a double evil

. . .

the ghost

Le gamin au vélo

Now showing at Athens Cine through June 7.

carax/the public

un ange passe

the next step in the digital turnover

I wonder if in ten years we'll go to museums and look at HD projected images instead of actual paintings

sin

falling asleep on the job

. . .

Notes on Kracauer

From Caligari to Hitler. The film medium, suited to explore reality. “Of all the technical properties of film the most general and indispensable is editing.” Film comes from instantaneous photography (Muybridge/Marey) and Magic lanterns/motion machines, goal = to picture things moving. “Film is uniquely equipped to record and reveal physical reality… the transitory world we live in.” Special cinematic techniques (soft focus, close-ups, super impositions, dissolves), these are means for implementing the potential of the medium at the service of “camera-reality.” 2 main tendencies: Lumière (strict realist) vs Méliès (free reign of artistic imagination). Méliès substituted “staged illusion for unstaged reality,” he exploits many cinematic devices but uses photography in a pre-photographic spirit. Movement is cinematic, only the motion picture camera can record them. “recording functions” + “revealing functions”. The Chase: motion at its extreme. Dancing, 2nd type of specifically cinematic movement. Films go beyond the stage because they can dwell not only on actors but on nonhuman objects as well. “Films in which the inanimate merely serves as a background to self-contained dialogue and the closed circuit of human relationships are essentially uncinematic.” Films can reveal things normally unseen, objects too small (revealed through close-up) or too big. The Realistic Tendency vs The Formative Tendency. “Due to its fixed meaning, the concept of art does not, and cannot, cover truly “cinematic” films-films, that is which incorporate aspects of physical reality with a view to makes us experience them.” “Even the most creative filmmaker is much less independent of nature in the raw than the painter or poet; that his creativity manifests itself in letting nature in and penetrating it.” The Griffith CUs are not only important components of the narrative but reveal new aspects of physical reality. Accelerated and slow-motion show us things we could’ve never seen in real life (the growth of a plant, an explosion). Blind spots of the mind, the refuse (objects that remain unnoticed because we never look their way, like the aftermath of a party), the familiar (opposite of the refuse, we get so used to seeing them we take it for granted). Phenomena overwhelming consciousness: experiences so overwhelming that we can’t fully comprehend them, like death, elemental catastrophes, atrocities of war, acts of violence and terror, sexual debauchery ,etc. Special modes of reality: “expose physical reality as it appears to individuals in extreme states of mind." Cinema should reveal, not just record.
Examples:
- Waterer Watered by Lumière. “Story from everyday life”. Gorky said: “The spray will hit you…we shrink back.” Nature caught in the act.
- Arrival of a Train (Lumière) vs A Trip to the Moon (Méliès), the train in the Lumière is the real thing while in Méliès it is a toy train
- The Red Shoes, “Moira Shearer dances, in a somnambulistic trance, through fantastic worlds avowedly intended to project her conscious mind-agglomerates of landscape-like forms, near-abstract shapes, and luscious color schemes which have all the traits of stage imagery. Disengaged creativity thus drifts away from the basic concerns of the medium.”
- Keystone Chase films
- Ten Days That Shook the World, Eisenstein shows us a physical universe reflecting exultation (special mode of reality)

jusqu'à la victoire

Godard also wanted to meet and film the Palestinian leader. He secured a meeting. The filmmaker posed two questions to Yasser Arafat, the first about the concentration camps. “I asked him if the origins of the Palestinians’ difficulties had something to do with the concentration camps. He said to me, ‘No, that’s their story, the Germans and the Jews.’ And I said, ‘Not exactly, you know that in the camps, when a Jewish prisoner was very weak, close to death, they called him Muslim.’ And he responded, ‘So?’ I said, ‘You know, they could have called them black or an entirely different name, but no, they said Muslim, and that shows that there is a relationship, a direct relationship between the Palestinians’ difficulties and the concentration camps.” The second question was very short, “what is the future of the Palestinian revolution?” And Arafat’s response was even shorter, “I have to think about it, come back tomorrow.” Godard finished the story, “He never came back. At least he was honest.”

Taken from Ted Fendt's blog here, who translated it from the Antoine de Baecque's Godard: biographie

psycho mrs. morales

lang/scope

mitchell haven

Notes on Hugo Münsterberg

To Münsterberg films were getting closer to 'complete cinema' which is bad because it is getting closer to reality with color/sound/etc, betraying the silent film. He celebrated the flatness of the image, silent films, the artifice in cinema. “We do not see the objective reality, but a product of our own mind which binds the pictures together.” Cinema can break time/space unlike theater. The photoplay mirrors how the mind works. Epistemology is that the cinema works as a brain. Flashbacks are important to him. We know the world through memory/imagination/emotion. The world of dreams + fantasy. Emotion comes from crosscutting. Méliès over Lumière. “It is the aim of art to isolate a significant part of our experience in such a way that it is separate from our practical life and is in complete agreement with itself.” The mind completes the art work. “Our mind is here and there, our mind turns to the present and then to the past; the photoplay can equal in its freedom from the bondage of the material world.” The playwright limited by the fundamental principle of real time. “It is certainly true for the photoplay that nothing has the right to existence in its midst which is not internally needed for the unfolding of the unified action.” Fundamental principle of art is the demand for unity. “A good photoplay must be isolated and complete in itself like a beautiful melody.” “The photoplay must bring action and pictorial expression into perfect harmony.” “The photoplay shows us a significant conflict of human actions in moving pictures which, freed from the physical forms of space, time, and causality, are adjusted to the free play of our mental experiences and which reach complete isolation from the practical world through the perfect unity of plot and pictorial appearance.”

Quotations and ideas from Münsterberg's The Photoplay (1916)

ESSENTIAL READING: Across the Movi-Verse by J. Hoberman (Film Comment, March/April 2012)

"A Good Night for the Movies precipitated a form of celluloid primary-process thinking."

Hoberman's write up on Joe Dante's The Movie Orgy and Ken Jacobs' A Good Night for the Movies (II): 4th of July by Charles Ives by Ken Jacobs is a review piece that certainly fits in the current discussion of the digital takeover.  Hoberman describes attending the Good Night for the Movies screening where, "Ken kept climbing into the projection room, and over theater seats, orchestrating and conducting everything," as films where shown all over the almost empty cinema for 24 hours, "at various speeds, on top of or alongside each other, their soundtracks silenced or merged."  Jacobs started this project after getting a $300 grant for a project involving the projection of old Hollywood films on 16mm throughout different rooftops in NYC directly into the sun.  As Hoberman notes, Jacobs does the opposite by projecting the films in a tunnel-like cinema. He used the $300 grant to rent the films.

Still from God's Step Children, Oscar Micheaux's 1938 film which Jacobs finished the 24-hour screening with

André De Toth, 100

One of the great eye patch directors would've turned 100 yesterday. Currently on Instant Netflix: Hidden Fear, The Other Love, Monkey on My Back and Play Dirty.




More from David Hudson at Fandor.

Margaret (Kenneth Lonergan, 2011)

Margaret, are you grieving

Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By & by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep & know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What héart héard of, ghóst guéssed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

Gerard Manley Hopkins



A film that ends up being as confused as its heroine and antihero. Its heroine channeled through an incredibly headstrong and misguided 17 year-old and its antihero through the city itself, specifically post-9/11 NYC. Lonergan's creates one of the most poignant character studies of this specific culture in what is, most likely, the best American film of 2011.

It is stunning that we were nearly denied one of the freshest, most honest and raw depictions of the post-9/11 mindset so many filmmakers (including one this year) have been chasing on the screen, an accidental masterpiece. The film bathes in themes of loss, grief and guilt in incredibly organic ways, the editing precise and purposeful, the whole a messy but truthful construction that ranks as one of the most impeccably acted films I've ever seen, packed with ideas on the page that put Lonergan -- if he wasn't already there -- in the top echelon of writers in the field.

Kristopher Tapley

Now showing at Athens Ciné in stunning 35mm!

the phantom empire

read the first chapter last night, stunning, more thoughts upon completion... some excerpts from that chapter:

... The staging of the battle of Omdurman for The Four Feathers was as much a historical, certifiable event as the battle itself. You have proof before you, the actual footage of the faked battle: and that is all you have, or can ever have.

... A spectator can avoid certain movies, but not the Movies. You have been part of a captive audience all your life. Love it or leave it. But even if "they" permitted you to leave, there is no place to go. They own the airports. They own the telephones. They have seen to it that the pictures are everywhere. Swedish Hostage Syndrome begins to kick in. If you are to be strapped down and forced to watch these gigantic images, your survival odds improve drastically if you develop a fondness for them.

charlie, pt. IV

balázs

Close-up (CU) can express “the hidden life of little things.” CU has widened and deepened our vision of life.  “A good film w/ its CUs reveals the most hidden parts in our polyphonous life and teaches us to see the intricate visual details of life." With CUs even objects get human expressions projected onto them, the CU breathes human soul into objects. Facial expression: most subjective and individual of human manifestations and it is rendered objective in the CU. “The silent soliloquy” the face can say much more than a soliloquy, it cannot be suppressed or controlled. Many profound emotional experiences can never be expressed with words. The revolutionary world of the CU takes the viewer from the external world to the internal soulife. CUs makes us see the world anew. CU revealed the hidden mainsprings of life we thought we already knew so well. CUs are the pictures expressing the poetic sensibility of the director. “The facial expression on a face is complete and comprehensible in itself and therefore we need not think of it as existing in space and time." Physiognomy – the assessment of a person’s character from their outer appearance, especially the face. “They are picture-like yet they seem outside space; such is the psychological effect of the facial expression." Spoken word has hidden though, film (with CU) was the first to show us the truth of the face. Silent film [in the silent facial expression] gave us the world of microphysiognomy which could not otherwise be seen with the naked eye or in everyday life. Silent film + CU present a “drama of the spirit closer to realization than any stage play has ever been able to do." Saw film as an instrument for generating a new understanding of the real world.
Examples:
- Lillian Gish + the Chinaman in Griffith’s Broken Blossoms. When the chinaman asks her to smile. “But his friendly eyes bring a real smile to her face. The face itself does not change; but a warm emotion lights up from inside and an intangible nuance turns the grimace into a real expression.”
- The Passion of Joan of Arc, maid’s examination scene. “We move in the spiritual dimension of facial expression alone… Fierce passions, thoughts, emotions, convictions battle here, but their struggle is not in space.”

Günther Kaufmann, R. I. P.

The great Günther Kaufmann passed away.

An incredible actor who not only acted in most of Fassbinder's work and was a great singer but also in 2001 he even took the fall and went to jail for a crime that was his wife's. A stellar guy who will be sorely missed.

 

ferrara, filmmaker painter

-    --

The French filmmaker Olivier Assayas once called Dangerous Game one of the most daring moments in the history of movies. Few films make moviemaking look so ugly, even though Ferrara maintains unshakeable faith in the beauty of movies themselves. In terms of lighting, Ferrara is one of the most precise and painterly of modern filmmakers, and his sense of the beautiful remains evident even in his films’s darkest moments

Ben Sachs

nash vylle 2

a physical journey +
a journey through sound mixing and eiditing =
a jlg homage
// reading charlie

http://strugglingon2fronts.com

3 crowns

chaplin pt. III

The Deep Blue Sea (Terence Davies, 2011)

Working at an art house can be frustrating sometimes.  Seeing what little amount of people actually show up to watch these films is depressing.  Especially when the films that actually manage to get some people through the door are Salmon Fishing in the Yemen and the like.  And films like The Deep Blue Sea play to a theater with just one or two bodies.  Being only my second Terence Davies film I certainly don't understand why I've neglected this auteur for so long, especially considering that my first was Of Time and the City and I was completely blow away.  The Deep Blue Sea's opening sequence reminded me of Lars von Trier's Melancholia's overture.  An operatic sequence that blends past, present and future.  Beautifully shot with Barber's concerto working much in the same way as Wagner in the von Trier film. Actually the film felt like a weird mixture of Melancholia and David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method.  All films have this nostalgic, classic aura, a long with heavy doses of romanticism.  They are incredibly over-the-top melodrama, a 'problems of the rich' film; as are many of Fassbinder's work, of course the king of them all: Sirk, etc..  Somehow this three films nostalgic feelings seem much more honest than other such straight-forward tributes as The Artist and Hugo which actually seem too gimmicky to amount to anything beyond that.

Berkley, cont.

more here / here

charlie pt. II

James Agee, Life, 1949

Of all the comedians he worked most deeply and most shrewdly within a realizations of what a human being is, and is up against. The Tramp is as centrally representative of humanity, as many-sided and as mysterious as Hamlet, and it seems unlikely that any dancer or actor can ever have excelled him in eloquence, variety or poignancy of motion... The finest pantomime, the deepest emotion, the richest and most poignant poetry are in Chaplin's work.

the tramp

Charlie in '23 :

That costume helps me to express my conception of the average man, of almost any man, of myself. The derby, too small, is a striving for dignity. The mustache is vanity. The tightly buttoned stick and his whole manner are a gesture toward gallantry and dash and 'front'. He is trying to meet the world bravely, to put up a bluff, and he knows that, too. He knows it so well that he can laugh and pity himself a little.

oriental ruby

FOOTLIGHT PARADE PT2

race,

...