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Displaying 4 of 9 wall posts.
Marcel Pla
23May12
Rainer Werner Fassbinder, speculated upon the place Schroeter and his films might some day hold for the history of cinema: Werner Schroeter will one day have a place in the history of film that I would describe in literature as somewhere between Novalis, Lautréamont, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline; he was an ‘underground’ director for ten years, and they didn’t want to let him slip out of this role. Werner Schroeter’s grand cinematic scheme of the world was confined, repressed, and at the same time ruthlessly exploited. His films were given the convenient label of ‘underground’, which transforms them in a flash into beautiful but exotic plants that bloomed so unusually and so far away that basically one couldn’t be bothered with them, and therefore wasn’t supposed to bother with them. And that’s precisely as wrong as it is stupid. For Werner Schroeter’s films are not far away; they’re beautiful but not exotic. On the contrary.
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Marcel Pla
27Apr12
The Films of Max Ophuls Max Ophuls (1902-1957) was a supreme stylist of the cinema and a master storyteller of romance, doomed love and sexual passion. Fusing the subject of his stories with his endlessly mobile camera, he choreographed emotion, overflowing into ecstatic and extended moments that merge images of desire with desire for cinema. As his themes focus so closely on people and their extreme feelings, performance and star presence are of the essence in Ophuls’ cinema, and it is often in dance sequences that all of these elements intertwine: in Liebelei (1932), Fritz and Christine fall in love while dancing to a mechanical jukebox, surrounded by mirrors and caught in their movement by the movement of the camera; in Earrings of Madame de… (1953), Louise and Donati’s flirtation develops into amour fou across a series of sequences in which camera, mirrors, human emotions and dance fuse and fragment. Ophuls was a truly international director, born, emblematically, in the Saar, a small state located between France and Germany. His filmmaking career began in Berlin in the early 1930s, in the aftermath of the transition to sound and just before the Nazi party came to power. After 1933, unlike many of his contemporary ethnic exiles, Ophuls attempted to remain in Europe, moving to France, where he worked – with films produced also in Italy and Holland – until forced to move to the US by the German occupation of 1941. Ophuls was the last of the exiles to arrive in Hollywood and found the environment hard. He was comparatively unknown, lacking a U.S. success as a “calling card,” and he came up against studio intransigence with his insistence on persisting with his own idiosyncratic shooting style. His elegant, elongated takes often overstepped the limits of conventional editing rhythm so that disapproving, self-righteous editors would chop his shots or break them up with cutaways (sometimes with the connivance of audience-nervous producers). But Ophuls also flourished in Hollywood, relishing the opportunities offered by highly skilled technicians, the studio sets with walls and staircases that could be moved at will, the tracks, cranes and so on, altogether the most advanced mechanisms of cinema in the
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Marcel Pla
17Jan12
In an article for The Telegraph, Tilda Swinton writes about Virginia Woolf's Orlando, the impact the novel had on her personal life, and her experiences playing the title role in Sally Potter's 1992 adaptation : 'I was at school near Sevenoaks, within a short walk of Knole, and one of my school chums was a Sackville-West. Like Orlando – like Vita – I had grown up in an old house and looked like the people in the paintings on the stairs, mainly ruffed, mustachioed, velvet-covered men. We all posed formally in front of bits of furniture, strung together on a high family tree like so many forgotten party balloons caught in the branches. Like Orlando, I wrote poetry. In my adolescent fantasy I read this book and believed it was a hallucinogenic, interactive biography of my own life and future.'
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Classroom Battles
16Jan12
sorry, I saw that you rated the new wong kar wai film 5 stars. But, where did you watch it??? I'd kill to have a chance to watch it.
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