December 2009
8 posts
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Interview Notes - Robert Bresson with Ronald... →
Photographer Unknown
He is very eloquent on working with non actors, on improvisation, on being inside, on restraint and much else. Here are some especially powerful parts:
Q: Is economy a different problem when you’re working in colour instead of black and white? A: The problem of unity is the same. You touch people’s emotions with unity of effect. You must start from the blank...
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The Matching Principle
I think we we are criminally bad at knowing what it is that our heart wants. The best we can do is match ourselves from the outside. This goes against all the natural tendancies of human thought but it is the only way to really judge what we want. The process looks like this: Look at who you are, what you say, what you think, and what you do, and then look for people who say, think and do like...
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Interview Notes - Michael Haneke (Film Comment) →
I was very taken by Haneke’s The White Ribbon (2009) when I saw it the other day. I loved its formal grandness, its glacial, seasonal pacing, its protestant restraint in nearly everything. Here are some quotes from an interview with him:
Q: Except for a brief and vague remark at the beginning, the narrator does not reflect on anything beyond this one story and these local characters. And...
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Vanguard Interview Shoot Notes
I was hired (payment terms still to be confirmed) to shoot a band interview and some live performances at the Vanguard that would go up on their website. It was something different and I was very interested to see how the camera (and I) would go in a live situation like that.
Interview Planning
I didn’t know too much about the shoot before-hand. It wouldn’t have made a huge difference to how I...
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The Photographic Urge in Cinema
I come from a photographic background. I have always looked down at ‘staged’ photography as being a lower form of the art, as it evades the central challenge of the medium: to make intuitive, spontaneous sense of the symbolic chaos of visual life and to realise new knowledge out of this which can’t be grasped at by other mediums like writing. But now as I’m foraging in the unfamiliar forest of...