tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-56262807004917586202024-03-05T19:38:01.930-08:00Howling WretchesTed Fendthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14756460782437417166noreply@blogger.comBlogger31125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5626280700491758620.post-31854886588094669322017-02-17T14:13:00.000-08:002017-02-22T11:05:25.829-08:0050 ans de cinéma américain - Tavernier/Coursodon/Spielberg<style>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>From the second volume of Tavernier and Coursodon's </i>50 ans de cin<span class="st">é</span>ma am<span class="st">ér</span>icain. <i>Discovered seven or eight years ago, translated last summer for friends.</i></div>
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<br /></div>
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<u>Spielberg, Steven</u></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
1947</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
unprecedented commercial phenomenon that his career represents impedes a calm
evaluation of his merits as a filmmaker. Spielberg was not yet forty when he
already had four of the eight most commercially successful films "of all
time" under his belt, including the absolute champion <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">E.T.</i>, which earned the distributor sixty million dollars <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">more </i>than its closest competitor <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Star Wars</i> even before its home video
release catapulted it to even more dizzying heights. Such success does indeed
make one dizzy, and critical reactions have consequently been somewhat distorted in both
directions. Even Hollywood professionals who normally revere commercial success were unsettled in the face of the enormity of his, no doubt judging it indecent. They reacted by obstinately
refusing to give him the ultimate reward: an Oscar for Best Picture or Best Director (even
though <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Color Purple</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Empire of the Sun</i>, with their mixture of
visual opulence and humanist ambitions, seem to combine all the ingredients
most likely to charm the members of the Academy). </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>An
unprecedented phenomenon, we were saying. Certainly, but not entirely without
an equivalent because it cannot be dissociated from the triumphs of his
contemporary and frequent collaborator George Lucas, the inventor of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Star Wars</i> saga, producer of Spielberg's
three <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Indiana Jones</i> films, and,
therefore, cumulatively, the uncontested box-office champion. After setting up
his universe in the first episode of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Star
Wars</i> trilogy, however, Lucas abandoned directing to devote himself solely
to producing, whereas Spielberg, while also developing a lucrative career as an
executive producer (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Back to the Future</i>,
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Gremlins I</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">II</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Innerspace</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Who Framed Roger Rabbit</i>), has pursued
film directing, going in a new direction in 1985 with <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Color Purple</i>, a film without special effects that wants to be seen as
"mature." Whereas Lucas looks like a kind of contemporary Thomas Ince
or, to use a more contemporary reference, a Disney-like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">merchandizer</i>, Spielberg seems to have decided on continuing to be a
creator first and a businessman second. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>He is a creator
contested by a fair number of critics who also seem to be excessively obsessed by his
box-office shattering performances. It is not only a matter of money, however. After all, these hundreds of millions of dollars correspond to millions of
viewers who are satisfied and even enchanted in the strongest sense of the
word. The impact of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">E.T.</i> on the
popular imagination is clearly less superficial than that of James Bond, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Star Wars</i>, and the other mega-successes
of the last twenty years like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Grease</i>,
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ghostbusters</i>, and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Beverly Hills Cop</i>. The film seems to
touch something deep in the universal psyche. From the viewpoint of public
support, there are only two precedents, Disney's <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Snow White</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Gone With the
Wind</i>, produced by David O. Selznick; two films whose effects it combines:
the first primarily addressing an audience of children, the second an audience of adults, while children, adolescents, parents, and grandparents have trembled
or cried during <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">E.T.</i> (there is some
Disney and Selznick in Spielberg, a great admirer of the former, whom he quotes
in his films whenever possible* – it's only natural that he produces animated
films – and whose taste for flamboyancy calls to mind the producer of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Garden of Allah</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Gone With the Wind</i>, and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Duel in the Sun</i>; the glowing, red suns
in these films, for example, are also setting in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Color Purple</i>). </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Can such
support not be "suspect"? For many critics and cinephiles, Spielberg
is merely a talented show-off, a master manipulator (of techniques and viewers’
emotions) in whose work everything is borrowed, conventional, formulaic, and
only directly connected to the collective unconscious because he has shrewdly
been able to identify several major archetypes. For others, however, he is a
sublime adventurer who has rediscovered for us (like the lost ark and the
grail, mythic and mystical MacGuffins) the sacrosanct spirit of childhood
missing from a sadly cynical and disenchanted contemporary cinema. To be fair, this
must, as usual, be qualified, since if Spielberg's universe appears simplistic,
the “Spielberg case” itself is not.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Spielberg's
cinema has often been qualified as anti-intellectual (including by himself) and
optimistic, as if these two approaches necessarily go hand in hand; but the
former is much more exact than the latter. Of course, in his films the
extraterrestrials do not come to conquer or destroy the earth, but in order to
communicate (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Close Encounters of the
Third Kind</i>) or to instruct (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">E.T.</i>,
where the "invaders" at the beginning appear to be botanists
collecting plant samples), which is enough to separate Spielberg radically from
older, more paranoid, movie science fiction where the metaphoric threat
always originates in space. When he shows humans and their world, however, Spielberg
is much less debonair. He has a taste for satire, even for meanness, exactly
like the cynicism of his more "adult" contemporaries. It is not
surprising, moreover, that his tendency to take refuge in the imaginary and
fantastic, to see the world through a child's eyes, is complimented by misanthropy.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>This
misanthropy is clearly visible in the biting irony with which Spielberg depicts
American society and most of the adults who compose it. Personal interest,
egoism, pettiness, prejudices, and corruption are present in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Jaws</i>, where the satire of the big shots
at a whaling station whose sole industry is under threat is clearly more
interesting than the horror and special effects. In Spielberg's films, nobody
really believes in traditional American values. The crowds in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Sugarland Express</i> cheer for the two
outlaws who the police are chasing. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Close
Encounters of the Third Kind</i> is full of defiance of all forms of power, especially government, with Washington hatching a true hoax and creating
a panic to fool the public. Likewise in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">E.T.</i>,
where federal agents are an invasive and threatening presence (they look like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">evil</i> extraterrestrials), while at the
end of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Raiders</i> government bureaucracy
proves its incompetence by burying an extraordinary secret weapon deep in a
warehouse inspired by Charles Foster Kane. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>This
paranoid vision of power – certainly encouraged by post-Watergate era scandals
– corresponds to a fashion: Spielberg is not as cut-off from political and
social realities as we would like to think. But if the crowds he shows fooled
by their leaders are sheepish, it is rare for individuals to rise above the
manipulated masses. Spielberg has a contempt for Middle Americans that is noticeable
in his depiction of suburbanites, couples, families, and outsiders.
Individuals never communicate; they talk without listening to one another.
They can be so preoccupied with themselves that they are able to refuse the most tangible
evidence of something out of the ordinary: Teri Garr hysterically denies the
invasion in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Close Encounters of the Third
Kind</i>, Dee Wallace is literally blind to E.T.'s presence directly under her nose.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Let us briefly
note that this incapacity – of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">women</i> especially
(the two above-cited characters are presented as a traditional mothers) – to be
open to the unexpected and extraordinary, to thinking of anything other than
their most material and immediate preoccupations is an aspect of Spielberg's
misogyny (a particular case of his misanthropy) that also appears, on another
level, in the hyper-caricatured and sexist heroine in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom</i> who is alternatively annoyingly emasculating
or a cowardly whiner who Indiana and the kid ignore in a manly way while she
undergoes a slew of humiliations that are supposed to entertain the audience
(see the woman in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Last Crusade</i> as
well, who is revealed to be a Nazi spy after a few scenes of smooth talk). Even
in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Color Purple</i> – which wants to pay
homage to courage, endurance, and the force of character of doubly oppressed
women – the caricatured treatment of the characters and situations tends to
deprive them of the humanity with which the filmmaker is striving to invest
them.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The only
exceptions to the rut of everyday mediocrity are children and rare adults who
have not lost the spirit of childhood: in<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">
Close Encounters of the Third Kind</i>, Richard Dreyfuss practically has to
become a child again (his suddenly infantile behavior enrages his wife and
upsets his own son) before he can access the secret and become one of the
Chosen. Naturally, he is misunderstood and vilified by "normal"
people: symbolically, he goes against the crowd in the shots evoking Kevin
McCarthy alone against everyone on the highway at the end of Don Siegel's <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Invasion of the Body Snatchers</i>.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Spielberg
seems to be suggesting that the only hope for salvation for this fat,
egotistical society resides in the beatific outer space evoked in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Close Encounters of the Third Kind</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">E.T.</i> The extraterrestrials bring kind
words or at least a message of peace. But men must earn it and first learn to
decipher it. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Close Encounters</i>, a film
about <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">interpretation</i> in the many
senses of the word, shows us some men with good intentions trying to establish a
common language (after the symbolic Babel of languages at the beginning of the
film) and finally managing to do so in a way that is both the most unexpected
(because it is nonverbal) and the most banal (since it refers to the venerable
cliché: "music, the universal language").</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
religiosity of Spielberg's message is clear to everyone. In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Close Encounters of the Third Kind</i>,
Richard Dreyfuss acts like characters in the Bible who abandon everything to
pursue their vision after a sudden illumination. He shares his vision of a
mythical mountain – evoking many Biblical mountains – with a woman and her
son, and this new group sets off on a pilgrimage guided by the stars like the
three wise men. The spaceship looks like a giant Christmas tree and its
lift-off is an ascension in a theological as much as a mechanical sense. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">E.T.</i> is even more explicit: the Christ-like
journey of a being from elsewhere who lets children approach him, gives life
(even if just to wilted flowers), misses the kingdom from which he has come,
dies at the hands of men, is reborn, and rises to heaven in front of his
disciples. In this regard, both films respond to and complement each other (we
could say that Richard Dreyfuss in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Close
Encounters of the Third Kind</i> is the adult version – refusing to grow up –
of Elliott, the little boy in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">E.T.</i>).
Spielberg can be vaunted just as well as castigated for making recourse to
archetypes that are effective but no less valid. The (not very interesting)
question of his sincerity aside, it is clear that a sense of wonder doubled by
a sure sense of humor protect the use of these figures from solemnity as well
as banality (moreover, as Jung writes, "archetypes are by no means useless
archaic survivals or relics. They are living entities which cause the
preformation of numinous ideas or dominant representations"). </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>It must be
added that the religiosity is considerably defiled (which was undoubtedly
inevitable given the context) in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Indiana
Jones</i> films, particularly in the third one, where the Holy Grail is only a
vulgar <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">gimmick</i> that good and bad guys
fight over like any other treasure. A tactlessly literal approach trivializes
the myth to the point of altering it completely: this Grail brings a mortally
wounded man back to life and gives eternal life in this world (Spielberg is not
afraid of mixing his myths, like others their metaphors; but here, the
filmmaker's chariot is navigating a volcano, one that we would like to see wake
up like in old, exotic adventure films where the eruption manifests the wrath
of the offended gods). The free-for-all around the sacred chalice is like a
burlesque, while all the evidence suggests that Spielberg wants it to be not
only dramatic, but symbolic and edifying as well. Whoever wants to act like an
angel, acts like a beast...</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>One wonders
what compels Spielberg to want to act like an angel when nothing is forcing him.
It is not only that he believes in the permanence, and therefore the
bankability, of the archetypes he is manipulating, but also that he is trying
in good faith to go beyond pure entertainment by rooting his popular art in a
noble, prestigious tradition. This is the ambition which made him construct an
homage to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">serials</i>, a humble and
popular genre if ever there was one, around a Biblical artifact charged with
mystic-mythical connotations (the Ark of the Covenant) and then pushed him, a
few years later, to enrich it in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Indiana
Jones and the Last Crusade</i>, with the quest for the Grail, the archetypal
model for every quest produced by the western imagination. Let us add that,
when he is not acting the angel, he tends to be the beast in another way: the
"bestial" compulsion is given free reign in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom</i>, deprived of any religiosity
and dominated by a perverse delight for refined tortures and other sadistic
cruelties in the staging (is the angelicness a safeguard against the excesses
of Spielberg's id?).</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Some were
surprised by the "revelation" of a hidden side to a filmmaker they
had believed to be "Disneyian," but a film like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Poltergeist</i> from two years before – written, produced, and more or
less directed by Spielberg through a middle man (Tobe Hooper) – should have
alerted them:<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> Poltergeist</i> is the
negative and the negation of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">E.T.</i>, its
dark, evil, satanic version. The point of departure is exactly the same: an
average suburban American family (the only difference: the father is present;
the mother, nevertheless, is the solid, strong element: she saves her
daughter), presented humorously, finds itself confronted with foreign forces.
But this time the extraterrestrials are entirely evil. They belong to a beyond
that is no longer spatial (the distant galaxies of the visitors in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Close Encounters of the Third Kind</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">E.T.</i>) but psychic and particularly
suspect because it escapes all the physical laws of our world. The bastion of
this universe of vengeful spirits, its Trojan Horse, is in the heart of the
victims' living room: it is the television set through which they intrude on
the family's everyday life, disrupt it, and kidnap one of them. The most
familiar object in the modern living room, this electronic marvel that
inexhaustibly dispenses distractions and information therefore becomes the
vehicle of the forces of evil and a nightmarish experience. Likewise, the
childhood terrors that fill the film (which Spielberg admits are personal
memories) are rooted in the most banal reality, but transfigured by his
imagination. The child's bedroom becomes a laboratory for monsters. Like
young Steven making electric ghosts to hide in his closet and scare his
sisters, however, the filmmaker concretizes these imaginary fears: the tree, whose silhouette is threatening in the night and whose branches look like arms ready
come through the window to grab the child (a memory of the trees in the forest
in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Snow White</i>, a film that terrified
young Steven) ends up being revealed as a supernatural and evil force brought
to life by a destructive, physical power. Every familiar element of everyday life
is likewise exploited and transformed into a potential or very real threat.
What we call reality or normality is an illusory construction built on the
shifting sands of irrationality, the way the Freeleng's house is built on an
ancient cemetery haunted by the lost souls buried in it. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The first
two-thirds of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Poltergeist</i> constitute
one of the peaks of Spielberg's work, culminating in the superb invention of a
rope thrown into the fourth dimension – an umbilical cord that helps the mother
bring back to the world her daughter who has been kidnapped by the
"spirits,” the placenta covering the child reinforcing the re-birth
imagery. After this (false) return to normality, the film sinks into a series
of horror and Grand Guignolesque scenes that only seem Spielbergian for their
incoherence and gratuity, although it would be naive and not very logical to
attribute responsibility for them only to Tobe Hooper, who is only following an
undoubtedly very detailed storyboard provided by the producer-screenwriter. It
is hard to doubt that Spielberg wanted this horrifying bric-a-brac, partially for
its commercial potential but also because it corresponds to a very clear taste
in his work for unpleasant, and indeed repulsive, images. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>This
perverse, infantile taste, already present in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Jaws</i> (the contents of the shark's stomach that cause Richard
Dreyfuss to faint) is also found in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Indiana
Jones</i>: the snakes in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Raiders</i>
(used again in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lost Crusade</i>), the
rat-infested tunnel in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Crusade</i>, the
chirping of insects in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Temple of Doom</i>,
and, in the same film, the monstrous menu in the extraordinary meal scene:
live serpents (coming out of an enormous gutted snake), stuffed beetles, a soup
filled with real eyes, brain served in the scooped-out skulls of monkeys. The
excess and gratuitousness of this kind of scene is surprising and shocking, but
they are only the manifestation of one of the less appetizing aspects of the
"childhood spirit" – Spielberg is addressing a pre-adolescent
clientele that delights in this kind of joke.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Spielberg
is not a man to be "content" with a popular and commercial triumph,
even one without precedents. Looking to modify his trademark image and prove he
could do more than super-serials and juvenile epics with special effects, he
announced plans to direct a "serious," "adult" film (these
are his own terms, or in any case those attributed to him), a film with real
characters, where he would tell a story "through the performances."
But just as soon as it was chased away, Spielberg's true self came galloping
back: the result, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Color Purple</i>,
is a monument of redundant vulgarity. Two years later came <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Empire of the Sun</i>, far superior, sometimes even admirable, but
manifesting the same incomprehension (or is it simply a refusal?) of the
demands of its subject.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In both
films, Spielberg takes on an intensely dramatic theme, a story with
occasionally unbearable aspects, and treats them like a musical comedy, a music
video, or an ad for a luxury product. As the horror of the situations increases,
his cinematic treatment puts them at a distance by making them beautiful.
Celie's tribulations in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Color Purple</i>
accumulate and surpass those of all the heroines in Ponson du Terrail-style
melodramas and almost make those of Justine de Sade's heroines look like mere
trifles. Their very excess and the flamboyant style in which they are staged,
however, quickly drain them of any authenticity. Jim Graham, the young hero in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Empire of the Sun</i> – who by the end of
the film reaches approximately Celie's age (14 years old) at the beginning of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Purple</i> – spends four years in a Japanese
concentration camp with other British and American soldiers, but, in spite of
the terrible living conditions in the camps, he seems to get through the test
as in a dream, in a state of permanent exaltation lumping him together with the
protagonist in John Boorman's <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hope and
Glory</i> (transformed by a childish or pre-adolescent way of seeing, the
horrors of war become a marvelous experience; but this approach, totally
convincing in Boorman's film, becomes hard to accept in the context of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Empire</i>, where the prisoners are
literally dying of hunger, are savagely beaten, and where every day is a
constant struggle for survival). </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Robert
Benayoung, the only unconditional admirer ("unrestrained" in his own
words) of Spielberg among "serious" critics in France considers both
films "masters theses on life lessons rivaling [Mark] Donskoy and King
Vidor" (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Positif</i>, no. 343). If he
means professional mastery, we can only approve the description: Spielberg's
virtuosity and his technical control are impressive; the weaknesses for
which he is criticized are not clumsiness, everything is intentional. As for
the "lessons," we are more skeptical. Celie and Jim's adventures are
such extreme cases and Spielberg's approach disdains believability to such an extent
(his vision of reality, which is in fact a kind of phantasmagorical
hyper-reality, consists of simultaneously stylizing and magnifying its
characteristics) that the force of his characters' personalities and their
ability to survive lose any exemplary power; it's a bit as if comic strip super
heroes entered a naturalistic drama. Celie's transformation of Albert's kitchen,
for example, is so much like a "before/after" sequence in a commercial that it
provokes laughter (it is almost a gag intended for a cartoon) more than
admiration. In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Empire</i>, the entire
economy of the camp and a good part of its life seem to be organized around
the bartering activities of a twelve-year old boy; for us to believe this,
Spielberg would need to demonstrate how it functions, but such attention to
practical details and the reality of things would contradict his heroic and
mythologizing vein. The more the film progresses, the clearer it becomes that
the kid's astounding socio-economic success is a gift we must accept without
discussion.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The old
popular expression "it's just a movie," seems to have been made for
Spielberg, especially these two films that aspire to humanism. We never for a
second forget that we are in the cinema (this artificiality is actually part of
their charm, which is real, especially for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Empire</i>).
Rendering a reality (historical, ethnic, social) about which he has no direct
knowledge (the exoticism of Alice Walker and J.G. Ballard's novels is what must
have attracted him), Spielberg imposes his cinephile filter. Pauline Kael
describes <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Purple</i> as "a remake of
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Song of the South</i> by Visconti"
(according to her, Spielberg sees 1909 Georgia the way a European filmmaker would).
We might add that such jubilatory sequences are less evocative of Donskoy or
Vidor than the Sam Wood of the end of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A
Day at the Races</i>.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Empire of the Sun</i> is Spielberg's most
ambitious film and undoubtedly his most successful with <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Close Encounters</i>. He once again confirms his talent and his limits,
the latter so directly linked to the former that it would feel in vain to
reprimand him. We remain stunned by the size of the production, the brilliance
of the direction, and the way in which the one sings the others praises. Other
films have probably used an equally large number of extras, but very few have so
productively showcased them. Some crowd shots filmed with a crane (there are
countless crane shots in this film and the camera is rarely static) make the
famous shot of the Atlanta train station in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Gone
with the Wind</i> look petty and insubstantial. This reference is not
accidental: the Selznick quality we noted at the beginning of this text
manifests itself again in the mix of vastness, unrealism, and a flamboyance
sometimes at the limits of good taste that characterize <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Empire</i> (Spielberg even puts a giant poster for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Gone With the Wind</i> in a street scene at the beginning of the film).
The first part (the sequences in Shanghai) – busy, very active, constantly
visually inventive – creates a euphoria comparable to certain moments in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Close Encounters</i>. For about the first
hour, the film is so impressive that we wonder how Spielberg will maintain his
distance (the film is 145 minutes long). And in fact, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Empire</i> begins to lose steam and disintegrate in the second half.
Each sequence is enormously finessed, but remains isolated, as if it was
conceived for itself alone with no relationship to the general structure, the
overall rhythm. As in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Indiana Jones</i>,
the film becomes a series of spectacular set pieces that hide or extremely
schematize what is exciting about the subject: the realities of camp life, the
relationships of the prisoners among themselves and with the Japanese, the
problems of survival. The sequences follow each other without revealing any
connection between them. Therefore, we notice the symbolism of Jim's passages back
and forth between the British section and the American section of the camp, but
we have trouble understanding what motivates them. This incoherence is all the
more regrettable since the organization of the script hints at a real concern
for the construction and the composition, in the musical sense of the word:
certain visual themes (like the juxtaposition of toy planes and real planes)
are repeated and modulated over the course of the film. This concern can also
be found in the music itself: the Welsh song Jim sings in church at the
beginning of the film is superimposed over a Japanese military song at the end.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Aside from
a few ideas like these, John Williams' music remains abominable: redundant,
emphatic, and underlining in broad strokes every emotion in the worst Hollywood
tradition. Spielberg explains with candid frankness his predilection for
Williams: "I know how to bring a tear to the viewer's eye, but he knows
how to make them flow" (interview in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rolling
Stone</i>, no. 459 – two years before <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Empire</i>).
In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Empire</i>, it often feels like the
purpose of the music is less to bring tears to our eyes (there is hardly a
moment to be truly moved in such an overly grandiose film) than to inject a
vaguely mystic solemnity to images in which Spielberg seems to lack confidence.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Religiosity
is more present than ever, in a context where it would not seem to have much
place. An atheist (he defines himself this way) preoccupied with God, early in the
film Jim dreams of him as a tennis player and imagines him at the end in an
apocalyptic photo whose flash is the explosion in Hiroshima. There's an
impression that Spielberg is looking to make his film "deeper," more
significant, while he already had a story with exceptional gravity and
amplitude at his disposal, which could have done without such supplements if it
had only been treated more directly. Religiosity is only one of the familiar
Spielberg characteristics we find in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Empire</i>.
It is striking that a film that wants to be so different from the earlier ones
resembles them so deeply (its Spielberg's natural way – the sign that he is an <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">auteur</i>!). One example among hundreds:
when the prisoners evacuated from the camp arrive in an immense stadium where
the luxury furniture of their previous homes is stored – their limos, pianos,
harps (everything perfectly conserved after four years in the open air!) – we
can recognize his taste for bric-a-brac, for the surreal juxtaposition at the
end of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Raiders</i> (which is citing the
ending of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Citizen Kane</i>) or the scenes
in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Close Encounters</i> where airplanes
from thirty years before are found in the desert (or, in the "special
edition," a cruise ship buried in the sand). This scene makes no sense,
plays no role in relation to the rest of the action, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">serves</i> no purpose other than to allow the director to please
himself – like so many other scenes in his films that are equally gratuitous
and playful – like the boat found in the sand or the thousands of hands raised
in unison in response to François Truffaut's question in the same film. Such
moments often please us and we would grudgingly stay away from our pleasure.
But Spielberg seems not to want to admit that his – laudable – decision to
handle more "serious" themes and subjects comes with responsibilities
such as not indiscriminately giving in to the compulsion to be playful. He
wants to be taken seriously while continuing to be a child: for him, play
ultimately counts above all else. Hence the caricatures, the Guignolesque style
of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Color Purple</i>, and the
trivialization of the subject in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Empire
of the Sun</i>.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>We know
that Spielberg bought the young Charles Foster Kane's sled, "Rosebud,"
in a studio prop auction (it is hanging on his living room wall). Such an
acquisition does more than satisfy the desire of a cinephilic collector.
Rosebud, a key word in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Citizen Kane</i>,
represents the lost paradise of childhood – doubly lost since the symbolic
object is thrown in the fire in a final scene that seems to fascinate Spielberg
(meaning even the memory of this paradise is destroyed; the world – contrary to
the viewer of Welles' film who the camera puts in the know – will never know
what Kane's last words mean). By recuperating the sled, was he not figuratively
saving it from the flames and in doing so denying the passage of time and
death, bringing the spirit of childhood back to life and affirming its
permanence? In the above-cited scene in the stadium/warehouse in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Empire</i>, the young hero rediscovers <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">intact</i> the symbolic objects of his
childhood that had brutally been torn away from him like Rosebud from Charles.
Spielberg's work has a sincere and touching desire to preserve this lost
childhood paradise, to invest it, or even to convert it, as if to turn
Wordsworth's verses in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Intimations of
Immortality</i> and common experience into lies. This chimerical but seductive
project excuses the infantilism, which is the other side of the coin.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
*It hass even been said that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">E.T.</i> was a copy of Peter Pan.</div>
Ted Fendthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14756460782437417166noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5626280700491758620.post-80051904138115716122014-11-01T08:56:00.000-07:002014-11-01T18:21:56.223-07:00Godard in Venice<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"></span><br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">A transcription of the entirety of Jean-Luc Godard's press conference for <i>Prénom Carmen</i> at the 1983 Venice Film Festival.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">What led you, at the same time as several other international filmmakers, to shoot your version of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Carmen</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">?</span></span></div>
<br />
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Jean-Luc Godard:</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> First, the film is not called </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Carmen</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. It is called </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Prénom Carmen</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> and in the film, at one point a series of questions is answered: “What comes before the name?... What is its name?... And, moreover, must it be named?... Must we names things or should things come to you without being named?...”</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">All these questions, because I think that cinema must show things before we name them: so that we can name them, to help us name them.</span></span><br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<br />
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Today, we’re in a time where a powerful terrorism of rhetoric and language accentuated by television is being practiced. And so I, as, I don’t know, let’s say a modest cinema employee, I’m interested in seeing things, not before they exist but before we name them: to talk about the child before dad and mom give him a name; to talk about myself before I was named Jean-Luc; to talk... about the sea, about freedom before it is named the sea, wave or freedom.</span></span></div>
<br />
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">If it happened that several directors were also making films that are called </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Carmen</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, it is maybe because </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Carmen</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> is a major feminine myth, a major feminine myth that existed only through music. And if the times wanted the media and the audio-visual to grab hold of this myth – since a small independent producer like me as well as a big commercial firm like Gaumont is interested in this feminine character – it is maybe because it’s in the air. But, what is in the air? It may be </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Carmen</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, if we’re talking about it... But it may also be either the final fight of women against men or the first...</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">In fact, I like to deal either with things that are no longer going to exist or things that do not exist yet. From there, the film could be called...it’s true title could be: </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Before Names, Before Language</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, with in parentheses: </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">(The Children Play Carmen)</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">If it’s called </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Prénom Carmen</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> and not </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Carmen</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, it’s because of the originality of the work, in Anne-Marie Miéville’s script and adaptation. Everyone knows the story of Carmen. At the same time, nobody knows what happened between Don José and Carmen, between Joseph and Carmen. We know how it begins. How it is going to end. But how do we go from the beginning to the end? Telling stories is showing what happened. That’s where the big difference lies between the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Carmen</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> Rosi is finishing and Saura’s, which are illustrations of a classical theme. What interested us was showing what a man and a woman said to each other under the influence of this image of love that weighs on them. Whether we call this love or their adventure: destiny, love or malediction. </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">What did they say to each other when they were in a kitchen? What did they say to each other when they were in a car? We don’t know what they said to each other. In my next film, as if by accident, I’m keeping the masculine character of Joseph: his Carmen will be named Marie. Well, what did Joseph and Marie say to each other before having the child? If you’d like, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Prénom Carmen</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> is also a preparation for my next film. For me, a film always announces the next one...thanks to the friendship of a co-producer, I’m already announcing the music...and I’m trying to not announce the catastrophes...</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Why choose Beethoven and his </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Quartets</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> when we were expecting Bizet’s music?</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I didn’t choose Beethoven. I’d say instead that Beethoven chose me and that I responded to his call. Younger, around twenty – that’s the young age of my characters – I listened to Beethoven. It was next to the sea, in Brittany. And I discovered his Quartets. It’s an accepted idea that </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Carmen</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> does not exist without music. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Hamlet</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> exists without music. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Antigone</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> exists without music. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Electre</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> exists without music. Not </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Carmen</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. Music is part of the story of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Carmen</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. Besides, Mérimée’s novel has never been famous. It only became so once Bizet set it to music.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Bizet is a composer who made music that Nietzsche characterized as “brown.” It was the music of the Mediterranean. Bizet is a southern composer. He is, moreover, very linked to the sea. So I did not choose another music but another sea. The Ocean instead of the Mediterranean. </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">In fact, my idea in regards to the music is that it was necessary to choose a fundamental music. Music that has marked the history of music. Music that is both the practice and theory of music. This was the case with Beethoven’s Quartets.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I could have also chosen Bach and something like </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The Well-Tempered Clavier</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">. It’s music that, again, synthesizes the theory and practice of all the music that existed and gave work to future musicians for a hundred or two hundred years. It’s in that sense that I made my choice. Besides, my next film will be conceived with Bach’s music.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Did you feel a need to try acting?</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">It was to have fun... Yes... To see if one really has fun being an actor. I have always had relationships that are both very tender and very violent with actors or with the crew. But for once I wanted to see myself in front of and not only behind the camera. It was also with the goal of preparing. I want to direct a film where I play the lead role. It would be a bit like in the past with the films of Harry Langdon or a small Jerry Lewis, a character for which you know I have great admiration.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I think that it’s also in the interest of not working my mind alone. I wanted to work my body and my voice.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">And then for technical and narrative reasons I thought it was good to play, under my own name, something that was not entirely me, all while being me, so that we believe in the truth a bit: just like we see the musicians, the one inventing the story is part of the story. </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Carmen</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> is a love story. Curiously, we never see Maruschka Detmers laughing. That didn’t bother you?</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">You must not have watched the whole film. Or you sneezed just at the moment when Maruschka was laughing. She was even laughing much too often for me. I had to eliminate laughs in the editing. She laughs often. Three or four times. On other hand, maybe she doesn’t smile. That’s true. But you would have to ask Maruschka why she doesn’t smile. I let the actors do absolutely what they want. I put them in certain conditions. They think it’s going to be easy and they discover that it is rather hard: it’s up to them to save themselves. They told me they knew how to swim. I threw them in the sea and I watched how they swam. That’s my manner of working with actors. Maybe that makes them not smile...</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Doesn’t dealing with the theme of love in a film at the moment seem to you something out of fashion?</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I think that in cinema there can only be love stories. With military films, it’s about boys’ love for weapons; with gangster films, it’s about boys’ love for theft... That’s cinema, in my opinion. And that’s what the New Wave brought that was new: Truffaut, Rivette, me and two or three others, we brought something that didn’t exist anymore, maybe, or that had never existed in the history of cinema; we loved cinema before loving women, before loving money, before loving war. Before loving whatever, we loved cinema. For me, I’ve often said that cinema made me discover life. It took a while. It took me thirty years. All that because I had to go beyond, in fact, what I was projecting, myself, on the screen.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">There are no films without love. And if today cinema still works on television and it’s even the thing that works best, that’s the reason. There is no love in television. There is something else that is very powerful, both in life and the industry: there’s power in its pure state. If cinema, like sports, works it is because the people who do it, be it Zidi or myself...above all, we love: we need to go towards the screen to go towards others. In life we don’t manage to go towards others. We’re a bit powerless, which is to say we don’t have the power of soldiers or scientists or television people. We recognize ourselves as powerless but that said, we have the desire, the sincerity to go towards, to project, and then we hope...and then others come to meet us. That’s cinema. Cinema is love for oneself, love for life, love for men on the earth... In another way, it is very evangelical. It’s no accident that the screen is white: it is a canvas and it is me. In my next film I would like to take it as such: it’s Veronica’s Veil, it keeps a trace, some traces of the world. There are no films without love, whatever it is. I insist on that. That doesn’t exist.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Isabelle Adjani was supposed to have the role of Carmen. What happened between you and the actress?</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">It’s true, at the beginning we were supposed to make the film with Isabelle Adjani. I think she was very tired from the two films she had just finished. We went into production. She arrived. And she didn’t think she was pretty. She found that there wasn’t...and then no, I think that she didn’t think she was pretty enough. We did fifteen days of tests and afterwards I think that I fired her at the same time that she fired me. Following that, Alain said “We’re continuing.” We found Maruschka. That’s that.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Doesn’t recording direct sound lead to conflicts of incompatibility with the shot, especially during the shooting of a subject like </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Prénom Carmen </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">where music occupies a predominant place? </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Since the beginning, meaning since I have been directing films, I have worked this way. We were the first to make films with direct sound. I stopped seeing Italian films when, having shot in Italy, I noticed that they weren’t recording the sound whereas there’s a great Italian musical tradition.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">In </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Prénom Carmen</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> there is no conflict between image and sound. There cannot be any. Quite the contrary. The music is part of the action. I wanted that because I didn’t want it to be like Saura’s </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Carmen</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, a literary pretext to show that musicians are playing. Which is to say that if the musicians stop playing, I have no more ideas. When Prokofiev was working with Eisenstein, the battle in </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Alexander Nevsky</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> was first written as a score. That gave ideas to Eisenstein. He had the score modified. Then they shot.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">For example, the idea of the bank robbery came to me while listening to a certain part of the 10th Quartet. As I was thinking that there would be a police aspect in my film, the music made me see that Carmen could belong to a small gang and at that moment the idea came that Don José is a police officer and we return profoundly to the true story of Carmen.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I stand by the originality between sound and me in relationship to other filmmakers because I find that I am, in fact, very original. My work is even, undoubtedly, unique in so far as all my films, since </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Sauve qui peut (la vie)</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> have only two tracks. I don’t know if you know the technical side, but in general for a film, there are several tracks. When a car arrives, next to the sea, there’s the direct sound, the sound of the car. Then there’s the sound of the actors’ voices: one says, “I love you,” the other responds, “me too” or the opposite, that makes a second track. On a third track we hear the noise of the sea. The sound of the music is on a fourth track. And if we are in the countryside, near a farm, there’s someone who says, “it would be good if we put in a rooster sound,” so we add a rooster and that’s five tracks. Then we place the tracks, beforehand, like in television, and we make them march like soldiers in a parade. We call that the mix.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I’m not against putting in a rooster, if we’re eventually within the proximity of a farm, but with me, all the sounds are regrouped and there is almost no more room on the two sound tracks. I use two tracks because we have two hands. If I had only one hand, I would film with one hand and I would only use one soundtrack. I’m sorry for talking a bit technically but it’s rare with journalists to be able to talk technically...and about art too...</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Let’s go back to the relationship between image and sound. For the love scenes, I had asked the crew and the actors to go see Rodin’s sculptures. They refused. That was supposed to give me ideas. They didn’t want to. It wasn’t done... Nevermind that at the moment of shooting those scenes, we were saying: “Oh, we’re going to do the Rodin..." While cutting, myself, and mixing, I rediscovered the idea that I had about Rodin: the image of a sculptor who works with his hands a surface that he digs into. He digs into space, and here musicians would undoubtedly talk about sound space. It interested me to succeed in digging into the sound space. In filming the performers – they were only good performers, but very good, like the actors – I already had a physical feeling for the music. Especially with the violin. At times it gives the impression of digging. At those moments, you look for and find connections. After an image of the violin digging into the sound, what must be shown as the image? An image of the sea must come to mind. With hollows, highs and lows. If you have an idea about high and low, you find a story where there are two characters who are going to know highs and lows. Everything is linked. Logically. Completely. That’s cinema. There are is no invention in cinema. We can only look and try to organize what we’ve seen...if we have been able to see.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Aren’t you generalizing a bit with Italian cinema?</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The only one who did sound in Italy is Nino Rota. There’s nobody else.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Many young filmmakers reference you. What’s the Godard style for you?</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Godard has no style. He wants to make films, that’s all. If I’ve been able to influence young filmmakers who are a bit my children or my brothers or who were my parents before I began, it’s by showing them that a film is always something possible; that a film can be made without money. When one has a lot, one can make one too, but differently than Americans, Russians or television do it today. In fact, my process has always involved going to the side, being marginal, in the margin. I’m in the place of the audience who is watching. Being marginal is occupying the audience’s position.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">A notebook doesn’t exist without margins. The margin is a necessary place.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I’m beginning to understand today all of the power of television. Twenty years from now, I won’t even have the right to pretend to have a place sweeping at RAI. They’ll refuse me even that. So I have to save myself. Likewise, I’m looking for characters who are interested in saving themselves. If these are Palestinians, these are Palestinians: I’m not forced to go see them, I can try to listen to them... If it’s a musician, it’s a musician... If it’s Picasso, it’s Picasso... If it’s an unknown, it’s an unknown... If...</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I’m also now appreciating what must have been the drama of certain directors like Keaton – who fell – like Chaplin – who took time falling – like others who picked themselves up, when talkies appeared. At that time, cinema was a major and authentic popular art. That’s my idea and I’m preparing a history of cinema in collaboration with channel 4, in France, where we’ll try to show that, in fact, cinema, with all the cultural forces it put into play, was unique. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Painting never knew this. Goya was seen by few people. Beethoven was not heard much. There wasn’t like today with technology, 60,000 people who listened to Beethoven every morning. Those things were made for princes. Cinema, however, was immediately seen by 100 people at the Grand Café. And then it was a phenomenon of inflation. It met with a true popular anchorage: whether it was intentional or not, whether it was for reasons of money or not. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Birth of a Nation</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> was made for money reasons, to make some dough, even if Griffith had other reasons, and ultimately the reasons were shared democratically. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Talking cinema – speech – appeared at a time of unemployment in the US during which Roosevelt took power and during this time, in Germany, Hitler was beginning to take hold of power as well, meaning of speech. But it wasn’t about the true speech of philosophers, or even of lovers’ words of love. It was the speech of people in power; speech that today has been installed through technology, in television. As a result, there are no more images today and we don’t read anymore.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Jean-Pierre Gorin, during the time I was working with him, told me: “We don’t see films anymore, we read them.” And it’s for this reason that round tables where people – sincere and intelligent as they are – talk, aren’t very interesting. They talk without the object. It’s like parents talking about the happiness of their children without trying to see with them if they prefer a bike, candy or a bank account... How can they pretend to understand?</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I, who was interested in new technologies before they had a certain order, a certain discipline, I noticed that video, which means “I see,” took hold of speech with the complicity of the crowd of people who desire, precisely, to not see. “What makes it so that in the world, American films are enjoyable?” The question has been asked, I ask it myself, because there must be something true in it. Didn’t an average American film, let’s say the remake of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">A bout de souffle</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, tour the world? It was bought everywhere. The people who made it live properly. They have cars, television sets, two bathrooms. It made them money. My films don’t tour the world. I have a big problem reaching people at the right moment. Americans know how to touch the public at four in the afternoon or eight in the evening, on television or with videotapes on which nothing is seen, moreover. That’s a huge force.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">A Swedish film doesn’t tour the world either. One from time to time. It’s the same for a Japanese film. As for African films, from North Africa or South Africa, it’s not even worth talking about. People don’t want to see them.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">What do we have to recognize in Americans that allows them, like Greek gods in the past, to have the right to accomplish things that men who live on the earth normally don’t have?</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">What I regret most is that Americans benefit from their situation by dominating instead of allowing a bit of freedom. When I meet a taxi driver who knows my name a little, who tells me: “I didn’t like your last film too much,” I respond: “I don’t like the way you drive too much.” This could be the same thing. It’s just an example. Which doesn’t stop there from being a deep mystery. Which is not ready to be cleared up. Of course, Americans are the last ones who want it to be. Is it a story about dollars?... What makes it so that we trust more in the dollar than in the Italian lira?</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Based on the photography in </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Prénom Carmen</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, you still use very few lights. Nevertheless your palette seems to have been considerably enriched.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I’m happy. It’s time to talk about technology. Like all children, I began in primary school with primary colors, with everything that is primary. I filmed idiots, or people that were called idiots, who, however, for me, were not idiots. Now, I feel like I’m entering, and it’s normal at fifty, into secondary school.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">For me, the camera is not a gun, it is not something you fire. It’s an instrument that receives, thanks to light. It is for this reason that in the opening credits, equally, you will see that the film’s photography is signed by three people. Me, who said “we’re filming this,” Coutard next who still manages today, when he hadn’t shot too much of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">SAS</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> before, to accept – while all the other cameramen refuse – working without lights, while still thinking what he’s doing is interesting. He accepts thinking that light filtering through a curtain is not the same as light entering through a door. He tries thinking about this and we see together if we reconstitute it or not. Finally, the third character, who has always been a friend, Kodak. I prefer it to Fuji, and for once I put it in the credits. Which doesn’t prevent me from thinking that the Japanese are right to shoot on Fuji. Besides, it’s time that Africa invented its colors because in television and cinema the white or grey level is done but it is in relation to white skin, never in relation to the somewhat muted skin of the Japanese, somewhat yellow of Eskimos or black of black people.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Black and white are the most delicate colors. Here, we tried mixing them. But it’s still a problem for labs who are obsessed with the television-image. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">As I was telling you, there is lighting, very little, but there is no light. That’s what scared Adjani. Like all stars, she thinks that lots of lighting, lots of spotlights assures a better rendering of her beauty. She didn’t manage to see that daylight, corrected a little – because now I correct it, I don’t accept it raw – could also ensure her beauty.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">In </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Prénom Carmen</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, we tried constantly to mix the light in the shots, artificial light and daylight. We tried to have on the right what we see at the end, so yellowish light, candlelight, like in church, and on the left, daylight, so bluish light. All that in order to obtain a constant mixture of hot and cold corresponding to the film’s climate. In sum, we have a super classical film. We rediscover constantly in the photography, the hot and cold that Carmen expresses in her emotions. From this point of view, it was relatively polished. </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">What is a producer for Jean-Luc Godard?</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">A producer like myself...</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Listening to you talk about television, one might think that cinema has entered a twilight phase</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">No, not at all. When we say this called the dawn, it isn’t necessary to make us say that this is called dusk. Basically, I have in mind a notion of dusk. But aren’t the most beautiful walks often taken at nightfall when there’s hope for tomorrow? Lovers rarely walk hand in hand at seven in the morning. In general, they wait for seven in the evening. To my eyes, dusk carries hope rather than despair. I’m beginning to find something beautiful and very human in films that gives me the desire to make them until my death. And I think that I will probably die at the same time as cinema, such as it invented itself.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Cinema is neither painting, music or dance. It’s something that has to do with the reproduction of men and women’s movements. It can no longer last the way it was invented. Already television is has something else to do. The existence of cinema cannot exceed, more or less, the length of a human life: between eighty and hundred and twenty years. It’s something that will have been fleeting, ephemeral. </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Now, we don’t see films anymore. We stock them on videotapes. But the more we buy tapes, the less time we have to watch them. We stock up more than we can eat. That’s not a film. It’s ephemeral. It lasted, moments. And I who lived through this period completely, whose parents knew the beginning, I’m going to extend your remark by saying: “It’s terrible, but what are we going to become?”</span></span><br />
<br />
<i><span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Originally published in <i>Cinématographe</i>, no. 95, December 1983.</span></span></i>Ted Fendthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14756460782437417166noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5626280700491758620.post-46200274877969131052014-09-28T20:45:00.000-07:002014-11-01T18:24:08.049-07:00<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 15x;">"And even then King did not think of his work as complete. In 1921 he personally toured <u>Tol'able David</u>, presenting the film in different parts of the country. In 1936 King devoted time to marketing <u>The Country Doctor</u>, taking it to exchanges across the country and to studio-arranged meetings with key exhibitors. When Zanuck wondered why he was doing this, King replied that it was all part of the service. Zanuck was so impressed that he raised his salary $25,000 a year--at a time when a single-engine private plane cost $9,000.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;">For King such work was play. And play it is if one recalls that in English and German, to play is to imitate an action, and thus games and drama may be linked as an imitation of life. King worked a 12-hour day, was on set at 7:00 a.m., rarely sat down, and delighted in his vocation. He never tired of the constant challenge:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;"><i>To make a picture, you work for months preparing a story, going into business, getting a crew, getting a staff, getting sets built, doing research. You complete the picture--you edit it--you preview it--you're out of business. Now you start over and go into an entirely new business. You have only the experience and judgement gained from past performances. You can't use anything... from this past picture. You can't use the same technique or anything else because it doesn't fit--like trying to wear another man's clothes</i>."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;">Walter Coppedge, <i>Henry King's America</i>, 1986</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small;"><br /></span>Ted Fendthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14756460782437417166noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5626280700491758620.post-82305092921834357352014-09-19T23:07:00.002-07:002014-09-19T23:07:59.585-07:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />Ted Fendthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14756460782437417166noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5626280700491758620.post-26225492823711597942014-09-12T21:39:00.002-07:002014-09-12T21:39:44.490-07:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />Ted Fendthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14756460782437417166noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5626280700491758620.post-91816563265768524882014-09-08T21:16:00.000-07:002014-09-08T21:16:01.368-07:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />Ted Fendthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14756460782437417166noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5626280700491758620.post-46220287399120106602014-08-14T21:44:00.001-07:002014-08-15T09:01:07.002-07:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: small;">Along with this I still have this
absurdity of being foreign, noble, an orphan,</span><span style="font-size: small;"> of living in a castle lost in the
countryside, and I am in the hands of a great, hypochondriac lord who looks
like Chateaubriand’s father.<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"> What do you want me
to do about it? Did I choose this place? I hate it.</span></span></div>
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<i>Dialogue d'ombres</i></div>
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(Jean-Marie Straub, Danièle Huillet, 1954-2013)</div>
Ted Fendthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14756460782437417166noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5626280700491758620.post-1101811356904091762014-08-13T09:09:00.002-07:002014-08-13T09:11:53.261-07:00Death in the Garden (Luis Buñuel, 1956)<div dir="ltr" id="docs-internal-guid-d0bd9686-c806-d82f-1460-354e7a986244" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The Number Two </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">by Luc Moullet</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I can see what first attracted Buñuel’s attention in [José-André] Lacour’s novel: a “non-conformist” tone pushed to madness. “He was undoubtedly encouraged by a certain hunger to destroy, to destroy for nothing, for the insult that it throws in the face of things, and less so by a penchant to create and to love that had no outlet other than in a certain pain inflicted on beings and things and by which, surely without him realizing it, he again became the accomplice, the neighbor, the brother of things and beings…” (readers will appreciate this). There are also the points against governments and societies, against religion and the clergy and, finally, this association of men brought together by chance and who, enemies in the past, rediscover in the heart of nature the meaning of human solidarity, the ideal of all atheism-based thought.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Buñuel’s metaphysics is a metaphysics of ambiguity and complexity, but this complexity finds the ideal material of its expression in what is most opposed to it – the satisfied certainty of the bourgeois, of the clergy (</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Susana</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">El</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The Criminal Life of Archibald de la Cruz</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">) or of anarcho-atheists (</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">L’âge d’or</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">That is the Dawn</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Death in the Garden</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">). The betrayal of the words of the novel is accompanied by a betrayal of the spirit, meaning by a “de-mythification.” The values preached in the book are demolished here. They are the reflection of a certain impartiality before events and the goal of Buñuel’s work is the search for a greater truth, of an absolute that, once attained, consequently finds itself destroyed. An event never has a meaning that the human mind can conceive: </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">El</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> is the living confirmation of this, there is not a single scene in the film whose importance we can specify without being mistaken and, if we formulate an opinion, the following fact will undoubtedly contradict it. In Buñuel’s films, the truth is the juxtaposition of an opinion and its opposite, an action and its opposite, a thought and its opposite, an attitude and its opposite. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Death in the Garden</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> is in the same vein: there is no social critique here, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">criticism is impossible</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> in this work where each shot orders us: “Do not judge because you don’t have the possibility or the right;” the governors of Cuchazo are both dictators and weaklings, murderers and cowards, but are they not right to forbid all private prospecting? Nationalized prospecting would make the natives wealthy – more admirable than these upstarts who have no other ambition than filling their pockets before going back home. There's a stunning scene when the machine gun platoon charges the inoffensive mass of cowardly workers and moves out of the way to let its most dangerous enemy, Chark, pass by! Castin, this mediocre fellow, in love with a prostitute, spending all his time in church, is no less complex than his companions, Djin and Tito Jonco, amateur double dealers; as for Padre Fernandez, his character evokes not so much Breton, Sade, Artaud or Claudel as Bernanos. The Spaniard who spent ten years of his life with the Jesuits is deeply attentive to religion but he does not allow for the idea of Providence. Every time our priest sets to predicting the future or giving his word, he finds himself contradicted by the facts. But Buñuel has particular fun showing us the incompatibility between the divine and the human. The first duty of a Christian is to help his fellow humans and save them from death; as no plant in the jungle can burn, the priest resolves to tear some pages from his missal, though his first duty as a priest is to respect the Holy Book. The boa constrictor having been devoured by ants, he calmly puts the torn pages back in their place. But he gives the chalice to those who are thirsty. The Padre seems to act like every good Christian should but his behavior puts him at odds with the theory he professes. Take the scene where he tries convincing Castin to give himself up to the police. Castin responds: “It’s an innocent man who’d give himself up.” A few minutes later, he is forced to make the villagers who have broken into Djin’s house believe that he was the one who needed the prostitute’s care. “He’ll understand what it means to be innocent and to pretend to be guilty,” lets out Djin. As for the old myth about human solidarity far from the social world, it appears even more ambiguous: Castin, Djin, Maria, Chark and the Padre are only brought together because their union is their only chance for survival. That’s no joke – the final massacre and the dissensions after the plane’s discovery are proof of it. But why does Chark backtrack to bring food to his famished companions? He could have left them forever without it costing him anything.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The unusual is only a subtle form of ambiguity, both are extensions of the same origin, the components of Buñuel’s universe: man cannot know the truth because it is always beyond his grasp. Ambiguity, duality as well as the unusual, and the extraordinary are by definition what we feel without managing to explain them. Surrealism only added to the bourgeois and Jesuit influences that marked Buñuel’s early years, drawing his attention to things of this world that go beyond the limits of what is rational, to the point that he was forced to conclude that there are no others. This aesthete’s attitude becomes in Buñuel work – and in his work alone – a vision of the world, adapted in every way to the reality that justifies it: </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Land Without Bread</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> is the most typical example of this surrealist neo-realism. Love of the bizarre is not an aesthetic attitude but the natural way of acting with a knowledge of the world and a generous appreciation of what it contains. “I find that there is no better means of expression than cinema to show us a reality that touches us directly everyday.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">There is nothing cheerful or flattering about this universe. But the pessimism is not arbitrary, Buñuel likes his neighbors, like every major filmmaker: his bitterness is linked to his complete impartiality which forces him to accept a tragic idea of the world. To François Truffaut who, very correctly, said to him, “You like to disturb to the point that we could almost tell you that you do films the way Gide does novels: to unsettle,” he responds: “I force myself to do nothing disgraceful or reassuring. We must not make people think that everything is for the best in the best of worlds. We don’t have to break everything and make subversive films but I would like </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Bread, Love and Dreams</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> better with a few less dreams and bit less optimism.” Buñuel’s temperament is marked by a fundamental honesty. He recognizes the authority of the material edifice over man’s soul but, rather than delighting in it, he lets out a cry of pain. Isn’t the rooster at the end of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The Brute</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> the living symbol of a universe that is foreign to us? The animal theme that we find again in </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The Brute</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> as well as in </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Death in the Garden</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> (the stunning fauna in the jungle, the boa constrictor, the cat, the plane, etc.) and all the other Mexican and French films is charged with a terrible meaning. The animal – a soulless being that strolls through events and things of the universe without understanding anything – singularly recalls the contradictions of our own existence. A pessimist, for sure, but Buñuel is not just that: the danger is wanting to ignore our own insufficiency, palliating it with a comfortable theory, the work of the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">intellect</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, on which we can rest easy; faced with this hypocrisy, he proposes the recognition of our own state and bases our grandeur on our weakness; we must know how to live our lives and construct them on </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">perceptible</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> facts. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Originally published as <i>Le chiffre deux</i> in <i>Cahiers du cinéma</i>, no. 56, November 1956 </span></div>
Ted Fendthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14756460782437417166noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5626280700491758620.post-5250949852904611982014-07-01T21:12:00.000-07:002014-07-01T21:12:04.540-07:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Life Hesitates at 40</i> (Charley Chase, 1935)</div>
Ted Fendthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14756460782437417166noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5626280700491758620.post-54370383559583112272014-06-26T18:31:00.000-07:002014-06-26T18:32:04.666-07:00<i>I wanted to shoot in a city that I knew, where I'd lived. I don't entirely agree when people say: you have to see a city with the eyes of someone who is arriving for the first time. Instead, you have to see it with the eyes of someone who leaves his house everyday and impose that on the audience from the start. This is found in the films I love. It's a bit to illustrate and defend this cinema that I loved that I took this stance. Even if it takes an hour to adjust, a city must be shown in a certain way. Aside from people from Narbonne, everyone must be surprised. </i><br />
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– Jean Eustache on <i>Le Père Noël a les yeux bleus</i> Ted Fendthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14756460782437417166noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5626280700491758620.post-63418408420873033292014-02-10T21:18:00.002-08:002014-11-01T08:59:04.485-07:00Secret Défense (Rivette, 1997)Secret Défense: Small Trafficking in Death<br />
Claire Vassé<br />
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After a foray into musical comedy, with the intersecting adventures of three Parisian girls in <i>Haut, bas, fragile</i>, Jacques Rivette now guides Sandrine Bonnaire between the countryside and Paris, but a Paris that is distinctly less playful, closer to the Paris of <i>Paris nous appartient</i>. Without a single note of music – aside from the credits – or dancing, <i>Secret Défense</i> is a film in which the weight and movements of the bodies are all the more realistic for constituting an essential part of the film. For the most beautiful scenes are perhaps the trips on the subway (one of which is filmed in real time) and train that allow Rivette to prove once again that he is the master of prolonging time. This is not to say he is a filmmaker of time: Rivette is above all a director of space, and this latest film affirms so, ostensibly in a somewhat diversionary manner, but ultimately quite neatly.<br />
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If the essence of Rivette’s cinema is not time, it is, first, because the films lack a notion of irreversibility that alone affords time its true substance, permeated by tragedy and death. The director of <i>Céline et Julie vont en bateau </i>prefers to shift back and forth between dreams and reality, envisaging life as a vast, endlessly restarting Game of the Goose, like so many mysteries whose resolution remains suspended. Just as Ida in <i>Haut, bas, fragile</i>, is running away from her rediscovered origins, Rivette is running away from the how and why, preferring to suspend time than to complete it with a conclusion that would herald death – or at least give a foretaste of it.<br />
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Curiously, though, <i>Secret Défense </i>defies these characteristics, ending instead in the most definitive manner possible: the death of Sylvie (Sandrine Bonnaire), the mystery having been cleared up. “Paris bores me,” the character of Walser (Jerzy Radziwilowicz) says at one point; and these words could be understood as a direct echo of the filmmaker’s first feature, a kind of confession of weariness from someone who has always wanted to understand the world as an immense game in order to preserve its inconsistency and labyrinthine mysteries. But this may be jumping the gun: if Rivette’s latest film appears to be more linear and more conclusive, it is not without a spirit of twists and turns that strives to deviate from the path, the better to make it go in circles.<br />
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The first diversion requires the application of the film’s own mise en scène to resolve the mystery: a story about body trafficking, that of Sylvie’s sister, Elisabeth, whom her father sold to satisfy sordid professional ambitions. And the traffic of bodies is Rivette’s main business more than ever. Rivette is just as happy contriving their intersections and reappearances in his giant, playful race, as he is having them pass away, so that they can be simply and purely interchanged with one another. This is explicitly the case with Ludivine (Laure Marsac), the twin sister of Véro, who appears after the latter’s death and takes her place in the bed of her lover Walser. Trafficking bodies in a way, Rivette tries out roles, movements, behaviors and clothes on the same actress, just like Walser, the director’s alter ego, when he hides Ludivine in the shadows so that he can better orchestrate the surprise of Sylvie discovering her; and so that he can better test her nerves, a matter of experimenting how the surprise will affect her exhausted body as it bends the tiniest bit. More metaphorically, bodies are interchanged by fulfilling tasks that were not initially their responsibility: Walser killed Sylvie’s father so that her mother did not have to,* and Sylvie tells her brother, who wants to kill Walser, “I have to do to do it in your place.” As for the film’s two murders, they also happen to concern bodies being substituted for one another: those of Véro and Sylvie, blocking Walser’s body, the only one actually being targeted.<br />
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<i>Secret Défense</i> sticks clearly to its refusal to represent the past, leaving all tangible signs of other temporal layers to the background: photos and the children of the servant Marthe, the symbol of a new generation, that we only glimpse. The film takes place, moreover, over seven days, ending on the day it begins, closing the loop clearly as it ends on the murder of Sylvie by Ludivine, the twin sister of Véro who was killed a few days earlier by Sylvie. In a sense, Rivette is inviting us to a circling dance of death, but one that is in a certain way contested, the murdered body rising to the surface to take revenge on the murderer.<br />
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“Rising to the surface” is in fact the major subject of the film, which continually reduces questions of time and death to questions of spatial configuration, as in the case of Véro’s murder. The only difficulty it seems to cause Walser is that the body, which he gets rid of by throwing it into a river, does not “rise to the surface.” The time of the dead, then, is fixed to a space. In this regard, the real-time filming of a scene of travel that is actually about retracing one’s steps is emblematic, as if time could have little sway over a space that eschews time altogether by moving in an endless circle. The association of space with time in order to counter the influence of the latter is, moreover, the most significant maneuver <i>Secret Défense</i> makes to counter the march of time – or rather, to counter the figure of death. When Sylvie finds herself at risk of falling into the depths of the past by looking at a painting of a Middle Ages landscape, she is rudely brought to her senses by the surrounding space, which is made apparent by the noise of her brother Paul’s motorcycle arriving at the estate. And the past relative to Elisabeth is also put into relation with the space since, above all, it is initially her bedroom that Sylvie mentions to start the conversation about her with Marthe. As for Ludivine, she does not want “to follow the same path as her sister,” that is, by dying. Here again, death is expressed in terms of space, which is, in a way, a compensatory equivalent to the time that is slipping away. “I drove fast to catch the lost time,” Walser explains to Sylvie when he tells her about the circumstances of her father’s murder. As though this spatialization of time was a way of circumscribing death in a territory, of containing it within limits. <br />
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If death is present in <i>Secret Défense</i>, it is, curiously, because it is missing, placed at the center of the film only then to be constantly denied by Rivette. This incapacity to stage death gives way, moreover, to one of the most beautiful moments in the film: Sylvie and Ludivine are in the estate’s garden, and Sylvie wants to confess to her that her sister is dead. Very quickly, the scene turns into a confrontation, Ludivine reproaching Sylvie for “her superior airs” of someone who knows more than the others. Of course Sylvie knows more than she is saying but, in Rivette’s universe, death is not spoken, its experience is not communicated. Nobody is qualified to talk about it, not even Rivette, whose complex relationship to aging is expressed by Sylvie's nightmare, imagining that she meets her sister fifteen years after her death, and that her sister hasn’t aged but nevertheless is still the oldest. Despite her position as the oldest, she agrees to play with Sylvie, who ends up suddenly noticing that she is alone, then wakes up. This way of wanting to deny time – or at least of distorting it to try to reduce its fatal effects – is what is at play in <i>Secret Défense</i>.<br />
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Rivette’s mise en scène is euphemistic. It makes death a simple desertion of space and not of time. Paradoxically, the weight of death only gains more importance because there is a downside: a simple absence carries the seed of the eventuality of death. The sound work bears witness to this underlying anguish about spatial separation: voices on the phone are in no way muted—a way of attenuating distance, or in fact, of refusing it altogether. But death only becomes more haunting. These voices that echo with such abnormal loudness are voices coming from nowhere, voices of ghosts that float, like Sylvie’s body, which refuses to give way to the desire of her lover Jules to “finally have a moment together.”<br />
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As if by a boomerang effect, the death that one wants to push off into space ends up invading the entire film. Rivette is not a filmmaker of time, he does not film “death at work,” but bodies and spaces that traffic in death and lead the spectator on a wandering journey that is both fascinating and enchanting.<br />
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*The dialogue between Sylvie and her mother Geneviève is explicit in this regard. When Sylvie asks her why Walser killed her father, Geneviève responds: “For me.” To which Sylvie replies: “You mean: in your place.”<br />
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Originally published in <i>Positif</i>, no. 446, April 1998<br />
Translation by Ted Fendt<br />
<br />Ted Fendthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14756460782437417166noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5626280700491758620.post-71902397634440027162013-12-04T22:24:00.001-08:002013-12-04T22:24:57.755-08:00Corps à coeur (Vecchiali)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />Ted Fendthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14756460782437417166noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5626280700491758620.post-10376147345816176552013-11-29T07:16:00.001-08:002013-11-29T07:16:58.321-08:00Predator or A-ViolenceA new translation, published on The Vulgar Cinema blog, of <a href="http://thevulgarcinema.blogspot.com/2013/11/predator-or-violence.html" target="_blank">Martin Barnier's piece on John McTiernan's <i>Predator</i></a>. The first in a series of translations from the 1996 action cinema issue of French journal Admiranda/Restricted.<br />
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<br />Ted Fendthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14756460782437417166noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5626280700491758620.post-7535995182961630272013-09-30T22:16:00.000-07:002013-10-01T08:39:49.489-07:00Renoir: The Grandeur of PrimitivesThe Grandeur of Primitives<br />
by Jean Renoir<br />
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I often admire recent films but it's an admiration within reason. I rarely lose it and I remain sensible. I think: "My God, what a beautiful photographic effect…;" "That actor's performance is great…," "This dialogue is perfect…," "Great direction…," etc., and I bore myself to death.<br />
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Every art that isn't purely individual goes through this. They are only great—really great—in their primitive state… Low-warp tapestry is fascinating; Beauvais' and Gobelins' are, of course, amazing, but good for official receptions. Ceramics from Urbino are adorable and, with just one of those little, awkward vases on your table, you enrich your life. Look at what the art of ceramics became with Sèvres and Meissen. I can watch a film by Méliès, a Griffith, an early Tourneur or a Max Linder ten times in a row. I can only endure a screening of our latest masterpieces once. <br />
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For as long as they've existed, men have confused art with the imitation of reality. In primitive periods, either the limitations of the technical means or certain religious rules created by well-advised prophets prevent artists from following this bad tendency. In our time, that of so-called progress, no more limitations, no more rules; and we are witnessing a kind of debauchery. Individual artists—painters, writers, sculptures, musicians—can still pull through. Nothing prevents them from taking in nature as they understand it and rendering it for us in the most unexpected forms. But to make a film, tons of people are put together, and even if one of them vaguely has the idea that one of the characteristics of art is to be artificial, even if this person manages to communicate this point of view to his co-workers, the odious voice of reason quickly makes itself heard. By "reason," I mean the need to make a commercial work and to not shock audiences who are supposedly connoisseurs of that famous "reality." They are, anyway, and how could they not be after twenty-five years of the idiotic perfection of photographic reproduction? Out of this come today's ideals. An actor becomes a star because he looks like lots of people we see in the street. This way, it is believed, people will be happy to see themselves on screen, with just a few, minor improvements: better fitting costumes, smoother skin, and no hairs in their nose. From time to time, a film director looks innovative by keeping the nose hair or by showing a young beginner with rotten teeth. For my part, if I'm shown, in a movie, the same people I can meet at a cafe, I don't see why I wouldn't go to the cafe instead of the movie. It's more comfortable and I can drink there.<br />
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Those who came before us were really lucky: orthochromatic film that didn't allow for any nuance and forced the most timid cameramen to accept violent contrasts; no sound, which forced the least imaginative actors and the must pedestrian directors to use involuntarily simplified means of expression.<br />
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Happy were the Etruscan potters who, for decorating their vases, only knew two colors.<br />
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Happy was Queen Matilda who, for Bayeux's masterpiece, ignored the perfected craft of high-warp tapestry and aniline dye.<br />
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Happy were the filmmakers who still believed themselves to be carnies. But the golden age is over. And we must either become "true auteurs" in the classical sense of the word, with all the responsibilities it entails, or let the already wavering flame of our marvelous magic lantern die.<br />
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Originally published in <i>Ciné-Club</i>, no. 7, May 1948<br />
Re-published in <i>Jean Renoir: écrits 1926-1971</i><br />
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<br />Ted Fendthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14756460782437417166noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5626280700491758620.post-30451095517523531412013-09-16T15:49:00.003-07:002013-09-16T15:50:54.316-07:00LOLA 4There's a new issue of <a href="http://lolajournal.com/4/index.html" target="_blank">LOLA</a> with several articles on Brian De Palma including my translation of Alain Bergala's piece on <i>Obsession</i>: <i><a href="http://lolajournal.com/4/time.html" target="_blank">Time Denied: An Apotheosis of the Imaginary</a></i>. Check it out.Ted Fendthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14756460782437417166noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5626280700491758620.post-15360407250702745642013-07-15T14:38:00.002-07:002013-07-15T15:42:19.359-07:00Carpenter/Wellman<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;">Positif: We've noticed an evolution in your work. At the time of </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;"><i>Halloween</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;">, you didn't let yourself express any messages. But, since </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;"><i>Escape From New York</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial;">, your films clearly reflect a stand on the world we're living in.</span><br />
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John Carpenter: I don't think I express a message. The word "position" is more appropriate. Message films, they're like <i>The Next Voice You Hear...</i>, where God talks to people on the radio! That never works, that's not my style. But themes, yeah. A theme in a film is like a theme in music. It evolves, develops and underpins the emotions. That's not a political commentary. It's more of a poetic thread.</div>
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-<i>Positif</i>, no. 409, 1995</div>
Ted Fendthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14756460782437417166noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5626280700491758620.post-52054211773839002832013-07-13T07:08:00.000-07:002014-11-01T09:01:30.734-07:00<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.15; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mack Sennett: Liberator of Cinema </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16px; line-height: 1.15; white-space: pre-wrap;">Robert Desnos</span><br />
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<b id="docs-internal-guid-3d759643-d4bc-d9b9-1be8-8ef86281ef48" style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span></b>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Admiral Dumont d’Urville, the same person who discovered the Venus de Milo, met death in the first railway accident.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Marquis de Sade, imprisoned in the Bastille, having made a megaphone out of a gutter, stirred up the crowd at the beginning of July by announcing that prisoners were being massacred. On July 4th, he was transferred to Charenton; on July 14th, the Bastille was taken. He died in 1814, having spent almost all his life in prison.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Trelawney, who was lieutenant of De Ruyter’s privateer, lit with his own hand the log that consumed Shelley’s corpse. He was witness to Byron’s last days, married two daughters of barbarous kings, was the first to swim across the Niagara and Missouri and, at the age of 90, died in England in a calm rose garden.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">All exemplary lives participate in this tragic slapstick, this lyrical humor, to the point that comedy is, definitively, only the most disconcerting form of lyricism.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Enemies of all poetry are not mistaken, in cinema as well.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The average critic, in general, listened to and respected, has only contempt for slapstick films and this qualifier is an insult from his pen. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This is why it is appropriate to place very high, on the same plane as Charlie Chaplin, this creator of lyrical and sensual slapstick: Mack Sennett.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Bathing beauties running along sandy beaches, lost sirens, tender lovers, mad inventions—he introduced a new element in cinema that is neither comedy nor tragedy but, to be precise, the most elevated form of cinema, on the plane of ethics, love, poetry and freedom.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The madness presiding over his scripts, we well know, is that of fairy tales and of those dreamers who the world despises and to whom the world owes the delights of life.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Without him, what would have become of Fatty Arbuckle (so admirable, moreover, and so unjustly forgotten, the incarnation of ferocity and hopelessness), Buster Keaton, Larry Semon or Al St. John?</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The importance of the Mack Sennett Comedies in the evolution of cinema is immense. But must we not once again suspect American hypocrisy for having hindered his free development?</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It is again Mack Sennett’s stunning influence that gives Harry Langdon—recently arriving on French screens—that inexpressible charm that, via a different route than Chaplin, knows how to deeply move us: Fatty Arbuckle, Larry Semon, Al St. John, Harry Langdon, as much as they remain poets, easily obtain an elevated ethics of life and passions, image and imagination powerfully serving their designs. As soon as they want to evolve on a purely moral plane, they are overburdened by psychology, which is the peak of horror. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">While, in the suspended world in which he lives, Mack Sennett presides over the sensational encounter of love and sensuality, fairies—those inseparable sisters of both poetry and freedom, dead and deeply buried under twenty centuries of Christianity in the crypts of churches—are reborn and appear with their true faces and their pompous costumes. And we recognize seductive modern women, enigmatic smiles that delight us, eyes that make our own droop and, above all, love—our love—tormented by dreams, freedom, revolt and fear.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: small; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Originally published in</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: small; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Le Soir</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, April 15, 1927</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: small; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Reprinted in Robert Desnos, </span><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: small; font-style: italic; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Les Rayons et les ombres: cinema</span><span style="font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16px; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-size: small;"> (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1992), 97-99. </span> </span>Ted Fendthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14756460782437417166noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5626280700491758620.post-70266647124674809602013-06-30T08:24:00.001-07:002013-06-30T08:24:43.960-07:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Hallelujah!</i></div>
Ted Fendthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14756460782437417166noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5626280700491758620.post-12348878251635506022013-06-10T20:59:00.002-07:002013-06-10T20:59:33.295-07:00Allan Dwan: A DossierA new dossier on Allan Dwan, edited by Gina Telaroli and David Phelps, was published last week. Currently available for free download <a href="http://elumiere.net/especiales/dwan/indexdwan.php" target="_blank">here</a> is the original language version with essays in English, French, Spanish and Portuguese by the likes of Dave Kehr, Bill Krohn, Zach Campbell, Gina Telaroli, David Phelps, Daniel Kasman, Marie-Pierre Duhmal, Serge Bozon, Andy Rector, Mathieu Macheret, Carlos Losilla and many more.<br />
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An all English language version will be published soon with a number of my translations in it.<br />
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Don't know who Allan Dwan is? Here's an obituary for him written by Serge Daney. For more information check out the dossier and if you're in New York right now go see Dwan's films at MoMA.<br />
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<b>DEATH OF THE WORLD'S OLDEST FILMMAKER: ALLAN DWAN (1885-1981)</b><br />
<b>Serge Daney</b><br />
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<b id="docs-internal-guid-7627c407-3162-86ec-d20b-1331f0d74821" style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Joseph Aloysius Dwan died last Monday. Hollywood’s “conscience,” people called him. Then its remorse. Then the oldest of the dinosaurs. But also an important, secret and underknown filmmaker.</span></b></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Who’s been able to see 2% of his films?” a film historian asked one day. Not I. Nor he. Or anyone. If it existed, Allan Dwan’s complete filmography would take up an entire page in </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Libération</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, typos included. At least. Born in 1885 in Toronto, Canada, and under the dynamic sign of Aries, Dwan encountered cinema in 1909 and never gave it up: it’s cinema that gave him up in 1961 (his last film, unreleased in France like so many others: </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Most Dangerous Man Alive</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">). Then he lived for twenty more years. I don’t believe he complained or that he lost his cold blood. That wasn’t his way of doing things. His way was to film several hundred films (how many hundreds is the mystery: between 1911 and 1913 alone, more than two hundred one-reelers). At first he was known and respected, marginalized little by little and then entirely forgotten, believed dead, and became (like Gance) a kind of dinosaur.</span></div>
<br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">He knew it all: bounding cape and sword films, early silents, personal westerns, comedies, opera films, historical vignettes, island adventures, everything. All kinds of monsters paraded before his camera. To begin with, the saints. Eight films with Douglas Fairbanks (including </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Robin Hood</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> in 1922 and the ambitious </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Iron Mask</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> in 1929). Eight films with Gloria Swanson (including </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Stage Struck</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, in 1925, and </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What a Widow!</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, 1930). And then child stars (Shirley Temple, already seasoned in </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, 1938), slapstick stars (the Ritz Brothers, hacks who tried to rival the Marx Brothers: </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Three Musketeers</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Gorilla</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> in 1939), rising celebrities (Wayne in </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sands of Iwo Jima</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, a great war film, 1949), and dimming stars (Ray Milland in </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Enchanted Island</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, 1958). And, lastly, poor B movie stars (Reagan, of course, as an idealist fool, and especially the unforgettable bad guy John Payne, not to mention the more intoxicating Rhonda Fleming), including the ugliest of them (I remember, and still shiver at, the terrifying Vera Ralston, imposed by the producers of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Surrender </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">(1950), a beautiful film nonetheless). In short, he practiced his </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">metier</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. He practiced it like everyone of his generation. He encountered the cinema unintentionally and never left it (this has changed a lot). He was a math and physics teacher, a mechanical engineer, and coached a football team. Then came California. Four names help map out this unmappable career: Griffith (who he met in 1911), Fairbanks, with whom he teamed up, Swanson, for whom he was at one time </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">the </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">director, and last but not least, Benedict Bogeaus. He’s the least known. But without this independent producer, Dwan would undoubtedly not have signed, between 1954 and 1961, his most beautiful films, the rare ones that we know a little and that we remember the most vividly. Those who recently saw or saw again </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Tennessee’s Partner</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Slightly Scarlet</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> on TV know that I’m not making anything up. May everyone else demand that one of these amazing films be rebroadcast.</span></div>
<br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Dwan had a strange trajectory. He descended down all the ranks of Hollywood society, from Triangle and Fox to Republic, without ever stopping, all in all, to make good films. Without ceasing to be himself when he directed Fairbanks, but he is even more himself when, forty years later, freed from the star system and Hollywood mythology, he directs the great John Payne. Something within him resisted everything, was in no way eroded. </span></div>
<br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Dwan had one motto: it’s the story that counts. He divides films into two types: on the hand, those where the star counts (so the story must be adapted to the star) and those where the story counts (so it has to be told, its pace followed, it must be respected). The small 1% of Dwan’s opus that we’ve seen authorizes us to say this: Dwan is never more alive, precise and surprising than when he is telling a story.</span></div>
<br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Take the Bogeaus period, no doubt his best. For several years, there is a common tone, favorite actors, the work of a major photographer (John Alton), and stories that have a familial air about them. It’s the period of the personal westerns. We understand that this filmmaker who often filmed violence, doesn’t really believe in it, in violence. He always considers it a madness or a misunderstanding, always a thing outside of the character. What he loves is a situation that becomes violent because there are words to not say, friends to not expose, secrets to not reveal. </span></div>
<br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">For Dwan, a story is always about a secret. About friendship as a secret. The friendship of one man for another, of a woman for another (the two redheads), the friendship of a man for what surrounds him, for the landscape in which he is plunged. Casualness is rather exceptional in American films. Dwan’s heros want to live on good terms with the world. They ask for nothing more, but in this respect they will be intolerable, obsessed by the lynching in the very beautiful </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Silver Lode</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (1954).</span></div>
<br /><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A hypothesis: it is this talent for protecting his characters that Dwan was able to maintain all throughout his long career. To do this, he never forgot Griffith’s lesson (he worked on </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Intolerance</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">). His direction is at once archaic and refined. He brings his characters into the landscape of his shots, without any decorative showiness. He takes them out and reinserts them. He remained faithful to the silent era—perhaps why he was unable to follow the cinema in its modern turns (modern cinema loves indiscretion, Dwan does not). This is also why rarely in his films is a landscape just a landscape. Neither an idea or a set, but the familiar and indifferent presence of the surroundings. The place where the characters return when they’ve managed to free themselves (the word is Goimard’s, the historian I cited at the beginning of this article) from everything that exposed their freedom.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Cambria; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
</b>Ted Fendthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14756460782437417166noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5626280700491758620.post-74627137699294404562012-12-31T14:49:00.001-08:002014-11-01T09:02:08.074-07:00<span id="internal-source-marker_0.8403254506535079" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><i>Two responses from filmmakers to a questionnaire from the January 2000 issue of </i>Cahiers du cinéma. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span id="internal-source-marker_0.8403254506535079" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">1. In your opinion, what are the major events — films, filmmakers, actors, images, techniques, etc. — that have marked the 1990s?</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">2. How did your filmmaking evolve over the course of the decade and how do you see it evolving in the next one?</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Pedro Costa</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">1, 2.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The death of Antonio Reis.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">My four films, between 1989 and 1999.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Less and less money for making them.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">I need less to make them.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">JLG’s </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Nouvelle Vague </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">(1990) and DH, JMS’ </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Sicilia!</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Luc Moullet</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">1. A lot of events. Due to the lack of space, I’ll stick to the two main ones.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">First,
the eruption, throughout Iranian cinema, of the film within a film.
Kiarostami, Mahmalbaf and the others continue (probably without being
conscious of it) May 68 and the lesson of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Vent d’Est</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">La Concentration</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Faire la déménageuse</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Rendez-vous d’Anna</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> and </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">La Vérité sur l’imaginaire d’un inconnu</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">.
May 68 and situationism in the country of the Ayatollahs - who would
have believed it? As much as this direction (described as self-absorbed)
was criticized in the French cinema of the time, it has been accepted
without regrets in the framework of a third world cinema, presumed to be
social above all else, that has become the best cinema in the world, in
part thanks to this orientation.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The other, more recent, event is the release of Alan Rudolph’s </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Breakfast of Champions</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, from Vonnegut’s novel. It’s one of the best adaptations of literary work, a domain Americans are very strong in (</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The Magnificent Ambersons</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Greed</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The Grapes of Wrath</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The Tarnished Angels</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">A Place in the Sun</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">A Farewell to Arms</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The Group</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">),
and in which the French (except sometimes Bresson) always fail. It’s
one of the rare films where the use of video is fully integrated, giving
the film a fresh and very surprising dimension in its final part. It is
a mind-blowing vision of the New America — a commercial city off a
highway exit — where the excess of mush, dumps, and mud is becoming
vomit-inducing. The film rediscovers, through an itinerary full of
contradictions, the holocaustal value of the cinema of thirty years ago (</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Les Carabiniers</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Jeanne Dielman</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">). One also thinks of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">
It’s sometimes Fellini-esque, but without the Romagnol filmmaker’s
complaisances. It’s also the unusual avant-garde film made with every
available means and Hollywood actors.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Bruce Willis’ best film or, rather, his only film.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The full confirmation of an exemplary filmmaker, who is the only one in Hollywood that takes risks. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">2.</span><span id="internal-source-marker_0.49232851126026733" style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">
No change in method for me. Recently, I tried to do something other
than always make people laugh. Two films of a more dramatic character
(an adaptation of Henry James and </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Au champ d’honneur</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: small; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">)
have often been welcomed with scepticism and rejected by festivals that
were going easy on me. Does this mean that I’m only made for comedy? Or
did I only transgress my trademark image and throw off my fans? Which
of the two theories is correct? I’d like to know. To be safe, I decided
to stick with comedy for the next one, assuming there is a next one: I
always have the feeling that the film I’ve just done will be the last
one. In any case, I know that I must absolutely avoid big budgets, for
which I won’t find enough dough, and that I can’t go above 3 million
francs for a feature and 200,000 francs for a short.</span>Ted Fendthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14756460782437417166noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5626280700491758620.post-30606491878100620502012-12-20T07:34:00.002-08:002013-01-01T08:28:20.988-08:00Adieu au TNSMy article on Godard's <i>Adieu au TNS</i> and refutation of Richard Brody's claims regarding it, as well as a translation of the full text Godard recites in the video, is now online at Kino Slang.<br />
<br />
http://kinoslang.blogspot.com/2012/12/adieu-au-tns.htmlTed Fendthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14756460782437417166noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5626280700491758620.post-84102065458938038302012-12-12T19:57:00.000-08:002014-11-01T09:02:59.338-07:00Renoir on Bazin<style>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">A tender winter
sun yellows the old house that I see from my window. What a beautiful evening. André
Bazin would have loved it. The pale gold of the luminous rays would have made
him forget this famous “dry cold” that Musset preferred to call “a good head
cold.” </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I forget the
script I’m in the middle of writing and I think of all the time I’ve lost. Life
is spent wasting time, neglecting a good opportunity, turning one’s back on
what is useful to rush towards what is useless.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">André was part
of the very small crowd of very useful people.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Of course, he
was very busy and sick. It would have been indecent to abuse his tireless
sociability. And now, I regret not having had this indecency. I miss him all
the time. How many questions I still have to ask him, how many dark corners he
could have shed light on, how many passionate discussions that will never be
born!</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">In one of his
studies, he draws the readers’ attention to the secondary role that scholars
have played in the development of the cinematograph and insists upon all that
we owe to the visionaries, the obsessives. Reading it, I was thinking of the
“Bazins.” </span></div>
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</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">In the
simplistic language of our 20<sup>th</sup> century, we would say “artists,” in
opposition to scholars.</span>
</div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">An artist’s
mission is to precede the pack. He has to reveal hidden feelings, open the
window on landscapes that, of course, already existed, but that we poorly
discerned, hidden as they were by the fog of false traditions. The artist’s
function is to tear away some of the veils covering every reality.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I’m looking at
the last spot of sun on the roof of the old house. It reveals some stunning
grey moss to me. Some pigeons stretch their wings towards the fleeting light,
assuming positions revelatory of their pigeon spirit. The shade increases. I
get up and, standing on my toes, I can catch a last ray of the setting sun.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">I forget the old
house and the pigeons. This light has erased them from my mind.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Certain
directors of films, whose work André Bazin analyzed so scrupulously, will only
remain in man’s memory because their names will be read in his books. Their
worth is not in question. To tell the truth, it matters little to me. I’m
grateful to them for having inspired a clear poet, an artist who, by dint of
objective humility, made his work the moving expression of his generous
personality.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Originally published in<i> </i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Cahiers du cin</i></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="FR" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language: FR;">é</span></i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">ma</span></i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">, no. 91, January 1959.</span></div>
Ted Fendthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14756460782437417166noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5626280700491758620.post-67118433913186540382012-08-30T21:28:00.001-07:002014-11-01T09:04:08.309-07:00<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: small;">From Epic to
Entr’acte: How the West Was Won</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: small;">Jean-Andr</span><span lang="FR" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: small;">é</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: small;"> Fieschi</span></div>
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</div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: small;">Everything
happens as if it were a matter of the conscious destruction of realism, for the
benefit of another reality, one whose essence is purely mythological. Not the
mythology of the West, as we’re invited to believe, but that of the cinema
itself. One thinks a little of <i>The
Longest Day</i> where, like here, the face of History fades behind the faces of
the actors who incarnate it, a Grand Parade of all Hollywood. There are no more
characters, just a giant “show.” The viewer can only be the ‘conscience of the
show.’ The two seams and the roundness of the Cinerama screen inevitably
increase this feeling.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: small;">The first
programs – eye-catching documentaries where the Fitzpatrick’s aesthetic was
increased as much as possible – accommodated themselves somewhat poorly to a
particularly heretical process. To narrate a story with this all-consuming
tool, even one reduced to its simplest expression, bordered on being an impossible
challenge. You can’t scorn the auteurs, then, for having tried. At least the
dialectical linearity of the screenplay allows the imagery to assert itself, a
point so elementary at heart as might have been feared. Or rather, a heroic
naivety that joins the film, through an unexpected detour, to the spirit of the
pioneers whose gesture it had been charged to sing. Hathaway – this honest
illustrator who sometimes emerges from a sage-like sleep to suddenly become
passionate about the rhythm of a fight – knew to conserve in his work the
academic dignity expected from him. If he works in convention, he also allows
the film to exist, a film that has, precisely, certain conventions of American
cinema. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: small;">It is not, for
all that, a revisionist western, but the sum of ideas that one generally can
have of the western when it is imagined as an epic. It obviously is lacking the
seed of madness with which the epic imposes itself, but Hathaway isn’t Vidor,
and it’s Vidor who would have been needed. You think more or less about all
this during the screening and your own ideas added to what is happening onscreen
banish any boredom, all the more so as the awaited and thundering bravura
sequences every ten minutes arrive just in time to avoid any hint of drowsiness.
In short, all this sticks out disagreeably, a kind of cocktail of the mind, a circus,
a rodeo, and comic strip.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: small;">After the
entr’acte, a mother’s sudden farewell to her son who is leaving for the Civil
War – on the family farm, with the patch of graves and blooming trees –
instills the serenity of the old legends, a biblical, elegiac tone that is
unable to prevent, in spite of everything, a certain emotion from arising. Then the red
uniforms shine like stripes on the blue of the night, the canons boom, the dead
are stiff with fear like in a painting by Gros, the blood on the table where
the wounded are operated on is cleared off with big buckets of water, the door
opens and Wayne appears as Sherman, muddy, unkempt and tired, like himself in
his stubborn, catlike approach. It’s John Ford’s passage, an incredible
anthology, with a superior, elegant form that one takes as either good-natured
or routine.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: small;">In fifteen
minutes, everything is said with a Griffithian sharpness; thenceforth the show
fades and seems worn out. It’s a bad idea to mix cinema into this parade.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: small;">Originally published in </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: small;"><i>Cahiers du
cinéma</i>, no.<i> </i>148, October 1963.</span> </span></div>
Ted Fendthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14756460782437417166noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5626280700491758620.post-68994348416600355902012-07-13T22:15:00.000-07:002014-11-01T09:04:20.606-07:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">"With the Straubs, in <i>Too Early, Too Late</i>, we shot outside, a bit all over France. We had about two shots a day and we filmed the same thing from morning to night. The light evolved over the course of the day and, then, they chose while editing. It was a 15 day shoot that could have been done in 3 if someone else had done the scheduling. We had amazing moments, black skies Brittany...But it's a director's demand, who in this case was his own producer."</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Times,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">-William Lubtchansky, 2003</span></span><br />
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Ted Fendthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14756460782437417166noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5626280700491758620.post-58083892738464633392012-06-28T21:18:00.000-07:002013-01-01T08:29:21.737-08:00Ana"Women directors are a rarity in Portuguese cinema, although there are a couple of first works in post-production at the time of writing. But the filmmaking team of Margarida Cordeiro and António Reis has produced a number of films since <i>Jaime</i>, their 1972 debut. <i>Ana</i> is a marvelous introduction to their surreal vision of the world. Lyrically photographed to capture the atmosphere of the region in which the film is set, <i>Ana</i> is a portrait of a simple, selfless grandmother, filtered through the memory of her grownup granddaughter. Childhood memories, incomplete and half-remembered - the return of a young girl in the middle of a storm, the walk the grandmother takes to a lake - combine to create a timeless, almost liturgical tone. Rejecting the traditional conventions of narrative cinema, Cordeiro and Reis concentrate on incident and form, celebrating the darkness and somberness of the primitive mountain people whose lives are briefly interrupted by a team of ethnographers. 'Let us guard ourselves against looking at the film as if it were a simple ecological requiem advocating a return to nature. The cinema of Reis and Cordeiro has reached a crucial point in which categories like nature, civilization, rural, and urban are condemned to lose their aesthetic relevance. Only knowledge remains. This cinema knows. <i>Ana</i> is a film that has entirely conquered the time and space it evokes.' -João Lopes"<br />
<br />
-Piers Handling in the 1990 Festival of Festivals ProgramTed Fendthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14756460782437417166noreply@blogger.com0