Anna Karenina is one of the most subtle things you’ll come across, and very readable but if it you want something shorter, there’s :
The Cossacks, also by Tolstoy.
Vladimir Voinovich’s Ivan Chonkin, a genuinly funny and surreal satire.
And Solzhenitsyn’s A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which is a straightforward, more melancholic than traumatic book about, well, a day in the life of a labour camp inmate.
Here’s a not-that-original choice, September 1, 1939 by Auden
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.
Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism’s face
And the international wrong.
Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.
From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
“I will be true to the wife,
I’ll concentrate more on my work,”
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
Said the Tailor to the Bishop:
Believe me, I can fly.
Watch me while I try.
And he stood with things
That looked like wings
On the great church roof-
That is quite absurd
A wicked, foolish lie,
For man will never fly,
A man is not a bird,
Said the Bishop to the Tailor.
Said the People to the Bishop:
The Tailor is quite dead,
He was a stupid head.
His wings are rumpled
And he lies all crumpled
On the hard church square.
The bells ring out in praise
That man is not a bird
It was a wicked, foolish lie,
Mankind will never fly,
Said the Bishop to the People.
Isn’t Show me love sort of an obvious choice? It’s a feel-good love story about teenage girls, what more do you want? I mean, it’s hard not to feel like a teenage girl while watching it, so…
The problem of that film is not that is claims that Serbs were these noble anti-Nazi fighters while Slovenes, Croats and Bosnians welcomed Hitler (although it does that)
If you insert archive footage in a fictional film outside any meaningful context, with no genuine ties to the plot, and if that footage shows Croats as fascists, and you do that in Serbia in 1995, it’s a huge problem, it’s pure propaganda.
In today’s Serbia Kusturica is a marginal person
That’s not true. He’s just sold like a 100.000 copies of his autobiography, in a country where real writers sell 500-1000. Plus, he’s best friends with a huge part of the political elite in Serbia, and the Serb Republic in Bosnia. How else did he get to run a national park? (he doesn’t own a village, it’s more like a mountain)
based on a novel by Ivo Andrić, which is infamous for being one of the first nationalist works which contributed to the rise of ethnic tensions in Yugoslavia
If one wants to interpret Bridge on the Drina like that, he can conclude that we should all be running around killing muslims. But it’s probably not the best way to do it, and Andric isn’t really perceived today as an infamous nationalist. There are right-wing quasi-liberals quoting 1984, doesn’t mean Orwell wasn’t a socialist.
The premise of Underground is stolen from the 1989 film “Bunker Palace Hotel” by the famous French-Bosnian director and comic artist Enki Bilal.
I think it’s actually based on a play by Dusan Kovacevic, though that doesn’t really matter anyway.
You’re right about that rascist element in Underground. The problem is, if you see it as a story about a couple of lunatics doing insane stuff, it’s brilliant, but it isn’t just that. There’s a weird idea inherent in that nationalism in Serbia (Kusturica, Cosic, etc.), they see the nation as a bunch of animals, and in the same time they claim that there is something divine about it (it’s all mud, and one must cherish the mud, something like that). And of course there’s the all sides commited crimes, therefore we/they are all the same argument at the end of the film. We would have to revise the entire history of the 20th century if we espoused that.
Bosniaks/Bosnians/Muslims, whatever you call them, may have the right to say that, since they are generally perceived as the victims and it would be a sort of dissent, but for an artist or intellectual from Serbia, it’s just cowardice.
And the song about Karadzic is just bloody disgusting.
Access today is not the issue, there are open-minded theaters and festivals, if not there’s the internet and peer-to-peer sharing, you can watch what you want to watch, if you can be bothered to look.
An interesting question for me is whether the dominant atmosphere has become more anti-intellectual (maybe one might draw an analogy with the shift to the right in politics), especially among those who are supposed to be a bit agressive, rebelious. I’m slightly familiar with film/drama students in my country, and there is maybe a tendency to have a, let’s say self-content approach to taste. There is also a resistance when it comes to non anglophone films (unless they’re sort of classics), which is a bit of a paradox coming from eastern europeans.
There is possibly a conservative, lazy way of thinking, a less stimulating spirit within the let’s-call-it-liberal community, that’s more pronounced now than some 30 years ago.
The first part of All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace has been aired, and feeling somewhat lonely in my appreciation of Adam Curtis (a way too small, douglas-adamsian number of fans on mubi), I thought I might try to draw some attention to his work.
You can find most, if not all of his films on youtube, and if you want to sample it first you can start with the shorts he made for Charlie Brooker’s newswipe.
He also keeps a brilliant blog in the same spirit as the documentaries, with a heavy use of material from the BBC archives, sometimes posting full length documentaries. There’s an excellent film made in 1968, America: Democracy on Trial (which features a conversation about Vietnam that seems like an eerie transposition of Levin’s thoughts in Anna Karenina), and Curtis writing about it speaks in the same time about his own work:
The film is about the relationship between the everyday experience of the family – especially the wife, who is a fascinating and enigmatic character – and the big story they are told about the world. But it is made at a moment when that story no longer makes sense and the fragments that it is made of are beginning to fall apart.
Stories are the central theme of Curtis’s films, he actually tells stories about stories, emphasising the idea that constructing narratives is not just a need, but a necessity, that thought implies reduction, communicating it through a narrative, through form. There’s Zizek’s rather beautiful analysis of Three Colours : Blue:
What she is able to do at the end is to acquire a proper distance towards reality. This is what happens in the famous circular shot where we pass from Julie’s face, while she is making love […] this free floating in a fantasy-space, far from distancing us from reality us to approach reality. She is putting together the co-ordinates which enable her to experience her reality as meaningful again.
Or that image at the end of Decalogue I, a man dedicated to understanding the world who did all that was within the reach of reason (calculating and testing the thickness of the ice) and failed anyway (son fell through the ice) still can’t accept the randomness (tears down the altar).
Curtis deals with this inevitable failure (“a word is elegy to what it signifies”, Hass), though usually with less noble protagonists, and bigger failures, with an underlying notion that ideas, narratives, matter, as either motivation or justification, or both, which people tend to forget with surprising ease (a matter he confronts directly in The Trap), and pays attention to ideas that have become commonplace and possibly lost some of their meaning while gaining in strength. (freedom, individualism, egalitarianism…).
He uses many artistic, almost literary techniques, differentiating his work from films like Inside Job, which is a journalistic retelling of known facts. There is a certain playfulness, humour, (auto)irony, an ability to make wild connections and in the same time to leave a lot of space for the viewer to make them himself, all of which correspond in a way to Calvino’s values of lightness and quickness, “my work as a
writer has from the beginning aimed at tracing the lightening flashes of the mental circuits that capture and link points distant from each other in space and time.”
This quote maybe bares resemblance to what I think Curtis is trying to do, to offer a different perception:
When I write I am trying to express my way of being in the world. This is primarily a process of elimination: once you have removed all the dead language, the second-hand dogma, the truths that are not your own but other people’s, the mottos, the slogans, the out-and-out lies of your nation, the myths of your historical moment – once you have removed all that warps experience into a shape you do not recognise and do not believe in – what you are left with is something approximating the truth of your own conception. That is what I am looking for when I read a novel; one person’s truth as far as it can be rendered through language. (Zadie Smith)
I’m aware of that, but this is an internet forum for people who can be bothered to look for films, and those particular films can be found on the internet, it’s like…a target demographic.
Plus, I’m not exactly from Bristol myself.
I wasn’t being hostile, I just wanted to reply, you know, to keep the thread going. I can see why you misunderstood me though, having reread the post. That is not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all.
Ok, we’ve managed to challenge the concept of communication with just a couple of posts.
Nevermind, I’ll try one more time.
@ Aflwydd
I just loved the entrepreneurs founding out that they both named their kids after Ayn Rand. Wonderfully zealous, for two reasons probably, the first being the one-book syndrome (I doubt that they have another little girl called Camus, or Leo Nikolayevich), and the secong embracing ideas that give moral value to your ambitions. It’s maybe similar to the link between the middle class and protestantism, or calvinism, with labour eventualy becoming a moral value and succes a sign of divine mercy (it’s dumbed down, I know).
his documentaries implicitly do is ask you to challenge the power structures
For me it’s more about looking at familiar things and common opinions in a slightly different way, trying to be conscious of the faults of our own, intimate ideas (like the shift in the attitude toward credits in the last decades). Intellectual responsibility is important in those films, he’s a bit like Orwell there, along with the making political writing into art stuff. It’s more than nodding, though maybe it just suits me to think that way.
If every person in Britain tuned in on Monday night
Since something like the Big Society and free schools can make it’s way in Britain, I’d say that many haven’t been paying attention until now, and probably won’t on Monday. Would be nice if I were wrong.
Won’t try to convince you, but I really like that voice over, I don’t know how familiar with french you are, but it seldom has such a sound and heavy rhythm Lavant did a hell of a job.
Here’s this too:
AA: For Beau Travail you had written “booklets” rather than a screenplay…
CD: It was Jean-Pol’s idea, because since we didn’t have the authorisation to shoot in Djibouti, and so as not to be bored to death, we wrote Galoup’s remembrances, Galoup’s diary. And I was able to have it read by Chevalier (director of the fiction unit of Arte) or by Denis Lavant, to give them an idea of what the film was like. After that, we wrote the screenplay based on these booklets.
I understand what you mean, I have the same problem with Days of Heaven, but here the voice over adds something, I think.
@ Persona
http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/3683426/Beau_Travail_1999_DVDrip_XviD, if you don’t have access to the film…
The black and white stills are from Bergman’s Summer Interlude (Sommarlek), and the color ones are, well, from Black Swan. And I have a question.
I’m not trying to rekindle the discussions about the quality of Black Swan, they’ve led pretty much nowhere, so if anyone actually wants to reply, please ignore your indignation glands and refrain from stuff like ’how can you compare him to Him’.
Aronofsky doesn’t cite the film as an influence, nor do I remember coming across a text making a connection between the two, despite the obvious similarities, so my question is:
is this kiss-en-pointe thing often used, like a cliché that’s developed a twofold irony or something, or is it a Julie-from-Blue-hears-a-homeless-man-playing-her-late-husband’s-unpublished-music type of occurrence?
My dear Telemachus,
The Trojan War
is over now; I don’t recall who won it.
The Greeks, no doubt, for only they would leave
so many dead so far from their own homeland.
But still, my homeward way has proved too long.
While we were wasting time there, old Poseidon,
it almost seems, stretched and extended space.
I don’t know where I am or what this place
can be. It would appear some filthy island,
with bushes, buildings, and great grunting pigs.
A garden choked with weeds; some queen or other.
Grass and huge stones . . . Telemachus, my son!
To a wanderer the faces of all islands
resemble one another. And the mind
trips, numbering waves; eyes, sore from sea horizons,
run; and the flesh of water stuffs the ears.
I can’t remember how the war came out;
even how old you are—I can’t remember.
Grow up, then, my Telemachus, grow strong.
Only the gods know if we’ll see each other
again. You’ve long since ceased to be that babe
before whom I reined in the plowing bullocks.
Had it not been for Palamedes’ trick
we two would still be living in one household.
But maybe he was right; away from me
you are quite safe from all Oedipal passions,
and your dreams, my Telemachus, are blameless.
A great second Odyssey,
Greater even than the first perhaps,
But alas, without Homer, without hexameters.
Small was his ancestral home,
Small was his ancestral city,
And the whole of his Ithaca was small.
The affection of Telemachus, the loyalty
Of Penelope, his father’s aging years,
His old friends, the love
Of his devoted subjects,
The happy repose of his home,
Penetrated like rays of joy
The heart of the seafarer.
And like rays they faded.
The thirst
For the sea rose up with him.
He hated the air of the dry land.
At night, spectres of Hesperia
Came to trouble his sleep.
He was seized with nostalgia
For voyages, for the morning arrivals
At harbors you sail into,
With such happiness, for the first time.
The affection of Telemachus, the loyalty
Of Penelope, his father’s aging years,
His old friends, the love
Of his devoted subjects,
The peace and repose of his home
Bored him.
And so he left.
As the shores of Ithaca gradually
Faded away behind him
And he sailed swiftly westward
Toward Iberia and the Pillars of Hercules,
Far from every Achaean sea,
He felt he was alive once more,
Freed from the oppressive bonds
Of familiar, domestic things.
And his adventurous heart rejoiced
Coldly, devoid of love.
Bio:
Danis Tanović was born in 1969 in Zenica, former Yugoslavia, today Bosnia & Herzegovina.
After a diploma in civil engineering, he studied piano at the Academy of Theatre
Arts and film at the Sarajevo Film Academy and then spent two years on the frontline
filming for the army. In 1994 Tanović emigrated to Belgium to continue his film
studies. He has directed No Man’s Land (2001) – Best Foreign Language film at the
Academy Awards, Hell (2005) and Triage (2009). Cirkus Columbia has been selected
as the Bosnian entry for Best Foreign Language film at the Academy Awards 2011.
-Göteborg International Film Festival
Quote:
When reading a script, I try to find the essence of each scene and what it can contribute to the subject as a whole. I then dream about my film. I work while lying down on my sofa, as if at a session with a psychoanalyst. Danis, the patient, relates his story to Tanovic, the psychologist. Visions appear to me with such precision that I can then shoot and edit them very quickly.
In white,
the unpainted statue of the young girl
on the side altar
made the quality of mercy seem scrupulous and calm.
When my mother was in a hospital drying out,
or drinking at a pace that would put her there soon,
I would slip in the side door,
light an aromatic candle,
and bargain for us both.
or else I’d stare into the day-moon of that face
and, if I concentrated, fly.
Come down! come down!
she ’d call, because I was so high.
Though mostly when I think of myself
at that age, I am standing at my older brother’s closet
studying the shirts,
convinced that I could be absolutely transformed
by something I could borrow.
And the days churned by,
navigable sorrow.
Ah, love, this is fear.
This is fear and syllables and the beginnings of beauty.
We have walked the city, a flayed animal signifying death, a hybrid god
who sings in the desolation of filth and money
a song the heart is heavy to receive. We mourn
otherwise. otherwise the ranked monochromes,
the death-teeth of that horizon, survive us
as we survive pleasure. What a small hope.
What a fierce small privacy of consolation.
What a dazzle of petals for the poor meat.
Blind, with eyes like stars, like astral flowers,
from the purblind mating sickness of the beasts
we rise, trout-shaken, in the gaping air,
in terror, the scarlet sun-flash
leaping from the pond’s imagination
of a deadly sea. Fish, mole,
we are the small stunned creatures
inside these human resurrections, the nights
the city praises and defiles. From there we all
walk slowly to the sea gathering scales
from the cowled whisper of the waves,
the mensural polyphony. Small stars,
and blind the hunger under sun,
we turn to each other and turn to each other
in the mother air of what we want.
That is why blind Orpheus praises love
and why love gouges out our eyes
and why all lovers smell their way to Dover.
That is why innocence has so much to account for,
why Venus appears least saintly in the attitudes of shame.
This is lost children and the deep sweetness of the pulp,
a blue thrumming at the formed bone, river,
flame, quicksilver. It is not the fire
we hunger for and not the ash. It is the still hour,
a deer come slowly to the creek at dusk,
the table set for abstinence, windows
full of flowers like summer in the provinces
vanishing when the moon’s half-face pallor
rises on the dark flax line of hills.
Your’re right, the description is no good. It’s particularly obvious when Noe jumps in the river, Josephine going along with him trying to amuse her, it seems playfull, as if they knew each other for quite a while.
I think that the university is an opportunity to look at Josephine in a different environement, with a completely different demeanor, it’s another aspect of her life.
The Thirl World/immigration thing doesn’t necessarily have to relate directly to the characters (though it seems plausible that the issues discussed at school are important to Jo), it’s just the world they’re a part of, it helps describe what it is to be a part of that community. On the other hand, if I got it right, Denis wanted to give a different perception of non-whites on film, in which being black and living among a majority of black people actually isn’t so important, she’s making a statement by not emphasising the entire thing. Zadie Smith did something very similar in On Beauty, where the race of the characters isn’t (explicitly) specified, which makes it very hard to ‘place’ them for the first fifty pages or so, and tells you quite a lot.
There’s a scene where Gabrielle asks what’s that 35 rhums story, and Lionel answers that it’s an old story, which might also be a wink to Late Spring, which would put even more emphasis on what Lionel, the character, is saying – it’s not just old, we’ve also been telling it for a long time.
What I’m suggesting is that maybe some people see people like Jo as a “troublemaker” (as in protest against the establishment) and a liberal do-gooder, but we see another side to her that most people (including those of a more conservative bent) would find likable.
For me it’s the inverse, you see her as quite tender from the start, and then at uni she’s somewhat insecurely arrogant, less (directly) likeable.
I’m not sure that Denis focused on that liberal/conservative conflict, there is something American (no negative connotations) about it that doesn’t feel, let’s say, right in this context. Also, the character likeability question was, I think, less important here than, in a way, just telling the truth. Usually with her films, the viewer too has to do some work in order to like or accept the characters.
It’s impossible not to be beautiful in a Claire Denis film, she knows how to shoot people, and I’m not sure that the beauty of Diop and Dogue would be a matter of general consensus (though Diop is bloody lovely). I read a review where Colin is referred to as ‘a mess of sexiness’, and there is that shot at the end of him waiting for Jo, with the camera looking up, and there is an air of readiness which feels quite erotic, so yeah, she knows how to shoot people (there is generally something female about her camera, which is fascinating).
Wait. I don’t get this. You sound as if Denis is making a documentary, more than a fictional film. Why is Jo’s likability the “truth?” Denis didn’t have to make her likable, right? Or am I misunderstanding you?
Well, somewhat, yeah. I was trying to reformulate your previous comment (If you mean Denis wanted to show that the black characters similar to whites of the same class and any viewer, regardless of their ethnicity would find the characters appealing and likable.). By truth I meant, let’s say, the artist’s truth. David Foster Wallace often said in his interviews that he writes what feels real (and his work isn’t very documentaristic), or as Zadie Smith wrote Fictional truth is a question of perspective(…) It is what you can’t help tell if you write well. So maybe to Denis it ‘feels real’ that being part of a minority doesn’t necessarily imply poverty, ghettos, violence, facing racism (as it is usual in films focused on these communities), but more importantly, driving trains and missing a daughter. I wanted to say that she didn’t portray ‘them’ as similar to ‘us’ so that we find them likeable, they (characters, or black people) are like that, that is her perspective. The likability thing would be condescending maybe, both to the audience and to the characters (or minorities). Just wanted to make that slight difference.
You might rephrase it, they are relatable because they’re real (to the author), but we’re saying the same thing, I think.
I don’t think I can really enjoy a European film with a father-daughter relationship portrayed in a conventionally touching way. :)
I’ve heard several Europeans making the same comment so… My great theory is that it’s ‘the times we live in’, the overexposure to images of tenderness-gone-wrong.
How wonderfully your songs begin
With praise of Nature and her beauty,
But then, as if it were a duty,
You drag some god-damned sweetheart in.
Did you imagine she’d be flattered?
They never sound as if they mattered
the best films about the affects of loneliness? over 2 years ago
Eternity and a Day, Angelopoulos?
And oh, since Wenders is on the table, there’s the much-hated Million Dollar Hotel.
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Best starting point for Russian Literature? over 2 years ago
Anna Karenina is one of the most subtle things you’ll come across, and very readable but if it you want something shorter, there’s :
The Cossacks, also by Tolstoy.
Vladimir Voinovich’s Ivan Chonkin, a genuinly funny and surreal satire.
And Solzhenitsyn’s A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which is a straightforward, more melancholic than traumatic book about, well, a day in the life of a labour camp inmate.
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Our Favourite Poems- for a site anthology over 2 years ago
Here’s a not-that-original choice, September 1, 1939 by Auden
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.
Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism’s face
And the international wrong.
Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.
From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
“I will be true to the wife,
I’ll concentrate more on my work,”
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
Go to Comment
Our Favourite Poems- for a site anthology over 2 years ago
and another one by Brecht
The Tailor of Ulm (Ulm 1592)
Said the Tailor to the Bishop:
Believe me, I can fly.
Watch me while I try.
And he stood with things
That looked like wings
On the great church roof-
That is quite absurd
A wicked, foolish lie,
For man will never fly,
A man is not a bird,
Said the Bishop to the Tailor.
Said the People to the Bishop:
The Tailor is quite dead,
He was a stupid head.
His wings are rumpled
And he lies all crumpled
On the hard church square.
The bells ring out in praise
That man is not a bird
It was a wicked, foolish lie,
Mankind will never fly,
Said the Bishop to the People.
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Movies with My Niece over 2 years ago
Isn’t Show me love sort of an obvious choice? It’s a feel-good love story about teenage girls, what more do you want? I mean, it’s hard not to feel like a teenage girl while watching it, so…
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FILM DATABASE SUBMISSION SEPTEMBER 2010 over 2 years ago
Sutra ujutru (Tomorrow Morning)
Oleg Novković, 2006
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Film Database Submission March 2011 over 2 years ago
Sutra ujutru (Tomorrow Morning)
Oleg Novković, 2006
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Emir Kusturica's politics about 2 years ago
edo, just a couple of remarks
The problem of that film is not that is claims that Serbs were these noble anti-Nazi fighters while Slovenes, Croats and Bosnians welcomed Hitler (although it does that)
If you insert archive footage in a fictional film outside any meaningful context, with no genuine ties to the plot, and if that footage shows Croats as fascists, and you do that in Serbia in 1995, it’s a huge problem, it’s pure propaganda.
In today’s Serbia Kusturica is a marginal person
That’s not true. He’s just sold like a 100.000 copies of his autobiography, in a country where real writers sell 500-1000. Plus, he’s best friends with a huge part of the political elite in Serbia, and the Serb Republic in Bosnia. How else did he get to run a national park? (he doesn’t own a village, it’s more like a mountain)
based on a novel by Ivo Andrić, which is infamous for being one of the first nationalist works which contributed to the rise of ethnic tensions in Yugoslavia
If one wants to interpret Bridge on the Drina like that, he can conclude that we should all be running around killing muslims. But it’s probably not the best way to do it, and Andric isn’t really perceived today as an infamous nationalist. There are right-wing quasi-liberals quoting 1984, doesn’t mean Orwell wasn’t a socialist.
The premise of Underground is stolen from the 1989 film “Bunker Palace Hotel” by the famous French-Bosnian director and comic artist Enki Bilal.
I think it’s actually based on a play by Dusan Kovacevic, though that doesn’t really matter anyway.
You’re right about that rascist element in Underground. The problem is, if you see it as a story about a couple of lunatics doing insane stuff, it’s brilliant, but it isn’t just that. There’s a weird idea inherent in that nationalism in Serbia (Kusturica, Cosic, etc.), they see the nation as a bunch of animals, and in the same time they claim that there is something divine about it (it’s all mud, and one must cherish the mud, something like that). And of course there’s the all sides commited crimes, therefore we/they are all the same argument at the end of the film. We would have to revise the entire history of the 20th century if we espoused that.
Bosniaks/Bosnians/Muslims, whatever you call them, may have the right to say that, since they are generally perceived as the victims and it would be a sort of dissent, but for an artist or intellectual from Serbia, it’s just cowardice.
And the song about Karadzic is just bloody disgusting.
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Young Mubians, Give Us Your Thoughts and Opinions about 2 years ago
Access today is not the issue, there are open-minded theaters and festivals, if not there’s the internet and peer-to-peer sharing, you can watch what you want to watch, if you can be bothered to look.
An interesting question for me is whether the dominant atmosphere has become more anti-intellectual (maybe one might draw an analogy with the shift to the right in politics), especially among those who are supposed to be a bit agressive, rebelious. I’m slightly familiar with film/drama students in my country, and there is maybe a tendency to have a, let’s say self-content approach to taste. There is also a resistance when it comes to non anglophone films (unless they’re sort of classics), which is a bit of a paradox coming from eastern europeans.
There is possibly a conservative, lazy way of thinking, a less stimulating spirit within the let’s-call-it-liberal community, that’s more pronounced now than some 30 years ago.
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This is a story about... about 2 years ago
The first part of All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace has been aired, and feeling somewhat lonely in my appreciation of Adam Curtis (a way too small, douglas-adamsian number of fans on mubi), I thought I might try to draw some attention to his work.
You can find most, if not all of his films on youtube, and if you want to sample it first you can start with the shorts he made for Charlie Brooker’s newswipe.
He also keeps a brilliant blog in the same spirit as the documentaries, with a heavy use of material from the BBC archives, sometimes posting full length documentaries. There’s an excellent film made in 1968, America: Democracy on Trial (which features a conversation about Vietnam that seems like an eerie transposition of Levin’s thoughts in Anna Karenina), and Curtis writing about it speaks in the same time about his own work:
The film is about the relationship between the everyday experience of the family – especially the wife, who is a fascinating and enigmatic character – and the big story they are told about the world. But it is made at a moment when that story no longer makes sense and the fragments that it is made of are beginning to fall apart.
Stories are the central theme of Curtis’s films, he actually tells stories about stories, emphasising the idea that constructing narratives is not just a need, but a necessity, that thought implies reduction, communicating it through a narrative, through form. There’s Zizek’s rather beautiful analysis of Three Colours : Blue:
What she is able to do at the end is to acquire a proper distance towards reality. This is what happens in the famous circular shot where we pass from Julie’s face, while she is making love […] this free floating in a fantasy-space, far from distancing us from reality us to approach reality. She is putting together the co-ordinates which enable her to experience her reality as meaningful again.
Or that image at the end of Decalogue I, a man dedicated to understanding the world who did all that was within the reach of reason (calculating and testing the thickness of the ice) and failed anyway (son fell through the ice) still can’t accept the randomness (tears down the altar).
Curtis deals with this inevitable failure (“a word is elegy to what it signifies”, Hass), though usually with less noble protagonists, and bigger failures, with an underlying notion that ideas, narratives, matter, as either motivation or justification, or both, which people tend to forget with surprising ease (a matter he confronts directly in The Trap), and pays attention to ideas that have become commonplace and possibly lost some of their meaning while gaining in strength. (freedom, individualism, egalitarianism…).
He uses many artistic, almost literary techniques, differentiating his work from films like Inside Job, which is a journalistic retelling of known facts. There is a certain playfulness, humour, (auto)irony, an ability to make wild connections and in the same time to leave a lot of space for the viewer to make them himself, all of which correspond in a way to Calvino’s values of lightness and quickness, “my work as a
writer has from the beginning aimed at tracing the lightening flashes of the mental circuits that capture and link points distant from each other in space and time.”
This quote maybe bares resemblance to what I think Curtis is trying to do, to offer a different perception:
When I write I am trying to express my way of being in the world. This is primarily a process of elimination: once you have removed all the dead language, the second-hand dogma, the truths that are not your own but other people’s, the mottos, the slogans, the out-and-out lies of your nation, the myths of your historical moment – once you have removed all that warps experience into a shape you do not recognise and do not believe in – what you are left with is something approximating the truth of your own conception. That is what I am looking for when I read a novel; one person’s truth as far as it can be rendered through language. (Zadie Smith)
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This is a story about... about 2 years ago
@ Matt Parks
I’m aware of that, but this is an internet forum for people who can be bothered to look for films, and those particular films can be found on the internet, it’s like…a target demographic.
Plus, I’m not exactly from Bristol myself.
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This is a story about... about 2 years ago
I wasn’t being hostile, I just wanted to reply, you know, to keep the thread going. I can see why you misunderstood me though, having reread the post. That is not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all.
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This is a story about... about 2 years ago
Ok, we’ve managed to challenge the concept of communication with just a couple of posts.
Nevermind, I’ll try one more time.
@ Aflwydd
I just loved the entrepreneurs founding out that they both named their kids after Ayn Rand. Wonderfully zealous, for two reasons probably, the first being the one-book syndrome (I doubt that they have another little girl called Camus, or Leo Nikolayevich), and the secong embracing ideas that give moral value to your ambitions. It’s maybe similar to the link between the middle class and protestantism, or calvinism, with labour eventualy becoming a moral value and succes a sign of divine mercy (it’s dumbed down, I know).
his documentaries implicitly do is ask you to challenge the power structures
For me it’s more about looking at familiar things and common opinions in a slightly different way, trying to be conscious of the faults of our own, intimate ideas (like the shift in the attitude toward credits in the last decades). Intellectual responsibility is important in those films, he’s a bit like Orwell there, along with the making political writing into art stuff. It’s more than nodding, though maybe it just suits me to think that way.
If every person in Britain tuned in on Monday night
Since something like the Big Society and free schools can make it’s way in Britain, I’d say that many haven’t been paying attention until now, and probably won’t on Monday. Would be nice if I were wrong.
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Voice Over in Beau Travail about 2 years ago
Won’t try to convince you, but I really like that voice over, I don’t know how familiar with french you are, but it seldom has such a sound and heavy rhythm Lavant did a hell of a job.
Here’s this too:
AA: For Beau Travail you had written “booklets” rather than a screenplay…
CD: It was Jean-Pol’s idea, because since we didn’t have the authorisation to shoot in Djibouti, and so as not to be bored to death, we wrote Galoup’s remembrances, Galoup’s diary. And I was able to have it read by Chevalier (director of the fiction unit of Arte) or by Denis Lavant, to give them an idea of what the film was like. After that, we wrote the screenplay based on these booklets.
I understand what you mean, I have the same problem with Days of Heaven, but here the voice over adds something, I think.
@ Persona
http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/3683426/Beau_Travail_1999_DVDrip_XviD, if you don’t have access to the film…
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Film Database Submission July 2011 almost 2 years ago
When I Grow Up, I’ll Be a Kangaroo (2004)
dir. Radivoje Andrić
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A moment from Summer Interlude almost 2 years ago
The black and white stills are from Bergman’s Summer Interlude (Sommarlek), and the color ones are, well, from Black Swan. And I have a question.
I’m not trying to rekindle the discussions about the quality of Black Swan, they’ve led pretty much nowhere, so if anyone actually wants to reply, please ignore your indignation glands and refrain from stuff like ’how can you compare him to Him’.
Aronofsky doesn’t cite the film as an influence, nor do I remember coming across a text making a connection between the two, despite the obvious similarities, so my question is:
is this kiss-en-pointe thing often used, like a cliché that’s developed a twofold irony or something, or is it a Julie-from-Blue-hears-a-homeless-man-playing-her-late-husband’s-unpublished-music type of occurrence?
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Our Favourite Poems- for a site anthology almost 2 years ago
Some haikku to be found in Tarkovsky’s book, Sculpting in time. The author of the first two isn’t mentioned.
No, not to my house.
That one, pattering umbrella
Went to my neighbour
As it passes by,
The full moon barely touches
Fishhooks in the waves.
Those are by Basho:
Reeds cut for thatching
’The stumps now stand forgotten
Sprinkled with soft snow.
Why this lethargy?
They could hardly wake me up.
Spring rain pattering.
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Film Database Submission September 2011 almost 2 years ago
Eve (2008)
dir. Natalie Portman
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Our Favourite Poems- for a site anthology almost 2 years ago
Brodsky
Odysseus to Telemachus
My dear Telemachus,
The Trojan War
is over now; I don’t recall who won it.
The Greeks, no doubt, for only they would leave
so many dead so far from their own homeland.
But still, my homeward way has proved too long.
While we were wasting time there, old Poseidon,
it almost seems, stretched and extended space.
I don’t know where I am or what this place
can be. It would appear some filthy island,
with bushes, buildings, and great grunting pigs.
A garden choked with weeds; some queen or other.
Grass and huge stones . . . Telemachus, my son!
To a wanderer the faces of all islands
resemble one another. And the mind
trips, numbering waves; eyes, sore from sea horizons,
run; and the flesh of water stuffs the ears.
I can’t remember how the war came out;
even how old you are—I can’t remember.
Grow up, then, my Telemachus, grow strong.
Only the gods know if we’ll see each other
again. You’ve long since ceased to be that babe
before whom I reined in the plowing bullocks.
Had it not been for Palamedes’ trick
we two would still be living in one household.
But maybe he was right; away from me
you are quite safe from all Oedipal passions,
and your dreams, my Telemachus, are blameless.
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Our Favourite Poems- for a site anthology almost 2 years ago
Cavafy
Second Odyssey
A great second Odyssey,
Greater even than the first perhaps,
But alas, without Homer, without hexameters.
Small was his ancestral home,
Small was his ancestral city,
And the whole of his Ithaca was small.
The affection of Telemachus, the loyalty
Of Penelope, his father’s aging years,
His old friends, the love
Of his devoted subjects,
The happy repose of his home,
Penetrated like rays of joy
The heart of the seafarer.
And like rays they faded.
The thirstFor the sea rose up with him.
He hated the air of the dry land.
At night, spectres of Hesperia
Came to trouble his sleep.
He was seized with nostalgia
For voyages, for the morning arrivals
At harbors you sail into,
With such happiness, for the first time.
The affection of Telemachus, the loyalty
And so he left.Of Penelope, his father’s aging years,
His old friends, the love
Of his devoted subjects,
The peace and repose of his home
Bored him.
As the shores of Ithaca gradually
Faded away behind him
And he sailed swiftly westward
Toward Iberia and the Pillars of Hercules,
Far from every Achaean sea,
He felt he was alive once more,
Freed from the oppressive bonds
Of familiar, domestic things.
And his adventurous heart rejoiced
Coldly, devoid of love.
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The Auteurs Film & Cast Member Database almost 2 years ago
Profile information for Danis Tanović:
Bio:
Danis Tanović was born in 1969 in Zenica, former Yugoslavia, today Bosnia & Herzegovina.
After a diploma in civil engineering, he studied piano at the Academy of Theatre
Arts and film at the Sarajevo Film Academy and then spent two years on the frontline
filming for the army. In 1994 Tanović emigrated to Belgium to continue his film
studies. He has directed No Man’s Land (2001) – Best Foreign Language film at the
Academy Awards, Hell (2005) and Triage (2009). Cirkus Columbia has been selected
as the Bosnian entry for Best Foreign Language film at the Academy Awards 2011.
-Göteborg International Film Festival
Quote:
When reading a script, I try to find the essence of each scene and what it can contribute to the subject as a whole. I then dream about my film. I work while lying down on my sofa, as if at a session with a psychoanalyst. Danis, the patient, relates his story to Tanovic, the psychologist. Visions appear to me with such precision that I can then shoot and edit them very quickly.
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Film Database Submission September 2011 almost 2 years ago
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (2011)
dir. Adam Curtis
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Our Favourite Poems- for a site anthology almost 2 years ago
Two poems by Robert Hass, a very, very cool guy :
Our Lady of the Snows
In white,
the unpainted statue of the young girl
on the side altar
made the quality of mercy seem scrupulous and calm.
When my mother was in a hospital drying out,
or drinking at a pace that would put her there soon,
I would slip in the side door,
light an aromatic candle,
and bargain for us both.
or else I’d stare into the day-moon of that face
and, if I concentrated, fly.
Come down! come down!
she ’d call, because I was so high.
Though mostly when I think of myself
at that age, I am standing at my older brother’s closet
studying the shirts,
convinced that I could be absolutely transformed
by something I could borrow.
And the days churned by,
navigable sorrow.
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Our Favourite Poems- for a site anthology almost 2 years ago
Sunrise
Ah, love, this is fear.
This is fear and syllables and the beginnings of beauty.
We have walked the city, a flayed animal signifying death, a hybrid god
who sings in the desolation of filth and money
a song the heart is heavy to receive. We mourn
otherwise. otherwise the ranked monochromes,
the death-teeth of that horizon, survive us
as we survive pleasure. What a small hope.
What a fierce small privacy of consolation.
What a dazzle of petals for the poor meat.
Blind, with eyes like stars, like astral flowers,
from the purblind mating sickness of the beasts
we rise, trout-shaken, in the gaping air,
in terror, the scarlet sun-flash
leaping from the pond’s imagination
of a deadly sea. Fish, mole,
we are the small stunned creatures
inside these human resurrections, the nights
the city praises and defiles. From there we all
walk slowly to the sea gathering scales
from the cowled whisper of the waves,
the mensural polyphony. Small stars,
and blind the hunger under sun,
we turn to each other and turn to each other
in the mother air of what we want.
That is why blind Orpheus praises love
and why love gouges out our eyes
and why all lovers smell their way to Dover.
That is why innocence has so much to account for,
why Venus appears least saintly in the attitudes of shame.
This is lost children and the deep sweetness of the pulp,
a blue thrumming at the formed bone, river,
flame, quicksilver. It is not the fire
we hunger for and not the ash. It is the still hour,
a deer come slowly to the creek at dusk,
the table set for abstinence, windows
full of flowers like summer in the provinces
vanishing when the moon’s half-face pallor
rises on the dark flax line of hills.
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35 Shots of Rum (2008)--Denis Does Ozu almost 2 years ago
Your’re right, the description is no good. It’s particularly obvious when Noe jumps in the river, Josephine going along with him trying to amuse her, it seems playfull, as if they knew each other for quite a while.
I think that the university is an opportunity to look at Josephine in a different environement, with a completely different demeanor, it’s another aspect of her life.
The Thirl World/immigration thing doesn’t necessarily have to relate directly to the characters (though it seems plausible that the issues discussed at school are important to Jo), it’s just the world they’re a part of, it helps describe what it is to be a part of that community. On the other hand, if I got it right, Denis wanted to give a different perception of non-whites on film, in which being black and living among a majority of black people actually isn’t so important, she’s making a statement by not emphasising the entire thing. Zadie Smith did something very similar in On Beauty, where the race of the characters isn’t (explicitly) specified, which makes it very hard to ‘place’ them for the first fifty pages or so, and tells you quite a lot.
There’s a scene where Gabrielle asks what’s that 35 rhums story, and Lionel answers that it’s an old story, which might also be a wink to Late Spring, which would put even more emphasis on what Lionel, the character, is saying – it’s not just old, we’ve also been telling it for a long time.
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35 Shots of Rum (2008)--Denis Does Ozu almost 2 years ago
@Jazzaloha
What I’m suggesting is that maybe some people see people like Jo as a “troublemaker” (as in protest against the establishment) and a liberal do-gooder, but we see another side to her that most people (including those of a more conservative bent) would find likable.
For me it’s the inverse, you see her as quite tender from the start, and then at uni she’s somewhat insecurely arrogant, less (directly) likeable.
I’m not sure that Denis focused on that liberal/conservative conflict, there is something American (no negative connotations) about it that doesn’t feel, let’s say, right in this context. Also, the character likeability question was, I think, less important here than, in a way, just telling the truth. Usually with her films, the viewer too has to do some work in order to like or accept the characters.
It’s impossible not to be beautiful in a Claire Denis film, she knows how to shoot people, and I’m not sure that the beauty of Diop and Dogue would be a matter of general consensus (though Diop is bloody lovely). I read a review where Colin is referred to as ‘a mess of sexiness’, and there is that shot at the end of him waiting for Jo, with the camera looking up, and there is an air of readiness which feels quite erotic, so yeah, she knows how to shoot people (there is generally something female about her camera, which is fascinating).
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35 Shots of Rum (2008)--Denis Does Ozu almost 2 years ago
@ Jazz
Wait. I don’t get this. You sound as if Denis is making a documentary, more than a fictional film. Why is Jo’s likability the “truth?” Denis didn’t have to make her likable, right? Or am I misunderstanding you?
Well, somewhat, yeah. I was trying to reformulate your previous comment (If you mean Denis wanted to show that the black characters similar to whites of the same class and any viewer, regardless of their ethnicity would find the characters appealing and likable.). By truth I meant, let’s say, the artist’s truth. David Foster Wallace often said in his interviews that he writes what feels real (and his work isn’t very documentaristic), or as Zadie Smith wrote Fictional truth is a question of perspective(…) It is what you can’t help tell if you write well. So maybe to Denis it ‘feels real’ that being part of a minority doesn’t necessarily imply poverty, ghettos, violence, facing racism (as it is usual in films focused on these communities), but more importantly, driving trains and missing a daughter. I wanted to say that she didn’t portray ‘them’ as similar to ‘us’ so that we find them likeable, they (characters, or black people) are like that, that is her perspective. The likability thing would be condescending maybe, both to the audience and to the characters (or minorities). Just wanted to make that slight difference.
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35 Shots of Rum (2008)--Denis Does Ozu almost 2 years ago
@Jazz
You might rephrase it, they are relatable because they’re real (to the author), but we’re saying the same thing, I think.
I don’t think I can really enjoy a European film with a father-daughter relationship portrayed in a conventionally touching way. :)
I’ve heard several Europeans making the same comment so… My great theory is that it’s ‘the times we live in’, the overexposure to images of tenderness-gone-wrong.
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Our Favourite Poems- for a site anthology over 1 year ago
@ plavikavez – that sounds surprisingly good in english
Semezdin Mehmedinović
War
War
and nothing is going on -
I go into town to beg for cigarettes
I’ve always known your scent
but yo’ve never been closer -
sometimes when it’s cold in the morning you
put my underwear on by mistake
in ten years we haven’t been together as much
as we have these five months -
now you’ve got my sweater on all day
your joy
at the packets of humanitarian aid
makes me happy and sad at the same time
and I ask myself: where on earth do
you find us coffee every night?
There isn’t a single pane of glass left in our windows
and there’s just no way to get rid
of the lagging flies
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Our Favourite Poems- for a site anthology over 1 year ago
@kavez
Don’t know if this is new/interesting to you, if not someone else might check it out.
Serbo-Croation Poetry Translation
6 poems by Ujevic
And Mehmedinovic on his own, and Jergovic’s site.
Auden
To Goethe: A Complaint
How wonderfully your songs begin
With praise of Nature and her beauty,
But then, as if it were a duty,
You drag some god-damned sweetheart in.
Did you imagine she’d be flattered?
They never sound as if they mattered
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