Yes, Amour is as unrelenting and unflinching as you might expect from the provocateur, but there is tenderness within that marks a bit of a new direction for the helmer. Our introduction to Georges and Anne, finds them during happier times. The couple attend a concert performance by one of Anne’s former students Alexandre, with Haneke having a bit of fun early on with a great lingering shot that sees the viewer watching the audience, watching the pianist as he starts into his first number of the evening. We watch the pair at home and it becomes clear how deeply connected and familiar the duo are with each other. This has been a long, loving relationship. But of course, that happiness doesn’t last…
Yes, there is an ending here that will once again have people talking, but it’s not a stunt so much as a logical extension of the extreme emotional turmoil both Georges and Anne have been through… Amour is nevertheless the work of a filmmaker who isn’t afraid to ask the big questions about human nature, and coming out of Amour it seems the director has hope for us yet.
via: The Playlist
The one thing that’s helped me to survive is that I’m not bitter.
You can’t really enjoy life until you have a full awareness of death. We tend to have an awareness of death only when something critical happens, like the passing on of a loved one. We should have an awareness of death every day.
What makes Tarkovsky interesting is the very form of his films. Tarkovsky uses as this material element of pre-narrative density, time itself. All of a sudden we are made to feel this inertia, drabness of time. Time is not just a neutral, light medium within which things happen. We feel the density of time itself. Things that we see are more markers of time. He treats even humans in this way. If we look at the unique face of Stalker himself, it’s a face of somebody exposed to too much radiation and, as it were, rotting, falling apart alive. It is this disintegration of the very material texture of reality which provides the spiritual depth. Tarkovskian subjects, when they pray, they don’t look up, they look down. They even sometimes, as in Stalker, put their head directly onto the earth. Here, I think, Tarkovsky affects us at a level which is much deeper, much more crucial for our experience than all the standard, spiritual motives of elevating ourselves above material reality and so on. There is nothing specific about the zone. It’s purely a place where a certain limit is set. You set a limit, you put a certain zone off-limit, and although things remain exactly the way they were, it’s perceived as another place. Precisely as the place onto which you can project your beliefs, your fears, things from your inner space. In other words, the zone is ultimately the very whiteness of the cinematic screen.
Girl: Father, what is freedom?
Father: To know yourself and be the way your are.
-by Alejandro Jodorowsky
Lena Dunham’s reading habits
What book is on your nightstand now?
Right now I’m looking right at Mary Gaitskill’s “Bad Behavior”; the new Diane Keaton autobiography; “Having It All,” by Helen Gurley Brown (research); and “The Consolations of Philosophy,” by Alain de Botton — all in various states of having-been-read-ed-ness.
When and where do you like to read?
On the big couch by sunlight in the afternoon when I should be working. While I get my hair and makeup done on set. In bed. Always in bed.
What are your reading habits? Paper or electronic? Do you take notes? Do you snack while you read?
I loved my Kindle, but then I broke it, so I am back to my first love, paperbacks. And you know what? I don’t miss that little machine, even though it was saving me pounds in my luggage. That leaning tower of books by my bed pleases me to no end to look at and rearrange. I snack while I do most things. I like gluten-free crackers and soy cheese, even though I’m not allergic to the traditional version of either.
What was the last truly great book you read? Do you remember the last time you said to someone, “You absolutely must read this book”?
I am obsessed with “The Private Diaries of Catherine Deneuve,” in which we learn intimate details about working with titans of the French New Wave and she talks smack about Bjork. Her prose is elegant and defiant and very, very French.
What’s your favorite literary genre? Any guilty pleasures?
I love biographies and autobiographies, especially of famous (and famously complicated) women. Barbra Streisand, Leni Riefenstahl, Edna St. Vincent Millay. “Minor Characters,” by Joyce Johnson, with all that Beat generation gossip told from the eyes of a sweet ’n’ sour teen. Spiritually leaning self-help is obviously my guilty pleasure (not that guilty: I like Ram Dass, Deepak Chopra and especially Mark Epstein’s Buddhist psychology books). I also like extremely speculative books in which psychics explain what happens before we’re born / after we die (Sylvia Browne, master psychic). I have to read “Eloise” once a month or I’ll perish.
Have you ever read a book about girls or women that made you angry or disappointed or just extremely annoyed?
I don’t have a taste for airport chick-lit, even in a guilty-pleasure way. Any book that is motored by the search for a husband and/or a good pair of heels makes me want to move to the outback. If there is a cartoon woman’s torso on the front or a stroller with a diamond on it, I just can’t.
And what’s the best book about girls you’ve ever read?
“Catherine, Called Birdy,” by Karen Cushman. “Lolita,” by Vladimir Nabokov.
If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?
The “Guide to Getting It On!” seems like it would have something to offer anyone, although if Obama’s singing is any indication he’s got it covered.
One of the movies you included in your BAM film festival is “Clueless,” which was based on “Emma.” What’s your all-time favorite movie based on a book? The worst?
“The Group” is a favorite adaptation. It’s gaudy and sexy and a mess in the best way. I can’t watch the “Eloise” movie or I will also perish.
What book makes you laugh?
“Without Feathers,” by Woody Allen, makes me giggle like a baby. “Holidays on Ice,” by David Sedaris. “How to Have a Life-Style,” by Quentin Crisp.
What were your favorite books as a child? Do you have a favorite character or hero from one of those books? Is there one book you wish all children would read?
I have tattoos from children’s books all over my arms and torso. The biggest one is of Ferdinand the bull, which Elliott Smith also had, but his was a different page. What a good message that book has! Just be yourself and don’t gore anyone with your horns if you don’t feel like it.
Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel as if you were supposed to like, and didn’t? Do you remember the last book you put down without finishing?
This question is so up my alley because my history is dotted with shameful unfinisheds. “The Great Gatsby”? I put it down in eighth grade and haven’t picked it up again. Should I not be saying this? Will I be sent away somewhere awful? I often don’t finish books, even ones that I like.
Would you like to write a book? If you could write a book about anything, what would it be?
Who doesn’t want to write a book? I wish it were a mystery novel set in a quietly seething college town, but alas it would likely be memoir.
What’s the one book you wish someone else would write?
I wish my mom would let me type and edit her journals from when she was my age, but she doesn’t trust me that they’re a fascinating account of the inner life of a young artist in 1970s SoHo. I also wouldn’t mind reading Bill Murray’s memoirs or an instructional guide to getting dressed by Chloë Sevigny.
If you could meet any writer, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you want to know? Have you ever written to an author?
This is not exactly an answer to your question, but I wonder fairly often how Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath would be doing in the age of better living through chemistry. I love both their work dearly. I wrote a letter to Nikki Giovanni in middle school, care of her publisher, using many different-colored pens. I didn’t hear back but do not hold a grudge.
What do you plan to read next?
I am woefully unread in the areas of history and politics and have a grand plan to read “A People’s History of the United States,” “The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York” and some other books that might hack away at my ignorance. I am also looking forward to David Stockman’s upcoming book on the financial crisis, because I met him at a party and thought he was a very compelling character. I am going to go back and read “The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed” (I am not a libertarian, but I will read a book by one). I just pre-ordered Sheila Heti’s book “How Should a Person Be?” And “Love, an Index,” poetry by Rebecca Lindenberg, because I read excerpts of both and found them stunning in different ways. If you couldn’t tell, I mostly like confessional books by women.
*Editor’s note: I think I like Dunham a little bit more after reading this.
Varda reacts heatedly to my rather impolitic, obvious question, about her Le Bonheur (1965). “Let’s not go back to that,” she bristles. “That was more than ten years ago.” For the thousandth time, someone has asked Varda how she could make a film showing a wife drowning herself in a lake so that her husband can hang out freely with his mistress.
“Some people misunderstood Le Bonheur,” she replies disdainfully. “Women have become upset and asked, ‘How could you replace a woman with another woman?’ That’s what life is about. A man is replaced by another man in war. A woman is replaced by another woman in life.” Another point of contention: Varda can not tolerate puritanical responses to Le Bonheur’s conclusion, where the husband blissfully marries the mistress. “If his wife committed suicide, and he wants to feel good with another woman, he has the right! Do you think he should cry for twenty years?”
via: Gerald Peary
They make films…
Pier Paolo Pasonli
Martin Luther was asked, what would you do if tomorrow the world would come to an end, and he said, ‘I would plant an apple tree today.’ This is a real good answer. I would start shooting a movie.
“An essential element of any art is risk. If you don’t take a risk then how are you going to make something really beautiful, that hasn’t been seen before?”
Francis Ford Coppola (born April 7, 1939)
via: strangewood
Source: strangewood
Honesty, Eloquence: Louis Malle
“We film makers don’t work for posterity,” Louis Malle said a few years ago. “We create with celluloid and chemical pigments that don’t last very long. They fade away. In 200 years there will be nothing left of our work but dust.” He sounded more like a Chekhov character than a film director, as he summed up his career in “Malle on Malle” (Faber & Faber), a book-length interview with Philip French. Yet a remark that would have rung with false modesty or sour grapes from almost any other director simply echoed the fierce honesty and eloquence of Malle’s work. In an age of superstar directors, Louis Malle remained an artist, his eye always on the film he was making rather than the reputation he was building.
Maybe that’s why people can recall precise images — think of Brooke Shields carried on a litter in “Pretty Baby,” as a 12-year-old being ceremonially sold into prostitution, or Susan Sarandon languorously rubbing lemons over her arms in “Atlantic City” — without recognizing that they are from Louis Malle films. Other directors flourished on flash, dazzle and special effects. Malle, with supreme self-confidence, cultivated a style whose trademark qualities — grace, subtlety, intelligence — refused to call attention to themselves.
Yet Malle, who died 10 days ago at 63, was among the handful of truly great film makers of his generation. He wrote and directed an endearing and enduring social comedy about incest, “Murmur of the Heart,” and a delicate tragedy about a peasant who casually becomes a Nazi collaborator, “Lacombe, Lucien.” His boyhood memory of a Jewish schoolmate who was betrayed to the Nazis became his masterpiece of remembrance, “Au Revoir les Enfants.” And in his last film, “Vanya on 42d Street,” his mastery was still strong, his camera more subtle and unobtrusive than ever as he took viewers into a performance of Chekhov’s play, eerily blurring the lines between the harshness of Times Square and the shattering sadness of a Russian family in decline.
Malle was at his best when he used this elegant style to undermine the moral assumptions of the bourgeoisie. The son of a wealthy French factory owner, he had the money, knowledge and wit to do it. Today, it is easy to forget how shocking some of his early films were. His first feature, “Elevator to the Gallows,” made in 1957, featured a Miles Davis score and fluid camera work, creating a jazzy, dizzying atmosphere for the story of a woman, played by a minor actress named Jeanne Moreau, who plots with her lover to kill her husband. Malle captured the natural ripeness and sensuality of Moreau’s face, refusing to make her look conventionally pretty. He later recalled: “The first week, there was a rebellion of the technicians at the lab after they had seen the dailies. They went to the producer and said, ‘You must not let Malle and Decae’ ” — Henri Decae, the cinematographer — ” ‘destroy Jeanne Moreau.’”
Instead, he made her a legend. The next year in “The Lovers,” she played a wealthy woman who, after a night of passion with a young stranger, abandons her family to run off with him. The film is shot like a gauzy romantic dream, but its bold sensuality made it notorious. Its lingering close-up of Moreau’s orgasmic face became a turning point for sexual honesty on screen.
Francois Truffaut, in his book “The Films in My Life,” included Malle in a section called “My Friends in the New Wave,” and paid “The Lovers” the high compliment of envy: “Louis Malle has made the film that everybody carries around in his heart and dreams of turning into a reality: the detailed story of lightning striking.”
Truffaut also recalled being mistaken for Malle on the street, an easy mistake to make. Both were slight and handsome, with apparently irresistible French charm. Yet Malle was never part of the group — Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol — that made up the core of the New Wave. He did not have Truffaut’s pure genius or Godard’s taste for the avant-garde. What he had was the ability to create a moment so immediate and full of life that the viewer noticed the place, the character, the emotions, the story — noticed everything but the director’s wizardlike control.
Yet his control was flawless and his range astonishing. “Zazie dans le Metro” portrays the comic adventures of a little girl in Paris. “Calcutta” and “Phantom India” are highly praised documentaries. And “Atlantic City,” written by the playwright John Guare, creates the glorious swan song of a small-time American gangster, with Burt Lancaster in his last great role.
Malle’s richest work, “Au Revoir les Enfants,” took him a lifetime to achieve. The film is lyrical about childhood, yet unsentimental about the dangerous world all children must fall into. The two expressive and natural boys of “Au Revoir les Enfants” live in a world in which the immense evil of Nazism is aided by the petty nastiness of unimportant people, like the school’s kitchen worker who betrays the Jewish student and the priest who is hiding him.
The moment when Malle saw his schoolmate taken away was “the most significant event of my childhood, quite possibly of my life,” he told Mr. French, and turning it into a film was a great personal risk. “I would have hated myself if I had failed,” he said. Perhaps because he was looking into himself rather than at posterity, he created a work that as surely as Chekhov’s characters, will endure long after lesser films have turned to dust.
via: Caryn James
Some sort of pressure must exist; the artist exists because the world is not perfect. Art would be useless if the world were perfect, as man wouldn’t look for harmony but would simply live in it. Art is born out of an ill-designed world.
My films, sadly enough, are sometimes unbalanced. They have a limp or one arm shorter or a big nose, but even in the editing room when we try to change that, normally it doesn’t work.
-Claire Denis
On the set of…
American Graffiti with George Lucas
Source: jesuisperdu
