The Noteworthy: Left or Right, The Actor as Intellectual Artist, First Sight of "Love"

A new batch of video interviews from The Seventh Art, Adam Nayman on "Kubrick's Women," a video essay on "Snowpiercer," and more.
Notebook

"As far as I can tell, Godard hasn’t used the converging-lens method to create 3D during shooting. Instead of “toeing-in” his cameras, he set them so that the lenses are strictly parallel. He and his DP Fabrice Aragno apparently relied on software to generate the startling 3D we see onscreen.

This reminds me that postproduction has long been a central aspect of Godard’s creative process. Of course he creates marvelous shots while filming, but ever since Breathless (À bout de souffle, 1960), when he yanked out frames from the middle of his shots, he has always made post-shooting work more than simply trimming and polishing. His interruptive aesthetic is made possible by editing that wedges in intertitles (sometimes the same one several times). He breaks off beautiful shots and drops in bursts of music that snap off just before they cadence.

In both sound and image, the post-production process for Godard is a kind of transformation, an openly admitted re-writing of what came from the camera. He slaps graffiti on his own film."

  • Above: not sure how this flew under our radar, but Park Chan-wook has a new short film, A Rose Reborn, available to watch for free online. 
  • "The Actor as Intellectual Artist", Richard Brody writes on Jason Schwartzman:

"Like [Jean-Pierre] Léaud, Schwartzman, while being entirely himself, seems to perform for his own benefit, declaiming for his audience of one and thus lending an inescapable air of comedy to his serious actions. This intrinsic joie de parler renders all the more particular the range of filmmakers for whom Schwartzman is a ready fit. That’s why, when the part clicks, Schwartzman almost seems like the director’s co-auteur—the role in question inevitably involves the depiction of creative command and artistic imagination, and the performance inevitably suggests a metaphorical representation of the director’s own role."

  • Indie animating filmmaker Don Hertzfeldt is the latest to select his Criterion Collection Top 10.

"RAPOLD: The style of the film is quite distinctive—mostly wide, fixed-camera shots of crowds, with mobile shots for the running battles with the police. What made you choose this style? You don’t always even hear conversations between two people.

LOZNITSA: It is a popular movement, and what I wanted to show, the subject of my film, is the people. If I start singling out individual characters—just two, three, four, five characters—it would not be the story of the people anymore. It would just be individual characters, and then we enter into the territory of personal dimensions, which wasn’t interesting for this film. That is why I chose a style that enabled me to have many characters, groups, masses of people in the frame at the same time—to observe their actions and movements."

  • We're beyond pleased to see that Lumen, one of our favorite film journals, is returning with a second issue for Winter 2014. In the meantime, check out their lovely, redesigned web site.
  •  Above: the first poster for divisive filmmaker Gaspar Noe's Love.
  • At his blog, Ted Fendt has published the "transcription of the entirety of Jean-Luc Godard's press conference for Prénom Carmen at the 1983 Venice Film Festival."
  • The biggest bummer in recent film news has to be the cancellation of Olivier Assayas' Idol's Eye, which was just about to begin shooting. We were very excited to see the French auteur teaming up with Robert De Niro and Robert Pattinson, so let's hope the project can find an alternative source of financing or that this dream team can find another way to make something together.

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The NoteworthyNewsRuben ÖstlundJean-Luc GodardPark Chan-wookGaspar NoeWes AndersonDon HertzfeldtBong Joon-hoSergei LoznitsaOlivier AssayasVincente MinnelliStanley KubrickspotlightNewsletterVideos
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