I Origins

Fast Notes

These are some quick observations on what for me is one of the most exciting American films of the last few years, which I figure will be "rediscovered" around or shortly after 2020. It's Mike Cahill's follow-up to Another Earth (a really good movie, the last scene of which has profound implications), — it belongs to a techno-philosophical thread in recent American movies which counts among its proponent-adherents Cahill, Batmanglij, Carruth, and someone else I'm forgetting. In many ways (aside from Carruth) the auteur is co-writer/co-producer/star Brit Marling.

(1) Double-lives, doppelgängers, are a staple of Cahill's cinema to date. He cites Kieslowski's La double vie de Véronique as a major touchstone. I Origins was written as a "prequel" to an as-yet-unmade "core"-film called I. This sibling has not yet come to fruition, although my understanding is that Fox [Searchlight] have acquired the rights to that film alongside I Origins. Michael Pitt is himself here a doppelgänger for Brady Corbet. cf. Haneke's Funny Games redux — a terrible movie but which sports some of the most beautiful compositions and lighting (by way of Darius Khondji) so go figure.

(2) Sex-trafficking. An undercurrent of the film. When Michael Pitt's character, Ian Gray, takes up residence in the Indian hotel he encounters a sick-priest played by Tom Cruise's cousin, William Mapother, done up like Dano in There Will Be Blood. He tells Pitt he's in town for "sales" and that it's all in accordance with the big man up above. Later Pitt with Kashish ("Salomina") will avoid the hotel elevator when he sees that Mapother stands inside, and will take the staircase instead. One shot shows Pitt throwing a glance off-camera as though Mapother is present (or checking to see if he's present) when he brings Kashish inside his room.

(3) In a new world-of-the-movie literalized variation of screenwriting, intent begets reality, opening the door to a singular metaphysics. At the moment Àstrid Bergès-Frisbey ("Sofi") does her schtick in the stuck-elevator (which makes the first 30 minutes of the movie exasperating, but it's only a red-herring), Pitt snaps and proclaims her "a child". After the brilliant and only appropriate usage in a movie I can think of of a Radiohead track, "Motion Picture Soundtrack," the closer of Kid A (the greatest album "of a life"), Pitt will have adopted Kashish.

(4) More maybe soon

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Cool Apocalypse

Therapy and Depictions

Michael Glover Smith's 2015 feature reboots the saga of some of the earliest Mumblecores: traits variously include dancing in Chicago, black-and-white images high and low contrast, cheap living on low wages, and a primary leisure activity involving kitchen table conversation. Swap Chicago for Paris and Cool Apocalypse reboots the earliest Nouvelles Vagues, most especially the first film in the movement as it's most commonly understood (when it is neither Vigo nor Renoir), Présentation, ou Charlotte et son steak by Éric Rohmer (silent version and image edit completed 1951, sound version completed 1961).

With its two pairs of 20-something couples, Cool Apocalypse smashes together the modern no-to-micro-budget relationship-film with the love story as I've historically understood it, from '60s Godard through the Carax of Boy Meets Girl and beyond. As such, it comes full-circle with both American independent cinema's significant recent past (Joe Swanberg's Young American Bodies and Kissing on the Mouth, Frank V. Ross's Present Company, Andrew Bujalski's Mutual Appreciation) and its present (the relationship-film-meets-love-stories of Swanberg's Happy Christmas and Digging for Fire). One couple (Tess [Chelsea David] and Claudio [Adam Overberg]) act out a relationship-film, the other (Julie [Nina Ganet] and Paul [Kevin Wehby]) a love story. The dynamic, the tension, between the idioms offers a critique, intentional or not, on the current and (at least at present) seemingly endless procession of slow-burn character-studies that involve "dramatic conflict" as the crux of worthwhile "dramatic" art. The love story portion of the picture corrects the relationship-film portion and ultimately resolves in an "all's right with the world" ending like a breath of fresh air.

Nina Ganet, of the love-story element, is as captivating as a Rohmer heroine: specifically, her lean-in and natural goodwill remind me of Katerina Diaskalou of Triple Agent without the cloying reliances that I still have not been able to reconcile with my love for Rohmer and that film in particular. There is in Cool Apocalypse even a shock moment, or beat, that would not be out of place in either Rohmer or perhaps even Rivette and which involves a cane and a wineglass.

I mentioned therapy against depictions; I want to say that the love-film is an act of therapy, and that the relationship film is a mere depiction of reality. The designations might be reversed; note for further elaboration. For now I will quote Godard in Adieu au langage, who says: "Those who lack imagination feel the need to take refuge in reality." I believe this trait to be endemic of most of the present American (truly) independent cinema and represents a kind of fall from the age of the earliest Mumblecores, such as their legacy as been misunderstood by a great deal of post-Swanberg post-Bujalski would-bes.

Love-ideal v. real(ationship)politik?

Yet in Smith's film the composite parts: the restaurant, the bookstore, the kitchen, the smoking balcony, the sidewalk: everything seems a quotation and a new instillment. The nocturnia of the film, too, recalls implicitly a kinship with another Chicago picture of recent vintage that searches for a new path, that is, a new way out: Vishnevetsky's Ellie Lumme.

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Rest in Peace Forever David Bowie. Image from Leos Carax's Mauvais sang [Bad Blood, 1986].

"I'm standing in the wind / But I never wave bye-bye / But I try — / I try —

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All the Cinema I Watched in 2015

24 Exposures [Joe Swanberg, 2013]
24 heures de la vie d’un clown [24 Hours in the Life of a Clown] [Jean-Pierre Melville, 1946]
4:44: Last Day on Earth [Abel Ferrara, 2011]
65 Revisited [D. A. Pennebaker, 2006]
88:88 [Isiah Medina, 2015]
Abus de faiblesse [Abuse of Weakness] [Catherine Breillat, 2013]
Adam’s Rib [George Cukor, 1949]
The Adventurer [Charles Chaplin, 1917]
Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes [Aguirre, the Wrath of God] [Werner Herzog, 1972]
Aimer, boire et chanter [To Love, Drink and Sing] [Alain Resnais, 2014]
Alone Together [Jacob Pinger, 2015]
Als ich tot war [When I Was Dead] [Ernst Lubitsch, 1916]
American Guerrilla in the Philippines [Fritz Lang, 1950]
American Psycho [Mary Harron, 2000]
Un amour de jeunesse [A Youthful Love] [Mia Hansen-Løve, 2011]
Assault on Precinct 13 [John Carpenter, 1976]
Atari: Game Over [Zak Penn, 2014]
L’avenir du cinéma [The Future of Cinema] [Catherine Breillat, 2013]
L’avventura [The Adventure / The Fling] [Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960]
Baby [D. A. Pennebaker, 1954]
Banshun [Late Spring] [Yasujirô Ozu, 1949]
Barbe Bleue [Catherine Breillat, 2009]
Behinderte Zukunft, zur Situation der körperbehinderten Kinder in der Bundesrepublik [Handicapped Future: On the Situation of Physically Handicapped Children in the Bundesrepublik] [Werner Herzog, Hans-Peter Meier, and Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein, 1970]
Behind the Screen [Charles Chaplin, 1916]
La Belle Endormie [The Sleeping Beauty] [Catherine Breillat, 2010]
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt [Fritz Lang, 1956]
Il bidone [The Swindle] [Federico Fellini, 1955]
Black Mass [Scott Cooper, 2015]
Black Panthers {English-Language Version} [Agnès Varda, 1968]
Blondes in the Jungle [Lev Kalman and Whit Horn, 2009]
Boston Fire [Peter Hutton, 1979]
Bridge of Spies [Steven Spielberg, 2015]
A Brief History of Time [Errol Morris, 1991]
Broken Arrow [Delmer Daves, 1950]
Casa de lava [Lava Home] [Pedro Costa, 1994]
Cavalo Dinheiro [Horse Money] [Pedro Costa, 2014]
CCDT Presents: Rehearsal: Season 2 [Alex Fischer, 2015]
Une chambre en ville [A Room in Town] [Jacques Demy, 1982]
Charli XCX: “Famous” [Eric Wareheim, 2015]
Le chemineau [The Vagabond] [Albert Capellani, 1905]
A Christmas Carol [Edwin L. Marin, 1938]
A Christmas Carol [Clive Donner, 1984]
Chuck-A-Luck [Fritz Lang, 1952]
Cike Nie Yinniang [The Assassin Nie Yinniang] [Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2015]
Cinéma Cinémas: ‘Jour de fête,’ à la recherche de la couleur perdue [Cinéma Cinémas: ‘Jour de fête’: In Search of Lost Color] [Claude Ventura and François Ede, 1988]
Ciné Regards: Jacques Tati [André S. Labarthe, 1978]
City for Conquest [Anatole Litvak, 1940]
Clouds of Sils Maria [Olivier Assayas, 2014]
I clowns [The Clowns] [Federico Fellini, 1970]
Cobra Verde [Werner Herzog, 1987]
Colleen [Alfred E. Green, 1936]
Color Guard [James Alexander Warren, 2015]
The Conjuring [Andrew Wan, 2013]
Cool Apocalypse [Michael Glover Smith, 2015]
The Counselor [Ridley Scott, 2013]
The Count [Charles Chaplin, 1916]
Cours du soir [Evening Classes] [Jacques Tati and Nicolas Rybowski, 1967]
Les croix de bois [Wooden Crosses] [Raymond Bernard, 1932]
Crystal Voyager [David Elfick and George Greenough, 1973]
The Cure [Charles Chaplin, 1917]
Dangerous Money [Terry O. Morse, 1946]
Dave Lambert: Audition at RCA [D. A. Pennebaker, 1964]
Dawn [Rose McGowan, 2014]
Daybreak Express [D. A. Pennebaker, 1958]
Dead Man on Campus [Alan Cohn, 1998]
Decker 3: Decker vs. Dracula [Gregg Turkington, 2015]
Decker: Port of Call: Hawaii [Tim Heidecker, 2015]
Decker vs Dracula: Behind the Truth [Tim Heidecker, 2015]
Decker vs Dracula: The Lost Works [Gregg Turkington, 2015]
Dégustation maison [House Specialty] [Sophie Tatischeff, 1977]
Dent May: “I’ll Be Stoned for Christmas” [Robbie Hillyer Barnett, 2015]
Designing Woman [Vincente Minnelli, 1957]
A Diary for Timothy [Humphrey Jennings, 1946]
Digging for Fire [Joe Swanberg, 2015]
Dinner at Eight [George Cukor, 1933]
Documenteur: An Emotion Picture {Bilingual Version} [Agnès Varda, 1981]
La dolce vita [The Sweet Life] [Federico Fellini, 1960]
Dont Look Back [D. A. Pennebaker, 1967]
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde [John S. Robertson, 1920]
Easy Street [Charles Chaplin, 1916]
L’école des facteurs [Postmen’s School] [Jacques Tati, 1946]
L’Éden et après [L’Éden and After] [Alain Robbe-Grillet, 1970]
The Eighty Days [Humphrey Jennings, 1944]
Ellie Lumme [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, 2014]
Enough Said [Nicole Holofcener, 2013]
Entertainment [Rick Alverson, 2015]
Escape from Tomorrow [Randy Moore, 2013]
The Fall of Babylon [D. W. Griffith, 1919]
Fata Morgana [Werner Herzog, 1971]
Faust, eine deutsche Volkssage. [Faust: A German Folktale.] {Domestic German Version} [F. W. Murnau, 1926]
Fa yeung nin wa [The Age of Blossoms / Those Wonderful Varied Years] [Wong Kar-wai, 2000]
Fellini-Satyricon [Federico Fellini, 1969]
Fitzcarraldo [Werner Herzog, 1982]
The Fireman [Charles Chaplin, 1916]
flight [Les LeVeque, 1998]
Forza Bastia 78, ou l’Île en fête [Forza Bastia 78, or: The Festive Island] [Jacques Tati and Sophie Tatischeff, 1978/2000]
Frau im Mond. [Woman in the Moon.] [Fritz Lang, 1929]
A Free Soul [Clarence Brown, 1931]
Fulta Fisher’s Boarding House [Frank Capra, 1921]
Gai dimanche! [Cheery Sunday!] [Jacques Berr, 1935]
The Gang’s All Here [Busby Berkeley, 1943]
Ganja & Hess [Bill Gunn, 1973]
Ghostbusters [Ivan Reitman, 1984]
Ghosting [Kim Sherman, 2015]
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night [Ana Lily Amirpour, 2014]
Giulietta degli spiriti [Giulietta of the Spirits] [Federico Fellini, 1966]
Glaube und Währung [Faith and Currency] [Werner Herzog, 1980]
Glissements progressifs du plaisirs [Successive Slidings of Pleasure] [Alain Robbe-Grillet, 1974]
Golden Casket [Doug Lussenhop, 2015]
Grand Hotel [Edmund Goulding, 1932]
Grimes: “Flesh Without Blood / Life in the Vivid Dream” [Grimes, 2015]
Die große Ekstase des Bildschnitzers Steiner [The Great Ecstasy of the Figure-Carver Steiner] [Werner Herzog, 1975]
Halloween III: Season of the Witch [Tommy Lee Wallace, 1982]
Hapax Legomena: 1: (nostalgia) [Hollis Frampton, 1971]
Hapax Legomena: 2: Poetic Justice [Hollis Frampton, 1972]
Hapax Legomena: 3: Critical Mass [Hollis Frampton, 1971]
The Haunting [Robert Wise, 1963]
Heaven Knows What [Josh Safdie and Benny Safdie, 2014]
Les herbes folles [Wild Grass] [Alain Resnais, 2009]
Her Cardboard Lover [George Cukor, 1942]
Hernia [Jason Giampietro, 2015]
Her Wilderness [Frank Mosley, 2014]
Herz aus Glas [Heart of Glass] [Werner Herzog, 1976]
Hijôsen no onna [Dragnet Girl] [Yasujirô Ozu, 1933]
The Hills Have Eyes [Wes Craven, 1977]
Hiroshima mon amour [Hiroshima My Love] [Alain Resnais, 1959]
Hogaraka ni ayume [Walk Cheerfully] [Yasujirô Ozu, 1930]
L’homme qui ment [The Lying Man] [Alain Robbe-Grillet, 1968]
Horrible Bosses 2 [Sean Anders, 2014]
Horse Feathers [Norman Z. McLeod, 1932]
House [Steve Miner, 1986]
House of Dark Shadows [Dan Curtis, 1970]
The House of Seven Corpses [Paul Harrison, 1974]
How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck…: Beobachtungen zu einer neuen Sprache [How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck…: Observations on a New Language] [Werner Herzog, 1976]
How to Fix the World [Jacqueline Goss, 2004]
Hua yang ne nian hua [The Time of ‘The Age of Blossoms / Those Wonderful Varied Years’] [Wong Kar-wai, 2001]
The Ides of March [George Clooney, 2011]
I Love You, Alice B. Toklas [Hy Averback, 1968]
The Immigrant [Charles Chaplin, 1917]
The Immortal Story [Orson Welles, 1968]
L’immortelle [The Immortal] [Alain Robbe-Grillet, 1963]
Ingmar Bergman: Reflections on Life, Love and Death: With Erland Josephson [Stefan Brann, 2000]
Inherent Vice [Paul Thomas Anderson, 2014]
The Innocents [Jack Clayton, 1961]
Intolerance: Love’s Struggle Throughout the Ages [D. W. Griffith, 1916]
Is Marriage Necessary? [aka “The Palm Beach Story”] [Preston Sturges, 1942]
It Happened One Night [Frank Capra, 1934]
Jailhouse Rock [Richard Thorpe, 1957]
Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle [Every Man for Himself and God Against Everyone] [Werner Herzog, 1974]
The Jinx [Andrew Jarecki, 2015]
Joanna Newsom: “Divers” [Paul Thomas Anderson, 2015]
Joanna Newsom: “Sapokanikan” [Paul Thomas Anderson, 2015]
Jour de fête [Fête Day] {Tati’s Intended Color Version} [Jacques Tati, 1949]
Koroshi no rakuin [Branded to Kill] [Seijun Suzuki, 1967]
The Lady Vanishes [Alfred Hitchcock, 1938]
Laila [George Schnéevoigt, 1929]
Land des Schweigens und der Dunkelheit, aus dem Leben der taubblinden Fini Straubinger [Land of Silence and Darkness: From the Life of the Deaf-Blind Fini Straubinger] [Werner Herzog, 1971]
The Last Days of Disco [Whit Stillman, 1998]
The Last House on the Left [Wes Craven, 1972]
The Legend of Cambo [Harmony Korine, 2015]
Less [Hollis Frampton, 1973]
A Letter to Three Wives [Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1949]
Limelight [Charles Chaplin, 1952]
Lions Love… and Lies / Lions Love [Agnès Varda, 1969]
Lolita [Stanley Kubrick, 1962]
Louie: Season 5 [Louis C.K., 2015]
Louis C.K.: Live at The Comedy Store [Louis C.K., 2015]
Love & Mercy [Bill Pohlad, 2015]
Love Streams [John Cassavetes, 1984]
Madame Dubarry [Ernst Lubitsch, 1919]
Mad Max: Fury Road [George Miller, 2015]
Magellan: The Birth of Magellan: Day 0XX = 30 Dec: The Birth of Magellan: Candenza 1 [Hollis Frampton, 1980]
Magellan: Straits of Magellan: Day 000 = 1 Jan: Pan 0 [Hollis Frampton, 1974]
Magellan: Straits of Magellan: Day 000 = 1 Jan: Pan 1: Light Pull Pendulum 1/74 Eaton [Hollis Frampton, 1974]
Man of the West [Anthony Mann, 1958]
Manual of Arms [Hollis Frampton, 1966]
The Martian [Ridley Scott, 2015]
Marty [Delbert Mann, 1955]
Master of None: Season 1 [Aziz Ansari and Alan Yang, et al, 2015]
Mauvais sang [Bad Blood] [Leos Carax, 1986]
Medium Cool [Haskell Wexler, 1969]
Meet Me in St. Louis [Vincente Minnelli, 1943]
Meet the Fockers [Jay Roach, 2004]
Message de salutations: Prix suisse / remerciements / mort ou vif [Message of Greetings: Prix suisse / Many Thanks / Dead or Alive] [Jean-Luc Godard, 2015]
Metropolis [Fritz Lang, 1927]
Les misérables [The Wretched] [Raymond Bernard, 1934]
Mon oncle [My Uncle] [Jacques Tati, 1958]
Moonfleet [Fritz Lang, 1955]
The More the Merrier [George Stevens, 1943]
The Mother and the Law [D. W. Griffith, 1919]
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington [Frank Capra, 1939]
Mr X [Tessa Louise-Salomé, 2014]
Muck [Bruce Smolanoff, 2015]
Mulberry St. [Abel Ferrara, 2010]
Mur murs {Blingual Version} [Agnès Varda, 1980]
Myra Hess [Humphrey Jennings, 1945]
My Uncle [Jacques Tati, 1958]
N. a pris les dés… [N. Took the Dice…] [Alain Robbe-Grillet, 1971]
Nashville [Robert Altman, 1975]
Nathan for You: Season 3 [Nathan Fielder, et al, 2015]
New York Portrait: Chapter II [Peter Hutton, 1981]
A Night in the Show. [Charles Chaplin, 1915]
Nijushi no hitomi [Twenty-Four Eyes’ Irises] [Keisuke Kinoshita, 1954]
No quarto da Vanda [In Vanda’s Room] [Pedro Costa, 2000]
North by Northwest [Alfred Hitchcock, 1959]
Nosferatu, Phantom der Nacht [Nosferatu: Phantom of the Night] [Werner Herzog, 1979]
Nugget [Sarah Salovaara, 2015]
Obvious Child {feature film} [Gillian Robespierre, 2014]
Obvious Child {short film} [Gillian Robespierre, 2009]
Oscar Night Year 2000 [Jason Giampietro, 2009/2015]
The Offence [Sidney Lumet, 1972]
On demande une brute [A Brute Wanted] [Charles Barrois, 1934]
One A. M. [Charles Chaplin, 1916]
The Other [Robert Mulligan, 1972]
Our Daily Bread [King Vidor, 1934]
Outrage [Ida Lupino, 1950]
Paper Moon [Peter Bogdanovich, 1973]
Parade [Jacques Tati 1974]
Partie de campagne [Country Outing] [Jean Renoir, 1936]
The Pawnshop [Charles Chaplin, 1916]
Peau d’Âne [Jacques Demy, 1970]
Le père de mes enfants [The Father of My Children] [Mia Hansen-Løve, 2009]
Pet Therapy [Catherine Orchard, 2015]
Pickup on South Street [Samuel Fuller, 1953]
Playground Love [Sofia Coppola, 1999]
PlayTime [Jacques Tati, 1967]
The Postman Always Rings Twice [Tay Garnett, 1946]
Private Resort [George Bowers, 1985]
The Professor [Charles Chaplin, 1919]
Queen of Earth [Alex Ross Perry, 2015]
Quelques remarques sur la réalisation et la production du film 'Sauve qui peut (la vie)' [A Few Remarks on the Direction and Production of the Film ‘Sauve qui peut (la vie)’] [Jean-Luc Godard, 1979]
Ransom! [Alex Segal, 1956]
Resident Evil: Extinction [Russell Mulcahy, 2007]
Results [Andrew Bujalski, 2015]
Ride the Pink Horse [Robert Montgomery, 1947]
The Right & Left Brains of Casey Jane’s [Casey Jane Ellison, 2015]
The Rink [Charles Chaplin, 1916]
The Rise and Fall of The Clash [Danny Garcia, 2012]
The Rover [David Michôd, 2014]
Sabbatical [Brandon Colvin, 2014]
Saint Laurent [Bertrand Bonello, 2014]
Salem’s Lot [Tobe Hooper, 1979]
Sauve qui peut (la vie) [Jean-Luc Godard, 1979]
The Scary Movie [Peggy Ahwesh, 1993]
Secret Beyond the Door… [Fritz Lang, 1947]
Secret in Their Eyes [Billy Ray, 2015]
Seishun zankoku monogatari [A Tale of the Cruelties of Youth] [Nagisa Ôshima, 1960]
Sequence: Four Short Stories [James Alexander Warren, 2014]
Shoah [Claude Lanzmann, 1985]
The Shop Around the Corner [Ernst Lubitsch, 1940]
Le silence de la mer [The Silence of the Sea] [Jean-Pierre Melville, 1949]
Silicon Valley: Season 2 [Mike Judge, et al, 2015]
The Sisters [Anatole Litvak, 1938]
The Sleepwalker [Mona Fastvold, 2014]
Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman [Stuart Heisler, 1946]
Snow White and the Huntsman [Rupert Sanders, 2012]
Soigne ton gauche [Keep Your Left Up] [René Clément, 1938]
Someone’s Watching Me! [John Carpenter, 1978]
Sono yo no tsuma [That Night’s Wife] [Yasujirô Ozu, 1930]
Sous le nom de Melville [Under the Name of Melville] [Olivier Bohler, 2008]
The Spectacular Now [James Ponsoldt, 2013]
Spione [Spies] [Fritz Lang, 1928]
Spotlight [Tom McCarthy, 2015]
Spring Breakers [Harmony Korine, 2012]
Stalag 17 [Billy Wilder, 1953]
Stroszek [Werner Herzog, 1977]
Sullivan’s Travels [Preston Sturges, 1941]
Summer of Blood [Onur Tukel, 2014]
The Swarm [Irwin Allen, 1978]
Tagebuch einer Verlorenen [Diary of a Lost Girl] [G. W. Pabst, 1929]
The Tall Target [Anthony Mann, 1951]
Telephone Me [Michael Demetriou, 2014]
The Thief of Bagdad: An Arabian Nights Fantasy [Douglas Fairbanks and Raoul Walsh, 1924]
The Thin Red Line [Terrence Malick, 1998]
Tim & Eric’s Bedtime Stories: Sauce Boy [Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim, 2015]
Tim & Eric’s Bedtime Stories: Tornado [Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim, 2015]
Time [Theodore Collatos, 2015]
Tokyo-Ga, ein gefilmtes Tagebuch. [Tokyo-Ga: A Filmed Diary.] {English-Language Version} [Wim Wenders, 1985]
Tôkyô monogatari [A Tale of Tokyo] [Yasujirô Ozu, 1953]
Tôkyô nagaremono [Tokyo Drifter] [Seijun Suzuki, 1966]
To the Wonder [Terrence Malick, 2012]
Touch of Evil [Orson Welles, 1958]
Trade Winds [Tay Garnett, 1938]
Trafic [Traffic / Circulation] [Jacques Tati, 1971]
Trans-Europ-Express [Alain Robbe-Grillet, 1966]
The Tree of Life [Terrence Malick, 2011]
The True Story of Lili Marlene [Humphrey Jennings, 1944]
Two for the Road [Stanley Donen, 1967]
Two on the Guillotine [William Conrad, 1965]
Uncle Yanco {Bilingual Version} [Agnès Varda, 1967]
Under the Skin [Jonathan Glazer, 2013]
L’univers de Jacques Demy [The Universe of Jacques Demy] [Agnès Varda, 1995]
V.1. [Humphrey Jennings, 1944]
Les vacances de Monsieur Hulot [Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday] [Jacques Tati, 1953/1978]
The Vagabond [Charles Chaplin, 1916]
Valerie a týden divů [Valerie and Her Week of Wonders] [Jaromil Jireš, 1970]
Veep: Season 4 [Armando Iannucci, et al, 2015]
Violent Saturday [Richard Fleischer, 1955]
The Virgin Suicides [Sofia Coppola, 1999]
Viskningar och rop [Whispers and Cries] [Ingmar Bergman, 1972]
Un vivant qui passe [A Living Being Passing Through] [Claude Lanzmann, 1997]
Vous n’avez encore rien vu [You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet] [Alain Resnais, 2012]
Wedding Crashers [David Dobkin, 2005]
Welcome to New York {Complete 2h 5m cut} [Abel Ferrara, 2014]
We’ll Find Something [Casey Gooden, 2015]
Western Union [Fritz Lang, 1941]
While the City Sleeps [Fritz Lang, 1956]
While We’re Young [Noah Baumbach, 2014]
Whiplash [Damien Chazelle, 2014]
Wild Canaries [Lawrence Michael Levine, 2015]
Wild Orchids [Sidney Franklin, 1929]
Wild River [Elia Kazan, 1960]
The Wind [Victor Sjöström, 1928]
The Winds That Scatter [Christopher Jason Bell, 2015]
W/ Bob and David: Season 1 [Bob Odenkirk and David Cross, et al, 2015]
Woman of the Year [George Stevens, 1942]
The Woman with a Whip {aka ‘Forty Guns’} [Samuel Fuller, 1957]
A Wonderful Cloud [Eugene Kotlyarenko, 2015]
Woyzeck [Werner Herzog, 1979]
Yajû no seishun [Youth of the Beast] [Seijun Suzuki, 1963]
You and Me [Fritz Lang, 1938]

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Her Wilderness

"In the sound of a few leaves"

I came away from my first viewing of Frank Mosley's 2014 feature Her Wilderness nonplussed, questioning whether its tack wasn't to formulate clichéd (albeit good-faith) provocations à la recent 'experimental' microbudget cinema. I expressed my frustrations to Frank, and he responded with a spirited, articulate defense of his picture. And why shouldn't he? Every film should speak for itself, but when a director gets put on the spot, he should be able to stand his ground, say, "Think what you will, and take what you will from my telling you this was my impetus — ..." After that I watched it twice more: which is all it took — both times I thought it was a terrific film. I asked him why he chose to describe the picture as an experimental narrative, that wasn't he only pigeon-holing himself or leading the potential audience, or rather potentially drawing only a certain sort of audience. He replied that if anything, it was more of a way to pre-emptively alert festival programmers screening the submission that they shouldn't dismiss it from having a place in their series.

For me, one of the most impressive aspects of the movie has to be the sound design and mix. It's as though all the voices in the film exist as their own entity, as though sonically the film registers as 3D in 2D: voices as an element of a foreground plane: existing at once in a vacuum but also liberated: body and soul disassociated, and in this separation, a clarity of their unity. You might think of Her Wilderness as a Joe Frank radio episode playing on top of the images, or, indeed, set to images.

The vibe of the movie and, I think, its general theme share an affinity with one of my favorite R.E.M. lyrics: "Whispered with calm, calm: 'Belong.'"

Vignettes interact: late at night or early in the morning a woman teases electrocution suicide in a bathtub after calling a male co-worker she's obsessed with, waking him up from sleep next to his pregnant wife. Her mother slips off a ladder propped against a house while she argues on her cell with the man she left a first husband for. All throughout, a little girl wanders lost in a labyrinth of trees that at last opens onto presumably the same lake shore that borders the older woman's property. A lightning storm erupts; this has been the weather of late: a fuse blew the lights out in the married couple's home.

The child is the avatar —

Water, suicide, birth, death, blood-pressure, yoga, sleep, coffee, eggs, flip-phones, electricity. Rain falls, shadows play on the wall, tree leaves dapple the sun, candlelight flickers on the ceiling above the tub, as soft light flickers cross the face of a wife. An extraordinary opening credits sequence streams for five minutes as letters slowly emerge upon stark white leader as though embossed — the full list of participants atypically placed at the front of the film so at the picture's end all that remains is a cut to white and a fade to black.

===

Like so many others, I'm really excited about the theatrical release of Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens on Thursday/Friday, and I've got my tickets for Friday afternoon. I even tuned in for the live feed of the red carpet premiere in Los Angeles on Monday evening at StarWars.com. It was fun, but there were strange technical difficulties beyond buffering that made what seemed to be an already awkward interview with George Lucas just that much more bizarre. (If viewing from a computer, click to view on YouTube, as Blogger technology is ten-years outdated and won't scale the embedded-version to the content area.)



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Au revoir Chantal: Philippe Garrel Remembers Chantal Akerman

The following is my translation from the original French of a piece that appeared in the November 2015 issue of the Cahiers du cinéma. Thank you to Gabe Klinger, who is finishing his first feature in Paris now, for the heads-up. And thank you to Jean-Philippe Tessé, co-editor-in-chief of the Cahiers, for allowing me to print this translation here. Please check out the December issue for, among other highlights, its potent cover image by Luz.

"It was in New York, the morning of the New York Film Festival screening of L'ombre des femmes, that Philippe Garrel learned of the death of Chantal Akerman. The same evening, he presented his film to the New York audience with a few moving words for she who was among the five filmmakers of her generation that had come together in Les ministères de l'art [1988]. It was also in New York that he discovered No Home Movie, her final film. The next day, Philippe Garrel granted us a long interview, during which he quickly revealed at which point his life and his work are inextricable from those of his friend Chantal. The title of this interview is his. —Nicholas Elliott"

The Underground

The first time I met Chantal was at Frédéric Mitterrand's Olympic cinema. She came down the stairs that led from the booth in wooden clogs. She was very young. I saw right away that this was a girl of extraordinary intelligence. For Chantal and me, and whenever we got together you could tell, the greatest pleasure in life was intelligence. Nothing can stop someone from thinking, such are the conditions of freedom, and thinking is something that is extremely exciting. But for people who look at the world only as a mirror for intelligence, it's also a form of solitude. When you connect on that level, inevitably there's a kind of attraction. That's why we had Godard as our master. Not because he was the most talented of the Nouvelle Vague. Truffaut had as much talent as him, but for us Godard was the most intelligent. We looked at Godard as the greatest modern filmmaker.

We're the only two to have started out as teenagers. We were the youngest two filmmakers out of anyone. This was a source of great pride. It created a tremendous bond between us. When I saw Saute ma ville, I thought it was extraordinary. It was in 35, in black and white; it was exactly like the twin of Les enfants désaccordés. That's typical: if someone's making films at 16 or 18 years old, he has an outlook on the world that's incapable of imitating someone who's 25-30 years old. On that point Chantal and I connected immediately. We weren't trying to make our way in cinema. We just wanted to make cinema in a different way. We're the only two inside the post-Nouvelle Vague movement to have belonged to the counterculture.

So what binds Chantal and me together isn't just the generation — Doillon, Eustache, Téchiné, Jacquot — it's that we're the only two to have belonged during a decade in the underground. Chantal was an underground filmmaker, but that wasn't our aim when we were making Saute ma ville or Les enfants désaccordés. It's '68 that put us in the underground. Your generation has to understand that it's not because we were forced into the underground, it's because after '68 we didn't want to show our films to a mass audience. We thought that was a vulgar job, as a matter of critiquing the society of the spectacle. We joined up with a movement whose idea was circulation purely by word-of-mouth. It was a really peculiar thing, with an elitism that didn't belong to the bourgeoisie, nor to social success, nor even to the conquest of any run-of-the-mill power structure. We tried to remain a secret. It didn't last just for one film; we were all committed with the idea of staying that way for the rest of our lives. Even Jeanne Dielman is the story of a star, Delphine Seyrig, accepting to work for an underground filmmaker, just as Jean Seberg accepted working with me in the same period for Les hautes solitudes. In the underground, if there was ever a get-together, the well-known people weren't the stars of the party; on the contrary, they were slightly ashamed. An artist as unknown as they were known was superior, by very virtue of the fact. Chantal was in this category. When we were known by only a few people, as was the case with Chantal, famous people were deferential to us, as though we were pure. And as though they had already watered down their wine. So we weren't frustrated at being unknown, because on top of that we managed to construct a work at home. It's a movement of refusal, the underground — it's not a movement of compensation.

The Industrial Cinema

Afterwards there's another person who contacted us — Hubert Bals, the creator of the Rotterdam Festival. He invited all the marginal and underground filmmakers. He had a hotel-boat for the invitees, a building with several movie theaters, and a live closed-circuit television where there'd always be the image of a filmmaker talking. And filmmakers from around the world, but underground. Chantal and I were at every festival. There was also Fassbinder and Godard, who always arrived like the Grand Manitou.

When we leave the underground, it's around the time I make L'enfant secret in '79 and I get the Vigo in '81, and Chantal manages to sign with Gaumont for Les rendez-vous d'Anna thanks to the cultural success of Jeanne Dielman. That's where we emerged from the underground and afterwards, bang, in the '80s, we enter the ordinary, classical cinema, but as we're still greatly influenced by the avant-garde, it remains completely abstruse to people. Even still, afterwards we had a little bit of nostalgia for self-produced films. Her most beautiful film of the '70s is News from Home — that's one of the self-produced films. For me, there's Les hautes solitudes. We told each other that still, it's not making the same kind of films when we're produced. At that point, Chantal and I had even more of a bond as industrial directors — industrial and avant-gardist, mixed. I made Les ministères de l'art, in which I made the synthesis of our generation. After that we met Marco Müller, who became the director of Venice. He came looking for me in my editing suite when I was making Les baisers de secours, and then he went looking for Chantal. It's a little as if we'd had the same people helping us out — Langlois, who screened Chantal at the Cinémathèque, then Marco Müller. There'd been a period in which we made films for Venice and we'd cross paths down there. We only ran into one another with finished films, not in the factory. It was always one film under our arms, one new film under our arms.

We weren't at all jealous of one another; just the opposite. I was laughing, saying if Chantal hadn't liked women, I would have married her. I thought she was an extraordinary woman.

We made the anthology film Paris vu par... 20 ans après. Frédéric Mitterrand calls me up after '81 — it's almost certain, since he has the same name as the president, that he can just go to a bank and say he wants to make a film — he tells me he's going to make an omnibus film, very quickly, and that there will be me and Chantal. As soon as he says Chantal, I say okay, and I get moving. What was fun was racing against Chantal. I love competition. He explained to us that he was going to do it like Barbet Schroeder did with Paris vu par..., that we were going to make the film in blown-up color 16mm, and that each of us was going to choose a neighborhood. I'm making Rue Fontaine, I'm in my editing suite, and I'm told Chantal has left the project: "Oh, you know, she finally got to shoot in 35 black-and-white." "Oh shit, I'm finished!" And that's the truth: J'ai faim, j'ai froid is one of her masterpieces. The films of hers I love are Les rendez-vous d'Anna, Jeanne Dielman, News from Home, Saute ma ville, La captive, and J'ai faim, j'ai froid. And No Home Movie. She won. Very strong, Chantal. It's magnificent. J'ai faim, j'ai froid. The two girls in the street saying: "There's no work."

A Loss for Art

If again we take Les ministères de l'art, between Jean [Eustache] who committed suicide in 1981 and her in 2015, it's strange, this kind of distress. And then there's me, who makes four films with people who kill themselves in fiction. I don't know why this is. I'm not suicidal at all. I think one has the right, that's all. But it really makes you think, the fact that among the six, the first two mentioned would go by their own hand. It's something that didn't exist in the Nouvelle Vague. All this is very complicated. Deleuze would still have to be among us to say alright, we'll try and write about this.

When I made Les ministères de l'art, it really had to do with Eustache, I already told that story. In May '81 I had him on the phone, and I told him things were going to change, that he was going to have more money. He was in despair, he was living in a shoebox, he no longer had any money after the failure of Petites amoureuses. Because Jean didn't come from the underground, he hadn't started out invisible. He always found a way into theaters. To try and draw a moral, I read him what I wrote for Les ministères: "Jean Eustache is a genius. La maman et la putain is the Règle du jeu of our generation." Now you'd have to write a Ministères de l'art Part Two: "Chantal Akerman was the most intelligent among us and the sole female."

I think she did this according to a private plan, having no regard for us. But it's also a loss for art. It's a loss for art because the people who are very nonconformist from the time they're children — Chantal was at the head of the class, but a bit apart, just like me — all the people who are incapable of being satisfied with life such as it is, it's art that is their saving grace. I for one was saved when I was given a sheet of Canson big as the table, and some gouache, and I had the right to do what I wanted and if I got myself messy it didn't matter... It's like in Saute ma ville, when she polishes her shoes and doesn't care that there's polish everywhere, before turning on the gas... The fact that art could be freedom to act saved people like me and her. And normally it saves them on the scale of existence. It might even be more than that. Now like I'm involved in the field of cinema studies, if someone told me you have three years left, I'd think that I'd have a reason for occupying them with cinema. It's a field in which life gets short by relation to the complexity of what it is, art; it's at once having the right to express oneself and to translate the world...

It's a loss for art in the sense that there's considerably enough work for a lifetime's worth, in the sense of an exciting kind of work, not as an obligation. Jean Eustache's suicide, same thing — it's a defeat. But what one really has to see — and here one can make a critique — it's that art is incredibly useful to our civilization but doesn't receive enough support. You have to know that Adieu au langage cost 400,000 euros, while the average film here costs 2 million. How is it that the greatest filmmaker in the world has the smallest budget in his native country? As Chantal demonstrated with films like News from Home, you always have to work with the budget found and which is granted to us, but to almost always experience an absence of budget, even if Chantal managed to survive and was no longer completely flush, the fact that she didn't have the budget to make a film, that's a joke. It's a place we're looked at from. Compared to Eustache, after Mes petites amoureuses, he makes Une sale histoire. It's made for next to nothing. It's like with Chantal. These are films made on the scale of a private life. But if Chantal still made those kind of films, it was no longer a matter of choice, as the underground no longer exists; it was really because she couldn't do otherwise.

Doing Otherwise

What's brilliant in Chantal — it's there too in Duras with India Song, is how she truly invents a cinema on the cheap: silent, with a voice-over, as in News from Home. Sync-sound slows down the creation of a film a great deal and is extremely expensive. It's not just multiplied by two — you can do a silent movie all on your own. When I made Les hautes solitudes, there were no technicians. If you make a movie all by yourself, you can be in the room sleeping with the actress and you're making the film. You can't bring a crew over to people's house. Chantal made films like that. Even in No Home Movie, she has her camera, with digital sound — she takes care of everything by herself. That's what makes a different cinema. The others of the post-Nouvelle Vague never practiced that kind of cinema. There's only Chantal and me. We thought it was very interesting because it never existed before then. When we had problems, all we did was downscale. Better shooting alone with professional material, which was the case with Chantal. The evidence is that the majority of the others remained stymied for several years because they didn't find a producer, whereas we had to keep on a roll or we'd be tanked once again — but we never stopped shooting. Chantal made forty films. It's mindboggling. I think I've made twenty-eight or twenty-nine. If we waited to have them properly produced, we never would have made them. For Chantal, she managed to exist within the D-system, but truly the D-system, while inventing a way of making films in a different way. That her last film should be as it is, that she'd made it all on her own... voilà, quoi.

The Cinema According to Mama

Inbetween our running into each other at the Olympic and the point I see her over and over again at Rotterdam, I remember I was at my mother's house. The TV was on and Chantal came on to speak about Jeanne Dielman. My mother says: "This woman, she's something, Philippe." For me, that was the cinema according to mama. With respect to the fact that you have to make a humanist cinema — it's not everything just to have talent.

Yesterday seeing No Home Movie, the whole time I thought about my mother's death. What was extraordinary in Chantal's cinema is that she proves that we're all the same, we all live through the same thing. It's much stronger than "I don't think the same way as you do." You need people who say this when they're young, but No Home Movie is: "we all live through the same thing." Our parents' agony, the love that's capable of bonding us to them. All the discussions between Chantal and her mama, her mother's attitude, even her advanced stage of decrepitude, is exactly what I just saw my mother in a year and a half ago before starting production on Les ombres des femmes. She was dead five days before shooting began, and as this is an industry I had to go to the set. It's as though Chantal lived everything I lived: the chaise-lounge, the mama who wants to sleep because she's exhausted, the mama who's very proud, the connection of love... What's very strong in Chantal is that she draws from a modern tradition to tell us that we're all from the same stream, we're alive here, and she makes it so by way of art. People criticized the fact that Delphine Seyrig peeled potatoes and did the dishes in Jeanne Dielman. But we all peel potatoes — we all do the dishes — and Chantal introduced the idea of making a work of art out of this, all while speaking with talent.

Chantal had two arts: cinema and literature. Her first novel, Ma mère rit, is the major work of the last part of her life. Fantastic. The year before the release of her book, Chantal was reading it at the Châtelet during the Nuit Blanche. People came by at 1 in the morning. She was alone on the stage in the middle of reading Ma mère rit. When I was there I felt she had again become an artiste maudite, doing a performance, all by herself. Afterwards, I read Ma mère rit and I was cut into two. I gave the book to my mother. It's the last book she read.

She's something else, Chantal... For me, there were very few people like her. There's Leos. There's Godard. There's Jacques Doillon. It's become emotional; it's not just artistic. It's a little like the beginning of my own end. I tell myself I really only have twenty more years to make films. And her death will be like Eustache's death. A decisive moment that shows that the cinema too is a drama. •

===

From The New York Times, November 8, 2015:

"Spectre, the latest James Bond thriller, took in about $73 million in ticket sales at domestic theaters over the weekend, giving Hollywood one of its biggest openings of the year, even though sales were down sharply from those for Skyfall, the previous Bond movie. Spectre, the most expensive 007 installment ever, costing Sony Pictures Entertainment, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Eon Productions roughly $400 million to make and market, has taken in an additional $223 million overseas, breaking records."

From The New York Times, November 8, 2015:

"Filming the movie version of the novel Room, in which Joy Newsome, played by Brie Larson, and her son, Jack, played by Jacob Tremblay, are held captive in a small garden shed, was a challenge.

"About 70 crew members worked for 22 days in and around a box that was no more than 150 square feet that precisely duplicated the Newsomes’ fictional prison, somewhere in the American Midwest, right down to a working version of the bathroom plumbing.

"“Yeah, I got sick of it,” the film’s director, Lenny Abrahamson, said of the space."

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The Winds That Scatter

Escape Song

The indifference of reality, of the universe, to existence: that is one of the themes of Christopher Jason Bell's 2015 US feature The Winds That Scatter, the depiction of a Syrian refugee, Ahmad Chahrour, in search of odd jobs in the area of northern Jersey that circles Newark.

"They did not spare anyone. They killed people and destroyed the place. They killed all that walks": the words spoken by one of the men in a suburban living room get-together as he shares iPhone footage of the aftermath-carnage in Aleppo, Damascus, any town in Syria. Bashar al-Assad and Daesh have scattered Syria's sons and daughters, relegated them to lives lived inbetween: murdered at home, adrift and unwanted abroad, where only the lucky few will find the means to hashtag: NoNotAllArabs.

Small resonances of 9/11 abound in The Winds That Scatter. As Bell explained in a statement to IndieWire: "I didn't want to make yet another white male-centric film as those are quite prominent in both Hollywood and independent film. At the same time I thought it was important to portray Muslims and Arabic people in a positive light given the atmosphere in post-9/11 America. Collaboration was the key to avoiding not only the typical portrayal (terrorists) but also Orientalism.
" — Resultingly, images challenge images: "a gathering of Muslim men in a suburban house" vs. "a cell"; "a public protest denouncing Bashar" vs. Trump's "thousands celebrating"; the wreckage of what appears to be an airliner in the middle of the woods...

Then reverse the power, consider the here-and-elsewhere. Here: the demolition of buildings to make way for luxury condominiums aligned with contiguous market values. There: structures razed by continuous shelling and pell-mell catapulted barrel-bombs. In either instance only façades remain.

Two inflections then of the Mechanical. One pertains to death from sideways and above, and the ensuing flight-instinct. The other involves capital, labor, and the automaton. (This aspect of The Winds That Scatter calls to mind for me another great and politically-made film I saw recently: Abel Ferrara's Welcome to New York and its post-prologue overture of money-making at the U.S. Mint.)

The old advice given to artists is: "Write what you know." Bell chooses: "Write what you don't know" instead, that is, this white male prefers the route of exploration. There are two authors of the film, then: Bell, and Chahrour or, by extension, Chahrour's Syrian expat community. So a merging of impulses occurs: Not only to merely document the daily routines of the dispossessed, but to get inside, to live it, to understand that the small quotidian defeats cumulatively brutalize: you can't smoke in here; this trade's too complicated for you to learn the ropes...

As is already too clear at the time of this writing in December 2015, and as The Winds That Scatter further elucidates, for much of the Syrian nation and the wider Arabic population enforced diaspora is still no guarantee of escape.

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FAS: My New Short

written directed and edited by Craig Keller
starring and narrated by Stephen Gurewitz
also featuring Eliana Ceniceroz and Dan Mele
additional camerawork by Britni West and Eliana Ceniceroz
poster art by Eliana Ceniceroz and design/art-direction by Craig Keller
16 minutes / 1.78:1 (16x9) aspect ratio

ADVISORY: NSFW — Contains Mature Content & Themes

Please view in full-screen mode or at the Vimeo page itself — and feel free to share. Thanks!

FAS from Craig Keller on Vimeo.

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Eisenstein and the Graphic Question

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In Memoriam: Ron Benson (17 October 1943 – 19 October 2015)

Marion and Ron Benson, photo via Eureka & the Benson Family.

My boss and friend Ron Benson passed away on early Monday morning after a long struggle with cancer and ensuing complications. I'm grateful to have last heard from him by email this past Thursday, and to have spoken to him on the Thursday prior over Skype. We had a nice chat. Although he was speaking from his hospital room, he was in good spirits and sounded lively.

Some very brief remarks: For the nearly ten years I knew Ron, after being brought in by Nick Wrigley to work on The Masters of Cinema Series in early 2006, I was ceaselessly gob-smacked by his individuality, which zig-zagged over the course of years, months, a single given day: one half of a 10-year conversation that found room for more hilarity, warmth, exasperation, agreement and disagreement, football club updates, industry gossip, gut-instinct green-lights and red-lights, and filthy jokes goyishe/yidishe than any collaboration should rightfully anticipate. I will treasure the many trips we made together to do business at the Cannes and Berlin Film Festivals, the excellent meals we shared, and the time that friends and I were able to have spent with him and his wife Marion when the couple visited New York. To have witnessed, and often been the recipient of, his extreme loyalty, empathy, generosity, and general kindness: I'll never forget this.

Rest in peace Lord Benson.

===

The following is the eulogy read at Ron's funeral by his daughters Denise and Ruth, and reprinted at a JustGiving fundraising page set up in Ron's name to help raise awareness and money for his favorite charity, the Teenage Cancer Trust, here.

•••

Ronald, Ron, Ronny, RB, Dad, Grandpa, Bubbie and of course Lord R. Benson born in Bishop Stortford 17 October 1943 was a people person and took his personality into both business and home life. Dad could light up any room and would speak to anyone in any company at any time – and was ‘definitely’ more than happy to have an argument with anybody at any time about anything – but as everybody in this room will agree, Dad often made up, argued some more but managed to maintain friendships over many decades. He was generous in spirit and was at his happiest when he could do things to help people including his dedication to charity work in particular the Teenage Cancer Trust.

Dad was literally a self-made man from beginnings that were not that advantageous. Dad’s parents came into this country as immigrants escaping war and persecution.

From difficult beginnings Dad built a successful career, qualifying as an electrician and then running his own businesses. Always forward thinking and aware of what was happening in the world – after reading an article in the FT, he got very excited and with his passion for film he started up the video rental business (Mr Benson’s Video Collection). He was then one of the first people to enter the mail-order business (Mr Benson’s World of Home Entertainment which later became Bensonsworld), building a successful company working with all the main studios and distributors. Being the forward thinking man he saw ahead and moved on to owning intellectual properties (Eureka Entertainment) whether it be the amazing cult classics or the unseen wonders!

Although Dad’s body was riddled with cancer he put on a brave fight. Right up to the end he was determined to keep working and running his business, every second always on his phone, checking his emails, organising everyone.

Family was always very important to Dad; he would do anything for his wife of 49 years - Marion, children Denise and Ruth, his six grandchildren James, Nicole, Samuel, Matthew, Anthony, Adam and his sister Eva.

Dad was always a strong man both physically and mentally as proved by running a number of London marathons. Whether it was medical science or sheer will power – with only three months to live he managed to keep going for another year to attend and enjoy and dance his way at his Grandson Sam’s Bar Mitzva.

To sum up our Dad – A quote from an email we received yesterday from his consultant:

"It was a privilege to be Ron’s doctor - what a character! I shall never forget him. His humour shone through right to the very end. I will also treasure the copy of iPlot he gave me..."

He will always be remembered in our hearts and will never be forgotten.

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Van Gogh (Pialat) - Essay by Sabrina Marques + Words from Pialat + Godard's Letter to Pialat About the Film

The following brilliant essay and accompanying pieces originally appeared in the booklet for the 2013 Masters of Cinema UK Blu-ray release of Van Gogh [Maurice Pialat, 1991] which I produced. This was our last Pialat release to-date, and the film is Pialat's penultimate feature, considered by many perhaps his greatest.

Notes, information, and remarks by Pialat on the director's short films, which span in their entirety 1951-1966, can be found here.

Kent Jones's 2008 essay on L'enfance-nue, and my translations of accompanying interviews with Pialat can be found at this blog here.

Emmanuel Burdeau's 2009 essay on Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble, and my translations of accompanying interviews with Pialat can be found at this blog here.

Gabe Klinger's 2010 essay on Sous le soleil de Satan, and my translation of a 1987 interview with Pialat, and a 2003 interview with Sandrine Bonnaire, can be found at this blog here.

Adrian Martin's 2009 essay on La gueule ouverte, and my translation of remarks about the film, can be found at this blog here.

Dan Sallitt's 2008 essay on Police (which he considers one of his favorite pieces of his own writing) has just been posted at his blog, here. A dossier of my translations of interviews with Pialat about the film has been posted here.

Dan's 2010 MoC essay on À nos amours. has also been posted at his blog here. A visual I made for the film along with my translation of the 1984 Le Monde conversation between Maurice Pialat and Jean-Luc Godard can be found here.

My essay on Passe ton bac d'abord... — "The War of Art" — can be read here. A dossier of my translations of four interviews with Pialat around the film can be read here.

I'm posting these Pialat pieces on the occasion of the retrospective of Maurice Pialat's complete features (and the Turkish shorts) that runs from October 16 till November 1 at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens.


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Pialat & Van Gogh: Fellow Outsiders

by Sabrina Marques (2013)

“To look at the picture ought to rest the brain or rather the imagination.”
– Vincent van Gogh,
letter to his brother Théo about the painting “Bedroom in Arles”

SOCIETY'S SUICIDE

In one of his famous art history books, Gombrich portrayed Van Gogh as an artist who crossed art by faith with a “sense of mission”. He fought with his brush, he battled until the last consequences. He remained a painter even when absorbed in a desperate loneliness. He kept his freedom as few like him had. He was a “society’s suicide”, as Artaud put it. He attacked conformism and conventions with “incendiary mixtures and atom bombs”, and he became an outcast. Madness? Or an active lucidity that any medicine might have helped? A clairvoyance that his time couldn’t understand, maybe?

By the end of May 1890, Van Gogh withdrew to Auvers-sur-Oise to consult Docteur Gachet. The three months that followed were his last. Those are the humble times in the south of France we watch through Pialat’s fiction. In fact, the director had always preserved a special interest for the Dutch painter. Almost thirty years before, he had already directed a documentary short-film named Van Gogh [1965] included in the series Chroniques en France. And in À nos amours. [Here’s to Love. / To Our Romance., 1983], Pialat (playing the role of the father) quotes what’s assumed to have been Van Gogh’s last sentence – “La tristesse durera toujours” [“Sadness will go on forever”] – before commenting on it: “I thought Van Gogh was talking about himself, about his misery, but no. He was trying to say that the battle will last forever. It’s you who are sad.”

EMOTIONAL LANDSCAPES

The simplicity of Van Gogh’s life is inscribed in the depurated surface of the film. Its main feat is its concision. Historical reconstitution has been wrested away from its usual elaboration. In fact, the accuracy of historical reconstruction doesn’t interest Pialat – we can see, for example, how the famous question of the chopped ear (even though it is mentioned in the film) is ignored by the physical characterization of Van Gogh. Pialat is focused on the presentation of a man and the battles within him apart from his name (thus, we rarely see his paintings and, even more rarely, his most iconic ones).

In spite of its apparent simplicity, the production difficulties grew and the diminutive budget of forty-five million francs was not enough. The shooting had to be interrupted. However, at the time of its première in 1991, the film was enthusiastically received both by critics and by the public. Pialat had surpassed himself and this was to be his masterpiece. And still a film of a painter about a painter.

A detailed attention to cinematography, a skillful mastery of perspective, and a regard to composition construct, in this film, images of a persistent beauty – both in episodes of immense genius and of immense squalor. But it isn’t Van Gogh’s vivid chromaticism that provides the film with its colors. Actually, Pialat is inspired by the incipient palette of the Impressionists, the sovereign canon in Van Gogh’s days. We therefore see his world as Van Gogh didn’t see it. We could never access with any exactitude his genius, his vision, his mind. This is one of Pialat’s triumphs, in permanent insurrection against academicism. The formal aspects of Van Gogh are a demonstration of this liberty. The shots bloom with fluidity. If in one moment, the studied fixity of the camera holds the actors’ movements, in the next zooms and pans it coordinates the speed of a chat at the table. Everything exists naturally. The characters exist within reality, they converse with a sincerity that is sometimes brutal. And the beauty is there, raw, inherent to the layers of life in pasty smudges of small precision.

BEAUTIFUL OUTSIDERS

This permanent sensation of Beauty – beautiful fields, beautiful colors, beautiful girls, beautiful songs – comes with an intoxicating monotony. This is Van Gogh’s portrait of inadaptation, he whose troubled personality couldn’t be contained within pleasant conventions. His painting doesn’t reproduce reality, it rather interprets it; it interprets itself. Sky and land are mixed up, water and sky are mixed up, detail is absent. He discovers the affectivity of solid colors, he relates forms and colors hoping to alter the world by altering the look of the things in it. The feverish energy of the brush continues. The noisy strength of the spatula attacks the canvas. The furious convulsions of the hand are intuitive. The strokes don’t detail. As the urge rises, the secret reality of the eyes is born in solid colors. The style is impulsive. The style is the message. As the “eye is a great heart that sends the camera hurtling” (Jean-Luc Godard, in his letter to Pialat), the fingers of the painter are his heart too. Van Gogh painted the world he wished others saw. In a letter to his brother, he describes his urge to cleanse form and color, “giving by its simplification a grander style to things”.

These paintings are raw wounds of color. Van Gogh had the vortical need to invent his own mirror. All is free there, all stands beyond the order of the visible. Expression is emotion. This rush carries the strength of life. One lives his life for art until one loses his life – but art remains. In the end, isn’t the overcoming of time the ultimate aspiration for any artist? And Van Gogh and Pialat arrived there through incomparably different paths.

THE DESTRUCTION

Pialat’s state of struggle was of a different kind. Famous for his unstable posture, he has always interpolated the most prodigious moments with the most irascible words of resentment. Like Van Gogh, Pialat was an outsider, rambling among schools, movements, groups. Having dedicated himself to other arts such as painting (which he declared his favorite art of all) and theatre (admittedly without vocation in this field), it was through the cinema that he had formulated the deepest dialogue with himself. If with this Van Gogh the mastery of his cinematographic art overcomes itself, it is also here that the confrontation of the artist against incomprehension is portrayed, in the figure of a Van Gogh that is (also) Pialat.

To read the letters of Van Gogh to his good brother Théo, an art dealer, is to unveil the confessions of a spirit in doubt, which alternates a fierce faith in his own work with a profound disbelief held by a sense of failure, doubt, and guilt. In Pialat’s film, the painter never theorizes, debates, explains, or legitimizes his own art, contrary to what happens with Minnelli’s Van Gogh in Lust for Life [1956]. Dutronc encloses himself inside a body of permanent tension. He seems incarcerated in a mutism from which he frees himself only through excess: the rip of the brush, the verbal fury, the sexual promiscuity, the frenzy of the dance, the physical confrontation. One senses the ultimate abyss where, in desire for the absolute, his destruction will arrive. This rupture is inscribed in the simplicity of that moment of so much interpreted symbolism: Walking with Jo, Van Gogh throws himself suddenly into the river, noisily, staging a suicide. It is the calm perfection of the Impressionists that is shattered by the impetus of Van Gogh, at the same time that, in a cynical and almost burlesque tone, it foreshadows what is to happen. Art is not splendour, art is not dazzle – art is something else. It exists in the soul alongside brutality.

This is a film about a slow end, almost voiceless. Loss is everywhere. It is the process of a body untying from itself, falling into a secret madness and letting go at the mercy of a mind without sovereignty, in the margins of society. He belongs nowhere, he belongs to a time that hasn’t arrived yet (and that he won’t live to experience).

We will remember the sore sight of madness in that mute and dry body folding inside itself. This Van Gogh with his “eyes fixed in the land and never in the sky,” as Serge Toubiana wrote in “Il s’appelle Van Gogh et il n’en a rien à foutre” [“His Name Is Van Gogh and He Doesn’t Give a Damn About Anything”], constantly alternates between contention and emotional outburst. Jacques Dutronc knows how to depict the calm intensity of that sadness, in a virtuous interpretation that deserved the César.

Maybe the social inadequacy of Van Gogh, who has failed in his plan to create a brotherhood of artists in Auvers-sur-Oise is in the first place inflicted by the successive exclusions among his peers. In deep disbelief, he carries his sorrow into all the other worlds he passes by. A blockade, he rejects everything and everybody. Van Gogh is the extreme personification of that old idea (very recurrent in Pialat’s heroes) that we are ultimately utterly alone and forsaken. There is not a person in the film who doesn’t feel incomplete or betrayed. Not even the couple, apparently happy at first.

THE MOVEMENT OF LIFE

Pialat’s camera accompanies the fading of hope. Pialat is the filmmaker of solitude but never leaving behind the quiet dream of integration. Even under a melancholic shade, hope doesn’t cease its flow, close to life. The film is crossed by the torrent of an overwhelming energy. And in these moments of ephemerality, all evil seems to be overcome. A brief instant... A cheerful lunch with the Gachet family, where everybody has fun without fearing the ridicule of contributing somehow to the general laughter... An improvised song at an outdoor ball... The relief of frenzied dances in pairs... And the most remarkable of all moments: that frantic collective dance in the brothel, an organic whole wonderfully filmed and choreographed, reminding us of John Ford or Jean Renoir.

THE WOMEN

The idea that, in Pialat’s Cinema, women are “positive heroes” (the exact expression is by Laurence Giavarini in her article “Hommes et femmes” [“Men and Women”], Cahiers du cinéma, no. 449, November 1991) is crucial to this movie. There’s the old hostess and her teenage daughter with their motherly attention; there’s the red dress dancer-prostitute ready to love him one day without any money being involved; but the most relevant of all the characters is Marguerite (Alexandra London), the bored young bourgeoise who is fascinated with the distinct personality of Van Gogh. Introduced as a soft, candid being, she will evolve into his antagonist. She will affirm that he can’t paint (after he paints her portrait), she will insist that life is more important than art, she will accept and love him as he is. Van Gogh would obviously dedicate himself as a whole to his art (in his last letter to Théo, unmailed, he would write "my own work, I am risking my life for it and my reason has half-foundered because of it..."), admirably trusting his destiny to art until the end. He resists; he carries on painting even when nobody, not even his own brother, believed in it, even when not having sold more than one painting in his entire life.

Away from romanticism, both Marguerite and Vincent travel a transformative path. Marguerite initiates a ritual of emancipation, against the conventions of her own class, against the feminine privations, against the patriarchal authority, against what she used to be. In spite of the hours spent with Marguerite in light and company, Vincent’s tension confines him as the resistance vanishes. And in that memorable close-up in the final scene, when Marguerite assumes that Van Gogh used to be a close friend of hers, in her triumphant face the apprenticeship she owes him is complete. She recognizes him now as, more than an intermittent lover, a unique being who she had the privilege of meeting and, somehow, understanding. The artist stayed alive.

Pialat and Van Gogh: How many eyes don’t owe them their fortunate corruption? •

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Letter to Pialat

by Jean-Luc Godard (1991)

Translated from the French by Craig Keller

My dear Maurice, your film is astonishing, totally astonishing; far beyond the cinematographic horizon covered up until now by our wretched gaze. Your eye is a great heart that sends the camera hurtling among girls, boys, spaces, moments in time, and colors, like childish tantrums. The ensemble is miraculous; the details, sparks of light within this miracle; we see the big sky fall and rise from this poor and simple earth. All of my thanks, to you and yours, for this success – warm, incomparable, quivering.

Cordially yours,

– Jean-Luc Godard •

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Words from Pialat

excerpts translated from the French – of Pialat in conversation with Michel Ciment and Michel Sineux – by Pierre Hodgson (1992)



Maurice Pialat on the set of Van Gogh.

What happened on this film is what happens on all my films. I don’t like always being the scapegoat, but it keeps happening. It was the same on this film, but I suppose someone had to take the brunt – it’s symptomatic of today’s cinema. The film was halted because it was costing too much, because it was under-budgeted. Some of the costs could have been avoided totally, and others reduced. It should have cost about 40 million francs, whereas we spent over 60 million francs. About 15 or 20 million went up in smoke, spent on sets, things we didn’t even use. As a result the film was stopped, to save 3 million francs and three weeks of shooting. It’s not very logical, saving 3 million on a film that’s costing 60 million. The 3 million that were then found, and now represent three quarters of an hour of the film. I am partly responsible, but it all seems odd, I didn’t believe it was going to stop and leave everyone in limbo, with no one making any decisions, least of all the decision to put a halt to the enormous sums of money being swallowed up in set designs that were finally never used. We even had to finish the film twice. We resumed filming knowing that we couldn’t go through to the end, and then filmed again a month later. All this enabled people like Dutronc to claim that we filmed for eight months, although in fact it was only four, which was already a lot. He said other things as well, while claiming it was nothing to do with him. I realized that, out of the ten films I’d made, five have been stopped during filming, one of which, Loulou [1980], was stopped for over a year. Can you imagine making a film, all the time knowing that you’re almost bound not to finish it? With Loulou, it wasn’t my fault. Isabelle Huppert left for a year to go rollerskating with [director Michael] Cimino [in the scene in Heaven’s Gate (1980)]. Then the producers went bankrupt, so for months we screened the film with chunks missing. So, all in all, ten films, five of which were filmed in two parts. You must admit that it’s sod’s law that it always falls on me, who has a reputation for causing trouble. Do you believe that for one minute? It’s masochism, it doesn’t make sense. Right from the start I had problems, as I was up against the wall, I felt like a reject. One day, when I’m calm, I should write all this down like a police report, objective and without bitterness. [...]

A team of set decorators spent a month doing nothing. Twenty people being paid. Did you notice that you don’t see any exteriors in the film? That’s another thing, critics who know everything. Like at school, when you did something, and then someone, who was usually ignorant, took your hand and told you what you were trying to do. For instance, I was told it was intentional that you saw nothing of Auvers. Or that you don’t see Van Gogh painting. In fact, I had no choice in these matters. But I cracked it. I work best when everything is going wrong. [...]

[The film] shouldn’t be as it is, there’s so much missing. It’s okay, but you don’t see all that should be in it, and isn’t there. [...]

[In the film] I cut some shots in which he was simply holding a paintbrush, not even painting. I find it all so false. Sadly, in some scenes, such as when Marguerite is posing for him at the piano, we see him painting outside. It’s dreadful. Resorting to using the hand of a real painter is awful too. To make it credible you need a look, a feel. I just had to let the piano scene ride, I was so stunned by the child’s performance, and I thought that if I said “Cut!”, she would think that she wasn’t doing it right. Anyway, no one sees anything. I could have put in some link shots, but putting separate shots into a sequence like this is very unsuccessful.

[Regarding most people only seeing a film once and not noticing the worrisome details, that’s] something interesting about movies. It’s worth thinking about. There is no reason why people shouldn’t see films several times, but fewer and fewer people are really capable of, or interested in, discovering things. Those who have this awareness and knowledge, this desire, and who go back again and again to see a film – these are the people we should primarily be making films for. [...]

When I started to paint, I was twenty years old, I adored Van Gogh. I grew to like him less and less. A long time ago, I wanted to make a film about him, not out of admiration but because the story his sister put together was good raw material. Otherwise, I’m more interested in, say, Seurat’s last year. Just as, other things being equal, if I was going to adapt Bernanos, I’d have been better off doing L’imposture [The Fake, 1927] than Sous le soleil de Satan [Under the Sun of Satan, 1926, which Pialat adapted into a film in 1987]. To return to Van Gogh, I’ve just mentioned Seurat. What beginners like about Van Gogh, is the ease with which he works. You couldn’t buy pictures like that at the time, it would have been unimaginable. [...]

In the first place, it would have been hard to find an actor to play Seurat. [...]

Listen, [producer Daniel] Toscan du Plantier has many failings, but he’ll do anything. The proof is Sous le soleil de Satan. That was looney. You’re probably going to say I’m obsessed with the box office, but Seurat would have sold thirty thousand tickets, no more. Anyway, films about painters never work. Though, for the first three weeks, we had a feeling Van Gogh was going to do well. [Editor’s note: Van Gogh sold 1.4 million tickets in France.] I am disappointed in that I expect a great deal of my audiences, I am too demanding. People are facile. Like it or not, cinema needs commercial success. [...]

In 1964, I made a short I could show you. It lasted six minutes. At the time, I was making Chroniques en France for television, short programs for French-language broadcasts worldwide, not shown in France. I made about ten of these bread-and-butter projects. One of them was a little film called Auvers [i.e., the 1965 Van Gogh], which was not just about Van Gogh but about Daubigny too; there were landscape shots of the area, a little rostrum work, not much, in black-and-white. [...]

[The actor Daniel Auteuil] met Bernard-Henri Lévy and wanted to shoot his Baudelaire [Lévy’s 1988 novel Les derniers jours de Charles Baudelaire, or The Last Days of Charles Baudelaire]. [...] I started to read the thing, but I didn’t get to the end. I couldn’t see myself doing a period piece with all those top hats. I didn’t feel like doing another costume drama, even if I did end up doing exactly that with Van Gogh, though in this instance we were fairly restrained. The exception is the two dance-hall scenes, which were a bit hasty, a bit “let’s get it in the can”.

I’m giving you a psychoanalytic interpretation here, though it may not seem like that. You’re the one on the couch, but I’m the one suffering. This is how I make a film. I meet a nice guy who commissions me, but doesn’t put money on the table. He does bring a bit in though, because with his name someone like me can get a bigger budget. So I say, “I’ve got something I want to do.” [...]

[Opening the film with a shot of Van Gogh painting, and the hand actually being my own, is] an admission that something is missing. There’s so little painting in the film, we had to start with that.

[Regarding costume and dialogue, and focusing on the most concrete aspects of everyday life so that there is nothing anachronistic] – As far as the dialogue is concerned, the reason is really simple: I didn’t think about it. The language is not really contemporary. What people forget when they make museum films, the huge anachronism, is that people never speak old-French. I believe that if you start using period terminology, you might as well give up. As far as the costumes are concerned, things are even simpler. There are plenty of photographic records of the period and it would have been easy to use them. But I wanted to avoid stiff collars and top hats. I was haunted by that. We had some made in London, which were okay but – surprise, surprise – they're not in the final cut. But the really ridiculous things – the ones we rented – do appear a couple of times. [...]

This may sound immodest, but I think one of my talents is turning fuck-ups to my own advantage. Which isn’t to say I seek them out. When something goes wrong – and this is part of my theory that the real true moment in filmmaking is the shoot itself because what counts is what’s in the can – then I always find a way out. I believe I steered the film towards those comic moments, to the extent of my ability to do so. I’ve been wanting to make a comedy for a long time now, but I wouldn’t know how to write it, I have neither the wit nor the sense of dialogue to write the screenplay. People like Woody Allen, even Audiard, know how to do that. I’d need to shoot someone else’s writing, though with that person’s permission, I’d have to stick my nose into his work. It’s true that this is one dimension of Van Gogh, but then the expectation is of something heavy and dramatic. I wanted to inject some humor, some fantasy, without – I hope – being too heavy-handed. [...] I steered the movie in that direction to make it more fun to watch. Basically, the natural audience for Van Gogh are the people who never went to see it. Anyway, I don’t think life is all that dramatic. We’ve all seen people die. Well, to the very end, life hangs on in there. Just because someone’s a painter, it doesn’t mean they have to go around with this inspired, affected expression on their face. Painting is technical, you do it as well as you can.

I do think that Van Gogh was more driven than my depiction allows. That’s a weakness in the acting. Just think of all he managed to paint in those seventy days! I read in [Stefan] Zweig’s bad book about Nietzsche [Nietzsche, 1925] – it could only be bad, given what Zweig is like – that Van Gogh painted really fast. That sounds right, I’m sure it’s true. Actually, it’s something he could be criticized for. The idea that painting is about gesture came later. It’s in a different class. Some of his contemporaries, like Seurat, went on preparing their canvases and meditating. Cézanne needed up to sixty sittings for a portrait and redid the picture from start to finish at each sitting. In terms of portraiture, the result is not always as good as Van Gogh’s portraits, even if purely in terms of pictorial achievement there is more to it. Van Gogh, on the other hand, could do up to three pictures a day. [...]

I may express opinions through the character [of Van Gogh]’s mouth but he's quite unlike me. I exercised restraint in the remarks about critics, I could have gone much further. As far as I’m concerned, the best pieces are demolition jobs. I prefer negative criticism of my own work. When someone who is reasonably silly and not very well-educated – I mean critics in general – decides to lay into a film, he turns quite nasty, he seeks out the flaws and often gets it right. Whereas praise... [...]

Perhaps I had to wait till I reached an advanced age before I could show men and women in a relaxed relationship. Before now, I've just depicted the bitches I've come across in my life. [...]

We had a meal in a good restaurant that recently closed, unfortunately. One of the waiters had seen Van Gogh, like quite a few people who know me personally. Well, there was one thing he didn’t really get and that was the death scene. He wasn’t sure if he’d followed it properly or not, but he thought that the prostitute had sent one of the men to kill him out of jealousy. When you hear that, you know he’s right. Audiences that know nothing about Van Gogh are accustomed, because they watch TV series, to know exactly who kills whom. And if there’s a mystery, it’s always solved at the end. The funny thing is that I was going to call the film Who Killed Van Gogh?. I also liked Dr. Gachet’s Daughter. It wouldn’t have made much difference. [...]

I’ve got a cuttings book from the [1991 Cannes] festival. The press is bad, which is incredibly unfair. I don’t mind telling you that by the end of the edit, I thought Van Gogh was the best film in France since the war. When a film is released, you need to believe in it and the fact is that, to an extent, Van Gogh was up to my expectations. But now I know it’s not good enough. If I were the only judge, but I'm not. There are lots of reasons why no one can make the best film in France since the war. In any case, those kinds of competitions are a bit like the Tour de France. I don’t care much for them. I really feel that you can’t let the kind of press coverage that we had at Cannes pass — it’s unforgivable. Editors should fire critics for writing that kind of article; that’s assuming editors are any better than their journalists, which is often not the case. Usually they’re worse since they have to play the watchdog. I hear that one female journalist got canned, but I don’t think that was the reason. [...]

When we stood up for the applause [at the Cannes screening], at the end, I knew there were a few alterations that needed doing, childish little things. We went up to the actors, kissed them, shook their hands. That way, you get the clapping to last a bit longer, there are always people timing these things, though the timings they get are always off. I like playing that sort of trick. I’m a bit of a ham, really. A big ham. •

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The film's original French one-sheet.

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