FILM Caché (Hidden) – Michael Haneke
Secrets, Lies & Videotape
By Catherine Wheatley (BFI)
Caché (Hidden) A review by Michael Farman
Family Is Hell and So Is the World : Talking to Michael Haneke at Cannes 2005
(Bright Lights Film Journal)
Review by Fred Thom in Plume Noir
BLOG Letters of Note [noted]
Some bright spark has thought of blogging facsimile letters of note from the famous, called Letters of Note
The 18 November 2009 entry is Kurt Vonnegut Jr’s 1944 letter home to Kurt Vunnegut Snr. Typed. Where did he get the typewriter – did they dole them out like email accounts for the forces nowadays? KV-J is the one we know, the other his Dad.
The letter is as funny as Slaughterhouse 5. Look out for the equivalent of the now famous, “So it goes.”
I’ve put the blog in my links.
FILM DOCUMENTARY My Life as a Terrorist
My Life as a Terrorist: The Story of Hans-Joachym Klein [2005]
This a free movie from Indiemoviesonline.com
Duration 70 mins. Directed by Alexander Oey. Summary from Spill.
The one review in Rotten Tomatoes reckons it’s much too long. It needs to be long in order to develop the character who is Klein. There is a point at which one can get the feeling, “This guy talks too much”, which is who he is. It is only through the length and the talking, including to as-is-now Dany Cohn-Bendit, that there ought to come some sort of ambivalence in the viewer about if the guy is simply not too bright (explaining how he got involved) or someone who wasn’t too bright to start with and has through reading and thinking come to a maturer understanding of things. In other words, at the time he acted (rashly and precipitously) he had too small a set of information and ideas to work on, despite access to students and academics who who really did grasp what it all meant.
It is not just about Klein, but about the times he lived in. So it is a glimpse of an era – for those who may have lived through it; and those who know nothing about it – and the mindset of those who believed direct action was imperative, like Klein.
In the spill review it claims:
At that trial, a number of Klein’s former collaborators — by then well-respected politicians in France, such as Daniel Cohn-Bendit — joined forces to incriminate him.
Either I wasn’t keeping up or that bit wasn’t mentioned. They seemed affable towards each other.
FILM – Times 100 best films of the decade
The 100 best films of the decade
Times of London, that is: in reverse order, of course.
Film lists are often more interesting because of what others think shouldn’t have been left out ( 9 pages of comments below this list…) or the completely alternative lists they generate.
What about a different kind of list, where films considered of equal stature are ranked equal.
Here, those films with links have reviews.
A little point: once read, such lists may influence. For example, I have never heard of Michael Haneke, let alone seen one of several films, but now I am about to see (DVD winging its way) what the fuss is about.
We can’t all see all the films ever made, so how can we judge? Certainly our judging is based on what others recommended us to watch in the first place.
A list might tell us the sort of films one values/likes. This in itself instructive because one may ask what it is about a particular list that might have a common thread running through it, and so on, and then come to some conclusions of our own about what makes a good film.
Then: who in their right mind would ask someone like Sir Ben Kingsley if he has seen the films he lists? I certainly wouldn’t : I saw him in that film (Sexy Beast) where he is a very irritable psychopath/sociopath sent out to Spain persuade a very suntanned former associate Ray Winstone to do another job.
FILM Wim Wenders Alice in the Cities [1974]
They never really show what it was you saw
Philip Winters in Alice in the Cities
FSFF offers three samples in YouTube with links to articles on Wenders. YouTube does Alice in the Cities in 10 parts under “A//ALCE//IN///CTIES PART 1 1974″.
Blurb in YouTube:
German journalist Philip Winter has a case of writer’s block when trying to write an article about the United States. He decides to return to Germany, and while trying to book a flight, encounters a German woman and her nine year old daughter Alice doing the same. The three become friends (almost out of necessity) and while the mother asks Winter to mind Alice temporarily, it quickly becomes apparent that Alice will be his responsibility for longer than he expected. After returning to Europe, the innocent friendship between Winter and Alice grows as they travel together through various European cities on a quest for Alice’s grandmother.
David Tacon’s 2003 article on Wenders in The Senses of Cinema puts Alice in the Cities in the context of the life and his other films.
And then, near the end of the film
Looking up reviews and analysis of the film I came across The Internet Movie Cars Database (!). Here for Alice, a series of still of all the vehicles that come into frame, Perhaps if one were being really nerdy, there would be comparison of the number of US car makes over European….
…..I was initially intrigued by this page because of the number of grabs of the film pe se.
*
The FSFF post on Alice lists a variety of essays/academic papers,
The Art of Seeing Rescues the Existence of Things: Notes on the Wenders Road Films and Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution (Part 2) has some passages that get to the core of what Alice is about:
In Alice in den Städten and in Im Lauf der Zeit there may be a tendency by the main character to mirror the existential perceptions of the director/author. In Alice, the incapable of writing Philip, shifts his attempt to capture the “American scene” to photography. [37] Eventually all representations through writing and photography is abandoned and instead, Philip embarks on an improvised journey around a single photograph of Alice’s grandmother’s house. Like his lead character, Wenders abandoned the written text once the production had returned to Germany [..]
In Alice in den Städten, Philip Winter is paralysed by his writing assignment. Incapable of representing the American reality by way of the written word, he attempts to use Polaroid photography to achieve this end. As he explains to his magazine editor, “the story has to do with things that one can see … with pictures and signs.” [47] Franklin notes that Winter’s statement can be generally understood as a direct comment by Wenders to the spectator. As the narrative unfolds however, Winter’s snapshots are obviously as incapable as the written word of portraying the American reality. Winter complains that his instant snapshots, “never show what you’ve really seen.” [48] Like Wenders, Winter is powerless to capture the American scene.
Winter’s obsessive photography soon becomes a futile attempt at capturing reality. His German girlfriend in New York alludes to this when she says: “You always act as if you were the only one to experience things and that’s why you keep taking these pictures.” [49] Elsaesser comments that, “the mediations of writing, describing, recording, no longer reflect or hold the subject in any stable identity … polaroid pictures become the necessary and yet insufficient frame to hold the image of the self, which in its contact with the world is constantly threatened by dissolution.” [50] When Philip Winter complains about the complications Alice has brought into his existence, she answers him: “What else did you have to do? Just scribble in your notebook?” [51] Near the end of the film Alice asks Philip what he will do when he gets to Munich. He replies: “I’ll write an end to this story. And you?” [52] Alice simply shrugs.
FILM The Top 100 Spiritually Significant Films
The latest MovieMail catalogue highlights The Top 100 Spritually Significant Films compiled by Arts and faith. Each entry in the latter has a summary/review and a youtube extract/ trailer embedded.
FILM SOUND Sound in Tarkovski’s Stalker
This also came via Catherine Grant’s FSFF :
The Edge of Perception: Sound in Tarkovski’s Stalker
by
Stefan Smith
The Soundtrack, volume 1, number 1, 2007
FILM Roman Polanski’s Knife in the Water
Catherine Grant has posted on Knife in the Water and Polanski otherwise. In fact you can watch the whole film in parts in Youtube.(No English subtitles)
PERCEPTION Seeing Myself See: The Ecology of Mind
Seeing Myself See: The Ecology of Mind
Beau Lotto, Reader in neuroscience and head of Lottolab at University College London, talks about how colour, vision and seeing ourselves see can contribute to a richer, more empathetic view of nature and human nature.
This lecture comes from the UC Channel. But I can’t find it there.
FILM Pierrot le fou
Pierrot le fou
by Royal Brown in Cineaste, vol 33, no. 3 (summer 2008)
FILM Godard Art and Arriflex
GODARD: You forget the cinema is people who invest their money, invest their ideas, their heart. Actors invest their body and sometimes their heart. I invest my heart. One has rarely seen technicians invest in the cinema. [Excuse me.] One has rarely seen technicians invent equipment. It wasn’t a sound engineer who invented the Nagra. You didn’t invent the Arriflex — you don’t even know who invented it. Hitler invented the Arriflex, so battles could be filmed. That’s why you have a light camera.
CINEMATOGRAPHER: This is not what they invented…
GODARD: NO, but the Arriflex was developed from it…
CINEMATOGRAPHER: I know the story…
GODARD: It was the military…
CINEMATOGRAPHER: I know the story…
GODARD: I regret that a cameraman or a camera operator never invented, the way a singer invents a song. There are many things like that. So when one is insulted, one knows what risks he’s taking on the film; he doesn’t have to take risks but he doesn’t have to sulk either! There are enough unemployed in France.
CINEMATOGRAPHER: It’s now been 5 weeks that we have a strange relationship with you…
GODARD: And I have a strange relationship with you. And you have a curious relationship with the sun. I’d rather spend an hour discussing an intonation.
CinemaTechnic Camera Profiles: ARRI 35 II
From Jorge Diaz-Amador at Cinematechnic.com
FILM Bergman: cinematic philosopher?
Irving Singer, Ingmar Bergman, Cinematic Philosopher: Reflections on His Creativity, MIT Press, 2007, 240pp., ISBN 9780262195638.
Reviewed by Thomas E. Wartenberg, Mount Holyoke College
FILM Godard Histoire(s) du cinéma
Histoire(s) du cinéma
Doug Cummings review (10 September 2008) in Moviemail.
Histoire(s) du cinéma – Alifeleti Brown in Senses of Cinema.
From end note 13:
La « partition » des Histoire(s) du cinéma de Jean-Luc Godard created by Celine Scemama.
Jean-Luc Godard and the other history of cinema.
Ph.D. Thesis. Douglas Morrey. Warwick University 2002.
Making History – Essay and inteview with Jean-Luc Godard
by Jonathan Rosenbaum
Excerpts from his essay on Godard’s Histoires[s] du Cinema
Jean-Luc Godard by Craig Keller Senses of Cinema.
FILM More on decoupage
Translator’s note on découpage.
What is Cinema? by Andre Bazin. Translated by Timothy Barnard. Caboose 2009.
Mentioned in Girish in post, A Cinema Haunted by Writing, 3 may 2009, on cinema as writing.
FILM DISSERTATION Viewing novels, reading films: Stanley Kubrick and the art of adaptation as interpretation
Viewing novels, reading films: Stanley Kubrick and the art of adaptation as interpretation.
Ph. D. Thesis by Charles Bane, 1998.
FILM Climates by Nuri Bilge Ceylan
Watched Climates on iPlayer last night and was struck by the way several shots were set up in extreme close up, trying without success to remember a well-known film that used the same technique.
Steven Yates in his review of Climates in kamera.co.uk, did not give a direct answer but confirmed that Ceylan is both filmmaker and photographer. Right from the beginning of the film the main character Isa, played by Ceylan himself, is taking digital photographs, boring his girlfriend played by his wife Ebru Ceylan.
In his own photography website, nuri bilge ceylan photography, the bumf for his 2007 Grenada exhibition includes:
Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s career as a filmmaker is indivisible from his interest in still images. He is in charge of the cinematography of his own films and often includes a photographer in the plot, such as the protagonist of Distant, a spectator of the city of Istanbul from the other side of the lens, and who is incapable of verbal communication beyond images. During the preparation and shooting of his latest feature, Climates, which Cines del Sur presents in the Itineraries Section, Ceylan took a panoramic camera with him to capture exteriors; what were initially locations to be used in production soon became a specific work…
One of photographs in his Turkey cinemascope series, Ishakpasa palace, 2005, is in the film near the end.
FILM The Neuroscience of film
Neurocinematics: the neuroscience of film
Film, Narrative, and Cognitive Neuroscience by Zacks, Jeffrey, et al.
Inter-subject synchronization of cortical activity during movie watching
Summary of paper in workshop on the cognitive neuroscience of film held in 2005.
Links to pdf paper in Science 12 march 2004:
Intersubject Synchronization of Cortical Activity During Natural Vision.
FILM NON-FICTION Werner Herzog
Came across some of these Herzog documentaries before but reappeared in a surf on something not that related purely serendipitously:
Mein liebster Feind – Klaus Kinski
Notes: wiki: my best Fiend
Notes: Wiki: Dieter Dengler
notes: wiki: Little Dieter needs to Fly
Extract from Denglaers’ Escape from Laos
~
There is no doubt a personality disorder called STBOS -BWNTBSTMTACAU*: I need to say about Herzog’s non-fiction that he films it in feature film style, which is in sharp contrast to the default style coming from cinema direct/cinema verite tradition. Even his colouration and mis-en-scene is big-filmic. This has a strange but satisfying effect, a kind of equivalent visual effect to the aspects of the contrapuntal in music.
With this in mind, I am a little bit disappointed with some of the music he uses, particularly in films like Lessons in Darkness. Though music can be used to almost poke fun at the cinematic. In the oily-boy story – which is as riveting as any he has made – the music is what can only call kitsch because of its relation to the visual: that is, it is not kitsch in and of itself, but becomes so when associated with the particular visuals he uses. I would be prepared to argue this one! But it does need a sort of reply that includes the details in shot (moment-by-moment) specific film terms to explain why my opinion is wrong.
The music in Dieter does work very well unlike that in Lesson in Darkness. One is reminded of Dr.Strangelove: I can’t give chapter and verse right now, but will add to this post when I re-look at some extracts of the Kubrick.
Even if one can see where Herzog is going with all the heavy music with its deeply ironic tone, it is not as one-to-one as one might think on first seeing/hearing the film. There are many layers to the symbiosis between the music and cinematography in Lost. Repeated watching highlights subtler colours within the, at first, seemingly bleeding obvious purpose to this particular set of sound backdrops.
STBOS-BWNTBSTMTACAU* = Stating The Bleeding Obvious – But Wot needs To Be Said To Make Things Absolutely Unambiguous
