FILM – The White Ribbon – Michael Haneke
From Festival de Cannes website, a beautifuly designed 29-page black and white .pdf promo for The White Ribbon, posted here mostly for the set of 30 stills.
Unexpected tenderness [Catherine Wheatley - BFI]
FILM – Caché (Hidden) [2005] – Michael Haneke
“I try to construct stories so that several explanations are possible, to give the viewers the freedom to interpret. I do it by everything I don’t show, and through all the questions I raise and don’t answer. That way, the audience doesn’t finish with the film as quickly as if I’d answered everything.”
— Michael Haneke
“Cache” is one of those films that I instantly hated from the bottom of my heart for being incredibly pretentious while having the substance of a mediocre high-school essay
——————————–a pseudonymous ‘novakant‘.
Wiki: Caché
Dialogue transcript (not screenplay/script) from Script-O-Rama
A continuous dialogue without scene divisions. Not a script or screenplay as such.
Reviews and Analysis
These reviews and analyses contain spoilers. I’m trying to gather together here some of the better ones. The reviews and academic papers have got a bit jumbled as more have been added. The reviews are certainly not in order of importance.
COTA Award for Best Title for a Review of Caché goes to [pause] :
The Discreet Masochism of the Bourgeoisie by A O Scott in NYT. Unfortunately the review itself doesn’t stand up to the promise of the title. Scott does mention the BoBo business directly, whereas others don’t. Bobo link at the bottom.
Hidden (Caché) by Peter Bradshaw [Guardian, 2006]
Final paragraph succinctness:
Hidden is Michael Haneke’s masterpiece: a compelling politico-psychological essay about the denial and guilt mixed into the foundations of western prosperity, composed and filmed with remarkable technique. It is one of the great films of this decade.
Review: Caché (Hidden) [Christopher Campbell, Cinematical]
Header still photo from film of Georges at his desk, Anne on the phone, and the TV showing war footage. Mention of ‘61 massacre and Papon: links to page on 1992 documentary: Drowning by Bullets.
Hidden [Anton Bitel, Eye for Film]
Caché [Ken Hanke]
Caché : Smile You’re on Candid Camera [Marty Mapes]
Caché (Hidden) [Frank Swietek, Ass. Prof. Hist., U of Dallas]
Caché [Lon Harris, Crushed by Inertia blog]
Maybe he muses Monty Python’s sketch : Society for Putting Things on Top of Other Things does the job quicker. ( “I have just discovered, gentlemen,” Graham Chapman announces as club president, “that this entire room is surrounded by film.”)
Hidden (Caché) Ben Greener [in MusicOMH]
We love Hidden. But what does it mean? [Jason Solomons, Guardian]
Hidden (Michael Haneke, 2005) Liam O’Brian in Projectorheads in which there are short reviews of other Haneke films]
Caché (Hidden) A review by Michael Farman.
Review by Fred Thom in Plume Noir
Et Alors? Michael Haneke’s Hidden. A short review by Grahame Hobbs in MovieMail to accompany the advert for the Artifical Eye DVD.
Caché – A Film Review by James Berardinelli
Cache [Robert Ebert, 2006 ]
The Times names Haneke’s ‘Caché’ the decade’s best. [from In Contention film blog.]
Caché’ tries to dig into what lies beneath, but comes up empty [Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle]
….we’re expected to see this bad thing he did — for personal, not racial or political reasons — as the story of French colonialism (!) writ small.
Flashbacks [John Petrakis, Christian Century, 21 Feb 2006]
“Hidden/Cache” by Michael Haneke [Konstantinos Vassilaros]
Guilt, lies and videotape [Mark lawson, Guardian, 21 Jan. 2006]
Hidden Meanings in Haneke’s Mystery Lie Deeper than You Think [Tim Milfull, MC Reviews]
Hidden (Caché) [ Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat ]
Cache and the Post-Post-Modern Film – The Search For Authenticity [A blog post from politick]
Caché (Hidden) – Michael Haneke [Zettel]
A View to a Kill By Adam Nayman
The Tell-Tale Tapes? The Trouble with Caché Jeff Ignatius in Culture Snob
Cache/Hidden [Reynolds in We Like to Watch]
Long post and long comments stream.
Deep Cuts by Benjamin Ogrodnik, {2} Film International, Issue 37.
Para 1:
” Michael Haneke’s most explicitly political film, the French psychological thriller Caché (2005), is also his most self-reflexive, obsessed as it is with the social impact of media images on the real world. Throughout, the film exposes how narrative devices in the mass media advance specific political agendas and interpretations. While interrogating taken-for-granted storytelling elements of the film form in particular, Caché also critiques the media construction of racial identity, and addresses the larger issue of contemporary race relations in the Western world. Asd an allegory about the failure of Algerian assimilation into a multicultural melting pot of French identity, it highlights the ongoing tensions between the former colonialist White culture and the once-colonized ethnic culture of Algerians struggling to coexist in France. In all these wys, Caché examines present-day neo-colonial racism and Eurocentric projections of the past, focussing on the media’s role in channeling and reinforcing hostilities that foreclose any possibioity of moving beyond racial divisions.”
Though Ogrodnik’s argument focuses on George’s attitude to other races (hidden, but exposed by the pressures of believing he is being got at by one of them he used to know as a child…), and the shift in the audiences empathy towards the immigrant characters. Majid’s son, to confuse matters, or to make them clearer (is it race not immigration? Or both?) is the second generation born in France.
The film does not show George’s attitude to other classes in French society, except in so much as he and his friends are cloistered by class and success from them. The way the film is structured makes Georges isolated from all ordinary French people: he doesn’t go into a bar and order a drink, but buys a drink from a dispenser in a completely empty shop; the Laurents don’t even have a servant to whom they they might be shown relating. He may well, for all we know, be as unempathetic to the lower orders in general as he is to the immigrants. Does the way Haneke shows Georges’ response to a (hidden) threat mean this is how we are expected to assume all people of his type would respond similarly?
A point missed by commentators is that George’ parents were not what he has become. They were prepared to go to Paris to look for the missing parents of Majid, recent immigrants from Algeria, and think about adopting the child when it is discovered they have proabalby been killed during the FLN riots.
In talking to his elderly mother at the family home, George evokes no enthusiasm in her for the subject, which she sees as in the past. We are left wondering whether she really doesn’t care about Majid, or whether her guilt prevents her from articulating any concern. Though she asks Georges what he is thinking, and he refused to tell her much, we get the impression this is a sort of collusion. They have both forgotten: in different ways. Though Georges, unlike his mother, has had cause to think (and dream) about his past.
Though his lack of concern for Majid – when he finally meets him again for the first time since childhood – might hint that this is the way these type of people think about the Majid’s of the world anyway, to me this makes it a specific problem Georges has, both in how he sees he has to maintain his middle-class position, respectibility and influence and, exposed progessively in the film, in his revealed racial attitudes.
The word scapegoating is not mentioned, but the audience is allowed to examine whether this might be a species of the genus, and so refer itself during or after the film to Great Scapegoats of Our Times.
Whereas Georges’ parents lived in the era of the last Algerian War – which led finally to independence after struggle that began post 1945 – and might be expected to have anti-Algerian sentiments, as was common amongst the French at the time who were losing an important colony (and being influxed with large numbers of pied noirs as a result, which is another, though interesting story), George was a very young child at the time. One suspects if he has strong racist feelings, particularly about Magreb Arabs, for example, or maybe anyone from Africa, it is something he has learnt. Or that it is a spasm of his type: he has been conditioned to react like this, unthinkingly.
The suggestion being that he has absorbed this way of thinking from French society as a whole. And that in turn this society has had a slanted view of things presented to it by a biased and manipulative media (though government should be implicated as well…): represented in the film both by Georges’ editing of his TV programme but also by mention of the 1961 Paris Massacre. Haneke has to present the killing of supporters of the FLN as a brief description of what happened coming from the mouth of Georges himself, who is shown not to show any angst about it as he chats with the guests at his diner party.
The question is whether this sort of unthinking racism is particularly virulent in France in comparison with say Germany, Britain or the U.S. The film does not show any white working class racial animosity. It shows the swimming instructors as being non-white, and the presumably all middle-class white children being allowed to be trained by them. It shows Georges waving amicably to an instructor. It shows mixed races coming out of the state school at the end of the film.
The danger, then, is the idea that the souce of the racism is in the fear of the middle-classes. Presumably it then filters down to the working classes in the form of fear of loss of jobs and housing. Though the film shows an example of the subsidised state housing, HLM (habitation à loyer modéré) in the block in which Majid lives, it does not show whether these are all immigrant/non-white ghettos.
Haneke expects the intelligent viewer to tease out the racism per se from the concerns of the middle-classes for their own self perpetuation. A key element of the film is the way that Georges goes about trying to shore up his status and power in the face of a perceived threat. He doesn’t suspect his cohorts but instead the lower orders. I thought on watching the film again, that we were witnessing some sort of anomoly. Even if George’s had imbibed the hatred of (and/or indifference to) immigrants from his parents and society itself, he would surely be expected, as a highly intelligent man, to suspect he was being got at by someone in his family, or at work, or a member of the public who didn’t like his TV programme or in the media itself befiore thinking it was an Algerian from his past. This particular Algerian, Majid, was born in France.
I am finding Ogrodnik’s analysis very useful as I explore Haneke’s Caché.
At several points he uses the word Anglo. I assumed this was interchangeable with Western at first:
Is he suggesting the French media are Anglo-orientated? That their modus/ethos is borrowed from the English speaking media? The French themselves would not think so! Or does this mean a kind of default? That medias of this type (here French TV, as an example) by default use the manipulative and controlling ethos developed by and common in the English speaking media? (A debate about the way the BBC operates in comparison would be instructive…)
The French experience of course is with state controlled TV and radio as well as commercial. My thinking is along the lines of Haneke using the French media as a particularly bad example of bias/control, in that the 1961 Paris massacre of FLN supporters (and their mass detention using the same detention centres as the Vichy govt….Papon is mentioned in Cache: he was part of Vichy and the Algerian repressive apparatus, but also ended up a minster of Finance in a Barre and Giscard govt.), according to what I have been able to learn from the web, was just not reported in the press/media, so the public really didn’t know about it until it came out in the Papon trial in the late 90s. But this is state/media collusion. Can one say that this happens regulary in the US for example? Well, no, Nixon got found out. The Vietnam war was fully reported in all is gory detail, etc. and helped to end it.
I find it amusing that Mitterand’s (hidden…) daughter is an actor taking the part of a panelist on George’s TV book prog. And that Mitterand himself had ‘hidden’ elements, which people are still not sure about. Very murky and uncertain. Was he a socialist doing under cover work in Vichy, or as he playing a double game? Mitterand is now know to have ordered the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland harbour when president. But his direct involvement didn’t come out till much later. Perhaps the film should have been called Caché!
A subject that greatly interest me is Mitterand the Jansenist. Though it is a long way from the immediate meanings and purposes of Haneke’s Caché, there is something in this Loyalist/Catholic thing, which Mitterand seemed linked in some way to, that explains Petain and Vichy and might in turn suggest other underlying reasons for the racism in France.
For Caché to do the work it is meant to in creating a world of images and ideas stimulated by Haneke’s script, the audience has to be a pretty knowledgable one. So George spelling out (admitting to his friends and wife after showing them one of the video that he hasn’t seen because it has just ‘arrived’.) what happened in Nov. 1961 in Paris (Haneke has to make it a mini essay – albeit with no analysis from George or the guests – or no one would know what he meant…) would not strike up many emotional resonances in an American movie audience as it would in a French one. It certainly doesn’t move Georges as he retells the story. And none of the diner guests, all media types, take it up, for example as being a stain on the honour or France. They prefer to listen to a shaggy dog story. And (in my simplified words), what Haneke cleverly does is make his audience (here particularly the French one…) feel the desire to hide things as they watch the film while at the same witnessing the extent to which a character lies and hides in order to uphold (as he sees it) his privileged middle-class indentity!
Secrets, Lies & Videotape By Catherine Wheatley (BFI) In one scroll, but dealt with under headings. Roughly 3-4 pages equivalent.
Hidden in plain sight: Robin Wood on Michael Haneke’s Cache
originally in ArtForum, Jan, 2006.
Michael Haneke’s Caché By Florence Jacobowitz
Originally in CineAction, Winter, 2006.
p. 2 of 4:
‘Caché exposes the extent to which the bourgeois class safeguard the mythologies that empower and conceal its dark side.’
Then follows how Georges puts these into effect in his own life. An important sentence:
‘They have lost their ability to respond to life without the encumberances of first having to protect their reputation and social position.’
There are many things in the film, many strands, personal, sociological and political, but this seems to be key to understanding it. We can examine various elements such as the meaning of the mention of the massacre of 1961, the heavy editing of his TV book programme, which parts of the film are remembered, imagined or dreamed, which are literal, which metaphorical or allegorical, but in the end these two phrases are the heart of the film.
An entry in Nationmaster has a suggestion at the end about the meaning of the final scene:
The question of who sent the tapes is open to interpretation. Majid and his son both deny involvement. There is a cryptic last scene (as the credits roll) of Pierrot and Majid’s son interacting in front of Pierrot’s school. Haneke has said in interviews that at first he included the sound of their dialogue, then he removed it. Another interpretation is that the tapes were shot by Haneke himself to confront Georges with his past. The foreshadowing of Majid’s suicide in the drawings delivered to Georges supports this interpretation.
Left Behinds blog has a post, New movies: Caché? What does it mean? , and a follow up post Update: Caché’s meaning, pretty much enters the territory I am, slowly. He includes a frame grab of Majid’s son and Pierrot that is almost the same as the one I snipped after watching it in the other day. I was looking for any contact and affability between the two, and here he gets that with son touching Pierrot with left hand, facing the camera.
The comment stream in the second post is long, with many suggestions.
A long analysis in Not Coming to a Theatre near You, starts with the TV studio shot, which it claims segues from the traditional, standard pull back shot at the end of studio programmes, but turns into a tracking shot that is Haneke’s camera rather than the studio camera, which ‘watches’ as Georges leaves the set to taka call behind the scenerry of the set. SEE still at head of post.
In the Artifical Eye DVD there is both an interview with Heneke and a short film on the making of the film, in which he talks as well. At one point he mentions having tried in the past to film dreams without success.
Nowhere to hide – Hari Kunzru assesses the films of Michael Haneke
(Guardian, 31 October 2009)
A Cache of Guilt : Michael Haneke turns his camera on the audience in his latest film, Caché. Noy Thrupkaew
Hidden Agenda Jason McBride
Monsters and Critics DVD Review (Frank Dees)
Girish blog post, Caché.
The French Lesson by Stephen Metcalf in Slate.
I have found myself unable to shake Caché. I am still poring over its studied ambiguities, arguing with its facile-fashionable politics, poking its dead zones, to see if it might yield even a modest smile, a drop of social hope. Life is short, and one function of a critic is to grant permission to ignore pretentious bullies like Haneke. In this instance, though, permission denied. Go see Caché.
Film blog post, Films I love #35: Cache (Michael Haneke), has a brief comment but here mostly for the set of clear 16 stills included.
Paul Arthur in a 2-page article, End Game, in the website of The Film Society of Lincoln Center.
Downcast Eyes: Michael Haneke and the Cinema of Intrusion by Asbjorn Gronstad, Nordicom Review 29, pp. 133-144 [pdf]
Ambivalence and Displacement in Michael Haneke’s Caché (Mary Caputi, Cal. State University) [12 pages]
Auteur de force: Michael Haneke’s “cinema of glaciation”. Roy Grundmann reviews DVDs od earlier films (originally in Cineaste).
Video discussion
1 hr. 25 min. YouTube video academic discussion of Caché, from the Philoctetes Center, with Roy Grundsman, Edward Nersessian, Brigitte Peucker, Brian Price and Garrett Stewart.
Profiles/Interviews with Haneke
Family Is Hell and So Is the World : Talking to Michael Haneke at Cannes 2005 (Bright Lights Film Journal)
The Unhappy World of Michael Haneke by Alan Riding [NYT]
De-icing the Emotions -Michael Haneke’s retrospective in London [Kinoeye]
Michael Haneke profile/filmography [at alt-flix]
Senses of cinema – Michael Haneke – by Mattiad Frey – before Caché.
What do Algerians think of Caché?
I can’t find anything on the web in English. If you have read something in Arabic or French in an Algerian newpaper published in France or Algeria on the web, please let me know.
The nearest I could get was Why, French Algerians’ football celebrations turned into a battle, Andrew Hussey Observer, 22 November 2009, in which the film gets a mention because it came out in 2005 at roughly the same time as the 2005 riots.
If you are really into the background to the French and the Algerians, then Alistair Horne is your man. Details of his book below.
Meanwhile, here are some more political interpretations of Caché:
I came across this article in World Socialist Web Site (isn’t website meant to one word?): The Artist has not done the most difficult work, by David Walsh argues for a kind of false objectivity in Caché while also:
Haneke (born in 1942) often returns to the coldness of society. Speaking of Austria, he refers to “my country’s emotional glaciation.” An awful indifference and distance generally separate his characters. Intelligent but deliberately chilly, Haneke’s films have tended to register certain moods of the European middle class in recent decades—increasing paranoia and tension, a sense of being overwhelmed by events, perhaps xenophobia—without, however, shedding a great deal of light on them.
In the name of rejecting the facile approach of certain socially-conscious filmmakers of the past, directors such as Haneke (and he is one among many, particularly in Austria, Germany and France) evade the responsibility of adopting any strong or recognizable attitude toward contemporary society. In reality, this false objectivity, presented as ‘letting the audience think for itself,’ is a concession to a confused and stagnant political climate.
Walsh does a good job in showing the limits of Haneke’s ideas, calling him light-headed in connecting Georges the six year old’s treatment of the child Majid with ‘the legacy of French colonialism!’ I recommend you read this as an antidote if you have become fixated on the film.
So far no North African reviews to get another perspective. I’ll keep looking. If someone could point me to an Algerian film review, I would be eternally grateful.
This abstract from a The Empire Looks Back by Max Silverman in Screen, 2007, 48(2), 245-249, is the first piece I have read in my Cache odyssey, to bring in Fanon. Wonder if Haneke’s bookshelves holds The Wretched of the Earth. Would that explain the bloody drawings and the bloody throat slitting in Caché ?
To read this snip, open in another tab:
Eye Wide Shut: of politics in French cinema, and more specifically in Michael Haneke’s Hidden by a certain Nico, starts rather promisingly with “Hidden is both interesting and a rather bad movie”, later asserting: ” Hidden represents what it denounces and reaches a refined form of harmless critique, the kind that lets good middle class citizens laugh at their own situation and happily bask in it in the same movement. “
Movies: revenge is a dish best served competently, a post on Caché from blog, And Now the Screaming Starts, bridges the gap between the personal and the political by positing Hanek 1 and Haneke 2.:
First there’s the genre-subverting, meticulous, unsentimental, and rigorous artist. This Haneke does all the work. Then, throughout his flicks and somewhat at random, a second Haneke – a ham-fisted, ingenuous, and simple-minded – drops in awkward political asides that are so egregiously thoughtless that many otherwise sympathetic and astute viewers assume that they’re being insulted.
More History/Sociology/Politics
A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 by Alistair Horne. New York Review of Books paperback edition 2006, with new preface together with original preface of 1977 edition.
Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962)
1 page summary: mentions Sarkozy’s role as Minister of Interior in 2005 riots.
Wiki: Paris Massacre of 1961
Check out the heading “the Massacre in popular culture – which mentions the first verse of Sticky Little Fingers’, “When The Stars Fall from The Sky”:
Mid-October, sixty one
The French Police were having fun
Cutting down Algerians
Breaking heads all over town
Yet no-one saw and no-one knew
No-one dared to speak the truth
200 dead became just two
Sweep them in the river
The witnesses were run to the ground
Put the bastards underground
Buried every black in town
Who dared to show their face
Mazarine Pingeot (the hidden daughter of Francois Mitterand) – guest in George’s TV book programme. Mitterand himself – where will this end? – was himself a bit of a hider of things such as his role in Vichy. Papon, of ‘61 Massacre fame, was a Vichy functionary. But before that Papon was a Police chief in Algeria at the height of the Algerian War, who rose to become a Minister. If we can say anything, we can say that Hanke has read some stuff! He admitted to having seen the TV documentary on the ‘61 massacre before making Caché.
SEE Maurice Papon, Vichy and Algeria, dissertation by Stepahie Hare-Cumming, L. Sch. of Economics.
Papon ended up as Budget Minister under Barre and Giscard d’Estaing and was buried with the Legion of Honour awarded by De Gaulle in July 1961, a few months before the Paris massacre.
To me the most fascinating ‘caché’ was Mitterand’s: how he started off under Petain (Vichysto-résistant?) and ended up as socialist president : was he a Vichyist who changed sides, or always a Free-French undercover agent. He started off right wing before the war. As a functionary in the Vichy Government, he eventually turned against Vichy because of Prime Minister Lavel’s (started off a socialist and became right wing) decision to send French workers to Germany.
It is now known Mitterand as president ordered the sinking of Rainbow Warrior.
World Reactions to the 1961 Paris Pogrom by Daniel A Gordon, University of Susses Journal of Contemporary History, 1, (2000)
HLM ( habitation à loyer modéré) – wiki on subsidised housing in France.
BoBo [ Bourgeois Bohême ] – definition in Urban Dictionary. Georges Laurent uses the expression.
Policing Paris:Private Publics and Architectural Media in Michael Haneke’s Caché [Michael Gallagher, J. for Cultural rsearch, Volume 12, Issue 1 Janiary 2008, pp. 19-38)
There is a pay-for article. This is just a 7 line abstract, but the gist is there.
Secrets and revelations: Off-screen space in Michael Haneke's cache [Libby Saxton, Studies in French Cinema, Vol 7 Number 1, 2007]. Summary and abstracts. Heavy academic tripe, but enough to tease out a few ideas.
“Cache is preoccupied, literally and metaphorically, with troubled, distorted or blinkered vision – with the mechanisms of secrecy, amnesia and denial that prevent us from taking responsibility for the past and facing the present clear-sightedly. The article argues that Haneke’s images produce meaning as much through what they conceal as through what they reveal, thereby exposing some of the blind spots that structure history, memory and spectatorship. ”
” Defined by Jacques Aumont as `the collection of elements that, while not being included in the image itself, are nonetheless connected to that visible space in an imaginary fashion for the spectator’, off-screen space, or the hors-champ, is a permanent presence in cinema. It also remains one of the most enigmatic and persistently elusive of filmic sites. Michael Haneke’s critically acclaimed film Cache (2005) enlists both its protagonists and its viewers in a quest to make sense of off-screen space. Haneke’s camerawork, montage and mise-en-scene consistently accord priority to sites, events and entities which elude our gaze, yet which we nonetheless experience as irreducibly present, and which invest their visible counterparts with meaning. The film investigates the invisible dimensions not only of cinema, but also of digital video, surveillance footage and the mass media. Secrecy, concealment and blocked or obstructed vision emerge here as central formal and thematic preoccupations. Moreover, as Haneke explores the processes of repression, denial and amnesia involved”
” …..the growing suspicion that, in Cache, it is off-screen space which establishes on-screen space, rather than vice versa. For the contents of the frame is always already subject to the look of another – a look which cannot immediately be attributed to either director or spectator. This enigmatic look is at once the origin and the blind spot of the narrative. The plot turns on a series of attempts to uncover the identity and motives of a hidden presence who observes, films and even, in a certain sense, directs the action from beyond the frame. Cache opens with a prolonged, unbroken, static shot of the facade of a house filmed from a vantage point somewhere in the pointedly named rue des Iris in the thirteenth arrondissement of Paris. The scene appears, at first, deceptively normal and tranquil; early morning birdsong and the hum of distant traffic are interrupted only by the passage of the odd pedestrian, cyclist or car. But as the minutes slip by, the image, still unchanged, gradually begins to appear more suspect. Ostensibly devoid of narratively significant action, the scene’s inertia and banality start to unsettle the audience. After a while, the image ceases to hold our attention, which wanders instead – confirming Burch’s observations about the centrifugal force of the `champ vide’ – towards offscreen space, as we wonder who else, besides us, might be looking, and why. This, we begin to realize, is not a conventional establishing shot; the longer “
” The stasis of the camera and image and the deferral of a counter-shot or alternative perspective prevent us from making sense of the space outside the frame. Eventually, nearly two-and-a-half minutes into the film, disembodied voices intrude on the soundtrack discussing an as yet unidentified object that was left in a porch in a plastic bag. Haneke then cuts briefly to a shot of a man and a woman leaving the house, and we watch the man peer in puzzlement up the rue des Iris in the now failing light. As we return to the initial shot, horizontal tracking marks appear on the surface of the image, as if someone has pressed the fast-forward button on a remote control. These visual and aural clues arouse suspicions that are subsequently confirmed by a medium shot of the couple back inside the house in front of a television screen, remote control in hand. The protracted opening sequence is thus retrospectively identified as an excerpt from a videotape sent anonymously to a family whose home appears to be under surveillance. What we at first read as a long shot turns out instead to have been a close-up of the screen on which Georges and Anne Laurent are viewing the tape. Finally regaining our bearings, we realize that we are inside the house we are viewing from the outside. We thus share, at least temporarily, the confusion and disorientation of a couple we encounter in the uncanny situation of watching themselves being watched. What is more, from the very outset of the film, we find ourselves already implicated, as spectators, in an economy of voyeurism and surveillance. ”
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.
