Budd Boetticher

Susan King reports on the Aero Theater at The LA Times (31.05.2007) :

Budd Boetticher's westerns flew under the radar in the 1950s. Considered B movies, they were relegated to drive-ins. It didn't help that Boetticher's star was lanky Randolph Scott, whose best days were behind him. But between 1956 and 1960, they created a string of sparse movies that would influence filmmakers to come, including Clint Eastwood and Taylor Hackford. The American Cinematheque at the Aero Theatre is celebrating Boetticher's legacy this weekend with six films, five of which have yet to hit DVD.

Kicking off the tribute Friday is a new, restored 35-millimeter print of his 1951 non-western "The Bullfighter and the Lady," starring Robert Stack and Gilbert Roland. The taut 1958 sagebrush saga "Buchanan Rides Alone," starring Scott as a former mercenary, rides shotgun.

Screening Saturday are the recently restored 1956 masterpiece "Seven Men From Now," starring Scott as a taciturn sheriff hunting down the men who killed his wife, and 1957's "The Tall T," with Scott as a rancher who is kidnapped by a killer.

On tap for Sunday are 1959's "Ride Lonesome," which casts Scott as a sheriff-turned-bounty hunter, and 1960's "Comanche Station," the last collaboration between director and star.

A long, long time ago, I didn't know how to pronounce his name, "Boetticher". Did you?

Eiichi Kudo's Guerrilla Filmmaking

Robin Gatto reviews Japanese movie director Eiichi Kudo's works, reflecting on "jidai geki", at Midnight Eye (14.05.2007). Worth a read :

In 1985, Assassination director Masahiro Shinoda declared to journalist Judy Stone: 'What characterizes Japan is the imposition upon the people of absolute power and authority without the right to question and debate. The United States, despite its injustices, has seemed to the Japanese a fresh force and inspiration for those burdened with the weight of authoritarianism'. 20 years after WW2, Japan was going through Post-Anpo disillusionment and the whole gamut of political extremism. The time was ripe for searing black and white jidai geki reflecting those times of violence. Great directors like Shinoda, Gosha, Misumi, Okamoto and Kudo all launched themselves into the melee and made sharp jidai geki that were heavily tinged with their new-wave personalities.

Not all those directors were staunch believers in democracy- some, like Gosha, were quite defiant, others, like Shinoda, were more confident; they all felt that they had been betrayed by the kokutai system - blind obedience to the Emperor based on samurai ideology - but they could not always adhere to democratic principles which they felt formed merely a new system imposed upon people. Their jidai geki reveal both their pessimism and faith in forms of individualistic rebellion against authoritarianism. To top it all, Eiichi Kudo's films stemmed from the most improbable realm: the Toei Kyoto studio, the world of entertaining jidai geki for children and uneducated people. But the sheer strength of films like 13 Assassins, The Great Killing and 11 Samurai, although deemed B action jidai geki at the time of their production, deserves a brand new evaluation in the light of political history.

Robbe-Grillet, Gradiva

Par Roman Le Vern à excessif (09.05.2007).

Autant prévenir : Gradiva (C’est Gradiva qui vous appelle) est une expérience «autre» de cinéma qui ne vous interpellera uniquement si vous aimez son auteur : Alain Robbe-Grillet, cinéaste spécialisé depuis des lustres dans les histoires d’amour perdues dans le temps, les rencontres hasardeuses et les brouillages spatio-temporels. Beaucoup le connaissent pour avoir apporté sa plume absurde à L’année dernière à Marienbad, d’Alain Resnais (ce dernier peaufinant ses qualités de formaliste). Eternel amoureux des jeux fictionnels tordus, de la fantaisie incontrôlable et des étreintes cérébralo-sensuelles, il plonge dans des eaux généralement ignorées par le cinéma. D’où grand intérêt de la découverte. L’action de son dernier long métrage se déroule dans une casbah à proximité de Marrakech, un ancien palais en ruine où errent quelques vestiges du passé, des frasques immorales et peut-être des fantômes d’amour. Dans ce cadre précis, le réalisateur propose une illustration de l’orientalisme pictural et d’une chambre des fantasmes où une tête chercheuse (James Wilby, totalement déphasé) croise Belki, une jeune maîtresse mystérieuse, esclave sexuel interlope qui incarne peut-être l’idéal féminin physique aux formes provocantes (Dany Verissimo) et Gravida/Hermione un fantôme d’amour qui devient l’incarnation de la femme rêvée et de l’amour platonique (Arielle Dombasle).

Abel Ferrara

By David Sterritt at PopMatters (19.04.2007). Reviews Nicole Brenez, Abel Ferrara, Illinois, 2007. The frist paragraph :

There are two main reasons why filmmaker Abel Ferrara isn’t a familiar name—on the order of Martin Scorsese or Quentin Tarantino, say—to most moviegoers. The more obvious one is that he’s chosen to project an unruly, law-unto-himself public image that defies the rules of today’s celebrity-oriented media. The more important reason is that Ferrara has dedicated most of his career to probing ambiguous issues of guilt, innocence, temptation, and transcendence through stories and images supercharged with graphic sex, explosive violence, and a vast array of antisocial attitudes. In addition to alienating all camps in the culture wars, this combination of the cerebral and the sensational makes his movies hard to categorize as either cinematic art or Saturday-night entertainment.

Jean-Luc Godard décrit l'Histoire à travers le prisme de l'imaginaire

Par Jean-Luc Douin au Monde (19.04.2007).

Continue reading "Jean-Luc Godard décrit l'Histoire à travers le prisme de l'imaginaire"

Chantal Akerman : "Faire un film sans raconter une histoire"

Propos recueillis par Jacques Mandelbaum au Monde (17.04.2007).

Continue reading "Chantal Akerman : "Faire un film sans raconter une histoire""

Alain Resnais

On the occasion of his latest movie Cœurs (Private Fears in Public Places) opening, Dave Kehr looks back on his movies at The NY Times (08.04.2007).

Kinoshita et Kudo

Par Samuel Douhaire à Libération (28.03.2007).

Collection Keisuke Kinoshita «Carmen revient au pays» (1951), «les Vingt-Quatre Prunelles» (1954), «la Rivière Fuefuki» (1960), «Un amour éternel» (1961) et «les Enfants de Nagasaki» (1983). 5 DVD MK2 Editions, 25 € chaque. Eiichi Kudo : Samouraï Révolution «les Treize Tueurs» (1963), «le Grand Attentat» (1964) et «les Onze Guerriers du devoir» (1967). Coffret 3 DVD, Wild Side Vidéo, 40 €.

Continue reading "Kinoshita et Kudo"

Alfonso Cuarón on Children of Men

An interview video at ComingSoon.net (23.03.2007) :

ComingSoon.net talked to Children of Men director Alfonso Cuarón about the thriller, coming to DVD and HD DVD on Tuesday, March 27. Features on the DVD include deleted scenes, "The Possibility of Hope," comments by Slavoj Zizek, "Under Attack," "Theo & Julian," "Futuristic Design," and "Visual Effects: Creating the Baby."

Interview with Cédric Klapisch

From Cafe Babel (21.03.2007) :

At 46, you are nearly the same age as the European Union. Do you think European cinema and the Union have grown at the same rate?

No, I believe that political Europe and European cinema have little in common. There are several 'Europes', just like there are several 'Frances', several 'Parises', several 'mes'. There is the Europe of Brussels, the Europe of farmers, the Europe of students, the Europe of footballers, the Europe of rockers, the Europe of filmmakers... these are different Europes at different phases, in terms of age and of the quality of exchanges.

The message that I tried to get across with L'auberge Espagnole ('Pot Luck, 2002) is that political Europe is constructed 'alongside' that being built by the leaders of each member state. Erasmus students have their own way of imagining a new Europe, which is not quite that which Brussels wishes to create.

The concrete result is that those twenty-somethings live Europe in an intimate and everyday way. It isn't Brussels that has invented the European identity. It existed long before that, in the regular exchanges of the literary, scientific and philosophical communities. In the 30s and 40s, Hollywood cinema took much inspiration from European directors - Josef Von Sternberg, Fritz Lang, Alfred Hitchcock.

Entretien avec Juliette Binoche

Propos recueillis par Aurélien Ferenczi et Frédéric Strauss à Télérama (13.03.2007) :

Votre sensibilité croise-t-elle un sentiment religieux, dans votre vie ou dans votre métier, par exemple quand vous jouez Marie-Madeleine dans Mary, d’Abel Ferrara, en 2005 ?
Les pensées inspirées me font du bien. Je pense au taoïsme, au soufisme, à la poésie ou aux textes bibliques. Cela doit calmer une souffrance en moi. J’étoufferais sans cela. Je ne crois pas au matérialisme. Je ne crois pas que le corps et l’esprit soient séparés. Nous sommes des êtres incarnés, mais aussi des êtres du possible, et nos rêves nous le prouvent bien. Quand j’ai fait le film d’Abel, c’était important pour moi de dire que Marie-Madeleine a eu auprès de Jésus un autre rôle que celui que les églises lui ont attribué. Le fait qu’on ait trouvé, caché sous le sable, un évangile de Marie-Madeleine (1) est pour moi une révolution totale : avoir la vision de l’enseignement de Jésus à travers une femme, c’est fabuleux, mais on n’en parle pratiquement pas ! Quand j’ai lu le scénario de Mary, j’ai vu que la retranscription de l’évangile de Marie-Madeleine n’était pas bonne, car je connais son exégète français, Jean-Yves Leloup. Abel était étonné que je sois au courant de cela, et il y a eu une rencontre intéressante entre nous. Cela paraissait très naturel de faire ce film, et en même temps extraordinaire, car se plonger dans l’intensité de Marie-Madeleine, c’est toujours « extra-ordinaire ».

Votre désir de partage vient-il aussi de là ?
Oui, le partage est spirituel ! Bon, j’ai expliqué les choses avec des grands mots, mais il en faut souvent moins pour que ça puisse se passer, le partage entre acteur et cinéaste, entre acteur et spectateur. L’important, c’est que toutes les dimensions de l’humain soient reliées en nous. C’est la grâce de l’éveil. L’humain est plus grand qu’on ne l’imagine.

I want to read her talk about love... And you?

Elena Del Rio on David Lynch

From Jonathan Busch's report at VU Weekly (n.d.) :

Last fall, Del Rio finished a book on the theories of Gilles Deleuze and performance in film.

“It’s called Powers of Affection. It’s about how [Deleuze] relates to the way the body behaves in the cinema in terms of gesture, movement and dance. There are behaviours of the body that interrupt the logical reasoning of the narrative.”

The famous Silencio nightclub sequence in David Lynch’s 2001 film Mulholland Drive is an example to which Del Rio refers.

“What Lynch does in this film is he takes away any subjective or objective anchors [which is] very much tied with classical Hollywood and the realistic development of events,” she explains.

“In the Silencio scene, we don’t know why the tone changes so drastically, from the two women [Naomi Watts and Laura Harring] being happy and having started a love affair, then this woman [Rebecca Del Rio; no relation, I think] comes on stage and starts crying. We have no idea where this incredibly affective moment emerges from. Precisely because its reason is taken away from us, by disturbing the realism, the affect grows intensely.”

Her new book is not yet published, it seems. But I wonder, is it written in Spanish? I don't understand Spanish much...

Interview with Linda Hattendorf

Linda Hattendorf is the movie director of The Cats of Mirikitani. From Nichi Bei Times (08.03.2007) :

Nichi Bei Times: First, how did you meet Jimmy?

Linda Hattendorf: I first met Jimmy Mirikitani in January 2001. He was living on a street corner in my neighborhood in SoHo. It was bitterly cold and beginning to snow, so he had taken shelter under the awning of a Korean deli where I shopped. He was wrapped in so many coats, scarves, and blankets that I could barely see his face. Despite the weather, he was calmly drawing a picture of a cat. I admired the drawing, and he gave it to me, asking only that I take a picture of it for him. I returned the next day with a video camera and asked him to tell me the stories behind his pictures. It turned out he had a lot of stories to tell.

NBT: What were your first impressions of him?

LH: When I first met Jimmy, I was shocked to find such an elderly man living on the streets. He was 80 years old when I met him in 2001. I worried about his health and his safety, and wondered what had happened in this man's life that led to these circumstances. As I got to know him better, I became deeply impressed by the strength of his spirit. No matter what the weather or the hour, whenever I saw him, he was completely focused on making art. In that regard, he was a real inspiration to me as an artist. As I met others in the neighborhood who knew him, I found that they too had the same mix of concern and admiration.

Nathalie Baye, l'amour monstre

Du Figaro (07.03.2007), un entretien avec Nathalie Baye sur Mon fils à moi par Emmanuèle Frois :

Quelle mère est-elle ? « Je n'ai jamais voulu être une copine, je suis restée une mère, proche, complice, à l'écoute. L'enfant a besoin de repères. » On imagine qu'elle n'est pas sortie indemne de cette aventure. On se trompe. « À mes débuts, j'ai incarné certains personnages dans le désarroi ou à la dérive, qui ont pu déteindre sur moi. Une certaine mélancolie m'envahissait. Ce n'est plus le cas. Être une autre, c'est très libérateur et enrichissant. Tous ces personnages ont une histoire et j'ai l'impression d'avoir plusieurs mémoires, plusieurs vies. Cela m'a rendu aussi beaucoup plus tolérante car ce ne sont pas des êtres exceptionnels. J'ai cohabité avec eux et je les ai compris. Je ne fais pas ce métier par besoin narcissique mais pour m'oublier et aller vers autre chose. C'est ce voyage qui m'intéresse. Quand je me retrouve je suis très contente ! »

Trailer à Allocine.com. Mother-castrator?

Iris Yamashita : Scriptwriter talks about Japan hit 'Letters'

Mark Schilling has an interview with Iris Yamashita on Letters from Iwo Jima, at The Japan Times (01.03.2007) :

Japanese comment that "Letters" plays like a Japanese film. That is, they feel that it is an "inside" view that does not exoticize the Japanese characters. Did you have any feeling that you were writing for a Japanese audience?

Yes, as I was writing "Letters" I did try to think through my Japanese side. For instance, Paul Haggis had some suggestions that would have been great if an American were saying those words but didn't sound right to me for these characters, and once I explained this, he understood. In particular, I looked into a lot of first person accounts of WWII from the Japanese perspective of not only soldiers but civilians as well.

Mikio Naruse : A Modern Classic

"The invisibility of Naruse might also be due to his style. He was not so elaborate as Kurosawa, and neither did he develop a highly distinctive personal bookmark style, as did Mizoguchi with his long takes or Ozu with his parametric treatment of space. Naruse's style is calmer, simpler and "easier", but it hides underneath it a richly depicted view of human relations, especially those within or resembling domestic situations." — Ella Niskanen at Midnight Eye (11.02.2007).

'Letters From Iwo Jima' Sparks World War II Debate in Japan

David Gordon reports on the premiere at the Berlin Film Festival, intreviewing Ken Watanabe, Tsuyoshi Ihara and Kazunari Ninomiya, at Spiegel (13.02.2007). I assume that Ninomiya-kun didn't know what Eastwood was. He's going to be a great actor, I bet.

Ian Buruma : Eastwood's War

Ian Buruma's essay on Clint Eastwood's two movies, Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima, at The NY Review of Books (15.02.2007 Issue). Mr. Buruma doesn't make much of Eastwood's theme "family", it seems. Does he deliberately (or conveniently) avoid mentioning it?

Rétrospective : redécouvrir l'oeuvre de Yasujiro Ozu

Par Jacques Mandelbaum au Monde (13.02.2007).

"Ozu × 36 = l'intégrale !". Maison de la culture du Japon, 101 bis, quai Branly, Paris-15^e. Tél. : 01-44-37-95-00. Jusqu'au 24 mars.
Deux ciné-concerts : "Choeur de Tokyo", le 27 février, à 20 heures ; "Gosses de Tokyo", le 28 février à 20 h 30. Réservation au 01-44-37-95-95.
DVD : "Ozu volume 2", 1 coffret de 5 DVD et "Voyage à Tokyo", 1 DVD Carlotta films.

Continue reading "Rétrospective : redécouvrir l'oeuvre de Yasujiro Ozu"

The Cats of Mirikitani

From Nichi Bei Times (08.02.2007) :

SACRAMENTO — The Northern California premiere of “The Cats of Mirikitani,” winner of the Audience Award at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2006, is the featured event during the Northern California Time of Remembrance program on Sunday, March 18, at the Crest Theater, 1013 K St. in Downtown Sacramento. Doors open at noon for a Special Reception and at 1:15 p.m. for the 2 p.m. screening.

The event is hosted by the Northern California Time of Remembrance Committee — a coalition of the Florin, Lodi, Marysville, Placer County, and Sacramento chapters of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL).

This dramatic film tells the story of 80-year-old Jimmy Mirikitani, born in Sacramento, who survived the trauma of the World War II concentration camps, Hiroshima, and homelessness by creating art when 9/11threatens his life on the New York City streets. The filmmaker brings him to her home and the two embark on a journey to confront Mirikitani’s painful past.

“An intimate exploration of the lingering wounds of war and the healing power of friendship are the heart of this documentary,” said a statement by the Time of Remembrance organizers.

Homepage.

Entretien avec Clint Eastwood et Kazunari Ninomiya

Propos recueillis par Stephen Sarrazin à l’occasion de la sortie de Lettres d’Iwo Jima au Japon, aux Cahier du Cinéma (n.d., février?) :

Qu’avez-vous suggéré à Clint Eastwood ?

Kazunari Ninomiya : Je suis membre du groupe Arashi (idoles pop/télé), et on me demande si je vais collaborer avec Clint Eastwood lors de notre prochain concert. Je lui ai proposé de venir et si l’occasion se présente, je lui donnerai des invitations pour venir au concert. Ma seule véritable contribution concernait le personnage de Shimizu, joué par Ryo Kase, le soldat avec lequel j’ai une relation de complicité dans le film. Il reçoit une lettre de sa mère à laquelle, dans le scénario original, il ne répondait pas. J’ai confié à Clint que cela me semblait cruel et peu probable, pensant que Shimizu aurait répondu. Cinq minutes plus tard on est venu vers nous avec le scénario et on a ajouté une scène où Shimizu écrit.

Clint Eastwood : Son idée était si bonne que je l’ai fait mienne !

Ninomiya-kun advised Eastwood. A good job.

Watai Takeharu : Little Birds

"Little Birds : A Japanese Filmmaker’s Devastating Window on the Iraq War" by Gregory Elich at Japan Focus (31.01.2007) :

At a time when the Iraq war continues to be a defining issue on the American scene, it is ironic that the most powerful and uncompromising documentary on the subject remains almost entirely unknown and unseen in this country. It took Japanese filmmaker Watai Takeharu a year and a half to film more than 123 hours of footage in Iraq, which he managed to edit down to two unforgettable hours. The result is the stunning Little Birds, which plunges the viewer into the middle of the war, in all its sorrow and horror, and never lets up.

Website and Mr. Watai's weblog (Japanese). Now he's in Austin, Texas.

John Williams : Tokyo's Dark Side

The Japan Times has an interview with John Williams on his new noir film Starfish Hotel. He is not a guitarist nor a composer but a Welshman movie director (to make sure). According to Mark Schilling's introduction, "Williams looks like an expatriate everyman, but he is articulate, opinionated and quietly determined -- the last quality having served him particularly well in the still far from internationalized local film business." :

How did "Starfish Hotel" come together for you, especially the mix of Eastern and Western elements?

It started very simply. I had just moved to Tokyo after living in Nagoya for 12 years. I was living in Kamishakuji near the railway lines, and the place would shake every time the trains went by (laughs). I was really miserable, and Tokyo seemed really dark and depressing. I would see Takeshi Kitano's face on the trains, on advertisements, and it was as if this guy was watching me. I noticed that people in Tokyo were burying themselves in books on the train. Everybody seemed sort of disconnected from everybody else. So that's how it started -- a story about a man like me, floating in his middle years. He comes home one day and finds that his wife has disappeared and it's got something to do with a book and this malevolent godlike figure that's watching him. And because I was reading a lot of Haruki Murakami and seeing a lot of noir, I thought I wanted to make something noirish, something with a lot of shadows in it. So the idea was to have a thriller, a detective story in that very shadowy world. As I was writing it, I realized that there were parallels between the shadowy things in film noir and the shadowy things in Japanese ghost stories. But really it's a personal film about a man who's looking for his identity, I suppose.

How did you organize the various elements in your own head? Was there a key -- an image that everything flowed from?

Well, I worked very hard on the script. Although the film has a complicated story, it also has a very classical three-act structure. It starts with the everyday problems of this guy. Then his wife disappears, and he sets off to look for her. Then it escalates and there's a turning point. What I've done, though, is taken out all the signposts that say "here we're going into the past, here we're going into a dream." I know it's risky, but it's an attempt to take the storytelling to a different level. The film is about how we make sense of our lives by telling stories about ourselves. All those people in the Tokyo trains are going into fictional worlds to find something that's missing in their own lives. Very often, though, our narratives about ourselves break down, and we find ourselves in a dark hole, be it depression or breakdown or death. So the film plays with that theme -- how the stories we make about ourselves are created and destroyed. I'm aware that is abstract territory to go into. So I hope that the conventional man-who-lost-his-wife story will pull viewers through. I also know that this is film that will divide audiences -- those who are looking for a straight genre film will be disappointed. But some people really respond to it and really get it.

Beyond a Shadow of a Doubt, Nights Are Noir in Fog City

Wendell Jamieson's report on "Marsha Hunt : In Person" at The NY Times (29.01.2007) tells the story of Raw Deal that I haven't seen ! :

“I can’t get over this,” Ms. Hunt said as the film festival’s founder and organizer, Eddie Muller, genially interviewed her at the foot of the stage. “It was a strange sort of film,” she added, “about as negative as you can get. They hadn’t coined the term ‘noir’ yet.”

She’s right. It’s hard to imagine a darker film, literally or figuratively, than “Raw Deal.” Consisting almost entirely of luminescent day-for-night photography, it’s the story of an escaped con (played by Dennis O’Keefe) and the two women who love him (Ms. Hunt was one; Claire Trevor was the other), and features, among other pitch-black set pieces, a villain (Raymond Burr) who disfigures his girlfriend with a flaming dessert, and a furious midnight brawl in a seaside taxidermy shop. At the end everyone is either ruined, dead or under arrest.

And that darkness was just fine with the moviegoers here, which applauded vigorously as the closing titles rolled, just as they had at the beginning when the credit for the film’s director of photography, John Alton, the master of all that darkness, appeared on screen.

Mr. Eddie Muller's homepage.

Yasuzo Masumura : Red Angel

By Richard Brody at The New Yorker (29.01.2007 Issue). Reviews Yasuzo Masumura, Red Angel (1971), Fantoma, October 2006 :

Set in 1939 in occupied China, the story concerns Sakura Nishi (Ayako Wakao), a young Army nurse at a field hospital in Tientsin, who is raped on her first night of rounds by Private Sakamoto, one of many soldiers shown to be animalized by the certain death that awaits them. (As one says, “We either kill men, screw women, or eat rations.”) Sent to a field hospital near the besieged front, Sakura helps the chief surgeon, Dr. Okabe (Shinsuke Ashida), perform hundreds of amputations in three sleepless days, and falls in love with him. The cultured and cynical doctor, a freethinker who calls the war stupid and thinks that the maimed soldiers he’s saved are better off dead (amputees were not allowed to return home, lest they disillusion the populace), has also become a morphine addict, which renders him impotent; Sakura takes it upon herself to cure him, helping him through the agony of withdrawal.

For Masumura, violence and sex keep close company, as with one soldier who lost both arms and begs Sakura to masturbate him, and another whose shrapnel wounds may cripple his love life. “Red Angel” features terrifying battle scenes and a cholera epidemic that spreads from a base’s “comfort women,” but, despite the intense and lurid subject matter, Masumura’s style remains contemplative and impassive, as if he were stunned but powerless before the chaos and horror of the misguided war.

Are there any other critics who are into Masumura? I'm going to find them.

Iñárritu : Babel

Michael Wood reviews Alejandro González Iñárritu, Babel, at LRB (25.01.2007) :

Meanwhile in San Diego the children are in bed, and the nanny, Amelia, brilliantly, warmly played by Adriana Barraza, is getting ready to cross over into Mexico the next day for her son’s wedding. Her nephew Santiago, played by Gael García Bernal, like Barraza a veteran of Amores Perros, is going to pick her up and drive her there. The snag is that the person who was going to stay with the children doesn’t make it, and Amelia can’t find anyone else to stand in for her. She decides to take the children to the wedding. And in Japan Chieko (Rinko Kikuchi), one of the volleyball-playing girls, is feeling sulky and rejected, and hopes to cheer herself up with a night on the town and perhaps lose her virginity. So we’re all set. Boys in trouble, wounded woman stranded in a Moroccan village miles from any hospital, American children kidnapped with the best of intentions, and a Japanese teenager popping pills and drinking whisky, ready for a fall.

This is where the nightclub scene occurs. It looks conventional at first: crowds, noise, faces, gaudy colours. Then the colours fade a little, the images become almost abstract. Chieko is suddenly not having a good time, not laughing, not with the boy she thought was hers. She is all alone in this hurly-burly, and we see her solitary, angry face as if it were the only real thing in the world of the movie. Then, three times in a row, the soundtrack cuts out and comes back, so that we suddenly experience Chieko’s world as she does and just as suddenly leave it, and we try to get our heads around the idea of being deaf in a disco. She’s not alone because she’s deaf; but our momentary seeming deafness is a model of solitude, hers and many other kinds.

Download Torrent file (60.0K).

Also see "Borders fall as the academy reaches around the globe" by John Horn and Gina Piccalo at Calendarlive.com (24.01.2007).

Amar Bakshi : The Paradoxical Position of Film: Morality in 4 Classics

From The Film Journal (Issue 13) :

François Truffaut The Young Savage (1969), Carroll Reed’s The Third Man (1949), Orson Welles Citizen Kane (1941), and Fritz Lang’s Fury (1936), while rotating on different moral planes, all connect in one grave concern: that through the institutions of science, law and mass media, a powerful and arbitrary authority has taken hold of the hearts and minds of men. These films create an awareness of the modern “invisible hand”, one not of mutual exchange for mutual benefit, but one of ideas and images that dull and dent individuality away into normal, productive man, as we know him. All the filmmakers have a different conception of what this power is, the mechanism by which it infects the human soul, and the means of surmounting it. By first looking at each film on its own, one notice a series of parallels that support the broader claim that they are concerned with unjustified power and point to an interesting paradox in their solution: though the movies of these directors seek to liberate the minds of men from the unseen institutions exercising power over the men, the new medium of film is poised to occupy an equally hidden and controlling force. But these filmmakers are well aware of the hazard of their attempt – to replace one power mechanism with another – and therefore they strive to show to the viewer the very mechanism which they utilize in order to affect the viewer and manipulate him against manipulation. But it seemed to most of these filmmakers, that the very means of overcoming subjugation to institutions of power is embedded in a new mechanism of power – the film.

Interview with Rinko Kikuchi

Midnight Eye has an interview with Miss Kikuchi on Babel and her role :

I'd like to ask you about the auditioning process for Babel, because you said it took almost a year.

I really tried to do my best, almost desperately so. It was a lot like a love relationship: I really wanted him to look at me and see me. At one point, Alejandro remarked that he preferred to have a real deaf-mute woman play the character and, sure enough, on the next audition every candidate was deaf-mute except me! Alejandro is very frank. He speaks his mind and doesn't hide his feelings, but sometimes that put a lot of extra pressure on me. I believed that, compared to those other candidates, I had the ability to approach the character as a professional actress. If it was the part of a criminal I was auditioning for, would that mean that only a real criminal could play that role? Of course not. I kept that in mind and believed that I had what it takes to do the part as a professional actor. The character of Chieko is sixteen, but if I had been sixteen myself, I couldn't have played her the way I did. When I was that age, I didn't have the capacity to keep an objective view of such a character and at the same time retain a very positive attitude toward playing her. I wouldn't have been able to keep a distance from it.

There are few actresses in Japan today who are willing to do the kind of nudity you had to do in Babel. What were your own feelings about this?

I like the naked body. It's beautiful. I believe that the more we try to cover ourselves, the more we lose an essence of ourselves. In that scene, Chieko has no other way to get the attention she wants. It's very animalistic, in a way, but it's her only way. I think the movie shows that feeling in a very beautiful way. An actress can't avoid using her body as a tool and nudity is one form of expression that you have available to you. I didn't mind doing that scene at all.

Anne Wiazemsky : le mystère Bresson

Par Frank Nouchi au Monde (11.01.2007).

JEUNE FILLE d'Anne Wiazemsky. Gallimard, 220 p., 16,90 €.

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Donald Richie : Through the Terayama looking glass

By Donald Richie at The Japan Times (07.01.2007).

THE EXPERIMENTAL IMAGE WORLD OF SHUJI TERAYAMA, DVD four-volume box set. Tokyo: Daguerreo Press, Inc./Image Forum Video, 2006, color/monochrome, English subtitles, bilingual menu, audio commentaries (Japanese only) by Nobuhiro Kawanaka, Tatsuo Suzuki, Sakumi Hagiwara and Henriku Morisaki, 346 min., 18,900 yen.

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Interview with Katsuhiro Otomo

Kuriko Sato interviews Mr. Otomo at Midnight Eye (29.12.2007) :

You are known for science fiction. What was the interest in doing a period piece for you?

I've always been interested in jidai geki and in making one. As a Japanese, you grow up watching jidai geki. Every filmmaker probably wants to do one, to be like Akira Kurosawa. But not everybody can be Kurosawa. Also, I'm not interested in making films that someone else has already made. If I make a film, I want it to be unlike anything and when you find an idea that might allow you to do that, like in the case of Bugmaster, it really motivates you.

Joe Odagiri loves Domu: A Child's Dream, which is one of the ones that haven't been done yet.

In Venice I met Guillermo Del Toro, who's had the intention to adapt Domu for a while. But I don't know what's up with that right now. We tried to get it made once before, but there were problems with the producer. I gave Del Toro the rights, though, so as far as I'm concerned, if it ever gets made, it's he who will make it. Who knows, Domu is published in the US by Dark Horse, who also bring out Hellboy. So there is still a chance it will happen.

I wrote Domu like I would write a film. It's like the storyboard for one entire film. I've already made the movie Domu, in other words, and I'm not interested in making it again myself. I generally don't like revisiting or even reading my own manga. Maybe I just don't like my own work (laughs).

David Slade : Hard Candy

By Christian Perring at Metapsychology (02.01.2007) :

The writer and director are right to defend themselves against accusations that they are just making money off an attention-grabbing topic: this is a sophisticated and interesting film. Yet it is also troubling and unsatisfying experience because the interaction between Jeff and Hayley has seemed just a game, with little context and very few details to provide any emotional closure. The figure Hayley as the troubled, smart and angry adolescent girl is a great one -- Nelson expresses his admiration for Buffy the Vampire Slayer in one of the DVD extras -- but here she just appears and disappears, as if by magic. Combined with her unnatural strength and intelligence, she seems more of a mythical figure than someone we can relate to. It verges on exploiting the gender wars, and the implausibility of some of the plot details as it develops undermines its emotional power, but nevertheless it is one of the most distinctive movies to have been released recently.

Low budget but thrilling. I've seen a movie with the similar situation a long time ago but I can't remember what it was.

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L' « Art » du montage chez Reza

Par Barbara Métais-Chastanier à LHT no. 2 :

L’influence de ces techniques, qui s’explique sur un plan biographique par la proximité de Reza avec l’écriture scénaristique, se manifeste différemment au fil de ses pièces. Mais c’est toujours autour du monologue que s’articule cette influence décisive du langage cinématographique. Un monologue dont Reza fait un usage très particulier : celui-ci n’est plus seulement cette porte ouverte sur l’intériorité des personnages, il est devenu aussi le moyen de faire s’enchaîner des espaces, des temps et des esthétiques radicalement différents. Le monologue surgit comme un accident au sein de la continuité du tissu dialogique, il impose un régime de l’hétérogène, un mode de progression de l’ordre de la fracture ou de la rupture. Cette esthétique du fragmentaire, du discontinu, permise par le monologue, est à rapprocher du « montage [qui] suppose la fragmentation, le morcellement d’une scène en plusieurs plans, [variant] entre eux par leur incidence angulaire et leur échelle axiale8 ». De L’Homme du hasard à Une pièce espagnole en passant par « Art », Reza use du monologue pour explorer, au cœur du dramatique, différentes pistes esthétiques esquissées par les cinéastes.