Showing posts with label auteurism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label auteurism. Show all posts

Sunday, 20 March 2011

Federico Fellini Studies


Richard Dyer talks about his research project at the International Research Institute for Cultural Technologies and Media Philosophy (IKKM) Weimar. Period of fellowship: February 2009 – July 2009. Also see Richard Dyer's IKKM-Site.
“What is a movie, in the beginning? A suspicion, a hypothetic[al] story, a shadow of ideas, blurred feelings. And, still, [from that] first impalpable contact, it already seems to be itself, complete, vital, pure.” (Federico Fellini, Fazer um filme (“Making a Movie”). Rio de Janeiro: Editora Civilização Brasileira, 2000., 204 and 205, translated by Marcelo Moreira Santos and cited by him in 'Cinema and Pragmatism: a Reflection on the Signic Genesis in Cinematographic Art', Signs, Vol. 3, 2009: pp. 30-40)
“The movie tells its worlds, its stories, its characters, through images. Its expression is figurative, like [that] of dreams. (...) The movie tries to reproduce a world, an environment, in a vital manner. It tries to remain in this dimension, trying to recreate the emotion, the enchantment, the surprise.” (Fellini, cited in op. cit. 139 and 154)
Inspired by the video, above, of the sublime Richard Dyer talking about "The Wind in Fellini" in simply one of the best Film Studies lectures currently available on the internet, Film Studies For Free today brings you some choice links to openly accessible, and high quality, studies of and further viewing on the work of director Federico Fellini, and of his collaborators, like Nino Rota (the subject of a wonderful new book by Dyer).

Just so you know, FSFF is off on a trip shortly and will be back, joyously labouring away to track down such wondrous links as these below, in just over a week. See ye efter!
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          Sunday, 5 December 2010

          25 great Godard gifts!

           Laura Forde’s brilliant videoed presentation of her thesis:
          Objects to be Read, Words to be Seen: Design and Visual Language in the Films of Jean-Luc Godard 1959–1967
          (link from Atelier Carvalho Bernau) Check out Laura Forde's great blog Thesis Anxiety. It has a lot more Godard material.
          The films of Jean-Luc Godard have been written about perhaps more than any other cinematic works, often through the lens of cultural theory, but not nearly enough attention has been paid to the role of designed objects in his films. Collages of art, literature, language, objects, and words, Godard’s films have an instant, impactful, graphic quality, but are far from simple pop artifacts. The thesis this presentation derives from, “Objects to be Read, Words to be Seen: Design and Visual Language in the Films of Jean-Luc Godard 1959–1967,” explores and interprets the role of visual language within the films—title sequences, intertitles, handwritten utterances, and printed matter in the form of newspapers, magazines, and posters.
             By examining le graphisme within the cultural context of Paris during the 1960s, this thesis seeks to amplify the significance of graphic design in Godard’s first fifteen films, beginning with 1960’s À Bout de Souffle (Breathless) and ending with 1967’s Weekend. While Godard was not a practicing graphic designer in the traditional sense, he was an amateur de design, an autodidact whose obsession with designed objects, graphic language and print media resulted in the most iconic body of work in 1960s France. [Laura Forde]


          Désolée mais...Film Studies For Free's author has had a bit of a busy week blogging elsewhere on urgent matters.

          Had things been different, today's post might have appeared on the intended date of December 3: Jean-Luc Godard's 80th birthday. Oh well... FSFF is pretty hopeful that Godard himself would approve of revolting students and academics and of their creative responses to proposed devastating cuts! 

          Most of the links below were tweeted on the happy day itself by @filmstudiesff (FSFF's nifty, nippier, microblogging twin).

          Don't miss a much publicised on the day "Godard Birthday gift to everyone" from Atelier Carvalho Bernau,  a wonderful Jean-Luc typeface. Don't forget FSFF's recent study of Godard's 1980 film Sauve qui peut (la Vie). Et, pour les francophones: Rencontre publique avec Jean-Luc Godard. 

          A belated Happy Birthday, Jean-Luc!

          Godard Theses Online:
           Other freely accessible, good quality resources:
          Posted by purnawan at 08:40 0 comments
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          Wednesday, 25 August 2010

          Dreaming Movies: RIP Satoshi Kon (1963-2010)

          Image from Ohayo/Good Morning (part of Ani*Kuri15) (Satoshi Kon, 2008) See the video embedded below

          [...] Kon fully takes advantage of what makes animated films unique. [His film Paprika (2006)] is ultimately a dream about movies, as well as a movie about dreams. The way characters jump in and out of settings first made me think of Buster Keaton's Sherlock Jr., perhaps the original virtual reality movie. One can also easily link Paprika to such films as David Cronenberg's eXistenZ. In another moment that may be a nod to Cronenberg, two of the characters jump into a television screen. Because this is a truly animated film, Kon creates a universe where a long office hallway and walls suddenly undulate with the solidity of a half-filled waterbed, characters in advertisements leap out into other billboards or out into the streets, and giant toy dolls threaten the planet.
          It is the dense and detailed imagery that makes Paprika stand out. Frames are crowded with giant marching frogs, large appliances and living dolls. The goofy spirit of the film is close to the self-refererential work of the Fleischer Brothers' earlier work with Koko the Clown and Betty Boop. The story loops around itself like a mobius strip, with dreams and dreams within dreams.
          Paprika, the character, dreams of a street where there are old fashion movie theaters, one of which shows Roman Holiday. Kon even has a character going to a multiplex that is showing nothing but Kon's previous features on each of the screens. Movies have informed Kon's films, so that Perfect Blue is an anime thriller that has reminders of Hitchcock, De Palma and Argento. Tokyo Godfathers, with both its plot about an abandoned baby and Christmas setting could well have been inspired by John Ford's Three Godfathers. While Kon has not cited specific films as influences on Paprika, he did agree with the observation that his new film was "like a collision of Hello Kitty and Philip K.Dick." [Peter Nellhaus, 'Aurora (Colorado) Asian Film Festival, Part 3', Coffee coffee and more coffee, June 3, 2007]

          Film Studies For Free was very sad to hear of the untimely death at the age of 46 of Japanese  anime auteur Satoshi Kon. Paprika, the film Peter Nellhaus is referring to above, a complex and densely entertaining oneiric thriller, was one of FSFF's author's favourite animated films of recent years.

          Kon directed his first film, Perfect Blue, in 1997, followed by Millennium Actress, Tokyo Godfathers, Paprika, and the television series Paranoia Agent. A fifth film, The Dream Machine, is still in production at the time of his death.

          Some great memorial linkage about Kon has been posted in the last few days by David Hudson. But there are not too many online scholarly studies of Kon's work yet, sadly, though FSFF is sure that will change. For now, then, here are some links to the very worthwhile resources and discussions that have been made freely accessible.


            Posted by purnawan at 09:28 0 comments
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            Wednesday, 16 June 2010

            More Film Authorship Studies: Romero, Welles, Portillo, Mamet, and the studio system

            Film Studies For Free brings you some more great essays on film authorship (a favourite topic at this here blog), following the serendipitous discovery that a special issue on that subject by the (normally) subscription only periodical The Velvet Light Trap was chosen to be that journal's free online sample.


            Do also check out FSFF's earlier related posts if this is a topic of particular interest: On Auteurism and Film Authorship Theories, , film authorship and Orson Welles. 
            Posted by purnawan at 03:22 0 comments
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            Saturday, 5 June 2010

            Wide Screen Journal: on film analysis, film and history, Scorsese, Altman, Panahi, and much more

            An image of Lily Tomlin as Linnea Reese in Nashville (Robert Altman, 1975).

            Film Studies For Free is delighted to announce that the second issue of the online and Open-Access film studies journal Wide Screen has been published, with a characteristically broad spread of good quality essays.  FSFF particularly enjoyed Caroline Bainbridge and Candida Yate's very original Winnicottian study of DVD Culture, and Zélie Asava's essay on Todd Haynes's film I’m Not There (2007).

            Below is a list of direct links to each of the main articles. And FSFF has pasted in their abstracts, too, because there's absolutely nothing that this blog likes to do more than to encourage and inform online film-studies reading, even on sunny Saturdays like the one currently tempting its author away from her computer screen...
            • On Not Being a Fan: Masculine Identity, DVD Culture and the Accidental Collector - Caroline Bainbridge, Candida Yates 
              • Abstract: Recent work on DVD and home cinema technologies, audience and the context of reception has tended to focus on fandom, privileging the fanaticism that underpins the etymology of that term. This article is premised on focus group work that suggests, in counterpoint, that many contemporary collectors of DVDs do not see themselves as ‘fans’. What does this mean for the discourses that are developing around the consumption of new media technologies and their role in everyday life? Drawing on interview material, this article discusses the relationship between Western masculinity and the phenomenon of DVD collection. It considers the pleasures of this activity alongside the spaces of resistance it produces and we argue that commentary that interprets such phenomena in terms of fetishism does not account fully enough for what is at stake. Drawing on object relations psychoanalysis, we suggest that the material object of the DVD works in tandem with its psychical equivalent to produce new spaces of exploration and creativity for men. Against the backdrop of the commonplace assumption that masculinity is in ‘crisis’, we suggest that men make use of technologies to forge new spaces of interaction with one another, arguing that this creates new formations through which to think about the cultural structuration of homosociality and its creative potential.
            • Aura, Auteurism and the Key to Reserva - Kartik Nair 
              • Abstract: This essay revisits some of the most significant and enduring debates over the status of cinema as a popular form. The first debate is over the ‘aura’ and film. In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935), Walter Benjamin celebrated the democratic moment when technical reproducibility— culminating with film—abolished the centuries-old ‘aura’ of art. Conversely, in “The Culture Industry” (1944), Theodor Adorno lamented the anti-enlightenment standardization wrought by the assembly line under monopoly capitalism, and the movies were for him a primary example of this mindlessness. Arguably, auteurism emerged in the crossfire of the legacies of Benjamin and Adorno. Since it sought to cordon films off from the undistinguished mass of studio ‘product’ by elevating certain film-makers into the rarefied air of individual expression, ‘auteur theory’ may be said to have conferred a plenitude on its chosen few, a plenitude akin to aura. The second debate that I revisit is therefore that between Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael, a debate surrounding the Americanization of the auteur.
                    Finally, the essay concludes with a brief focus on the short film The Key to Reserva (2007), directed by Martin Scorsese. It is a playful 9-minute experiment – part mockumentary, part homage – in which Scorsese attempts to ‘preserve’ a script Hitchcock developed but left unfilmed. I shall attempt to stage The Key To Reserva as an exciting flashpoint for discussions not only of the status of Hitchcock and Scorsese in Hollywood viz. auteur theory, but also as a flashpoint for discussions of mass reproduction and cinema; the commodity form and advertising; standardization and style; anonymity, authorship, and aura.
            • Multiculturalism and Morphing in I’m Not There - Zélie Asava 
              • Abstract: ‘Passing’ narratives question fixed social categorisations and prove the possibility of self-determination, which is why they are such a popular literary and cinematic trope. This article explores ‘passing’ as a performance of identity, following Judith Butler’s (1993) idea of all identity as a performance language. The performance of multiple roles in I’m Not There (Haynes, 2007) draws our attention not only to ‘passing’, ‘morphing’ and cultural hybridity, but also to the nature of acting as inhabiting multiple identities.
                I’m Not There is a biopic of the musician Bob Dylan. It is a fictional account of a real man who, through his ability to plausibly ‘pass’ for a range of personae, has achieved legendary status. It uses four actors, an actress and a black child actor to perform this enigma.
                    The performance of multiple identities in this film explores the ‘moral heteroglossia’, that is, the variety and ‘many-languagedness’ (as Mikhael Bakhtin put it) of identity, through its use of multiply raced and gendered actors. But the film’s use of representational strategies is problematic. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam (1994) note that mixed-race and black representations are often distorted by a Eurocentric perspective. And, as Aisha D. Bastiaans notes, representation is a process which operates ‘in the absence or displaced presence, of racial and gendered subjects’ (2008: 232). This article argues that I’m Not There, like Michael Jackson’s Black or White (1991) video, exploits racial and gendered difference through ‘passing’ and ‘morphing’ narratives, to reinforce the white-centrism of American visual culture.
            • Urban Imagination and the Cinema of Jafar Panahi - Sarah Niazi 
              • Abstract: The city in Iranian cinema acquires a character of its own. This paper through the exploration of the fabric of Jafar Panahi’s films attempts to evaluate the claims of this statement and deduce in his cinema an ‘aesthetic of veiling’1 as a narrative and enunciative coordinate that defines the post- revolutionary cinema in Iran. Working through a Benjaminian analysis of the urban experience located in the flaneur; the essay will attempt to understand the cinematic flanerie of Panahi’s camera, the perceptual prowess of his children in The White Balloon (1995) and The Mirror (1997) and the adventures of his flaneuse in The Circle (2000) and Offside (2006) as a desire to map the experiential realm of Tehran that is located within the marvellously mundane and the monumental everyday.
            • Visual Story Telling and History As A Great Toy in The Lives of Others - Gerry Coulter 
              • Abstract: The Lives of Others is an important film for two reasons: 1) it is a striking example of how cinema tells a story by visual means as much as the script (which in this case is much weaker); and 2) the film raises extremely important questions for history in our virtual era, a time when the reach and influence of film makers far extends that of the historian.
            • Film Analysis: A Comparison among Criticism, Interpretation, Analysis and Close Analysis - Elisa Pezzotta 
              • Abstract: The first aim of this article is to summarize and discuss the definitions of film analysis reported in some of the more well known texts about this subject which were and/or are published in France, Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States and which are directed to undergraduate and graduate students. Because film analysis is a broad field, firstly, I will distinguish between analysis and criticism and among interpretation, analysis and close analysis. Then, I will underline what are the relationships between analysis and close analysis, what are the main instruments of close analysis, the assumptions of analysis and the goals of both close analysis and analysis.
                    This discussion is not exhaustive, but it furnishes a guide to an essential bibliography of film analysis and can aid students to undertake their own analyses with more awareness of their tasks. Finally, I strongly wish to have raised some important questions about the future of film analysis.
            • “Bhagat Singh Topless, Waving In Jeans”: Melancholia Through Mimesis In Rang De Basanti - Kshama Kumar 
              • Abstract: How is history mapped on the topography of twenty first century India? It seems apt to study the idea through modern India’s largest popular culture industry: Bollywood. This paper will examine the interaction between history and modern India in Rang de Basanti/Paint it Yellow (2006). The film employs history to understand the present. This paper, therefore, seeks to understand the different processes by which the film accomplishes this goal.It will involve a detailed study of the melancholia within the film which allows history and the present to co-exist. Temporal and spatial fluidity is afforded in the film through the mimetic process of the meta-drama, which will also then be studied to better understand the melancholic condition. The melancholic and the mimetic in the film, allow for an examination of the socio-political condition that the film seeks to represent. The film, this paper will argue also employs a critique of modern day governance. The paper will thus come full circle and examine modern day politics as a system of political history in action: pre-colonial politics in a postcolonial world.
            • Loss and Mourning: Cinema's 'Language' of Trauma in Waltz with Bashir - Natasha Jane Mansfield 
              • Abstract: This paper seeks to analyse Ari Folman’s 2008 animated film Waltz with Bashir from the perspective of psychoanalysis. The aim with any form of story telling is to meaningfully convey a narrative to an intended audience. This paper seeks to address the ways in which the audio/visual characteristics of film allow it to present narrative in terms that are unavailable to the written word. In this case, the form and style specific to animation, provides further avenues for exploration with regard to the narration of trauma. The focus of this paper is the representation of traumatic memory, from the perspective of middle aged men, recalling their teenage experiences of war: in this case the 1982 Israeli invasion of Beirut. The organising framework of Waltz with Bashir is the exploration of memory. It reconstructs experiences of war from a distance of approximately twenty years, using multiple perspectives in order to regain a sense of history. As a result, there are many strategies the film employs to try to weave together the various different narratives into an impression of events coherent enough to engage the audience and lead to some clarification of memory, and yet disparate enough to retain the idea of history as shifting and personal. The analysis also questions the difference in perception between the distance created by an artistic representation of reality through the talents of animators, and the distance created through the lens of a camera.
            • “We must be doing something right to last two hundred years”: Nashville, or the American bicentennial as viewed by Robert Altman - Chris Louis Durham 
              • Abstract: In this paper, I will discuss Robert Altman’s Nashville (1975) in the context of its relationship to bicentennial-era American socio-political culture, contemporary American filmmaking, and other films by Altman. In particular, I will argue that Nashville is typical in its problematic representation of “America,” echoing similarly problematic representations of contemporary America found in a number of films of the period. American society in 1975 anticipated the upcoming bicentennial and presidential election in 1976, but a sense of positive American renewal was complicated by very recent memories of the withdrawal from Vietnam (a matter of weeks before Nashville’s release), Watergate, and the pervasive ideological polarization of the late 1960s onward. Nashville is characterized by both the dystopic narrative structure and the fragmentary visual style common to Altman’s films and numerous “New Hollywood” films of the 1960s and 1970s, and which was symptomatic of a period which for many American filmmakers underlined the inapposite nature of utopian fantasies and the desirability of rejecting the traditionally more ordered, invisible and “objective” style of filmmaking that defined much of the American cinematic past. Nashville’s conscious representation of contemporary America – an America defined in terms of polarized communities, a bankrupt political culture, and the threat of random violence - ensures the film’s resonance as a cultural document, and as such one that merits considered analysis.
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            Wednesday, 17 March 2010

            Dorothy Arzner and female film authorship




            Like some film blogs of great note, Film Studies For Free has been pondering Kathryn Bigelow's recent Oscar for achievement in film directing. All in all, it concurs with Steven Shaviro's assessment in his wonderful recent blogpost on this event:
            Given the Academy’s lame choices for best film and best director over the years, Bigelow’s Oscars can scarcely be credited as a verification or proof of her auteurial status; but I am nonetheless greatly pleased, and indeed thrilled, and indeed a bit amazed, that so singular and powerful an artist has actually (and quite unusually) received this sort of recognition.
            FSFF's very own Bigelow links post is in preparation, but today, in part prompted by an excellent article in the latest issue of Sight & Sound by Sophie Mayer, this blog brings you a little list of links to online and openly accessible scholarly writing touching on the wonderful work of Dorothy Arzner, one of Bigelow's (acclaimed but unrewarded by the Academy) female forbears in the commercially-successful, Hollywood, movie-directing business.

            Like Bigelow, Arzner has been a hugely important figure to feminist film scholars and theorists, and so some of the work below explores her work in that context.






            Posted by purnawan at 05:06 0 comments
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            Monday, 8 February 2010

            The New 'Cinema of Attractions'? Andrew Clay on Web Cinema

            'Web cinema: Mind the Gap!' by Andrew Clay

            Film Studies For Free was extremely impressed by the quality of the above presentation, one of a number of excellent papers (all now online) given at the latest Video Vortex conference in Brussels.
            [In t]he past two years, the [Video Vortex] conference series - which focuses on the status and potential of the moving image on the Internet - has visited Amsterdam, Ankara and Split, growing out into an organized network of organizations and individuals. Time for an interim report, perhaps. [VV] asked some participants of the first Video Vortex editions and publication, as well as new ones, to reflect on recent developments in online video culture.
            Over the past years the place of the moving image on the Internet has become increasingly prominent. With a wide range of technologies and web applications within anyone’s reach, the potential of video as a personal means of expression has reached a totally new dimension. How is this potential being used? How do artists and other political and social actors react to the popularity of YouTube and other ‘user-generated-content’ websites? What does YouTube tell us about the state of contemporary visual culture? And how can the participation culture of video-sharing and vlogging reach some degree of autonomy and diversity, escaping the laws of the mass media and the strong grip of media conglomerates?
            In the videoed paper embedded above, as in his wonderful essay 'BMW Films and the Star Wars Kid: 'Early Web Cinema' and Technology' in the 2008 collection Cinema and Technology, Andrew Clay takes an in-depth look at the current state of online cinema. He asks what will happen to web cinema as we shift from learning to see and how to feel to learning how to participate in this new electronic space of modernity?

            In the talk, Clay examines many important 'participatory media' issues such as the phenomenon of cinematic 'prosumption' and the rise of the digital 'caméra-stylo'. His talk is wonderfully illustrated with clips. You can also read some of his brilliant work on these issues in the article linked to below:
            FSFF thinks that it is well worth keeping an eye on Andrew Clay's work: he is currently Senior Lecturer in Critical Technical Practices at De Montfort University, Leicester and programme leader of BSc (Hons) Media Technology in the Faculty of Computing Sciences and Engineering.
            Posted by purnawan at 06:46 0 comments
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            Sunday, 7 February 2010

            William Friedkin in conversation


            A quick post, today, to give Film Studies For Free's readers something good to watch while this blog undergoes some layout changes.

            The above video presents a highly entertaining, and very informative, hour-long Q & A session with film director William Friedkin. The event, facilitated by Joseph Pascal, took place on February 24, 2009 at the Hudson Union Society, New York City, and was made available online thanks to the wonderful people from FORA.tv.

            Friedkin, director of The Exorcist and The French Connection, discusses his legendary film career. He describes his on-set experiences, and explores the past, present, and future of the film industry.
            Posted by purnawan at 08:20 0 comments
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            Thursday, 14 January 2010

            Study of a Single Film: A.I. Artificial Intelligence (Steven Spielberg, 2001)




            What makes A.I. Steven Spielberg’s strangest, most interesting, and (though it may sound ironic to say it) most mature work is that, whether by accident or design, it’s the first of his movies to be both a “children’s” film, ingratiating and manipulative, and a film for adults—complex, ambiguous, brutal and cold. Or, to put it another way, both a Steven Spielberg film and a Stanley Kubrick film.
            Tim Kreider, 'A.I.: Artificial Intelligence', originally published in Film Quarterly, Vol. 56, no. 2, December 2002


            Although Stanley Kubrick spent almost two decades developing A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001), Steven Spielberg would eventually write and direct the final film after Kubrick’s death. While it may seem odd for a single work to result from two creators—especially two directors so distinct in style and temperament—this combination of minds actually reflects the themes and motifs of the film. Within its visual text, A.I.: Artificial Intelligence is obsessed with patterns of doubling and circular design. Throughout the film, faces become superimposed on top of one another, different characters repeat similar actions, and even the film narrative circles around on itself. In addition, specific characters are repeatedly framed through oval structures or reflected against rounded surfaces. These repetitions of shot choice and composition suggest multiple readings and underlying themes, including an interconnection between humans and machines that spans both desire and destiny.
            Ben Sampson, ''Intelligence Doubled: A Visual Study of A.I. Artificial Intelligence”, UCLA, 2010
            Way back in the increasingly dim and distant past, when Film Studies For Free's author used to teach film studies in a real classroom ... to real people ... (imagine!), one of her favourite courses was called Study of a Single Film. It fruitfully took a single film as its subject and object, for a whole semester,  revealing -- even to students who had hoped they might be able to choose the film themselves... -- the many benefits of truly concentrated film analysis and scholarship.

            FSFF was reminded of these benefits when its attention was drawn to a marvellous new video essay on a single film by Benjamin Sampson, a graduate researcher in Cinema and Media Studies at UCLA. Sampson is the creator of another visual essay that this blog loved, on Orson Welles's F for Fake, originally published in the online UCLA journal Mediascape. According to the Mediascape website, prior to his graduate studies, Sampson worked for four years as a freelance videographer and video editor. His current research focuses on the later films of Orson Welles, audience segmentation in the 1950s, and essay films

            Sampson's magnificently edited and profoundly argued new essay, embedded above, studies in detail the design and purpose of the many motifs of duality in Steven Spielberg's 2001 A.I. Artificial Intelligence. As Sampson himself notes in his commentary, duality is a particularly interesting aspect to study in relation to A.I., as it was the film with which Spielberg 'completed' Stanley Kubrick's original project in his own fashion. The essay is very timely, too: while somewhat derided by serious film criticism at the time of its release, A.I. recently found its way into some of the most discerning 'Best Films of the Decade' lists (see here [Reverse Shot], here [Glenn Kenny], and here [Jonathan Rosenbaum]), very deservedly in this blog's humble opinion.

            In honour of A.I., as well as in celebration of Ben Sampson's wonderful, multimedia essay on it -- a piece of work which really begins to show what scholarly video essays can achieve, FSFF today launches its occasional series of 'Study of a Single Film' blog-posts.

            There'll be links galore to online and openly accessible film scholarship or criticism of note (as below), all pertaining to great films of particular relevance to academic film studies. More of the usual, really...

            But if you'd like to suggest a fruitful film for this series on which FSFF might base future such blogposts, or if, like Sampson, you have produced a really good scholarly video essay on a single film (or know of someone else who has) that might be centrepiece of future posts, do please get in touch by email.
            Posted by purnawan at 03:53 0 comments
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            Tuesday, 12 January 2010

            The eloquence of cinematic space: Eric Rohmer 1920-2010


            Image from La Collectionneuse (Eric Rohmer, 1967)
            "What Rohmer does, in essence, is precisely to give space to this elusive life of the heart, expanding the arena for those subtle and important personal choices which most of the time, for most of us, are squeezed below the surface made up of work and more conscious or pressing demands", Judith Williamson [Deadline at Dawn: Film Criticism 1980-1990, Marion Boyars, London, 1993, p. 180]
            “After all I do not say, I show. I show people who move and speak. That is all I know how to do, but that is my true subject.” Eric Rohmer ["Letter to a Critic Concerning my Contes moraux"]
            "Rohmer remained true to a restrained, rationalist aesthetic, close to the principles of the 18th-century thinkers whose words he frequently cited in his movies. And yet [his] work was warmed by an undercurrent of romanticism and erotic yearning, made perhaps all the more affecting for never quite breaking through the surface of his elegant, orderly films" 
            Dave Kehr [The New York Times, January 11, 2010]


            A shocked Film Studies For Free mourns the passing of Eric Rohmer, one of the key directors of the French New Wave and one of the most eloquent founders, audiovisually and verbally, of the discourse of modern cinema.

            David Hudson of The Auteurs is busily gathering links to a fantastic range of eulogies to, and other worthwhile material about, this filmmaker. Below, FSFF offers up its own (customary) tribute in the form of a list of links to online, freely accessible, and notable scholarly resources which explore Rohmer's magnificent body of cinematic work:


                          • YouTube videos (part 1 and part 2): excerpts of Claire Denis's film of Serge Daney interviewing Jacques Rivette on his early interest in filmmaking, his days with Cahiers du cinéma, and his first meetings with Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, and Eric Rohmer (from 3 mins 30 secs). A must watch for those who haven't yet seen Denis's Jacque Rivette, The Watchman.
                          Posted by purnawan at 04:08 0 comments
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