FILM ESSAY LONGFORM Re-envisioning the Postwar Documentary: Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog and Hiroshima mon amour

Re-envisioning the Postwar Documentary: Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog and Hiroshima mon amour


Kate Kennelly, Bright Lights Film Journal, March 6, 2015

FILM VIDEO ESSAY Kogonada ~ the exemplar

kogonada ~ The Image Master


Jim Ridley, Nashville Scene, 19 March 2015


Kogonanda


His work – all wonderful ~ My favourite The Hands of Bresson {A previous COTA post}


Video essay techniques are all so different. Commentary. Just visuals. A single aspects of a directors style. Plus thrown in for good measure watching some of them there’s that, Heck I’m not really much of a cinephile -need to get in some DVDs.


The thing that makes Koganada outstanding is his technical skill. Everything he does demonstrates his understanding of film: using the raw material of other film-makers to say something about these films, while at the same time creating something new.

I’ve said before many try the video essay [leave out the categories now well established..] in whatever form they chose, but few succeed. They’re often academics, cinephiles or film writers who know what they want and could say it perfectly well in a text, but rarely achieve what it is obvious they are trying to do in visual terms: in the terms of film itself; in the language of film. [though of course that is not obligatory for a video essay].

The slide-show is not what video essays are about in their highly evolved form. Though many that are just slide shows are excellent. The notion that Godard was really a writer who ended up making films always comes to mind at this point! How many video essays are layered in his way….

[See how easy it is to drop a Godard into every post – P.S New book out now on Histoire[s] Canadian lectures]

Some video essayists do learn to select and edit effectively. Others sling sequences together – often just too many of them – which do little to demonstrate the thesis. Some simply can’t make up their minds if text/ audio commentary has to form a part of the essay or if it can be done with visuals alone. Music & sound effects a given – soundtrack or video-maker’s supplements.

The video essay really has become a branch of film studies! As I’ve probably said before being a film student studying film by making video essays as well as doing all the course work must be a really exciting thing to be involved in.


Waddoiknow. Watch this. Kevin B. Lee explains:


What Makes a Video Essay Great?


The comments are quite useful too.


Other


Motion Studies: essential video essays

FILM PRODUCTION DESIGNER Maria Djurkovic

Film Studies 101: Being A Production Designer
–The Imitation Game’s Maria Djurkovic shares her tips


Designing for The Imitation Game


Eliza Williams, Creative Review, 25 February 2015


The Imitation Game‘s Production Designer Maria Djurkovic – Part I


Bryan Abrams, The Credits, 1 Dec 2014

Design studio MinaLima


How Designers Recreated Alan Turing’s Top-Secret, Code-Cracking World In “The Imitation Game”

FILM Stefan Zweig, Grand Budapest Hotel, And The Writing on the Wall

Stefan Zweig, Grand Budapest Hotel, And The Writing on the Wall


By Baron Von Compos Mentis


27 March 2015


On Stefan Zweig


The Escape Artist – The death and life of Stefan Zweig.


By Leo Carey, The New Yorker, 27 Aug 2012


The World of Yesterday
–Lewis Jones welcomes Stefan Zweig’s acute memoir


The Telegraph, 11 Jan 2010

SCREENPLAY PINTER RADIO ADAPTATION Conrad’s Victory

 

Conrad Victory: Book Society Edition 1952

Harold Pinter’s Victory

Available on BBC iPlayer for who knows how long. Unfortunately Harold Pinter wasn’t there to do read his own stage directions. If you heard Pinter’s Proust Play on BBC radio many years ago, you will understand.

Here the blurb from the iPlayer webpage:

Harold Pinter’s previously un-produced screenplay of Joseph Conrad’s last major novel, Victory, adapted for radio by director Richard Eyre. Lena, a touring English violinist, accompanies a commercial ladies orchestra to the Dutch East Indies in 1900. There, she encounters Heyst, a reclusive Swedish baron who lives alone on a deserted island. Tired of being pursued by a host of predatory men, Lena is intrigued by the aloof and mysterious Heyst, who in turn forgets his disenchantment with life and humanity and invites her to escape with him to his remote home. However, the pair’s romantic idyll is interrupted when one of Lena’s spurned suitors seeks vengeance. Psychological drama, starring Bjarne Henriksen and Vanessa Kirby, with narration by Simon Russell Beale. {1}

World premiere for Harold Pinter play – 33 years after it was written

Playwright’s discarded script for a film based on Joseph Conrad’s novel Victory has been adapted for Radio 4 by Richard Eyre with roles for Vanessa Kirby, Mark Strong and Simon Russell Beale

Radio 4 to broadcast forgotten Harold Pinter screenplays

Notes

Amazing how many editions of Victory there were, which can be seen by looking at the Google search. Hard to make a choice. Could profitably spend a while looking at book covers of Victory and all Conrad books while waiting for warmer weather. Note some have the full title: Victory – An Island Tale. Penguin Modern Classics took a detail of Die Windsbraut by Oscar Kokoschka

Conrad Victory: Penguin Modern Classics

Victory e-book [Gutenberg]

Another e-book version at The Literature Network with better layout and individual chapter links.[But NB you’ll need to use Control + or – to get the text right]

An audio book summary [12 mins. Says it’s speech synthesis, though the voice is very good, not mechanical. As per speech syn., it’s a continuous flow without the gaps a reader would put in for punctuation. Quite funny.] ~ Just imagine this is Pinter speed-reading his own summary of the novel and he’s thinking, thinking about the screenplay.

Over the years 5 film versions, one Polish. Interesting to note in wiki: Joseph Conrad the list of Conrad films and adaptations, famously the based on Apocalypse Now [1979].

Quite natural to start to think about Conrad’s filmability. That Heart of Darkeness was a tricky one is well known. Conrad on Film [1997], here on GoogleBook enough even with the missing pages for many facts and thoughts. There is discussion of fidelity, Conrad’s irony and mention that Victory has been the favourite Conrad of filmmakers [so you’ll wnat to check tht out to see why..]. NB in the notes, p.15, that Orson Welles wrote a screenplay for Lord Jim and one for Victory which was called Surinam. The Lord Jim we known was written by Richard Brooks.


Joseph Conrad in Context


Pub. 2009.


[p.91-97/92 & 93 unavailable, tantalisingly about Conrad’s attempts to write plays of his books]


Ch. 12. Dramatic and other adaptations by Richard J Hand. As always just when it gets interesting a page is missing….but talks of play adapatations before going on to film in section II, which starts promisingly with, “Cinema provides the real triumph of Conrad adaptation.” Couple of paras on Welles’ involvement with screenplays of Conrad.

What can you adapt and how can you adapt it has always been a film preoccupation of mine. In COTA mentions of Fowles’The French Lieutentant’s Woman [Carol Reitz] and a post or 2 on Pinter’s Proust screenplay [available as a book], which only ever got to be a radio adaptation, which was a worthwhile thing to do, both because it was wonderful to listen to and at the same time as visual as a film. Film vs. radio adaption is an interesting and important topic.

Currently, though not posted about, my idée fixe on Graham Moore’s screenplay of The Imitation Game as an example of how not to do justice to a famous, important real person [though everyone seemed to enjoy the film]. Or even: how not to do it at all once presented with the enormity of the justice required [SMILES. PURSES LIPS. NODS.]. I tweeted furiously for weeks giving excerpts from the screenplay in the hope it would help in some small way to discouraging thoughts of awarding it Best Adapted Screenplay. Mirabile dictu – though not through my tweets, obviously – it hasn’t had a look in so far, except in being nominated. There will inevitably be a biopic soon on the life of Graham Moore, scriptwriter, for which I have put down in my mental notes for a script a must do reference, in some form or other, to Altman’s The Player, even if it only in the form of those trendy TXT-messaging-heads-up-on-screen thingys between scriptwriter and producer. If you feel an urge to work up a script along those lines, I’d be happy to join it. A fiction of course.

FILMMAKER 8 things about Albert Maysles by Matt Zoller Seitz

8 things about Albert Maysles


by Matt Zoller Seitz


March 7, 2015

FILMMAKER Albert Maysles, 1926 – 2015

Albert Maysles, 1926 – 2015


Las Critica has a bunch of YouTubes of his work.