Ten Minutes Older: The Cello

Bernardo Bertolucci proved to be Italian cinema’s great prodigy, making his debut The Grim Reaper at the age of 22, and Before the Revolution at the age of 24; achievements comparable to Orson Welles directing Citizen Kane at the age of 25. He was born in Parma in 1940. He initially followed the footsteps of his father Attilio, a noted poet and critic. His poetry received prizes at competitions and a collection of his work was published while he was still a teenager. But his attention was already diverted to the cinema, especially after viewing Godard’s Breathless. His planned transition from poetry to cinema found an accomplice in fellow poet Pier Paolo Pasolini. A family friend, he regarded Bertolucci as a kindred spirit and tasked him as his assistant on his landmark debut, Accattone. The experience, described by Bertolucci as witnessing “the invention of the cinema” further ignited his own ambitions.
The Grim Reaper was based on a story by Pasolini but the resulting film displayed a visual style at some distance from the director of Mamma Roma. Where Pasolini’s camera was often static, framing his characters as subjects in Renaissance paintings, Bertolucci moved his camera constantly. His was an exuberant cinema, pivoted around visualizations of intense emotional states. Before the Revolution further extended this approach, where the protagonist’s vacillation between political engagement and his restrictive middle-class upbringing was dramatized in images of powerful lyricism. Partner was his first film in colour; it featured Pierre Clementi in a tour-de-force performance which anticipates his collaboration with Marlon Brando. The film was made in 1968, the year in which student protests broke out in different parts of the world. Like the characters of his first films, Bertolucci was a youthful Marxist, one especially attuned to the often schismatic relationship between ideology and personal character. The films which followed probed deeper into these internal schisms, inspired in part by Bertolucci’s experience with psychoanalysis.

He released two films in the year of 1970. The Spider’s Strategem, marked his first collaboration with cinematographer Vittorio Storaro; who, along with art director Ferdinando Scarfiotti and editor/writer Franco Arcalli, became Bertolucci’s most important collaborator. The film revolved around a favorite theme of Bertolucci’s – the son struggling under the shadow of his father. This conflict was taken even further with The Conformist. This landmark film featured Jean-Louis Trintignant in the title role of a man who wishes to conform to society by transforming into a fascist. The film proved to be a critical and commercial success, its impact rivaled by Bertolucci’s next film. Last Tango in Paris was a sensation in its initial release, a path-breaking exploration of sexual relationships which influenced film-makers from around the world. The honesty with which it explored its subject and Marlon Brando’s performance made it a worldwide commercial success, although the film proved extremely controversial in Italy and other parts of Europe. In Italy, Bertolucci was charged with obscenity and given a suspended sentence with his civil rights revoked for five years.

Novecento (1976) would prove to be Bertolucci’s most ambitious undertaking (rivaled only by The Last Emperor). The film pivoted around an epic clash between peasants and landowners in Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region. The title in Italian meant “The 20th Century” which it chronicles from 1900 to 1945. Despite boasting a cast that comprises of Robert De Niro, Donald Sutherland, Burt Lancaster and Gerard Depardieu, the film failed to find the large public response his previous films had received, although it was a success in Europe. Succeeding features La Luna (1979) and The Tragedy of A Ridiculous Man (1981) gained a muted response while projected adaptations of Red Harvest (with Jack Nicholson) and La Condition humaine failed to come into fruition. The Last Emperor, made in 1987, was a stunning return to form. The first international production to receive access to shoot extensively in China; it became a worldwide success winning nine Oscars including two for Bertolucci (Best Director and Best Screenplay). This was followed by The Sheltering Sky (1990) and Little Buddha (1993), the three films comprising an “Eastern Trilogy”.

He returned to Italy with Stealing Beauty (1996) and Besieged (1998); the latter film cited by critic Jonathan Rosenbaum as one of his best films. The Dreamers (1964) was a nostalgic exploration of 60s Paris, centering on youthful cinephilia and political engagement; a belated return to the themes of Bertolucci’s earliest films. His next film is an adaptation of Niccolò Ammaniti’s You and Me, projected for release in 2012. —Mr Bongo

A provocative director whose films offer richly textured, contemplative examinations of cross-cultural tensions and alienation, Claire Denis is one of French cinema’s most distinctive and humanistic storytellers. A prolific filmmaker who is more concerned with the drive of her characters rather than the plot that weaves them together, she has been dubbed by one critic as one of the only current French directors who “has been able to reconcile the lyricism of French cinema with the impulse to capture the often harsh face of contemporary France.”

Born in Paris on April 21, 1948, Denis, the daughter of a civil servant, was raised in a series of African countries until she was 14, when her family returned to France. She learned about filmmaking as an assistant to a number of notable directors, including Wim Wenders (Wings of Desire), Jim Jarmusch (Down by Law), and Costa-Gavras (Hanna K.). She made her directorial and screenwriting debut in 1988 with Chocolat, a lush exploration of colonial life and emotional conflicts in 1950s West Africa as viewed through the eyes of a young French girl. The film, which was inspired by Denis’ own experiences in Africa and those of working amongst the stark Southwest landscapes of Paris, Texas, proved to be a very auspicious debut, screening at Cannes that year and earning both a Golden Palm nomination and a César nomination for Best New Director.

Denis followed her debut the next year with Man No Run, a documentary about Les Têtes Brulées (“the Flaming Heads”), a Cameroon band on their first French tour. She then made S’en fout la mort (No Fear, No Die, 1990), a story about two black men, one from Africa and one from the Caribbean, living on the fringes of French society. Like her previous films, it gave specific focus to cultural displacement and racial conflict, themes that would be further explored in J’ai Pas Sommeil (I Can’t Sleep, 1994). Set in a multi-ethnic Parisian neighborhood, the film looked at the various tensions – cultural, familial, and otherwise – at work among various immigrants, including a Lithuanian actress and an expatriate Caribbean family harboring a serial killer. Denis, who occasionally directs for television, next embarked on U.S. Go Home (1994) one part of Tous les Garçons et les Filles de Leur Age, a made-for-TV series depicting the adolescence of nine well-known directors. Denis’ section chronicled 24 hours in the lives of three teenagers trying to lose their virginity in the mid-‘60s. It marked the director’s first collaboration with Grégoire Colin, a young actor whom Denis would also employ in Nénette et Boni and Beau Travail.

The former film, made in 1996, was another coming-of-age drama that centered on the relationship between a lovelorn young man (Colin) and his rebellious, pregnant 15-year-old sister (Alice Houri). It received an enthusiastic international reception and a number of film festival honors, and it was one of the director’s most successful films to date. She followed it three years later with Beau Travail, a military drama based loosely on Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor. The film garnered a warm reception, with a number of critics commenting on Denis’ ability to capture the gorgeously ascetic physical setting of her story, as well as her success in replacing Melville’s verbosity with a silence that communicated volumes. –AMG

Michael “Mike” Figgis (born 28 February 1948) is an English film director, writer, and composer.

Figgis’s early interest was in music and he played keyboards for Bryan Ferry’s first band. In 1983 he directed a theatre play, produced in Theatre Gerard-Philipe (Saint-Denis, Paris, France). This play performed with great success at Festival de Grenada and in Theater der Welt (Munich, Germany).

After working in theatre (he was a musician and performer in the experimental group People Show) he made his feature film debut with the low budget Stormy Monday in 1988. The film earned him attention as a director who could get interesting performances from established Hollywood actors. He initially made a splash in America in the 1990s with the gritty thriller Internal Affairs that helped to revive the career of Richard Gere. His next Hollywood feature Mr. Jones was misunderstood by the studio who attempted to market the downbeat story as a feelgood movie resulting in a box office flop. Figgis poured his disenchantment with the film industry into Leaving Las Vegas, creating star turns for Nicolas Cage and Elisabeth Shue which earned Figgis Academy Award nominations for Best Directing and Best Screenplay. His most ambitious film to date is the low budget film The Loss of Sexual Innocence, a loosely based autiobiographical movie of the director himself.

Forays into digital video technology led him to conceive of and direct Timecode, which took advantage of the technology to create an ensemble film shot simultaneously with four cameras all in one take and also presented simultaneously and uncut, dividing the screen into four quarters. Since then, his work output has almost exclusively been on the cutting edge of creative digital filmmaking, with the exception of star-laden Cold Creek Manor. He returned to the Timecode quad-screen approach for his section of Ten Minutes Older, but has also worked on documentary pieces including a segment of The Blues (called Red, White, and Blues) and a short piece on flamenco. His curiosity with the cinematic use of time has led him to cite Robert Enrico’s film version of An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge as an influential film for him. Figgis has a well-documented love-hate relationship with the Hollywood system which leads him to often be an outspoken critic of the system while also despairing the lack of a better alternative, in his mind, at the moment. At an appearance at Camerimage in 2005, he expressed the view that filmmaking had become “boring and perhaps need[ed] to become even worse before anything better can emerge” successfully at least in reaction. –Wikipedia

The lynchpin of the French New Wave, Jean-Luc Godard was arguably the most influential filmmaker of the postwar era. Beginning with his groundbreaking 1959 feature debut A Bout de Souffle, Godard revolutionized the motion picture form, freeing the medium from the shackles of its long-accepted cinematic language by rewriting the rules of narrative, continuity, sound, and camera work. Later in his career, he also challenged the common means of feature production, distribution, and exhibition, all in an effort to subvert the conventions of the Hollywood formula to create a new kind of film.

Godard was born in Paris on December 3, 1930, the second of four children. After receiving his primary education in Nyon, Switzerland – during World War II, he became a naturalized Swiss citizen – he studied ethnology at the Sorbonne, but spent the vast majority of his days at the Cine-Club du Quartier Latin, where he first met fellow film fanatics Francois Truffaut and Jacques Rivette. In May 1950, the three men united to publish La Gazette du Cinema, a monthly film journal which ran through November of the same year; here Godard printed his first critical pieces, which appeared both under his own name and under the pseudonym Hans Lucas. With Rivette’s 1950 short feature Quadrille, Godard made his acting debut, also appearing in Eric Rohmer’s Presentation ou Charlotte et son Steack the following year.

In January 1952, Godard began writing for Cahiers du Cinema, the massively influential film magazine which also grew to include staffers Truffaut, Rivette, Rohmer, and Claude Chabrol, among others. However, Godard’s first tenure at Cahiers proved to be brief: In the autumn of 1952, he left France to return to Switzerland, where he worked on the construction of the Grande-Dixence Dam. With his earnings, Godard was able to finance his first film, the short subject Operation Beton. While in Geneva in 1955, he helmed his sophomore effort, the ten-minute Une Femme Coquette, subsequently appearing in Rivette’s Le Coup de Berger. Upon returning to France in the summer of 1956, Godard resumed his work at Cahiers after a four-year break from writing. There he rose to the top ranks of French film criticism while honing his increasingly fresh and freewheeling directorial style over the course of the short comedies Tous les Garcons s’appellent Patrick (1957), Charlotte et son Jules, and Une Histoire d’Eau (both 1958), the latter co-directed by Truffaut.

In 1959, Godard embarked on his feature debut, A Bout de Souffle (Breathless). Released at roughly the same time as Truffaut’s Les Quatre Cents Coups and Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour, the picture helped establish the emergence of what was dubbed the French New Wave, a revolutionary movement in film heralded primarily by Cahiers alumni. A Bout de Souffle quickly earned global acclaim as the definitive document of its era. Based on a rough story outline contributed by Truffaut, it was shot without a script, its inspiration the American gangster movies which its director loved so passionately. Crafted with a rough-and-tumble, home-movie-like quality, it dodged all accepted notions of narrative and visual storytelling, adopting a freeform hipness unlike anything before it and sparking a revolution in low-budget, on-the-fly independent filmmaking. Seemingly overnight, Godard was revered as the most important cinematic talent of his generation.

Quickly, however, Godard’s refusal to be pigeonholed became apparent, and despite a few works of lesser quality, his work over the course of the upcoming decade was a remarkable period of innovation, experimentation, and sustained genius. In 1960, he resurfaced with his second feature, an oddball political thriller titled Le Petit Soldat. The first of many films to star his then-wife Anna Karina, it became the subject of controversy over its characters’ connection to the Algerian crisis and was banned in France for three years. Shooting for the first time in color and in CinemaScope, he next filmed 1961’s comic tale Une Femme Est une Femme, followed a year later by the episodic essay on prostitution Vivre Se Vie. Again, both starred Karina, prompting criticism – similar to the charges of indulgence leveled at Michelangelo Antonioni over his frequent use of actress Monica Vitti – that Godard was using her as a non-actress, a mere screen presence utilized and manipulated in ways that she herself did not fully comprehend.

The first of Godard’s films to receive a critical thrashing was 1963’s war drama Les Carabiniers, but Le Mepris, a study of the nature of cinema itself, starring Brigitte Bardot, returned him to reviewers’ good graces. An astonishingly prolific and brilliant period followed, led off by 1964’s Bande a Part and Une Femme Mariee. Pierrot le Fou and Alphaville, une Etrange Aventure de Lemmy Caution, a singular science fiction effort, appeared in 1965, and a year later no less than three new features – Masculin Feminin, Made in USA, and Deux ou Trois Choses Que Je Sais d’Elle – bowed. Godard repeated the trifecta in 1967 with La Chinoise, ou Plutot a la Chinoise, Loin du Viet-Nam, and finally the apocalyptic Weekend, his most formally radical film since A Bout de Souffle.

Beginning in 1968, Godard’s so-called “radical” period emerged and took form during an era when the political leanings below the surface of many of his earlier works began to position themselves as the director’s dominant focus. Through Anne Wiazemsky, his second wife, Godard was initiated into Paris’ Maoist underground. Ultimately, his entire worldview shifted from that of the obsessive cinephile to a radical outlook which even prompted him to reject his own film oeuvre as “bourgeois.” The global tumult that defined 1968 further informed his consciousness as he mounted Le Gai Savior, a series of political dialogues punctuated by telling images and symbols. Next was Un Film Comme les Autres, a collection of images juxtaposed with the various conversations between workers and students. One Plus One – a documentary portrait of the Rolling Stones also known as Sympathy for the Devil – followed. The final project of 1968, One American Movie (a planned cinéma vérité collaboration with D.A. Pennebaker and Richard Leacock), went unrealized.

In the summer of 1968, Godard also co-founded (with Jean-Pierre Gorin, Gerard Martin, Armand Marco, Nathalie Billard, and Jean-Henri Roger) Dziga Vertov Group, a collective designed to make “political films politically” and in the process revolutionize the motion picture language. The films created by the group were produced and written based upon concepts of class struggle and dialectical materialism, all in an attempt to revive a kind of proletarian culture. Once a die-hard auteurist, here Godard began working closely with other Dziga Vertov members, in particular Gorin, shooting in 16 mm on extremely low budgets and forgoing the usual channels of distribution and exhibition. As a result, the collective’s work – 1969’s British Sounds (See You at Mao), Vent d’Est, and Amore e Rabbia, and 1970’s Vladimir et Rosa and the uncompleted Jusqu’a la Victoire – went unseen by virtually anyone outside of student and activist circles, existing outside of common theatrical situations and never even appearing in the U.S.

In 1972, Tout Va Bien marked the ending of the Dziga Vertov Group; an attempt to deliver the collective’s messages to a more mainstream audience, it actively sought distribution on commercial circuits and was even bankrolled with American financing. After completing 1972’s Letter to Jane, Godard relocated from Paris to Grenoble, planning to remodel a video studio and establish alternative methods of production and distribution (primarily by passing out videotapes to networks of friends and associates). There he met Anne-Marie Mieville, forging a long-lasting partnership which began with 1974’s Ici et Ailleurs and continued with 1975’s Numero Deux and the following year’s Comment ça va? In 1976, Godard and Mieville moved to the small Swiss community of Rolle and immersed themselves in video and television work. After a decade, Godard began moving away from radical politics, returning to more personal material, exploring issues of subjectivity and individuality.

Among their first projects in Switzerland was Six Fois Deux (Sur et Sous la Communication), a series of a half-dozen two-part programs commissioned for Swiss television. Another TV series, France Tour/Detour Deux Enfants, followed over the course of 1977 and 1978 before Godard and Mieville returned to France to begin work on 1979’s Sauve Qui Peut (La Vie). In 1980, Godard traveled to California to work with Francis Ford Coppola on a biography of mobster Bugsy Siegel which failed to progress beyond the planning stages. Upon returning to Paris, he began work on his “trilogy of the sublime,” a collection of films – 1982’s Passion, 1983’s Prenom: Carmen, and 1983’s highly controversial Hail Mary (which Pope John Paul II denounced as “blasphemous”) – all fascinated with notions of beauty, feminine allure, and nature.

After 1985’s neo-noir feature Detective, Godard and Mieville produced 1986’s Soft and Hard (A Soft Conversation Between Two Friends on a Hard Subject) for England’s Channel Four. A series of projects, including 1986’s TV film Grandeur et Decadence d’un Petit Commerce de Cinema, and 1987’s Soigne ta Droite and King Lear, appeared in quick succession, but Godard did not again resurface until 1990’s Nouvelle Vague. Over the course of the decade he mounted Histoire(s) du Cinema, a ten-part video study of France’s film legacy; most of Godard’s 1990s work was auxiliary to the series, including 1991’s Allemagne Annee 90 Neuf Zero and 1994’s JLG/JLG – Autoportrait de December. Forever Mozart, an episodic film about the attempts of a French theater troop to put on a play in Sarajevo, followed in 1996. The following year, Godard completed the third and fourth installments of his Histoire(s) du Cinema series with 3A: La Monnaie De L’Absolu; 4A: Le controle De L’Univers; he also starred in Nous Sommes Tous Encore Ici, an episodic comedy-drama directed by Mieville.

(Source: http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=2:91804~T1)

With his debut feature film Closely Watched Trains (1966), Czechoslovakian filmmaker Jirí Menzel became an important member in Czech New Wave cinema and won an Academy Award. Menzel started out as an assistant director and occasional actor for Vera Chytilova following his graduation from the Prague film school F.A.M.U. In 1965, Menzel directed an episode (“The Death of Mr. Baltazar”) for the feature anthology Pearls of the Deep, a tribute to distinguished Czech author Bohumil Hrabal. Later that year, he contributed an episode in a similar tribute to the writings of Josef Skvorecky, Crime at the Girls School. Following the success of Closely Watched Trains, Menzel directed Capricious Summer (1968) and turned in a great performance as a tightrope walker (Menzel is actually an accomplished balancer and performs regularly on-stage). In 1969, he made Larks on a String, considered by many to be his best work. Unfortunately, its critical stance on Communism led to its being banned from release until 1990 when it played internationally. Because the film was banned, Menzel was barred from filmmaking until 1974 when he publicly announced that he supported Communism. He then made Who Looks for Gold?, but has since disowned the film because of the personal price he had to pay to make it. From the late ‘70s through the mid-’80s, Menzel made non-political, nostalgic comedies that were almost slapstick at times. He had international success in 1986 with the delightful My Sweet Little Village. In the late ‘80s, Menzel again returned to political activism and continued to make films though the mid-’90s.

(From http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=2:102538)

Michael Radford was born in New Delhi, India, to an English father and an Austrian mother. He grew up mainly in the Middle East, where his father served in the British Army, and was educated at Bedford School and at Worcester College, Oxford. At the age of 25, having been a teacher for a number of years in Edinburgh, he was accepted at the National Film School and became one of the first 25 students in its inaugural year.

Upon graduating in 1974 he embarked on a series of documentaries, mainly for the BBC. These included “The Madonna and the Volcano” (Grand Prix Nyon Documentary Festival 1976) and “Last Stronghold of the Pure Gospel”. In 1980 he directed his first feature film for BBC Scotland, entitled The White Bird Passes adapted from the novel by Jessie Kesson and winner of the Scottish Radio Industries Award in that year. It was the success of this collaboration that led to the writing and directing of Another Time, Another Place his first feature film for the cinema and selected for the Quinzaine des Realisateurs at Cannes in 1983 and winner of fifteen major prizes at festivals around the world. The critical success of this film launched his career in feature films.

Radford’s next film made the following year (1984) was the cinematic adaptation of George Orwell’s book of the same name and starring Richard Burton and John Hurt. Radford’s 1984 won the won the British Film Award for best film and best actor, as well as numerous other International prizes. In 1987 he made his next film White Mischief starring Scacchi and Joss Ackland. Although the film has now become somewhat a cult movie, at the time of its release, it was a commercial failure and Radford did not make another film for over six years.

During this period he went first to live in France and then Italy, writing screenplays and directing commercials. It was his longstanding friendship with the Italian actor, Massimo Troisi that led to the writing and making of Il Postino. Nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Director and Best screenplay, and winner of the Oscar for Best Music, it garnered over thirty-five international awards, including the BAFTA awards for Best Director and Best Foreign Film and was for a long time the biggest grossing foreign language film in the history of cinema.

Radford then directed B Monkey with Asia Argento, Rupert Everett and Jonathan Rhys Meyers, his first film in Britain for eight years; and in 1999, Dancing at the Blue Iguana, an improvised film set in an LA strip club and made with an ensemble group of actors, including Daryl Hannah, Jennifer Tilly and Sandra Oh. September 2000 found him directing Hannah his first West End play The Seven Year Itch.

The following year, along with fifteen other major directors from around the world, he contributed to a compilation of short films on the subject of time entitled Ten Minutes Older. Radford’s contribution, a sci-fi film entitled “Addicted to the Stars” starring Daniel Craig premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2003. In 2003 he adapted and directed William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. Starring Al Pacino as Shylock, along with Jeremy Irons as Antonio and Joseph Fiennes as Bassanio. The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2004.

In the summer of the same year, he journeyed to Santiago in Chile where he directed Hector Nogeira the well known Chilean actor in the play Novecento by Allessandro Barrico at the Teatro Camino. It was subsequently voted South American production of the year.

Flawless, his current film, a heist movie set in the 1960 and starring Michael Caine and Demi Moore is due out in 2008. Presently he is in preproduction on his first foreign language film since Il Postino. La Mula, based on the novel by Juan Eslava Galan, is the story of a muleteer during the Spanish Civil War. It will be shot in Spanish and stars Oscar Jaenada and Maria Valverde.

Michael Radford speaks four languages and has homes in London and Los Angeles where he lives with his second wife, Emma, and his children: his son Felix born in 1991 by his first wife, his two step-sons, and his daughter Amaryllis born in 2005. –Magnolia Pictures