This scene, in all its unadorned simplicity and almost preternatural wonder, attests to that instantly graspable but maddeningly intangible project that the Dardennes have been honing to its keenest edge since La Promesse: a Bazinian revelation of the real achieved via the most fundamentally illusionistic properties of the narrative cinema. When coupled with the painstaking precision—of events and revelations, of looks and gestures—with which they construct their narrative architecture, the breathtakingly simple device of that insistently pursuing camera scores an ontological coup, enlarging the world precisely by narrowing the frame through which we are allowed to view it, indeed, most often making that frame commensurate with the body and movements of a single character. If The Son is the first among equals in the Dardennes’ remarkable body of work, it is because its dramatic crux most perfectly articulates the suggestively epic power ingrained in their determinedly and deceptively small-scale workings. Rigorously adhering to the circumscribed life, milieu, and field of vision afforded Olivier, eschewing any hint of allegorical or symbolic inflation, The Son moves organically into one of the richest evocations of worldly existence and experience achieved in cinema.

Best of the Decade #9: The Son | Reverse Shot


Posted 2 months ago

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An interview with Ritwik Ghatak (link)

When you prepare to make a film and choose subjects, what do you look for and look at?
People. I look at the struggle and misery of contemporary life. And try to say that “to the best of my ability”. My only concern is men and women of my country. I have nothing else. It does not matter whether my countrymen accept me or reject me. My only subject is my men and women. What else have I got?
What should be the primary objective of making films? 
The primary objective of making films is to do good to mankind. If you do not do good to humanity, no art is a true work of art. Rabindranath said that art must be faithful to truth first and to beauty secondarily (dipanjan: reference to satyam and sundaram). This truth comes out of an artist’s own perceptions and meditations. Since truth is never everlasting and constant and as this world is always subjective and changing, everyone must arrive at their personal truth with their entire life’s deepest thoughts and understandings. One should accept that truth only after fully realizing it. Art is not a trivial thing.


Posted 3 months ago

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Interview with Béla Tarr (link)

You know it’s a long way from my first film till now (laughs). It’s step by step, from film to film, everything is moved a little bit, changed a little bit . . .I often have the feeling that we make always the same movie, just always a little bit better. We try each time to make a little bit better. So the style was never a question, you know, it’s coming from the last movie, the last movie was coming from the previous movie, and so forth . . . I cannot tell you many things about it. Have you seen my last movie?


Posted 3 months ago

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Pedro Costa Interview in EYE WEEKLY (link)

Do you see your work as a cross between sociological study and narrative film?
It’s that special moment when true and false don’t matter. You have to be true in other ways. The relation between people has to be true. I can tell you that a lot of things that Varda says and does are not true. I’ll never say what and when. Withholding it amuses me.

How does that play to your audience?   
Whenever In Vanda’s Room is shown at a documentary festival, people get really angry. I’ve had ferocious Q&As. The argument is always, “You cannot do this in a documentary. It’s too vague, too poetic.” Those statements bore me to death.


Posted 4 months ago

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Interview Notes - Robert Bresson with Ronald Hayman (link)

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 screen and start from the silence. I like silence very much. When I read this little sentence—”Silence was pleas’d”—in Milton’s Paradise Lost, I liked the idea of silence being pleased.
    Another thing I was aware of was that nearly all gestures, all of our ways of talking, are mechanical. It’s true. You put your hand like this. Look. There are two pages in Montaigne about the way our hands go where we don’t want them to go. He’s a writer who isn’t really difficult. You can always read a page or two and find something. Theatre consists of well controlled gestures and words. Cinema must be something different—not controlled. It must be the equivalent of life, like any art, but certainly not copied or simulated. There must be little elements of life, of reality, captured separately, little by little with the extraordinary machine which is the camera. Then when you put them together in a certain way, a sudden life comes out of it—cinematic life, which is not at all like everyday life. Nor is it like the life of the theatre. The life of the theatre is like life only because actors are alive. In the cinema, when you photograph somebody, you kill him on film. It’s dead images. Projecting a film is projecting people killed. But there is a certain way of doing it so that the images are transformed by their contact together. Then life comes into it, like flowers reviving in water.
  • Q: What do you think of Tolstoy?
    A: In comparison I find him very dry. He works much more from the outside than from the inside. With Dostoevsky you feel “I’m sure you don’t make mistakes about human beings.” That’s what I’m looking for—to remain on the inside.

Click on the link in the title for the full interview.


Posted 8 months ago

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Interview Notes - Michael Haneke (Film Comment) (link)

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 his last words are: “I never saw any of them ever again.” The paradoxical effect, of course, is that we immediately start to think of where and when we might have encountered them in other shapes—throughout history or in our own lives. This is a good example of your double strategy to leave some things open but also leave enough traces for substantial interpretation.
    A: I always look for the places in a story where leaving things open can become really productive for the viewer. I often compare filmmaking with building a ski jump; the actual jumping should be done by the audience. For the filmmaker, this is pretty hard—it’s much easier to do the jump yourself, to do it for the viewer. Because there’s always the fear of frustrating them. What do I have to indicate? What do I leave out? How much can I not spell out when constructing a film and still not frustrate the audience? Such strategies have become widely accepted in modern literature, but much less so in cinema. That’s a bit sad.
  • On there being nuanced, rich characters in the film: “To me there are no completely positive or negative characters in the film. The pastor is not evil either, he’s really convinced of what he does. He really loves his children. That’s the horror of it. It was normal to beat one’s kids. When he tells them, “I won’t sleep tonight, because tomorrow I will have to hurt you,” it sounds cynical to our ears, but I think it’s better to believe him. It’s not very interesting to see him as a sadist or as a grotesque mental case. If these people had just been perverts, this kind of behavior wouldn’t have had such broad effects. And I’m not sure if any other system of education is inherently better. It’s always about the individual pedagogical impulse: do you do something just to exert your authority, or to help the other person find his or her way in society—as shitty as society may be. Each educational system is only as good as the person who acts in it. “
  • On the role of a director: “I had a fantastic crew—Christoph Kanter, my art director who I’ve been working with for ages, Moidele Bickel, the costume designer, whom I hired because she had done the costumes for Queen Margot—the best I’ve seen in cinema. She’s a master in creating the necessary patina, clothes that look truly worn. I don’t think a director needs to be proficient in all these crafts, cinematography, set design, etc., but he needs the ability to quickly perceive all details and proportions and see if something is wrong.”
  • A very different method to the messier, impromptu methods of Wong Kar Wai, and Antonioni: 
    Q: Are your films still storyboarded throughout? I wonder if certain strong images—like the crucified bird—are already present in the script rather than “found” while making the film.
    A: In general, I draw the storyboards after I’ve decided on the locations. But images like the one with the bird are always in the script. I don’t believe in fortuitous events on the set, except in relation to the actors’ work. I never trust “symbolic” things that happen by chance while shooting. They sometimes appear like sudden “proposals,” but usually I cannot judge in that exact moment what it would mean for the whole film if I were to include them. I did that twice in my career, and in the end I cut them out. You may find it great that very second, but it’s usually wrong in some other way. I pretty much follow the script 100 percent.
  • Goethe: “I have never heard of any crime which I might not have committed.”
  • Q: … Can you describe why genre traditions hold very little appeal for you, even though, as in the case of Funny Games or Caché, the points of contact are sometimes obvious?
    A: Points of contact is the correct expression, because I do use genre—both films you mention are thrillers in a certain way. But generally, what bores me in genre cinema is the sort of abstraction or de-realization of reality that takes place there. It bores me as a viewer, not as a filmmaker. It’s like in the theater, in cases such as Ionesco or Gombrowicz: when the world is reduced to a model, I lose interest after five minutes, because I know right away what it will boil down to. I also try to build models in my films, but ones that are “filled with the world,” where the effect is not just metaphorical but steeped in a verifiable reality. And most film genres—apart from the thriller—don’t do that for me. They offer prototypical modes of behavior that only interest me if I can reflect them as a filmmaker.
  • Q: I came upon something from Pascal, who is one of your gurus. It’s from the Pensées: “We do not content ourselves with the life we have in ourselves and in our own being; we desire to live an imaginary life in the mind of others, and for this purpose we endeavour to shine.” I had to think of Cannes, where you’ve been a regular, and of your recent Palme d’Or—the whole glamour and fame aspect of cinema. It’s not something you seem made for, but maybe even you desire to live this “imaginary life in the mind of others.”
    A: Look, this is a truly happy moment in my life. We are all social beings, and we strive for some appreciation by others. If your work is the center of your existence, it’s great to be recognized for it. You don’t do all this for yourself, you want to communicate. First and foremost, you may actually do it for your own pleasure, because you like to do it, but this energy will stall if you find no response or success. What makes me happy about the Palme d’Or is definitely not the glamour that goes with it but that it’s the optimal form of recognition in my métier. The work should shine—it’s what I go public with. As a person, I’d rather have my peace and quiet.

Click on the title to read the article.


Posted 8 months ago

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Jay-Z’s 99 Problems Video by Mark Romanek

Directed by Mark Romanek, who is very very good. His site is flash so I can’t link but check out his FAQ for an interview with him. Smart, smart. He directed the awesome 99 Problems clip above but also One Hour Photo and the Apple shuffle commercial where people put on new clothes and become new people.

Maybe I think too narrowly about my art, not everything has to be the equivalent of Herzog. Start small. Start.

(You can see his deep knowledge of photography in this clip, a lot of Arbus, Bruce Davidson, Robert Frank in there, but so modern.)


Posted 9 months ago

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‘Where the Wild Things Are’ and Spike Jones Profile on NYTimes (link)

Once again the whole secret seems to be sticking around. Fighting the war of attrition until success just gives up and hands itself to you on a platter. Or maybe not.

I did like the part about not compromising the vision even a little bit because that’s the start. That’s when they know that you will compromise, that you can. I’ve seen this strategy used by Bangladeshi wives on their husbands. They are uncompromising about the smallest details around the house and through that engender enough fear and control that they start owning the larger decisions over time. Scary.

Click the link in the title.


Posted 1 year ago

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© Adnan Chowdhury 2009