jerry Alert
Jerry Lewis is on Letterman tonight.
21628
From: Jonathan Rosenbaum
Date: Fri Jan 21, 2005 10:36pm
Subject: Re: Mulligan (avant-garde postscript)
> It is one of my favourite avant-garde films, from that great
Austrian
> flowering of the 1990s. Arnold later did the same (but
differently) with a
> few bits of an Andy Hardy musical - the result is called ALONE.
Sublime
> stuff - Judy Garland can never be seen or listened to in the same
way ever
> again, and Mickey Rooney kissing his Mom looks rather charged with
> perversity ...
>
> Adrian
I wrote a Reader column some time back (Feb 18, 2000) on this film,
with some material on PASSAGE A L'ACTE as well. It can't be accessed
online for free, so I hope I'll be forgiven for pasting it in here.
My only regret now is that I didn't give it four stars. Jonathan
Wrinkles in Time
Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy
Rating *** A must see
Directed by Martin Arnold
With Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, and Fay Holden.
Wearing suspenders, Mickey Rooney as Andy Hardy steps behind his
mother (Fay Holden), clutching her left shoulder and right forearm
with his two hands, and firmly kisses the back of her neck while she
slowly nods her head with a stoic, worldly-wise expression. In a
series of stuttering, staccato jerks, he does the same thing again,
to the throbbing strains of eerie, ghostly music. Then he does it a
third time, pausing first to rock back and forth from one foot to
another a good many times, as if he had ants in his pants. When he
kisses the back of his mom's neck this time, his lips seem to remain
glued there. This embrace, his barely perceptible jaw movements, and
her steadily bobbing head all conspire to suggest something vaguely
obscene and depraved. Could Andy have become some kind of Dracula,
sucking blood from his mother's neck? Or do the slow pumping rhythm
and repeated nervous thrusts represent some kind of sexual motion?
When Andy breaks away, this gesture too is repeated compulsively,
his mouth twisting back and forth between amorous solemnity and a
delighted grin, as if he couldn't make up his mind about how he
feels. Finally, when he moves away from his mother entirely, his
body turning in a semicircle, the camera cuts to a new and more
distant angle that shows he's wearing an apron; apparently he's been
washing dishes at an unseen sink. Her eyes steadily follow him as he
moves, and she smiles. Picking up a plate and a towel, he turns
further around in the same direction, showing his back to us and his
mother, stepping toward a table with a checkered tablecloth.
Meanwhile his mother, looking at him adoringly, says something both
wordless and inhuman.
I'm trying to describe the first two and a half minutes of Martin
Arnold's creepy 15-minute experimental film Alone. Life Wastes Andy
Hardy (1998), but I can't be confident that my account is either
complete or entirely accurate. For one thing, the somewhat stocky,
stolid older woman Andy Hardy kisses may not be his mother;
theoretically it could be his Aunt Milly, another character in the
series. I know that MGM released 15 Andy Hardy pictures between 1937
and 1946--7 in 1938 and 1939 alone--and a final one in 1958. But
with the possible exception of the last, I don't believe I've seen
any of them apart from occasional snatches while channel surfing.
I'm not even sure which of the Andy Hardy features furnished the
extracts for this film--assuming it was only one--though the
presence of Judy Garland in later segments of Alone narrows the
possibilities to three: Love Finds Andy Hardy (1938), Andy Hardy
Meets Debutante (1940), and Life Begins for Andy Hardy (1941)
(Garland plays a character named Betsy Booth in all of them).
And finally, because I never saw the sequence before Arnold got his
hands on it, I don't know with certainty if the perverse meanings
he's gleaned from it grow out of only one gesture. Does Andy Hardy
simply and briefly peck at his mother's neck in the course of
washing dishes? That's what it looks like, but I can't be sure.
Arnold--an Austrian who manipulates fragments of black-and-white
Hollywood features through optical printing and editing--is
presenting a program of his films, including Alone. Life Wastes Andy
Hardy, on Friday, February 18, at Columbia College's Ferguson Hall
through the auspices of Kino-Eye Cinema. Two earlier items on the
program are described as parts of a trilogy with Alone, though they
seem to me merely setting-up exercises by comparison: neither packs
the same punch, establishing most of Arnold's procedures but doing
much less with them. These films lack Alone's narrative and internal
complexity--its ability to connect a good many scenes and characters
while actually telling a story part of the time.
Piece touchee (1989, 16 minutes) shows a woman reading in a chair as
a door behind her repeatedly opens and closes; a man finally enters
and engages in some kind of interaction with her. It's difficult to
tell what it is because Arnold essentially turns the two figures
into epileptic dolls with his relentless repetitions and reversals:
he prints the same shots backward and/or upside down in rapid
alternation with the originals, producing various aggressive flicker
effects. (According to the French rock magazine Les Inrockuptibles--
which reviewed Arnold's short films earlier this month, just after
their video release in France--this fragment is drawn from Joseph M.
Newman's 1954 police procedural The Human Jungle.)
Passage a l'acte (1993, 12 minutes) is much more interesting to me
because its source is recognizable, which makes Arnold's perversions
more diabolical. It takes a few short fragments of a scene from To
Kill a Mockingbird (1962), with a father (Gregory Peck) and mother
figure, little girl, and little boy sitting at the breakfast table.
Arnold submits this material to the same sort of looping, inverting,
and scrambling as in Piece touchee, but this time the effect is much
more bizarre.
To Kill a Mockingbird is certainly ripe for deconstruction: this
rather self-satisfied 1962 adaptation of a pretty good southern
novel occupied 34th place in the American Film Institute's stupid
poll of the best American movies--and was ludicrously praised by
Jack Valenti as the first Hollywood film to deal honestly with
racial issues. But what Arnold chooses to deconstruct is to all
appearances a fairly ordinary family scene. The boy runs out through
a rattling screen door at the beginning and later returns; at the
end, both the boy and girl leave by the same door, though the girl
first does something with the lower part of the door and then either
kisses her father or whispers something in his ear. (In the
background of many of the shots with the boy is a black cook, seen
from behind.)
It's all quite obscure in terms of narrative, but most unsettling of
all is the way various manipulations transform the dialogue into a
series of unearthly and meaningless noises. What may start out
as "yes" from Peck is quickly transmuted into "byah," "weh," "bam,"
and "jam," immediately followed by volleys of what sound like
gunshots or an onslaught of attacking woodpeckers, then further
remarks from Peck that sound like "haffa-now," "flupper,"
and "patoot." Then there's a frenetic dialogue between the boy and
girl in which he seems to be saying "hoy-ya" and she quacks back,
followed by repeated rapid cuts between the woman raising a cup of
coffee to her lips and the girl doing the same with a glass of milk.
All this unnervingly dehumanizes the actors as well as the
characters they're playing. Arnold's distortions remind us of the
mechanical nature of film projection, which we take for granted as
representing reality: altering this mechanism can turn people into
inhuman geeks at the drop of a hat. Alone carries this principle
even further--most notably with Judy Garland's singing, which moves
in and out of recognizable as well as freakish registers--and makes
its point even more effectively by allowing us to comprehend a few
of the words being uttered by Garland, Rooney, and an unidentified
actor. (Indeed the title, Alone, comes from one repeated
recognizable portion of her song.)
Does this progression make each film in the trilogy "better" than
the last? For me it does: the recognizable movie and actor in the
second and the comprehensible dialogue in the third allow for more
dialectical play, enabling Arnold to exploit various registers of
discomfort. But someone who can identify the movie used in Piece
touchee and can't recognize Gregory Peck or To Kill a Mockingbird in
Passage a l'acte may well assess these films differently.
The few critical commentaries I've read about Arnold's trilogy imply
that he's doing something psychoanalytical. For instance, a blurb
from the San Francisco Cinematheque states that the trilogy's
targets are "the conventions of Hollywood filmmaking and its
inherent repressions." This suggests that Arnold's manipulations
bring the repressed to light--exposing, as it were,
the "unconscious" of the Andy Hardy movies.
The problem is that Freud's theory of the unconscious refers to the
minds of individuals--not to movies, which don't have minds. And if
we bring in Jung's notion of the collective unconscious, we have to
establish what collectives we're thinking of. Do we mean all the
people who made creative contributions to the Andy Hardy movies, all
the people in the audience who saw the originals, or some
combination of the two?
I think we have to opt for the third possibility--and in the case of
Alone also consider the audience of Arnold's film, which includes
many people like me who don't know the Hardy movies. And despite the
differences among these groups, I think we can safely assume there's
a lot of shared cultural baggage. Robert B. Ray in his 1995 book The
Avant-Garde Finds Andy Hardy notes that while practically nothing
analytical has been written about these extremely popular
movies, "they continue to be mentioned...as the principal source of
television's sitcoms (from Ozzie and Harriet and Father Knows Best,
the series most obviously derived from the Hardy series, to Family
Ties and The Cosby Show)." Which is another way of saying that we
all know these movies indirectly, probably at several removes.
Neal Gabler in his persuasive 1988 book An Empire of Their Own: How
the Jews Invented Hollywood (which offers a much better argument
than the oversimplified 1997 TV documentary based on it,
Hollywoodism: Jews, Movies and the American Dream) suggests that the
Hardy films can be seen as the propagandistic version of the
American dream that evolved out of MGM studio chief Louis B. Mayer's
denial of his European Jewish roots. Gabler cites Billy Wilder's
recollection of a scene at MGM while he was scripting
Ninotchka: "'We looked out the window because there was screaming
going on, and Louis B. Mayer held Mickey Rooney by the lapel. He
says, "You're Andy Hardy! You're the United States! You're the Stars
and Stripes. Behave yourself! You're a symbol!"'"
Does Alone unpack the dark underside of that symbol? To some extent
I think it does, even though I don't immediately see European
Judaism on the surface of Arnold's nightmarish film. Or maybe I do
and don't recognize it, sharing a certain denial with Louis B.
Mayer. Shortly after we see Andy and his mom committing incest in
the kitchen, we see Andy suddenly slapped by his father, Judge
Hardy, who simultaneously yells at him in fury, "Shut up!" It's a
genuinely shocking moment, in part because Arnold has isolated the
sound of that explosion so that it erupts from total silence. Arnold
then lingers over Andy briefly touching his cheek and slowly
registering pain, disbelief, and shame--before replaying Judge
Hardy's slap and command twice again, this time allowing Andy a
short verbal response after his pain, disbelief, and shame
register: "All right." In the final replay he follows this
with "Dad."
Is Jewish patriarchal rage rearing its ugly head in an Andy Hardy
movie, courtesy of Arnold's analytical editing? Perhaps, but on the
other hand I can't even be sure that the white-haired man slapping
Andy in the chops is Judge Hardy, because he doesn't seem to
resemble the images of that character reproduced in Ray's book. So
Arnold's extract could be turning another character into a father
figure, according him a mythic function he might not have had in the
original movie.
Whatever the details of Arnold's project, he's certainly
transforming a key image of American paradise from our past into a
very bad dream. In Arnold's archetypal Hollywood small town, lovers
kiss repeatedly in a park, then start hissing and emitting ducklike
wheezes. This is a blighted cosmos where Judy Garland sings "alone"
first like a melancholy foghorn and then as if someone has just
stepped on her foot--and where a door repeatedly opens and closes as
if attacked by some poltergeist until Mickey Rooney finally enters
in a top hat and tails and gets stuck in a perpetual dance shuffle,
caught in an endless loop that makes us realize he's actually in
hell.
21629
From: Noel Vera
Date: Sat Jan 22, 2005 0:42am
Subject: Twelve Great Filipino Films
http://movies.groups.yahoo.com/group/noelmoviereviews/message/480
To be honest, I despair of ever seeing any of these films appear on
DVD, much less the arthouse circuit. But anyone interrested who
knows a Filipino may possibly wangle an invitation to watch them--
most of them are screened on Cinema One in TFC, The Filipino Channel-
-and if that friend is willing, he might do a little benshi for you
(on-the-spot translation). Far as I know, none of them are
subtitled.
Anyway, the list, for your reference.
21630
From: Saul
Date: Sat Jan 22, 2005 2:28am
Subject: Re: Pollack (Was: Neutral Style)
David Ehrenstein wrote: (post # 21619)
> Most critics cited his work in "Husbands and Wives."
> But as nice as that is it doesn't compare to his
> surgically precise villain in "Eyes Wide Shut."
Is "villain" the right word? His status as good or bad was left highly
ambiguous, as was everything else in the film. If there was indeed a
villain it is probably human nature, same as with every other SK film.
David Ehrenstein wrote: (post #21583)
> Redford makes him a lazy director.
What do you mean by this? How can "The Way We Were" be one of his two
best films if he's being a lazy director? Although Pollack always did
know how to dress Redford, and he never before or since had such good
outifts - I particularly remember the pristine white suit he wore at
the start of "The Way We Were", accentuated by his closed eyes and
perfect upright stillness.
> that made "The Way We Were" we[work -- despite his
> egregious cutting of Laurents' key scenes.
What did these scenes consist of??
By the way, two techniques I didn't mention before but which I think
Pollack is particularly good at are: a long montage of silent images
composed to a piece of music - and his favourite way of ending a film,
the still frame, (even in a movie such as "Absence of Malice" where it
stills long after the characters have left and there is only a small
boat on the horizon).
And "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?", which a few people mentioned
earlier as one of his best did, if I remeber correctly, have some very
nice handheld camera-work in it, with the camera-man on skates in the
rink - I heard a lot of these skating shots were done by Pollack
himself, though he isn't credited. Can anyone confirm??
21631
From: hotlove666
Date: Sat Jan 22, 2005 3:01am
Subject: Re: Jerry alert
It was great to see him hearty and finally free of pain. The
description of the Dean and Jerry days suggests that the book will be
dynamite. He's so smart.
21632
From: hotlove666
Date: Sat Jan 22, 2005 3:25am
Subject: Unknown Pleasures
He's trying to move on from Platform and it hasn't jelled yet, but
it'll be something when he does.
Very artificial, even stagey solutions to enlarging the long-shot
style, so as to have something to pan to ("Cue the fireworks!") or to
backstop the shot ("Cue the stretchers!") or just to cut on, like the
sudden gesture at the end of the swish-pan Contempt scene. It's off-
putting when it shows: The shot of the boys passing around the dollar
suddenly feels like a moment out of West Side Story. And sometimes
it's just weird, as in the scene where the middle class kid and his
girlfriend are sitting on the couch: How many bites does one of those
apples have in it? And why does the poor kid still have the same
lousy haircut two scenes after he gets it clipped? The mysteries just
keep piling up. But it can also be charming, like the scene where the
they hold hands and sing along with the tv without missing a note or
a word, or funny, like the scene with the main girl - she's great -
and the nurse in the hospital.
Actually, if I had an overall critique of the film, it's that apart
from the modernism a lot of it's pretty old hat, but I bet it was
like a little bomb going off in China. Plenty of first-period Godard
stuff - the middle-class kid smokes almost as fast as Leaud! The
difference being that Godard was inventing his style starting with
his first feature, and this director is obliged to fight his way free
of a visual trap - the unbroken long-shots that are now an
international style - to find his own way. I loved Platform, which as
Dan says displayed his superb eye for composition, but I don't regret
that he's moving on. Who knows what he'll be three or four films from
now - maybe the Chinese Techine?
It's great seeing how the Mainland has changed since the Red
Detachment of Women days, although as with everything else in the
film, it's hard to know where realism leaves off and artifice begins.
No tv set is ever turned off in any of those rooms. If it's really
like that, Rupert Murdoch is going take over China next!
21633
From: hotlove666
Date: Sat Jan 22, 2005 3:36am
Subject: Takashi Miiike
I don't think he's capable of making a boring shot.
21634
From: thebradstevens
Date: Sat Jan 22, 2005 4:49am
Subject: Re: neutral style
Surely the only real example you could find of a 'neutral' style
would be in those TV sitcoms which are filmed live in front of a
studio audience. And even those aren't really so different from the
aesthetic practices of Leo McCarey, whose style wasn't 'neutral' at
all (being based on the far from neutral assumption that if one has a
few talented performers, all one needs do is set one's camera down in
a position that allows them to be clearly seen). For all intents and
purposes, the idea of a 'neutral style' is a contradiction in terms.
Maybe we need a more accurate term, such as 'bland style'.
But there's certainly nothing 'neutral' (or bland) about BEYOND A
REASONABLE DOUBT.
21635
From: Henrik Sylow
Date: Sat Jan 22, 2005 5:11am
Subject: Re: Takashi Miiike
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "hotlove666" wrote:
>
> I don't think he's capable of making a boring shot.
Amen.
He still is the enfant terrible of Japanese cinema, and probably
always will be, as he will defy any convention possible, if it goes
against the spontaneity and impulsiveness of his direction.
Sometimes it's a small miracle what he gets away with, as he is far
more interested in the proces of creating a scene, rather than
directing it. In that sense, Miike may be one of the few makers of film.
Henrik
21636
From: Saul
Date: Sat Jan 22, 2005 6:03am
Subject: Re: Mulligan (avant-garde postscript)
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Adrian Martin wrote:
> released commercially because it starred Deneuve and (uh oh, here he
comes) Malkovich!!
At the risk of sounding silly I want to ask: what's with all the John
Malkovich jokes? Am I missing something Adrian and Gabe???
21637
From:
Date: Sat Jan 22, 2005 2:13am
Subject: John Malkovich (OT)
Briefly: Bill Krohn hates John Malkovich as a performer, cannot abide him in
films, etc, and Bill & the gang like to kid about this.
Obviously, JM is in some important films: "Places in the Heart" (Robert
Benton), "Dangerous Liaisons" (Stephen Frears), "Beyond the Clouds" (Antonioni).
Mike Grost
21638
From: Saul
Date: Sat Jan 22, 2005 7:29am
Subject: Re: Takashi Miiike
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "hotlove666" wrote:
>
> I don't think he's capable of making a boring shot.
There was that rather nice shot in "Gokudô sengokushi: Fudô" where a
dart went in a man's ear, out the other ear, and landed in a wall with
a little globule of brain matter attached - rather an unusual way to
kill someone that I'm sure Dario Argento would have enjoyed - though
he far outweights Miike when it comes to creative, and bloody, bloodshed.
I thought "Ôdishon" was great as a kind of Japanese "Fatal Attraction"
- though of course it went further than any American film ever would -
Hollywood never goes beyond the 'point of no return' - the protagonist
always has to survive intact - (and if he looses something
irreplacable, such as a wife and kid, e.g. "Minority Report", he will
have a 'new' one at the end) - when she sliced through his foot I was
so tense waiting to see what would happen, for the first time in ages
unsure as to what the outcome would be.
Miike is like a Japanese Fassbinder - I think he's made over 60 films
in 15 years - If only RW Fassbinder had lived in our digital era of
direct-to-video!!! - he would have made 100 films the length of
"Berlin Alexanderplatz" instead of a mere 40 or so films - no-one
could film emotional pain, no-one could film that deep sense of loss
at your own inability to have a proper relationship, like Fassbinder
could - IMDB.com says he died of suicide by drug overdose - does
anyone know exactly what happened or what this means? Do they mean
'suicide' in the same sense that people say Fulci committed suicide???
are they merely referring to his destructive beahviour as a death wish
of some sort - or is there a note or something he left that I don't
know about???
21639
From: Saul
Date: Sat Jan 22, 2005 7:43am
Subject: Re: John Malkovich (OT)
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, MG4273@a... wrote:
> Briefly: Bill Krohn hates John Malkovich as a performer, cannot
abide him in
> films, etc, and Bill & the gang like to kid about this.
> Obviously, JM is in some important films: "Places in the Heart" (Robert
> Benton), "Dangerous Liaisons" (Stephen Frears), "Beyond the Clouds"
(Antonioni).
>
> Mike Grost
I liked the way he handled violence in "The Dancer Upstairs". By the
way, how do actor-directors work in the auteur system? What do we make
of Kevin Costner, for example?
Bill: I'd love to hear what your gripe with Malkovich is...
21640
From: Zach Campbell
Date: Sat Jan 22, 2005 7:49am
Subject: OT: Barthes query
I don't know if anyone can help me out with this, but I'm not
exactly sure where else I could find out more. Yesterday I learned
that Barthes wrote a book on the silkscreen artist Erté, which
sounds too interesting to ignore and yet is now out of print (NYU's
library also lacks a copy, surprisingly). Has anyone read this book-
-is it fascinating? (Is it even available translated into
English?) I'd like to know if I should be encouraged to track down
a used copy. Contact me offlist if you like. Thanks!
--Zach
21641
From: Zach Campbell
Date: Sat Jan 22, 2005 7:59am
Subject: Re: John Malkovich (OT)
Saul:
> By the way, how do actor-directors work in the auteur system? What
> do we make of Kevin Costner, for example?
It seems to me that actor-directors work the same as anyone else.
Though you get an added, value-neutral dimension of engaging with
your own image if you direct yourself. It's one reason why Clint
Eastwood is so interesting.
Kevin Costner's films seem to exhibit a taste for laid-back and
intimate action within grandiose, almost romantically extreme
settings (the End of Native American life, the End of Land, the End
of Everything but the Postal Service). I don't think he's a good
filmmaker, but I've heard the most positive things about the single
directorial effort of his I haven't seen (OPEN RANGE).
--Zach
21642
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Sat Jan 22, 2005 9:13am
Subject: Re: Re: Pollack (Was: Neutral Style)
--- Saul wrote:
> Is "villain" the right word? His status as good or
> bad was left highly
> ambiguous, as was everything else in the film.
Yes.And as I recalljonathan Rosenbaum dealt with this
factin his review. He's a classic Kubrick villain in
that he appears benign at first -- exactly like Adolph
Menjou in "Paths of Glory."
> > Redford makes him a lazy director.
>
> What do you mean by this?
I don't find his films with Redford of -- with one
exception -- of much interest.He attends to heim with
the sort of care Woody Van Dyke lavished on Norma
Sherarer in "Marie Antoinette."
How can "The Way We Were"
> be one of his two
> best films if he's being a lazy director?
Streisand and Arthur Laurents.
Although
> Pollack always did
> know how to dress Redford, and he never before or
> since had such good
> outifts - I particularly remember the pristine white
> suit he wore at
> the start of "The Way We Were", accentuated by his
> closed eyes and
> perfect upright stillness.
>
See above.
>
> > that made "The Way We Were" we[work -- despite his
> > egregious cutting of Laurents' key scenes.
>
> What did these scenes consist of??
>
>
You can find them all on the (extremely useful) DVD.
Katieand Hubbell's marriage was starting to come
aaprt, but the blacklist exacerbated it.Hubbell was of
course apolitical, while Katie was a Communist.
Laurents used John Garfeild as a template in this as
garfield wasn't a party muember, but his wife
was.Therefore Garfield lied to the commitee when he
said he'd never meta ommunist. They made him pay for
this, dribing him to an early grave. In his last film
"He Ran All the Way" he's practicallydying right on
screen for real.
Larents write a script in which Katie leaves Hubbell
so that he can continue his career. Though their
relationship was over, this would have been a final
act of love on her part. But the studio, and Pollack,
freaked out about the politics and fudged the film's
last act. As released it's not atall clearwhy Katie's
leaving him -- the biggest error in an otherwise very
good film.
>
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com
21643
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Sat Jan 22, 2005 9:15am
Subject: Re: Re: Mulligan (avant-garde postscript)
Bill LOATHES Malkovich
--- Saul wrote:
>
> --- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Adrian Martin
> wrote:
>
> > released commercially because it starred Deneuve
> and (uh oh, here he
> comes) Malkovich!!
>
> At the risk of sounding silly I want to ask: what's
> with all the John
> Malkovich jokes? Am I missing something Adrian and
> Gabe???
>
>
>
>
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com
21644
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Sat Jan 22, 2005 9:19am
Subject: Re: OT: Barthes query
You can find it in Barthes'"The Responsibility of
Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art and
Representation" -- a collection everyone on the list
should know.
--- Zach Campbell wrote:
>
> I don't know if anyone can help me out with this,
> but I'm not
> exactly sure where else I could find out more.
> Yesterday I learned
> that Barthes wrote a book on the silkscreen artist
> Erté, which
> sounds too interesting to ignore and yet is now out
> of print (NYU's
> library also lacks a copy, surprisingly). Has
> anyone read this book-
> -is it fascinating? (Is it even available
> translated into
> English?) I'd like to know if I should be
> encouraged to track down
> a used copy. Contact me offlist if you like.
> Thanks!
>
> --Zach
>
>
>
>
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
All your favorites on one personal page – Try My Yahoo!
http://my.yahoo.com
21645
From: Zach Campbell
Date: Sat Jan 22, 2005 9:36am
Subject: Re: OT: Barthes query
David:
> You can find it in Barthes'"The Responsibility of
> Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art and
> Representation" -- a collection everyone on the list
> should know.
Ah, thanks! That's not a Barthes I own yet. Will remedy that soon
enough.
--Zach
21646
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Sat Jan 22, 2005 9:58am
Subject: Re: Re: OT: Barthes query
--- Zach Campbell wrote:
>
> Ah, thanks! That's not a Barthes I own yet. Will
> remedy that soon
> enough.
>
> --Zach
>
>
It's an important book as it also contains Barthes'
essays on Eisenstein -- one of which was dedicated to
Andre Techine.
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com
21647
From: Michael E. Kerpan, Jr.
Date: Sat Jan 22, 2005 10:03am
Subject: Re: Twelve Great Filipino Films
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "Noel Vera" wrote:
>
> http://movies.groups.yahoo.com/group/noelmoviereviews/message/480
>
> To be honest, I despair of ever seeing any of these films appear on
> DVD, much less the arthouse circuit. But anyone interrested who
> knows a Filipino may possibly wangle an invitation to watch them--
> most of them are screened on Cinema One in TFC, The Filipino Channel-
> -and if that friend is willing, he might do a little benshi for you
> (on-the-spot translation). Far as I know, none of them are
> subtitled.
I really really would love to see some of Bernal's and Brocka's films
(and then some of the others on your list). I am beginning to despair
that I ever will, however.
Thanks for the list, though. ;~}
MEK
21648
From: Damien Bona
Date: Sat Jan 22, 2005 10:27am
Subject: Actor/Directors (was Re: John Malkovich (OT))
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "Saul" wrote:
> By the> way, how do actor-directors work in the auteur system? What
>do we make of Kevin Costner, for example?
It seems to me actor-directors work the same way as just plain
directors -- after all Welles and Eastwood are hyphenates. Granted
it's a generalization, but it does seem to me that most of the actor-
directors I can think of are true auteurs evidencing consistent
themes and styles (e.g. Cornel Wilde, Paul Newman), even those whose
films I care for (e.g. Robert Redford, Mel Gibson).
I haven't seen enough by two of the first stars to make the
transition, Robert Montgomery and Dick Powell, to have an opinion on
them. Anyone?
21649
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Sat Jan 22, 2005 11:07am
Subject: Re: Actor/Directors (was Re: John Malkovich (OT))
--- Damien Bona wrote:
>
> It seems to me actor-directors work the same way as
> just plain
> directors -- after all Welles and Eastwood are
> hyphenates. Granted
> it's a generalization, but it does seem to me that
> most of the actor-
> directors I can think of are true auteurs evidencing
> consistent
> themes and styles (e.g. Cornel Wilde, Paul Newman),
> even those whose
> films I care for (e.g. Robert Redford, Mel Gibson).
>
Don'tforget Warren Beatty!
> I haven't seen enough by two of the first stars to
> make the
> transition, Robert Montgomery and Dick Powell, to
> have an opinion on
> them. Anyone?
>
Montgomery's work is extremely interesting. The
much-misunderstood "The Lady in the Lake" is worthy of
close study, as is "Ride the Pink Horse."
Dick Powell's work is less interesting save for "The
Conqueror" which continues to fascinate for what can
only be called the "half-life" of its mise en scene.
There was a film planned a few years back about the
making of "The Conqueror" called "The Downwinders." I
don't believe it was ever finished. Does anyone know
what became of it and why?
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - Find what you need with new enhanced search.
http://info.mail.yahoo.com/mail_250
21650
From: hotlove666
Date: Sat Jan 22, 2005 11:40am
Subject: Re: neutral style
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "thebradstevens"
wrote:
>
> Surely the only real example you could find of a 'neutral' style
> would be in those TV sitcoms which are filmed live in front of a
> studio audience.
No. I'm using the term to cover very artful films, like Le pere Noel
a les yeux bleux, The Amazing Howard Hughes, King of Comedy, The
Incredible Shrinking Man and, indeed, Beyond a Reasonable
Doubt. "Neutral style" isn't about not doing anything - it's hard to
do right!
And even those aren't really so different from the
> aesthetic practices of Leo McCarey, whose style wasn't 'neutral' at
> all (being based on the far from neutral assumption that if one has
a
> few talented performers, all one needs do is set one's camera down
in
> a position that allows them to be clearly seen).
McCarey's tv work is fascinating.
For all intents and
> purposes, the idea of a 'neutral style' is a contradiction in
terms.
It is deliberately an oxymoron.
> Maybe we need a more accurate term, such as 'bland style'.
That's pejorative, and not at all descriptive of what I have in mind.
>
> But there's certainly nothing 'neutral' (or bland) about BEYOND A
> REASONABLE DOUBT.
Nothing bland, maybe, but neutral: you bet!
21651
From: hotlove666
Date: Sat Jan 22, 2005 11:44am
Subject: Re: OT: Barthes query
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, David Ehrenstein
wrote:
>
> --- Zach Campbell wrote:
>
>
> >
> > Ah, thanks! That's not a Barthes I own yet. Will
> > remedy that soon
> > enough.
> >
> > --Zach
> >
> >
> It's an important book as it also contains Barthes'
> essays on Eisenstein -- one of which was dedicated to
> Andre Techine.
>
Weren't all of those published first in the New Critical Essays
collection?
21652
From: hotlove666
Date: Sat Jan 22, 2005 11:54am
Subject: Re: Mulligan (avant-garde postscript)
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, David Ehrenstein
wrote:
> Bill LOATHES Malkovich
>
>
And I have taken a Sacred Oath never to see anything with him in it.
I screwed up and didn't walk out of Time Regained because Ruiz had
rendered Malkovich unercognizable.
21653
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Sat Jan 22, 2005 0:06pm
Subject: Re: Re: OT: Barthes query
--- hotlove666 wrote:
> Weren't all of those published first in the New
> Critical Essays
> collection?
>
>
>
>
No that's a different anthology.
Barthes wrote sporadically about film, but had a
considerable influence on it. "S/Z" is central to
close analysis of film/texts and was enormously
important to me in dealing with "Desert Fury" and
"Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train."
Barthes alos appeared as William Makepeace Thakeray in
Techine's "The Bronte Sisters"
He was played (in a manner of speaking) by Phillipe
Noiret in Techine's film a clef "J'embrasse pas"
Godard wanted him for roles in both "Alphaville" and
"La Chinoise" but Barthes turned him down both times.
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - 250MB free storage. Do more. Manage less.
http://info.mail.yahoo.com/mail_250
21654
From: hotlove666
Date: Sat Jan 22, 2005 1:15pm
Subject: Re: OT: Barthes query
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, David Ehrenstein
wrote:
>
> Barthes wrote sporadically about film, but had a
> considerable influence on it. "S/Z" is central to
> close analysis of film/texts
Let me stress again that anyone in the group who is interested in
close analysis of films but justifiably wary of local practitioners
should read S/Z, which has been well translated by Richard Howard.
There's no better introduction. And the best introduction to Barthes
is "Mythologies," also translated by Howard, which has exerted a big
influence on the writing of David and many other people. These books
are FUN TO READ. Barthes was a wit and a stylist in the tradition of
Montaigne, Voltaire, Diderot and Company.
> He was played (in a manner of speaking) by Phillipe
> Noiret in Techine's film a clef "J'embrasse pas"
An infinitely more sympathetic rendering than the vicious one in
Sollers' "Femmes."
>
> Godard wanted him for roles in both "Alphaville" and "La Chinoise."
As Alpha Soixante, or the Howard Vernon character? Either would have
equated structuralism with the bad guys - which was exactly how
Godard saw structuralism in 1965, and probably still does - so
Barthes knew what he was doing when he turned him down. Barthes would
have been good in the "La Chinoise" train scene with Wiazemsky. Her
character's strident fanaticism was the kind of thing he taught
against all his life, and the reason he invented the concept of "The
Neutral," which he lectured on for a year in 1976 at College de
France.
21655
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Sat Jan 22, 2005 1:22pm
Subject: Re: Re: OT: Barthes query
--- hotlove666 wrote:
>
>
> As Alpha Soixante, or the Howard Vernon character?
> Either would have
> equated structuralism with the bad guys - which was
> exactly how
> Godard saw structuralism in 1965, and probably still
> does - so
> Barthes knew what he was doing when he turned him
> down.
I believe as one of the scientists. Godard's main beef
was with Foucault, not Barthes. He called the former
"The Reverend Dr. Foucault" in a lengthy Cahiers
interview around the time of "La Chinoise."
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - Easier than ever with enhanced search. Learn more.
http://info.mail.yahoo.com/mail_250
21656
From: hotlove666
Date: Sat Jan 22, 2005 1:41pm
Subject: Barthes and Godard
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, David Ehrenstein
wrote:
Godard's main beef
> was with Foucault, not Barthes. He called the former
> "The Reverend Dr. Foucault" in a lengthy Cahiers
> interview around the time of "La Chinoise."
That's my favorite Godard interview. But I think his old-fashioned
romantic-existentialist distrust of the structuralists extended to
everyone. His championing of the text over the image today is based
on the same distaste for the idea of "reading" images, which Rohmer
articulated well in a CdC interview at the time of My Night at
Maud's. I have the impression that Rivette was much more open to the
new currents of thought than any of his New Wave colleagues. As I
recall, he orgamnized the interviews in CdC with Barthes and Levi-
Strauss.
The closest Godard came to embracing structuralism and post-
structuralism is the shot of De la grammatologie in Le Gai Savoir,
but his own experiments with sound and image in that film look past
the Dziga Vertov films - which are arguably fellow travellers of post-
structuralism, too - to the two tv series, 6x2 and Tour detour deux
enfants.
All of which is highly ironic, because from the beginning Godard's
collages, dicontinuities, montage effects, polyphonic soundtracks and
quotations were perceived by everyone as pushing film toward the text!
21657
From: jpcoursodon
Date: Sat Jan 22, 2005 2:38pm
Subject: Re: Mulligan (avant-garde postscript)
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "hotlove666" > >
> I screwed up and didn't walk out of Time Regained because Ruiz had
> rendered Malkovich unercognizable.
Besides, can anyone dream of a more felicitous casting than JM as
Charlus?
21658
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Sat Jan 22, 2005 2:43pm
Subject: Re: Re: Mulligan (avant-garde postscript)
--- jpcoursodon wrote:
>
> Besides, can anyone dream of a more felicitous
> casting than JM as
> Charlus?
>
>
>
>
Well I thought Alain Delon's Charlus was one of the
few things that really worked in Schlondorff's
otherwise unfortunate "Swann in Love" ( produced by a
girfriend of Susan Sontag's not even so much as
alluded to in any of the obits.)
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Meet the all-new My Yahoo! - Try it today!
http://my.yahoo.com
21659
From:
Date: Sat Jan 22, 2005 10:08am
Subject: Locarno 1995 (WAS: neutral style)
In a message dated 1/21/05 6:56:54 PM, hotlove666@y... writes:
> Locarno's 1995 retrospective of overlooked American masterpieces (the
> subject of the book).
>
What book, Bill? I did some searches and couldn't turn up anything. Any
links?
Kevin John
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
21660
From: hotlove666
Date: Sat Jan 22, 2005 4:01pm
Subject: Re: Locarno 1995 (WAS: neutral style)
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, LiLiPUT1@a... wrote:
> > Locarno's 1995 retrospective of overlooked American masterpieces
(the
> > subject of the book).
> >
> What book, Bill? I did some searches and couldn't turn up anything.
Any
> links?
>
> Kevin John
It only came out in French and Italian - the French title (Bernard's)
was Feux croises. I wanted to call it Serious Pleasures (the opposite
of guilty pleasures -- which I see has since been used as a book
title.
There was an "essay" by each filmmaker (usually created by me based
on an interview, but ghost-written as usual for Scorsese and
Eastwood, by Kent Jones and Michael Wilson respectively). Spielberg's
publicist gave me permission to use a paragraph he wrote about
Lawrence of Arabia - like that was really a forgotten masterpiece!
(When I told Bogdanovich that, he drew a square in the air with his
fingers.)
But a lot of what we got was interesting, and so were the filmmakers'
choices. Jim McBride was very illuminating on In Harm's Way - he was
my favorite - but we had good stuff from Schrader on Scorpio Rising,
Schroeder on House of Bamboo, Carpenter on Chimes at Midnight, Waters
on Boom!, Morrissey on Ed Wood, Burnet on The Swimmer, Van Sant on
Ordinary People, Dante on The Big Clock, Sarah Driver on Spider Baby,
John Woo on Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, Robert Kramer on
Killer of Sheep, Bogdanovich on I Was a Male War Bride (also
especially good), Anders on There's Always Tomorrow, Ferrara on
Zelig, Jarmusch on They Live By Night; brief but interesting comments
by Woody Allen on The Hill, Coppola on One Eyed Jacks, Friedkin on
Paths of Glory, Lynch on Lolita etc. - I forget all of them.
Then I (or Bernard, or both of us) researched each film and wrote one
or two short background essays on them. (We had a few other
contributors too, but I ended up doing most of it.) It was the first
time I had spent any serious time at the Academy Library doing
research -- eventually I got bit by the bug and even read the MS and
correspondence for In Harm's Way (the novel) at UCLA Special
Collections, thus putting paid to a few myths and opening some lines
of investigation, as Jim had done in his interview-essay. That's when
I started to see the possibilities for research-driven criticism, so
you could say that this ultimately thankless project lit the fuse for
Hitchcock at Work.
I even got a brilliant amateur named Karl Thiede to supply ACTUAL
cost and revenue figures for each film, mostly culled from the
studios' proft-and-loss statements, which are ultra secret for
reasons everyone knows. Then I burned my brain out writing an
introduction pulling together the films, the contributing filmmakers,
their "essays" and the research into a theory of the Hollywood New
Wave and its aftermath, which Bernard decided not to bother
translating and including because, he told Marco, he "couldn't
understand it." He was also miffed about the Dante-Rivette comaprison.
21661
From: jpcoursodon
Date: Sat Jan 22, 2005 4:22pm
Subject: Re: Mulligan (avant-garde postscript)
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, David Ehrenstein
wrote:
>
> --- jpcoursodon wrote:
>
>
> >
> > Besides, can anyone dream of a more felicitous
> > casting than JM as
> > Charlus?
> >
> >
> >
> >
> Well I thought Alain Delon's Charlus was one of the
> few things that really worked in Schlondorff's
> otherwise unfortunate "Swann in Love" ( produced by a
> girfriend of Susan Sontag's not even so much as
> alluded to in any of the obits.)
>
Did ANYTHING work in that dud? But of course you'd love Delon in
anything...
>
>
> __________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Meet the all-new My Yahoo! - Try it today!
> http://my.yahoo.com
21662
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Sat Jan 22, 2005 5:03pm
Subject: Re: Re: Mulligan (avant-garde postscript)
--- jpcoursodon wrote:
>
> Did ANYTHING work in that dud?
Ornella Muti was a perfect Odette -- built to drive
men wild with jealous desire. And the henze score was
lovely. But Irons was a terrible choice for Swann.
But of course you'd
> love Delon in
> anything...
> >
Mais Oui! Bu he's really very good here -- especially
eyeing the footmen at Guermantes' digs.
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - 250MB free storage. Do more. Manage less.
http://info.mail.yahoo.com/mail_250
21663
From: jpcoursodon
Date: Sat Jan 22, 2005 6:52pm
Subject: "Neutral" style and Barthes
Bill, as an avid Barthes reader, what do you make of his concept
of "le neutre" -- mentioned several times, for example, in "Barthes
by Barthes" in which he refers to "white writing," "the
smooth," "the empty," "the seamless" (my own clumsy translation) --
in relation to your theory of neutral film style?
21664
From: Kevin Lee
Date: Sat Jan 22, 2005 9:34pm
Subject: Re: Political Correctness, Jia Zhangke's The World (was Rivette Trashing HHH)
I'm afraid that my enthusiasm for this discussion is not reflected in my ability to sustain it
with regularity... but hopefully this conversation can be microwaved back to life...
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "Dan Sallitt" wrote:
>
> Just revisited PLAYTIME on New Year's Day...I don't think I would ever
> have made the connection. If I thought of anyone vis a vis the
> compositions, I thought of the Nick Ray of REBEL, maybe.
That's interesting... Someone could do an article exploring how Nick Ray may or may not
be a major influence on New Wave pan-Asian cinema. You mention THE WORLD... I think
Yang's A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY is a big-time Nick Ray-esque film, and the scene with
the boy in the planetarium in YI YI seems inspired by a similar scene in REBEL WITHOUT A
CAUSE. Wong Kar Wai's DAYS OF BEING WILD is the English transliteration of the Chinese
title to REBEL.
I'm not as alert to compositions as you are, but I'll grant that there's definitely this self-
pitying fatalism that's in both Jia and Ray's films! And it works for me a little more than
half the time in both cases, certainly not when it seems to feel like something the artist is
falling back on.
Tati doesn't
> seem to be to be doing anything similar with his compositions: he
> purposely chooses compositions that don't express anything about the
> problems or emotions of the characters, whereas Jia is much more
> anthropocentric. Even when he strands people in a wide shot, he tends
> to use the drama to direct attention toward them. Tati prefers that
> you see the film 15 times to pick up the details!
Interesting observation -- and I think it points to the difference in attitude the two artists
have in how their characters can possibly relate to a modern environment that for the
most part seems alienating and menacing. That was the thing I found connecting their
mises-en-scene -- but as you say, the compositional differences are there, and I think
they show opposing trajectories -- Tati moving towards a triumphalism of human spirit
and ingenuity of observation and interaction with one's surroundings; Jia seeming to brace
his characters heroically as they are inevitably swallowed by the social machinery. What
they're saying is equally legitimate, it's really in how they pull it off that I can evaluate
them.
>
> > What did you think of the "Tokyo Story" chapter? It was weird to
> > have such a blatant homage, connecting Ozu with migrant laborers in
> > Beijing, a connection that can only exist in Jia's mind.
>
> Geez, I confess I never thought of Ozu. Maybe I was missing
> something.... You're talking about the parents of the kid who died?
Yes -- that chapter is titled "Tokyo Story" -- there's one shot of the parents sitting
hunched like two monumental sacks of potatoes just like the elderly couple in Ozu's film.
And then Jia pulls in the actual music from Tokyo Story! ??????????
Anyway, we should watch this together while smuggling in a couple of Tsingtaos into the
theater.
K
21665
From: Kevin Lee
Date: Sat Jan 22, 2005 9:53pm
Subject: lotsa sound and fury signifying... ? (Scorsese's last two films)
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, David Ehrenstein wrote:
>
> --- Kevin Lee wrote:
>
> There's a sense of flailing
> > desperation in both
> > Scorsese's and Jia's last two features that may be a
> > byproduct of
> > this state of being torn in five directions by the
> > schizophrenic
> > miasma of one's creative impulses and external
> > influences.
> >
>
> Can't speak to the Jias, but I don't know what you're
> talking about when it comes to "The Aviator." Plenty
> of flailing desperation in "Gangs of New York," but
> not this one.
>
> Love to hear your thoughts on "Ivan the Terrible." Is
> Harvey worse than Stalin? Sounds like you'd call it a
> tie.
In the context of film history, I'd go with Stalin. A butchered GANGS is still better than a
fragment of IVAN THE TERRIBLE III.
I think the last two films (and BRINGING OUT THE DEAD, come to think of it) there's
definitely a kind of mania surging through, as if Scorsese is afraid that the whole thing will
collapse unless he keeps horsewhipping the narrative to keep charging forward. I think
there's a fear of encroaching exhaustion informing the work (the script of BRINGING OUT
THE DEAD bears this explicity). Don't get me wrong, I actually find this fascinating, if a bit
frustrating to watch at times. In both Gangs and Aviator he just seems hellbent on
cramming everything he can into the frames, the scenes, the story, he's wearing multiple
hats as termite spelunker of his own personal issues vs. white elephant showman vs.
tireless resuscitator of references throughout his viaggio in cinema.
You mean to tell me that you didn't find AVIATOR desperate at the core? I mean that was
one way the film managed to attain empathy with its protagonist, who otherwise swung
from half-baked psychobabble (the opening bathing scene, a total misrepresentation of
the factual causes of OCD all for the sake of paying homage to 8 1/2) to willful
inscrutability. The film is as manic as Hughes to Make Something Happen, the editing is
grueling. I haven't been this stressed watching a film since PUNCH DRUNK
LOVE.
But it's still an open question where this anxiety in late Scorsese is coming from -- of
course one can claim that it's always been there, but never this pronounced (except maybe
in CASINO).
Well I might be the only person who feels this way -- and as an auteurist I'm not even
saying it's a bad thing, just a remarkable phenomenon worth exploring a bit. Actually I'm
not the only person -- Geoffrey O'Brien made a terrific study of this in the current issue of
FILM COMMENT -- by the time I finished reading it I was convinced the film was a
masterpiece, and I had to read a couple other reviews to be reminded of what I had
problems with.
Kevin
21666
From: Kevin Lee
Date: Sat Jan 22, 2005 9:57pm
Subject: Johnnie To (was: Re: Re: coming sooner or later)
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, fmv@s... wrote:
> > Damn. Last year I missed THROW DOWN and BREAKING
> > NEWS. Heard one of them was good.
>
> They're both good, but Throw Down is great. To seems to be on some kind of
> a hot streak. Recommended if you haven't seen it: Fat Choi Spirit. An
> action comedy about Mahjong.
>
> Fred.
What do you think of PTU and RUNNING ON KARMA?
The film that seemed to have put him on the map back in '99 was THE MISSION. I finally
caught up with it last fall during a To Binge and it seemed inferior to all the recent work
I've seen (in order of preference, RUNNING ON KARMA, THROW DOWN, PTU, BREAKING
NEWS)
Kevin
21667
From: Kevin Lee
Date: Sat Jan 22, 2005 10:06pm
Subject: Re: Another Best of 2004 list...(sorry!)
Please say more about FIVE. Saw this last monday at MoMA and after about midway I just
kind of said to myself, "I could probably make a lawyerly defense for this film given what I
see Kiarostami doing with the dialectic between realty and fiction, naturalness and
manipuulation, that he's cultivated throught this career, but deep down, I'm just not
feeling it from Abbas tonight." I liked the first scene the most -- one of the most brilliant
"narratives" I've seen concocted in some time. The ducks on the other hand made me
wanna puke.
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "Raymond P." wrote:
>
> Just want to bring a slightly stranger perspective to the best of
> 2004... Here's my 10 best of the year, out of the 170+ mostly
> art/indie films I saw:
>
> 1. Five (Abbas Kiarostami)
> 2. Tony Takitani (Jun Ichikawa)
> 3. The World (Jia Zhangke)
> 4. Dealer (Benedek Fliegauf)
> 5. Los Muertos (Lisandro Alonso)
> 6. This Charming Girl (Lee Yoon-Ki)
> 7. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry)
> 8. Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
> 9. The Time We Killed (Jennifer Reeves)
> 10. Two Great Sheep (Liu Hao)
>
> Honourable mentions:
>
> The Soup, One Morning (Izumi Takahashi)
> Henri Langlois: Phantom of the Cinematheque (Jacques Richard)
>
> Most promosing young directors (with only 2 films under their belts):
>
> Ning Hao (Incense, Mongolian Pingpong (2005))
> Lisandro Alonso (La Liberdad, Los Muertos)
> Benedek Fliegauf (Forest, Dealer)
> Ho Yuhang (Min, Sanctuary)
21668
From: Kevin Lee
Date: Sat Jan 22, 2005 10:27pm
Subject: Re: Unknown Pleasures
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "hotlove666" wrote:
>
> > Very artificial, even stagey solutions to enlarging the long-shot
> style, so as to have something to pan to ("Cue the fireworks!") or to
> backstop the shot ("Cue the stretchers!") or just to cut on, like the
> sudden gesture at the end of the swish-pan Contempt scene. It's off-
> putting when it shows: The shot of the boys passing around the dollar
> suddenly feels like a moment out of West Side Story.
What's disheartening is that this shot is cribbed from his own film XIAO WU (where
members of a farm family pass around a pager, which none of them have seen before).
His approach in UKNOWN PLEASURES (and THE WORLD) makes the most sense if you
wanna see it like a newspaper fresco painting -- he's just trying to capture the zeitgest in
big sweeping long takes filled with informational mise-en-scene. Kent Jones said
something about this in his Film Comment piece, and compares him favorably to Godard
and Altman in the process...
But it can also be charming, like the scene where the
> they hold hands and sing along with the tv without missing a note or
> a word,
that's probably my favorite scene -- because it reminds me of my old students. They
really did do stuff like that, and you can feel Jia being amazed, proud and saddened all at
once by this raw display of innocence. Or maybe it's just me.
or funny, like the scene with the main girl - she's great -
Zhao Tao, who's taken the place of Wang Hongwei as Jia's protagonist in the last two films.
I wonder if she's Mrs. Jia Zhangke by now...
>
> Actually, if I had an overall critique of the film, it's that apart
> from the modernism a lot of it's pretty old hat, but I bet it was
> like a little bomb going off in China. Plenty of first-period Godard
> stuff - the middle-class kid smokes almost as fast as Leaud!
Yes, you can practically smell Masculin Feminin all over this film. Wonder where Jia saw it.
> It's great seeing how the Mainland has changed since the Red
> Detachment of Women days, although as with everything else in the
> film, it's hard to know where realism leaves off and artifice begins.
I think one can be incredibly accomplished at melding one's internal mindscape with one's
external landscape -- Godard being a good example, Fellini being a less successful
example, where spectacle for the sake of personal expression upstages a real interest in
reality. And of course Godard can be troublesome in this regard as well (I noticed
Jonathan mentioning earlier something about Godard being out of touch in recent years
and that bearing out in his films). I fear that Jia is becoming increasingly cloistered in an
arthouse lifestyle and that's keeping his mind in a China that exists more in his mind.
He's actually veering towards the thing he set out to overthrow, the exoticism and artifice
of the Fifth Generation.
> No tv set is ever turned off in any of those rooms. If it's really
> like that, Rupert Murdoch is going take over China next!
This is pretty much an open secret, his ambitions to command a big chunk of the Asian
media market -- he knows where the future is. His wife is Chinese, so I'm sure he wants
to do to China what he does to his wife.
21669
From: Kevin Lee
Date: Sat Jan 22, 2005 10:32pm
Subject: (maybe) not so OT: Barthes mythologies, Garbo vs. Hepburn
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "hotlove666" wrote:
>
> And the best introduction to Barthes
> is "Mythologies," also translated by Howard, which has exerted a big
> influence on the writing of David and many other people.
Can you explain the distinction Barthes makes between the face of Garbo (an idea) and
Audrey Hepburn (an event) in MYTHOLOGIES? Maybe it's a distinction of modernism
(eternal ideal, striving for transcendence) vs. post-modernism (Hepburn as flavor of the
month), but from my 21st century vantage point I can't tell the difference any more than I
could 10 years ago when I read him in college. Besides, my own girl students in China
considered Hepburn's face to be the ultimate ideal of feminine beauty -- and they would
recite lines from ROMAN HOLIDAY so they could talk just like her.
21670
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Sat Jan 22, 2005 10:35pm
Subject: Re: lotsa sound and fury signifying... ? (Scorsese's last two films)
--- Kevin Lee wrote:
>
> You mean to tell me that you didn't find AVIATOR
> desperate at the core?
Not for a nanosecond.
I mean that was
> one way the film managed to attain empathy with its
> protagonist, who otherwise swung
> from half-baked psychobabble (the opening bathing
> scene, a total misrepresentation of
> the factual causes of OCD all for the sake of paying
> homage to 8 1/2)
Uh, no it's not. The "8 1/2" parallel has ben wildly
overplayed. It's a lot closer to "Once Upon a Time in
America."
to willful
> inscrutability.
Very scrutable over here!
The film is as manic as Hughes to
> Make Something Happen, the editing is
> grueling. I haven't been this stressed watching a
> film since PUNCH DRUNK
> LOVE.
>
Don't get out much, hunh?
> But it's still an open question where this anxiety
> in late Scorsese is coming from -- of
> course one can claim that it's always been there,
> but never this pronounced (except maybe
> in CASINO).
>
"Tha Age of Anixety" (Bernstein/Auden)
> Well I might be the only person who feels this way
> -- and as an auteurist I'm not even
> saying it's a bad thing, just a remarkable
> phenomenon worth exploring a bit. Actually I'm
> not the only person -- Geoffrey O'Brien made a
> terrific study of this in the current issue of
> FILM COMMENT -- by the time I finished reading it I
> was convinced the film was a
> masterpiece, and I had to read a couple other
> reviews to be reminded of what I had
> problems with.
>
I'll have to read that (gave up reading FC after I got
into a fight with their editors back in the early 80's
and stopped writing for them.)
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com
21671
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Sat Jan 22, 2005 10:42pm
Subject: Re: (maybe) not so OT: Barthes mythologies, Garbo vs. Hepburn
--- Kevin Lee wrote:
>
> Can you explain the distinction Barthes makes
> between the face of Garbo (an idea) and
> Audrey Hepburn (an event) in MYTHOLOGIES?
Garbo is immobile : "Queen Christina"
Hepburn is in constant action: "Funny Face."
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com
21672
From: jpcoursodon
Date: Sat Jan 22, 2005 11:08pm
Subject: Re: (maybe) not so OT: Barthes mythologies, Garbo vs. Hepburn
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, David Ehrenstein
wrote:
>
> --- Kevin Lee wrote:
>
>
> >
> > Can you explain the distinction Barthes makes
> > between the face of Garbo (an idea) and
> > Audrey Hepburn (an event) in MYTHOLOGIES?
>
>
> Garbo is immobile : "Queen Christina"
>
> Hepburn is in constant action: "Funny Face."
>
> "You're not exotic
But so hypnotic
You've got
A lot
Of personality...
Though you're no Mona Lisa
For worlds I won't replace
Your funny, sunny face."
It's hard for someone who wasn't around when Audrey appeared to
understand her impact. Many cinephiles in France (especially most of
the original POSITIF gang) hated her because she was "flat-chested"
and "looked like a boy" (sic). Kyrou kept writing that only faggots
could like her (gay bashing was quite fashionable among the
cinephilic left.)And of course Cahiers's endorsement of Audrey
clearly meant that they were all a bunch of reactionary faggots.
I never found Barthes' piece very convincing. Of course there is
a huge gap between GG and AH, and of course he pinpoints the
difference but he was merely stating the obvious in highly seductive
intellectual terms. Now that Hepburn is as far away in time as Garbo
was when Barthes wrote maybe we need another meditation on the
difference between Audrey and... inset your favorite female (or
male?) icon.
JPC
>
>
> __________________________________________________
> Do You Yahoo!?
> Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
> http://mail.yahoo.com
21673
From: Charles Leary
Date: Sat Jan 22, 2005 11:14pm
Subject: Re: Johnnie To (was: Re: Re: coming sooner or later)
Well THE MISSION is my favorite, although I also like the
aforementioned RUNNING ON KARMA, FAT CHOI SPIRIT and PTU. I also
recommend LOVE ON A DIET and NEEDING YOU, the two Sammi-Andy Lau
romantic comedies that YESTERDAY ONCE MORE was following up on. Then
there's THE LONGEST NITE, nominally produced by To but may have been
actually partly directed by him, and FULLTIME KILLER, one of his more
referential works I think. Other good ones are WU YEN, a period-martial
arts comedy with shadowplay transitions, and EXPECT THE UNEXPECTED,
again, directed by Patrick Yau but produced by To. I'm a big fan so I
can think of a number of good ones.
Speaking of his Hollywood involvement, he's been courted for years and
there is the possibility of Hollywood remakes of some of his films.
Technically one could say he's already made a Hollywood film as his
TURN LEFT TURN RIGHT was produced by Warner Brothers Asia.
Charley
On Jan 22, 2005, at 10:57 PM, Kevin Lee wrote:
>
> --- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, fmv@s... wrote:
>
> > They're both good, but Throw Down is great. To seems to be on some
> kind of
> > a hot streak. Recommended if you haven't seen it: Fat Choi Spirit.
> An
> > action comedy about Mahjong.
> >
> > Fred.
>
> What do you think of PTU and RUNNING ON KARMA?
>
> The film that seemed to have put him on the map back in '99 was THE
> MISSION. I finally
> caught up with it last fall during a To Binge and it seemed inferior
> to all the recent work
> I've seen (in order of preference, RUNNING ON KARMA, THROW DOWN, PTU,
> BREAKING
> NEWS)
>
> Kevin
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
21674
From: hotlove666
Date: Sun Jan 23, 2005 1:04am
Subject: Re: "Neutral" style and Barthes
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "jpcoursodon"
wrote:
>
> Bill, as an avid Barthes reader, what do you make of his concept
> of "le neutre" -- mentioned several times, for example,
in "Barthes
> by Barthes" in which he refers to "white writing," "the
> smooth," "the empty," "the seamless" (my own clumsy translation) --
> in relation to your theory of neutral film style?
Good question - I'm trying to see if there is any relevance by
reading Barthes' published notes for his 1976 lecture series at
College de France, a magnum opus on Le Neutre. "Writing Degree Zero"
is another tempting place to make the connection, and "white
writuing," as you say. On the face of it his definition of what Le
Neutre does - dejouer (how do you translate that?) le paradigm, le
conflit, le sens - is half appropriate to what we've been talking
about and half not. There's a lot of Taoism in the lectures, and I am
fairly sure that critical proponents of neutral style - even if they
don't call it that - have spiritual, or at least metaphysical,
agendas that might coincide with that. I'm plowing through the notes
and will report back - in any case, it's a stimulating read.
21677
From: hotlove666
Date: Sun Jan 23, 2005 1:11am
Subject: Re: Unknown Pleasures
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "Kevin Lee"
wrote:
No tv set is ever turned off in any of those rooms. If it's really
> > like that, Rupert Murdoch is going take over China next!
>
> This is pretty much an open secret, his ambitions to command a big
chunk of the Asian
> media market -- he knows where the future is. His wife is Chinese,
so I'm sure he wants
> to do to China what he does to his wife.
Or what she does to him!
21678
From: hotlove666
Date: Sun Jan 23, 2005 1:41am
Subject: Re: Unknown Pleasures
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "Kevin Lee"
wrote:
it's hard to know where realism leaves off and artifice begins.
>
> I think one can be incredibly accomplished at melding one's
internal mindscape with one's
> external landscape -- Godard being a good example, Fellini being a
less successful
> example, where spectacle for the sake of personal expression
upstages a real interest in
> reality. And of course Godard can be troublesome in this regard as
well
I think that the Israeli heroine's suicidal insistence on the need
for dialogue in Notre Musique (note the plural) shows the contrary:
Godard is engaged in a (probably) final pirouette, redirecting
himself toward other people, other thinkers (the planned Collage de
France series starting later this year), other places: Sarajevo is no
longer a fictional place in Notre Musique, as it was in For Ever
Mozart - he's IN Sarajevo.
That's why I keep saying that Eloge d'Amour was a (beautiful) dead
end, from which he is extricating himself in Notre Musique, which was
initially supposed to be a filmed dialogue between Godard and Marcel
Ophuls, who bowed out, on the subject "What is a Jew?" The film he
made still bears the traces of that impulse toward a dialogue that
didn't take place.
I fear that Jia is becoming increasingly cloistered in an
> arthouse lifestyle and that's keeping his mind in a China that
exists more in his mind.
> He's actually veering towards the thing he set out to overthrow,
the exoticism and artifice
> of the Fifth Generation.
I don't know his work or personal circumstances or polemical history
well enough to answer that, but again what I saw in Unknown Pleasures
was just the opposite: a Minnelli wannabe trying to escape his self-
imprisonment as Master of the Long Shot (implicitly: the Long Shot as
Realistic Social Tableau), but not yet skilled enough (or well-
financed enough) to pull it off. The "Cue the stretchers" shot, for
example, would have gotten him fired if he had filmed it for ER -
where it would be right at home: there's really nothing extraordinary
about it. There were moments like that throughout where I thought I
was watching a student film by someone whose ideas exceeded his
budget and experience. In some cases, there weren't even fresh ideas -
just a will to move the camera. (Maybe HE'S been watching tv.)
But I think the Will to Artifice is coming from him, and was already
implicit in the long shots of Platform, whose wonderful lighting and
composition carry over into this film despite the occasional bumps
and dead spaces. I haven't seen The World, which I gather was made
with state financing. That should have enabled him to do more of what
he did in Unknown Pleasures and do it better. Or maybe the new film
doesn't bear out what I'm saying at all...
21679
From: hotlove666
Date: Sun Jan 23, 2005 1:46am
Subject: For David
Win makes Scorsese pic a front-runner for Oscar
The Producers Guild of America has tapped "The Aviator" as top
feature film of 2004, awarding producers Michael Mann and Graham King
the Darryl F. Zanuck award.
Miramax/Warner's sprawling Howard Hughes biopic won Saturday night
over Miramax's "Finding Neverland," Disney/Pixar's "The Incredibles,"
Warner's "Million Dollar Baby" and Fox Searchlight's "Sideways."
21680
From: Noel Vera
Date: Sun Jan 23, 2005 4:52am
Subject: Re: Twelve Great Filipino Films
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "Michael E. Kerpan, Jr."
wrote:
>
> --- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "Noel Vera"
wrote:
> >
> > http://movies.groups.yahoo.com/group/noelmoviereviews/message/480
> >
> I really really would love to see some of Bernal's and Brocka's
films
> (and then some of the others on your list). I am beginning to
despair
> that I ever will, however.
>
> Thanks for the list, though. ;~}
>
> MEK
Sure thing.
Pangarap ng Puso is available on VCD at http://www.regalfilms.com/ I
believe. No subtitles.
21681
From: Noel Vera
Date: Sun Jan 23, 2005 5:04am
Subject: Re: Takashi Miiike
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "hotlove666"
wrote:
>
> I don't think he's capable of making a boring shot.
Miike can be cartoonish fun, but I prefer Kurosawa Kyoshi myself.
21682
From: jpcoursodon
Date: Sun Jan 23, 2005 9:16am
Subject: Re: "Neutral" style and Barthes
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "hotlove666"
wrote:
>
> --- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "jpcoursodon"
> wrote:
> >
> > Bill, as an avid Barthes reader, what do you make of his concept
> > of "le neutre" -- mentioned several times, for example,
> in "Barthes
> > by Barthes" in which he refers to "white writing," "the
> > smooth," "the empty," "the seamless" (my own clumsy
translation) --
> > in relation to your theory of neutral film style?
>
> Good question - I'm trying to see if there is any relevance by
> reading Barthes' published notes for his 1976 lecture series at
> College de France, a magnum opus on Le Neutre. "Writing Degree
Zero"
> is another tempting place to make the connection, and "white
> writuing," as you say.
The relevant passage is the chapter "L'ecriture et le silence"
where he speaks of "une ecriture innocente" (but
not "impassible"), "ecriture transparente," "un style de l'absence
qui est presque une absence ideale du style" ("a style of absence
that is almost an ideal absence of style"). Doesn't that define what
you have in mind pretty well? (however Barthes cites Camus' "The
Stranger" as the literary work that "inaugurated" this "parole
transparente," -- is there anything as deliberately -- self-
consciously --"transparent" as Camus' style there in any of the
examples of "neutral style" you had in mind? JPC
On the face of it his definition of what Le
> Neutre does - dejouer (how do you translate that?)
What about "to foil"?
le paradigm, le
> conflit, le sens - is half appropriate to what we've been talking
> about and half not. There's a lot of Taoism in the lectures, and I
am
> fairly sure that critical proponents of neutral style - even if
they
> don't call it that - have spiritual, or at least metaphysical,
> agendas that might coincide with that. I'm plowing through the
notes
> and will report back - in any case, it's a stimulating read.
Does sound like it!... Going back to "L'Ecriture et le silence" --
a fascinating chapter, (quite blanchotien!) Barthes suggests
that "neutral writing" is an unattainable ideal: "nothing is more
unfaithful than white writing" (traditional forms always creep back
in, literature ultimately cannot be "vanquished.") Cannot the same
apply to filmic ecriture? JPC
21683
From: peckinpah20012000
Date: Sun Jan 23, 2005 0:20pm
Subject: Re: Takashi Miiike
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "Noel Vera"
wrote:
>
> --- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "hotlove666"
> wrote:
> >
> > I don't think he's capable of making a boring shot.
>
> Miike can be cartoonish fun, but I prefer Kurosawa Kyoshi myself.
We must also not forget the Miike of ANDROMEDIA, THE BIRD PEOPLE
OF CHINA, RAINY DOG, and LEY LINES who is far removed from
the "cartoonish fun" and "severed limbs" stereotypes conjured up by
most reviewers.
His output is huge and diverse. But, as his critic Tom Mes points
out in his book AGITATOR, there is much variation in his films. Due
to his amazing prolific output, he has his failures. But he is an
important voice in the now available world of post-war Japanese
commercial cinema embodied by talents such as Kinju Fukasaku whose
YAKUZA PAPERS (aka. BATTLES WITHOUT HONOR AND HUMANITY) are now
available in a 6 disk DVD set.
He often adds some very astute comments on the state of recent
Japanese society often operating under the guise of the "cinema of
outrage" offending certain critical senstitivities in the same way
as BATTLE ROYALE did. Miike is an interesting talent whose progress
is worth watching to see in which direction he will finally go
before his energies eventually dissipate due to fatigue.
Tony Williams
21684
From: Elizabeth Nolan
Date: Sun Jan 23, 2005 1:19pm
Subject: PSIFF / GOING THROUGH SPLAT: THE LIFE AND WORK OF STEWART STERN
Saying a general hello to everybody. I was at the Palm Springs
International FF for a few weeks with only modem access and a few
minutes to get on the net. I appreciate all your recommendations and
used them to guide my viewing
THE WORLD
STRAY DOGS
DEAR FRANKIE
DAY AND NIGHT
EARTH AND ASHES
NO ONE KNOWS
HOME OF THE BRAVE
KONTROLL
STRINGS
NAPOLA
(there are probably a few more personal favorites but I don't have a
list off hand). I did not like PEAS at 5:30, nor Ingelease (sp). I
didn't bother to see things that will be released here in San Diego
(Born into Brothels)
One film that was premiered and might be of interest to some is GOING
THROUGH SPLAT: THE LIFE AND WORK OF STEWART STERN of Rebel Without a
Cause; Rachel, Rachel; and Sybil scripts.
My interest in screenwriting got me to this documentary which I often
avoid because of the talking heads. Going through Splat was speaking
from the heart, often in a painful manner, both for Stern and the
audience. Remarkable, however, how uplifting it was, especially as
Stern was there for a Q and A with the filmaker WARD.
TELL THEM WHO YOU ARE, Haskell Wexler's son documentary about his
father -- equally interesting and painful. Both Haskell and his son
tests one's patience!
The LAST MOGUL about Wasserman could have been made more interesting as
it seemed repetitious to me. It'd be curious to know what such a
powerful person would be doing in Hollywood today.
I saw about 50 films but will confess a bit of 'absence' viewing. I'm
still in a 'do what is needed' mode and 'keeping busy' since my
husband's death in October.
21685
From: Elizabeth Nolan
Date: Sun Jan 23, 2005 1:20pm
Subject: Re: Sallitt on not showing (Was: OT: Sade) reacting to...
ALMOST BROTHERS is a Brazilian film with many prison and poor
neighborhood scenes with all the accompanying criminal and amoral acts
implied though few shown... still when a meandering cat is placed in a
pillow case and jostled a bit, many audience members seemed to leave en
masse.
> There is no proper way of showing rape on screen. No matter how
> you film it, there will be two opposed types of responses,
> corresponding to two types of viewers: those who are upset (and
> tuned off) by it, and those who are turned on (I suppose that would
> include most rapists, of whom there are countless millions, and I
> guess they too watch movies ).
>
> I don't see how you can "exaggerate the typography of evil" when
> representing rape on screen. Even the most sensationalistic director
> tends to underplay it. JPC
21686
From: hotlove666
Date: Sun Jan 23, 2005 5:15pm
Subject: Re: "Neutral" style and Barthes
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "jpcoursodon"
wrote:
>
> The relevant passage is the chapter "L'ecriture et le silence"
> where he speaks of a style of absence
> that is almost an ideal absence of style. Doesn't that define what
> you have in mind pretty well? (however Barthes cites Camus' "The
> Stranger" as the literary work that "inaugurated" this "parole
> transparente," -- is there anything as deliberately -- self-
> consciously --"transparent" as Camus' style there in any of the
> examples of "neutral style" you had in mind?
Absolutely. The neutral style of Eustache. Or the more elegant
neutral style of one Dan Sallitt.
Barthes suggests
> that "neutral writing" is an unattainable ideal: "nothing is more
> unfaithful than white writing" (traditional forms always creep back
> in, literature ultimately cannot be "vanquished.") Cannot the same
> apply to filmic ecriture?
You are totally on target. Far from being something anyone can do by
tying a camera to a tree, neutral style is an artifice, and a hard -
perhaps impossible -- artifice to pull of. A utopia, but one that is
on the horizon of many film "projects" (in the Frenchlish sense of
the word that is so commonplace in English now). What else is
Kiarostami aiming for - and of course missing - in Ten if not
neutrality, in that case through non-intervention during the filming?
21687
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Sun Jan 23, 2005 5:43pm
Subject: Re: Otto (was: "Neutral" style and Barthes)
--- hotlove666 wrote:
> What else is
> Kiarostami aiming for - and of course missing - in
> Ten if not
> neutrality, in that case through non-intervention
> during the filming?
>
And I'll take this as a lead-in to a director whose
work I was expectingothers would have brought upby now
-- preminger.
"Movie" -- a hotbed of premingerians -- was always
going on about the neurtrality of his style. V.F.
Perkins especially used Preminger as a giant rubber
chicken to hit Eisenstein over the head with. In his
view Eisenstein was a second-rate filmmaker because he
always arranged for viewers to react in a particular
way -- and led them by the nost both visually and
dramatically. preminger by contrast, in Perkins' view,
was wildly superior in that nothing was ever
telegraphed or resolved.The viewer had to come to
conclusions for his or her self. Easy to see what this
emans in a general way, especially with "Anatomy of a
Murder." But while Preminger doesn't condemn the
sybarites of "Bonjour Tristesse" reflexively in the
standard Hollywood manner, it's pretty clear that
we're not meant to see the film's end as a happy one.
Likewise much of "Exodus" Still and all Preminger is
remarkably subtle. Critics to this day argue aout
"Bunny Lake is Missing." And such late works as "Tell
Me That You Love Me Junie Moon" and "Skidoo" are more
than worthy of a second look.
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - Helps protect you from nasty viruses.
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail
21688
From: jpcoursodon
Date: Sun Jan 23, 2005 6:59pm
Subject: Re: Otto (was: "Neutral" style and Barthes)
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, David Ehrenstein
wrote:
>
> --- hotlove666 wrote:
>
>
> > What else is
> > Kiarostami aiming for - and of course missing - in
> > Ten if not
> > neutrality, in that case through non-intervention
> > during the filming?
> >
> And I'll take this as a lead-in to a director whose
> work I was expectingothers would have brought upby now
> -- preminger.
>
> "Movie" -- a hotbed of premingerians -- was always
> going on about the neurtrality of his style. V.F.
> Perkins especially used Preminger as a giant rubber
> chicken to hit Eisenstein over the head with. In his
> view Eisenstein was a second-rate filmmaker because he
> always arranged for viewers to react in a particular
> way -- and led them by the nost both visually and
> dramatically. preminger by contrast, in Perkins' view,
> was wildly superior in that nothing was ever
> telegraphed or resolved.The viewer had to come to
> conclusions for his or her self. Easy to see what this
> emans in a general way, especially with "Anatomy of a
> Murder."
Preminger's style may be "neutral" when compared to
Eisenstein's, but that's only because everything is relative (in
French: "Tout est relatif.") I don't think the neutrality Bill has
been talking about can be found in Preminger (whether early, mid or
late).
But while Preminger doesn't condemn the
> sybarites of "Bonjour Tristesse" reflexively in the
> standard Hollywood manner, it's pretty clear that
> we're not meant to see the film's end as a happy one.
> Likewise much of "Exodus" Still and all Preminger is
> remarkably subtle. Critics to this day argue aout
> "Bunny Lake is Missing."
Which is one of the least "neutral" films I can think of!
And such late works as "Tell
> Me That You Love Me Junie Moon" and "Skidoo" are more
> than worthy of a second look.
>
>
>
> I don't think I could bring myself to watch "Skidoo" again, but
maybe I should.
> __________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Yahoo! Mail - Helps protect you from nasty viruses.
> http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail
21689
From: Damien Bona
Date: Sun Jan 23, 2005 7:00pm
Subject: Re: PSIFF / GOING THROUGH SPLAT: THE LIFE AND WORK OF STEWART STERN
Elizabeth, my deep condolences on your husband's death. I hope your
friends and loved ones are helping you through this difficult time.
-- Damien
21690
From: jpcoursodon
Date: Sun Jan 23, 2005 7:07pm
Subject: Re: "Neutral" style and Barthes
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "hotlove666"
wrote:
What else is
> Kiarostami aiming for - and of course missing - in Ten if not
> neutrality, in that case through non-intervention during the
filming?
You really have to explain both "of course" and "missing."
21691
From: Elizabeth Nolan
Date: Sun Jan 23, 2005 7:21pm
Subject: looking too young, (and looking too old)... both are a problem
One Word for What's Happening to Actors' Faces Today: Plastics By
MANOHLA DARGIS in today's NYT
http://query.nytimes.com/mem/tnt.html?pagewanted=1&tntget=2005/01/23/
movies/23darg.html&tntemail1
This article is about actors (actually actresses for the most part)
whose plastic-surgery faces limit the emotion their facial close ups
can convey, don't convey the weight of stressful experiences, etc.
An opposite thought occurred to me when I saw Robert Redford (who
eschews plastic surgery for himself) in THE CLEARING. Redford plays a
rather successful businessman with all the accouterments of such
success, including the luxury car, tailored clothing, mansion-like
home, as well as a younger mistress... yet because of his personal
appearance, his aging face did not fit his otherwise urbane personality
and style. The personal appearance / screen persona conflict made me
think he ought to be more careful with the selection of his roles,
perhaps period pieces before plastic surgery came in vogue, or obvious
characters not likely to pursue facial enhancement the way I imagine an
urbane successful businessman with a younger mistress might.
I know someone has referred to Manohla Dargis in some posts in the
past... perhaps you can forward this thought to Manohla.
Elizabeth
21692
From: jpcoursodon
Date: Sun Jan 23, 2005 8:50pm
Subject: Re: looking too young, (and looking too old)... both are a problem
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, Elizabeth Nolan wrote:
>
>
> This article is about actors (actually actresses for the most
part)
> whose plastic-surgery faces limit the emotion their facial close
ups
> can convey, don't convey the weight of stressful experiences, etc.
>
Actually I wonder whether the inability to express
standardized "emotion" through standardized facial expressions isn't
a plus rather than a handicap. Maybe those frozen faces will have to
look for some other form of expression. That might be in tune with
the "neutral" style with have been discussing. JPC
21693
From: Elizabeth Anne Nolan
Date: Sun Jan 23, 2005 10:11pm
Subject: Re: looking too young, (and looking too old)... both are a problem
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "jpcoursodon" wrote:
>Maybe those frozen faces will have to
> look for some other form of expression. That might be in tune with
> the "neutral" style with have been discussing. JPC
That's a legitimate style, perhaps not unlike the neutral look of some of Bresson's actors.
21694
From: David Ehrenstein
Date: Sun Jan 23, 2005 10:17pm
Subject: Re: Re: looking too young, (and looking too old)... both are a problem
--- Elizabeth Anne Nolan wrote:
>
> That's a legitimate style, perhaps not unlike the
> neutral look of some of Bresson's actors.
>
>
>
>
WellI don't find them that neutral at all. "Stunning"
is the word that comes to mind for the likes of
Antoine Monnier and Francois Letterier.
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - Find what you need with new enhanced search.
http://info.mail.yahoo.com/mail_250
21695
From: Richard Modiano
Date: Sun Jan 23, 2005 10:30pm
Subject: Re: "Neutral" style and Barthes
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "hotlove666"
wrote:
>
"...Far from being something anyone can do by tying a camera to a
tree, neutral style is an artifice, and a hard - perhaps impossible -
- artifice to pull of."
Couldn't a neutral style be realized accidently? For example, could
industrial films, instructional films and certain home movies be
examples of neutral style achieved without calculation? Could
Warhol's SLEEP be described as embodying a neutral style?
Richard
21696
From: Richard Modiano
Date: Sun Jan 23, 2005 10:41pm
Subject: Re: PSIFF / GOING THROUGH SPLAT: THE LIFE AND WORK OF STEWART STERN
Having recently attended a memorial for my brother, I offer my
condolences. May you dwell in peace, may you be healed.
Respecfully,
Richard Modiano
21697
From: Elizabeth Anne Nolan
Date: Sun Jan 23, 2005 11:34pm
Subject: Re: looking too young, (and looking too old)... both are a problem
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, David Ehrenstein wrote:
> WellI don't find them that neutral at all. "Stunning"
> is the word that comes to mind for the likes of
> Antoine Monnier and Francois Letterier.
If hallowed could be used in a non-religious sense, that would have
been my stylized word.
21698
From: hotlove666
Date: Mon Jan 24, 2005 0:13am
Subject: Re: Otto (was: "Neutral" style and Barthes)
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, David Ehrenstein
wrote:
> "Movie" -- a hotbed of premingerians -- was always
> going on about the neurtrality of his style.
Their interpretation of Preminger was totally wrongheaded. He has bad
guys, good guys; he directs the audience's attention every second -
the whole shot. The Movie gang were committing the error Godard
(challenging the equivalent myth of Preminger in France)
called "reading metaphysics into style." The most eloquent debunking
of the Movie line I've heard was the lesson Jim McBride, speaking as
a filmmaker who was in awe of Preminger's storytelling technique,
gave me when we talked about In Harm's Way for that Locarno book.
21699
From: hotlove666
Date: Mon Jan 24, 2005 0:18am
Subject: Re: "Neutral" style and Barthes
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "jpcoursodon"
wrote:
>
> --- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "hotlove666"
> wrote:
> What else is
> > Kiarostami aiming for - and of course missing - in Ten if not
> > neutrality, in that case through non-intervention during the
> filming?
>
>
> You really have to explain both "of course" and "missing."
The film is very stylized - the one aspect that works throughout is
the mise-en-scene, ironically. And that is to be expected from a
director who has always mimed non-mastery while being extremely
demiurgic: The "sound glitches" at the end of Close-Up, while they're
listening to the conversation in the car ahead, were put in during
post-production; the girl who brings the production of the film-
within-the-film in Olive Trees could've been looped - something
Kiarostami is not, as far as I know, averse to doing.
21700
From: hotlove666
Date: Mon Jan 24, 2005 0:20am
Subject: Re: looking too young, (and looking too old)... both are a problem
--- In a_film_by@yahoogroups.com, "jpcoursodon"
wrote:
Actually I wonder whether the inability to express
> standardized "emotion" through standardized facial expressions
isn't
> a plus rather than a handicap. Maybe those frozen faces will have
to
> look for some other form of expression. That might be in tune with
> the "neutral" style with have been discussing. JPC
Example: Dietrich ,who sacrificed the wonderful expressiveness of her
face in her early work to preserve the mask. She was a good enough
actress to get away with it, but she did give up a lot. As for
neutral style, I don't know of any filmmakers so inclined who worked
with her after her face froze.
a_film_by Main Page
Home Film
Art
Other: (Travel, Rants, Obits)
Links About
Contact