Category Archives: Film Comment

Paris Filmmaker in 1929 Shows Us What a Camera is For

by Editor | 3 Comments

This is an odd post and I’m not entirely sure I can pull it off. The film above is called Montparnasse. It was made in 1929 by Eugene Deslaw.  I watched the film and want to write about it cold, without looking up Mr. Deslaw on Google.  I’ll check up on him after I’ve posted this and see if I’m even in the ballpark.

Watch the film all the way through.  If you think it’s just a collection of boring tourist shots in Paris with nothing happening, then stop reading and leave now because this post is for the four out of one hundred who catch the drift of the camera work.  Deslaw was shooting in the Paris of Pablo Picasso and Matisse.  He appears to have had a close connection to art and the cafe life of the city.  His film is full of odd angles and closeups.  He runs up onto a balcony in order to shoot straight down at some tabletops.  He catches a woman applying makeup at about the 13-minute mark and makes a shot that is worth paying for.  He films traffic and buildings, windows, curbs, chairs, newspapers, smokers, drinkers, snake-handlers, paintings, and water.  He’s fascinated by his city and by his camera.  He’s making art.  He set out one morning with his camera and went around making art.  Everyone was happy to be alive there in Paris in 1929 and he was playing his part in it.  Films made at that time tend to have this cheerful experimental quality.  Deslaw is nearly drawing with his camera.  It’s an immediate act of finding visual meaning.  He was walking and was struck by something and filmed it in an excited state.  He was consciously being an artist.

The film he made is beautiful.  It’s very hard to make a film with its kind of beauty today.  Think about it a little.  What would you do?  Go to a Best Buy and look around for a brand new digital camera.  You know, one of those shiny silver things with the HD viewfinder and all the buttons.  One of those?  Then what?  You’d march out into the neighborhood with this gleaming tourist gizmo and look like a ninny bending over to film trash as it floated down into a storm drain?  You’d walk up to a guy behind a news stand and ask to film him?  Really?

Yes.  That’s what you’d do.  You’d get a little camera and do just that.  And here’s your assignment: you must do this with the total conviction that you are about to make the greatest film ever made about your subject matter.  Set out for a particular street corner and make a magnificent short film or a long one about that corner and everything on it.  Spend an entire day doing only that.  Skip lunch.  Just stay there and make your film without ever entertaining even the slightest doubt that you are working on something of incredible importance and value.  It’s going to be very hard to do.  Some people will walk by and giggle.  Some will become belligerent and tell you to stop.  Film those people.  Run away if they chase you.  Then come back and continue your work.  Remember that you are an artist on a mission to make something and absolutely nothing will stop you.  Then come back home and figure out how to edit it and then put it online.  Tell me about it even and I’ll watch it.

In 1929 it would have been recognized by the maker of this film that a camera is a camera and it will make your film if you want it to.  Ever wonder why you don’t ever see Steven Spielberg out and about with his little camera making a movie for himself?  It’s strange isn’t it?  Could you imagine Pablo Picasso or David Hockney never carrying a sketchbook to make some quick pictures while having coffee or dinner?  I couldn’t imagine such a thing?  So when was the last time you ever heard of a Spielberg or Scorsese out with a camera making little films for their web site?

You could almost think of all the decades of massive budget film production and the studio structures built to support the film industry and film schools as an organized effort to confuse the issue and make people forget what a film actually is.  We think of screenwriters and producers and agents and superstars and all the talk shows.  But it’s very hard for the artist to walk out with the camera and go make a film the way a painter would work alone on a canvas.  The Montparnasse film should help to illuminate the proper use of the camera for anyone who’s interested.

The film comes from UBUWeb

Jean-Luc Godard Film

by Editor

Film director Jean-Luc Godard is making a film that appears to be called Le Socialisme.  I’m not entirely certain, but it sure looks to me from this trailer for the film like Mr. Godard is shooting with a small video camera.  I can even hear the wind hitting the microphone during shots on board the ship.  He’s always had a keen interest in shooting with small cameras, going so far at one point as to have a tiny 35 mm camera designed for one of his films in the seventies.  I like this kind of filmmaking.  This is how a filmmaker approaches a method that resembles the method of the painter or the writer.  Filmmaking, for all its technical achievements and its massive budgets and enormous popularity, lags far behind painting, photography, writing and music.  A filmmaker, in order to really be an artist, must be capable of functioning with the autonomy of the writer or the painter or the composer.  Until then, the filmmaker is simply interested in socializing, not making art.

Mr. Godard’s films are often difficult, infuriating, perplexing, gorgeous, ugly, profound, ridiculous, and experimental – but they are always, without a single exception, the expressions of an artist who owes nothing to anyone.

TheAuteurs.com Offers International Cinema Online

by Editor

laventuraThe Auteurs (www.theauteurs.com) is a site for art film lovers.  Their mission is to offer a huge selection of international art films by the world’s best directors for simple online viewing.  Last night I watched an Italian film from 1960 called L’Avventura, directed by Michelangelo Antonioni.  The image quality was excellent and the sound was also very clear.  It was one of the best experiences with watching a film online that I’ve ever had.  The image in this post is a reduced screenshot taken while I watched.  The film itself is one of the great examples of Italian cinema and is one you will never forget.  Apparently, The Auteurs has partnered with The Criterion Collection to bring many of the best films online.  Each month The Criterion Collection selects three or four films to run on the site for free viewing in a sort of revolving festival of great cinema.  This is an important connection for The Auteurs because Criterion is probably the very best thing that ever happened to DVDs.  Their efforts at finding the very best sources for their films set them far apart from any other DVD producer.  If you are serious about international cinema on DVD, you always look for what Criterion has to offer.

The site, which is still in beta, has about 120 films available at this point.  Most of these cost $5 for a 7-day viewing period.  There are also articles, film reviews, and member forums for discussing films and writing your own reviews.  The monthly curated festivals look like a really good idea and seem to be offering a few free films each month.

But the key to success with a film site like this is volume.  They must secure the rights to show many more films very quickly.  Nothing makes people lose interest in a film site faster than a limited selection.  For now, there are many films listed on the site which are not actually available which is somewhat disappointing.  The site is trying to give visitors an idea of the kind of films they will offer, but it is a distraction that is unnecessary.  Hopefully, the site will use its relationship with Criterion to drastically increase its library which shows great promise.  The idea for a site that culls the best of international cinema is an excellent and overdue one.  Now it remains to be seen if TheAuteurs.com can keep the attention of film lovers.

Jean-Luc Godard Talks About Critics, Bardot and TV

by Editor | 1 Comment

Jean-Luc Godard is one of the only film directors in the history of cinema to make films as if the camera were a pen.  For some reason, when a writer writes about their own experiences they are called a genius.  When a film director does it they are often called self-indulgent.  Godard has made some of the greatest examples of personal cinema.  His ability to consistently fool producers and studios into believing him and supporting his artistic dreams and whims is a rare talent.  This is a man who is known to have presented film studios and even government censors with entirely fake screenplays that had absolutely nothing to do with the film he was about to make.  This is the true genius of the French New Wave in the 1950s and 60s.  He went farther and deeper into the language of film than any of the other directors famous for New Wave works.

Green Lantern in Absurd Fan-Film Trailer

by Editor

Jaron Pitts has made a movie trailer for a non-existent Green Lantern superhero movie.  Quite frankly, it’s an odd thing to do and I don’t honestly know why anyone would do it.  I certainly like the way it looks for the most part.  I’ve always liked the idea of the Green Lantern.  But a fan film trailer?  I don’t know.   There’s a mashup of various films going on in here with some effects on top. The main problem with this kind of work is that you take popular and well-understood tropes from Hollywood super-hero action movies and reproduce them with sometimes astounding faithfulness, but what you end up with is a photocopy of current filmmaking habits.  It’s like jumping up and down shouting, “Look!  I can do it!  I can make the ship, you know… like fly just like in the big Hollywood pictures!  Like, you know, it zooms in at you and then it stops, and dips its wings and then darts off in another direction with a big ‘WOOSH’ and a little burst of energy and then the music goes ‘CRASH’ and then we see the guy in the pilot’s seat…”  and so on and so on.  My Green Lantern trailer would just have a tired nut-job sitting at his dining room table with a flashlight and a roll of Scotchtape, trying to fashion himself a green light logo to stick on his chest while he poses in front of a full-length mirror.  But that’s just me.  I would generally advise skilled and talented filmmakers to avoid wasting their time.

Fiction, Computer Games and Dante’s Inferno

by Editor

Here’s an article by Tim Martin in The Telegraph about how computer games are having a growing influence on literature.  As the game’s trailer shows, the upcoming computer game, Dante’s Inferno, will be a wild ride into hell.  I’m sure the game is full of levels as most games are and as Dante’s original literary Inferno certainly is.  It will also most likely contain a good sampling of quotations from the original since you’ve got two poets running around in hell making observations and explaining things for all of us.  In the electronic version I’m sure that Dante will get to cut off many limbs and heads and such things.  I don’t know – is gaming influencing literature or the other way around?  Maybe a little.  I think gaming is having more of an effect on film making.  Maybe the answer is in the trailer.  I also think that if you are going to make a game based on Inferno, you should not make it an action game.  You should make it an open-ended exploration of hell.  Just that.  No more required.

The Limits of Control: Jim Jarmusch Film and Interview

by Editor

Here’s the trailer for The Limits of Control, a new film by Jim Jarmusch. I’m always very impressed by Jim Jarmusch when he speaks.  Extremely intelligent and serious artist working in film.  In fact, he might be one of the only serious artists working in American film at present.  He’s kind of scary and punkish and seems more like a rock star than a film director.  I’d probably run screaming from the room if he came in to talk to me.  But maybe not.  I always find a person’s weakness and exploit it.  Jarmusch’s weakness is Bill Murray.  Too much focus on stars in Jarmusch films.  He shouldn’t do this.  Great directors in the 21st Century should not cast so many stars.  Stars ruin movies.  Imagine reading a great novel in which every single character is played by a movie star.  Sort of like when you buy a novel that’s been adapted to film and right there on the cover you see a big fat picture of Leonardo DiCaprio.  Ruins the entire book.  Ruins a serious film quite often too.  Why movie stars have become so essential to film is a total mystery.  A great director spends all his energy trying to direct the movie in circles around his star performers.  What a waste.  A movie that becomes a parade of the director’s movie star friends is not worth watching.  He should make new friends.  There’s nothing more time-consuming than watching a movie star pretend to be an artist.  It would serve Mr. Jarmusch better to find people on the street and use them instead.  He needs to get over this Bill Murray fixation and move on.  Murry is a deadly boring actor with a frozen face.  These stars are a major headache and a distraction from what the director has to say with film.  By the way, here’s a fascinating interview with Jim Jarmusch that is casting off sparks of connective ideas all over the place.  They talk about novels, essays, poetry, William Burroughs and the cut-up technique, secret societies, Scientology, Stanley Kubrick, and more.  Fascinating talk.  I really wish he’d stop hiring movie stars.  Jim Jarmusch is not a good director of movie stars.  This guy would be a real artistic threat if he’d just run around with a video camera and work that way.  Why he would want to be eating catered food with the walkie-talkie brigade is simply beyond me.

German Film Directer Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe

by Editor

He’s a German film director named Werner Herzog and in 1980 he made a bet with another filmmaker that if that other guy actually finished his first feature film Herzog would sit down in front of cameras and eat his own shoe. The friend did finish his movie, and so Mr. Herzog sat down to dine upon his footwear. During the strange event, he talks about how deadly television is and how we must fight its influence. It’s an old refrain, but he puts it in a way that I’ve not heard before. He goes on to talk about how we as a culture have not developed adequate images.  I’m not sure he’s right about this, but he certainly thinks he is and that’s always fun to watch. He is deadly serious about what he’s saying, but of course you must not forget that during it all he is cooking and eating a shoe. I always love to see people who are being funny while being totally serious.

The Hunt for Gollum: Excellent LOTR Fan Film

by Editor | 1 Comment

huntforgollumThe Hunt for Gollum is a 40-minute fan-made film that is available for free online viewing. The film was made through open collaboration of enthusiastic fans working under the leadership of director Chris Bouchard.  I’ve just finished watching it and can report that it is a wonderful success that tells its story with the perfect touch of mystery, action, and romance.  It captures the look of the Peter Jackson trilogy expertly and incorporates highly professional costuming, makeup, photography, script writing, and acting.  I think the producers of the LOTR trilogy should include this film when they release the eventual DVD of the upcoming film of The Hobbit.  Perhaps this is the best fan film ever made.  It probably is.  I have not seen all the available fan films, but it is difficult to imagine that anyone has made a better one.  Watch the film and then think about the fact that it was made for under $5,000.

The Cool School: LA Art Scene Film

by Editor

This video is from a PBS Independent Lens documentary about the Ferus Gallery that shaped much of the Los Angeles art scene in the early 1960s.  It’s short but it conveys some of the sense of LA’s wild, nervy, uncontrolled art attitude that is still in force today.  I love the zoom in on Andy Warhol who’s standing in front of one of his works and he just says, ‘Oh.’  LA still has that sense of offering the individual artist the clear opportunity to walk into a gallery, shake hands, say ‘How’s it going?’ and end up with an art showing a few weeks later.  It’s a city of entrepreneurs.  New York is a city of deeply knowledgeable and experienced people who understand that there is a system in place that’s been there forever.  That’s why people walk fast in New York.  They’re all trying to stay on schedule so the system keeps running.  In LA, everyone is throwing crowbars into the system and breaking it so that they can make their own.  The gallery scene in downtown LA is really interesting these days.  You can walk for blocks, stopping in at the galleries for a wide variety of offerings.  There are a couple of galleries that have copped an arrogant New York attitude and they are the ones I stay away from.  In general, you get a real feeling of the art being right there and totally accessible to you.  Everything is for sale.  The artists are interested in your money.  It’s very simple and healthy.  When I buy a piece of art in LA I feel like I’ve pulled a fast one on the art world somehow.  I feel complicit in something with underground tones.

The Hunt for Gollum: Lord of the Rings Fan Film

by Editor | 1 Comment

The Hunt for Gollum is a 40-minute fan-made film that will be available for free downloading on May 3, 2009.  The film was made through open collaboration of enthusiastic fans working under the leadership of director Chris Bouchard.  The all-volunteer production looks so much like a Peter Jackson LOTR movie that it’s almost scary.  One wonders why all the big budget money was spent if the films could have been produced by this crew of hard-working talented volunteers!  This film looks like it’s going to be a serious lot of fun and will be a great addition to the LOTR world for its fans.

Tesfaye: A Film About Reforesting Ethiopia

by Editor | 1 Comment

Tesfaye is a film by Brent Gudgel, made for Eden Reforestation Projects. It’s the story of an Ethiopian man who blames himself for helping to destroy the trees of his country. Now he wants to help fix the problem. It’s a beautiful film told with great simplicity and seriousness. It is the clear and direct communication from the man in the film that makes it so effective.

Moon: A Science Fiction Film Trailer

by Editor

Moon is a new science fiction film directed by Duncan Jones. It stars Sam Rockwell as a man administering a lonely moon base for a shift that lasts several years. The trailer looks pretty good, but I’m not sold on it. I do like to see a serious science fiction film getting projected in theaters after the horrific damage that’s been done to the genre by clever little men like George Lucas.  In fact, I blame Lucas more than Tolkien for the fact that every bookstore loads its science fiction shelves with sword fantasy books.  As soon as the idiotic Obi Wan Kenobi pulled out a lightsaber, the sci-fi film genre was doomed. But this thing looks from its trailer to be a mashup of homages to 2001: A Space Odyssey, Silent Running and Solaris. I just don’t get into ‘homage’ movies.  A little subtle homage is fine.  But this trailer is just packed to the gills with barely altered rips right out of these classic films. No serious science fiction director makes a movie that’s an homage to other movies. Stanley Kubrick would have choked on a chess piece if someone had suggested such a thing to him.  So, I’m sure I’ll give this movie a chance and go see it, but I fear that it will be exactly the movie it appears to be in its trailer.  The effects do have that wonderful super-reality quality to them that 2001 and television show Space 1999 had.

It is Repose in the Light: A Film by Jennifer MacMillan

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It is repose in the light, neither fever nor languor,
on a bed or on a meadow.

It is the friend neither violent nor weak. The friend.

It is the beloved neither tormenting nor tormented. The beloved.

Air and the world not sought. Life.

— Rimbaud, “Vigils”

This film is by Jennifer MacMillan who runs the Invisible Cinema blog where she posts about experimental film and her own poetic interests and observations. She makes many wonderful short films that are the highlight of her blog. She made this one to accompany a poem by Arthur Rimbaud.  Beautiful and thought-provoking.