by ·Comments Off on Menus-Plaisirs & La Danse (Frederick Wiseman)

La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet (2009)

Paris Opera, from classes to group and individual rehearsals to grand public performances. The final duo dance was the first music I recognized, a string piece. After my jazz era maybe I’ll get into ballets. At least one Pina Bausch piece, at least I can recognize those. Clicking the dancers’ names on lboxd for fun, I found actors from The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, early straight-to-netflix movie Divines, a Binoche feature, two obscure Deneuve movies, and Bonello’s Sarah Winchester short.

Michael Sicinski in Cinema Scope 42, after quoting C. Huber calling FW’s work the “Great American Novel”:

La Danse … represents both a bend in the river for Wiseman and a sort of coming-to-the-fore of tendencies that were probably there all along but whose presence was difficult to discern … This is a Wiseman film with virtually no struggle on the sociological scale … upping the spectacle and downplaying those detailed, Zolaesque dimensions for which his great novel is usually vaunted … One starts to get the sense that, at this point in his career, the filmmaker may be starting to see the value in letting non-intervention tip over into tacit boosterism.

–
Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros (2023)

We got caught up in the kitchen drama, but none of the customer/restaurant scenes are as memorable as the one in The Truffle Hunters. Nobody comments on the situation, which I think about constantly, where a French tire company gets to decide which eateries worldwide are legendary/great/decent. More from Will and Filipe.

Jay Kuehner in Cinema Scope 97:

The four-hour runtime here mimics that of a multi-course sit-down meal, digestible in its digressions … There is no cultural or institutional polemic here … Detours to various rendezvous with suppliers, whose respective practices of raising cattle, goats, and legumes reveal deep commitments to the land and its biodiversity, lessons on the necessity of minimal intervention in nature, but they also lack the immersive tendencies of Wiseman’s more cynical work due to the rather perfunctory blocking of the encounters between chef and farmer, suggesting a choreography of content that inevitably flatters both parties. While not hagiographic, Wiseman’s portrait of this culinary dynasty is no doubt conditioned somewhat by a persistent PR apparatus.

by ·Comments Off on National Gallery (2014, Frederick Wiseman)

I’ve started to appreciate how fast Wiseman’s cutting is – the movies are long but he wastes no time. We hear from preservationists, lectures on individual paintings, internal meetings. Some unusual perspectives: an art appreciation workshop for the blind, creating ornate picture frames, protests outside. Most mindblowing segment was about researching where a painting was commissioned, how the angles and lighting in the painting match the location where it originally hung.

by ·Comments Off on The Store (1983, Frederick Wiseman)

Coincidentally right after we entered Wiseman Mode a website put this online for free, so we enjoyed the current fake-HD (with interlacing) digital version. Whether a bunch of guys in giant 1980s glasses can sell a sable coat this holiday season is less interesting than how the public library will meet its annual education and inclusivity goals under budget, but we get some good overhead shots of elevators. Neiman Marcus is in the business of sales, we’re told – not a controversial statement – and everything revolves around sales. The department heads telephone their best customers to lure them back, trying to prevent them from spending money anywhere else. After witnessing the entire library system full of thoughtful workers, the sudden switch to top-down capitalism is enlightening – the only person who says anything of substance here is fearless leader Stanley Marcus. No matter how well the company protects its high-class image, it can’t prevent Wiseman from capturing an employee laughing hysterically at her birthday gift of a stripper chicken.

by ·Comments Off on Ex Libris: The New York Public Library (2017, Frederick Wiseman)

Katy is never up for watching the final hour of that cartoon we started, but gets right on board for a long doc about the NY library system. Expansive look at the work and mission of the public library, from branch meetings and funding talks to gala events. Sharply edited, every five minutes another facet of an institution devoted to knowledge. Tom Charity in Cinema Scope goes into the details, calls it “almost intelligentsia porn.”

by ·Comments Off on Summer Shorts 2015

La Luxure (1962, Jacques Demy)

Demy’s segment on lechery from The Seven Capital Sins anthology. Nice long takes, light musical feel, made right after Lola. Unshaven Jean-Louis Trintignant (My Night at Maud’s) tells his relentless ladies-man buddy Laurent Terzieff (La Prisonnière) about his early misunderstandings of the word lechery, feat. flashbacks and hell-sequences. Jean Desailly (The Soft Skin) and Micheline Presle (The Nun, A Lady Without Camelias) play flashback-Trintingnant’s parents. Quite a bit of rhyming and wordplay that’s probably not coming through in the subtitles.

Terzieff:

Puppy Love (2003, Michael Colton)

Watched some clips from the Illegal Art comp, similar to the shorts that Craig Baldwin showed in Atlanta. In this one, a dog is in love with a pikachu.

Black Thunder (2001, Brian Spinks, Bill Wasik & Eugene Mirman)

Short series of campaign ads for animals running for office.
I’m voting for the bear.

Incident by a Bank (2009, Ruben Ostlund)

Single take recreation of a comically failed bank robbery.

O Velho do Restelo (2014, Manoel de Oliveira)

Actors playing Don Quixote, author Camilo Castelo Branco and two others discuss Portuguese culture, with flashbacks to Oliveira films such as Doomed Love and Non.

Stardust (2013, Mischa Rozema)

Some beautiful celestial effects.

Haiku (2009, Frederick Wiseman)

Lion / Waiting / Legs

Haiku (2009, Naomi Kawase)

Cicada / Sunrise / Flower

Haiku (2009, Alain Cavalier)

Train / Poster of bearded man / Bearded Man
Nicely done, in one take.

Idem Paris (2013, David Lynch)

While art prints of a Lynch painting are being pressed, Lynch stalks the press, enamored with the clanking gears and spinning wheels.

by ·Comments Off on Crazy Horse (2011, Frederick Wiseman)

I watched it for the nudity but stayed for the choreography. After a while there are so many breasts you stop noticing them. Excellent behind-the-scenes doc of the preparation of a new season of Paris’s famous nude dancing show.

Antony does a song, making this the second nude-girls doc this year to feature his voice. Also a brief Michael Jackson clip. And lots of original songs, most of them quite bad, which makes it funnier that Ali, the bald creepy assistant director, is obsessed with them.

The three main talking heads: Ali sitting between creative director Philippe and shareholder rep Andree:

Funny: the dancers watch a tape of ballet bloopers to unwind backstage. A never-explained two-man disco tapdance routine takes place offstage. The movie opens with shadow puppets then a recording session of orgasm noises, which twice defeated my attempts to watch this quietly by myself while Katy and Maria were home.

Twin tapdancers:

Moonrise:

I’m sure Wiseman’s Juvenile Court and Domestic Violence and State Legislature are interesting and valueable, but I’ve never tried very hard to watch them. As soon as he made a film full of naked girls, I got interested. Let this be a lesson to all filmmakers everywhere.

M. Peranson:

The dancers’ bodies themselves are cinematic vehicles, either used to produce shadows on coloured backdrops, or as objects themselves onto which light and image is projected. Cinema in essence involves the projection of desire, and what Wiseman cleverly does in Crazy Horse is present desire, illustrate its operation and deconstruct it, with the technical rehearsals of the numbers showing the peculiar sweat and effort required to create this seamless illusion.

by ·Comments Off on Titicut Follies (1967, Frederick Wiseman)

The beginning of cinema verite, and the beginning of the most celebrated documentarian’s ongoing project to film America’s cultural institutions seemed like a fine place to start Documentary Month.

Movie is just what we thought it’d be, an unflinching look inside a Massachusetts state prison for the criminally insane. We see the inmates’ terrible conditions, their shower and recreation facilities, harassment from the guards. One inmate rebels against his circumstances (leading to force-feeding and death), another lucidly argues to whoever will listen that he doesn’t belong here and that the place is doing him harm. No wonder the state of Mass got hysterical when they saw what Wiseman had exposed, suing him to prevent the movie’s release while hurriedly renovating their prison system to address the imminent protests.