watching...

Vivre se vie - great film by Jean-Luc Godard. Here's the orginal trailer:

food for the writer...

An important film I've been watching - more than one view is needed to approach this work:

L'eclisse (1962)

Michelangelo Antonioni, Dir.


*

Antonioni is such a singular artist, a master.

the sky above berlin...

Wings of Desire (1987)

Wim Wenders, Dir.

*

Coming in October - 2-disc set - from Criterion Collection...

three, two, one, zero...

film diary

3-6 July 09

L’année dernière à Marienbad (1961)

Alain Resnais, Director

Alain Robbe-Grillet, Writer

... a film to live by ...

A: Who are you?
X: You know.
A: What's your name?
X: It doesn't matter.

*

After four days with Last Year at Marienbad, I'm a bit dizzy. This film is in itself an experience. And most likely different for each viewer. A writer's film - in every sense. Powerful performances by Delphine Seyrig - as A, Giorgio Albertazzi - as X, and Sacha Pitoëff - as M.

Empty salons. Corridors. Salons. Doors. Doors. Salons. Empty chairs, deep armchairs, thick carpets. Heavy hangings. Stairs, steps. Steps, one after the other. Glass objects, objects still intact, empty glasses. A glass that falls, three, two, one, zero. Glass partition, letters.

*

file under new or let's go to the movies...

My poem “Chamber Music” – acutally a three-piece suite based on Ingmar Bergman’s film trilogy – will be included in the Best of the Web 2009 anthology from Dzanc Books. The book’s publication date is later this year. The work originally appeared at Boxcar Poetry Review.

From the exquisite and murky world of David Lynch, another poem, “A Fable,” will appear in the Blue Velvet anthology from The Private Press. I’m very pleased to be a part of this marvelous series of anthologies edited by Ivy Alvarez. The release date is in the autumn.

that’s all it comes down to...

film diary

9 April 09



Krotki Film O Milosci (1988)

(A Short Film about Love)

Krzysztof Kieslowski, Dir.


[This film is an expanded theatrical release version of Dekalog, part VI.]

*

Kieslowski’s film gets at the heart of voyeurism as a natural human phenomenon or condition. It’s found in many of his works, in fact, underscoring the filmmaker’s personal approach to his art. Call it curiosity, call it desire, call it force – but it is pervasive and rich territory for storytelling.

power, ambition, despair...

film diary

23 March 09




Die Bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant (1972)

R. W. Fassbinder, Dir.

Karin: It’s all so complicated.

Petra: No… Nothing is simple. Nothing at all. You have to understand what humility is.

Karin: Humility?

Petra: You see… everyone has his own theory of the world. I believe you have to have humility to be able to bear what you know. I have humility in my work or in respect of the money I can earn or the many things that are stronger than myself.

Karin: I think ‘humility’ is a strange word. It reminds me of kneeling and praying.

*

A devastating film. The cinematography by Michael Ballhaus is a marvel. Making so much out of so little. Each performance, each frame, each sound … is perfect for Fassbinder’s vision of a confined world. I’ve seen the film fifteen, twenty times, but I’ve never found the bottom of its well.

coming soon...

Upcoming releases from Criterion Collection...



The Seventh Seal (1957)

Ingmar Bergman, Dir.
an updated release - with added features
2 Discs
June 2009





Wise Blood (1979)

John Huston, Dir.
1 Disc
May 2009






My Dinner with André (1981)

Louis Malle, Dir.
1 Disc
June 2009






Last Year at Marienbad (1962)

Alain Resnais, Dir.
2 Discs
June 2009

what is he doing...

film diary

5 March 09



The Perfect Human (1967)
[a version]

Jørgen Leth, Dir.


At times, the best way to find any understanding of life is through the mundane. Repetition becomes maniacal becomes truth. For me, that is what Danish filmmaker Jørgen Leth sets out to show in his brief, hypnotic, experimental work Det Perfekte menneske (The Perfect Human, 1967). The human being – the perfect man, the perfect woman – as landscape.

Again today I experienced something I hope to understand in a day or two.

~


There is a mystery in Leth’s film that has haunted Lars von Trier, another filmmaker – who forces Leth out of his obscure and depressed life in Haiti to revisit The Perfect Human. De Fem benspænd (The Five Obstructions, 2003) is an ingenious concept and production, directed by Leth and von Trier. Amazing.

Leth, based on von Trier’s project, must rethink the intervening thirty-five years and recreate, in the present, his “Perfect Human”. Leth accepts the challenge. But there are rules. He must make five new films, using the theme and script of the original, but with obstructions, designed to make Leth fail. Von Trier does this because he believes Leth’s original film to be, in fact, a perfect work.

Each film will have a different set of obstructions. Leth likes cigars from Havana, so the setting of the first “Obstruction” must be Cuba. After that, Leth decides he will not help or give away his weaknesses to von Trier. That doesn’t matter since von Trier is convinced he understands Leth more completely than Leth understands himself.

The retooling of the original idea is a fascinating possibility. Leth succeeds – no matter the setting or obstacle. With The Five Obstructions the viewer must experience the individual pieces but must also find the sum of those pieces.

The film is part joke, part journey, part fiction, part documentary – but total art. The ultimate truth? ... art cannot be duplicated – only imitated.

The major barrier for #1 is that no scene could be more than 12 frames – or ½ second – in length. Leth initially assumes this rule to be a monster, but later surrenders to it, calling it “a paper tiger”.

Obstruction #1 – The Perfect Human: Cuba (Leth, Dir. / 2003):



... films to live by ...

will there be a last letter some day...

I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining.

We do not remember. We rewrite memory much as history is rewritten.

How can one remember thirst?

               from a letter by Sandor Krasna, read by a narrator,
               in the film Sans Soleil, Chris Marker, dir.

here's to the marvelous evening...

film diary

16 February 09

The Exterminating Angel (1962)

Luis Buñuel, Dir.

... films to live by ...
















Greatness can never be explained - only witnessed. Greatness can never be explained... Wait. Didn't I just say that?

if the truth annoys you...

film diary

8 February 09

La Belle Noiseuse (1991)

Jacques Rivette, Dir.

... a film to live by ...

~

In Rivette’s film, an artist, Frenhofer, visits his studio – he had given up painting ten years earlier.

Frenhofer: I don’t want to stay here. It was difficult even to come. When I see a recent painting… the suffering here is unbearable.

Nicolas: At least it’s cool here. There’s silence.

Frenhofer: Silence? Can’t you hear the forest? The sound, the murmuring, all the time. It’s like the sea. Just like the sea. It’s the fossil sound of the universe. It’s the sound of the origins. The forest and the sea mixed together. That’s what painting is. Don’t you think?


Nicolas: No, I don’t For me it’s not that. For me painting is the stroke. A colour that stands out. A cadmium yellow, a flashing red. Something sharp, finished.

Frenhofer: Really? Every time I felt I’d finished a painting, completed it… I always said to myself I should have gone further, try a bit harder. Take the risk.

*

Later, Frenhofer speaks to Marianne, his model:

I’ll get to know what’s inside… under your thin surface…
I want the invisible. No, it’s not that! I want…
It’s not me who wants…



It’s the line…


the stroke…


Nobody knows what a stroke is.

And I’m after it.

*

La Belle Noiseuse is a brilliantly stunning film. I’m not certain that silence has ever been more effective in cinema. The emotional tension in the artistic process is strong and palpable.

When the artist was at work – and I should add that half way into the film, the model takes over and leads the artist – I became absorbed by those scenes, watching the film as though I were inside it.

This is one of the most important films – on both an artistic and a personal level – that I have ever seen. A major work.

overrun with spiders...

film diary

1 February 09



Magnificent Obsession (1954)

Douglas Sirk, Dir.





2 February 09





Viridiana (1961)

Luis Buñuel, Dir.


*

Great film sources for worlds in conflict - flesh & spirit, sight & unseen, guilt & ideals, reason & the absurd, cause, fetish, fate, choice, the vile, the beautiful...

striving for perfection...

Mirror
Andrei Tarkovsky, Dir. / 1975

I see it as the clearest evidence of genius when an artist follows his conception, his idea, his principle, so unswervingly that he has this truth of his constantly in his control, never letting go of it even for the sake of his own enjoyment of his work.

*

… [Robert] Bresson is perhaps the only man in the cinema to have achieved the perfect fusion of the finished work with a concept theoretically formulated beforehand. I know of no other artist as consistent as he is in this respect. His guiding principle was the elimination of what is known as ‘expressiveness’, in the sense that he wanted to do away with the frontier between the image and actual life; that is, to render life itself graphic and expressive. No special feeding in of material, nothing laboured, nothing that smacks of deliberate generalisation. Paul Valéry could have been thinking of Bresson when he wrote: ‘Perfection is achieved only by avoiding everything that might make for conscious exaggeration.’

                                               Diary of a Country Priest
                                               Bresson, Dir. / 1951

*

The artist cannot make a specific aim of being understandable— it would be quite as absurd as its opposite: trying to be incomprehensible.

*

When I say I cannot influence an audience’s attitude to myself, I’m attempting to formulate my own professional task. It’s clearly very simple: to do what one has to, giving of one’s utmost, and judging oneself by the most rigorous standards. How can there then be any question of thinking about ‘pleasing the audience’, or worry about ‘giving the public an example to emulate’? What audience? The anonymous masses? Robots?

*

In a word, the image [in film] is not a certain meaning, expressed by the director, but an entire world reflected as in a drop of water.

*

The function of the image, as [Nikolai] Gogol said, is to express life itself, not ideas or arguments about life. It does not signify life or symbolise it, but embodies it, expressing its uniqueness.

*

A book read by a thousand different people is a thousand different books.

*

Through a Glass Dakrly
Bergman, Dir. / 1961






I have a horror of tags and labels. I don’t understand, for instance, how people can talk about [Ingmar] Bergman’s ‘symbolism’. Far from being symbolic, he seems to me, through an almost biological naturalism, to arrive at the spiritual truth about human life that is important to him.

*

All creative work strives for simplicity, for perfectly simple expression; and this means reaching down into the furthest depths of the recreation of life. But that is the most painful part of creative work; finding the shortest path between what you want to say or express and its ultimate reproduction in the finished image. The struggle for simplicity is the painful search for a form adequate to the truth you have grasped.

                     – from Sculpting in Time, Andrei Tarkovsky
                           (Trans. Kitty Hunter-Blair)




Solaris
Tarkovsky, Dir. / 1972

would you repeat the question...

A Matter of Life and Death (1946)

Written, Directed, and Produced by
Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger

... films to live by ...

[Released on DVD (Sony Pictures / Region 1 / 2009) as The Films of Michael Powell – a two-disc set, including A Matter of Life and Death and Age of Consent]


Watching the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, also known as The Archers, is like slicing off a part of the universe and holding it in your hand. A close view of everything that is possible. The films have many layers and are never clearly defined by any one central character or action. Their works are among the most personal artistic views that can be presented in cinema. The stories are always emotional but avoid sentimentality. Each film creates a new world.

Characters in an Archers’ production do tend to represent ideas and ideals but never lose their own characterization. Allegories with real people, with real situations – even in the midst of outlandish settings. The landscapes found in their stories are necessary parts of the auteur’s vision. In fact, the role of landscape – consider films such as I Know Where I’m Going, The Small Back Room, Black Narcissus – is what separates these filmmakers from all others.

A Matter of Life and Death, a remarkable piece of cinema, is part psychological, emotional, ideological, and even metaphysical – though not religious. The story itself, a familiar one, is given so many twists that it stays fresh. By the end of the film, notions of real and unreal cannot be separated. For me that is one of the film’s strengths.

The principle actors – David Niven, Kim Hunter, Roger Livesey – give strong performances. The look of the film is stunning - filled with visual and aural rhymes –: stars, lights, flickers of red and yellow, black and white, sky to land, heaven to earth, circles & rectangles, time, games of chess, music, alarms, blinds, brick and stairs. A film experience, not to be missed, worth many viewings.

Can a starving man prove he’s hungry except by eating?

good evening...

film diary

Three by Alfred Hitchcock...


12 October 08




Rear Window (1954)












             17 September 08

Vertigo (1958)






19 October 08






Psycho (1960)







*

Betrayal. Obsession. Out of balance.

A major artist, working at the top of his form, creating very personal films at the end of a dying studio system with its rigid and conventional limits.

dreams aren't enough...

film diary

25 September 08




The Earrings of Madame de... (1953)

Max Ophuls, Dir.







27 September 08




Three Colors: White (1994)

Krzysztof Kieslowski, Dir.




29 September 08



Le Mépris (1963)

Jean-Luc Godard, Dir.


*

Following the theme of obsession and betrayal ... The three directors are meticulous in their attention to the smallest detail. The camera movement in these films – while differing in terms of technique – is effective and absolutely essential to the narrative structure of their separate stories.

shakin the bushes...

What we have here is failure to communicate.


Paul Newman

1925 - 2008

beneath the skin...

Kon Ichikawa

(1915-2008)

Japanese Film Director

Doesn’t this desire for a happy ending show how unhappy they really are?

       Ichikawa’s comment about audience reaction
       to his film, Manin densha [The Crowded Streetcar], 1957

*



Biruma no tategoto [The Burmese Harp], 1956

the wind began to howl...

Music notes all exist, waiting for someone to order them. That two individuals in different places can think of the same music is an example of what unites people.

         – Krzysztof Kieslowski, French television interview, 1994
            (in reference to Trois Couleurs: Bleu)

*

I’ve always believed this to be true. Dylan wrote “All Along the Watchtower,” but it really wasn’t his song. Hendrix heard the song as it should have been written – and performed it. Once Dylan heard Hendrix’ version, he could no longer do the song as he’d written it.