Beautiful definition of happiness by Mr. Hitchcock.
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.
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.
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.
William S. Burroughs by Jeannette Montgomery Barron, New York, 1985
William Burroughs inspired many artists, but here is one of the most beautiful realization of his ideas on screen: Gus Van Sant’s 1978 short-film adaptation of Burrough’s essay “Do Easy (DE)”.
“DE is a way of doing. It is a way of doing everything you do. DE simply means doing whatever you do in the easiest most relaxed way you can manage which is also the quickest and most efficient way, as you will find as you advance in DE.”
Watch Gus Van Sant’s “The Discipline of DE”
Still from Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945). Hitchcock hired Dali to help create dreamlike atmosphere for his film.
Salvador Dali not only contributed to various films: from Luis Buñuel’s Un chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog) and L’age d’or (The Golden Age) to Hitckcock’s famous dream scene in Spellbound, but he was also quite friendly with television. His various talents are famously (and comically) on display in a television game show “What’s my Line” from 1950’s which is surprisingly fresh and interesting today.
Hillman Curtis is legendary graphic designer turned into a filmmaker. His short films are capsules enclosed with special moments of life, which are often the ones of truth and revelation.
Check out his artist series (for example this great one, with Stefan Sagmeister) to understand his subtle and subdued approach as a director, often letting his “actors” to make the film for him.
“12 glowing men” is yet another great project from Martijn Hendriks. This time, instead of erasing something, he adds glowing aura to persons from Sydney Lumet’s classics.
Artist summs it up greatly by saying:
“In a way it is a completely dumb effect, too easy and light to explore the dark subject of the source material. But this dumbness and lightness were an essential part of the material I wanted to work with, it offered another layer of re-appropriation.”
Re-appropriation of classical films is what we all need sometimes. Thank you, Martijn.
Continuing with Hitchcock… Martijn Hendriks’ ongoing project Untitled (or The Birds without the birds, or give us today our daily terror) is exact copy of master’s film with just all the birds removed.
The most amazing thing is the question the project poses: do we, as viewers, still experience fear if the fear symbols are erased from the film?
Martijn Hendriks says:
“In my video piece of The Birds without the birds, the terror of that film is still amazing. But the source of the terror has changed. By taking out the birds, terror isn’t given a form anymore, which instead is something we start doing as viewers.”
“Films are created when there’s no one looking”
says Jean-Luc Godard in Wim Wender’s documentary “Room 666”.
Rainer Fassbinder and Werner Herzog in Room 666
Made in 1982 at the Cannes film festival it has a very simple idea: Wim Wenders invited selected directors one by one into same hotel room and presented them a list of questions concerning the future of cinema. Some answers are more interesting than the others but all in all documentary gives us insight into some of the cinema’s greatest minds: Fassbinder, Antonioni, Herzog, Godard and the issues that worried them at a time.
This is a great video of frequent David Lynch’s collaborator composer Angelo Badalamenti explaining in the very detail how he got the main tune for “Twin Peaks”. Emotionaly moving and very sincere it is a beautiful insight into the nature of creating music for films.
