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Hilary Hahn and Hauschka

Interview with Wes Anderson

Interview at Dazed Digital with filmaker Wes Anderson:

Dazed & Confused: In the film, Sam asks Suzy what she wants to be when she grows up. As a kid, what did you want to become?
Wes Anderson: I wanted to be an architect. I don’t even know where I got that idea from. I think I was told ‘you should be an architect’ somewhere early on, and I just latched onto it. My idea of being an architect was envisioning variations of what my room could be, split-level secret chambers, transportation in and out, that sort of stuff. I guess that’s why I enjoy getting to build these fantasy locations.

D&C: There are outcasts at the heart of your films. Do you see yourself as one of them?
Wes Anderson: I don’t know. To me an outcast sounds like someone who is completely isolated. I have always had lonely characters in the mix – I don’t think there is much question that most of them are sort of misfits in one way or another. I do see myself that way. I see most people that way. Well, most of the people I know anyway, they feel like misfits, they question whether they belong. Certainly there is a period of time from when you are 12 to... actually, I don’t know if it ever ends, but you start to have these questions like, ‘Do I fit in? Do I need to fit in? Why is this now a question? I didn’t used to have to think about this.’

D&C: Was it hard making a love story about two 12-year-olds feel authentic? Did any of the dialogue come from your own childhood?
Wes Anderson: There is a certain number of lines in every movie that I’ve done where it’s not hard to write, because so and so said it to me 24 years ago and I still remember it. There is one line in this movie where a kid says, ‘Do not cross this stick!’, which came from a time when me and Owen (Wilson) were jogging – which is not something I normally do – many, many years ago, in Texas. This kid came into the middle of the road, and that’s what he said to us: ‘Do not cross this stick.’

D&C: Did you cross it?
Wes Anderson: Yes we did. (laughs)

D&C: What did he do?
Wes Anderson: He recoiled angrily as if he thought we were going to fight him. (laughs)

D&C: Talking of fighting, Sam and Suzy are prone to outbursts of anger. What makes you angry?
Wes Anderson: What makes me angry? So many things. But I tend to be a little more insular. People who know me just know when I’m grouchy. I snarl, and people who know just let it blow over. It doesn’t tend to be a sudden outburst, it tends to be, ‘Forget it; don’t even bother with him for the next few hours.’

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Lauren E. Simonutti Video

I think the world is like this

An interview with filmmaker Bela Tarr on his stark last film, The Turin Horse:

What appealed to you about the Nietzsche anecdote?
I remember it was 1985 [when I first heard it] and by the end it was calling me, this story, about Nietzsche and the horse. But we added this question -- what has happened with the horse, what would happen with the horse. We know what has happened with Friedrich Nietzsche but we don't know what happened with the horse, but the horse was very important for me.

Why the focus on this horse? How did you pick this horse?
Because this is the real issue -- the horse is one of the main characters. Without this horse, what we are doing?

Why do you choose to use long takes?
When you do long takes, you are doing everything in the camera, you are editing in the camera. You just do not cut, because the tension of the time, and the tension of the movement, and the tension of the situation between the actors and between the actors and the camera and the whole stuff together, you can have it, and everyone has to be in the situation -- they cannot escape. If you do short takes, it takes 15 or 20 seconds then cut. Then the poor actor has no chance to be in the situation and what we like, and what I like very much.

What do you mean when you say real?
You have to listen for the situation, you have to listen what is really happening with the people, what is happening under the table, what everyone is hiding, and by the end, you know, somehow, we have to understand, they are very slowly disintegrating.

Your movies are very concerned with showing real life -- How do you draw the line between what is real and artificial for the viewers?
I know I am crossing always borders. I'm crossing the demarcation line. If you have a concept it is somehow artificial -- every concept is artificial. When you do it [the film] it is a confrontation. Your concept, [if] it's reality, you can get something.

What is it about repetition you found important for the telling of this story?
We are doing very little things, but every day we are doing the same things -- you are getting weaker and weaker, you have less and less energy and you are getting older. You cannot live with anything in your life, you can do the same thing but in a different way and unfortunately, you are going down, and I am going down, and everything is going down.

Why do you use non-professional actors?
I am doing the casting, and I am always listening for the personalities of the characters, the real personality of the actors, how they are. I'm just listening for the people. And I don't care if someone is professional or not professional, I don't care about these things, I'm just listening for their presence.

How did you determine what the landscape of the film would be?
The landscape has a face. The landscape is also one of the main characters. It has the same importance as the face of the actors or the music -- which is also very important, also one of the main characters.

What is the role of God in this film?
The god created this fucking shit, what we have. We just wanted to show you how we disappear and I don't know who is the god. But if you remember, Nietzsche stated, God is dead.

It seems that things start to go wrong, for unexplainable reasons, until finally, even the lamp won't light and the embers go out -- what's happening here?
It's the same in life. Somehow everything is getting ruined and dead. Just some things, small things, but they are getting lower. Don't you see, I think, I think the world is like this.

Collective artistic labor

From the NYT "review" of This Is not a Film, an innovative approach to film and social criticism from Iranian non-filmaker Jafar Panahi:

This video essay was recorded in Tehran last year, as Mr. Panahi, one of the leading Iranian filmmakers of the past decade, was under a legal assault from his government that included the confiscation of his passport, the threat of a long prison sentence and an even longer ban on making movies.

Careful to obey the letter of that injunction — and thus exposing the preposterousness as well as the meanness of its spirit — Mr. Panahi did not write a screenplay or wield a full-size camera. A colleague, Mojtaba Mirtahmasb (credited as co-director), comes to his apartment to shoot, and Mr. Panahi restricts his activities to talking, recording with his iPhone, commenting on some of his earlier films and reading aloud from existing scripts. So if this is not a film, it is, among other things, a statement of creative resistance in the face of tyranny and a document of intellectual freedom under political duress.

But that “among other things” brings us, in a way, back to Magritte, because while “This Is Not a Film” bristles with a topical, real-world urgency pointedly excluded from the Surrealist project, it is also a provocative, radical and at times surprisingly playful meditation on the nature of representation. Using modest, ready-to-hand techniques and a format that seems to emphasize the most banal, literal-minded, artless aspects of picture taking, Mr. Panahi has constructed a subtle, strange and haunting work of art.

Don’t tell the Iranian authorities, though by now they should be familiar with movies that explore the enigmatic qualities of everyday life while at the same time inviting ruminations on the ambiguities of cinema itself. In the 1990s and the early years of this century Iranian filmmakers like Mohsen Makhmalbaf and Abbas Kiarostami, Mr. Panahi’s erstwhile mentor, blended social inquiry with formal self-consciousness in a series of experiments that amounted to the invention of a new style.

The international eminence of Iranian cinema — the most recent manifestation of which is the Oscar given to Asghar Farhadi last Sunday for “A Separation” — is in large measure a recognition of this novel and fruitful way of mixing documentary, social realism and poetic insight.

Mr. Kiarostami’s “Life and Nothing More,” Mr. Makhmalbaf’s “Moment of Innocence” and “The Apple” by his daughter Samira are in part about how the movie camera can estrange and intensify the reality it discloses to the viewer. Actual events in the world — the aftermath of an earthquake in a rural village, a violent encounter between a policeman and a student radical, a bizarre episode of family dysfunction — are not simply documented in these films but are also re-enacted, interpreted and argued about as the cameras roll. Cinema is both a transparent lens and a distorting mirror, and using it as a tool to examine the facts of human existence makes it impossible to take any of those facts for granted.

There is a philosophical headiness to these recursive, argumentative movies, an intellectual high that accompanies and sometimes magnifies their emotional impact. Though “A Separation” is not as formally self-conscious, turning as it does on competing views and after-the-fact reconstructions of a contested event, it works in a similar vein.

And so do Mr. Panahi’s earlier films, notably “The Circle,” “Crimson Gold” and “Offside,” which add a vigorous dose of pointed and passionate social criticism. His contribution to Iranian cinema in the past decade has been to bring matters of class, gender and social alienation into the foreground with tact as well as with anger.

In the wake of the contested elections of 2009 and their bloody aftermath, it is perhaps not surprising that the forces of reaction singled out Mr. Panahi for punishment, even though (or perhaps just because) they knew that persecuting him would raise an international outcry. “This Is Not a Film,” smuggled out of Iran last year to be shown at Cannes and other international festivals, has done important work in keeping the rest of the world aware of the Iranian situation.

Film Book Tarkovsky

From Slates' review of Dyer's Zona, a book on Tarkovsky's Stalker:

For the next few days, I alternated between reading Zona and watching a few scenes at a time of Stalker. An unusual camera movement might catch my eye (as will often happen with Tarkovsky, whose framing and perspective choices are subtly unsettling), and I’d grab the book to see if Dyer had anything to say about it. Or Dyer would begin a section with a grandiose claim, like “There follows one of the great sequences in the history of cinema,” and I’d feel compelled to stop reading and watch the sequence in question before returning to the book to hear him break it down. (As often as not, he would turn out to be right.) It was a disorganized and sometimes maddening mode of both reading and viewing, but a productive one too.⁴ I’d never engaged quite so intensively with a book and a movie at the same time.

Though it’s only 228 pages long, Zona manages to feel sprawling.⁵ Dyer is an enormously seductive writer, a British man-about-town who’s published four novels in addition to books of essays on everything from jazz (But Beautiful) to World War I memorials (The Missing of the Somme) to his own experiences with drugs, art, music, and travel (Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It). He has a wide-ranging intellect, an effortless facility with language, and a keen sense of humor. He’s like the most brilliant boyfriend you ever had in grad school—though sometimes you wonder whether he’ll ever finish his dissertation.⁶

But if Zona goes off in a few too many directions, most of them are fascinating enough that we’re happy to zigzag along in the author’s wake. In addition to being a real-time explication of a single movie, Zona is a meditation on movies and time: the way movies change us, and change for us, as we return to them through our lives. Dyer reminisces about seeing Stalker in different decades, in different cities, with different girlfriends, as a young and then a middle-aged man. These autobiographical asides weave in and out of the Stalker discussion in no apparent pattern: An early footnote about Steven Soderbergh’s 2002 remake of Tarkovsky’s Solaris abruptly turns into a lengthy discourse on Dyer’s wife’s apparently uncanny resemblance to Natascha McElhone, the co-star of that film.⁷ As he makes his way through Stalker scene by scene, Dyer’s account of what’s happening on screen is constantly being interrupted and informed by associations with the past as well as the present.

Miami Vid

Bomba Estereo

Bomba Estero | A Take Away Show | Part 1 from La Blogotheque on Vimeo.

How do we live together in couples?

From Michael Sicinski's essay on Kiarostami's "Certified Copy":

At the start of this essay, I said that certain parts of Certified Copy could be explained rather directly, even as their function—the “emotional vapor,” I wrote, rather grandiloquently, as I’ve been a bit self-conscious about my opening sentences lately—was highly evocative and mysterious in impact. There are distinct moments during Kiarostami’s film at which not just the stakes but the meaning, the denotative legibility, of Shimell and Binoche’s characters’ relationship changes. Although you can pinpoint the exact moments when this occurs, this doesn’t make those moments obvious. They’re put across in small, subtle gestures that you probably wouldn’t notice if you weren’t looking for them. This is in contrast, of course, with the rather dramatic tonal shifts and careening conversational volte-faces that mark the conversations between Binoche and Shimell as something peculiar, the very thing that makes Certified Copy what it is. Point being, every meltdown, every wrinkle in time, has a starting point, an almost imperceptible rift.

So, to make it absolutely clear: this is a film about a married couple, and although Kiarostami orchestrates the film in something pretty close to real time, we are not watching a series of linear events. To borrow from David Bordwell, the syuzhet of Certified Copy is not the same as its fabula. In other words, the plotline, the series of events depicted onscreen are not the temporally defined, single-trajectory story of “the marriage of the Millers.” As Bordwell tells us, art films frequently pry plot and story, syuzhet and fabula apart, this being the very aesthetic “work” they perform on their topic of choice. (I mentioned some other films of this ilk above.) Certified Copy, like some of the late Buñuels, doesn’t provide clear internal markers of this divergence. In fact, Kiarostami’s sleight of hand (and I apologize for that language—sounds like a parlor trick, when it’s really far more philosophical) is more radical than Buñuel’s, since the Spanish master would provide 45° pans or doubled performers, odd but unmistakable signposts that reality was shifting. (In this regard, Buñuel’s truest heir is, of course, David Lynch.)

Colin Stetson at The Drake Hotel

COLIN STETSON - Live at the Drake Hotel from Mitch Fillion (southernsouls.ca) on Vimeo.