FILM DIRECTOR Jean Renoir

Jean Renoir as August in La Regle du Jeu

Jean Renoir, a long, detailed post by James Leahy in Senses of Cinema, March 2003.

FILM SHORT Back to Land

Back to Land


….a meditation on the sight of a blue whale beached on a California shore. The film observes the onlookers and the nature of their looking.


4 min short by Tijana Petrović

This came to me from Aeon film, but decided to look for Tijana’s home page to show it from.


One for L.

FILM DIRECTOR Atom Egoyan’s pearls of wisdom

Wisdom Wednesday: Atom Egoyan’s Golden Rules




Honestly can’t remember watching any of his films. Ararat rings a bell. And didn’t know he was born in Egypt. His name looks like it’s Turkish or Armenian. Proves to be the latter. wiki:Atom Egoyan. I’m at a slight advantage because we had a couple of -ians at my school: Kevorkian, Torosian. Wiki:Armenian name tells me something I didn’t know either. The -ian means ‘son of’. Surnames, schmirnames. Messerschmidt. It’s forenames that count. And what a name Atom is! Every family should have an Atom in it. When he was a little boy, when you said his name, you could define him as well. Molecule. Mmmmm.

Atom’s #3 struck a chord. [ed. this is changed from ‘rang a chord’.]

#6 is in stark contrast to what I just read in footnote 1, chapter 2 Film Editing: The Art of the Expressive, by Valerie Orpen, on Godard’s view on actors.

“My relationship with actors is very hostile. I don’t speak to them….They don’t have a destiny and they know it. They are always conscious of their mutilation. The gap between the creator and the actor is the same as the as the gap between being and having. An actor cannot be.

[Le Nouvel Observateur, Oct 12-18, 1956]

No, but he can recite Hamlet’s soliloquy. One wonders if Godard had been reading too much of Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness”. Thought he might try it out on actors at their most vulnerable. Pretending to talk to the Arrifex, but clearly to the actors – who he doesn’t talk to – Your Being-in-itself is nothing! Etc.

But who is this Godard? Nothing….

Egoyan’s Devil’s Knot [2013], was mostly thought utter crap by the reviewers [32% reviewers/ 85% viewers, which is presumably based on the US audience]. The Sweet Hereafter [1997] got high praise, but I’d tend to go for Ararat [2002] – a lot because it’s a historical subject that interests me and is a film about a film. And there is some suspicion over why it was banned in Italy. And Turkey once wanted to be in the EU! Huh. Next thing we know it’ll be the German’s kicked out because of the Holocaust…