MadInkBeard | Derik A Badman

This week I spent an autumn afternoon watching Yasujiro Ozu’s An Autumn Afternoon (Criterion, 2008). Then I spent an autumn evening watching it a second time with the excellent commentary by David Bordwell (whose blog I highly recommend). His is one of those rare commentaries by someone who has interesting and intellingent things to say [...]

An interesting film still that not only shows three separate shots at once, but also shows a rather comics-like use of text making a visual path across the image from one character to another. (Image from David Bordwell‘s post “Lucky ’13″.)

According to Crisp, the loss of the retrospective narration, and therefore the loss of identification with the first person, is unfortunate. He contends that in the Moral Tales the retrospective narration gave the audience the pleasures of searching for ambiguity and contradiction in the ‘uneasy coexistence of these subjective reflections and of the “objective” image [...]

To the extant that these fictions work through a limited number of motifs, they pointedly critique the notion according to which true filmmakers are those who refuse to repeat themselves. For Rohmer, the art of the film director lies not in the search for new subjects, genres, or tones but in orchestrating now subtle, now [...]

The picture must be better to see the second or third time than it is the first time. There musty be more in it to see at one time than any one person can grasp. It must be so ‘meaty,’ so full of implications, that everybody will get something out of it. Orson Welles quoted [...]

But it’s rare to find an American ready to keep the camera still and steady and to let the actors sculpt the action in continuous time, saving the cuts to underscore a pivot or heightening of the drama. Now nearly every American filmmaker is inclined to frame close, cut fast, and track that camera endlessly. [...]

As regards content, the persistence of certain key antinomies structuring all his work has already been noted [this is from the Conclusion of the book]. While these originate in an underlying opposition between the temporal and the eternal, the human and the divine, the material and the spiritual, they are realized in a variety of [...]

But the moment-by-moment texture of the scene allows the individual shots, gestures, and sounds to drift somewhat free. Each image takes on a more intrinsic weight, and the juxtaposition of picture and sound acquires a resonance that we usually call poetic. A shot of Eva in the sun playing with the Rubik’s cube, unanchored in [...]

Over the weekend I watched Yasujiro Ozu’s Floating Weeds, a 1959 remake of his own earlier A Story of Floating Weeds (1934) (both available on a 2 disc set from Criterion). The story involves a wandering acting troupe, whose master takes them to a seaside town where his former lover and illegitimate son live. The [...]

Explaining anything involves analyzing it, at least to some degree. Analysis is a matter of breaking up whole phenomena into relevant parts and showing how they work together. [...] An academic film critic will divide a film into parts (scenes, sequences, “acts”) to see how the overall architecture works. Explaining something also involves describing it. [...]

Two quotes from David Lynch’s Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity (Penguin, 2006). Lynch discusses transcendental meditation and a lot about artistic process in short chapters. Most interesting for the insight offered onto his films and how they come together in different ways, and how their meanings are sometimes planned, sometimes aleatory, and [...]

(1962) Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci. Criterion recently released this dvd of Bertolucci’s first film. He co-wrote the screenplay from a story by Pier Pasolini. It’s a Rashomon structured story involving the police interviewing a number of individuals about a murdered prostitute. The movie is divided into segments showing us (with sometime contradictory voiceover) what the [...]

Went to the Secret Cinema‘s Velvet Underground Film Festival last night, which included 2 long and a bunch of short VU/Warhol related films. Two sets of screen tests featuring Nico, Lou Reed, Sterling Morrison, John Cale, Susan Sontag, Helmut Newton, Salvador Dali, and a few Factory regulars, wherein the subjects sit in front of a [...]

Dir. Jean Vigo (1934). This is wonderful romantic film that is quietly fantastic. The majority takes place on a river barge. Lots of flowing water. A few of the scenes are quite surreal. In one the protagonists, Jean and Juliette a newly married couple, are sleeping in separate beds far from each other. They simultaneously [...]

Dir. Tsai Ming-Liang (2003). DVD. This is a slow and beautiful film–the former quality nicely works with the latter to allow one to linger over the images presented. Ming-Liang must spend a great deal of time working out his settings. Colors are vivid and complementary–even a public washroom is presented in muted yellows and blues. [...]

The Five Obstructions (2003). Jorgen Leth and Lars Von Trier. Now available on DVD. French language website. This past week I finally saw Lars Von Trier’s “The Five Obstructions”. The film was immediately of interest to me when I heard about it earlier in the year: Von Trier gets filmmaker Leth to remake Leth’s short [...]