cours petit Antoine Doinel, cours.
Wednesday, 8 February 2012
Saturday, 4 February 2012
Friday, 3 February 2012
La Tour du Cinéma
In 1957, François Truffaut wrote a script for a 25-minute film called Autour de la Tour Eiffel (Around the Eiffel Tower), about persons obsessed with getting to the tower, which they can see easily, but can never reach. In one version, a peasant finally reaches the top and sees “a Parisian Paris down to the fingertips”. The film was never made, but two years later, in the credits for Les quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows), Truffaut’s first feature, the camera scanning the streets of Paris comes to a halt at the foot of the Tower. Truffaut would collect replicas of the Tower in all sizes, which he displayed in his apartment in the 16th arrondisement, from which the Tower itself was visible.
O artigo completo aqui.
The White Shadow blogathon
Last year, the New Zealand Film Archive and the National Film Preservation Foundation announced that they'd discovered a tinted print of The White Shadow (1924), "an atmospheric melodrama starring Betty Compson, in a dual role as twin sisters — one angelic and the other 'without a soul.' With mysterious disappearances, mistaken identity, steamy cabarets, romance, chance meetings, madness, and even the transmigration of souls, the wild plot crams a lot into six reels." As David Sterritt noted in that announcement, though he was only 24 at the time, "Alfred Hitchcock wrote the film's scenario, designed the sets, edited the footage, and served as assistant director to Graham Cutts, whose professional jealousy toward the gifted upstart made the job all the more challenging."
Today, Farran Nehme, Marilyn Ferdinand and Roderick Heath have announced that their third For the Love Film blogathon, running from May 13 through 18, will be a fund-raising drive to rouse up the $15K needed to get The White Shadow on the NFPF site so that we'll all be able to see it for free for four months.
Apesar da blogathon ser só entre 13 e 18 de Maio quem quiser pode já doar (nem que seja apenas um bocadinho) neste site. Vá lá, quem é que não quer ver esta preciosidade de Hitchcock?! Eu já estou apaixonada por esta frame de Betty Compson.
Ce vendredi (14h30 en salle Langlois), venez assister à la conférence de Noël Very, qui décrira la découverte du steadicam, ses origines, l'histoire du premier exemplaire, son utilisation et son évolution. Il témoignera de sa propre expérience de cadreur sur les tournages de Subway, Valmont ou Carmen. Des démonstrations de steadicam seront réalisées en direct sur scène à l'aide d'un modèle des plus récents.
O que eu não dava para ter assistido a isto!
JLG
Jean-Luc Godard’s collaboration with a museum comes at a point in his œuvre when his work is not reaching the size of audience enjoyed by his early films, whilst his name has never been so frequently evoked and celebrated. This apparent contradiction can be partly explained by the fact that the combination within a single film of a critical dimension and a capacity for entertainment has become less and less accepted. À bout de souffle (1960), Le Mépris (1963) and Pierrot le fou (1965) achieved a perfect blend of theoretical power and spectacular lyricism.
In the past the filmmaker has devoted considerable attention to reflecting on the conditions of a film’s production by disrupting spectatorial investment through techniques such as narrative rupture, looks to camera, interrupted music, non-linearity of events and so on. He has also frequently represented the cinematic ‘machine’ and deprived the viewer of illusion, while nonetheless retaining a certain lyricism. Similarly, the sudden breaks to which he subjects his borrowed musical extracts serve to defer, if not prevent, the formation of his characters.
Collage(s) de France was a response to something for which the filmmaker had often been reproached: not telling a story. One day he jokingly recalled how he used to be reprimanded as a child (‘Don’t tell stories’), whereas in his work as a filmmaker he is now asked by producers to tell them. In fact he has always sought a balance between fiction and ethical gesture.
LALANNE: The HADOPI law, for example, or the matter of prosecuting downloads, or the property of images...
GODARD: I'm against HADOPI, of course. There's no intellectual property. I'm against estates, for example. That the children of an artist might enjoy the rights of their parents' body of work, why not, until they come of age. But afterward — I see no evidence that Ravel's children are getting their hands on the rights for the Boléro...
LALANNE: You don't claim any rights over the images that any artists might be lifting from your films?
GODARD: Of course not. Besides, people are doing it, putting them up on the Internet, and for the most part they don't look very good... But I don't have the feeling that they're taking something away from me. I don't have the Internet. Anne-Marie [Miéville, his partner, and a filmmaker —JML] uses it. But in my film, there are images that come from the Internet, like those images of the two cats together.
LALANNE: The second-to-last quotation in the film is: "If the law is unjust, justice proceeds past the law..."
GODARD: It ties back in with the right of the author. Every DVD starts off with a title from the FBI criminalizing copies. I went for Pascal. But you might take something else away from that phrase. You might think about Roman Polanski's arrest, for example.
LALANNE: Is the idea of accomplishing a body of work, one which life granted you the time to complete, a matter that weighs upon you?
GODARD: No. I don't believe in the body of work. There are works, they might be produced in individual installments, but the body of work as a collection, the great oeuvre, I have no interest in it. I prefer to speak in terms of pathways. Along my course, there are highs and there are lows, there are attempts... I've towed the line a lot. You know, the most difficult thing is to tell a friend that what he's done isn't very good. I can't do it. Rohmer was brave enough to tell me at the time of the Cahiers that my critique of Strangers on a Train was bad. Rivette could say it too. And we paid a lot of attention to what Rivette thought. As for François Truffaut, he didn't forgive me for thinking his films were worthless. He also suffered from not ending up finding my films as worthless as I thought his own were.
LALANNE: Do you really think that Truffaut's films are worthless?
GODARD: No, not worthless... Not any more than anything else... Not any more than Chabrol's... But that wasn't the cinema we were dreaming of.
LALANNE: Posterity, leaving a trace behind — does this concern you?
GODARD: No, not at all.
LALANNE: But has it weighed upon you even for an instant?
GODARD: Never.
LALANNE: I have a hard time believing that. You can't make Pierrot le fou without having the urge to create a masterpiece, to be the champion of the world, to take your place in history forever...
GODARD: Maybe you're right. I had to stake that claim in my early works. I came back down to earth pretty quickly.
LALANNE: Do you think about your death?
GODARD: Yes, inevitably. With health problems... You end up being a lot more introspective than you used to be. Life changes. In any case, I've made a break with the social life for a long time now. I'd really like to take tennis back up again, which I had to stop due to knee-problems. When you get old, childhood starts coming back. It's good. And no, I don't get particularly distressed about dying.
LALANNE: You seem pretty detached...
GODARD: Mais au contraire! I'm very attached! [laughs] And further on this topic: Anne-Marie told me the other day that if she ever ends up outliving me, she'd write on my tombstone: "Au contraire..."
Longas horas submergida em tudo o que é JLG (JLG e não Jean-Luc Godard).
A obra actual de Godard e a sua tendência para descontruir a realidade e tudo o que já fez durante a Nouvelle Vague é algo que, de facto, não deve ser levado de ânimo leve. Requere uma análise, um estudo, acima de tudo um pensamento crítico, e se de início, desabituados a estas imagens provocadoras que criticam a contemporaneidade, nos sentimos confusos perante esta "novidade", quando nos damos ao trabalho de ver além do evidente, apercebemo-nos da sua clareza assertiva e pessimista. Mais do que isso, numa altura em que atentados à liberdade surgem sob a capa do respeito dos direitos de autor (que pouco remetem para os autores) é crucial ler e reflectir sobre o que diz Godard, quem um dia afirmou, tomando uma posição tipicamente extremista, "Le droit d'auter? L'auter n'a que des droits".
Para quem está interessado em ver mais das suas reflexões, estão aqui alguns vídeos que fazem parte de um pack intitulado Morceaux de conversations avec Jean-Luc Godard.
Monday, 30 January 2012
Sunday, 29 January 2012
Saturday, 28 January 2012
Supreme Court Says Congress May Re-Copyright Public Domain Works
They claimed that re-copyrighting public works would breach the speech rights of those who are now using those works without needing a license. There are millions of decades-old works at issue. Some of the well-known ones include H.G. Wells’ Things to Come; Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and the musical compositions of Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky.
In dissent, Justices Stephen Breyer and Samuel Alito said the legislation goes against the theory of copyright and “does not encourage anyone to produce a single new work.” Copyright, they noted, was part of the Constitution to promote the arts and sciences.
The lead plaintiff in the case, Lawrence Golan, told the high court that it will not longer be able to perform Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony and Peter and the Wolf, or Shostakovich’s Symphony 14, Cello Concerto because of licensing fees.
O artigo completo aqui.
Jarmusch & Waits
(poster polaco de Night on Earth)
Night on Earth, é, para mim, um filme de Jarmusch e Tom Waits. Já no post anterior falei da importância da musica de Maurice Jaubert nos filmes de Jean Vigo, e agora falo de Waits e Jarmusch.
Em Night on Earth a música surge sempre no momento certo, servindo de contraponto para uma situação burlesca ou amargurada. Se Jaubert ajuda Vigo a estabelecer um diálogo com o público, Waits, nesta viagem, ajuda, nos momentos certos, a estabelecer o estado de espírito que nos vai guiar. A música que surge durante o filme é sempre a mesma, e no meio de histórias cómicas ou tocantes, Waits relembra que It's a sad and beautiful world (já se dizia em Down by Law).
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