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"What is meant by "reality"? It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable—now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now a daffodil in the sun."
And of course it can also be found right under a writer, or filmmaker's, nose as the success of the documentary Helvetica seems to prove. A film about a font sounds like an unlikely subject but apparently everyone wants to see Gary Hustwit's itinerant film. Me too, I'm dying to see it now, after hearing so much about it. Hopefully I'll be able to get a seat next time it comes to London on 7 September at the ICA.
Artificial Eye has rung in to tell us that film director Béla Tarr (pictured) will be in conversation with Jonathan Romney after a screening of Tarr's 2o0o film Werckmeister Harmonies on 14 August (Tuesday) at 6.10pm at the Renoir Cinema. The Hungarian director's latest film is called The Man From London and includes indie heroine Tilda Swinton in the cast. According to IMDB, the film will be next seen at the Toronto Film Festival in September. So this London screening is a rare chance to see a Tarr film on the big screen.
Just as we were all mourning Bergman's death, we found out that Michelangelo Antonioni (Blow Up, L'Eclisse) died at 94 last night. Alongside Bergman, he was one of the last living cinema greats, a beacon of Italian cinema when it was the forefront of artistic invention. He will be much missed.
Reuters has reported that Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman died today at the age of 89 at his home on Faro Island in the Baltic Sea.
By Thessa Mooij(New York) - New York’s Japan Society usually screens the occasional film – such as historical biopics with a national character – that aren’t picked up by any U.S distributors or any of the city’s festivals.
However this year, the society presents its first full-bodied programme: Japan Cuts. This moniker definitely fits the bill. Co-produced with the New York Asian Film Festival, with its fondness for cult-ish horror and Bollywood B-movies, Japan Cuts consists of 15 U.S and New York premieres. No less than 13 of those have violent subject matters involving cut-up corpses, killers, yakuza, manga, personal angst or war traumas. The legacy of the samurai sword is alive and kicking.
Having recently enjoyed such classics as Harakiri, Tokyo Drifter and Ugetsu, I sadly lack the stomach for the current heirs of these genres: Miike Takashi and the younger generation of filmmakers with their penchant for extreme horror.
Having missed the other film at this year’s Berlin festival, where it won the Netpac award for best Asian film, I decided to go see Faces of a Figtree (pictured). The protagonist is Maasa, a high-strung mother and wife, who unintentionally alienates her grumpy husband and emotionally absent children the more she fusses over them. Her only real friend is the fig tree in her garden. Seen from her own scatter-brained perspective, the film promised to be a surreal character study.
I had first read about Faces of a Figtree in the December 2006 issue of Metropolis magazine, Tokyo’s English-language weekly. The film is the directing debut of veteran actress Kaori Momoi, who has worked Kurosawa, Sokurov, Miike Takashi and Rob Marshall (Memoirs of a Geisha). In Metropolis, an ebullient Momoi claims to have directed before under a pseudonym, because “in Japan, men find smart women unattractive. So I didn’t showcase my name. Now that I’m older, I’m at a point where I can reveal my name as a director.” Yes, and she also hopes to become 120 without significantly aging.
Details of such alleged previous work are not forthcoming and Faces of a Figtree shows all the hallmarks of a long-awaited feature debut. The hyperrealism is frantic, firing at all cylinders. Momoi’s joy of playing with extreme close-ups, animated non-sequiturs and visual jokes is infectious.
When Maasa's husband dies from overwork on his construction site, it turns out all the nagging and silences was really an expression of love between them. Maasa goes into denial for a while, but when she moves from her traditional Japanese home into her daughter’s apartment close to the Tokyo Tower, she finds some sort of balance. Happily working in a restaurant, where she can continue her frantic culinary administrations, the owner asks her to marry him.
This is where the film’s enthusiasm fails to carry it any longer. Maasa becomes completely unhinged. Her current husband is caring and understanding (and naturally her previously barren fig-tree is finally bearing fruit), but this is precisely the moment that she can’t keep it together any more.
Most actors love to showcase their abilities by playing madmen or junkies and by directing her first feature, Ms Momoi has created her very own showcase. But the other actors hold themselves up well against her self-indulgence. There is something about Maasa’s (and presumably Momoi’s own) frantic energy, colorful art direction and vibrant cinematography that keeps this uneven debut going.
Being no expert in current Japanese cinema, and not having seen any other films in this Japan Cuts programme, I am wondering whether Japanese films are drawn along neat gender lines: violence from male directors, whimsical quirks from female directors.
Are there any Kamera readers out there who have seen any films that could confirm or refute this? Can anyone recommend any other current Japanese films and has anyone discovered any new potential Miike Takashi's out there?
Woody Allen's New York films are definitely a thing of the past. After London, the American director has moved on to Barcelona, where he started shooting his new work, 'Midnight in Barcelona'. The financiers must have been keen on capitalising on the city's frothy reputation and made sure its name got into the title!
Paris, Paris, Paris. Were it not enough to have to read about Paris Hilton everywhere, it seems like the film world is having a little love affair with the French capital of the same name as the Hilton one. We caught the virus and published a review of Paris Mon Amour, another unrefutable evidence of cinematic Paris renaissance, not to mention the resurrection of French female icons like Edith Piaf in La Vie En Rose and the recently confirmed, yet untitled biopic of Coco Chanel, to be played by Audrey Tatou.Alfie Dennen - mobloguk
Daniel Florêncio - filmmaker
Davide Scalenghe - Current TV
Dennis Morrison - Zzizzl films
Romain Forquy - photographer
Max Schleser - FILMOBILE
FILMOBILE NETWORKING EVENT
Date:
29th June 2007, 5pm - 7pm.
Venue:
CEPLW (Centre for Excellence)
University of Westminster
35 Marylebone Road
London NW1 5LS
Tank TV is launching on Thursday, 28/6, at the ICA in London, its compilation DVD of artist's films called Fresh Moves. So what is it about? I'll let Tank TV do the talking:"Showcasing new moving image work since 2003, tank.tv presents its first DVD anthology. This collection contains 24 film and video pieces by 24 UK based artists, each around three minutes long, and reflects the creativity, innovation and wide variety of subject matter for which www.tank.tv has become known and respected. It also includes five new, specially commissioned interviews pieces between feted curators and artists.
Fresh Moves was compiled by a panel that included Hans Ulrich Obrist, director of the Serpentine Gallery, and Stuart Comer, curator of film and video at Tate Modern. Turner Prize winner Jeremy Deller and infamous philosopher Slavoj Žižek both make an appearance in the series of interviews.
The DVD features recent work from some of the most important artists working in moving images today, such as Cerith Wyn Evans, Daria Martin, Runa Islam, Spartacus Chetwynd and Andrew Kötting, as well as emerging artists like Torsten Lauschmann, Anja M. Kirschner and David Blandy. Rather than a comprehensive overview, Fresh Moves aims to provide an anthology encompassing animation, fictional narrative, digital film, montage and installation-based film work. The works explore a wide variety of subjects - from politics to identity and aesthetic practices, all tempered with a healthy measure of humour - and so celebrate not just the artists featured, but the art of moving images as a whole."
It just came to our attention at Kamera that Ousmane Sembene, the Senegalese filmmaker and pivotal figure of African post-colonial cinema, died at his home in Dakar, Senegal, on 9 June. He was 84 and one of the finest directors in the world.His last film, Molade (2004), dealth with the subject of female circumcision, a heavy subject by any account but which Sembene managed to handle with typical warmth and humour.
We're very pleased to announce our first screening in London which will take place on 05 July at the Fleapit on Columbia Rd in London's E2 (the Sunday flower market road). Our first programme is dedicated to the feature film Stella Polare (DV, 76', 2006) by London-based directors Anthea Kennedy and Ian Wiblin. We have set up a page with all the information so please take a look. It will be great to see you there. Entry is free.
Performance artist and writer, director and star of the quirky film, Me and You and Everyone We Know, which won a special jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival and the Camera d'Or at Cannes in 2005, Miranda July (pictured), will be in London tomorrow (4 June) being interviewed live at the Serpentine Gallery in connection with her short stories book, No one belongs here more than you. July will also be reading from her book. At 8:30pm, free.
There's quite a selection of film events coming up in London. First and foremost, I can't recommend enough the season of Glauber Rocha films that will take place at the Tate Modern in London between 9 June and 28 July. Rocha, the leading light of Cinema Novo was, roughly speaking, Brazil's equivalent of Godard. Even though the former died young at the age 42 in 1981, his legacy is enormous and includes masterpieces such as Black God, White Devil (1964) and Antonio das Mortes (1969, pictured), which are all included in the Tate Modern's of programme.
Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's thriller and love story The Lives Of Others (Das Leben der Anderen) has taken over £2 million at the box office to date since its release on 13th April, making it the highest grossing German language film ever released in the UK. The film was favourably reviewed on Kamera.
The 60th edition of the Cannes Film Festival opened yesterday and footage has already popped up on YouTube, with this clip of the opening ceremony, which looks a bit like the Oscars, actually. That is, grand and cheesy.
The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, Algeria/Italy, 1966), which is currently playing theatrically in the UK, was chosen by Guardian readers as their fifth favourite foreign film of all time. Here's the Guardian's comment on the choice:
Kamera was sad to hear at that one of its favourite European directors, Lars Von Trier, is going through a bout of depression which has thrown his future projects into uncertainty. According to an article issued by the Associated Press, Von trier said last Saturday said to the Danish newspaper Politiken that after his treatment for depression earlier this year he has been left like a "blank sheet of paper." His next planned project, but which now is indefinitely on hold, is a horror movie called Antichrist, which depicts Satan as the world's creator.
So it seems that finally the long-rumoured Leni Riefenstahl Hollywood biopic starring the recently outed-again Jodie Foster is going to get off the ground. The German director, who died at the age of 101 in 2003 and whose biggest contribution to the art of cinema was the stunning documentary about the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin (Olympia), surely is superb biopic material and it is easy to see the attraction such a project holds to Foster (who actually does look like the young Riefenstahl). What remains to be seen is how much the film will focus on Riefenstahl's Nazi connections and - one can only wish - try to emulate her superb aesthetic sense.
I just loved the lyricism in the press release for the upcoming film about France's 'little sparrow' Edith Piaf, called, you guessed it, La Vie En Rose (pictured). So here it goes:
The Barbican cinema in central London is showing on Sunday 06 May the legendary and infamous Häxan (Sweden 1922 Dir. Benjamin Christensen 104min). The film was banned in every country in Europe when first released in 1922. It was one of the first drama-documentaries, integrating fact and fiction, and Christensen's experimental style endeared it to the Surrealists. A brew of the horrific, gross, and darkly comedic, Häxan chronicles grave robbing, repressed eroticism, possessed nuns, and a satanic Sabbath, as the director asserts that the ‘witches’ of the Middle Ages suffered the same mass hysteria as did the mentally ill centuries later. Häxan retains a powerful and shocking contemporary resonance, and emerges as a moving, disturbing but ultimately liberating study of the persecution of the mentally ill, women, the poor and the elderly. Geoff Smith's (pictured) new score for Häxan further explores his pioneering approach to composition and performance that was exemplified in his recent scores for Faust and The Cabinet of Dr Caligari.
Shown this year at Sundance and Berlin (no theatrical releases scheduled yet), Strange Culture deals with the nightmare of internationally-acclaimed artist and professor Steve Kurtz began when his wife Hope died in her sleep of heart failure. Police arrived, became suspicious of Kurtz’s art, and called the FBI. Within hours the artist was detained as a suspected 'bioterrorist' as dozens of agents in hazmat suits sifted through his work and impounded his computers, manuscripts, books, his cat, and even his wife’s body. Today Kurtz and his long-time collaborator Dr. Robert Ferrell, former Chair of the Genetics Department at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health, await a trial date.
