by ·Comments Off on Chronicle of a Summer (1961, Jean Rouch & Edgar Morin)

Before looking for critical articles and reading the Criterion extras, I supposed this was an important film for a few reasons. Firstly, it’s part of the French New Wave movement to bring the new, portable film cameras into the streets. Then it’s a portrait of the times, an ethnography of 1961 Parisians and their thoughts, two years before Le Joli Mai did similar work with a more political flavor. And it’s also a total meta-film, which I hadn’t realized going in.

Rouch & Morin introduce their “novel experiment of film-truth” to interviewer Marceline. I correctly assumed this was Marceline Loridan Ivens of A Tale of the Wind. Either I’d read it before, or she was mentioned in opening credits, or she’s just the only Marceline I know of. Anyway, they intend for her to ask people “how do you live? What do you do all day,” and everyone’s acting like this is the first time people have ever been interviewed on camera.

A backlit Marceline from the best shot in the film:

Then a montage of Marceline interviewing people on the street, or trying to, since nobody is much interested. I was afraid the whole movie would be like this. They find some people willing to talk (ahem, friends of the filmmakers) and hang out at their places. They find a black student named Landry, and one of the first questions is “so you don’t mind being black?” Marceline gets her own turn to speak, then they regroup and discuss their progress. “So far, the film has confined itself to take in the events of this summer of 1960,” then they bring in the war in Algeria, racism, the newly independent Congo, Marceline’s concentration camp tattoo (Landry: “I’ve seen a film about them, Night and Fog“) which leads into a dreamy monologue about her camp experience, and the movie starts to get interesting. Interview subject Angelo is being harassed by his employer for participating in the film. Landry goes to St. Tropez as “the black explorer of holiday France.” Morin: “You know Rouch and I are making a film. We don’t agree. Rouch thinks life is fun and I don’t.”

Landry:

This is the first movie I’ve seen to include its own test screening. Participants and non-participants give their reactions. “It’s completely phony.” “Extremely painful. When it’s not terrifyingly boring, it’s at the cost of total indecency.” Finally, the directors interview each other about the test screening results. “As soon as they’re more sincere than in life, they’re labelled either as hams or exhibitionists.” One of them finally decides the film is about the failure to communicate (isn’t that what all films are about?).

Morin was a sociologist who’d coined the phrase cinema-verite three years earlier. Rouch had already made 20 documentaries at this point (including Les Maître fous) and would make 80 more (including Rose and Landry two years later – a follow-up?). Produced by Argos Films (which released Night and Fog). The second most intense interview subject after Marceline is Cahiers du Cinema secretary Marilu Parolini, who later cowrote four Rivette films and The Spider’s Stratagem. Cameramen included Michel Brault (Mon Oncle Antoine) and Raoul Coutard (at least 15 Godard films).

Marilu…

and her boyfriend Jacques Rivette:

S. Di Iorio:

Morin was largely responsible for the film’s radical content: alternately analyst, priest, and spectator, he led the in-depth conversations that formed the backbone of the project and worked to facilitate moments of communal contact … Rouch, on the other hand, was concerned with form, and spent much of the production developing a walking-camera approach – they called it “pedovision” – that offset the closed-room structure of his partner’s scenes with renegade expeditions into contempo­rary France. While the film’s oscillation between sincere attention (Morin wanted to listen) and anarchic exuberance (Rouch brought water skis) almost justifies Morin’s self-deprecating description of the two of them as a kind of Martin and Lewis of ethnographic cinema, what matters more than these differences is the fact that, as partners, they shared fundamentally similar values. Both were confident that cinema offered a means to analyze everyday life; both believed that invaluable discoveries could result from what Lautréamont and the surrealists framed as the friction of unexpected encounters; both were convinced that their film would be determined by the chance associations and meandering pathways of open-ended conversations.
…
For Chronicle, Rouch and engineer André Coutant developed a prototype of the first handheld, sync-sound 16 mm camera ever used in France.

Morin:

I thought we would start from a basis of truth and that an even greater truth would develop. Now I realize that if we achieved anything, it was to present the problem of truth. We wanted to get away from theater, from spectacle, to enter into direct contact with life. But life is also theater, life is also spectacle.

by ·Comments Off on The State of Things (1982, Wim Wenders)

“Making movies is suicide.”

Watched this right after Ruiz’s The Territory.

Alexander Graf quoted by Michael Goddard: “The story is based on the situation [Wenders] found when he visited [Ruiz] in Portugal to charitably bring black and white film stock to a stranded film-crew whose finances were exhausted: their story became the background to the story for The State of Things, in which he films the crew – some of whom were borrowed from the real stranded crew – in the act of waiting.”

Opens as a sepia-toned post-apocalyptic sci-fi film starring The Territory cast, and after a few minutes turns to silvery black-and-white behind-the-scenes, with Sam Fuller playing the cinematographer, and Patrick Bauchau (Rohmer’s La Collectionneuse) as the director Fritz. After a close-up shot, Fuller tells Fritz they’re out of film. The crew gets down time, hangs around their hotel, everyone assuming the producer can send more film soon, but after a few days Fuller hears that his estranged wife has died and returns to the States, soon followed by Fritz who wants to find their producer Gordon.

Sam and Fritz:

This first half is great, from the sci-fi stuff to the beautifully shot (by Alekan again) boredom and cast/crew artistic hobbies. Then in the States, Wenders thinks we need a pulp plot. Gordon’s lawyer (Roger Corman, who supposedly helped produce The Territory) won’t say where Gordon is, but Fritz finds his mobile home and goes for a ride, finding out Gordon (Allen Garfield, a Gene Hackman type, of Hi, Mom! and Putney Swope) is broke, never paid for the movie in the first place (the screenwriter did), and owes money to gangsters, who inevitably catch up and kill both men. The very ending is a highlight, Fritz pulling out his camera, holding it like a gun while searching for the shooter.

Movie references about. Fuller himself makes a Forty Guns reference, pointed shots of a marquee with The Searchers and Fritz Lang’s star on the walk of fame. Billboards for 1980-81 movies like Caveman, The Jazz Singer and Ordinary People. Wenders was in his classic American cinema phase, having just worked with Nicholas Ray and made a couple of detective movies.

Corman:

Fuller’s driver: “I take pictures, photographs, but I never really thought in black and white before I saw our rushes. You can see the shape of things.”
Fuller: “Life is in color, but black and white is more realistic.”

Organ doom music (by Wenders regular Jürgen Knieper – not Jim Jarmusch as IMDB states) sometimes overloads the scene. Nice use of X’s Los Angeles when they arrive in Los Angeles.

Fritz complete filmography:

Artur Semedo, the other man on the dam in The Territory, plays the production manager:

I read that Joaquim Pinto’s new movie What Now? Remind Me has behind-the-scenes footage of The Territory. I would’ve made this a triple-feature, but it’s not out yet.

by ·Comments Off on Natan (2013, Paul Duane & David Cairns)

Not as relentlessly Decasian as the trailer suggests, actually settles down into a normal storytelling groove of interview material for a good while, but punctuated by Natan’s papier-mache-headed stand-in, a few effects shots of a wall of posters, and that voiceover by The Film Itself. These are all evocative additions – the poster gallery returns re-postered before and after the nazi invasion, and some of the scant footage of Natan himself, at his trial, has him repeatedly covering his head with a newspaper. This is already more thoughtful stylistic presentation than most documentaries get, then the voiceover and bookending Melies stories put it over the top.

Plus the story is killer, one of those subjects that researchers dream of – a chance to correct the wrongs of history. Bernard Natan isn’t set up as a saint, but at the very least an important figure in history, a founder of French cinema who deserved a better end and reputation than he got. The directors even scored an interview with the academic who brought the unfounded rumors and nazi-era smears into the modern age, a villain of the picture though he doesn’t seem to realize it.

by ·Comments Off on The Act of Killing (2012, Joshua Oppenheimer)

What can you say? Sometimes the genocidal killers win, stay in charge, and have no reason to feel shame for what they’ve done. Someone finally got the great idea to interview these people and allow them to glorify/incriminate themselves. Letting them tell their own stories through filmmaking and showing the behind-the-scenes process was a stroke of genius, and filming it must’ve felt terrible and dangerous, as evidenced by all the anonymously-credited crew members.

Never go to Indonesia.

by ·Comments Off on The Man Who Left His Will On Film (1970, Nagisa Oshima)

A closed loop of a movie, unusual for Oshima in that you can guess where the story is going and how it will end, but there’s plenty of engaging craziness in between. Opens with a handheld shot of two people fighting over a camera. Someone with a camera suicides off a building, the cops apparently have taken the camera, and Motoki wakes up with his friends (or comrades – they seem to be a political media collective).

Nobody else seems to know anything about anyone jumping off any buildings, just that police attacked while the group was filming a protest in the park and took their camera, and Motoki had bravely tried to reclaim it (though they chide him for having a sense of private property about the group’s camera). Motoki swears to Yasuko that her boyfriend Endo killed himself this morning – though Endo was in the room with them all a few minutes before. Then he rapes Yasuko – why? A “seventh art series” video essay I found says that she was always his girlfriend, but when Motoki doesn’t seem to remember this she plays along, agreeing that she dates Endo.

He and Yasuko start acting like a couple, screen footage of seemingly random locations shot by another group member then set out to find these locations, each starting to “remember” events that may not have happened, and denying events that did. “The stupid asshole who made that movie didn’t exist!” Motoki seems to accidentally find his own parents’ house while reverse-location-scouting. He sets out to shoot the same landscapes in order to become the other cameraman, and Motoki stands in every shot, ending up hurt or raped each time. Finally we see a POV shot of the group confronting him to return their camera, and he runs – but in front of the handheld camera, as if there are two of him. Atop a building, Motoki appears, blocking his way back down, so he jumps – then we see a hand pick up his camera and run with it.

C. Fujiwara, in an excellent article on Moving Image Source:

The sense that The Man Who Left His Will on Film has come after something else, in a “post” period, is explicit in the Japanese title, Tokyo senso sengo hiwa, which means “Secret Story of the Period after the Tokyo War.” “Tokyo War” refers to the mass protests in November 1969 against Japanese prime minister Eisaku Sato’s visit to the United States. This war is assuredly and emphatically not “the War” that serves as the main historical landmark for characters in other Oshima films, providing a (false) explanation and excuse for their actions (as with the officials in Death by Hanging and the father in Boy [1969]). The Man Who Left His Will on Film places itself within a later history, one perhaps not yet readable at the time it was made.

by ·Comments Off on Berberian Sound Studio (2012, Peter Strickland)

Squeamish British sound engineer Toby Jones arrives in Italy to work on a movie called The Equestrian Vortex, not realizing it’s an extra-bloody horror film. Supposedly he was hired because the film’s director Santini holds him in high regard, but nobody else in the studio could care less, and his requests meet with blank stares and insults, as over the weeks of work he gets more shaken by the company and his work stabbing and snapping vegetables as torture-foley.

Like the 1970’s and 80’s Italian horrors Berberian claims to be recreating (we never see a scrap of footage from the film-in-a-film except its opening titles), this movie cares much more about atmosphere than anything else, and does a great job creating that through image and sound. With Jones playing a foley artist and sound recorder, they knew we’d be paying close attention to the soundtrack, and it’s wonderful. But while the Argento and Fulci movies have overstuffed but ultimately empty stories submerged in their gothic atmosphere, this one mostly dispenses with story and lets its atmosphere do all the talking. In fact, they seem to have forgotten to give the movie an ending. It has a neat build-up, as Toby’s letters from home bleed into his work, a story of a birdnest rampage paralleled in the inner film’s carnage and in editing-room chaos after a wronged actress takes out her frustration upon the audiotapes, but then it peters out after that.

Very nice touch that sound equipment is activated by a black gloved hand in close-up. Shot by Nic Knowland (Institute Benjamenta, Piano Tuner of Earthquakes). I must find Strickland’s earlier feature, a Romanian revenge drama.

by ·Comments Off on The Blind Owl (1987, Raoul Ruiz)

“That’s the sickness that comes from thinking about film.”

Some notes I took:

He cuts up some woman and puts her body in a trunk. On a train, a man tells stories about a mysterious rider with a companion speaking to him from inside a small suitcase.
Mentions of Grenada and Marrakesh
Middle-east parody?
Communicating by dance
Protagonist tends to wail
The subtitled part is the movie our protag is watching
White-robe is the Sailor? from Three Crowns? Yes he is.
Very good string music, reminiscent of Three Crowns
Protag has no memories.

Some of this will be wrong, and much will be left out. I will happily watch the movie again, hopefully from some glorious high-res copy released in the future, not a fan-subtitled compressed file made from a two-decades-old beta videotape.

To start with, our guy gets a job at a movie theater. “The films we projected, I never knew who chose them, but I think that nothing that was shown was ever watched.” He and erratic coworker Kasim sleep in the projection booth, living there with Kasim’s girlfriend Fatima. Our guy meets an unknown uncle, then an unknown nephew, then goes on a journey (see note above about cutting up and trunking some poor woman).

Suddenly: “Here begins the story of Aba Yahyar ibn Abu Bakhra as recounted by Ibn Abas may it please Allah”. A riddle-spouting djinn sets a crazily fake-bearded young man searching for his crazy uncles, then he finds the “seven sleepers of ephesus” inside a giant mouth (flashback to the giant teeth in City of Pirates). Also, twin brothers (“the only thing that distinguished them was that one drank more water”) love the same woman. Took me a while to realize that all this is the film-within-the-film.

Bearded man seeks uncle:

Giant teeth:

Back in the projection booth, Fatima eats and drinks sound and images by grabbing them off the projector beam with her hand, and our guy gets into a bloody fight with Kasim. Back in the inner film, more uncles and twins starts to jumble together. “Thus I discovered I no longer needed to watch the film. Henceforth, it would be part of me. I would see it projected on the walls of my room, on the face of my nephew and on the sheets of my bed. I could discern it in a dog’s bark, a man’s groan or a bird’s song, all of them telling me one grand tale of my two fathers, my two uncles and my mother, the dancer.”

Sailor:

The Sailor says he collects the decapitated heads of thieves, shows off his heads and one removed eye to Rosalia (the inner film’s fascinating mystery woman). Back at the theater, our protagonist comes to some final realization (“I’ve never had any memories, and in the space of that day I had aged some fifty years”) and leaves the building, ghostlike.

From (the only) IMDB review:

So not a fiction film but about fiction, immortal stories without particular author or answer, that always seem to begin by their narrator with “I heard a story”…

Based partly on a Persian novel by Sadegh Hedayat. A plot summary of the 1975 film version sounds twisty and surreal, and almost nothing like the Ruiz version except that it involves a young man fixated on a memory of a glimpsed “ethereal” woman.

Hard to tell which actors played whom, but Jean-François Lapalus is the lead, and Jessica Forde (star of Rohmer’s Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle) was in there somewhere.

Maybe right here:

“It is at once an enormous joke and a cosmic, existential work on the human condition.” There’s little writing on this obscure Ruiz feature online, but Rouge has published an essential Luc Moullet piece.

by ·Comments Off on Holy Motors (2012, Leos Carax)

The ultimate movie-movie, starring Denis Lavant 11 times.

Prologue in a movie theater where he is locked in a room with a secret-panel door to which his metal finger is the key.

“Oscar” leaves a giant house as a banker, gets into limo driven by the great Edith Scob (looking much more lively than she did in Summer Hours – I know it was acting and makeup, but I was concerned), is told he has nine appointments today and starts getting into makeup.

1. He plays a hunched homeless woman begging for change, seeing mostly pavement and shoes.

2. Motion-capture room inside a factory – he is covered in tracking markers like the kind Andy Serkis is always wearing. First he enacts an acrobatic fight scene, then runs on a treadmill firing a machine gun, then is joined by a red-rubber-suited woman for a mutant sex scene.

3. “Merde,” he mutters as he glances at the dossier. And so he is Merde, striding through the cemetery eating flowers until he comes across a photo shoot. He bites a camera assistant’s fingers off then abducts model Eva Mendes (of Bad Lieutenant 2), takes her to the sewer, reconfigures her clothes and lays in her lap naked. Best joke of the movie: the headstones all advertise the deceased’s websites.

4. Beleaguered father picks up daughter Angele from a party where she was too shy to dance and mingle. He takes it badly because she lied and said she had a great time.

5. Musical intermission with accordions, time to reflect on the movie. At some point between scenes Michel Piccoli visits the limo to discuss Oscar’s work. Cameras are mentioned – the fact that they used to be these big things but are now tiny and hidden everywhere. So Oscar is a sort of character film-actor of the future. The first two parts he played couldn’t be more different (old and feeble vs. acrobatic, grim realism vs. stark techno-future), so we’re seeing a range of Oscar’s performance types before the second half gets more personal.

6. A bald guy with facial scars knifes another guy to death in a warehouse, makes that guy up to look like himself, then gets knifed by the dying man, ending in a hilarious visual joke, two Oscars dying side-by-side on the ground. As he staggers back to the limo, helped by Edith, we wonder – which one was Oscar, and were either of the stabbings real?

7. He’s a dying man in bed, having a final conversation with sad niece Lea. Further ruptures in the structure: when the old man is “rambling incoherently” he recites lines from previous episodes, and after he “dies” we watch him get back up and leave, chatting briefly with the actress playing his niece on the way out.

7.5?: He quickly makes Edith stop the limo, throws on a red barbed-wire stocking cap and shoots himself-as-the-banker dining along the sidewalk, then gets shot to death. Edith runs over, apologizes to everyone saying it’s a mistaken identity and collects him (stocking-cap, not banker).

8?: During a limo-driver right-of-way argument he wanders off, seeing a girl he knows (Kylie Minogue). They’re in the same line of work and had major history together – she sings a song to fill us in. He seems to be himself (Oscar) here, and she’s preparing for a role where she’s suicidal, waiting for another man. On his way back to the limo, Oscar runs screaming over her dead body, having performed her scene and jumped to the pavement. If she’s as “dead” as he becomes in his scenes then she’ll be fine in a few seconds – and if this wasn’t a performance but the “real” Oscar then why can’t he see her anymore, and why the extreme reaction to her death?

9. Anyway, Oscar ends up at a house full of chimps, whom he kisses goodnight. Edith parks the limo, puts on her Eyes Without a Face mask and walks off. Then the limos converse, tail lights flashing as they speak.

Need to watch this again – not because I may have missed a scene or listed them out of order, but because the movie (and Lavant) is completely amazing [edit: watched again; Katy didn’t like it]. From skimming the critics’ reports I was prepared for something extremely crazy and nonsensical, but this made plenty of sense, and is a completely unique piece of meta-cinema. Caroline Champetier, cinematographer of this and Merde, also shot Of Gods and Men, Rivette’s Gang of Four and Class Relations.

D. Lim: “… as close as Carax has come to an artistic manifesto: a film about life as cinema and cinema as life.”

by ·Comments Off on 8 1/2 (1963, Federico Fellini)

I remembered the atmosphere of this movie but not the story or characters, so watched it again – turns out it’s 98% atmosphere. What story? What characters? Even Marcello Mastroianni’s Guido is a weak and confused lead. Instead it’s an impressionistic glimpse into Fellini’s life and work, a film about filmmaking, or about itself. I’m not saying anything that everyone doesn’t already know, but I had to be reminded – there’s not really a story of Guido casting and shooting some big picture, just fragments: agents and critics and hangers-on as the director deals with his fame, personal life and artistic indecision.

Opens with a wordless dream sequence – film director Guido (Marcello Mastroianni) floats away from an oppressive traffic jam, flies over the ocean but is roped and pulled down by business partners.

Guido is “taking the cure” at a vacation retreat, prescribed holy water, keeps running into people he knows in a sort of choreographed dance of acquaintances. Soon he’s on his film set, arguing with a writer (Daurmier?) who criticizes the script, placating coworkers and avoiding making decisions. Soon I lose all ability to describe plot or characters as it spirals inevitably into the spinning whirl of an ending.

I’ve seen an even five of Fellini’s 7 1/2 previous films. Cinematographer Gianni Di Venanzo shot about half the Italian movies I’ve heard of – this was his first for Fellini, having just worked on L’Eclisse.

Guido

Claudia Cardinale of The Leopard the same year, supposed to be starring in Guido’s film, seems good-natured about the whole thing.

wife Luisa (Anouk Aimée, shortly after Lola) with mistress Carla (Sandra Milo of Juliet of the Spirits)

His buddy Mario Pisu with new mistress Barbara Steele

Magician Ian Dallas, who according to IMDB inspired the song Layla. He and his apparently psychic partner pull magic words from Guido’s psyche cueing a flashback schene wherein young Guido is told that these words could make a portrait come to life… a “motion picture,” if you will.

Saraghina, wild woman of Guido’s youth

Guido and Carla

A. Sesonske:

8 1/2 is a film about making a film, and the film that is being made is 8 1/2. Notice how everything Guido says about the film he is making turns out to be true of 8 1/2, even the sailor doing a soft-shoe dance; how all the screen tests are for roles in the film we are seeing; how some camera movements create an ambiguity between Guido, the director in the film, and Fellini, the director of the film, thus taking self-reference one step beyond the work to its maker.

Fellini: A Director’s Notebook (1969)

“I composed a poem on the ruins of your film.”

This masquerades as a documentary on Fellini’s working methods, but is really a self-conscious fake-doc made by Fellini himself. Suspension of disbelief lasted about 30 seconds – you can’t convince anyone you’re making a documentary, interviewing random people on the street, when all the voices are badly dubbed.

In 1966-ish the director was to film Mastorna, “perhaps the most famous unmade film in Italian cinema.” Its half-built sets sit unused on huge lots, so Fellini shoots them here, haunted by poets, then roams Rome at night. All the places he goes are full of people who seem like… well, like characters in Fellini films.

Giulietta Masina introduces the “man with the sack” sequence from Nights of Cabiria, which at this point had never been seen, claiming it’s based on a true story. Some Satyricon, then we get a frenetic sepia-toned ancient-Rome silent short watched by a screaming audience (including a raptly attentive young Fellini).

Recreating Fellini’s childhood cinema:

A cab ride with a clairvoyant, and a subway ride with a professor. This last one is great because he tries to talk about lost societies beneath Rome but Fellini keeps interrupting, asking him to speak into the camera – then their train accidentally travels through time, proving the professor’s point.

We visit Mastroianni, who gives us a fake screen test, then off to an early morning slaughterhouse to summon the feeling of ancient sacrifices, where the workers keep transforming into ancient Romans. Then a stream of non-actors come to Fellini’s office to submit themselves for film roles.

That’s F.F. at left:

Criterion: “Producer Peter Goldfarb … had suggested the project as a way for Fellini to deal with his inability to make the film The Voyage of G. Mastorna. As Tullio Kezich and others have pointed out, 8 1/2 is strikingly prophetic of this development in Fellini’s career.”