Flight scene from F. W. Murnau’s “Faust” (1926) was a cutting-edge cinematic spectacle of the time. It was a high budget film and elaborate models were built for this scene.

An interesting and personal side story makes the flight, breathtaking as it is (especially viewed in cinema), a bit more special. Murnau served as a combat pilot for Germany in World War I. According to historical accounts he was an excellent pilot and loved to fly. Considering that, and the fact that in 1926 very few people actually experienced flying, it seems director’s background helped to make the scene both breathtaking and realistic.

One of the most exciting documentaries ever (technically it is more of an amateur film) is now available online.

Kon-Tiki documents an inspiring journey across the Pacific with a raft. Six crew members, led by Norwegian Thor Heyerdahl, took 101 days to sail a distance of almost 7 000 kilometers from Peru to Polynesia. The 16 mm film, shot by the members of the expedition, documents daily routines as well as tense moments. Poetic and beautiful it is both a sign of times and enduring testimony of the courageous adventure spirit of a human.

The expedition took place in 1947. The film was released in 1950 and won an Oscar for the best documentary film in 1951. It remains the only Norwegian film to win it till today. Some rare colour footage from the expedition is available to watch here.

An instruction letter from Stanley Kubrick to projectionists about screening Barry Lyndon in cinemas. It tells as much about Kubrick’s working methods as about his love for films.

Emmanuelle Riva and Eiji Okada on Alan Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959)

Got to love the French way of conducting emancipated yet elegant interviews: in this clip journalist François Chalais is talking with Emmanuelle Riva about her role in the film Hiroshima Mon Amour shortly after the film was premiered.

Great scene from great film (Damnation by Hungarian Béla Tarr). It is one of my probably top 5 film scenes.

Song Over and Done by Vigh Mihály.

It is interesting to think about one’s favorite scenes from films. I find it both easier and more difficult than distinguishing favorite films. Even a bit more personal.

“The Clock” is a great video piece by Christian Marclay that is currently on display at White Cube gallery in London.

‘The Clock’ is constructed out of moments in cinema when time is expressed or when a character interacts with a clock, watch or just a particular time of day. Marclay has excerpted thousands of these fragments and edited them so that they flow in real time. While ‘The Clock’ examines how time, plot and duration are depicted in cinema, the video is also a working timepiece that is synchronised to the local time zone. At any moment, the viewer can look at the work and use it to tell the time. Yet the audience watching ‘The Clock’ experiences a vast range of narratives, settings and moods within the space of a few minutes, making time unravel in countless directions at once. Even while ‘The Clock’ tells the time, it ruptures any sense of chronological coherence.

‘The Clock’ plays with how audiences experience narrative in cinema, examining the conventions and devices through which filmmakers create a persuasive illusion of duration. When watching a film, an audience is removed from normal time and swept up in a new register that corresponds to the narrative at hand. ‘The Clock’ transforms this condition of cinema: time, in this case, corresponds precisely to the actual time beyond the work.

“The magnifying glass of the film camera will show you your shadow on the wall, something you live with without noticing, and it will show you the adventures and the ultimate fate of the cigar in your unsuspecting hand, and the secret – because unheeded – life of all the things that accompany you on your way and that taken together make up the events of your life.”

Beautiful thought on film by Béla Balázs (“Visible Man”, 1924)

“This is truly the art of the future.”

“Why we go to the Movies”, Hugo Münsterberg, 1915

Watch “Star Wars” ballet conducted by John Williams at the Los Angeles Philharmonic. No light-sabers but the intro music that starts ballet and each film from the series gives me shivers.

Interesting thoughts on “Star Wars” by Alex Carnevale in his article “The Jedi of Minsk”:

Some parts of the culture stay parts of the culture. Usually they relate to cultural icons, whose identities are so frequently personified in the art and Sovietesque reproduction of the image that it becomes currency in every aspect of the society.

Star Wars, on the other hand, is probably destined to inevitably disappear.

Mission-based programming like Star Trek and Stargate is about the vagaries of human exploration. That’s not Star Wars. It’s about fear of technology, and a movie about fear of technology is probably not going to age all that well in the age of technology. That’s the age we’re in.

While I don’t completely agree with the article (I also think the special effects of the first film are very well done), it provides some interesting points. In my opinion “Star Wars” are based (and very well based) on archetypes and century-old stories, much like the Greek myths and that should provide some foundation for its longevity. It is a shame story gradually depreciated with each episode.

Jean-Luc Godard on a set filming À bout de souffle (Breathless)

Godard’s iconic masterpiece celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. Cinematographer Raoul Coutard told a interesting story for The Observer about working with Godard on this film:

Fifty years of Breathless is of course remarkable, but I think the fact that we’re all still breathing is just as remarkable.I am 86 years old now but I remember working on the film very clearly. I had no idea at the time that 50 years afterwards I would still be talking about it, but I did know that it was a very different film, that we were doing something that had never really been done or seen in cinema before. I didn’t know it would work, though.

I had met Jean-Luc Godard when he was working in the publicity department of 20th Century-Fox in Paris. I had been a war photographer for magazines but I had started making films almost by mistake. I didn’t have any training with a film camera at all, so I was really learning as I went along. Jean-Luc didn’t hire me. The original guy went off to shoot a “proper”movie, so producer Georges de Beauregard told Jean-Luc he had to work with me. I was cheap and Godard was determined this was going to be the cheapest film ever made, shooting in the street, with no sound, no lights, no crew. He told me it would be like shooting a reportage, so I was happy because that was a type of photography I understood.

We didn’t have permissions or anything. We just went into the boulevards, like the Champs-Élysées and filmed Jean Seberg and Jean-Paul Belmondo. There was no crowd because no one knew we were there. We’d put the actor in position and walk many paces back and get them in shot. We didn’t do any sound at all, not even a wild track, so everything was put on later. That was all new to cinema, but as none of us really knew how to do any different, it didn’t feel like a risk.

Belmondo was a total unknown but I could see in my lens that he was a very easy performer, what I call désinvolte [breezy, carefree]. He was also very good at improvising because we had no script. There was the original press article on which Truffaut had based his story outline, but every day Jean-Luc would just turn up with his little exercise book and scribble some notes and some dialogue and we would rehearse maybe a couple of times so I knew where to point the camera vaguely. This was strange for Jean Seberg as she was the only one who’d actually made du grand cinéma. She’d worked with Otto Preminger on Saint Joan but that was a flop so she was very nervous about doing this little film in Paris. She was really concerned how she’d appear.

I’m aware now that what we made was iconic, but at the time… no. I used a Caméflex Éclair 35mm camera and they always say oh, “handheld” photography. It’s true that it was light and easy to move and reload quickly but it made one hell of a noise. I still have that terrible din in my ears. Do I still have the camera that captured those iconic shots? No, no, no. It was a cheap movie. We hired the camera and had to give it back.

In today’s restrained mainstream cinema smoking is hardly seen. But who is the most cigarette-loving character of all time?

One that springs to mind is Dr. Rothke from the great German postwar noir “Der Verlorene (The Lost One)”. Dr. Rothke (played by Peter Lorre, who also directed the film) lits 2-3 cigarretes in every scene, be it in hospital, train, his own house or laboratory.

At one point he asks a companion:

“Do you know why I’m still alive?”

And answers himself:

“Because of a cigarette.”

Bas Jan Ader was a Dutch conceptual artist, photographer and filmmaker. Born 1942 in Netherlands he was mysteriously lost at sea in 1975.

Ader left a small body of film work, most of which is said to be made over a weekend. However his short pieces are exceptional and presents a subtle insight into a tender and fragile mind of the artist.

Highly recommended.

This would make a great poster for Woody Allen’s “Manhattan”. Taken from Postcards to Alphaville.

From project’s website:

“Postcards to Alphaville” is a project dedicated to film characters featured in guest-made illustrations. Everyone participating in this adventure has to watch a film and make postcard portraying specific character from it. It is love-letter to films and those characters that brings us, the viewers, moments of joy, sorrow and revelation and sometimes seems more real than the neighbor next-door.

Lumet on set with Al Pacino, filming Dog Day Afternoon

Sydney Lumet’s favorite films (as revealed in “Halliwell’s Top 1000”) are mostly good old classics:

1. The Best Years of Our Lives (Wyler, 1946) 2. Fanny and Alexander (Bergman, 1982) 3. The Godfather (Coppola, 1972) 4. The Grapes of Wrath (Ford, 1940) 5. Intolerance (Griffith, 1916) 6. The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer, 1928) 7. Ran (Kurosawa, 1985) 8. Roma (Fellini, 1972) 9. Singin’ in the Rain (Kelly, Donen, 1952) 10. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968)

The list was published in 2005, but even then half of the films were more than 50 years old while the newest one - The Godfather - is not actually new, being made in 1972. Did Lumet feel that new films are not so much interesting? Probably not, as in an interesting interview with Logan Hill in 2007, he says:

I think it’s a great time right now for New York film, actually.

Asked to mention some names, Lumet’s answer was sly:

Oh, I can’t say names. Somebody would get bent out of shape.

It is said that in Pierrot le Fou (1965), Belmondo really plays the character of Godard: a man who can’t choose between life and art.

This is a beautiful image of French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard with two of his frequent collaborators: Anna Karina and Jean-Paul Belmondo. To me, this image conveys the emotional lightness of Godard’s way of work, which allowed spontaneity and exchange of ideas, often simulating and changing the film on the go.

As David Sterritt remarked in his “The films of Jean-Luc Godard– seeing the invisible”:

“What is ultimately spontaneous as we watch a Godard film is not the story, the characters, or the cinematic techniques, all of which lie frozen on strips of celluloid. Rather, the spontaneity he treasures is found in the mercurial stream of creativity that flows from him and his collaborators as they work. While this creativity is as ephemeral as thought, it leaves unmistakable traces on the work we eventually view.”