Sam Peckinpah Interview.

Le Samourai: Melville's work of art

Le Samouraï: Jean-Pierre Melville's Work of Art from Edwin Adrian Nieves on Vimeo.

"...what I have to say is very simple and very short: He's the greatest director I've had the good fortune, pleasure and honor to work with up to this point. It'd take too long to explain. He's wonderful. He knows more about cinema than anyone. He's the greatest director I know, the greatest cameraman, the best at framing and lighting, the best at everything. He's a living encyclopedia of cinema."
 - Alain Delon on Jean-Pierre Melville

Sokurov on power

Why make three movies on historical subjects and one on a fictional one? "Why do you think?" I suggest Faust is a sort of prequel to the other three. "Maybe," he nods. Or is it that the first three deal with the death of power, whereas Faust addresses its acquisition? "But he never gets this power," Sokurov says. "It's impossible to have this power, because it doesn't really exist. It only exists to the extent to which people are ready to submit to it. Power is not material." Do some people have no choice but to submit to power? "No. There is always choice. Even during Stalin's terror, people had choices. They could betray or not betray, for example." Does he mean that people were persuaded, rather than forced, to submit to power?

 "I would be more precise, even," he replies. "They wanted it. Because it's the most comfortable position for most people. We enjoy being forced. It takes responsibility off your shoulders. People are more afraid of responsibility than anything else. Especially all-encompassing responsibility for your country, for the security of your people, for war and peace. Many millions survived only because they withdrew from these responsibilities. For example, they voted for Hitler, they tolerated Stalin. Millions of people did nothing to stop the Cultural Revolution in China. Just like now most of us are refusing to think about the conflict going on between Christian and Muslim civilisations."

via

The Woodmans

Francesca Woodman made visionary photographs. She created a body of work that her peers and parents recognized for their specific genius, and that have since gained worldwide renown, been collected by major museums, ripped off by fashion photographers and form the basis for a cult. She’s big on Twitter. Much in the same way young female poets have to contend with Sylvia Plath, young female artists wrestle with Francesca Woodman’s visions.

She achieved this before she committed suicide at 22 by jumping off a tall building in New York. The suicide, like it or not, adds the glamour of death to her story, as it does for Ian Curtis, Adrienne Rich or Vincent Van Gogh.

The Woodmans is a documentary about her family. Her father, mother and brother are all artists themselves. None of them, as they themselves note ruefully, have reached anything like the acclaim of Francesca. They’re collected; they’re in the Whitney and so on, but: not that famous.

Betty, a Russian Jew from Boston married George from New Hampshire and Harvard. George’s family, classically WASP, refused to have anything to do with him after the marriage. They moved west, got jobs at the university in Boulder and had children, first Charlie, now a video artist, and then Francesca. “Gift/calamities,” as George calls them.

Betty and George – “so very married” as Francesca would write in her diaries – share a fierce commitment not only to art, but to living life esthetically. They eat from the dishes Betty, a ceramicist makes. Their house in Boulder is a modernist art installation as much as a home.

"Our children learned that art is a very high priority; you don’t mess around. They learned this is a very serious business at an early age, " Betty says. The couple buys a farm in the hills outside of Florence. They send the children to the Uffizi with notebooks so the parents can work undisturbed.

Betty’s ceramics are functional, cheery, decorative. George’s paintings are abstract, cool, about pattern and repetition.

At 13, Francesca receives a medium-format camera as a gift from her father. She starts taking photos and never really stops until the end of her life. They’re mostly self portraits, mostly nude, dreamlike, gritty, mysterious, personal, Dionysian, even. "My art is about myself, for a lot of wrong reasons," wrote Francesca Woodman in her journal.

That is, everything her parents’ work is not.

Yet they recognized the brilliance of her photographs immediately.“She was so good; she made my own work look kind of stupid,” George Woodman says. “I wouldn’t mind getting a bigger slice of that cake myself.”

After boarding school at Phillips Andover, Francesca arrived at the Rhode Island School of Design a fully-fledged artist with a distinct vision. She worked hard. Her fellow students were awed and impressed. She was “intense,” “dramatic,” a “rock star.” Some loved her.

Next, she went to New York. Her parents had also recently moved there wanting to jump start their careers.

Francesca struggled, couldn’t find work, didn’t get a major gallery show, ended up assisting a fashion photographer. A breakup with her boyfriend triggered depression. Suicide attempts followed. Her parents “babysat” her, and found her a therapist who in turn prescribed medication. She seemed to do better. Then, late January, she threw herself from the top of a building.

The story turns back to the family and friends. The friends choke up when they speak of Francesca’s suicide. George and Betty know what the filmmaker’s up to, respectful as he is and as the documentary is. They do not shed tears. Betty’s eyes harden. It’s a subject she won’t deal with. Period. George, haunted, won’t say much either. Old school. Or, wary survivors.

After their daughter’s death, Betty stops working. Then she turns away from functional to fine art ceramics.  George reacted differently to her death, as Betty notes with a hint of a mother’s jealousy of a daughter’s place. He couldn’t focus, then turned to Emily Dickinson’s poems.

The film shows George at work. He’s taking photographs now with a medium-format camera of young women who are frequently nude. The model in the film is reminiscent of his daughter. The photos themselves are layered, lush and sensuous.

As the film draws to a close, we see Charley arrive at the Tuscan farm with his wife and child. Betty’s commission at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing goes up, an exuberant mish mash of color.  We see the surviving Woodmans in the lobby, robust in old age, he a hale country doctor from New England, she, an indestructible babushka in striped socks and sandals.

The documentary, directed by Scott Willis, is lucid and respectful. It’s an authorized version. He had access to Francesca’s diaries. Her words float up out of the notebooks. He features her photographs throughout. She made some videos as well, and he uses these to great effect, the soft-edged black-and-white VHS dusty and ghostly. We hear her voice, surprisingly girlish.

It’s a tasteful film, made up of well composed shots and close ups, mostly of George and Betty, and it remains their story, finally. It’s brisk, too, clocking in at 82 minutes. Formally, it’s straightforward – talking heads, the subjects working, the subjects at home, archival material, well crafted. It pulls back at key moments and lets you draw your own conclusions, or makes you fill in the blanks.

It leaves several unanswered questions. The main one is: Why did she do it? The suicide itself, as central as it is to the story, is handled briskly. There’s very little description of her last few months. The parents resolutely do not want to open the door to any theorizing. She got sick. We tried to help. She died.

In some ways, the whole situation reminded me of a lost, American Thomas Mann story. Art can kill. It's a fatal disease, a kind of Dr. Faustus bargain with the devil, a virus that destroys. Or: is it art that's responsible, or a blind devotion to art above all else that can be as destructive as greed or sexual fixation? What is art worth? How much should you be willing to devote to creating great work? We routinely say whatever it takes, and then most people are too lazy to follow up with that commitment. But what is it worth to get into the permanent collection of the Whitney? To be an art star -- that is, to be collected by the fashionable and the rich? Is that the measure?

Let's say, we're all Zen and it's all about the work. So, are the pleasures and pains of creating something in the studio and the discipline and time spent in that worth, say, a daughter? A son? We generally see art as a positive good, or even in our secular times, as the ultimate good. But what does it cost?

Assuming that depression led to the suicide -- and, let's be clear, suicide and depression don't have to go together -- but assuming that her depression was the cause: would she have been diagnosed earlier? If you examine the work by Francesca, does it seem moody and alienated in a modern way, a romantic kind of fascination with the dark? Or can/should you reduce them to being symptomatic?

Can the exquisite kill? I'm not implying that the Woodmans themselves exhibit the kind of hysterical refinement you see in The Pillowbooks of Sei Shoganon. But what would be the consequences of pursing a purely aesthetic existence above all else? Is there a point when it crosses over from enriching daily life to becoming a weight, a heavily enforced obligation to make each moment a kind of epiphany of beauty?

The levels of pain that George, at least, must have endured, can only evoke sympathy. But somehow, you can't help but judge, weigh, and wonder.

In the end, it terrified me. Deaths of children do that to me. I felt both sorrow and pity, and, I have to say that a few times I found myself thinking that they, the survivors, were monstrous mediocrities – but how much they had worked to make it there, how truly brilliant and accomplished they are. And yet, they’re only going to be Salieris to Francesca’s Mozart. And they know it.

Blog post

http://www.edwardwinkleman.com/2011/01/woodmans.html

Filmmaker web site

http://www.thewoodmansmovie.com/

IMDB

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1610516/

PBS/ITVS web site

http://itvs.org/films/woodmans

An evening with Werner Herzog

The interview starts around 8:51.

And then the rain -- True West

Tools and filmmaking

From A BitterSweet Life:

This blog post by Peter Webber encompasses my every thought about the true value of technology and the tools in filmmaking. The act of creation is centered not on materials but on a vision and its realization. Take Pablo Picasso and his cardboard sculptures hanging on the walls of museums or Joseph Cornell’s boxes made of found objects. The unavailability of tools should not hinder the artistic process while the availability of them should not hinder the essence of creativity, to create something original, both personal and universal, and timeless.


The Newest New Wave
Despite the fact that I am excited by the possibilities of new technology, the following blog is probably going to make me sound like an old grump.
Writing about social media over the last few days got me to thinking about the massive strides that film technology has taken in the years since I left school. At twenty-six, getting into Bristol University where they taught the rather grandly named Postgraduate Certificate in Radio, Film and Television (or the RFT course, as we called it) meant I finally had access to a veritable cave of filmmaking wonders in all its mid 80’s glory: Bolex cameras, Nagra synch-sound recorders, Steenbeck 16mm film flatbed and low band U-matic editing equipment and best of all an impressive VHS library of the greatest films ever made. I was thrilled. I never looked back.

Now all that stuff belongs in a museum, and VHS has long been consigned to the dustbin of antiquated media format history. Its all so shockingly pre-digital.

At sixteen, your average London-teen now has a phone with an HD capable 8 megapixel camera, and a computer with pro-branded animation and editing software, complete with history’s most comprehensive visual library: Youtube, which also doubles as an unparalleled means of distribution. Its all there, and it’s all taken for granted.

Film maker Aaron Stewart-Ahn who tweets as @somebadideas (and is a must-follow) touched on this when he tweeted (and I paraphrase) that the average 24-year-old has better tech than Jean Luc Godard and his cameraman Raoul Coutard, but that we don’t see films as brave, funny, entertaining, ambitious or unashamedly intellectual as the ones they made together. The technological advances of that era such as lightweight cameras also liberated the imagination of these film makers and led to the French New Wave. Nowadays there seems to be an overall diminution of ambition, an unfortunate limiting of horizons.

The fact that it is now possible to make films at a fraction of the cost one would have incurred in the 60’s or 70’s and then beam them at no cost at all into the phones and computers of literally millions upon millions of people around the world is astoundingly effortless. And perhaps that is the key to the question of quality.

The ramifications of all this change have yet to be fully revealed, and whilst the possibilities remain exciting, there is no doubt we are at a very different place to where we were say in 1991 when Francis Ford Coppola said the following in an interview.

“To me the great hope is that now that (with) these little 8mm video recorder and stuff now, people who normally wouldn’t make movies are going to be making them. And, you know, suddenly one day some little fat girl in Ohio is going to be the new Mozart, and you know, make a beautiful film with her father’s little camcorder and for once this whole professionalism about movies will be destroyed forever and it will become an art form. That’s my opinion.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WOnRAvdK2s%22%20%5Ct%20%22_blank

It is a prescient interview that in some ways anticipates the brave new world of Youtube. I love Youtube and can spend hours grazing it’s fertile plains. Yet it must also be said that we have yet to discover this new Mozart of the movies, there or elsewhere. The genius Coppola predicted has not risen from the wheat fields of Ohio. The new messiah is not yet amongst us. Writing in the 1940’s, Jean Renoir was firmly of the opinion that advances in technology in fact meant a diminution of inventiveness in the cinema. It’s certainly true that there is a magic in Melies’ Trip to the Moon that is sadly lacking in John Carter of Mars.
In the end, perhaps there is a limit to what can be expected from this democratisation of the means of film production. The most important commodity in all of this is not in fact the technology but the talent.
And that is always in limited supply.

Wong Kar Wai and Christopher Doyle Interview

So hard not to go out and copy every move they made. Even the tv cameraman couldn't resist.

Werner Herzog

Lang/Friedkin

William Friedkin interviews Friz Lang.

Herzog via Vice

Gilliam on Fellini

Holy land

. . .but parallel to that, I have filmed with other death-row inmates for a series of shorter films for television. Those are more focused on just one person. One of them, who was 23 minutes away from execution, got a stay. He tells me about his last trip from death row — which is in Livingston, Texas, but they don’t have a death chamber. So they’re transported 43 miles to Hunstsville, to Walls Unit, where they have a death house. And for the first time in 17 years, he sees trees. He sees other cars; he’s riding in this van. Actually, I did this trip now with a camera, because he says something very, very beautiful: Seeing an abandoned gas station, for example, or seeing a cow in a field is something very magnificent. And he says for him, it was like Israel — it was like the Holy Land. All of the sudden I look at America — the forlorn, kind of bleak part of Texas between Livingston and Huntsville — and everything appears like the Holy Land. You see, because of this project and talking to death-row inmates, my perspective has shifted somehow. And it’s not just America. If I travel from Munich to the village where I grew up, this is holy land.

Werner Herzog, via

Malick's advice

from the comments section:

While sitting down and eating lunch on break, I had the opportunity to chat with Mr. Malik about Filmmaking and other topics, along with his wife. His advice to me was to use Nature because it was free and always keep writing.  

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2011/08/sean-penn-vs-terrence-malick.html#ixzz1VibKP3Hn

Peckinpah: Passion and Poetry, Straw Dogs

So I guess there's some remake of Straw Dogs floating around out there, another installation from the Hollywood recycling factory.

Let's revisit the genius who made the first one.

Check it out, it builds. Especially around 7:48 plus . . .




Check out at 17:08, his shark grin as he says: "...Mister Williams as a penchant for his own work. I don't."

The greatest movie ending

From Nights of Cabiria, directed by Federico Fellini

To Live and Die in LA: Title Sequence and Interview with William Friedkin

I w.as obsessed with this movie, and, while I think it's one of the best movies from a generally crappy decade, I'm still not sure why it caught my attention so deeply. Lots of good insight from Friedkin below.


Title Sequence


Part 1



Part 2



Part 3



part 4



part 5

Interview with Jean-Pierre Melville

I saw Le Doulos last weekend: brilliantly atmospheric, with enough plot twists to make even Raymond Chandler's head spin. Funny to see M. Melville wearing the same hat my Colorado grandpa favored.

Lately, I've been thinking about what artisanal filmmaking might mean; Melville's a few years ahead of me. But how great that would be to have your film studio right below your apartment. Just like a baker or a painter, living above the shop.

Kubrick's fan note to Bergman

Mist of blood: Coppola's notebook for the Godfather