A documentary about the shaping of trans identity in the shadow of patriarchal society from a first-time filmmaker who was once mentored by philosopher Jacques Derrida sounds, on paper, like homework. But trans writer-turned-director Paul B. Preciado’s “Orlando, My Political Biography” is hardly so, instead revealing itself as a playful and joyous ode to how transness calls out the social order’s inherent fictions, binaries, and normativities — and it’s also a loving paean to the prose of Virginia Woolf.
The great British writer’s “Orlando: A Biography,” about a noble who changes genders in their sleep across a 300-year lifespan, already inspired a great Sally Potter film, 1992’s “Orlando” starring Tilda Swinton. But Preciado’s film essay, populated by a colorful cast of sparky trans characters worthy of a Pedro Almodóvar fresco, is a fitting heir to “Orlando’s” literary and cinematic bona fides, both an embrace for...
The great British writer’s “Orlando: A Biography,” about a noble who changes genders in their sleep across a 300-year lifespan, already inspired a great Sally Potter film, 1992’s “Orlando” starring Tilda Swinton. But Preciado’s film essay, populated by a colorful cast of sparky trans characters worthy of a Pedro Almodóvar fresco, is a fitting heir to “Orlando’s” literary and cinematic bona fides, both an embrace for...
- 11/10/2023
- by Ryan Lattanzio
- Indiewire
Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI, and sign up for our email newsletter by clicking here.NEWSThis week, we’re remembering the iconoclastic, anti-capitalist filmmaker Jean-Marie Straub, who has died at the age of 89. In the course of revisiting Christopher Small’s Straub-Huillet Companion column, we were moved by this quotation from Straub, from a 1974 edition of Jump Cut:The revolution is like God’s grace, it has to be made anew each day, it becomes new every day, a revolution is not made once and for all. And it’s exactly like that in daily life. There is no division between politics and life, art and politics. I think one has no other choice, if one is making films that can stand on their own feet, they must become documentary, or in any case they must have documentary roots. Everything must be correct,...
- 11/23/2022
- MUBI
Exclusive: Ian McKellen is among the stars of Ken McMullen’s Hamlet Within, a part-documentary feature investigating the mythology around the Shakespeare play, which is headed to the Cannes Market.
The Art Cinema and Scape Films co-production will be released as an Nft collection on newly formed Blockchain ecosystem platform Cineverse, which allows filmmakers, distributors and producers to market their features directly.
The film will launch in Cannes at an event on May 21, with Screenbound International Pictures selling it at the market.
Hamlet Within is billed as a “radical cinematic investigation into the myth of Hamlet, its origins and its enduring appeal across cultures and systems of beliefs.” Part-doc and part-fictional discourse, it is shot in five acts and framed by a prelude and an epilogue and billed as “a collage of acted monologues and staged dialogues referencing Hamlet’s most famous soliloquies.”
It will feature the likes of the...
The Art Cinema and Scape Films co-production will be released as an Nft collection on newly formed Blockchain ecosystem platform Cineverse, which allows filmmakers, distributors and producers to market their features directly.
The film will launch in Cannes at an event on May 21, with Screenbound International Pictures selling it at the market.
Hamlet Within is billed as a “radical cinematic investigation into the myth of Hamlet, its origins and its enduring appeal across cultures and systems of beliefs.” Part-doc and part-fictional discourse, it is shot in five acts and framed by a prelude and an epilogue and billed as “a collage of acted monologues and staged dialogues referencing Hamlet’s most famous soliloquies.”
It will feature the likes of the...
- 5/12/2022
- by Jesse Whittock
- Deadline Film + TV
Alexis von Wittgenstein’s Munich-based production shingle Violet Pictures is expanding its TV series pipeline with a slew of new projects, among them a historical drama about the role of women in the creation of modern Europe, the story of a mother of three who became one of the Soviet Union’s most successful spies, and a 1970s-set anti-nuclear activist romance.
The company, whose credits include “Oktoberfest: Beer & Blood,” which premiered last year on Ard and currently streams on Netflix, is also partnering with “Unorthodox” producer Real Film Berlin on a four-project slate that includes the tentatively titled “Sayn & Schein,” a dark comedy about a royal title dealer set in the present-day world of German and British aristocracy.
“It’s a booming market,” says von Wittgenstein, noting that there are people who pay intermediaries hundreds of thousands of euros to obtain princely titles. The series is also produced by Michael Lehmann,...
The company, whose credits include “Oktoberfest: Beer & Blood,” which premiered last year on Ard and currently streams on Netflix, is also partnering with “Unorthodox” producer Real Film Berlin on a four-project slate that includes the tentatively titled “Sayn & Schein,” a dark comedy about a royal title dealer set in the present-day world of German and British aristocracy.
“It’s a booming market,” says von Wittgenstein, noting that there are people who pay intermediaries hundreds of thousands of euros to obtain princely titles. The series is also produced by Michael Lehmann,...
- 5/21/2021
- by Ed Meza
- Variety Film + TV
Despite its simple title, Mexican filmmaker Alonso Ruizpalacios’ latest feature is far from a simple shoot-‘em-up cop movie. It’s more like a cop movie written by Jacques Derrida, directed with nods to Wes Anderson and Jean-Luc Godard and then remixed by Abbas Kiarostami in its efforts to tear down the fourth wall.
Which is to say that this Berlinale competition premiere is not exactly a commercial venture, nor does it resemble the kinds of policiers that Netflix, which will release the film online, usually places at the top of your viewing queue. But it’s nonetheless an intriguing, completely deconstructed ...
Which is to say that this Berlinale competition premiere is not exactly a commercial venture, nor does it resemble the kinds of policiers that Netflix, which will release the film online, usually places at the top of your viewing queue. But it’s nonetheless an intriguing, completely deconstructed ...
Despite its simple title, Mexican filmmaker Alonso Ruizpalacios’ latest feature is far from a simple shoot-‘em-up cop movie. It’s more like a cop movie written by Jacques Derrida, directed with nods to Wes Anderson and Jean-Luc Godard and then remixed by Abbas Kiarostami in its efforts to tear down the fourth wall.
Which is to say that this Berlinale competition premiere is not exactly a commercial venture, nor does it resemble the kinds of policiers that Netflix, which will release the film online, usually places at the top of your viewing queue. But it’s nonetheless an intriguing, completely deconstructed ...
Which is to say that this Berlinale competition premiere is not exactly a commercial venture, nor does it resemble the kinds of policiers that Netflix, which will release the film online, usually places at the top of your viewing queue. But it’s nonetheless an intriguing, completely deconstructed ...
As an optimist that believes theatrical exhibition will survive, I look forward to the day when David Prior’s The Empty Man is introduced by a genre geek at an upcoming cult screening, perhaps Weird Wednesdays at the Alamo Drafthouse. The Empty Man is a curious creation, arriving as a B-movie compromise from Disney for beleaguered theaters while the studio ships its A-level movies like Pixar’s Soul to Disney+. This picture, with a 137-minute running time, was seemingly plucked from the limbo of the pre-Disney Fox vault, and although Disney has changed the name of the studio in February, they didn’t even spare the expense to swap out the 20th Century Fox logo and presenting credit on the Dcp sent to theaters.
Putting aside the business of distribution and exhibition, as well as The Empty Man’s unique time and place in cinematic history, for much of the...
Putting aside the business of distribution and exhibition, as well as The Empty Man’s unique time and place in cinematic history, for much of the...
- 10/24/2020
- by John Fink
- The Film Stage
All too often a nonfiction film’s cinematic possibilities deflate in post-production, where the pressure, both internal and external, to make something formulaic becomes intense. The irony, of course, is that it is in the editing that an ambitious nonfiction film’s possibilities can be discovered, or even created. Here are two shining examples of editors steering remarkable films and filmmakers to find their full potential.
Nels Bangerter
Editing documentaries is a singular process quite distinct from its application in narrative features. Non-fiction storytelling often requires culling from hours of footage, weaving together material from disparate times and places, connecting one moment to another even if they were never planned out that way. Over the past decade, Nels Bangerter has emerged as an exemplar of that craft.
Bangerter’s credits extend far beyond the limited realm of talking heads: The 2012 Oscar-nominated short “Buzkashi Boys” assembles a coming-of-age story about two...
Nels Bangerter
Editing documentaries is a singular process quite distinct from its application in narrative features. Non-fiction storytelling often requires culling from hours of footage, weaving together material from disparate times and places, connecting one moment to another even if they were never planned out that way. Over the past decade, Nels Bangerter has emerged as an exemplar of that craft.
Bangerter’s credits extend far beyond the limited realm of talking heads: The 2012 Oscar-nominated short “Buzkashi Boys” assembles a coming-of-age story about two...
- 12/3/2019
- by Chris O'Falt and Eric Kohn
- Indiewire
In a 1997 interview with philosopher Jacques Derrida, the late saxophonist and sonic trailblazer Ornette Coleman recalled the origins of his most famous composition. “Before becoming known as a musician, when I worked in a big department store, one day, during my lunch break, I came across a gallery where someone had painted a very rich white woman who had absolutely everything that you could desire in life, and she had the most solitary expression in the world,” he said of his time working as a stock boy at L.A.
- 5/22/2019
- by Hank Shteamer
- Rollingstone.com
Rhayne Vermette; courtesy of the artist. Punchers, burins, blade knives, and guillotine splicers invade Rhayne Vermette’s working space. Born in Notre Dame de Lourdes, Manitoba, and residing in Winnipeg, for this self-taught artist, collage, photography, and film are the tools that demolish the house of rhetoric. Inspired by architects who infused a reinterpretation of building with wood, glass, and stone, Vermette questions methodological foundations and surroundings—in her case, to make the towers fall. What once was defined as path and pillar do not govern the artist or her work. She breaks down structures that mirror the dysfunctional models and causalities of closed structures. Her schemes and patterns are not affixed or in service to a system. Instead, she shows what is beneath the logic of make-sense enunciations, and their own relational dynamics. By deconstructing edifices of rules, meaning takes its power back. Scratches, flares, glue, and tape are...
- 3/18/2019
- MUBI
Yann Gonzalez’s Knife+Heart arrives at a time when contemporary genre cinema is reckoning with itself. In the last ten years, a number of filmmakers, particularly in Francophone Europe, has produced and directed relatively high-profile films occupying a genre that has come to be known as neo-giallo. A definition for neo-giallo borders on impossible, save perhaps a film that retroactively occupies the European thriller genre of giallo, which peaked in popularity in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and in doing so becomes a film made self-consciously, with an awareness of the genre’s conventions and thus a postmodern relationship to the material. At first glance, Gonzalez’s film certainly qualifies as such, extrapolating certain elements of giallo to an extent where it almost becomes necessary to understand the pedigree that haunts the genre as a whole. The film is not by necessity a deconstruction, but rather an earnest...
- 3/15/2019
- MUBI
The retrospective Godard and the Dziga Vertov Group is showing from February 27 - March 26, 2018 on Mubi in the United Kingdom and United States.British SoundsThe execrable new film Redoubtable by Michel Hazanavicius reduces all aspects of Jean-Luc Godard and his career to the level of a cartoon. And not even a great, cinematically advanced cartoon—the Fleischer brothers, Chuck Jones, or Tex Avery, something that might actually capture some semblance of Jlg’s anarchic humor. No, Redoubtable is strictly Hanna-Barbara, two-dimensional animals lumbering about on an unchanging, depthless landscape. (Oh look! Silly Jean-Luc has broken his glasses again!) As if to drive home the childishness of the film, it is being retitled in the U.S. Now called Godard Mon Amour, it not only makes a mockery of an actually great film by Alain Resnais and Marguerite Duras. It emphasizes Godard as little more than a brand name, a selling point.
- 2/28/2018
- MUBI
Close-Up is a column that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place (1950) is playing June 2 - July 2, 2017 on Mubi in the United Kingdom as part of the series The American Noir.Although mostly remembered now by the public for his 1955 classic Rebel Without a Cause, Nicholas Ray left behind him a legacy of over twenty feature films. A veritable cinematic explorer, Ray traversed genres ranging from noir, western (most notably his 1954 gender-bending cult Trucolor extravaganza Johnny Guitar), melodrama, epic and experimental film. He dared as few would to shoot in remote and forbidding locations such as the Arctic and Everglades National Park. What are Ray’s films about? As in his signature piece Rebel, despite Ray’s wide-ranging endeavors in genre and subject matter we are often met with anti-hero protagonists who struggle and rail against authority while lamenting their meaningless and circumscribed existences.
- 6/2/2017
- MUBI
Close-Up is a column that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Lav Diaz's Elegy to the Visitor from the Revolution (2011) is playing January 12 - February 10, 2017. Lav Diaz’s Elegy to the Visitor from the Revolution is a unique example of how texts inform each other. In the film, elements of the past inform and comprise those of the present, while exposition ultimately informs images of the present. As a viewer, one can reasonably make a case that this was Diaz’s intention given the film’s story and structure: While its premise is relatively simple—a mysterious woman appears in various places in a 20th century city—Diaz tells it primarily with wordless storytelling, mostly images and extended takes. While the viewer gathers that the woman is the titular ‘visitor from the revolution,’ implying that she is from the late 1890s (the Philippine Revolution), it is only late...
- 1/15/2017
- MUBI
2016 wasn’t a banner year. Say what you will, even outside the realm of politics, 2016 was a profoundly troubling year that will go down in the history books as a turning point on a global scale. We lost many a legend, and nations are growing more and more divisively divided. However, despite this seemingly ever-expanding divide between not only cultures but sub-cultures therein, the world of film saw numerous films that will forever alter the language with which filmmakers speak to one another and their audiences. Be it profound documentaries about forgotten sub-societies or nuanced and empathetic dramas offering glimpses into underrepresented groups in today’s world, 2016 is one of the great film years of this decade, and these are the top ten films that I can’t stop myself from talking or thinking about.
10. I Am Not Your Negro
Starting off this list is one of the truly great documentaries,...
10. I Am Not Your Negro
Starting off this list is one of the truly great documentaries,...
- 1/9/2017
- by Joshua Brunsting
- CriterionCast
Cameraperson's Kirsten Johnson on Jacques Derrida: "He is present." Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze
Abigail Disney, director of The Armor Of Light and executive producer of Cameraperson with Gini Reticker, director of Pray The Devil Back To Hell, hosted an intimate, cosy and warm reception for Kirsten Johnson. Kirsten as cinematographer has filmed Laura Poitras's Citizenfour, Risk, and The Oath; Dawn Porter's Trapped; Kirby Dick's The Invisible War and This Film Is Not Yet Rated; Linda Hoaglund's The Wound And The Gift with Vanessa Redgrave; Amy Ziering and Dick's Derrida; Leah Wolchok's Very Semi-Serious; Johanna Hamilton's 1971; Christy Turlington's No Woman, No Cry; Catherine Gund's Born To Fly: Elizabeth Streb Vs. Gravity; Katy Chevigny's Election Day and Deadline co-directed by Kirsten.
Election Day director Katy Chevigny and Deadline co-director with Kirsten Johnson Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze
Cameraperson, which was featured in Doc NYC's Short List programme,...
Abigail Disney, director of The Armor Of Light and executive producer of Cameraperson with Gini Reticker, director of Pray The Devil Back To Hell, hosted an intimate, cosy and warm reception for Kirsten Johnson. Kirsten as cinematographer has filmed Laura Poitras's Citizenfour, Risk, and The Oath; Dawn Porter's Trapped; Kirby Dick's The Invisible War and This Film Is Not Yet Rated; Linda Hoaglund's The Wound And The Gift with Vanessa Redgrave; Amy Ziering and Dick's Derrida; Leah Wolchok's Very Semi-Serious; Johanna Hamilton's 1971; Christy Turlington's No Woman, No Cry; Catherine Gund's Born To Fly: Elizabeth Streb Vs. Gravity; Katy Chevigny's Election Day and Deadline co-directed by Kirsten.
Election Day director Katy Chevigny and Deadline co-director with Kirsten Johnson Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze
Cameraperson, which was featured in Doc NYC's Short List programme,...
- 12/18/2016
- by Anne-Katrin Titze
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
Influence Film Club and Mubi are partnering to show Kirby Dick's The Invisible War (2012) online in the United States from November 1 - 30, 2016 in the United States. This interview was conducted by and first appeared at the Influence Film Club.The Invisible WarWhat can we say? Kirby Dick is a director truly after our heart. Not only does he make incredibly powerful films about challenging topics that matter, he is a champion of discussion as a tool for change-making. It is for these reasons that we are proud to present his films The Invisible War—in collaboration with Mubi—and The Hunting Ground as our films of the month for November. —Influence Film ClubINFLUENCE Film Club: What is it that draws you to documentary film?Kirby Dick: I find the unpredictability of the process very stimulating.Influence: What is your history with documentary? Is there a red thread that...
- 11/8/2016
- MUBI
Usually the home for the latest and greatest in classic, arthouse and foreign language film restorations, distributors Janus Films have become as much known for their painstaking work in restoring and subsequently distributing classic films as they have been for their connection to The Criterion Collection. Offering a direct route from big to small screen, Janus has also turned the rare new release acquisition into something truly special. Taking on far fewer new release films a year than even the smallest of independent distributor, the Janus stamp is one of quality and curation.
However, in the case of Kirsten Johnson’s Cameraperson, even that doesn’t seem to do it the justice it so rightly deserves.
Best known as a documentary cinematographer, with films like Citizenfour and Fahrenheit 9/11 to her name, Johnson has become one of non-fiction cinema’s most lauded photographers. With an uncanny ability to shoot films as...
However, in the case of Kirsten Johnson’s Cameraperson, even that doesn’t seem to do it the justice it so rightly deserves.
Best known as a documentary cinematographer, with films like Citizenfour and Fahrenheit 9/11 to her name, Johnson has become one of non-fiction cinema’s most lauded photographers. With an uncanny ability to shoot films as...
- 9/9/2016
- by Joshua Brunsting
- CriterionCast
I’ve spoken to many accomplished artists, but there are perhaps none who bear the same extent of experience as Kirsten Johnson. Don’t worry if the name doesn’t ring any bells: she’s built her repertoire as a documentary cinematographer by working with and for the likes of Michael Moore, Laura Poitras, and Jacques Derrida, and the things she’s seen have been funneled into Cameraperson, a travelogue-of-sorts through Johnson’s subconscious.
Her time as an interviewer, or at least a companion to interviews, came through when we sat down together at Criterion’s offices in New York last month. Never have I been more directly forced to think about my work than when she turned the tables on me — all of which started with some complementary danishes left for us in the room. It’s a level of engagement that befits one of this year’s greatest films,...
Her time as an interviewer, or at least a companion to interviews, came through when we sat down together at Criterion’s offices in New York last month. Never have I been more directly forced to think about my work than when she turned the tables on me — all of which started with some complementary danishes left for us in the room. It’s a level of engagement that befits one of this year’s greatest films,...
- 9/8/2016
- by Nick Newman
- The Film Stage
Colin MacCabe on shooting Berger: "John absolutely refused to plan things." Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze
Author, artist, self-declared storyteller John Berger is the focus of the intricately woven strands that make up The Seasons In Quincy: Four Portraits Of John Berger. Produced by The Derek Jarman Lab as a quartet of individual film essays, directed by Tilda Swinton, Christopher Roth, Bartek Dziadosz and Colin MacCabe, the combination allows for fascinating interplay of concerns.
On the opening day in New York, Colin MacCabe and I had a conversation that led from Berger's kitchen to Ken Loach's I, Daniel Blake, The Spectre Of Hope on Sebastião Salgado, Chris Marker, Neil Jordan collaborator Patrick McCabe, Isaac Julien, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger, the editing by Christopher Roth and the cinematography of Bartek Dziadosz, apples, raspberries and cows, Brexit and Northern Ireland.
Tilda Swinton: "As soon as we finished the first one,...
Author, artist, self-declared storyteller John Berger is the focus of the intricately woven strands that make up The Seasons In Quincy: Four Portraits Of John Berger. Produced by The Derek Jarman Lab as a quartet of individual film essays, directed by Tilda Swinton, Christopher Roth, Bartek Dziadosz and Colin MacCabe, the combination allows for fascinating interplay of concerns.
On the opening day in New York, Colin MacCabe and I had a conversation that led from Berger's kitchen to Ken Loach's I, Daniel Blake, The Spectre Of Hope on Sebastião Salgado, Chris Marker, Neil Jordan collaborator Patrick McCabe, Isaac Julien, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger, the editing by Christopher Roth and the cinematography of Bartek Dziadosz, apples, raspberries and cows, Brexit and Northern Ireland.
Tilda Swinton: "As soon as we finished the first one,...
- 9/2/2016
- by Anne-Katrin Titze
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
Phillip Warnell’s film about a man who kept a tiger and an alligator in his New York apartment questions the mysteries of animal consciousness
A strange film about a very strange episode in the life of New York City: it’s a filmic B-side to Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man. In 2003, Antoine Yates was arrested for keeping a full-size tiger named Ming in his apartment in Harlem – and also an alligator named Al. They seemed happy enough, until Ming playfully got Antoine’s leg in his mouth and a call to the emergency services had to be made. Without ever questioning Yates that closely about how he got the animals, or what it was like to live with them, film-maker Philip Warnell interviews him generally about how these animals’ captivity must have felt – and he includes ambient footage of local residents drifting about, his camera regarding them as incuriously...
A strange film about a very strange episode in the life of New York City: it’s a filmic B-side to Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man. In 2003, Antoine Yates was arrested for keeping a full-size tiger named Ming in his apartment in Harlem – and also an alligator named Al. They seemed happy enough, until Ming playfully got Antoine’s leg in his mouth and a call to the emergency services had to be made. Without ever questioning Yates that closely about how he got the animals, or what it was like to live with them, film-maker Philip Warnell interviews him generally about how these animals’ captivity must have felt – and he includes ambient footage of local residents drifting about, his camera regarding them as incuriously...
- 7/21/2016
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
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Castle and Beckett's relationship remaining a secret is a stretch too far in the latest episode of Castle...
This review contains spoilers.
8.15 Fidelis Ad Mortem
The term “deconstruction” tends to be one that confuses a lot of people and with good reason. If you look at the word itself, you might think, as most people do, that it means to pull something apart piece by piece—to analyse it, really.
When theorists use the term, however, they are talking about something else. When they throw it out there, they aren’t really talking about what the reader or viewer is doing when they look at a text, but what the text does to itself. Jacques Derrida, who coined the term, spent forty years of his life trying to define it, so it’s complex, but Richard Rorty sums it up nicely when he said, that it is...
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Castle and Beckett's relationship remaining a secret is a stretch too far in the latest episode of Castle...
This review contains spoilers.
8.15 Fidelis Ad Mortem
The term “deconstruction” tends to be one that confuses a lot of people and with good reason. If you look at the word itself, you might think, as most people do, that it means to pull something apart piece by piece—to analyse it, really.
When theorists use the term, however, they are talking about something else. When they throw it out there, they aren’t really talking about what the reader or viewer is doing when they look at a text, but what the text does to itself. Jacques Derrida, who coined the term, spent forty years of his life trying to define it, so it’s complex, but Richard Rorty sums it up nicely when he said, that it is...
- 4/4/2016
- Den of Geek
At Sundance, zombie movies — like all horror films — are typically delegated to the Midnight section. This year, Sundance threw a curve-ball by programming Jeff Baena's gory debut "Life After Beth" in the narrative competition. The horror-comedy, centered on a mild mannered guy (Dane DeHaan) who discovers that his dead girlfriend (Aubrey Plaza) has come back from the dead, features plenty of zombie gore, but as Baena stressed during a Q&A following the film's second-to-last screening yesterday, "Life After Beth" has more to it guts and blood. (This shouldn't come as a complete shock — Baena co-wrote the philosophically adventurous script for David O. Russell's "I Heart Huckabees.") "One of the things that informed me was this William Blake poem called 'Eternity,' which was about not holding stuff that you love, otherwise it destroys you. I also was reading some Jacques Derrida at the time." "This version of the zombie,...
- 1/24/2014
- by Nigel M Smith
- Indiewire
I started writing this piece a little over two years ago when, wondering if this was a debate whose terms I wanted to propagate, I thought twice. After the recent Godard retro in New York, however, thinking thrice, I've decided not to think about it again. With very special thanks to Sam Engel, Matthew Flanagan, Danny Kasman, Andy Rector, Gina Telaroli, who provided so much of the source code for this piece. There's no greater fount of wisdom in the world for a guy to plagiarize.
And so:
***
“Pauvres choses! Elles n’ont que le nom qu’on leur impose.”
“Poor things! They have nothing but the name imposed upon them.” — Film Socialisme
“You can stick your little pins in that voodoo doll.
Very sorry baby, doesn’t look like me at all.” — Leonard Cohen, “Tower of Song”
"Three Jewish characters, it's a lot for a single film. The fourth...
And so:
***
“Pauvres choses! Elles n’ont que le nom qu’on leur impose.”
“Poor things! They have nothing but the name imposed upon them.” — Film Socialisme
“You can stick your little pins in that voodoo doll.
Very sorry baby, doesn’t look like me at all.” — Leonard Cohen, “Tower of Song”
"Three Jewish characters, it's a lot for a single film. The fourth...
- 12/5/2013
- by David Phelps
- MUBI
In his film The Oath of Tobruk, the French writer charts his role in persuading Sarkozy to back the Libyan revolt
As a French public intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy is a creature perfectly unimaginable in Anglo-Saxon culture. In true Gallic style the philosopher is as famous for his luxuriant steel-grey mane, handmade black suits and crisp white shirts (invariably unbuttoned to reveal startling acreages of tanned flesh) as his prolific literary output and ferocious critiques of socialism.
In all, he is a figure many Britons find quite hard to take seriously; to tell the truth, there are even those in France who find him, despite his undoubted intellect, arrogant and pretentious.
Yet, by his own account – an account that has received no challenge – it was this philosopher who, in March 2011, persuaded the then French president Nicolas Sarkozy to recognise the leaders of the emerging Libyan opposition. And it was Sarkozy, straight...
As a French public intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy is a creature perfectly unimaginable in Anglo-Saxon culture. In true Gallic style the philosopher is as famous for his luxuriant steel-grey mane, handmade black suits and crisp white shirts (invariably unbuttoned to reveal startling acreages of tanned flesh) as his prolific literary output and ferocious critiques of socialism.
In all, he is a figure many Britons find quite hard to take seriously; to tell the truth, there are even those in France who find him, despite his undoubted intellect, arrogant and pretentious.
Yet, by his own account – an account that has received no challenge – it was this philosopher who, in March 2011, persuaded the then French president Nicolas Sarkozy to recognise the leaders of the emerging Libyan opposition. And it was Sarkozy, straight...
- 5/25/2012
- by Charlotte Higgins
- The Guardian - Film News
Second #1739, 28:59
The lights on the stage, they illuminate Dorothy, whose talent in this frame to deny Jeffrey her gaze. She is Gilda transported from 1946 to 1986, the curtains behind her unanimated with the sort of predatory menace that the Production Code forbade Rita Hayworth from exploiting. Lynch must have recognized the power of restraint, of not showing, and so nearly the first one-third of Blue Velvet is as tame as an Andy Hardy movie. In this regard, the enduring power of Blue Velvet is that it meets a very specific need and desire: our desire for the archive. In his great (and sort of neglected) book Archive Fever, the postmodern enfant terrible Jacques Derrida wrote:
We are en mal d’archive: in need of archives. Listening to the French idiom, and in it the attribute en mal de, to be en mal d’archive can mean something else that to suffer from sickness,...
The lights on the stage, they illuminate Dorothy, whose talent in this frame to deny Jeffrey her gaze. She is Gilda transported from 1946 to 1986, the curtains behind her unanimated with the sort of predatory menace that the Production Code forbade Rita Hayworth from exploiting. Lynch must have recognized the power of restraint, of not showing, and so nearly the first one-third of Blue Velvet is as tame as an Andy Hardy movie. In this regard, the enduring power of Blue Velvet is that it meets a very specific need and desire: our desire for the archive. In his great (and sort of neglected) book Archive Fever, the postmodern enfant terrible Jacques Derrida wrote:
We are en mal d’archive: in need of archives. Listening to the French idiom, and in it the attribute en mal de, to be en mal d’archive can mean something else that to suffer from sickness,...
- 11/2/2011
- by Nicholas Rombes
- Filmmaker Magazine - Blog
Focus Online is reporting that media theorist Friedrich Kittler has died this morning in Berlin. Having taught at a number of universities, including Berkeley and Stanford, he was appointed to the chair for Aesthetics and History of Media at the Humboldt-University, Berlin in 1993. The European Graduate School notes that his book Gramophone, Film, Typewriter "first appeared in German in 1986. The book examines the restrictive nature of Michel Foucault's discursive textual archive theory. Kittler proposes a wider media band in which he examines phonographic and cinematic flows as ways of deconstructing literary writing. Friedrich Kittler's 'media discourse theory' follows from Foucault as the prime member of the triumvirate Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida…. Kittler derives Lacan's real, imaginary and symbolic from the data channels of the phonograph, cinema and typewriter. His ability to apply theoretical concepts to technology is what makes him one of Germany's most relevant philosophers of today.
- 10/18/2011
- MUBI
Second #893, 14:53
In the early days of silent cinema, text and image coexisted, as intertitles directed viewers how to read a film, literally. In the best of these films, intertitles not only conveyed narrative information, but suggested possibilities of reading that allowed for the viewer to construct her own meaning from the relationship between text and image. In Blue Velvet, the Lincoln street sign, which functions almost like an insert shot, is its own form of postmodern intertitle. [Christian Metz: “When approaching cinema from the linguistic point of view, it is difficult to avoid shuttling back and forth between two positions: the cinema as a language; the cinema as infinitely different from verbal language.”] Lincoln appears suddenly and to Angelo Badalamenti’s Shostakovich-like pounding air-raid siren music (lifted directly from the first four seconds of Symphony No. 5, movement 4, right before the drums) so over-determined that it practically splits the film in two. Read as an intertitle, Lincoln tells us something, but what? The name of a street. And the name of an assassinated president. And a bad part of the town where “the singer” lives. But...
In the early days of silent cinema, text and image coexisted, as intertitles directed viewers how to read a film, literally. In the best of these films, intertitles not only conveyed narrative information, but suggested possibilities of reading that allowed for the viewer to construct her own meaning from the relationship between text and image. In Blue Velvet, the Lincoln street sign, which functions almost like an insert shot, is its own form of postmodern intertitle. [Christian Metz: “When approaching cinema from the linguistic point of view, it is difficult to avoid shuttling back and forth between two positions: the cinema as a language; the cinema as infinitely different from verbal language.”] Lincoln appears suddenly and to Angelo Badalamenti’s Shostakovich-like pounding air-raid siren music (lifted directly from the first four seconds of Symphony No. 5, movement 4, right before the drums) so over-determined that it practically splits the film in two. Read as an intertitle, Lincoln tells us something, but what? The name of a street. And the name of an assassinated president. And a bad part of the town where “the singer” lives. But...
- 9/19/2011
- by Nicholas Rombes
- Filmmaker Magazine - Blog
Soviet state-run cinema was fast, furious and fun before the dead hand of Stalin called time on experimentation and entertainment
A fast and furious chase, full of physical gags and gangsters, with jokes at the expense of American imperialism. A hallucinatory horror, where ordinary objects take on a life of their own, scripted by a literary theorist. A bed-hopping love triangle, simmering in a cramped flat. A big-budget science fiction spectacular, full of futuristic sets and bizarre, revealing costumes. A workers' strike, depicted via special effects and pratfalls. A film about film-making itself, with no plot, no words, no narrative, which is somehow the most thrilling film you'll ever see. A film about collective farming with full-frontal nudity and inscrutable, poetic metaphors. A film about mutinous sailors that manages to accidentally invent the action film as we know it.
This is Soviet cinema in the 1920s. An almost entirely state-run cinema,...
A fast and furious chase, full of physical gags and gangsters, with jokes at the expense of American imperialism. A hallucinatory horror, where ordinary objects take on a life of their own, scripted by a literary theorist. A bed-hopping love triangle, simmering in a cramped flat. A big-budget science fiction spectacular, full of futuristic sets and bizarre, revealing costumes. A workers' strike, depicted via special effects and pratfalls. A film about film-making itself, with no plot, no words, no narrative, which is somehow the most thrilling film you'll ever see. A film about collective farming with full-frontal nudity and inscrutable, poetic metaphors. A film about mutinous sailors that manages to accidentally invent the action film as we know it.
This is Soviet cinema in the 1920s. An almost entirely state-run cinema,...
- 5/27/2011
- by Owen Hatherley
- The Guardian - Film News
Hello, Zoners! Weren’t last week’s Reports wonderful? Stephen has really been rockin’ it, and I’m looking forward to more. I think he has a fascinating roster of guests this week, and I know I’m heading to the bookstore to get Fen Montaigne’s latest!
Monday, January 10th: Fen Montaigne
Fen Montaigne’s articles have appeared in The New Yorker, National Geographic, Outside, Smithsonian, and Wall Street Journal. In 2006, he received a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship to research his newest book, Fraser’s Penguins: A Journey to the Future in Antarctica, a look at the devastating effects of climate change on the these appealing animals. Montaigne went to Antarctica for five months to accompany the team of ecologist Bill Fraser–an expert on Adelie Penguins who had recently watched their population dwindle alarmingly. The New York Times said that the book “leaves one feeling exhilarated.” To get a...
Monday, January 10th: Fen Montaigne
Fen Montaigne’s articles have appeared in The New Yorker, National Geographic, Outside, Smithsonian, and Wall Street Journal. In 2006, he received a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship to research his newest book, Fraser’s Penguins: A Journey to the Future in Antarctica, a look at the devastating effects of climate change on the these appealing animals. Montaigne went to Antarctica for five months to accompany the team of ecologist Bill Fraser–an expert on Adelie Penguins who had recently watched their population dwindle alarmingly. The New York Times said that the book “leaves one feeling exhilarated.” To get a...
- 1/10/2011
- by Karenatasha
- No Fact Zone
Since her 1988 debut Chocolat, Claire Denis has established herself as one of France's most respected film directors, with a wide-ranging body of work and a taste for danger. Her latest film, White Material, which stars Isabelle Huppert, draws again upon her colonial African childhood, and its violence has sparked
controversy in the French press. Not that she cares…
One of the lingering charms of the Left Bank of Paris in the 21st century is that, although much of the area has long since surrendered to chain stores and fast-food joints, the streets between Boulevard Saint-Michel and rue Mouffetard are still dotted with fleapit cinemas with names such as L'Accattone, Studio Galande and Le Champo. On any given afternoon – to take a random sample from the programmes on offer in these places last week – you can take in Battleship Potemkin, a Buñuel retrospective, a lesser-known Fellini, or Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar...
controversy in the French press. Not that she cares…
One of the lingering charms of the Left Bank of Paris in the 21st century is that, although much of the area has long since surrendered to chain stores and fast-food joints, the streets between Boulevard Saint-Michel and rue Mouffetard are still dotted with fleapit cinemas with names such as L'Accattone, Studio Galande and Le Champo. On any given afternoon – to take a random sample from the programmes on offer in these places last week – you can take in Battleship Potemkin, a Buñuel retrospective, a lesser-known Fellini, or Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar...
- 7/3/2010
- by Andrew Hussey
- The Guardian - Film News
As Cole Abaius pointed out late last week, a hyperbolic debate has occurred regarding the alleged potential of Matthew Vaughn’s Kick-Ass to “kill” the superhero movie by subverting its conventions, or whether or not such subversions and the very existence of this film stand as evidence that audiences have tired of the conventional superhero film, or the superhero film as a whole. This post attempts to answer such questions by briefly examining Jacques Derrida's philosophy of deconstruction and applying it to genre film theory and, specifically, Kick-Ass.
- 4/20/2010
- by Landon Palmer
- FilmSchoolRejects.com
Family Demons: The Ghost as Domestic Inheritance by Donna McRae
Low cinematic genres – (as Clover, Williams and Robin Wood and others) have often pointed out – often handle explosive social material that mainstream cinema is reluctant to touch. — Joan Hawkins (1)
Can you make a film about the aftermath of incest and child abuse and its effect on three generations of women in the same family? Would this film contain an inherited ghost running through the narrative that could represent repressed feelings of colonial guilt on another level? Could this film prick the conscience of a nation that might be shuddering in silence for all its past sins? Would you get funding for this film from an Australian funding agency if you didn't have a track record? Would this very serious film fill cinemas, especially Australian ones? Could you get international profile actors to star in your film? Or would Australian film actors like Gracie Otto,...
Low cinematic genres – (as Clover, Williams and Robin Wood and others) have often pointed out – often handle explosive social material that mainstream cinema is reluctant to touch. — Joan Hawkins (1)
Can you make a film about the aftermath of incest and child abuse and its effect on three generations of women in the same family? Would this film contain an inherited ghost running through the narrative that could represent repressed feelings of colonial guilt on another level? Could this film prick the conscience of a nation that might be shuddering in silence for all its past sins? Would you get funding for this film from an Australian funding agency if you didn't have a track record? Would this very serious film fill cinemas, especially Australian ones? Could you get international profile actors to star in your film? Or would Australian film actors like Gracie Otto,...
- 12/16/2009
- by Superheidi
- Planet Fury
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