One can often tell a cinephile by the rituals they establish. For my part, I begin every summer by revisiting Jacques Tati’s Monsieur Hulot's Holiday (1953), the feature debut of his most beloved character. I can no longer remember what drew me to this habit outside of a strong association of the season with the smooth jazz theme to the film “Quel temps fait-il à Paris?”, written by Alain Romans. Revisiting the film last summer, I decided for the first time to put on the 1953 version of the movie instead of the 1978 version I usually watch, which is labeled “definitive” by Les Films de Mon Oncle, the foundation responsible for the restoration and rerelease of Tati’s films. Outside of one addition to this later cut, I was unaware of the differences between them, and couldn’t find much information about the original release. Almost immediately, I was shocked to...
- 8/30/2023
- MUBI
Peter Strickland's Berberian Sound Studio (2012) and The Duke of Burgundy (2014) are showing in June and July, 2019 on Mubi in the United Kingdom.“…if the film or television image seems to ‘speak’ for itself, it is actually a ventriloquist’s speech.”—Michel Chion, Audio-Vision, 1990In an early scene in The Duke of Burgundy, a character describes how one can tell two seemingly-identical species of butterfly apart by the sound each makes, saying, “Since these species are so visually indistinguishable from each other, the sound they produce should differentiate the two.” In a way, the statement provides a thesis for much of the cinema of Peter Strickland relative to his aesthetic forebears. According to the majority of film writing that takes either of his two features Berberian Sound Studio or The Duke of Burgundy as a subject, Strickland’s oeuvre owes something to European genre cinema—more popularly known in French...
- 7/11/2019
- MUBI
Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani’s Let the Corpses Tan is a film about sensations, derived more so from the mechanics of filmmaking than from storytelling. Like their previous works, it exists as a standalone genre film in the classic European mold, even when divorced from its stylistic trappings, with sunshine and gunfire supplanting dark corridors and unsheathed daggers. In the last ten years, the reception of Cattet and Forzani has come to understand theirs as a tactile cinema: What happens onscreen is never quite as important as how it looks and sounds—or perhaps, how it ‘feels’—while it’s happening. While Corpses is certainly exploitation cinema formally in its emulation of European westerns and gangster films, it is also exploitation cinema by design in its manipulation and abstraction of photography and sound.As with their two previous features Amer (2009) and The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears...
- 8/31/2018
- MUBI
David Lynch proved himself as a master of film music in his 1986 feature.
“Every note of music has enough breath to carry you away, and as a director, all you have to do is let the right wind blow at the right time” — David Lynch
Sound and music are incredibly important in David Lynch’s films. From Eraserhead (1977) on, Lynch has shown his talent for creating creepy and dreamy soundscapes, which include music and dialogue as well as diegetic and non-diegetic sound effects. Perhaps Lynch’s most popular film, Blue Velvet (1986) perfectly blends together pop music, original score, and Lynchian sound effects. Blue Velvet is especially rich with beautiful music that both comments on and runs counter to the images onscreen. This was the first film in which Lynch focused on both original score/sound effects and pre-existing pop music.
David Lynch is never completely serious or completely joking — he is always both at the same time...
“Every note of music has enough breath to carry you away, and as a director, all you have to do is let the right wind blow at the right time” — David Lynch
Sound and music are incredibly important in David Lynch’s films. From Eraserhead (1977) on, Lynch has shown his talent for creating creepy and dreamy soundscapes, which include music and dialogue as well as diegetic and non-diegetic sound effects. Perhaps Lynch’s most popular film, Blue Velvet (1986) perfectly blends together pop music, original score, and Lynchian sound effects. Blue Velvet is especially rich with beautiful music that both comments on and runs counter to the images onscreen. This was the first film in which Lynch focused on both original score/sound effects and pre-existing pop music.
David Lynch is never completely serious or completely joking — he is always both at the same time...
- 3/28/2017
- by Angela Morrison
- FilmSchoolRejects.com
Jenni Olson begins The Royal Road, her latest emotional excavation of Hollywood nostalgia via Benning-esque 16mm landscape portraiture, by self-referentially quoting Michel Chion on the shadowy pretext of off screen voiceover after reflecting in her own dryly articulated voiceover on the monologue that opens Billy Wilder’s classic allegory of broken La dreams, Sunset Boulevard. Though Olson’s film revolves around another stretch of California highway, the 600-mile El Camino Real strip, the cinematic reference leads us down a winding poetic path on which Hollywood history, the neglected record of the Mexican American War and Olson’s own unrequited romantic pursuits come together with the same sort of mannered meditation that won her San Francisco Film Critics Circle’s Marlon Riggs Award for The Joy of Life back in 2005.
Pitting rigorously composed images of modern day Los Angeles and San Francisco against her own gender dysphoric voice, she explicates an...
Pitting rigorously composed images of modern day Los Angeles and San Francisco against her own gender dysphoric voice, she explicates an...
- 10/26/2015
- by Jordan M. Smith
- IONCINEMA.com
The seventh entry in an on-going series of audiovisual essays by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin.***At the beginning, we know nothing. And some smart filmmakers (among them Fritz Lang and Samuel Fuller) like to keep us in the dark for the whole of a movie’s opening sequence—often a wordless sequence. There is time enough for verbal explanations in the following, catch-up scene.We know nothing: where we are, what is happening, or who exactly these people are. There are no opening captions, no prologue. We are thrown into a fiction abruptly, driven headlong down a country road, barrelling through a tunnel, entering a city’s limits. Who is at the wheel, exactly, and what is their destination? When the director is Alfred Hitchcock or Stanley Kubrick or Roman Polanski, we will find out soon enough, because we are already wedded to a character’s point-of-view, even...
- 7/6/2015
- by Cristina Álvarez López & Adrian Martin
- MUBI
Musical theorist Michel Chion coined the term "synchresis" to define the forging of picture and sound, the way artistry on both sides of the line blurs into our favorite movie moments. Sound design can manifest and warp reality, but film scoring has its own synchresistic effect, albeit one that's rather bizarre. There's no reason music should ever be playing against a film aiming for truth. Yet over 100-plus years of filmmaking, a composer's touch — or restraint — has become an essential part of the medium's power. A musical cue stamps an iconic scene, a director's vision and a film's legacy. There are sense memories connected to the opening notes of an iconic theme. Nevertheless, it took the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences a few years to recognize film music's weight-pulling at the Oscars. Film's transition into a synced sound medium kept the business resisting the honor until the 7th...
- 11/28/2014
- by Matt Patches and Kristopher Tapley
- Hitfix
With only six feature films to his name, four of which featured his iconic onscreen alter ego, the cinema of Jacques Tati remains an island of unique delight despite his influence on decades of filmmakers since and comparative efforts of peers from his own period (considering Marguerite Duras’ critique, now widely accepted, concerning the taken-for-granted stylistic likeness between Tati and Robert Bresson, a director whose subject matters were a bit less pleasant or comical). Without Tati and his bumbling character Monsieur Hulot, sputtering about memorably in a series of some of the most well-crafted moments of ingenious, highly organized chaos ever put to celluloid, we’d be without latter day influences, like Roy Andersson, Otar Iosseliani, several Peter Sellers characters, and even Rowan Atkinson’s similarly crafted Mr. Bean.
At the time, Tati’s obvious influences date back to the silent era, where Buster Keaton and Charles Chaplin crafted the...
At the time, Tati’s obvious influences date back to the silent era, where Buster Keaton and Charles Chaplin crafted the...
- 11/11/2014
- by Nicholas Bell
- IONCINEMA.com
The first entry into my "Best Movies" section was Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita (read my essay here) and after rights to the film were finally decided I speculated as to whether or not Criterion will finally get their hands on the absolute classics. The answer is a resounding Yes as the Blu-ray release of the film has just been announced for October 21 with the following features: New 4K digital restoration by the Film Foundation, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray New visual essay by : : kogonada New interview with filmmaker Lina Wertmuller, who worked as assistant director on the film Scholar David Forgacs discusses the period in Italy's history when the film was made New interview with Italian film journalist Antonello Sarno about the outlandish fashions seen in the film Audio interview with actor Marcello Mastroianni from the early 1960s, conducted by film historian Gideon Bachmann Felliniana,...
- 7/15/2014
- by Brad Brevet
- Rope of Silicon
Above: New Fancy Foils
My new favorite filmmaker is the American animator Jodie Mack. In 2012 I was in the audience at the Views from the Avant-Garde sidebar of the New York Film Festival and had the unexpected experience of dropping my jaw and having it remain fully in that position throughout the surface loveliness and aggregating intensity—both analytic and sensual—of Mack's lace flicker film Point de Gaze. Its young filmmaker has been making films since 2003—several of which are viewable on her website—with a flurrying productivity which belays the painstaking efforts taken to bring her animated films to life. The screening was the revelation of incredible talent, a moving effort of hands and mind, and it promised a great deal for the future.
That promise had already paid off in spades at the 2014 International Film Festival Rotterdam in January, which presented a program of Mack's recent short films not as a profile,...
My new favorite filmmaker is the American animator Jodie Mack. In 2012 I was in the audience at the Views from the Avant-Garde sidebar of the New York Film Festival and had the unexpected experience of dropping my jaw and having it remain fully in that position throughout the surface loveliness and aggregating intensity—both analytic and sensual—of Mack's lace flicker film Point de Gaze. Its young filmmaker has been making films since 2003—several of which are viewable on her website—with a flurrying productivity which belays the painstaking efforts taken to bring her animated films to life. The screening was the revelation of incredible talent, a moving effort of hands and mind, and it promised a great deal for the future.
That promise had already paid off in spades at the 2014 International Film Festival Rotterdam in January, which presented a program of Mack's recent short films not as a profile,...
- 5/11/2014
- by Daniel Kasman
- MUBI
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