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Tuesday, June 02, 2009

LINKS :: Lav DIAZ

@ 6/02/2009 06:21:00 PM By Matthew Flanagan
Lav Diaz (born 30 Dec 1958, The Philippines)
12 films / 9 screenplays (first film:1998/last:2009)
INSPIRED BY : Andrei Tarkovsky; Lino Brocka; Ishmael Bernal; Mike de Leon; Peque Gallaga?
CCC FILMS : Melancholia (2008); Death in the Land of Encantos (2007); Heremias (2006); Evolution of a Filipino Family (2005)
INFLUENCE ON : Raya Martin?

Butterflies have no memories (2009, Jeonju Digital Project, "Visitors", b&w digital video, 40 mins / "director's cut": 59 mins)
Melancholia (2008, b&w HD video, 480 mins) IMDb
Purgatorio (2008, b&w digital video, 16 mins) IMDb
Kagadanan Sa Banwaan Ning Mga Engkanto / Death in the Land of Encantos (2007, b&w digital video, 540 mins) IMDb
Heremias (2006, b&w digital video, 515 mins) IMDb
Nang Matapos Ang Ulan (2006, segment of Imahe nasyon, 5 mins) IMDb
  • “Imahe nasyon (2006)” by Oggs Cruz, Lessons from the School of Inattention, February 2007.
  • (add link here)
Ebolusyon Ng Isang Pamilyang Pilipino / Evolution of a Filipino Family (1993-2005, 16mm film & b&w digital video, 650 mins) IMDb
Hesus Rebolusyonaryo / Hesus the Revolutionary (2002, 140 mins) IMDb
Batang West Side (2001, colour, 35mm film & digital video, 256 mins) IMDb
Hubad Sa Ilalim Ng Buwan / Naked Under The Moon (1999, 110 mins) IMDb

GENERAL (PRINT) BIBLIOGRAPHY
  • "The Art of Pito-Pito" by Roger Garcia, Film Comment 36.4, July 2000, p.53-55. (Excerpt viewable here.)
  • "Sex, crime and diaspora: Four Filipino Films" [on Batang West Side] by Noel Vera, Cinemaya 54/55, January 2002, p.50-51.
  • "The Evolution of a Filipino Family" by Christoph Huber, Cinema Scope 22, April 2005, p.46-48.
  • "Evolution of an epic" [on the making of Ebolusyon & Heremias] by Silvia Wong, Screen International 1525, November 2005, p.11.
  • "Amok cinéma" [on Lino Brocka & Lav Diaz] by Elisabeth Lequeret, Cahiers du cinéma, #607, Feb 2006, p.55-56. (Excerpt viewable here.) [FRENCH]
  • "The Pain of the People" by Christoph Huber, The Little Black Book (Movies), Cassell, 2007, p.767.
  • "Shifting agendas: the decay of the mainstream and rise of the independents in the context of Philippine cinema" by Alexis Tioseco, Journal of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 8.2, June 2007 , p.298-303. (Excerpt viewable here.)
  • "Dust to Dust" [on Death in the Land of Encantos, Venice 2007] by Olaf Möller, Film Comment 43.6, November 2007, p.56-61. (Excerpt viewable here.)
  • "Minority report" [on Melancholia, Venice 2008] by Olaf Möller, Film Comment 44.6, November 2008, p.58-61. (Excerpt viewable here.)
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BOOKS on Lav DIAZ
  • "Kino-sine: Philippine-German cinema relations", ed. by Tilman Baumgärtel, Goethe-Institut Manila & Anvil Publishing, 2007. Includes "We Were Talking About the Poetry of Cinema" by Lav Diaz, p. 64-65. Available for download here.
  • "Critic After Dark: A Review of Philippine Cinema" by Noel Vera, BigO Books, 2005. [Includes pieces on Hesus Rebolusyonaryo and Batang West Side.]

GENERAL ONLINE ARTICLES

INTERVIEWS

MISC. TEXT by LAV DIAZ
  • “Our Death, In Memoriam” by Lav Diaz, Kino! 2/3.
  • “The Aesthetic Challenge of Batang West Side” [RTF to download] by Lav Diaz (Manila, December 2002, translated by Noel Vera), originally published in Ekran, 2005.
  • "We Were Talking About the Poetry of Cinema" by Lav Diaz in "Kino-sine: Philippine-German cinema relations", ed. by Tilman Baumgärtel, Goethe-Institut Manila & Anvil Publishing, 2007, p. 64-65. Available for download here.
  • (add reference here)

WEBSITES
Please complete, correct when needed. This is an ongoing resource page to be updated.
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    Wednesday, May 13, 2009

    UNSPOKEN Journal - now online

    @ 5/13/2009 10:09:00 PM By HarryTuttle
    The first and only issue of the UNSPOKEN Journal (EDIT 2010: moved here; EDIT 2011: now offline) is finally completed, you can read it online, and print it out at the website. Thanks a lot to our guest editor Yvette Biró who directed this special issue dedicated to Tarr Béla, and to all our contributors who kindly replied to our request : Robert Davis, Matthew Flanagan, Edward Howard, Ian Johnston, András Bálint Kovács, Pacze Moj, who developed their interpretation of what is Contemplative Cinema in Tarr's films. And our apologize for the submissions that couldn't make the final line up for various complicated reasons.

    Table of content Béla TARR :
    • Timeless Time, Yvette Biró
    • Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky in Conversation with András Bálint Kovács
    • The Dieppe Switchman, András Bálint Kovács
    • Confined Space, Yvette Biró
    • Seeking Order in Disorder : Béla Tarr's Werckmeister Harmonies, Ian Johnston
    • Piercing the hermetic skin of Sátántangó, Robert Davis
    • “The Style's Function” : Narration in Béla Tarr's Sátántangó, Matthew Flanagan
    • Damnation, Edward Howard
    • Family Nest, Pacze Moj
    • Hands & Faces : Family Nest Photo-essay, HarryTuttle
    ANNEXE
    • Vital Rhythms, Edwin Mak
    Unspoken : Tarr
    May 2009
    Editors : Yvette Biró, Edwin Mak & HarryTuttle



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    Monday, May 04, 2009

    The Least Gesture (Deligny)

    @ 5/04/2009 06:59:00 AM By HarryTuttle
    Le Moindre Geste (1971/Fernand Deligny)

    Review of the first shots of the film by cinematographer Caroline Champetier, on France Culture (3-4-2009). Take a look at what could look like another way to talk about cinema without plotline. My tentative translation :


    The story of Le Moindre Geste is a novel, a genuine mad story. Never a film had been more improbable. Made against all logic from end to end during 8 years. From 1962 to 1970, only 2 years of shooting. And in 1969, a young cinematographer, Jean-Pierre Daniel decided to edit the dailies. Meanwhile around Fernand Deligny, a group begins this shooting in 16mm Black&White, aspect ratio 1:1.33. As a method of observation of a young autist : Yves Guignard. For a camera : diamond in the rough. For a sound engineer : incandescent embers.

    The film opens with a slate : "Yves is Yves in the film. Annie is Annie. Her father is her father. Her mother is the mother of Richard. Marie-Rose is Marie-Rose. The Cevennes mountains are the Cevennes." Which is to say everybody is from The Cevennes, hard-boiled, raised with chestnuts, not really sentimental. The first image is a drawing being traced. We hear an encouragement : "Go Yves!" and grumbling, probably from the one drawing this. "There", he grumbles again "there, it's nice, oh shit".

    Then on the finished drawing, the voice clear and precise of an aged man :
    "Deligny speaking. This sort of man, it's the hand of a 25 years old young fellow which traced it. 'Mentally retarded' say the experts. Such he is in Le Moindre Geste. Such he is in real life as we lived it for 10+ years together. Such he is for us, never-ending cause of laughters, no matter what happens. And in this film like in daily life, I certify his voice is not mine. Could we say this voice is his? But why should a voice belong to someone? Even if someone voices it out."
    What Deligny says there, as an experienced educator, maybe inventor of another manner to accompany autist children, is at the same time, unbeknown to him, a very question of cinema.
    -- "Why should a voice belong to someone? Even if someone voices it out."
    Thus breaks down here this filmic tyranny of the "continuité dialoguée" [script with dialogues only]. Cinema, before all, is made of images and sounds, the adventure of their mating, the very adventure of the film.

    Le Moindre Geste is divided in 3 chapters :
    1. Yves and Richard escape the mental asylum
    2. Richard while hiding falls in a hole
    3. The daughter of a quarry worker observes Yves left alone, and bring him back to the asylum
    After an introduction on the life at the asylum, first image of Yves and Richard near the stream. Zoom on Yves's back. Strange body. Other shot : Richard, small, agile; Yves, heavier, follows him walking downstream. Other shot : Yves stops to drink water from the stream, using nature naturally. Water runs down, he drinks it. Richards comes back for him and takes him to the right side of the frame to continue their walk. Later, like in Kiarostami's Where is The Friend's Home? (1987) a wide shot, high angle, on a path in a S shape. Grass everywhere. Short on the left of the path, higher on the right. The 2 silhouettes of Richard ahead followed by Yves, leave the path. The loud sound of two police motorcycles which we saw in the previous shot. Now a shot at eye level. The two boys walk toward the camera. The heavy walk of Yves, as his body seems to be more adapted to the weather. He took out one of his shoes, his right foot is thus naked on the ground. The next shot, is almost a Bresson shot. The 4 legs of the 2 boys in close up. One with shoes on, Richard; the other with only one shoe, Yves, scratches his ankle with a single finger, while Richard speaks his head off. And then, voluntarily, with a slight movement downward, the camera avoids the boys' faces. This is how the system of the film install itself, finds its form. Dissociation of image and sound. Concomitance, as would say the man who invented the timecode. And throughout the film, emotions will come from there. The body of Yves, the autist, the so-called 'retarded', walking this Cevennole nature, as if being part of it, without crossing it. Almost a moving tree. A rolling stone. A cat. A lizard pointing his face to the sun. All this is contained in the image, dilated. On the soundtrack, grumbles. Sometimes Yves' shouting who talks a lot of DeGaulle, the Virgin Mary, who swears a lot. These sounds, these words are frightening. The signify clearly the mental disease. The image doesn't. By necessity, the image follows him, caresses him, embraces him.

    Did Deligny, and his entourage, know that he used cinema as a scientific thinker? that he granted cinema its highest function because they needed it ? Turning all the shot-countershots of "continuité dialoguée" in miserable things. Cinema to see and to listen, and feeling between the two a mysterious exchange.

    This film was made by people who had no experience of cinema. Except for the editor, who made sense of all the takes filmed all these years, when Yves was willing to participate to a shooting. Fernand Deligny was a psychiatrist. His collaborators took care of autistic children in an open space center, unlike any psychiatric institution at the time. The camera was held by an amateur, and this is among the most beautiful images I've seen in my life. Its aesthetic is almost involuntary or terribly inspired, with a sharp, risky stance of high contrasts, long takes and discontinuity. The kind of high-wire work that only a master could pull off. And yet, it was filmed without budget, like a home-movie, as a therapeutical exercice to communicate with an autist.
    My review, written a few years ago now.
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    Tuesday, April 28, 2009

    3 Convergences

    @ 4/28/2009 03:24:00 AM By Matthew Flanagan
    3 Godfathers (John Ford, 1948)

    Freedom (Sharunas Bartas, 2000)

    Birdsong (Albert Serra, 2008)

    ---

    Inspired by this.

    (Hat tip to Vinyl is Heavy for the concept.)

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    Sunday, April 26, 2009

    Le cinéma de l'immobilité - Ludovic Cortade

    @ 4/26/2009 11:53:00 PM By HarryTuttle
    « Le cinéma de l'immobilité » / Motionless Movies : Style, Politics, Reception published in French by Publications de la Sorbonne, Paris, December 2008.
    by Ludovic Cortade (Assistant Professor of French at New York University)

    Abstract in English by the author :
    Taking as its starting point Christian Metz’s assertion that the “reality effect” is intimately linked to the “real presence of motion” in the image, this book examines the links between the impression of immobility in the cinema from three perspectives: aesthetics (sound; the fixedness of the frame; of the actors; the still; the filming of photographs) ; the apparatus (the immobility of the spectator in the theater); reception (examining the notion of “kinetic context”).

    The first part outlines four aesthetic categories for considering this sense of immobility that contributes to the spectator’s suspension of disbelief.
    Firstly, fixing designates the suspension of movement caused by an emotional climax (the final still in Truffaut’s The 400 Blows). Following Bazin’s interpretation of the immobility of Bette Davis in Wyler’s The Little Foxes, a second category, repose, signals by contrast the prevention of this climax, as evidenced in the stills of Truffaut’s Jules and Jim. The third, apatheia, corresponds to a transcendence which the cinematographic code renders by the absence of movement, while the last category, inertia, describes an unceasing movement that thereby produces the appearance of immobility (Keaton, Wenders, Hou Hsiao-Hsien).

    The second part analyzes some paradoxes in the thinking of cinematic immobility that one finds in French theory of the 1970s. From the standpoint of the apparatus, Jean-Louis Baudry imagined the physical stillness of the spectator as the necessary and sufficient condition of his or her “croyance”. From the point of view of film form, however, the interruption of movement is rather considered as a contesting of the representational and political orders, whether as the agent of Brechtian “distancing” (Douglas, Fassbinder, Godard/Gorin), or as the vehicle of a subversive expenditure that Jean-François Lyotard has called “Acinéma.”

    The third part undertakes a redefinition of the relation between the moving image and immobility on the basis of a historical anthropology of reception. Using notions such as “kinetic context” and the Nietzschean “will to power” of immobility, it evaluates the effects of motionlessness created by the American underground cinema of the 1960s (Fluxus, Andy Warhol, Alfred Leslie, Hollis Frampton, and Robert Smithson), not only as a reaction to the visual culture of that era, marked as it was by the ubiquity of movement, but also as a desire for questioning the film medium through iconoclasm and the slowing down of time.

    Table of Content :

    Part 1
    Immobilités et croyance : une esthétique de la transparence
    • 1. Immobilité médiumnique et immobilité iconique
      • - Immobilité du son et son de l’immobilité
      • - Le son immobilise le mouvement de l’image
      • - Le paradigme du mouvement et le paradigme de l’immobilité
    • 2. Le figement
      • - Le figement comme paroxysme émotionnel : l’image médusée
      • - Figement et narration : faire et défaire la croyance
      • - Le figement : du paroxysme à la propension
    • 3. Le repos, ou la prévention du paroxysme
      • - André Bazin et l’ambiguïté temporelle du repos
      • - Le repos est une somme d’instants discontinus : une relecture de Bazin ?
      • - Le complexe de Pygmalion : désir de mouvement et nostalgie de l’immobilité
    • 4. L’indifférence au mouvement : l ’apatheïa et l’inertie
      • - L’apatheïa comme code de la transcendance
      • - L’inertie et le cinéma « moderne »
    Part 2 : Immobilités et idéologie
    • 5. L’immobilité du spectateur : idéologie et dispositif
      • - Michel Foucault et Jean-Louis Baudry : un déterminisme du dispositif
      • - La déambulation du spectateur dans de nouveaux dispositifs
    • 6. Immobilité : distanciation, subversion
      • - Dziga Vertov : une immobilité réflexive ou dramatique ?
      • - Bertolt Brecht et la mise en évidence des contradictions sociales
      • - L’immobilité comme perversion du mouvement : l’« acinéma » selon Jean-François Lyotard
    Part 3 : Vers une anthropologie culturelle du cinéma
    • 7. Immobilité et réception
      • - L’immobilité et le cinéma expérimental américain : présence et absence de l’humain dans le film
      • - L’immobilité, la stabilisation du temps et l’iconoclasme : Hollis Frampton et Robert Smithson
    • 8. Une survivance de l’iconoclasme
      • - Déclin et apocalypse dans le cinéma américain de 1950 à 1969
      • - Une spectacularisation du mouvement : Cinérama, 3-D, Cinémascope, Vistavision
      • - Une culture visuelle du mouvement dans l’image fixe : l’iconographie du magazine Life (1950-1969)
      • - Le mouvement dans l’image pieuse comme facteur d’humanisation du sacré et d’iconoclasme
    Conclusion
    • - Le film à l’arrêt : immobilité et fétichisme
    • - Le désir d’arrêt sur image : un portrait du cinéphile en Persée
    • - Entre présence et absence de l’homme : la fiducia comme tragédie de la croyance
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