Le chinoise.Most serious writing about Jean-Luc Godard tends to be both high-flown and forbidding, rather like the films it’s discussing. Translations from French to English or vice versa can make things even dicier. But according to the literary scholar Fredric Jameson, who contributes an enthusiastic preface and afterword, Reading with Jean-Luc Godard—a compendium of 109 three-page essays by 50 writers from a dozen countries, announced as the first in a series—launches “a new form” and “a new genre.”The brevity of each entry tends to confirm Jameson’s claim. The book can be described as an audience-friendly volume designed to occupy the same space between academia and journalism staked out by Notebook while proposing routes into Godard’s work provided by his eclectic reading—a batch of writers ranged alphabetically and intellectually from Louis Aragon, Robert Ardrey, Hannah Arendt, and Honoré de Balzac to François Truffaut, Paul Valéry,...
- 1/30/2024
- MUBI
Milan Kundera, whose 1984 novel “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” was turned into an Oscar-nominated film, has died at the age of 94.
Kundera died Tuesday in Paris after a long illness, Jindra Pavelková, a representative of the Moravian Library, the Czech library housing his personal collection, told Variety Wednesday.
“Milan Kundera was a writer who reached whole generations of readers across all continents and achieved global fame,” Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala said. “He leaves behind not only notable fiction, but also significant essay work.”
The 1988 film adaptation of “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” was directed by Philip Kaufman and starred Daniel Day-Lewis and Juliette Binoche. Jean-Claude Carrière and Kaufman were Oscar nominated for adapted screenplay, and Sven Nykvist was Oscar nominated for cinematography.
Other films based on his writing include 1965’s “Nobody Will Laugh,” directed by Hynek Bocan, which won the Grand Prize at Mannheim-Heidelberg Film Festival, 1969’s “The Joke,...
Kundera died Tuesday in Paris after a long illness, Jindra Pavelková, a representative of the Moravian Library, the Czech library housing his personal collection, told Variety Wednesday.
“Milan Kundera was a writer who reached whole generations of readers across all continents and achieved global fame,” Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala said. “He leaves behind not only notable fiction, but also significant essay work.”
The 1988 film adaptation of “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” was directed by Philip Kaufman and starred Daniel Day-Lewis and Juliette Binoche. Jean-Claude Carrière and Kaufman were Oscar nominated for adapted screenplay, and Sven Nykvist was Oscar nominated for cinematography.
Other films based on his writing include 1965’s “Nobody Will Laugh,” directed by Hynek Bocan, which won the Grand Prize at Mannheim-Heidelberg Film Festival, 1969’s “The Joke,...
- 7/12/2023
- by Leo Barraclough
- Variety Film + TV
Buenos Aires — Gkids, the U.S. distributor of ten Best Animated Feature Oscar nominations including this year’s “The Breadwinner,” has acquired North American rights to Spaniard Salvador Simó’s “Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles.” Gkids will release the film theatrically next year.
The animated feature is sold worldwide by Spain’s Latido Films; the all-rights deal was negotiated by Gkids’ CEO and founder Eric Beckman and Latido’s Antonio Saura.
The acquisition comes after “Buñuel” world premiered at this year’s Gkids co-run Animation Is Film Festival in Los Angeles, snagging a Special Jury Prize for its innovative handling of unexpected subject matter and positive reviews.
“Frankly, it was a brilliant choice on the part of director Salvador Simo to use such an expressionistic medium [as animation] to examine how surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel bent reality to his own ends in the making of 1933 documentary “Las Hurdes” (aka “Land...
The animated feature is sold worldwide by Spain’s Latido Films; the all-rights deal was negotiated by Gkids’ CEO and founder Eric Beckman and Latido’s Antonio Saura.
The acquisition comes after “Buñuel” world premiered at this year’s Gkids co-run Animation Is Film Festival in Los Angeles, snagging a Special Jury Prize for its innovative handling of unexpected subject matter and positive reviews.
“Frankly, it was a brilliant choice on the part of director Salvador Simo to use such an expressionistic medium [as animation] to examine how surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel bent reality to his own ends in the making of 1933 documentary “Las Hurdes” (aka “Land...
- 12/12/2018
- by John Hopewell
- Variety Film + TV
Cate Blanchett and Julian Rosefeldt talk Manifesto animals and more inside the Crosby Street Hotel Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze
Through the words of Yvonne Rainer, Louis Aragon, Olga Rozanova, Guy Debord, Lars von Trier, Stan Brakhage, Werner Herzog, Jim Jarmusch, Thomas Vinterberg, Tristan Tzara, Paul Éluard, Claes Oldenburg, Sol LeWitt, Barnett Newman, Kurt Schwitters, Francis Picabia, André Breton, Antonio Sant'Elia, Lebbeus Woods and others in Julian Rosefeldt's film Manifesto, a chameleonic Cate Blanchett in 14 roles, speaks lines of truth and dare to us giving them all new context in contemporary situations.
Cate Blanchett: "Julian and I were both in New York and we sat down and he had come up with sort of about fifty characters, about fifty, sixty different scenarios." Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze
The role of the Manifesto animals as being "another way of portraying humanity", how the changing of the settings each day "was a...
Through the words of Yvonne Rainer, Louis Aragon, Olga Rozanova, Guy Debord, Lars von Trier, Stan Brakhage, Werner Herzog, Jim Jarmusch, Thomas Vinterberg, Tristan Tzara, Paul Éluard, Claes Oldenburg, Sol LeWitt, Barnett Newman, Kurt Schwitters, Francis Picabia, André Breton, Antonio Sant'Elia, Lebbeus Woods and others in Julian Rosefeldt's film Manifesto, a chameleonic Cate Blanchett in 14 roles, speaks lines of truth and dare to us giving them all new context in contemporary situations.
Cate Blanchett: "Julian and I were both in New York and we sat down and he had come up with sort of about fifty characters, about fifty, sixty different scenarios." Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze
The role of the Manifesto animals as being "another way of portraying humanity", how the changing of the settings each day "was a...
- 4/28/2017
- by Anne-Katrin Titze
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
Every few days, we'll be rounding up some of the latest buzz and reviews coming from the Croisette—our favorite takes from trusted sources on the latest films to make their debut at the 67th Festival de Cannes.
First up, Variety's Scott Foundas on Mike Leigh's Mr. Turner:
"In perhaps the greatest of all movies about the lives of painters, Maurice Pialat’s Van Gogh, not a single Van Gogh painting was ever shown. Leigh doesn’t go quite as far in Mr. Turner, but his sensibility is largely the same, striving to capture the temperament of the man and his times rather than reducing them to a series of iconic images and eureka moments. Scenes of Turner scribbling in his sketchbook and slathering paint on canvas are used sparingly, and never without a clear purpose. Shooting in widescreen, the director and his regular d.p. Dick Pope...
First up, Variety's Scott Foundas on Mike Leigh's Mr. Turner:
"In perhaps the greatest of all movies about the lives of painters, Maurice Pialat’s Van Gogh, not a single Van Gogh painting was ever shown. Leigh doesn’t go quite as far in Mr. Turner, but his sensibility is largely the same, striving to capture the temperament of the man and his times rather than reducing them to a series of iconic images and eureka moments. Scenes of Turner scribbling in his sketchbook and slathering paint on canvas are used sparingly, and never without a clear purpose. Shooting in widescreen, the director and his regular d.p. Dick Pope...
- 5/17/2014
- by Adam Cook
- MUBI
James Gray's reception in North America is a little bewildering, regardless of which side you stand on. To some, including this author, Gray's qualities as a filmmaker are obvious. Decidedly at odds with the trends of contemporary cinema since he made his debut with Little Odessa in 1994 (something discussed in the following interview), Gray's so-called "classical" style is invested in things seemingly forgotten in American movies. He stands outside of the present, yet it is far too simple to say he comes out of the past. Aside from Clint Eastwood, is there another director working in Hollywood making subtle, emotional, expertly-crafted dramas while also maintaining a delicately mannered mise en scène? Because of this, Gray seems out of place. Maybe that explains the lack of Cannes awards on his shelf (despite four trips to the festival's competition), the dissenting reviews (which don't even appear to be written on the...
- 10/6/2013
- by Adam Cook
- MUBI
Introduction
In Laissez-passer [Safe Conduct], the film that the French director Bertrand Tavernier made in 2002, we see the French film industry of the Occupation years as a ruined and almost shut-down institution that is highly dependent on the factor of chance. In his story, Tavernier exculpates one of the key figures of the occupation cinema, Henri-Georges Clouzot, from the accusation of collaborating with the Nazis. He pictures Clouzot as a man whose Jewish wife has been held hostage by the Nazis and, and against all odds, he finishes Le corbeau about the vicious and nasty people of a small town in France, where someone is sending poison pen letters to its "honourable" citizens. Le corbeau became a very popular box-office hit during the Occupation, and, at the same time, the underground press attacked it for showing France as a land of the degenerate and perverted people, a view that, according to accusers,...
In Laissez-passer [Safe Conduct], the film that the French director Bertrand Tavernier made in 2002, we see the French film industry of the Occupation years as a ruined and almost shut-down institution that is highly dependent on the factor of chance. In his story, Tavernier exculpates one of the key figures of the occupation cinema, Henri-Georges Clouzot, from the accusation of collaborating with the Nazis. He pictures Clouzot as a man whose Jewish wife has been held hostage by the Nazis and, and against all odds, he finishes Le corbeau about the vicious and nasty people of a small town in France, where someone is sending poison pen letters to its "honourable" citizens. Le corbeau became a very popular box-office hit during the Occupation, and, at the same time, the underground press attacked it for showing France as a land of the degenerate and perverted people, a view that, according to accusers,...
- 7/16/2012
- MUBI
Brian Dillon hails the return of Patrick Keiller's Robinson in a film about the conundrum of the countryside
The opening sentence of Patrick Keiller's new film, voiced with laconic precision and italic irony by Vanessa Redgrave, is calculated to quicken the hearts of admirers of Keiller's enigmatic oeuvre: "When a man named Robinson was released from Edgecote open prison, he made his way to the nearest city and looked for somewhere to haunt." Robinson in Ruins is the third of Keiller's feature-length essay-fictions to deposit his eccentric protagonist among the relics of millennial England, where he functions once more as the comically half-deluded conduit for the director's own brand of visionary scholarship. As a fictional invention, the autodidact aesthete Robinson, whom we only ever encounter via the films' narrators' vexed relations with him, is an absurd sort of wraith, tricked up from reminders of Defoe and Céline, but...
The opening sentence of Patrick Keiller's new film, voiced with laconic precision and italic irony by Vanessa Redgrave, is calculated to quicken the hearts of admirers of Keiller's enigmatic oeuvre: "When a man named Robinson was released from Edgecote open prison, he made his way to the nearest city and looked for somewhere to haunt." Robinson in Ruins is the third of Keiller's feature-length essay-fictions to deposit his eccentric protagonist among the relics of millennial England, where he functions once more as the comically half-deluded conduit for the director's own brand of visionary scholarship. As a fictional invention, the autodidact aesthete Robinson, whom we only ever encounter via the films' narrators' vexed relations with him, is an absurd sort of wraith, tricked up from reminders of Defoe and Céline, but...
- 11/20/2010
- by Brian Dillon
- The Guardian - Film News
Director: Robert Guédiguian Writer: Robert Guédiguian, Serge Le Péron, Gilles Taurand Starring: Virginie Ledoyen, Simon Abkarian “They were twenty-three when the rifles blossomed Twenty-three who gave their hearts before their time Twenty-three foreigners but still our brothers Twenty-three who loved life to death Twenty-three who cried out “France!” as they fell.” (Louis Aragon, Strophes pour se souvenir) The phrase "army of crime" is a reference to a caption on the Affiche Rouge ("red poster"), a propaganda poster campaign with which the Nazis sought to present French resistance fighters as criminals: "Liberators? Liberation by the army of crime." Based on the true stories of the Francs-tireurs et partisans - Main-d'œuvre immigrée (Ftp-moi), Army of Crime begins with an Altman-esque intertwining of the very individual narratives concerning a multifarious hodgepodge of anti-fascists operating clandestinely and individually in occupied Paris (a city that seems to have accepted German occupation and the mass deportations...
- 8/21/2010
- by Don Simpson
- SmellsLikeScreenSpirit
Avant-garde French cinematographer at the heart of the new wave
For 45 years, the French cinematographer William Lubtchansky, who has died of heart disease aged 72, put his talents at the disposal of the most challenging, intellectually inquiring, uncompromisingly brilliant film directors who emerged with the French new wave. Lubtchansky worked with Jean-Luc Godard (six times), although they fell out, made up and fell out again; the husband and wife team of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet (11 times); and Jacques Rivette (14 times).
Although these directors differed in their approaches and sensibilities, they were united in their irreverent, generally unsentimental treatment of character, their existential attitude to society and to human behaviour, and their experiments with filmic space and time. They questioned cinema itself by drawing attention to the conventions used in film-making and quoting from the other arts. They presented an alternative to Hollywood by consciously breaking its conventions while at the...
For 45 years, the French cinematographer William Lubtchansky, who has died of heart disease aged 72, put his talents at the disposal of the most challenging, intellectually inquiring, uncompromisingly brilliant film directors who emerged with the French new wave. Lubtchansky worked with Jean-Luc Godard (six times), although they fell out, made up and fell out again; the husband and wife team of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet (11 times); and Jacques Rivette (14 times).
Although these directors differed in their approaches and sensibilities, they were united in their irreverent, generally unsentimental treatment of character, their existential attitude to society and to human behaviour, and their experiments with filmic space and time. They questioned cinema itself by drawing attention to the conventions used in film-making and quoting from the other arts. They presented an alternative to Hollywood by consciously breaking its conventions while at the...
- 5/12/2010
- by Ronald Bergan
- The Guardian - Film News
By Michael Atkinson
As the Korean New Wave fades and dissipates, from a throng of cultural force fields to a mere battery of individual filmographies, ambitious or withering or otherwise, one director stands as the most passionately embraced and steadily distributed in the tradition of imported art films. Strangely, it's Hong Sang-soo, not Park Chan-wook or Bong Joon-ho, both of whose pulpy trajectories have stalled and didn't, in any event, summon the English-speaking world's eyeballs expected for their psychodramatic hyperbole. Hong's films are not crowd-pleasers, but measured, often uncomfortable meditations on Korean urbanites and their lives of power-boozing, disconnection and romantic failure. Up to now, Hong's great modernist trope was (tellingly, for a Korean) the bifurcation of perspectives. His elusive masterpiece "The Power of Kangwon Province" (1998) is so sneaky about its doubled-up narrative and its delivery of emotional haymakers that you might not realize that it's all about the residue...
As the Korean New Wave fades and dissipates, from a throng of cultural force fields to a mere battery of individual filmographies, ambitious or withering or otherwise, one director stands as the most passionately embraced and steadily distributed in the tradition of imported art films. Strangely, it's Hong Sang-soo, not Park Chan-wook or Bong Joon-ho, both of whose pulpy trajectories have stalled and didn't, in any event, summon the English-speaking world's eyeballs expected for their psychodramatic hyperbole. Hong's films are not crowd-pleasers, but measured, often uncomfortable meditations on Korean urbanites and their lives of power-boozing, disconnection and romantic failure. Up to now, Hong's great modernist trope was (tellingly, for a Korean) the bifurcation of perspectives. His elusive masterpiece "The Power of Kangwon Province" (1998) is so sneaky about its doubled-up narrative and its delivery of emotional haymakers that you might not realize that it's all about the residue...
- 12/30/2008
- by Michael Atkinson
- ifc.com
By Erica Abeel
When was the last time you heard someone drop a mention of Jacques Lacan? (I'll pause if you need to refresh your memory of the name at Wikipedia). If the answer is never, you haven't sat down with the delightful James Gray, who was at Cannes with his new film "Two Lovers," starring Joaquin Phoenix, Gwyneth Paltrow, Vinessa Shaw and Isabella Rossellini. In a stream-of-consciousness monologue that could pose a challenge to any interviewer, Gray also cited as influences Dostoevsky's novella "White Nights," Scorsese, Hitchcock, French poet Louis Aragon and a B-movie starring, uh... John Hodiak? There's a sense that Gray's in a hurry to put across his ideas now, since later can be a long time coming, given the gaps between his films. Bowing in 1994 at age twenty-four with "Little Odessa" (which took the Silver Lion in Venice), he didn't produce "The Yards" till 2000, "We Own...
When was the last time you heard someone drop a mention of Jacques Lacan? (I'll pause if you need to refresh your memory of the name at Wikipedia). If the answer is never, you haven't sat down with the delightful James Gray, who was at Cannes with his new film "Two Lovers," starring Joaquin Phoenix, Gwyneth Paltrow, Vinessa Shaw and Isabella Rossellini. In a stream-of-consciousness monologue that could pose a challenge to any interviewer, Gray also cited as influences Dostoevsky's novella "White Nights," Scorsese, Hitchcock, French poet Louis Aragon and a B-movie starring, uh... John Hodiak? There's a sense that Gray's in a hurry to put across his ideas now, since later can be a long time coming, given the gaps between his films. Bowing in 1994 at age twenty-four with "Little Odessa" (which took the Silver Lion in Venice), he didn't produce "The Yards" till 2000, "We Own...
- 5/26/2008
- by Erica Abeel
- ifc.com
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