The Dardenne Brothers are relatively recent, and their films have done fairly well in France, even if they haven’t quite acquired Intouchables-type success. Then again, maybe it’s just an anomaly.
What were you meant to provide a link to, because you linked to something by Rosenbaum, but I thought you were linking to an article from which you extracted that quote? Oh, nevermind, I didn’t look at the article carefully enough.
I’m sure this has been discussed before, but I notice a lot of people tend to interpret his endings as being positive, especially those of the Moral Tales. For example, people will say (insert Moral Tale title) is about a man who gets distracted by a woman but eventually returns to the woman he truly wants to be with. I don’t see it that way. I personally feel it’s more ambiguous and that the point of the film is to examine in some part the lies the male protagonist tells himself and how they affect his actions. I could go on, but…A Winter’s Tale definitely had a false happy ending.
I don’t think the people on this site who complain about CCC do so, because of the films’ failure to conform to their view of what a film should be but rather due to a law of diminishing returns. It’s a style of filmmaking that some people feel is overused but can be effective if applied in moderation. I’m just voicing what I feel to be the sentiments of others. I don’t necessarily agree or disagree with what I just wrote.
Eh, the male protagonists in La Collectionneuse and Claire’s Knee were definitely obnoxious, along with the female protagonist in A Winter’s Tale, but Frederic in Love in the Afternoon, while a flawed person, was someone I was able to relate to on some level, so I can’t say I dislike him. The same goes for the protagonist of My Night at Maud’s. Jean-Louis wasn’t a “bad person”, and neither was Frederic.
I just saw Night Train. It’s certainly an attractive looking film with some gourgeous frames, but the films didn’t equal the sum of its parts in my opinion, because I felt the aim was to blatantly film an American style noir/Hitchcockian film in Polish, which seemed a bit gimmicky in my opinion. I’m sure some will disagree with me, but that’s how I felt.
I don’t know about past editions, but the most recent one, which I think has Black Swan on the cover, managed to include The Red and the White, Red Psalm, Before the Revolution, Marketa Lazarova, Celine and Julie Go Boating, Two or Three Things I Know About Her, and perhaps some other films one wouldn’t expect to see in a publication like that.
“Perhaps, not enough “serious” intellectuals have gotten behind the likes of Spielberg, and other more recent Hollywood filmmakers—making a case for these filmmakers and their films as art—and that’s the bigger problem then art vs. entertainment.”
Would you also apply this to James Cameron, Quentin Tarantino, David Fincher, et al?
Then again, that’s the thing, will Spielberg one day be seen as the present day equivalent of Hitchcock or will he follow in the footsteps of someone like Cecile B. Demille? Demille isn’t exactly seen as a great artist. And Hitchcock was commercially successful in his day, but he never had an ET, Jaws, or Star Wars, financially speaking. Maybe a Gladiator, but…
In any case, just because a film has survived for over fifty years doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a great work of art. Sometimes a film simply manages to maintain its popularity in spite of dubious artistic merits (i.e. Ben Hur and Gone With the Wind) Perhaps Spielberg’s films will be well known 40-50 years from now but more in the fashion that Ben-Hur is well known today rather than in that of films like Vertigo and Sunset Blvd.
One thing I wonder though is did people like Jancso, Vlacil, Angelopoulos, and the pre-70s Bertolucci like to think of themselves as ivory tower filmmakers, or did they humbly see themselves as normal filmmakers, who wound up being embraced by self-consciously highbrow intellectuals after the fact? So it begs to question, which non-Anglophone “arthouse” filmmakers are/were self-consciously ivory tower practitioners, and which are/were not? Are films like Celine and Julie Go Boating, Before the Revolution, and Red Psalm deliberately aimed at an exclusive high brow audience any more so than say Rio Bravo or Psycho, or did their respective filmmakers make them thinking, “If it’s a mainstream commercial success, then great, if not, then oh well.”
Well…the young Bertolucci was probably self-consciously high brow, and that was probably what ultimately contributed to his downfall, in spite of his artistic talents. He was way too naive to successfully continue in that fashion, unlike his self-consciously highbrow but more discerning spiritual godfathers Pasolini and Godard.
That’s the thing. Many films only have a low digestibility quotient, because most people can’t accept that cinema can do other things besides visually recounting a concrete narrative. Many films are seen as difficulty for the sole reason that they conflict with most people’s notions of what a good film is meant to do (i.e. L’Avventura, Hiroshima, Mon Amour, Pickpocket, Vivre Sa Vie, My Night at Maud’s, Stalker) Films like the ones I just mentioned are only seen as difficult, because most people are too closed-minded to accept cinema can do more than one thing. Pickpocket and Finnegan’s Wake aren’t exactly comparable in terms of digestibility.
I understand where you’re coming from, but wouldn’t agree that sometimes a film needs to be seen more than once to be fully appreciated and for you to have that “ah ha” moment?
But to the others:
I think what Axel is trying to say is that if you experience great art, you shouldn’t have to rationalize that it’s great, but rather you should just feel it on an intuitive/gut level, and I can’t exactly disagree with that. Many times people, including myself, find themselves in a situation where they watch a film once without getting much from it, and out of fear of perhaps being labeled a philistine they simply say perhaps it’s a difficult film and that they’d have to watch it again if they didn’t care for it the first time. There are two issues here. The first is people should be able to feel secure in their opinions any film without fear of accusations of philistinism. Art can be boring and uninteresting. Those are two adjectives that usually describe bad art. The second issue is that sometimes people should be secure enough to tell themselves that perhaps a film was “less accessible” because it wasn’t that good.
If Bergman said Godard and Antonioni bored the shit out of him, not that I agree with his assessment, then we should be able to say Weerasethakul or Hong Sangsoo bores the shit out of us. I’m not necessarily saying that’s my opinion of Hong and Joe, but still…
“I have perhaps around 500 dvds in my sparse collection and there’s tons of others I have on my Amazon.com queue, but I don’t have a spare $5k lying around (anyone care to donate? heh), and I view renting as monumental waste of money (might as well buy it), not to mention seeing a film in the theatre (which I reserve for films that I have to see immediately).”
Deckard:
Let me ask you this, even though you wrote this about two years ago it seems. Would you prefer to blind buy a film or see it for the first time in the theater, and why? If the choice is between an $8-10 movie ticket and a $20+ DVD or blu ray for that matter…Perhaps the DVD/BD may cost less, but whatever.
Not to pull at strings or anything, but sometimes it seems as though some contemporary ‘CCC’ filmmakers operate in this vacuum in which they’ve conditioned themselves to believe cinema was invented on the European continent in 1959. They seem to be looking for ways to make an “art” film in order to be enshrined as a regular on the international festival context. Antonioni, Bresson, Godard, et al. are important, but one must examine them within a certain context just as Debussy and Andrew Hill need to be appreciated and examined within a certain context. Hong Sangsoo’s problem is that he wants to be an “arthouse” filmmaker. I know what I’m saying may go over certain people’s head. Philippe Garrel, Kiarostami, Claire Denis, and Bela Tarr are also probably guilty of wanting to be “arthouse” filmmakers, but they all have enough genius to get away with it. Hong, Joe, and Sissako do not, at least not in my opinion. The problem is they’re so eager to be seen as serious artists that they do anything they can to avoid being seen as mainstream in the least, not realizing if they have talent/genius this shouldn’t have to be an issue. They’d be artistically respected regardless. This is sort of the Old Guard European art house tradition’s way of dying out with a whimper as people like Joe and Hong self-consciously try to keep an old tradition alive. In order for cinema to survive as a medium, artists need to allow themselves to be influenced by the rules and conventions, in order to break them, all the while allowing themselves to appreciate and be influenced by the best works that still play by the rules (i.e. Nicholas Ray, Hitchcock, Renoir, Lang, early Bergman, Chaplin, etc.). In other words you need to start from scratch and figure out your own method of reacting to conventions that differs from how Godard or Antonioni reacted to them. It’s okay to be influenced by Antonioni, just as long as you’re capable of viewing his work within a certain context, instead of perceiving his method or that of Bresson as a mastered convention of filmmaking. If you want to take what Antonioni attempted to a whole other level you must operate with what came before Antonioni in mind, as well. In other words, you need to put things in perspective and have an understanding cinema history in its entirety rather than just an understanding of experimental/arthouse cinema.
Why are these all region locked? I thought it was only the major Hollywood studios who cared about region coding, so that people couldn’t take advantage of earlier release dates in other parts of the world. I also don’t understand the reluctance to put English subtitles, since I always assumed it was standard practice on any disc to provide subtitles in at least a couple of major international languages like French, English, Spanish…
I watched A Nos Amours completely blind other than seeing it happened to be a Criterion release just before I decided to watch it on Netflix, but I hadn’t been aware of its existence before coming across the film on Netflix minutes before I resolved to watch it.
For example, most DVDs in North America include Spanish and French subtitles. Why doesn’t Criterion do the same? Also, in France, some MK2 DVDs have English subs on them, such as Pickpocket, but others don’t, such as The Three Colors Trilogy, and that’s something I don’t really understand, but oh well.
Just out of curiosity, does Ray Carney not like Pialat and Antonioni, because every time someone’s written him a letter in which either one of those filmmakers is mentioned he seems to dodge the task of offering his opinion on them, simply choosing to barely mention them if he mentions their name at all? But he never actually offers up a concrete opinion.
Really? I can sort of see how Antonioni wouldn’t fit into his polemic, but I’d think Pialat fits right up his alley, unless of course Carney feels Pialat is treading on Cassavetes’ territory.
Are the French Cesar Awards less commercially oriented than the Oscars? about 1 year ago
The Dardenne Brothers are relatively recent, and their films have done fairly well in France, even if they haven’t quite acquired Intouchables-type success. Then again, maybe it’s just an anomaly.
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Are the French Cesar Awards less commercially oriented than the Oscars? about 1 year ago
What were you meant to provide a link to, because you linked to something by Rosenbaum, but I thought you were linking to an article from which you extracted that quote? Oh, nevermind, I didn’t look at the article carefully enough.
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Rohmer and the art of the false happy ending about 1 year ago
I’m sure this has been discussed before, but I notice a lot of people tend to interpret his endings as being positive, especially those of the Moral Tales. For example, people will say (insert Moral Tale title) is about a man who gets distracted by a woman but eventually returns to the woman he truly wants to be with. I don’t see it that way. I personally feel it’s more ambiguous and that the point of the film is to examine in some part the lies the male protagonist tells himself and how they affect his actions. I could go on, but…A Winter’s Tale definitely had a false happy ending.
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Do you have a prescriptive view of films? about 1 year ago
I don’t think the people on this site who complain about CCC do so, because of the films’ failure to conform to their view of what a film should be but rather due to a law of diminishing returns. It’s a style of filmmaking that some people feel is overused but can be effective if applied in moderation. I’m just voicing what I feel to be the sentiments of others. I don’t necessarily agree or disagree with what I just wrote.
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Rohmer and the art of the false happy ending about 1 year ago
Eh, the male protagonists in La Collectionneuse and Claire’s Knee were definitely obnoxious, along with the female protagonist in A Winter’s Tale, but Frederic in Love in the Afternoon, while a flawed person, was someone I was able to relate to on some level, so I can’t say I dislike him. The same goes for the protagonist of My Night at Maud’s. Jean-Louis wasn’t a “bad person”, and neither was Frederic.
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KAWALEROWICZ about 1 year ago
I just saw Night Train. It’s certainly an attractive looking film with some gourgeous frames, but the films didn’t equal the sum of its parts in my opinion, because I felt the aim was to blatantly film an American style noir/Hitchcockian film in Polish, which seemed a bit gimmicky in my opinion. I’m sure some will disagree with me, but that’s how I felt.
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KAWALEROWICZ about 1 year ago
But then again, maybe I was in the wrong mood, as I was in more of a mood to watch a ‘Polish’ film at the time. Who knows?
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Is there an aesthetic bias in the film community? about 1 year ago
“What bias?”
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so the 1001 films to see before you die publication actually has balls! about 1 year ago
I don’t know about past editions, but the most recent one, which I think has Black Swan on the cover, managed to include The Red and the White, Red Psalm, Before the Revolution, Marketa Lazarova, Celine and Julie Go Boating, Two or Three Things I Know About Her, and perhaps some other films one wouldn’t expect to see in a publication like that.
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so the 1001 films to see before you die publication actually has balls! about 1 year ago
Fair enough Tommy
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so the 1001 films to see before you die publication actually has balls! about 1 year ago
Well even the Mubi elite doesn’t seem to have a problem with ‘Old Hollywood’-type classics like Citizen Kane, Sunset Blvd, The Searchers, etc.
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Ever download films for free? (It's ok - I won't tell anyone) about 1 year ago
By the way, are torrents of Out 1 available?
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so the 1001 films to see before you die publication actually has balls! about 1 year ago
“Perhaps, not enough “serious” intellectuals have gotten behind the likes of Spielberg, and other more recent Hollywood filmmakers—making a case for these filmmakers and their films as art—and that’s the bigger problem then art vs. entertainment.”
Would you also apply this to James Cameron, Quentin Tarantino, David Fincher, et al?
Then again, that’s the thing, will Spielberg one day be seen as the present day equivalent of Hitchcock or will he follow in the footsteps of someone like Cecile B. Demille? Demille isn’t exactly seen as a great artist. And Hitchcock was commercially successful in his day, but he never had an ET, Jaws, or Star Wars, financially speaking. Maybe a Gladiator, but…
In any case, just because a film has survived for over fifty years doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a great work of art. Sometimes a film simply manages to maintain its popularity in spite of dubious artistic merits (i.e. Ben Hur and Gone With the Wind) Perhaps Spielberg’s films will be well known 40-50 years from now but more in the fashion that Ben-Hur is well known today rather than in that of films like Vertigo and Sunset Blvd.
Go to Comment
so the 1001 films to see before you die publication actually has balls! about 1 year ago
One thing I wonder though is did people like Jancso, Vlacil, Angelopoulos, and the pre-70s Bertolucci like to think of themselves as ivory tower filmmakers, or did they humbly see themselves as normal filmmakers, who wound up being embraced by self-consciously highbrow intellectuals after the fact? So it begs to question, which non-Anglophone “arthouse” filmmakers are/were self-consciously ivory tower practitioners, and which are/were not? Are films like Celine and Julie Go Boating, Before the Revolution, and Red Psalm deliberately aimed at an exclusive high brow audience any more so than say Rio Bravo or Psycho, or did their respective filmmakers make them thinking, “If it’s a mainstream commercial success, then great, if not, then oh well.”
Well…the young Bertolucci was probably self-consciously high brow, and that was probably what ultimately contributed to his downfall, in spite of his artistic talents. He was way too naive to successfully continue in that fashion, unlike his self-consciously highbrow but more discerning spiritual godfathers Pasolini and Godard.
Go to Comment
so the 1001 films to see before you die publication actually has balls! about 1 year ago
That’s the thing. Many films only have a low digestibility quotient, because most people can’t accept that cinema can do other things besides visually recounting a concrete narrative. Many films are seen as difficulty for the sole reason that they conflict with most people’s notions of what a good film is meant to do (i.e. L’Avventura, Hiroshima, Mon Amour, Pickpocket, Vivre Sa Vie, My Night at Maud’s, Stalker) Films like the ones I just mentioned are only seen as difficult, because most people are too closed-minded to accept cinema can do more than one thing. Pickpocket and Finnegan’s Wake aren’t exactly comparable in terms of digestibility.
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Contemporary Contemplative Cinema - The Default Style for Lazy Hacks about 1 year ago
But Axel:
I understand where you’re coming from, but wouldn’t agree that sometimes a film needs to be seen more than once to be fully appreciated and for you to have that “ah ha” moment?
But to the others:
I think what Axel is trying to say is that if you experience great art, you shouldn’t have to rationalize that it’s great, but rather you should just feel it on an intuitive/gut level, and I can’t exactly disagree with that. Many times people, including myself, find themselves in a situation where they watch a film once without getting much from it, and out of fear of perhaps being labeled a philistine they simply say perhaps it’s a difficult film and that they’d have to watch it again if they didn’t care for it the first time. There are two issues here. The first is people should be able to feel secure in their opinions any film without fear of accusations of philistinism. Art can be boring and uninteresting. Those are two adjectives that usually describe bad art. The second issue is that sometimes people should be secure enough to tell themselves that perhaps a film was “less accessible” because it wasn’t that good.
If Bergman said Godard and Antonioni bored the shit out of him, not that I agree with his assessment, then we should be able to say Weerasethakul or Hong Sangsoo bores the shit out of us. I’m not necessarily saying that’s my opinion of Hong and Joe, but still…
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Rivette about 1 year ago
Duelle’s available on Amazon France in a set with Noirot for a very reasonable price, provided you speak French.
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Rivette about 1 year ago
Just out of curiosity, does anyone know where the one print in existence of Out 1 lives/is kept?
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KINDERGARTEN COP about 1 year ago
It’s an April Fool’s joke on Criterion’s part.
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Contemporary Contemplative Cinema - The Default Style for Lazy Hacks about 1 year ago
Let me just point out that being tedious is not necessarily the same thing as being challenging/inaccessible.
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The Turin Horse blu-ray......... about 1 year ago
Region free blu ray players are still fairly expensive. It’s only the region free DVD players that are cheap.
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Ever download films for free? (It's ok - I won't tell anyone) about 1 year ago
“I have perhaps around 500 dvds in my sparse collection and there’s tons of others I have on my Amazon.com queue, but I don’t have a spare $5k lying around (anyone care to donate? heh), and I view renting as monumental waste of money (might as well buy it), not to mention seeing a film in the theatre (which I reserve for films that I have to see immediately).”
Deckard:
Let me ask you this, even though you wrote this about two years ago it seems. Would you prefer to blind buy a film or see it for the first time in the theater, and why? If the choice is between an $8-10 movie ticket and a $20+ DVD or blu ray for that matter…Perhaps the DVD/BD may cost less, but whatever.
Go to Comment
The Turin Horse blu-ray......... about 1 year ago
Best Buy barely carries CC blu-rays except on their website.
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Contemporary Contemplative Cinema - The Default Style for Lazy Hacks about 1 year ago
Not to pull at strings or anything, but sometimes it seems as though some contemporary ‘CCC’ filmmakers operate in this vacuum in which they’ve conditioned themselves to believe cinema was invented on the European continent in 1959. They seem to be looking for ways to make an “art” film in order to be enshrined as a regular on the international festival context. Antonioni, Bresson, Godard, et al. are important, but one must examine them within a certain context just as Debussy and Andrew Hill need to be appreciated and examined within a certain context. Hong Sangsoo’s problem is that he wants to be an “arthouse” filmmaker. I know what I’m saying may go over certain people’s head. Philippe Garrel, Kiarostami, Claire Denis, and Bela Tarr are also probably guilty of wanting to be “arthouse” filmmakers, but they all have enough genius to get away with it. Hong, Joe, and Sissako do not, at least not in my opinion. The problem is they’re so eager to be seen as serious artists that they do anything they can to avoid being seen as mainstream in the least, not realizing if they have talent/genius this shouldn’t have to be an issue. They’d be artistically respected regardless. This is sort of the Old Guard European art house tradition’s way of dying out with a whimper as people like Joe and Hong self-consciously try to keep an old tradition alive. In order for cinema to survive as a medium, artists need to allow themselves to be influenced by the rules and conventions, in order to break them, all the while allowing themselves to appreciate and be influenced by the best works that still play by the rules (i.e. Nicholas Ray, Hitchcock, Renoir, Lang, early Bergman, Chaplin, etc.). In other words you need to start from scratch and figure out your own method of reacting to conventions that differs from how Godard or Antonioni reacted to them. It’s okay to be influenced by Antonioni, just as long as you’re capable of viewing his work within a certain context, instead of perceiving his method or that of Bresson as a mastered convention of filmmaking. If you want to take what Antonioni attempted to a whole other level you must operate with what came before Antonioni in mind, as well. In other words, you need to put things in perspective and have an understanding cinema history in its entirety rather than just an understanding of experimental/arthouse cinema.
Go to Comment
The Turin Horse blu-ray......... about 1 year ago
Why are these all region locked? I thought it was only the major Hollywood studios who cared about region coding, so that people couldn’t take advantage of earlier release dates in other parts of the world. I also don’t understand the reluctance to put English subtitles, since I always assumed it was standard practice on any disc to provide subtitles in at least a couple of major international languages like French, English, Spanish…
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Going into a film "blind" about 1 year ago
I watched A Nos Amours completely blind other than seeing it happened to be a Criterion release just before I decided to watch it on Netflix, but I hadn’t been aware of its existence before coming across the film on Netflix minutes before I resolved to watch it.
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Cinema is a relatively fallow art form about 1 year ago
Tevarian:
Perhaps you “speak” written fiction but simply don’t “speak” film yet. Give it time.
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The Turin Horse blu-ray......... about 1 year ago
For example, most DVDs in North America include Spanish and French subtitles. Why doesn’t Criterion do the same? Also, in France, some MK2 DVDs have English subs on them, such as Pickpocket, but others don’t, such as The Three Colors Trilogy, and that’s something I don’t really understand, but oh well.
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Wacky But True; or, Another Damn Ray Carney Thread about 1 year ago
Just out of curiosity, does Ray Carney not like Pialat and Antonioni, because every time someone’s written him a letter in which either one of those filmmakers is mentioned he seems to dodge the task of offering his opinion on them, simply choosing to barely mention them if he mentions their name at all? But he never actually offers up a concrete opinion.
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Wacky But True; or, Another Damn Ray Carney Thread about 1 year ago
Really? I can sort of see how Antonioni wouldn’t fit into his polemic, but I’d think Pialat fits right up his alley, unless of course Carney feels Pialat is treading on Cassavetes’ territory.
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