31 mars 2007

DIGEST : Mars 2007

Unreviewed screenings, current reads, links, recommendations, free talk, questions, thoughts, informal conversation, anything... comments welcome.

>> updates below (sticky entry for a month)

26 commentaires:

HarryTuttle a dit…

Pascale Ferran, who won Best Picture at the French Césars, gave a political speech on the tough economical state of Cinema in France today. Published in Le Monde. And the ministry of culture responded in Libération. Both texts are posted on the Cahiers forum.

HarryTuttle a dit…

David Bordwell presents a few recent French books and chants his appreciation of the parisian cinephilia. Paris : filmville, capital of cinema. Vive la France :)
Homage to Mme. Edelhaus
I like how he "rates" the books by their weight, instead of mentionning the number of pages... it's true that these scholarly encyclopedias come in heavy, overwhelming, packages.

HarryTuttle a dit…

Jeu de pistes avec Jacques Rivette : (almost complete) Retrospective Jacques Rivette at the Paris MoMA, March 21 - April 30 2007.
as Ne touchez pas la hache his latest film will be released.
+ Debate with Jacques Rivette, Dominique Païni, Emmanuel Burdeau...

HarryTuttle a dit…

Cinema du Reel 2007 : 29th International Festival of Documentaries at Paris MoMA, 7-20 March 2007.
With a retrospective dedicated to contemporean German documentarists.

Including Jia Zhang-ke's Dong! and 2 Harun Farocki films in his presence.

HarryTuttle a dit…

An exceptional portemanteau film with 35 topnotch world directors will celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Cannes Festival this year.
via Variety and Filmmaker.

3' each : Angelopoulos; Assayas; August; Campion; Youssef Chahine; Chen Kaige; Cimino; Coen; David Cronenberg; Dardenne; De Oliveira; Depardon; Egoyan; Gitai; HHH; Inarritu; Kaurismaki; Kiarostami; Kitano; Konchalovsky; Lelouch; Loach; Moretti; Polanski; Ruiz; Salles; Suleiman; Tsai; Van Sant; Von Trier; Wenders; Wong; Zhang.

I love omnibus!

HarryTuttle a dit…

cineboy discuss love and responsability in criticism at PilgrimAkimbo

HarryTuttle a dit…

Lucas McNelly discusses the multimedia experience of the blogosphere, or technological improvements towards it. at 100 films.

HarryTuttle a dit…

After the zero-number in Februrary, this month e-Cahiers is online with an issue entirely in English.(Update bookmarks!) Demo magazine available (with the supplement on Pascal Ferran's Lady Chatterley), but the rest will be on subscription (4 euros per issue).
Dave Kehr is one of the translators.
Will this make a revolution/competition in the English-language cinema press world?

Soon a spanish version of the website, with a spin-off from Madrid. And a web 2.0 version of the French website is in the pipe too.

HarryTuttle a dit…

Abbas Kiarostami : Image Maker retrospective at NYC MoMA :
Jonathan Rosenbaum on David Denby's NewYorker article

at The House Next Door, Keith Uhlich reports 1 and 2, with an interview.

alsolikelife at Shooting Down Pictures on Homework

HarryTuttle a dit…

Aaron Hillis interviews Cahiers editor director Jean-Michel Frodon at The Reeler, on the French Seventies:
Cinema After May ’68 retrospective at the Alliance Française.

HarryTuttle a dit…

At Bordwell's blog, Kristin Thompson debunks a recent article on yet again the "defeat of cinema to new medias" in Movies still matter.

HarryTuttle a dit…

At Elusive Lucidity, Zach Campbell on the ongoing Kiarostami retrospective in NYC :

Kiarostami Until 1987

NYTimes Q&A with Abbas Kiarostami
and Zach's commentary

HarryTuttle a dit…

Interview with David Bordwell, on cinematic staging in Asia and fast cutting in Hollywood, at kutsite.com

HarryTuttle a dit…

3 pieces at NYT on the ineluctable transition of cinema to on-demand home entertainment.
- Manohla Dargis : The Revolution Will Be Downloaded (If You’re Patient)
- A. O . Scott : The Shape of Cinema, Transformed at the Click of a Mouse
- Noah Robischon : Little Films on Little Screens (but Both Seem Set to Grow)

HarryTuttle a dit…

Girish went to the Kiarostami NYC retrospective too and writes a post on : Abbas Kiarostami's Early Films
(4' short clip included)

HarryTuttle a dit…

March 21st, 2007
Virgin Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors: the Blog-a-Thon hosted by Brian Darr at Hell on Frisco Bay

HarryTuttle a dit…

Asian Film Award in Hong-Kong
Results at Chunking Express by Ouyang Feng
Commentary by Bordwell : A many-splendored thing part 1 & part 2

HarryTuttle a dit…

Cinema scope #30 :

- English translation of Daney's article on Elephant Man "Le Monstre a peur" (original article in French recently published on the Cahiers website)
- Belle Toujours (2006/de Oliveira)

I wish I could read these that are not available online :
- Film/Art: Expanding Film Festivals By Andréa Picard
- Letter On Malaysian Cinema By Pierre Rissient

HarryTuttle a dit…

New Sight&Sound (April 2007)

- Review of Lights in the dusk (2006/Kaurismaki)

HarryTuttle a dit…

Continuation of David Bordwell's review of Hong-Kong cinema :
A many-splendored thing part 3 & part 4.

HarryTuttle a dit…

Doug Cummings on Alain Resnais' Muriel (1963) at FilmJourney

HarryTuttle a dit…

David Bordwell analyzes the history and the philosophy of Film forgery. Pastiche, homage, mashup, sampling, appropriation, plagiarism, fakery, aesthetic crime, from UFO hoax to Bergman's silent movie forgery. Can you forge a film?

HarryTuttle a dit…

What every film critic must know
by Ronald Bergan (Guardian Unlimited)

"There's a common fallacy that anyone can review a film. But how can you do it if you don't have the proper tools to 'read' a film?
(...)
Unfortunately, this has led to a deterioration in film criticism, which has become primarily descriptive, anecdotal and subjectively evaluative rather than analytical. Most reviewers deal primarily with the content of a film - anybody can tell you what a film is about - rather than the style, because they do not have the necessary knowledge to do so. This leads me to believe that film critics should have some formal education in their subject, such as a degree in film studies.
(...)
They should know their jidai-geki from their gendai-geki, be familiar with the Kuleshov Effect and Truffaut's "Une certain tendance du cinéma français", know what the 180-degree rule is and the meaning of "suture".

They should have read Sergei Eisenstein's The Film Sense and Film Form and the writings of Bela Balasz, André Bazin, Siegfried Kracauer, Roland Barthes, Christian Metz and Serge Daney.

They should have seen Jean-Luc Godard's Histoire du Cinema, and every film by Carl Dreyer, Robert Bresson, Jean Renoir, Luis Buñuel and Ingmar Bergman, as well as those of Jean-Marie Straub and Danielle Huillet, and at least one by Germaine Dulac, Marcel L'Herbier, Mrinal Sen, Marguerite Duras, Mikio Naruse, Jean Eustache and Stan Brakhage. They should be well versed in Russian constructivism, German expressionism, Italian neo-realism, Cinema Novo, La Nouvelle Vague and the Dziga Vertov group."

HarryTuttle a dit…

Kristin Thompson puts into perspective A.O. Scott's optimistic NYT article on the universal Online videotheque (see link above) : The Celestial Multiplex.
Dave Kehr also comments.

celinejulie a dit…

Where are you, harrytuttle? I hope you are fine. Thank you for your signing the petition and putting "Afternoon Time" on the Tentative Chronology of Contemplative Cinema.

Do you like THE OLD GARDEN? I like it very much, compared to most Korean films shown in Thailand.

HarryTuttle a dit…

Hi celinejulie,
I haven't been able to write reviews for a long time now. I know I have to get back to Tossapol about his beautiful Afternoon Time! I didn't forget.
I'd like to find time to come back to the contemplative cinema at Unspoken Cinema too.

I was a little disappointed by The Old Garden actually. The multiples flashbacks are messy and unecessary. The timeline is too ambitious and only scratches a melodramatic surface of the big History.