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Malatu Astatke Teaser

Marosa Di Giorgio. El ruedo en flor

Marosa Di Giorgio. El ruedo en flor from Los Pájaros Ocultos on Vimeo.

Interview with Carlos Reygadas

From NYT Blog, an interview with filmaker Reygadas speaking about his cryptic and visually daring Post Tenebras Lux:

Q. Cannes has been good to you and important for your career. But based on the reactions last night, do you wonder if this is really the best environment for an adventurous filmmaker?

A. Not in the short term, but it is in the long run, as long as there’s exposure and as long as some people like the film. People asked me today how can you have the [nerve] to do something like that, and I said, I know that if I like it, there will be some other people who like it. In the time of the Greeks, Seneca said, the better a piece of art, the more rejection it will receive in its moment — that’s a social law. I don’t know why people are so worried, like some of my distributors. I tell them don’t worry, who cares? This is positive; you should be honored.

Q. Did you expect such hostile reactions? “Post Tenebras Lux” actually seems much gentler than some of your earlier films.

A. Yeah, totally. Friends in Mexico who saw it didn’t think it would be so divisive. You know, people here are tired, they’re paid to judge, and they think they have to judge before they feel.

The other day someone asked me whose films I’m looking forward to. And I said I care about Loznitsa [in competition with “In the Fog”], Seidl [“Paradise: Love”] and Omirbayev [whose film “Student” is in the Un Certain Regard section]. One thing that annoys me: why is a man like Omirbayev not in competition? It’s not good for cinema. I understand there have to be films with stars. But how many films are there in competition this year about cinema, by people trying to make cinema? Kiarostami, Seidl, Carax, probably four or five or six.

Q. To get back to “Post Tenebras Lux” let’s talk a bit about the film’s distinctive look. It’s shot in the boxy 1:33 aspect radio and, in many scenes, with a lens that creates a halo-like effect, with a sharp focus at the center of the image and a blurred circle on the edges.

A. Why did I want that look? Because aesthetics are in the end are a reinterpretation of the world.

Q. Why did you use this effect only for exterior scenes?

A. It was intuitive. I feel that somehow we experience the senses more outdoors. The outside world is where impressionism started. I was also thinking of glass that was made before the 1950s, where they pretended to make it perfect but the machines weren’t. It’s a little bit curved and creates little reflections, so you look through a window and you actually feel the glass — things look different — and there’s a reinterpretation of reality.

The landscape where I was shooting is very particular. I did “Silent Light” in CinemaScope because those were very flat, huge landscapes, and here it’s surrounded by very steep mountains. I also wanted the sense of everything being totally centered in a square format — it’s like things are more respected if they’re composed that way.

Q. This seems in many ways a deeply personal film: your children are in it; it was edited by your wife, Natalia López; and it was shot mostly in a location you know well.

A. It’s the village where I live, about 80 kilometers south of Mexico City in the state of Morelos. It’s a very personal film in the source, in where it comes from,, and the place and many of the things that happen are dear and close to me. But the values of the people in the film are not mine. I don’t share the way they see life or treat people or relate to each other.

The film was built up during a period of couple of years when I was building my house in the countryside, where the weather is rough, with the sun, the dust, the cold. At the same time I was walking a lot in the mountains with my children and my dogs, which you also see in the film, and I just wanted to share that. Some scenes — like in the sauna where the wife has sex with other people — are there because it’s also about desire. The film is about fantasy, but probably that scene is reality, who knows? I wanted to show that these people, while frustrated to a certain extent, are also capable of sometimes trespassing certain limits, which makes them a little more special than people who don’t.

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Post Tenebras Lux (Official UK Trailer from Independent Cinema Office on Vimeo.

Bianconi joue Debussy

PHILIPPE BIANCONI joue DEBUSSY from Bernard Martinez on Vimeo.

Colin MacCabe on Godard Podcast

From a Colin MacCabe lecture on Godard:

To rehearse what presumably is very familiar to you, the Cahiers du Cinéma came up with their theory of the author in the mid fifties and they came up with it, as Godard says, so that we could say that Hitchcock or Ford were as great an artist as Aragon or Picasso. And the theory of the author that the Cahiers’ critics developed was a theory of the author, above all, at the service of a theory of the cinema which was against writing. Classic French cinema traditionally took a great literary text, adapted it, and the director and indeed the writer of the screenplay were held to be at the service of this literary masterpiece. Truffaut, Godard and the others wanted nothing to do with that. They were not interested in the writer, they were interested in the director, they were not particularly interested in the script, they were interested in the lighting, in the shot sequence, the performances, they were interested the themes that repeated across films. There are two things that you can say about it: the first thing is that the Cahiers du Cinéma is the first theory of the author, or at the least the first theory of the author, that I am ware of, to be produced from the position of the audience. It is not a theory produced from the side of the author, the side of the subject, it’s a theory of the author produced from the side of the audience. And the second thing to say about it, it is that was above all a way of categorising the cinema, it was above all a way of taking a huge archive of a particularly commercial American cinema and saying “here there are certain ways in which you can divide up the archive. Here there are certain ways in which you can decide what it is that it is worth seeing”. That actually the concept of the author is a way of dividing up, of regulating this history and producing a canon which actually we are now deeply familiar with, because it’s a canon we all learn from, but a canon which was not, in those initial years, available.

So as a theory of the author it has the interesting features that it is from the side of the audience and it is related to the archive or the corpus. In that sense is very very different from traditional, romantic theories of the author, though it does have most of most traditional, romantic theories in with it. If one is coming to the cinema from outside, if you are coming to a film set on which large numbers of people mill around, expensive equipment is moved about and those delicate things called actors place themselves in front of the camera, you become fairly quickly aware of the fact that if there is not someone orchestrating this huge assemble the whole thing is likely to fall apart. So, in other words, if you look at a film set it seems quite clear that there has to be someone in charge of it, and  it is also quite clear that someone is most evidently be the director. Now I should just as a parenthesis say that actually I have a great number of doubts about the auteur theory in its pure form. If we just take the filmmakers whom the Cahiers were most interested in, that is, Hitchcock and Hawks, they were interested in them as great directors who didn’t write. But actually film history of the last thirty years has rather altered the picture of those directors. It is true, as form as we know, that Hitchcock never put pen to paper; on the other hand, if you read the accounts of how Hitchcock would get some original material, get the writer and decamp to a hotel room in which he would sit with the writer until the script was finished, it is not at all clear that Hitchcock did not at some level write his own scripts. And if we look at Hawks, with a very different method of work, but if we look at the time he spends improvising with his actors and the way that that improvisation gets turned into the scenes that we watch, again, the notion that Hawks isn’t originating the scripts is extremely doubtful. So this is not the topic of my lecture but it seems to me than when one is talking about the author in cinema that the role of the writer is absolutely not to be underestimated. Actually, as a matter of fact, all of the directors who came out of the Cahiers du Cinéma writing in the fifties – we all know their names (Rohmer, Rivette, Chabrol Godard, Truffaut), with the exception I think of Chabrol and even I am not sure he’s an exception – they all wrote as well as directed. So although, theoretically, they had been in favour of the director against the writer and although they had been absolutely determined to stress features of the cinema which were not to do with the writing, it is nonetheless of some importance that they actually all wrote their own scripts. But that is, as I say, is an aside.

If we are now faced with a series of arguments against the author, a series of arguments above all against a notion of the unified and controlling author, the author perhaps above all of romantic theory, the author as the individual set aside from society who finds in nature and art a truth which she communicates and a truth to which she has privileged access to. If we want to avoid the problems of that view of the author we are nonetheless faced with the same arguments which makes it difficult, particularly in the cinema, to get round the author. Arguments both practical, as well as theoretical. And those are in some sense the difficulties that I found myself confronting when I decided to write the biography of Godard. And it seemed to me that the way to avoid the problem of unified author was indeed to take my lessons from the modernists texts which in fact had inspired both Barthes and Foucault. Because the whole of the Parisian theory of the sixties is in fact the kind of repetitional rerun of the modernists experiments in art, literature and thinking of the twenties and thirties. And I took as my model that well-known Irish writer James Joyce. And, as you know, Joyce, well…it can be argued that Joyce did nothing but write autobiographies. But leaving that more general question aside, we know that Joyce had two very different stabs at writing an autobiographical novel. The first, of which apparently there was over a thousand pages of manuscript, he throw in the fire and small fragments of it were retained and published after his death as “Stephen Hero”. A second version, with which we are I assume, particularly in this room, all familiar, “A portrait of the artist as a young man”, which was published in 1916. In the first book, “Stephen Hero”, Joyce tries to write a continuous narrative account of the birth of the artistic consciousness. We don’t have the beginning and we don’t have the end, but we have a middle section which shows us a student at the University, fifty times cleverer than all his contemporaries, fifty times more artistically endowed and, it has to be said, a tremendous prig. And it’s interesting that priggishness is entirely built into the structure of “Stephen Hero”, which is exactly written within a continuous progression towards ever greater knowledge, and which, that ever greater knowledge is always already at the author’s hand in order for him to pour scorn and derision on the stupidity of his student fellows and their pathetic aspirations, both religious and political.

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2 or 3 Things

2 or 3 Things I Know About Her - Part 1 (Jean Luc Godard, 1967) from Adriana Valdez Young on Vimeo.

From ACIDEMIC, a film journal:

In Two or Three Things Godard offers humanity nothing less than a filmic template for bold and authentic communication in the world: an aesthetically rich and pedagogically fertile piece of language curriculum that bears repeated visits. Without exaggeration, I'd call it a Linguistic Declaration of Independence. Notice, if you will, how the film celebrates the miraculous potential of spoken language, while at the same time interrogating it in what linguists refer to as a meta-talk, or talk about talk fashion often through the power of amazingly simple, wonder-provoking phrases.

For example, whenever Juliette the bored housewife who moonlights as a prostitute addresses a person, the camera, or thin air with a random thought that just popped into her head (I know how to talk; Let's talk together; Together is a word I like.) or when Robert, Juliette's husband, engages in that remarkable see-saw dialogue with a strange woman in the café (Say words; Do you know what talking is? Talk about something interesting.); or the pretty girl at the bar, whose deer-in-the-headlights narration of the simple details of her life startles us with its unassuming transcendence (I like to take walks, ride my bike for fun, go to the cinema two or three times a month. I like books); or when Godard himself, intoning with his whispery, philosophical voiceover, decides to interject a thought or two because he's the auteur (filmmaker as author) and can talk whenever he damn well pleases we're treated to a model of the magical possibilities of human speech.

Sometimes we become shy (and I myself still feel shy at times, depending, naturally, on who I'm with, or the situation), better still, let me phrase it a different way: we say that we're shy, or inarticulate, or afraid to talk, when in reality we're simply numbed by over-exposure to the prepackaged speech of movies and television shows: talk that's fakely fluid in the Hollywood sense. After watching actors speak brilliantly, dashing off hilarious applause lines as if they were talking naturally when, in reality, they spent days or weeks memorizing a pre-written script by comparison, our own conversational offerings might appear flat and boring to us. Certainly too, in a media-saturated age such as ours, because of our overexposure to glib, slick, oily-tongued, sonorous anchor people and celebrities, one could easily see how a person might get the false, even monstrous impression that this is how real people should talk. Unable to achieve such a bizarre standard of faux eloquence in our own speech, we clam up.

Philosopher Maxine Greene, critiquing such indurations in the mundane, talks about the need to resist passivity, to, partly through reflective art encounters she says, escape submergence in the everyday, the routine, the banal. Such submergence ought to include our current mass drowning, if you will, in a sea of pop cultural and media kitsch: a filling up of our heads, like the white cream inside a Twinkie, with a combination of advertisements, pop cultural fluff, and the grave pronouncements of the talking heads. Might such an inexorable assault on our cognitive and aesthetic apparatus tamp down our capacity to generate our own unique and creative thoughts, disabling our ability to write (and speak) our own essays to the world?

Godard offers us a cure to such a paralysis of language in Two or Three Things: an extraordinary pastiche of verbal and visual images, philosophy, and politics, that many critics have likened to an essay on film. As essays go, of course, it's worth noting that the traditional, written kind from the celebrated classics of Montaigne (Of Experience) and Emerson (Self Reliance) right up through today's brilliant NY Times pieces by Paul Krugman, Bob Herbert, and occasionally I'll grant, David Brooks offers one of the most powerful and flexible vehicles to tell our stories and richly express the complexity of our thoughts, questions, wonderings, and theories on any given topic.

 

Miles in Oslo 1971

Thank you, Europeans!

A fabulous historical record of a solid quartet of outstanding jazz players from the 60's-a great treat to see Yusef Lateef in his prime. It took Europeans to capture the gold here at home.

Monk in Denmark

Ciao Bebo

From NPR's , Blog Supreme, news of the great Bebo Valdes' passing:

One of the giants of Cuban music, pianist and composer/arranger Bebo Valdés, died Friday in Switzerland due to complications from pneumonia, according to his wife and manager. He was 94.

Ramón Emilio "Bebo" Valdés Amaro was born in 1918 in a village outside Havana. Trained at conservatory, and having absorbed the sounds of Afro-Cuban street music and American jazz in various ensembles, he became the house pianist and arranger at the Tropicana Nightclub in 1948. The Tropicana was the hottest venue in Havana at the time; many American entertainers performed there, and Valdés became known as the go-to arranger in town for studio dates, film scores and dance numbers. In 1952, he also participated in the first Afro-Cuban descarga, or jam session, recorded in Cuba, where a group improvisation turned into the recording "Con Poco Coco."

But as his career was booming, a revolutionary government took over in Cuba, accompanied by a crackdown on the entertainment industry. In 1960, he left Cuba to play a gig in Mexico City with his own band. He never returned, leaving behind his wife and children. Valdés eventually wound up in Sweden, where he remarried and pursued a quieter music career, often playing piano for cruise ships or in choice hotels.

"If you are a musician and you do one thing, you should enjoy what you do," Valdés told NPR's Felix Contreras in 2006. "This is my profession, and it is my hobby, and I live in love with what I do. In those years in Stockholm, even if I wasn't successful, I did it because I liked it, and I'll keep doing it until I die."

Meanwhile, one of his children had matured into a piano virtuoso himself, and had co-founded his own jazz-influenced, genre-crossing band called Irakere. When Chucho Valdes and Irakere played a date at Carnegie Hall in 1977, Bebo Valdes crossed the Atlantic Ocean to reunite with his son. It set into motion a reconciliation which resulted in several collaborations, in concert and on recordings like the Latin jazz performance film Calle 54 and the duet album Juntos Para Siempre.

Late in his career, Bebo Valdés enjoyed a resurgence of popularity. In 1994, another Irakere veteran and Cuban exile, reedman Paquito D'Rivera, convinced Valdés to record Bebo Rides Again, a disc of Cuban classics mixed with original compositions. The album led to future recordings, among them Grammy-winning efforts like El Arte de Sabor and Lagrimas Negras. He was also the inspiration and pianist for the animated film Chico and Rita, about Cuban musicians in the 1940s.

"This attention is a gift from God," he told NPR. "I did not ask for all of this. But since it was sent to me, I accept it from the heart."

From El Pais:

Ya se sabe que en la música cubana hay abundancia de genios y nombres imborrables. Sin duda, entre los que hay que escribir con mayúsculas esta el de Bebo Valdés, fallecido en Suecia a los 94 años de edad, después de pasar los últimos años de su vida residiendo en Benalmádena (Málaga) enfermo de Alzheimer. Bebo fue protagonista de momentos de oro de la música cubana, además de ser precursor de las famosas descargas de jazz afrocubano y creador de un ritmo propio, la batanga, que arrasó en la isla en los años cincuenta. Era padre de otro pianista y compositor genial, Chucho Valdés, quien se traslado a Málaga a cuidarle en los últimos momentos de su vida. Hace aproximadamente dos semanas, los hijos de de su última esposa, la sueca Rose-Marie Perhson, que falleció el verano pasado, se llevaron a Bebo de Málaga a Estocolmo en contra de la voluntad de Chucho, pero esa es otra historia.

El verdadero nombre de Bebo era Ramón Emilio Valdés Amaro y nació el 9 de octubre de 1918 en Quivicán, un pequeño pueblo de guajiros y tierras rojas a 40 minutos de La Habana. Desde que nació Bebo llevaba la música en el ADN. Antes de salir de Quivicán fundó con un amigo de la infancia su primera banda, la Orquesta Valdés-Hernández, y desde

En los años cuarenta, estando ya en la orquesta de Julio Cueva, compuso uno de sus primeros mambos, La rareza del siglo, en momentos en que la música popular cubana se modernizaba a toda velocidad.

A partir de 1948 y hasta 1957 trabajó en Tropicana, donde acompañó e hizo arreglos para la vedete Rita Montaner. Su orquesta, Sabor de Cuba, y la de Armando Romeu actuaban cada noche en el show del famoso cabaret y allí compartieron escenario con grandes artistas norteamericanos, incluido Nat King Cole, con quien llegó a grabar algún tema.

Por aquella época el jazz arrasaba en Estados Unidos y los músicos norteamericanos viajaban a la isla para descargar con sus colegas cubanos. Bebo participó en no pocas de aquellas legendarias jam session, que tenían como animador principal al percusionista Guillermo Barreto. En medio de aquel hervidero, el 8 de junio de 1952, con una banda de veinte músicos dio a conocer en los estudios de RHC Cadena Azul su nuevo ritmo, la batanga. Entre los tres cantantes que integraban aquella orquesta estaba el gran Benny Moré.

A finales de los cincuenta Bebo colaboró con Lucho Gatica, en México. En 1960, en medio de una gira decidió exiliarse en Estocolmo (Suecia), donde se caso con Perhson y rehízo su vida. Durante más tres décadas estuvo alejado de la música. Sólo amenizaba las veladas en el piano-bar de un hotel de la capital sueca cuando, en 1994, lo llamó Paquito D´Rivera y le invitó a grabar un nuevo disco, Bebo Rides Again, una colección de clásicos cubanos junto a temas originales de Valdés.

En el año 2000 fue el cineasta Fernando Trueba quien le redescubrió y le invitó a participar en su película ‘Calle 54’. Bebo se reencontró entonces en un escenario con su hijo Chucho y también con sus viejos amigos Israel López Cachao y Patato Valdés. Tras terminar el documental, Trueba grabó a los tres el disco ‘El arte del sabor’, que obtuvo el Grammy al Mejor Album Tropical Tradicional en 2001, primero de los nueve que obtuvo Bebo en los años siguientes gracias a su colaboración con el cineasta español.

Poco después triunfó nuevamente con Lágrimas negras, un álbum de temas cubanos con alma gitana realizado con el cantaor Diego el Cigala, con el cual obtiene otro Grammy y tres discos de platino en España. Con Trueba hizo ocho discos y se convirtió en el protagonista de su documental El milagro de Candeal, rodado en la favela del mismo nombre en Salvador de Bahía con Carlinhos Brown. También hizo la música y sirvió de inspiración para ‘Chico y Rita’, la película de animación dibujada por Javier Mariscal que fue nominada al Oscar en 2012.

Su último disco fue Bebo y Chucho Valdés, Juntos para siempre’, un homenaje en el que padre e hijo repasaron juntos el repertorio y los ritmos de la música cubana que siempre tocaron juntos y que Bebo interpretó como nadie.

Anoche, la muerte de Valdés fue recibida por Mariscal con dolor pero a la vez con el recuerdo azul de su alegría y sobre todo de su elegancia. “Bebo era la esencia de lo mejor de Cuba: todo en él era especial, su forma de tocar, su manera de caminar, su risa, su elegancia para todo”. El diseñador recordó las charlas y momentos musicales que pasaron juntos con Trueba durante la preparación de Chico y Rita y cómo, a través de los recuerdos de Bebo, él descubrió de nuevo Cuba. “Yo estaba enamorado de Cuba desde pequeño, y conocía el país y sus gentes, pero redescubrirla a través de los ojos y de la sensibilidad de Bebo fue algo especial”, afirma. “Bebo representaba la esencia de Cuba y de lo mejor de su música”.

El músico de Quivicán fue una de las inspiraciones del personaje protagonista de Chico y Rita, un pianista de la época de oro de la música cubana atrapado por el amor de una mulata y aquella Habana mágica. Mariscal, que piensa en imágenes, asegura que Bebo tocaba como “si de pequeño hubiera metido en una lavadora todas las partituras de Lecuona y de los mejores compositores de la música cubana”, atrapando fragmentos deshilachados y notas de cada uno e “incorporándolos a su espíritu”.

El contrabajista Javier Colina, que en 2007 ganó un Grammy con Valdés por Live in Vllage Vanguard, disco que grabaron a cuatro manos durante una semana en el mítico club de Nueva York, asegura que “aquella semana fue “la más feliz de su vida”. “Bebo no tenía igual”, aseguró. Chucho Valdés, que se mudo a Benalmádena a pasar junto a su padre los últimos años de su vida y se opuso a su reciente traslado a Suecia, se despidió de su padre como el “más grande” y con la felicidad de haber hecho antes de morir el disco Juntos para siempre.