FILM ANTONIONI Barthes: “. ..vigilance, wisdom and fragility.”
FSFF is doing Antonioni this week.
Looking through the academic papers Catherine has listed the divide between film and what is written about it seems enormous. The density and opacity of jargon-filled texts often seem to bear no relation to a film viewed on screen.
This is the intro essay by the editors in the collection.
The story is the screening of L’Aventura [1960] at the 13th. Cannes Film Festival. The audience hated it.
p.3
Michelangelo Antonioni and Monica Vitti, director and protagonist of the film, emerged from the projection in tears, devastated by the audience’s scathing reaction, but awoke the following morning to find, hanging from a wall in the hall of their hotel, a typewritten letter of support signed by a long list of directors, technicians, actors and critics (among many others, Roberto
Rossellini, Georges Sadoul, Janine Bazin, Anatole Dauman, André S. Labarthe and Alain Cuny). The short letter read: Conscious of the exceptional importance of Michelangelo Antonioni’s film, L’avventura, and appalled by the demonstrations of hostility it has aroused, the undersigned professionals and critics wish to express all their admiration to the author of this film.
Roland Barthes wrote an open letter, Cher Antonioni, which was read out on 28 January 1980 at a ceremony in which the city of Bologna awarded him a honour.
In Michaelangelo: The Investigation by Seymour Chatman and Paul Duncan, Barthe’s letter is described as:
p.11
…..a dense and insightful one and one of the most elegant pieces ever written about a film-maker.
Following paragraph:
There is a 6 part Youtube of a BBC Arena programme, Dear Antonioni…, aired on 18 January 1997, which uses Bartes’ letter to frame an essay on Antonioni. Included amongst the commentators is Alain Robbe-Grillet.
FILM BELA TARR Through a Glass Darkly – On Béla Tarr’s Damnation
Through a Glass Darkly – On Béla Tarr’s Damnation
By
Ela Bittancourt
Another goodie from the May 2012 issue 76 of Brightlights
PHOTOGRAPHERS Robert Capa, Gerda Taro and Chim
Robert Capa and Gerda Taro: love in a time of war
–Capa and Taro lived, loved and died on the frontline, becoming the most famous war photographers of their time. As a new novel about them is published, we explore their real relationship
Sean O’Hagan, The Observer, Sunday 13 May 2012
Other :
Lost Luggage [The Mexican Suitcase] – Adam Marelli
Leading Photographers: Gerda Taro – Amber King
Portrait of Gerda Taro
Gerda Taro in Weimar blog
Gerda Taro in blog En El Camino [On the Road]
Lost photographs brought to light by Olivier Laurent in British Journal of Photography
The Mexican Suitcase = a film by Trisha Ziff [promotion] [see details in story tab]
The Mexican Suitcase - International centre of Photography [ Gallery of photographs by Capa, Taro and Chim]
FILM JOURNAL BRIGHTLIGHTS May 2012 Issue 76
Brightlights Film Journal
May 2012, Issue 76
Editorial
An awful lot of interest in this issue. I’ve chosen these three to highlight:
Percolating Paranoia – Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat
by
Janus B Wager
“Nun-Lust, Torture-Porn, Church-Desecration and Bad Taste” – Reconnecting with Ken Russell’s The Devils
By
Gordon Thomas
Anthony Perkins – Forever Psycho
By
Dan Akira Nishimura
DENNIS POTTER The Singing Detective [1986]
Most of The Singing Detective is available on Youtube. For some reason the 6 part series peters out at part 6. But the final section of part 6 can be seen in other versions.
A website called the British Film Resource – no idea who has produced it – has a fairly detailed hypertexty analysis of The Singing Detective, which could be a starting point after the wiki of course.
Clenched Fists (“The official Dennis Potter website”, run by Dave Evans till his death in May 2005) Dennis Potter : The Why of his Doubles and Devices, by Irving B. Harrison, Chapter 4
Chapter 3: The Singing Detective – A Place in Mind, Psychoanalysis and Culture, A Kleinian Perspective (1999) edited by David Bell. (GoogleBook: pp. 63-85, no missing pages)
The Singing Detective is still pitch perfect William Skidelsky, Observer, 12 February 2012
FILM REVIEW MICHAEL WOOD Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once upon a Time in Anatolia
Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once upon a Time in Anatolia
Michael Wood, London review of Books, 10 may 2012
PHOTOGRAPHY Facing the Camera by Alberto Manguel
Blog post:
Facing the Camera
by Alberto Manguel
–How much does a photograph really capture the essence of a person?
PHOTOGRAPHY Extract from Photography and Political Violence by Susie Linfield
Extract from:
The Cruel Radiance – Photography and Political Violence
by
Susie Linfield
FILM WITHIN FILM TRUFFAUT La Nuit Americaine [1973]
Jean-Pierre Léaud and Francois Truffaut in La Nuit Americaine
Looked at Truffault again in the week before his anniversary date which was marked by a Google Doodle. With a bit of luck this should mean a lot of people looking to see who he was. And watching some of his films. Could check DVD sales.
Watched 400 Cent Coups from my collection and then decided to buy a DVD of La Nuit Américaine (Day for Night, 1973). In reading about the film over the years and forever coming across the first shot of the square where Alphonse, played by the adult Jean-Pierre Léaud, pops out of the metro, and then the exposure of the film-within-a-film with light, camera crane, it always felt this would be my kind of film.
Having watched it twice – the no-English subtitle DVD, allowing me to focus more on the visuals; then in YouTube with English subtitles – I felt disappointed he chose to counterpoise his clever, funny film about film-making with a run-of-the mill film-within-a-film. Yes, it’s part of the fun to have a bog-standard melodrama – which Truffault himself said still demonstrates how film-making works – but there are reasons why a film-within-film as good as the film itself might have worked too.
A sensible remark elsewhere: look at them as two films spliced together as well as a one film framing another. That is the physical reality, despite the viewer seeing the making of Pamela ‘through the frame’ of Day for Night.
It’s easy to see why he chose a rubbish film to film, right down to questions of mise-en-scene. What’s so clever about Day for Night is how he teases out these issues at different levels: from that of Day for Night itself and how it shows how a film can portray filmmaking; from the point of view of the director of Pamela (played by Truffault himself), who narrates his opinions about films and film-making at certain points (yet the director of Day for Night, Truffaut doesn’t!); and the interplay between the two films as exemplified by where Truffaut is allowed to be (can be) both directors at the same time, directing his own film with a crew we don’t see, and Pamela as Ferrand – at times Ferrand can be Truffaut directing Day for Night when he is in front of the camera directing as Ferrand. This is first shown at the end of the Square shot when after seeing the actors and crew break up from the mise en scene, moving in to listen to the assistant director talking through a megaphone, we see Truffault in the background showing the principle actors how to do their last action: a slap from character Alphonse to Alexandre. One’s first reaction is that this is Pamela‘s director, Ferrand, but it can just as easily be Truffaut the director of Day for Night showing how he wants the slap acted by the real-life actors.
If Truffaut had gone for something which was almost equivalent in quality to his own film, it’d take away from Truffaut’s depiction (Eh? How? Since they’re both his films!): primarily, at times we might have been more engaged in the story he was framing to the detriment of his own. A good story is a good story even if it’s a brief scene or two. Every time we were that absorbed in a narrative, we would be less aware there was another real director and his crew behind that. (Well, perhaps no! They alternate, so we are always made aware of which is which.) In practice the framed film takes only a 1/4 or so of the film’s total time.
There is a point in Day for Night where this actually happens: the past-it woman actress can’t remember her lines because she’s drunk too much, and keeps on drinking more to try to remedy the situation, blaming other people for her ineptitude, while the director of Pamela – played by Truffault to make sure we never forget it’s a Truffaut film by appearing regularly as the acted director reassuring her with lot’s of, “It’s not a problem”, eventually taping her lines to various parts of the set and patiently asks her to re-do it, several times. Truffault the director of Day for Night, as well as of Pamela is the clever bit that others who tried films-within-films didn’t try.
At this point – where we wish she’d just get it right because it’s like a soap being rehearsed; we are also quite enjoying how it allows Truffaut to show how film is created, and the the familiar jokes about film-making – we are not so aware it’s being directed and filmed with Truffaut behind his own camera, because he’s seen so much in front of it. That’s quite clever too.
I kept on thinking (for some reason) why not use, instead of a simple film like Pamela, some kind of modern take on Renoir’s Regle de Jeu with those clever mirror shots and complex story. But then the joins would have been easier to see: it would really seem as if it was two films spliced together (which is was anyway), even with Truffaut bridging the two as himself and the framed film’s directer.
One is left with so much of Day for Night being a film one would never watch! In order to watch his entertaining take on films on films, we have to endure shots re-shot in a film, Pamela, we wouldn’t watch. Of course one of the film-maker’s jokes – made within Pamela at various points, such as the death of the lead actor and the finances, the goings on among the crew – is all this effort is going into the making of film that will probably never get distribution. But his own film, Day for Night, will! Saying that doesn’t say the producer, director and crew as depicted by the actors in Pamela aren’t thoroughly professional. We see the professionals at work in Pamela, but not those creating Day for Night.
But let’s get serious.
Illusion 24 frames per second: François Truffaut’s La Nuit Américaine, Daniel Fairfax, Senses of Cinema.
The principal question haunting La Nuit Américaine is, on the other hand, whether films are superior to life.
Ferrand, director of Pamela :
Films are more harmonious than life, Alphonse, there are no bottlenecks in films, no dead-time, films keeps rolling forward, like trains, you understand, like trains in the night. People like you and me, you know, are only happy in our work, our work in the cinema.
Character Alphonse at another point in in Pamela:
“I think Ferrand has it wrong. Life is more important than the cinema.”
Natalie Baye as script girl Joëlle in Day For Night
La nuit Américaine was the point beyond which Truffaut and Godard’s friendship failed. e.g. Truffaut, Godard, Day For Night, and a link. The link is to an short edited version translated into English of an interview Godard gave to Christian Jurgen in German NZZ Online [7 November 2010]. (If read in Chrome, a rough automatic translation of the whole interview is possible).
The Truffaut-Godard spat is a great story and – is there a film already? – is briefly mentioned in that interview, which also covers Godard himself, cahiers, his explaining his turn away from auteur theory (he says it applied to the New Wave, which passed) his new film Socialsme, and so on.
In the interview Godard is asked about Truffaut:
You fell out later with François Truffaut. What was the reason?
I noticed over time that he made exactly the films we attacked: Written movies! Truffaut’s works were not influenced by the camera, but from the pen. The camera imitating what his pen had written.
Godard’s notion of this in some way breaking their rules – as perceived by Godard – of how they made films, links up with my deliberately laboured attempts, below, to look at the joins in Day and Night. I’ve always been a lot more interested in film as a technical medium, its capabilities and limits, than in stories film tells per se, though there are many fine ones, well told.
If you can avoid a cliche in praise-filled phrases you’d be clever. Roger Ebert does well with’…not only the best movie ever made about the movies, but also a great entertainment.’
The cleverest bit in a way is not the film-within-film antiques but that Truffaut is the director of Day for Night and his film-within-a-film (Godard in Le Mempris has Fritz Lang playing himself spouting Godard!), Meet Pamela. It’s the sort of thing that auterists would see in some sort of diagram as the script was developed. The first time we see Truffaut in his trade-make leather blouson, he being filmed from a crane (yet to be shown itself to establish visually the film-within-film, though we already know this from the behaviour of the actors and the evidence of the camera track running the length of the square) in a medium-long shot giving post-shot instructions to Alphonse and Alexandre. Since he is the director of Day for Night as well as of Pamela, which director is he being at that point? Well, of course, he can relax into this and be both at the same time.
At this point, the viewer can see the possibilities and look forward to enjoying the fun. However – sacred bleu, mais non! Incroyable!- I didn’t find it as exhilarating as I thought I might, wondering all the time whether anyone else had tried, or has tried since, a similar take on film-making.
Having watched Day for Night and then read up again on what others think of it, I’ve come across all sorts of ideas: that the bus which careers round the square in the main shot is going too slow. Crikey, it looked to me it was a wonder a the speed it was going in such a confined space, circling the square, that no one was hit! That’s where the cleverness of the film is slowly established. Other shots (the film of the film shots) show how the extras are carefully walking, well away from the bus, though in Pamela’s shooting shot, it all looks a bit hairy because the tracking shot is sow low.
FILM Not watching films
This is spurred by reading Why Finish Books? by Tim parks in New York Review of Books (13 March 2012). It’s one of those you’ll lose the argument but have fun in the trying ones.
The New Wave: Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer, Rivette. Rivette?
My first dabble with Rivette was Jeanne la Pucelle (two disc set, Artificial Eye).
Where before have you seen a whole article dedicated to the idea of finishing a book? This is a kind of verboten in the world of culture. Not exactly a taboo, but admitting to failing with Tolstoy’s War and Peace, or more likely Proust, is so much about exposing one’s failings as a work from the literary canon. Though there are a few brave well-known souls who have admitted to finding a book everyone else says was a master-work everyone has to read as dry and dull as ditch water and that they gave up before page 50. (O.k, I admit to finding quite a few of William Golding hard to get into. Though there will come a time when the wind is up and in the right direction when they will seem like a good read.)
Feeling a little more confident after being urged to consider not finishing books, I’m getting to thinking there could be an equivalent for film. Even not to watch something at all. But hey, we do that for books too. Not read them. Ironically, we might read reams about a film’s qualities or failings or confusions or pointlessnesses, and then decide not to watch it. Or, that in the great scheme of things, and limited time, we have to make decisions about what to watch and what not to. Let’s leave out films we watch by mistake.
I don’t have a great deal of interest in films predominantly about people rehearsing plays. Truffaut’s Le Dernier Metro is an exception. But that wasn’t really all about play rehearsing.
I have this sinking feeling about the just over 12 hours of Rivette’s 01 which is deemed by many his master work.
Seeing the point of using film to portray rehearsals is not quite the same as being prepared to endure the filmic portrayal of them. Particularly perhaps starring Ben Gazzara in a improvisation. Did he do a play one? No idea. Mind you the more I read about 01 the more intriguing it becomes. That’s not to say the full 12 hours is high on my list of priorities.
Rivette: Out 1 (Volume 1) and Rivette: Out 1 (Volume 2) a dialogue (in two parts) by James Crawford and Michael Joshua Rowin, is a very interesting way to convince yourself not to bother with 01. Interesting ideas and clever quotes, my favourite so far is:
All of the Nouvelle Vague directors I hold dear address cinema from its first principles, like students learning the grammar of a foreign language—and then proceed to break, bend, twist, and ignore the ones they find the most limiting. Rivette finds displeasure in the strictures of storytelling soi-disant, and so, furthering his use of the vehicle as metaphor, lets his narrative motor idle, sputter, and eventually stall while he drifts over to the stuff he finds more intriguing. The problem is thus bequeathed to the spectators, who are asked to cast off their ossified conceptions of film’s ontological categories, and let the film resonate and wash about like music.
Writing this and working my way through both essays on 01 at the same time, it’s looking decidedly like the more I read about the film, the more I’m tempted to look at some of it. Strange to think reading about books, films, art, music, means you rarely if ever come to a work with your own eyes first, but after someone much cleverer and more articulate than you has thoroughly dissected it, broken it down, built it up again for you. A reason perhaps why the able few both do the study and then go out and make one of their own, ensuring the authentic first time experience. You thought it up. if you do – novel, play, film – you’re excused being suffused with intertextuality and referentiality and reflexivity. There’s really no escape from them.
FILM Michael Woods on Godard’s Breathless
At the Movies
Michael Woods, LRB, Vol. 32 No 14 ,22 July 2010
Short, interesting, enjoyable.
Qu’est-ce que c’est degueulasse? Oz Skinner takes it on in his blog Godard Montage.
In Musings on Godard’s 1960 classic, Robert Stanley Martin says:
The film’s ending presents them as tragic figures who can’t even commit to their own tragedy; they can only go through the motions of that as well. Godard highlights that with the film’s handling of a single word: dégueulasse.
Qu’est-ce que c’est dégueulasse? Needs a little examining of course. Strangely my very old Cassell’s (1930 edition) has the verb degueuler, v.i. (vulg.), to spew, vomit, but no examples. Further checking shows a more polite rendering would be degoutant. dégueulasse is from degueuler, to puke, to spew, and degueuler from guele, mouth.
Now: dégueulasse
With a bit of reverse translation, there is another nub: rotten “C’est dégueulasse de faire une chose pareille.” That’s a rotten thing to do.
Pas dégueulasse – not half bad : “Pas dégueulasse ce petite vin de pays.”
And finally, WordReference has the sort of list in my post on Haneke’s Caché: dégueulasse, which is pasted in full to get an instant grab of:
dégueulasse adj (dégueu) icky
dégueulasse adj vulgaire (répugnant) offensive, repugnant, disgusting
dégueulasse adj très familier (sale, vicieux) filthy
dégueulasse adj (sale) yucky
dégueulasse adj (injuste) lousy
dégueulasse adj (sans valeur) lousy
dégueulasse adj (sans valeur) crappy
dégueulasse adj hateful, despicable
dégueulasse adj crude, vulgar
dégueulasse adj gross, vulgar
dégueulasse n (expression de dépit) barf
Why worry. Enjoy the film again as depicted by Warren Craghead
FILM DIRECTOR CLAUDE LANZMANN “You don’t have to be a nice man to make a good film.”
Claude Lanzmann
from blog
Arun with a View
FILM ESSAY NICO BAUMBACH – All that Heaven allows: what is, or was, cinephilia
All that Heaven allows: what is, or was, cinephilia [part 1]
All that Heaven allows: what is, or was, cinephilia [part 2]
Film comment, Film Society Lincoln Center, 12 February 2012
At time of this post two further parts were promised
Part 1 quotable quote:
Bordwell’s argument is framed as an attempt by an academic to reach out to film critics not simply to heal a rift but to mutually enrich both practices. Yet more interesting, and problematic, he outlines what writing about film can successfully accomplish and what it cannot. He implies that the opposition between academics and critics obscures a more fundamental opposition between two different ideas of what the primary object of writing on cinema should be — its relation to culture and society or to the more localized specifiable effects that films produce. He believes that by ignoring the latter in favor of the former, film criticism and theory have lost sight of their object.
Part 1 mentions Laura Mulvey’s 1975 essay, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema
There is a digital cross-through in this version, so I’ve included a couple of other sources: LM 2 and a facsimile of the original article/paper: LM3 (which in a footnote says it’s a reworked version of a paper given in the French Department of University of Winsconsin, Madison, in the Spring of 1973
Baumbach quotes Mulvey:
“It is said that analyzing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. That is the intention of this article.”
which he then goes on to explain, including:
..her statement came from a conviction that theory about cinema mattered not just in relation to gaining specialized knowledge about a particular popular art form, but to how we live and experience the world.
FILM BERTOLUCCI The Conformist [1970]
The Conformist
Dual format DVD/Blu-ray edition in UK, 27th February 2012, Arrow Academy. Very god commentary by David Forgacs. Points out that professor Quadri’s telephone number and flat number were Godard’s at the time.
The Conformist – Slideshare
* 92 slides * Presentation transcipt
reviews
The Conformist by Shade Rupe
Films I Love #47: The Conformist (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970)
Short review and set of stills.
The Conformist: No 13 best arthouse film of all time
[Stuart Jeffries, The Guardian, Wednesday 20 October 2010 ]
DVDBeaver review
Poetry in Translation: The Zealousness of Bertolucci’s The Conformist
Review by Mostafa Hefny
refs.
The radical faces of Godard and Bertolucci By Yosefa Loshitzky
GoogleBook. From p. 58.
PHOTOGRAPHY ESSAY ERROL MORRIS On Roger Fenton’s 2 Crimean War photographs titled ‘Valley of the Shadow of Death’ taken 0n 23 April 1855
{1}
Which Came First, the Chicken or the Egg? (Part One)
Errol Morris, NYT, 25 September 2007.
Starts with Susan Sontag on Fenton. Canvasses expert opinion. Gets down to the question of ordering the photographs without considering Fenton’s ‘intentions or beliefs’. Morris mentions there is an archive of Roger Fenton’s letters from the Crimea
Part 2
Errol arrives in Sebastopol to look for himself. We get to see maps at last.
Part 3
blog posts on
Who’s Zooming Who?
–Errol Morris’ obsessive investigation of a Roger Fenton photograph.
But Which Thousand Words is the Picture Worth?
Jim Lewis in Slate, 1 November 2007. Notable mainly for working out that the three-part essay plus comment stream is slightly longer than Moby Dick. Guess he would hate Bela Tarr’s Satantango.
Béla Tarr’s Long Takes (an education in film)
FILM Satantango (Sátántangó) by Béla Tarr {2}
Photography
wiki: Roger Fenton
N.B. mentions that Fenton’s equipment limited him to posed photos and landscapes because of the long exposures needed.
Roger Fenton – the first war photographer
Post in Slugger O’Toole blog • Gives background of Fenton himself • His photographic techniques • Crimean adventure, which lasted for 3 months from mid-march 1855 to mid-June 1855 • Under what auspices he went there • Limitations he was under
Crimean War Photographs by Roger Fenton March-June 1855
First photo is canon balls on road [ON]
My comments
The two photos above are not Fenton’s. But in one you can clearly see men standing amongst canon balls in a road not dissimilar to The valley of the Shadow of Death. Difficult to see but looks like one man has a big canon ball on his shoulder.
The fun of Errol’s story is he’s determined to solve it all from the photos. That’s all you’ve allowed. Of course in real life the wider context is always examined. What usually goes in on an area to make the specific event in time and space different or similar. here, there are 2 photos know to have been taken within an hour or two of each other according to the photographer. As Morris says, its the first movie.
Let’s talk movies for a moment to have a little light relief from 25 lb canon balls. Godard in his long interview, Fragments of Conversations with Jean-Luc Godard, talks about the famous footage of a little Palestinian girl standing in the ruins of Carame declaiming a famous poem, I will Resist, by Mahmoud Darwish, that Godard uses in his film Ici et Ailleurs. They are discussing authentic or inauthentic. it is given the thumps up even if it is staged.
There is no story without the two canon ball photos, OFF and ON. If ON had been the only one (maybe Fenton destroys OFF), whose going to debating canon balls? I wonder the strength of the message was destroyed (whether or not it was staged) by seeing OFF as well as ON. very few keen eyes would be questioning whether the balls on the road in ON where not randomly enough distributed.
Erroll did another essay on photography Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire (NYT 10 July 2007). This one on Fenton’s Crimean canon balls is fun because there were two photos. The main challenge for Errol to decide which was the before and which the after. (Kids of a certain age could have great fun with this. 7-8 years old would be perfect.)
Not surprisingly, in the end the story strays in the realms of conjecture based on such unreliable things as what humans would be expected to do. Well, despite high tech tools, the analyst he has asked to look the photographs is venturing into this territory, and Errol is keener to stick the the original premise: What can can be deduced from the photographs alone. He wants to avoid:
…arguing that to interpret a picture we need more than the picture itself..
Commenter crazymonk way down in the comments has posted links to enlargements of OFF and ON photos, with the idea to open them in adjoing tabs and flick between the two to see the rock movement:
OFF
ON
I don’t find it very easy to see the rocks moving, but very easy to see balls moving. One ball in the centre foreground disappears in ON. Three balls in the left foreground move. In enlarge (clicking the plus sign on your cursor over pic) it’s very easy to see one ball on the right of the track at 2 O’clock – just in front of a small rock outcrop – appear on the track no more that 1 metre or so SW of it’s original position. The more you click the more you see displacements. Right in the centre of the photograph in the ditch full of balls, three more appear in ON. In OFF there are a bunch of 9 in the mid- foreground
which are joined by by two more, here for example next to the little rock
one carefully placed to its right between two others, above and below it, in OFF. So they are not only going on the road itself, but more have been added to the ditch! The more you look the more you see. Above this group three balls appear in ON that weren’t there in OFF.
Has the man posting these photos in the comments been up to no good, moving balls digitally to pass away loge lonely evenings when there was noting worth watching on t.v.? Few of us reading Errol about Crimean Canon Balls are looking at the original prints but digital copies! There is no certainty the digital versions are exactly the same as the real prints. Even the one in the Fenton digital archives might not be identical to the original. Even more important, will people in the future ever be able to tell what was going on in photographs with any certainty as more digital copies are produced?
This is another one of Fenton’s. No,no, no don’t start counting those. Maybe there is only one of these.
Oh, by the way, yes that’s Roger Fenton the man himself posing at the top. I deliberately didn’t put his name there, so that you’d see the posed shot, read the long essay, then see canon ball photos, and – like in clever films which use a technique of inserting a shot which is only explained much further on (My favourite, mentioned more than once in my posts is the bird of prey swooping on the white chickens at the beginning of Kieslowski’s Camera Buff) – think about the posing Fenton when thinking about his Crimean balls.
Surely this self-portrait is the sort of evidence we also need to decide whether the canon balls were moved ON to create a more artsy shot. For me there no need for rock movement analysis really. If there are 9 balls in one cluster in the OFF ditch and 11 in the ON ditch, that says they were moved there as well as those onto the road itself. Simply because another fusillade from the Russian batteries would probably have sent dozens of new balls into the area. It does say somewhere that they regularly shot up on to the road whether there were troop movements or not, just to act as discouragement to try.
As apparent from the Morris essay and other sources, Fenton’s stock in trade was posed photos of the military personnel and landscapes, both suited to long exposures needed.
It’s still a great war photograph even if it was posed.
FILM MICHAEL HANEKE Funny Frames: The Filmic Concepts of Michael Haneke
Funny Frames: The Filmic Concepts of Michael Haneke
A Review by Jeremiah Ambrose, Trinity College Dublin
FILM GODARD Cahiers du cinéma ~ Godard’s American Director Thumbnails
My Gleanings blog has a post
Godard’s American Director Thumbnails
which is a translation from the French of Godard’s thumbnail sketches of eight then active American directors in the Dec 1963/ Jan 1964 edition of Cahiers du Cinema which was on American cinema.
This blogger, jdcopp, has two other blogs:
“The Bernanos Letter”: an inquiry into Francois Truffaut’s writing of A Certain Tendency
which he calls: An attempt to clarify certain aspects of François Truffaut’s conduct in writing A Certain Tendency of French Cinema focusing on a long forgotten letter written by the novelist Georges Bernanos.
THE NEW “PETIT JOURNAL DU CINEMA”
FILM GODARD Le Mépris [1963] – reviews old and new
Le Mépris
French at Drake
Classic ‘Contempt’ gets a new life
Ty Burr, Boston Globe, 11 April, 2008
Contempt (1963): Masterpieces of World Cinema
by
Emanuel Levy (undated)
FILM ESSAY For Ever Godard. Two or three things I know about European and American Cinema – Peder Grøngaard
For Ever Godard.
- Two or three things I know about European and American Cinema
Peder Grøngaard
P.O.V No. 12 – Comparing American and European Cinema
Jeremy Irons quote on American and European cinema
Nugget in section ‘A Story of a Film Being Made’: some details on why Godard chose a Hölderlin quote to come out of the mouth of Fritz Lang in Le Mepris.
FILM GODARD Bande à Part (Band of Outsiders, 1964)
From Cinemania Dan Jardinedid a long post with plenty of stills, 15 July 2011, which links to reviews of a handful of other reviews of Godard’s.
