tagged w/ Auteurs
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Hideo Kojima is to video games what Stanley Kubrick is to movies. Both are visionaries who had treated their respect project as a work of art, they were visionaries that made an impact on their media, their style has strongly reflected their auteurism, and failure is something that is almost rare to nonexistent in their portfolio.Hideo Kojima is to video games what Stanley Kubrick is to movies. Both are visionaries... more
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"We're talking here about 'wild' film-makers. They come from all decades and places, but prick up your ears to them in the kineopolis and you start to notice some trends. Think of the production values of the films of Cecil B. DeMille, Marcel L'Herbier, Erich von Stroheim, Giovanni Pastrone in Cabiria or Buster Keaton in The General and you realise that the 1910s and 1920s were years when there was a flight from tameness in cinema. Notice the megaphone passion of Ritwik Ghatak, the intensity of longing in Gulzar (who got a Best Original Song Oscar for Slumdog Millionaire after decades of writing and directing great films) and the fact that many Indian films derive from what were called 'mythologicals' - and can't resist lifting off the ground of realism into the gulf stream of musical fantasy - and you clock that most of Hindi (what's called Bollywood) cinema has a wild excess of expression.
But do these film-makers have anything in common beyond the fact of their attention grabbing? I think they do. First, they are mostly impatient with the Aristotelian unities of time and space - bugger that. They prefer their settings to be baroque, extended into multiple realms. Second, they're not ones for categories - think of the bisexuality and populism of Paul Verhoeven, or Baz Luhrmann's masala of disco, Shakespeare, Bollywood and Sergio Leone. Third, they're all people for whom the birth of an idea in the mind's eye is basically a violent or feverish event. Unlike the great movies of, say, Cukor, Ford, Hawks, Rouch and the great Indian director Tapan Sinha, who died in January, form is not servile to content for them. Rather, it is monstrous - “exploding, like the eruption of Mount St Helens”, as David Lynch once told me in an interview. Each of these 'wild' directors has a psychic energy that is manic to a degree and might well be fuelled by sexual rage, or colonial exploitation, or a Marxist hatred of consumerism, or a fear of modernity or the body (Tsukamoto Shinya, we salute you) - or by historical events such as Partition. But that energy in turn fuels a will to form that is so feral it makes the act of film-making look feverish - and makes fairness to content seem like an anaemic propriety.
Such energy makes for electrifying moviegoing, but if these Mr Hydes have in common the energy of their mental activity or the intensity of their reaction to society, then it should be made clear that neither of these things is purely filmic. Pasolini's writing is just as hysterical as his film-making; our hallucinated cage rattlers have much in common with R.D. Laing, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Edvard Munch, Wilhelm Reich, Vincent van Gogh and Mishima, to name just a few. If Aeschylus could watch a Bresson and Paradjanov double bill, he'd easily recognise the spirit of Apollo in the first and Dionysus in the second. The idea that the creative act is also a violent one occurs throughout human thought, nowhere more than in Hinduism. Kali, the goddess of both creation and destruction, would be a fitting patron saint of the 'Wild Bunch'. (She could be impersonated by Kenneth Anger in slap.)""We're talking here about 'wild' film-makers. They come from all... more
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"Quentin Tarantino never had to go through this.
When “The Age of Stupid,” a climate change movie, “opens” across the United States in September, it will play on some 400 screens in a one-night event, with a video performance by Thom Yorke of Radiohead, all paid for by the filmmakers themselves and their backers. In Britain, meanwhile, the film has been showing via an Internet service that lets anyone pay to license a copy, set up a screening and keep the profit.
The glory days of independent film, when hot young directors like Steven Soderbergh and Mr. Tarantino had studio executives tangled in fierce bidding wars at Sundance and other celebrity-studded festivals, are now barely a speck in the rearview mirror. And something new, something much odder, has taken their place.
Here is how it used to work: aspiring filmmakers playing the cool auteur in hopes of attracting the eye of a Hollywood power broker.
Here is the new way: filmmakers doing it themselves — paying for their own distribution, marketing films through social networking sites and Twitter blasts, putting their work up free on the Web to build a reputation, cozying up to concierges at luxury hotels in film festival cities to get them to whisper into the right ears.
The economic slowdown and tight credit have squeezed the entertainment industry along with everybody else, resulting in significantly fewer big-studio films in the pipeline and an even tougher road for smaller-budget independent projects. Independent distribution companies are much less likely to pull out the checkbook while many of the big studios have all but gotten out of the indie film business.
“It’s not like the audience for these movies has completely disappeared,” said Cynthia Swartz, a partner in the publicity company 42 West, which has been supplementing its mainstream business by helping filmmakers find ways to connect with an audience. “It’s just a matter of finding them.”
Sometimes, the odd approach actually works.""Quentin Tarantino never had to go through this.
When “The Age of... more
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Rudo means “tough.” Cursi means “corny.” Sorry for the remedial Spanish lesson, but I took French in high school, so all this is news to me.
In the tale of two brothers that is RUDO Y CURSI, Diego Luna is the tough Beto — hot-headed and an inveterate gambler — while Gael Garcia Bernal is the corny Tato, a romantic with dreams of becoming a singing star. What may help both siblings achieve their desires is that they’re fantastic soccer players who have been scooped up by a talent scout (Guillermo Francella) and placed on a fast-track for sports stardom. But since this tale happens to be told by Carlos Cuaron — who, with brother Alfonso, co-wrote Y TU MAMA TAMBIEN and is here making his feature directorial debut — things may not go quite the way either man wishes.
But, in the interim, you’ll get to see Bernal perform the corniest cover of Cheap Trick’s I Want You to Want Me ever.
Here is my interview with Carlos Cuaron.Rudo means “tough.” Cursi means “corny.” Sorry for the... more
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The gentleman is not merry. The gentleman is quite morose, as a matter of fact. The title only becomes comprehensible once you know that the THE MERRY GENTLEMAN, Michael Keaton’s directing debut, takes place during Christmas. Thus, by placing a “God rest ye…” before the title, you get some idea of the film’s emotional outlook.
Keaton stars as well, as a hit man at the end of his rope and seeking emotional salvation from Kelly Macdonald, playing a battered wife fleeing her abusive, cop husband. Add in a homicide detective — played by producer Tom Bastounes — who’s both on the trail of Keaton’s killer and also seeking solace in Kelly’s attentions, and you’ve got a rather unique romantic triangle that manages to take time out for occasional lashings of humor and the odd contract hit. The film doesn’t quite hit all its marks, but shows that Keaton exhibits definite promise as a helmer.
Here’s the press conference with Keaton discussing the film.The gentleman is not merry. The gentleman is quite morose, as a matter of fact. The... more
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"From cinema comes the idea of the auteur: the dominant directorial figure whose individual stamp is on every frame of a piece of film. But although the cult of the auteur has been widely attacked – not least by Gore Vidal in a brilliant essay called Who Wrote the Movies? – it is now in danger of spreading to theatre. Certain creative figures are in danger of acquiring auteur status. What that means, in effect, is that their individual style and idiosyncratic signature becomes more important than the work itself.
Elevating the director to cult status at the expense of the writer is the road to Hollywood's creative bankruptcy: keep the dramatist at the heart of the creative process.
The danger of the auteur theory is twofold. It creates idols who, to their acolytes, can do no wrong. In cinema this reached the point of absurdity. The other danger is that the interpreter becomes bigger than the thing interpreted. Or, to put it more bluntly, that the director takes precedence over the writer. And, if you want an example of where that can lead, you only have to look at the sterility of post-war German theatre which is dominated by star directors and starved of great dramatists.
In cinema the elevation of the director to cult-status, and the consequent downgrading of the writer, has led, most obviously in Hollywood, to a growing sense of artistic bankruptcy. Theatre, in Britain at least, is more level-headed and still places the dramatist at the heart of the creative process. I just hope that continues and that the director is seen as a necessary interpreter rather than as an icon to be devoutly worshiped.""From cinema comes the idea of the auteur: the dominant directorial figure whose... more
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Donny Moss doesn’t mince words: He wants to see the carriage horses that haul funnelcake-fortified tourists around New York’s Central Park gone for good. To that end, this Gotham-based comedian has created BLINDERS, a documentary that captures the abuses these hardworking creatures undergo, and lays out the reasons that many animal advocates believe the only humane solution to the problem is to see this service ended. Having witnessed the Disneyfication of Times Square and the flight of the middle class from Manhattan isle, I’m sort of reluctant to let go of another bit of classic, New York character, and I brought some of that reluctance to the table when I sat down with Donny. As the man makes clear, the titular blinders are not only those that keep the horses from seeing the chaos that surrounds them, but also the ones that allow romantic dudes such as me to cling to a tourist board fantasy despite the all-too-painful truth.Donny Moss doesn’t mince words: He wants to see the carriage horses that haul... more
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THE ESCAPIST is about as rough, as nasty, as gripping as a prison escape movie can be. Building the story around his lead performer, Brian Cox, director Rupert Wyatt’s feature debut takes the audience into the bowels of hell, while using a daring story structure to play with their expectations. Here’s Wyatt talking about what it took to pull off so elaborate a production under limited time and budget.THE ESCAPIST is about as rough, as nasty, as gripping as a prison escape movie can be.... more
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Ah, comes the spring! And in the spring, a young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of how to protect himself from getting his butt kicked by a homicidal homeless man. At least that’s the state of things in GIGANTIC, an off-beat, New York based romantic comedy starring Paul Dano, Zooey Deschanel, John Goodman, Jane Alexander, and Ed Asner. In this, our debut episode, we talk to director Matt Aselton about working with film veterans, keeping the most dynamic city in the world from overwhelming your characters, and how to simulate wandering in the woods while high on ’shrooms.Ah, comes the spring! And in the spring, a young man’s fancy turns to thoughts... more
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mhahn
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added this
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4 years ago
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