"(le cinéma est) rêver un rêve ensemble"

Film is more than Film

Fotografia de Vivian Maier

[a propósito de Epstein] (...) tudo aquilo que permite explorar os aspectos da realidade invisíveis a olho nu e que só o cinema pode revelar -  por exemplo, o grande plano é a alma do cinema porque acrescenta alguma coisa às aparências.

Paulo Viveiros, A Imagem do Cinema

no meio do "folheanço" dum livro empilhado na humilhantemente grande colecção de livros que ainda estão por ler, surge isto inesperadamente.

E la nave va

Um momento musical de Fellini para pôr o brilho nos olhos e dar logo balanço para uma noite de sonhos bem mais extravagante.

Fosse através das bandas sonoras magistrais de Nino Rota (o apogeu da musicalidade de Fellini - já não me lembro quem disse isto e onde o ouvi mas essa pessoa disse mesmo que a partir da morte de Nino Rota, os filmes de Fellini nunca mais foram os mesmos), da linguagem corporal das personagens, do próprio ambiente surrealista felliniano ou, neste caso, de uma orquestra de copos de cristal, os filmes de Fellini são sempre dotados de uma musicalidade tão própria e única, completamente inexplicável por palavras. Digo apenas que, para mim, é a perfeita música de embalar para viver sonhos bem mais bizarros e fantásticos.

"Eadweard Muybridge is the subject of today's Google Doodle. In the process of photographing galloping horses, Muybridge invented the Zoopraxiscope, the forerunner to the motion picture projector."

à barcelone!

What is cinephilia?

My second example comes from Laura Mulvey’s famous 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” which remains one of the primary targets for attacks on “Screen theory”. Perhaps the most infamous statement in her essay is the following: “It is said that analyzing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. That is the intention of this article.” Theory was to be a “weapon” against the pleasure derived from classical Hollywood films, which is to say the privileged object of cinephilia. But it is important to remember that Mulvey had never attended graduate school and was not an academic, nor was she anti-cinema or criticism; she was writing as a critic and filmmaker who was demanding a new kind of cinema and correspondingly a “new language of desire.” She explicitly rejects “intellectualized unpleasure” as a false alternative to classical Hollywood narrative—which hasn’t stopped that position from being attributed to her with stunning regularity—but she believes the negation of a certain unexamined pleasure was necessary for the invention of new forms of critical filmmaking and spectatorship that in turn would produce new kinds of pleasures.

One of the founding gestures of Seventies film theory was the renunciation of cinephilia on behalf of a new kind of political cinema. As Serge Daney put it, for Jean-Luc Godard after ’68, the cinema became a “bad place” and it had to become a school that taught how to leave the cinema. In 1959, “tracking shots,” according to Godard, were “moral questions,” but after ’68 they became political ones.

daqui

They claim that the function of criticism is not primarily about checking off likes or dislikes or creating a hierarchy of tastes but, as Fujiwara puts it, “to respond to what is open, troubling, or self-contradictory in a film, to show why things in it that may not even be immediately noticeable are deeply interesting, to reinvent it.” Here Fujiwara touches on a point emphasized by another contributor, Adrian Martin, that criticism is (or can be or should be) a creative act.

Criticism must always involve more than description, more than merely deferring all authority to the work itself—a position that if taken to its logical limit cancels out the need for criticism in the first place.

As Arnheim’s colleague and contemporary Siegfried Kracauer put it, ‘the good film critic is only conceivable as a critic of society.’ (Now of course the reverse is also true.)” Or as Adorno claimed: “The aesthetics of film is ... inherently concerned with society. There can be no aesthetics of the cinema, not even a purely technological one, which would not include the sociology of the cinema.”

daqui

I don’t think it casts a shadow on the word “cinephilia” to suggest that it has tended to imply a movie love that is somehow cultish—a degree of projection, faith, even perversion that shouldn’t have to be disavowed. Even if we reject essentialism and recognize that cinema, as Bazin claimed, is “impure,” one still needs to account for the specificity of its impurity that allowed for such devotion among its followers. Impurity might be understood not only in Bazin’s sense—which was that cinema can incorporate and serve the other arts—but also in a more anthropological sense: that cinema is somehow a space open to contamination, a peculiar mixture of private and public, art and non-art, in which bodies in the dark are transported to other worlds.

(...)as Mulvey stressed, that the specific pleasures of Hitchcock’s films are allied with the way he touches on the imbrication of guilt and the voyeuristic and fetishistic fantasies aroused by cinema.

Today, the negative stereotype of the cinephile is no longer someone trying to escape adulthood, but rather the elitist snob. Cinephilia had never been about restricting oneself to recognizable works of artistic seriousness but rather, to borrow a word from Agnès Varda, “gleaning”—salvaging obscure objects of desire that may go otherwise unrecognized in what respectable people call trash.

Meanwhile, theory (often quite “Grand” in Mills’s sense) is alive and well today in the academy, but the trend´is toward focusing on bodies, sensations, genes, or neurons, and not broader social forces. In this climate, the critical distance advocated by Seventies film theory, as well as other forms of political interpretation, are increasingly seen as suspect.

Critical distance rings false when everyone is thought to be hypercritical and linked in. Gone is the model of the cinephile, or cultural consumer more generally, as “passive.” Sarris relished a sense of passivity, Sontag longed to be “kidnapped,” Pauline Kael “lost it at the movies.” Again Kois serves as a telling representative of the current moment when he tells us that his “default mode of interaction with images [is] intense, rapid-fire decoding of text, subtext, metatext and hypertext.”

(..) what Jacques Rancière calls in a new book la politique de l’amateur. La politique de l’amateur means challenging the assumptions contained in hierarchies of taste or what counts as legitimate knowledge. It means breaking down the strict divisions that separate filmmakers, critics, theorists, and cinephiles It embraces what is made possible by the Internet at its best: when the anonymous capacity of anyone to have her say leads to creative encounters with words and images disengaged from their association with recognized authority.

According to Rancière, knowledge of the world we call cinema is always changing and always contested and belongs to anyone who takes it as a site to forge her own path.

daqui

Uma série de artigos cujas posições apresentadas podem levantar alguma discórdia em alguns aspectos (como eu senti) mas, definitivamente, muito interessantes de ler.

"quand on retrouve la couleur, c'est très agréable, parce qu'à force de tourner en noir et blanc on finit par trouver le monde vraiment gris"

- Entretien avec Philippe Garrel, Cahiers du Cinéma, Octobre 2011

(uma das entrevistas que mais ficou na minha memória)

Film, Film, Film

Voilà uma animação de 1968 do animador russo Fyodor Khitruk que aqui satiriza a indústria cinematográfica de uma maneira muito perspicaz.

Steal like an artist.

Criterion goes Kindergarten. Or doesn't it?

Historically, the policier and the family comedy were two distinct categories. Then, in 1990, Kindergarten Cop gave us all a lesson in genre revisionism. With muscular sensitivity, Hollywood’s last action hero Arnold Schwarzenegger embodies detective John Kimble, who is compelled to go undercover as a teacher of five-year-olds in order to catch a ponytailed drug dealer. Though it’s distinguished by pulse-pounding suspense, a Crayola-bright palette by cinematographer Michael Chapman (Taxi Driver), and trenchant observations about education in the Bush I era, the film’s emotional center is Schwarzenegger’s gruff yet good-tempered interaction with a class full of precocious scamps, including a tumor-forewarning death-obsessive and a genitalia expert. By leavening a children’s film with enough violence to please even the most cold-hearted bastard, director Ivan Reitman shows that he refuses to color inside the lines.

Simplesmente a melhor piada do dia das mentiras.