Category Archives: film

Le Monstre (1903) – Georges Méliès

Via gmtplus9:

Georges Méliès… Le Monstre (The Monster, 1903, .mpg video 02:55). “…Set against an exotic backdrop of pyramids, the Nile, and a great the Sphinx, Georges Méliès’ The Monster (Le Monstre) seems, at first glance, to be a typical Méliès magic film in which a bearded magician demonstrates a series of tricks with an animated skeleton in front of a single well-dressed spectator. The effects are similar to those used in Méliès films ranging from The Vanishing Lady (1896) to The Infernal Cauldron (1903), and in many ways this is a rare instance of a Méliès film in which the magic tricks are actually upstaged by the elaborate scenic backdrop.” From Georges Méliès Digital Video Files.

Underground

Parent: underground – philosophy of place – culture

By medium: underground film – underground literature – underground press – underground music

“Ideas enter our above-ground culture through the underground. I suppose that is the kind of function that the underground plays, such as it is. That it is where the dreams of our culture can ferment and strange notions can play themselves out unrestricted. And sooner or later those ideas will percolate through into the broad mass awareness of the broad mass of the populace. Occulture, you know, that seems to be perhaps the last revolutionary bastion.” — Alan Moore

Related: alternative – banned – censorship – clandestine – controversial – counterculture – crime – cult – drugs – economy – forbidden – grotto – hidden – illegal – illicit – independent – a glossary of the non-mainstream – overground – prohibition – resistance – secret – subculture – subversive – taboo – transgressive – underworld – The Velvet Underground

Contrast: mainstream

Underground mining station, image sourced here.

A basement or cellar is an architectural construction that is completely or almost below ground in a building. It may be located below the ground floor.

The mainstream comes to you, but you have to go to the underground. – Frank Zappa


Interconnected underground stems are called rhizomes

Bibliography: Lipstick Traces, a Secret History of 20th Century (1989) – Greil Marcus – Outsiders as innovators (1998) – Tyler Cowen – Notes from Underground (1864) – Fyodor Dostoevsky

MoKA, IMDb by tag cloud

IMDb presents a new tool for finding and discovering film titles within their large catalog. MoKA (Movie Keywords Analyzer) lets you find titles that have a particular keyword and then presents a tally of all keywords (presented as a tag cloud) from the titles that matched your keyword set.

Bonjour Tristesse (1954) – Françoise Sagan

Related: sadness – boredom – melancholy – pessimism – depression – spleen

After Laughter (Comes Tears) – Wendy Rene

Antonym: happiness – pleasure

Bonjour Tristesse (1958), Japanese soundtrack

Bonjour Tristesse (1958), Saul Bass film poster

Bonjour Tristesse (in English, Hello, Sadness) is a novel by Françoise Sagan. Published in 1954, when the author was only eighteen, it caused an overnight sensation.

The 1958 film Bonjour Tristesse was directed by Otto Preminger, featured music by Georges Auric, and had Jean Seberg and David Niven as lead actors. — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonjour Tristesse [Sept 2006]

Bonjour Tristesse (1958) Otto Preminger
Image sourced here.
Styling by Hubert de Givenchy

Rationales for movie sex and nudity

Found a good article titled Rationales for movie sex and nudity:

“To avoid the charge of presenting scenes involving “gratuitous sex and nudity,” Hollywood filmmakers often suggest a reason (or at least an occasion) for their stars’ behavior, offering various rationales for movie sex and nudity during each decade of the twentieth century.”

In many ways this phenomenon was also apparent in European art from the Middle Ages until the 1850s. But the rise of modern art and the related rise of realism in the arts in France changed all that. Artists no longer wished to hide behind artistic pretexts to represent nudity and eroticism. An important example of this is Manet’s Olympia.

Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977) – Richard Brooks

 


Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977) – Richard Brooks

Looking for Mr. Goodbar is a 1975 novel by Judith Rossner, and a 1977 film by Richard Brooks starring Diane Keaton and Richard Gere, based on the true story of a woman who has an affair with her sadistic and misogynistic professor as the beginning of a long downward spiral that culminates in her brutal murder.

In recent years the film has been compared to Jane Campion’s 2003 In the Cut. Lou Lumenick in the New York Post called the latter an “erotic thriller that amounts to an implausible update on Looking for Mr. Goodbar.”

Notes:

  • Looking for Mr. Goodbar foreshadows the end of the sexual revolution.
  • Looking for Mr. Goodbar wasn’t the first foray of Richard Brooks into true crime, there had been a film adaptation of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood in 1967.

Zazie dans le métro (1960) – Louis Malle

Zazie dans le métro (1960) – Louis Malle

I viewed the French film Zazie dans le métro (1960, an adaptation of the Raymond Queneau novel) by Louis Malle yesterday, and once again I enjoyed the DVD extras (can DVD extras be considered as secondary sources or paratexts?) more than the film itself. The film is a typical nouvelle vague product (Philippe Noiret self-referentially explaining in the scene where the taxi meter spins fast forward: “Qu’est ce que tu veux, c’est la Nouvelle Vague” (eng: “What do you know, this is the Nouvelle Vague“)).

Visual experience: a pop art styled colorful bonanza of surreal visual gags. Noiret’s wife Albertine is played by the beautiful Carla Marlier and one of the protagonists is Paris (the Eiffel tower scenes!) itself.

The DVD extras feature an interview with Philippe Collin, first assistant director, in which he explains the influence of Tex Avery (he did his thesis on Avery) and the influence of American photographer William Klein (Mr. Freedom, see picture below) and his focus on graphic design, advertising neon, etc…

Publicity shot for Mr. Freedom (1970) – William Klein, reproduced on the cover of Midi/minuit fantastique nr. 20 (clicking on the picture brings you to the Midi/minuit fantastique page, where all the covers are reproduced)

Final assessment: Psychological realism 2/10, Oddity value: 7/10, feelgood factor: 7/10 (I did get bored a bit.)

Political cinema and social realism

Inspired by an article at Wikipedia called political cinema, some research I did on social realism, some films by Godard and a search at Google consisting of “social realism” “political cinema” , I found this article by Mark Cousins (The Story of Film (2004) [Amazon.com]) with the title Cinema Gets Real which was published in prospect-magazine.co.uk in June 2006. It deals with the concept of realism in film.

Some quotes:

… The remarkable success of Brokeback Mountain showed that leftfield American filmmaking can do well at the box office and begin to form its own liberal mainstream. Brokeback missed out on the best picture Oscar, … the point remains that Brokeback Mountain is a new high-water mark of success in political cinema.

… Mention of Michael Winterbottom brings up another, unrelated area in which recent cinema has become, in a sense, more real. Despite showing genital close-ups, erections and ejaculation, his film 9 Songs was passed for an 18 certificate in Britain. When Patrice Chéreau’s British film Intimacy, which also featured explicit sex, was given a similar rating, it felt as if the new millennium had ushered in a more tolerant attitude to explicit consensual sexual activity on screen, and so it had. Encouraged by French films like Baise-Moi and Anatomy of Hell, both made by women, the taboo on showing erections in mainstream cinema just seemed to fade away.

… Life did feel like a disaster movie in the days after 9/11, prompting Belgian ultra-realist directors Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, who have won the Cannes Palme d’Or twice, to observe: “Today’s paradox is that the aestheticisation of reality requires the de-aestheticisation of art.” And it is not only realist directors who feel this. Michael Haneke, who had a recent art-house hit with Hidden, explains the intensity of his work by saying that reality is losing its realness.

… the very thing that the earliest filmmakers fell in love with—a camera’s ability to hoover up reality and re-project it in motion and detail on a big screen—is not quite as valuable as it once was. The best European filmmakers today—Haneke, Lars von Trier, Bruno Dumont, Claire [Claire Denis?] —are equally sceptical about film as a medium of social realism.

Excellent.