Movie City Indie Archive for June, 2011

“Lens Flare: A J. J. Abrams Joint”

[H/t Vulture.]

1 Comment »

First DVD Edition Of Rivette’s epic OUT 1 Out In November

Out 1

Jacques Rivette’s 12-hour-nine-minute Out 1: noli me tangere is coming to DVD in November for a mere 70 euro, with German subtitles from absolut-medien.de. So where’s the English subtitled version! One go among worshipful viewers was not enough. Rivette talked about Out 1 to Bernard Eisenschitz, Jean-Andre Fieschi and Eduardo de Gregorio in April 1973. (Translation: Tom Milne.) This passage seems to speak to this hardly-seen “text.” “A film is always presented in a closed form: a certain number of reels which are screened in a certain order, a beginning, an end. Within this, all these phenomena can occur of circulating meanings, functions and forms; moreover, these phenomena can be incomplete, not finally determined once and for all. This isn’t simply a matter of tinkering, of something mechanical constructed from the outside, but rather… of something that has been ‘generated’ which seems to entail biological factors. It isn’t a matter of making a film or a work that exhausts its coherence, that closes in on itself; it must continue to function, and to create new meanings, directions and feelings.

“Here one comes back to the Barthes definition. I refer to Barthes a good deal, but I find that he speaks more lucidly than anyone else at the present time about this kind of problem… and he says: there is a text from the moment one can say: things are circulating. To me it is evident that this potential in the cinema is allied to the semblance of monumentality we were just talking about. What I mean is that on the screen the film presents a certain number of events, objects, characters in quotes, which are closed in on themselves, turned inward, exactly as a statue can be, presenting themselves without immediately stating an identity, and which simultaneously establish comings-and-goings, echoes, among one another.” Let the echoes begin.

Out 4
Read the full article »

5 Comments »

Chicago Screenshots

After the first Mayor Daley’s practical ban on filming on Chicago locations ended, the city became a canvas for filmmakers fascinated by solid urban vistas that could also embrace human scale. (Paging Andy Davis…) A new Tumblr account, Chicago Screenshots, collects widescreen captures of movies shot by Lake Michigan. (Photographer Noah Vaughn is behind the collection.) The shots from Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer make an Edward Hopper-style suite of images of loneliness of Bucktown circa 1984. The first two: “Crime Story” and The Monitors.

Slightly more romantic than the third image, a frame grab from a recent trailer of a blown-up downtown Chicago from Transformers: Dark Of The Moon. The Marina Towers, seen in less crowded quarters in Bernie Sahlins’ 1969 science-fiction production, is among the casualties in Michael Bay’s 2011 epic.

Doc-Maker Adam Curtis Gets A Tender Slap

Here’s a playful nudge at Adam Curtis’ pile-on documentary style. (Embedding is disabled.)

“In a landmark new documentary produced for YouTube, Adam Curtis has not examined his career and laid bare his style in the light of some confused academic papers he stumbled across on the internet. Instead, I have plundered various video archives and ripped him off, up, down, left, right and back again,” japes “Psychonomy.” Entertaining commenters join in the to-and-fray.

“I Work For Documentary”: Sean Farnel Leaves Hot Docs After 6 Years

Sean Farnel, John Grierson

Since its inception, Hot Docs has become the second largest documentary festival in the world, after IDFA in Amsterdam. (I consider it a privilege I’ve attended the past four instalments.) While now-former programming director Sean Farnel doesn’t offer a roadmap to what comes next, his blog entry about leaving Hot Docs offers much about what’s come before: “I’ve watched over 4000 documentaries over the past twelve years. I still have notes on most of them. That’s a lot of reality. Another reality is that there comes a time to change course.” I like what Cameron Bailey tweeted tonight: “Sean Farnel worked 6 years at TIFF, 6 years at Hot Docs. One of the best in the business: taste, grit & humility. A Canadian.” [More at the link.]

[Photo: Sheffield Doc/Fest, November 2008; cradling Margaret Brown’s Youth Jury Grierson award for The Order Of Myths. © Ray Pride]

Why Ants Travel In Groups (0’30”)

Cahiers du Cinema’s cover image for TREE OF LIFE

What If Mountain Goats Had Been Around To Score THE WARRIORS? (3’38”)

[Via @mattfraction.]

Peter Greenaway’s “Nine Classic Paintings Revisited” (89 min presentation)

From autumn 2010, but his fixations haven’t waned.

All The Other Woodys In Under 90 Seconds

[Edited by Oliver Noble. Via Filmdrunk.]

Werner Herzog Reads “Go The F— To Sleep” (4’26”)

Jim Henson Animating (0’39”)

“Jim Henson working at his animation stand in Bethesda, MD around 1961. The footage is silent.” [Via The Henson Company.]

Teasing DON’T CLICK (미확인동영상) Korean Horror

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPI2J3XdWfE&feature=player_embedded

Frames within frames and variable screen ratios… A good start.

Movie City Indie

Quote Unquotesee all »

It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon