N'a_film_by

But who is keeping the Webb/Hitchcock/Minnelli line of mise en scene alive?, pergunta o Bill Khron.

Vai uma lista aqui, focando mais ou menos nos últimos 20 anos (ok, um pouco mais, um pouco menos de 20 anos dependendo de cada caso). Não está numa ordem de preferência pessoal, mas do que julgo ser a importância da contribuição de cada cineasta ao campo da mise en scène (embora haja aí uma coincidência: os dois primeiros desta lista seriam os dois primeiros de uma lista pessoal, e estariam tão bem colocados nessa lista pessoal porque são os melhores colocados nesta).

A lista:

Michael Cimino, Jean-Claude Brisseau, Claude Chabrol, Gérard Blain, Paul Newman, Paul Verhoeven, Jean-Claude Rousseau (tenho que ver seus outros filmes, mas a se julgar por Venise n'existe pas, sim - explicação abaixo), John Flynn, Brian De Palma (principalmente a partir de Carlito's Way), Robert Mulligan, Manoel de Oliveira, Michael Mann, Alain Resnais (Amores Parisienses, Mélo, Coeurs), Edward Yang, Jacques Rivette, Paul Vecchiali (Change pas de main, En haut des marches, Once More), John Carpenter (principalmente The Thing e Prince of Darkness), Eugène Green, Éric Rohmer, Blake Edwards, Raoul Ruiz, Dario Argento (principalmente por La sindrome di Stendhal), Youssef Chahine, Jean-Claude Guiguet, Jean-Marie Straub e Danièle Huillet (Klassenverhältnisse e principalmente Von heute auf morgen), Víctor Erice, Hou Hsiao-hsien, John Milius (Rough Riders), Maurice Pialat (o Visconti dos dias de hoje - a noite de Sous le soleil de Satan, e principalmente Van Gogh), James Gray (Little Odessa, The Yards), Chantal Akerman (La captive, digna de Duras e Oliveira), Pedro Costa (No Quarto da Vanda, para complicar um pouco as coisas), Catherine Breillat, Jerzy Skolimowski (até The Lightship), John McTiernan, Jean-Pierre Mocky, Alain Guiraudie (Ce vieux rêve qui bouge), Otar Iosseliani, Monte Hellman, Takeshi Kitano (Violent Cop, Sonatine), Luc Moullet (Les sièges de l'Alcazar, Les naufragés de la D17), Clint Eastwood (A Perfect World, Absolute Power), George Romero (principalmente por Land of the Dead), Yousry Nasrallah, James B. Harris, Leos Carax (Pola X), John Sayles, Hector Babenco, Vincent Gallo (por The Brown Bunny, e para complicar mais ainda após as inclusões de Rousseau e Costa), Mario Monicelli, Jonathan Mostow, Joe Dante (The Second Civil War), Terence Davies, Sidney Lumet (Running on Empty, Q & A), John Landis (Oscar, Innocent Blood), David Cronenberg (principalmente, e talvez unicamente, por Crash), Jane Campion (Sweetie, An Angel at My Table, The Portrait of a Lady), Larry Cohen, Bertrand Tavernier (L.627, L'appât), Woody Allen (Anything Else, Match Point), Michele Soavi, M. Night Shyamalan (Unbreakable, Signs)...

(...) Much of RAGING BULL gives the viewer the impression that what we see would be happening anyway, even if the camera were not there to record it. This is clearly not the case with PETE KELLY'S BLUES or the works of Minnelli, Hitchcock, etc., in which everything has clearly been arranged for the camera's benefit.

It flows on like a river

(subentendido o risco permanente de enchentes e inundações)

Marienbad introduced to a generation of filmgoers the idea of the film as a self-contained world where past, present, real and imaginary images coexist without reference to external reality. Like the great films of Italian neorealism, Marienbad fractured the flow of narrative images with a musical gamut of discontinuities that freed film from the conventions of action/reaction, seeing/seen, perception/emotion that governed classical cinema, substituting for a 'common reality' entirely composed of cliches a mental world like the one we inhabit every day. Turning Bertolt Brecht's 'estrangement effect' into a source of pleasure, as surrealists like Tex Avery had done in their seven-minute cartoons, the film's feats of cinematic legerdemain - vanishing characters, characters who appear to be in two places at once, changing backgrounds and games with sound and image, like the uncanny moment when the stage actor's lips begin to move in time with X's voiceover - revolutionized the relationship of audiences to cinema.

In addition, that revolution transformed the once largely unconscious activity of interpreting films by inviting the spectator to attach multiple and contradictory meanings to the film's action and characters. Here are a few: 1) X is lying, trying to seduce A by describing an affair that never happened. 2) X is telling the truth, and A is in denial. (These two opposed interpretations were trotted out for the press as the conflicting views of Robbe-Grillet and Resnais respectively, a marketing device with a praiseworthy didactic intent.) 3) X and A are puppets controlled by the masochistic M. 4) As in a Breton legend Resnais knew from childhood, X is Death, come to claim A after granting her a year's reprieve. 5) A is ill, and the hotel is a sanatorium. 6) X is Orpheus, come to bring Eurydice back from the land of the dead, where the cadaverous M is king. 7) The three leads are figures in the dream of a woman struggling to liberate herself: A symbolizes the ego, X the Id, M the superego. 8) X is the only real person in a castle filled with phantoms like those in Alfredo Bioy-Casares' La invention de Morel - three-dimensional images mechanically repeating actions that are registered once and for all, like the images of a film. The question of conflicting interpretations is raised within the film by the enigmatic sculpture, which like the film itself has no referent in reality: Resnais had the sculpture made to match Robbe-Grillet's description, suggesting that the sculptor model it on minor characters in a painting by Poussin.

Marienbad nonetheless tells a story with a beginning, middle and end: A does leave the hotel with X. For Robbe-Grillet, who sees any film as a succession of present moments with no past or future, Marienbad tells the story of all his novels, an attempt to 'make an annoying void disappear.' 'What happens is just the opposite,' he told Andre S. Labarthe and Jacques Rivette in 1961. 'The void invades and fills everything. In Marienbad you think that there was no "last year," and only later do you realize that "last year" has invaded everything: you're in it. In the same way, you believe that there's no Marienbad, only to realize that that's where you've been from the beginning. The event which the woman refuses ends up contaminating everything, so that even though she thinks she has never stopped fighting, and has won since she has always refused, she realizes at the end that it's too late - she has accepted everything. Just as if it were all true, even though it probably isn't.'

For Resnais, however, Marienbad takes place in mythical time, like the stories of Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Orpheus and the Breton maiden's bargain with Death, because he has constructed his film as a castle haunted by the great storytellers of cinema: Welles, Lang, Hitchcock (seen in silhouette in one shot), Cocteau, Pabst, Epstein, Gance, L'Herbier, Ophuls, Sternberg, Renoir, Disney, Lewton, Feuillade, Guitry, Bunuel, Bresson, Visconti, Antonioni, Bergman, Rossellini. Because his film is an original creation within which all those influences resonate, it is 'open to all myths,' as the director told Labarthe and Rivette. And although it is as singular an object as cinema has produced, it will be a long time before we see the last of its descendants.

Hitchcock, by the way, loved Resnais, whom he described as "almost a surrealist."


Bill Khron

Hellman at Work

From: "hotlove666"
Subject: Hellman at Work

I just ran into Monte at Riteaid, and he invited me over to look at rushes from his new film - a 30-minute ghost story called "Stanley's Girlfriend," about a strange episode in the early life of Stanley Kubrick. It's part of an omnibus film produced by Dennis Bartok of the American Cinematheque, "Bottled Ashes," with other sections by Ken Russell, Joe Dante and 2 others. For complicated reasons, Monte goes back to Vancouver in the spring to shoot another episode that will only be on the DVD, about a family heirloom and the problems it causes thru the generations. A Hellman double, like the two westerns and Backdoor to Hell/Flight to Fury.

The footage is a pleasure to see even in rough form - lots of lovely compositions in depth, great natural(-looking) lighting, spare camera moves, all shot in 3 1/2 days on a set he only saw the day before he started shooting. I found out that he never replaces dialogue. He's sensitive to the aural qualities of performances, and he doesn't like what happens when you loop afterward. Being an editor he always knew he could use one actor's line from another take to sweeten a scene where another actor was at his best, etc., like a French director.

It's all unknown actors: Stanley (who is never called Kubrick, but obviously is), Stanley's girlfriend and a young writer named Leo that he befriends in 1957, when most of the film takes place. John Gavin plays Leo in the epilogue, set in 1999. Monte showed me his last close-up and said: "I told him not to act here. Isn't he wonderful?" There's also an historical "document" filmed in black and white in a graveyard, which is Monte Does Mario (although I suspect he was thinking of the beginning of Great Expectations, one of his favorite films). His new favorite director is Tsai Ming-liang - he has posters all over his office, and he's over the moon about The Wayward Cloud, which "has more things in it to offend everyone than Iguana!"

He has been picking shots on his laptop and mapping out a paper cut, so he should finish his rough cut in one day with the editor on Monday, leaving him four days to play around with some sequnces using superimpositions and montage. "Bottled Ashes" will have a lot of effects, which are being done by Bob Skotak, but they are going to try to have it ready for Cannes.