Michel S., LA CHIENNE (by Jean Louis Schefer)

Legrand / Michel Simon

No kind of assurance is ever added to the image, no finishing touch to give a pluperfect image of solidity; indeed, what is added is the anxiety of the human voice (and perhaps the suspicion that it can signify). From the voice I retain certain qualities -- smooth or rough -- or its extraordinary composition, astonishingly produced by Michel Simon in La Chienne (Renoir, '31), and I hear behind it, behind its memory, nothing but a feeble burbling, an incoherence, something like the bankrupt monologue of a lover's protestation. The voices in this film -- Simon's and Janie Marèze's -- are neither real nor copied; they are simply the truth of a given scene. Marèze's voice is stereotyped (it is "stamped" upon the historical representation of a social class, attached to the irony of the characters who choose it, to the irony of a "type"): Simon's voice is not of a particular class; it is an invention and a mixture which begins to constitute the sonorous volume of the character. It is laid naked in that conversation scene, in the impossible confidences that precede the murder: the vocal tissue brings in only the "culture" which precisely allows him to appear as an imbecile in the place where he lives. In this I can hear the birth of the joker's tone which is always a strain in this actor's voice, the foundation he exploits -- the strange bleating tone of an old woman through which some emotion is always transferred, along with the proper distancing of the voice from the role itself, from its utterances, and from the actor's body: this is the whistle and the toothy sound which characterizes the actor's place of origin, the "accent" of Genevan Protestants. The tissue and composition of this voice play in the character (Legrand) as the nostalgia of a place where he does not belong -- the distance of the bleating voice and the raised accent suddenly lend him the air of a mental case. Like listening to opera, I hear only the feeble strain of what this voice signifies, what protestation it makes across the totally instrumental singing which, at the height of its artifice, cannot disguise the blinding truth of the body, of that sudden apparition of the visible man, trembling like a wet dog.

(excerpt from L'homme ordinaire du cinéma. JL Schefer. 1980. Translated by Paul Smith)

Lulu / Janie Marèze

Dédé "et rien de plus!" / Georges Flamant

— I want to show you a picture. You can see a truck driver. He's been blind for six months. But he doesn't want to be unemployed. So he drives through the streets and the child...

— That would make a nice film. He tells him turn right and.......Was a film made about this?

— No.

(Gespräch mit Godard ~ Conversation with Godard [A. Kluge, 2001], can be seen here)

COBBLER, STICK TO YOUR LAST; I AM A FILMMAKER AND WILL DIE ONE.

-Dreyer, 1964

free free...

Brecht at HUAC Hearings, 1947. Songs from DIE MUTTER and KUHLE WAMPE recited by members of the standing committee of the House of Un-American Activities, and corrected by Brecht. -- Extracts from KUHLE WAMPE (Dudow/Brecht, '32) and A KING IN NEW YORK (Chaplin, '57).

Teatro Francesco di Bartolo - Buti

thanks to Mr. P.C.

A volunteered footnote...

...to Straub in 6 Bagatelas (and elsewhere), when he cites Buñuel on those filmmakers who give the illusion that we live in the "BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS":

FILM: BOOK 1 , ed. Robert Hughes (New York, Evergreen/Grove Press, 1959)

Chapter:
THE SITUATION OF THE SERIOUS FILMMAKER:
THE FILMMAKER & THE AUDIENCE: Replies to a Questionnaire

THE QUESTIONS:

1. What specific difficulties have you experienced which have been caused by interpretations of the "audience" by producers, distributors, censors, etc.? (E.g., Flaherty's re Elephant Boy; Vigo's re L'Atalante and Zéro; Eisenstein's re Ivan; Rossellini's re The Miracle.)

2. What do you consider one of the most encouraging developments in film in recent years?

3. What do you consider one of the most discouraging developments?

4. What film or films would you make if you were free from the non-artistic limitations of sponsorship, censorship, etc.?

Luis Buñuel

1. Except during my first three films, all made before 1932, and produced with absolute independence -- Un Chien Andalou, L'Age d'Or -- I have always felt the pressure more or less heavily exerted by the producer. But one might deduce from your questions that the producers and distributors are to blame by their special interpretation of public taste for the limitations imposed on the filmmaker. In my opinion, the real responsibility for the spiritual stagnation of cinema lies with the amorphous mass, routinary and conformist, that makes up the audience. The producer limits himself merely to throwing to the beasts the food they demand of him. A businessman neither better nor worse than the others of his time, the producer has no scruples. He is capable of leaping from one ideological plane to another, even if the systems are morally and artistically antagonistic, so long as he is guaranteed prestige and economic success. For the moment it is impossible to foresee any moral elevation of human society. For this reason there does not appear even a glimmer of the spiritual improvement of the audience. One might even predict the contrary. Filmmakers will continue dragging the heavy chains of servility put upon them by the industry and the producers, who, as faithful representatives of the public, will continue their tyrannical repression of the artists' freedom.

2 & 3. To my way of thinking there is not one indication in the film production of recent years, either "capitalist" or "communist," that encourages any hope of the spiritual improvement of cinema -- unless it be in its technical aspect, where the progress of both is unquestionable.

4. If it were possible for me, I would make films which, apart from entertaining the audience, would convey to them the absolute certainty that they DO NOT LIVE IN THE BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS. And in doing this I believe that my intentions would be highly constructive. Movies today, including the so-called neo-realist, are dedicated to a task contrary to this. How is it possible to hope for an improvement in the audience and consequently in the producers when every day we are told in these films, even in the most insipid comedies, that our social institutions, our concepts of Country, Religion, Love, etc., etc., are, while perhaps imperfect, UNIQUE AND NECESSARY? The true "opium of the audience" is conformity; and the entire, gigantic film world is dedicated to the propagation of this comfortable feeling, wrapped though it is at times in the insidious disguise of art.

[Mexico City]

Mizoguchi Kenji

Jisei (death poem)

Already autumn chill is here—
Quickly with my studio comrades
Joyously I long to work

thank you Richard Modiano. Ganbattekudasai...

Peter Nestler, Straub and Huillet: Film, Painting, Seasons

.....played at Kino Arsenal.

--ZEIT

(TIME, Peter Nestler, 1992)

--IL RITORNO DE FIGLIO PRODIGO - UMILIATI

(THE RETURN OF THE PRODIGAL SON - HUMILIATION, Straub and Huillet, 2003)

Kino Arsenal's notes:

IL RITORNO DEL FIGLIO PRODIGO – UMILIATI is a continuation of OPERAI, CONTADINI (WORKERS, PEASANTS), the film narrating winter in green summer images. Similar to the relation of SCHWARZE SüNDE (BLACK SIN) to the preceding film TOD DES EMPEDOKLES (THE DEATH OF EMPEDOCLES), an even deeper and darker awareness arises – "from resignation to extreme affirmation" (Jacques Rancière).

The title and content of Peter Nestler's ZEIT (1992) attain a new meaning after VERTEIDIGUNG DER ZEIT (2007) dealing with the work of befriended colleagues. ZEIT consists of "seven Hungarian painters and sculptors presenting their work. They have worked hard all their lives as farmers, in the factory or as textile workers. It picks up on themes of their youth, themes that are very important to them." What UMILIATI and ZEIT also have in common is the preciseness and circuitousness with which they depict the post-socialist (sic) present.

After the "fin" at the end of QUEI LORO INCONTRI (the last five dialogs of Pavese's book Dialogues with Leuco), Jean-Marie Straub shot two new films, each after one of the dialogues: Two men remember a woman – LE GENOU D'ARTEMIDE (2008), two women a man (Odysseus) – LE STREGHE (2007–09). In ITINÉRAIRE DE JEAN BRICARD (2008), the Loire, black-and-white, in winter.

Nestler's TOD UND TEUFEL (2009) again visualizes the abyss one faces when confused emancipation that has become stuck (also when creating images) turns into fascism. The screening of DÜRFEN SIE WIEDERKOMMEN? ÜBER NEOFASCHISTISCHE TENDENZEN IN WESTDEUTSCHLAND (1971) on the photographer and Africa explorer Graf Eric von Rosen will be attended by the socialist political scientist Wolfgang Abendroth, among others. Guests: Peter and Zsóka Nestler. (Stefan Hayn)

"Truly doing movie criticism"

As part of the FILMVERMITTELNDE FILM Project Tag Gallagher has been interviewed about his video criticism, the why and the how of it.

"And the clearer my own ideas are, the fewer words I need. On paper, three paragraphs might make a point. On video, three words are better."

In addition to insights into his current video practice and the atmosphere in which it's done , Tag, who has always worked with the image, gives a wonderful little history of the use of frame-enlargements in printed articles.

At the end of the interview an invaluable filmography of Tag's is included. One wishes that dvd source information were also included, i.e. which commercial dvds include Tag's videos as "extras"; nevertheless, with the proper titles and dates one can usually locate them by searching online. And failing that, Tag is imminently approachable, via his website.

What is the translation of Filmvermittelnde film? Film mediating films? For now, it's clear that this is an extremely well mounted project by Volker Pantenburg, Stefan Pethke, and Michael Baute ( et al.) through the Vienna Filmmuseum (et al.) that thoroughly documents and explores film films, movies about movies. There are dossiers in German on Harun Farocki, Gustav Deutsch, Jean Douchet, Alain Bergala, pedagogical series, movies about movies on DVD (e.g. Janet Bergstrom on Murnau's 4 DEVILS, Jean-Pierre Gorin on PIERROT LE FOU, Bernard Eisenschitz on THEY LIVE BY NIGHT, etc) -- among others.

Stills:

1 from Tag's DREAMING OF JEANNIE (2003, on Ford's STAGECOACH), -- just as he begins a complex polemical aside (his videos are capable of that in addition to "three words are better") against Nick Browne's dead letter theories about Ford's camera and the spectator. Tag deploys superimpositions, moving repetitions, inventories of society in Ford, and camera position/axis graphs in his case against Browne's "Spectator-In-The-Text" (1975), showing that Ford gifts empathetic distance with the characters rather than (what Browne's text, through a questionable version of "suture" theory, assumes is) a submitting of the viewer to passive identification via a manipulative camera . This is part of a long standing debate about how the way-station scene in STAGECOACH works; Gilberto Perez also threw in his bit in a page-long footnote in The Material Ghost.

1 from Alain Bergala's movie about movies and Marseilles D’ANGELE A TONI (1998, FROM ANGELE TO TONI). "In 1934, two films, important in cinema history, were shot almost simultaneously around Marseilles : Angèle, the first feature film of the renowned young French author Marcel Pagnol; Toni, shot by Jean Renoir in Martigues at Pagnol’s invitation. Toni, which can be considered as the forerunner of the neo-realism movement. Both films were closed: based on the art of dialogue, love for direct sound, small-scale cinema with a taste for liberty during the shooting, and a familiy-like crew...Yet, they drew two diverging lines in the history of cinema: from Angèle to Toni, you step from Pagnol to Renoir, from a traditional vision of the Provence to a more contemporary vision of an area changed by industry, from Pagnol’s dramatic narration to Renoir’s documentary realism."

"3. In the packet of press materials that LM sent me last May is one still of Les contrebandières showing Brigitte (Françoise Vatel) scaling a bolder over a waterfall that is possibly the grubbiest I’ve ever seen — even grubbier than what the film looks like. Most people would call it “Substandard,” and they’d be right. This is the unfettered register that LM’s films occupy, breathe, and thrive in, a happy legion of the damned. Not even the $22 million spent on making Friedkin’s Sorceror look as impoverished and boring and artfully godforsaken and xenophobically unpleasant as possible could buy that sort of freedom and enlightenment."

--from Jonathan Rosenbaum's long unavailable, now available piece from 1977 **À la recherche de Luc Moullet: 25 Propositions**

a distant trumpet...

"MY CASE*: Straub complains. This time he complains that Heiner Müller who, upon meeting (the Straubs) in Berlin, lets fly something like 'it's good that people like you continue to exist!' A sentence where I, too, have heard the candid desire of death underlying it and to which one should be able to reply: 'Yes, I know I absolutely cannot count on you."

(Serge Daney in "Journal de l'an présent", TRAFIC, No. 3, été 1992.)

Interviewer: They say you are a marginal filmmaker?

Straub: Who?

Interviewer: A certain press, certain people...

Straub: Those are the ones who have an interest in supressing us, namely the industry pimps and, I was going to say, the whores who work for them, but that would be unfair to the whores. There's no reason to put a yellow star on certain filmmakers. Okay, so we have a yellow star. It's more interesting to check why. That means all journalists are whores and all producers are pimps. Well, almost everyone! (…) What does it take for a film to be marginal? The fact that it is left on the sidelines! From the moment a film enters the circuit, it stops being marginal. If it has the least sucess, you stop talking about marginalization! You then have the family blessing! Some racists labels are much more polished.

(Jean-Marie Straub, Danièle Huillet. Lisboa: Cinemateca Portuguesa, 1998.)

*Notre combat by Jean Douchet *

(translated by Craig Keller HERE)

Matters of a quarter of a second...

A new short by Jean-Claude Rousseau, SÉRIE NOIRE, has been made available online at INDEPENDENCIA:

-HERE, with English subtitles

-HERE, sans subtitles

It will only be available for viewing until July 29th.

All of Rousseau's films and videos breathe quite grand fictions, or lessons, and have something of the serial in them. SÉRIE NOIRE, an allusive title, is also wonderfully concrete, as you'll see. It's a "message" movie, like LA VALLéE CLOSE and DE SON APPARTEMENT, in the sound sense, not the genre sense.

One is always astonished by the diversity of expression in Rousseau's films. What is it that will tip the scales toward comedy "or" tragedy, toward the solitary work of handicraft (a message from another always received alone) or a vast collaboration with the earth and public?

The detective takes it on a case-by-case basis. It's possible for the filmmaker and spectator to join hands, and lead one another.

"C’est l’affaire d’un quart de seconde," Rousseau says of a complete change that occurs in the movie, where music provides a strange opportunity to lift the camera into the weeds, over a vacant lot, changing the relationship between the shooter, the shot, and the spectator. An almost Mizoguchian seizure (the off sound of the claps and bangs of some kind of intimate task become the shot's score as much as its reality) and just as grand, risky, sensual, implicating, cohering, emotional...

Manny Scale (3)

February 8, 1943

Manny Scale (2)

Manny Scale (1)

"Like Straub, I think it's sinful to give the audience material it knows already, whether the material is about race relations or the car culture or the depiction and placement of a candy bar."
-Manny Farber

*

Lumiere: A Conversation Between Jean Renoir and Henri Langlois

Excerpted and translated from the French by Bill Krohn

This translation, including a preface by Krohn, originally appeared in the Summer 2006 edition of the online political journal THE NOVEMBER 3RD CLUB. It is presented here with an embedded youtube of the entire film with Spanish subtitles. Note that the date of this dialogue is 1968, when street shots, whether like or unlike Lumiere's, were by historical necessity regaining their primacy [the May/June demonstrations and strikes] and "recreating the period" had many meanings. For Philippe Garrel, whose films Langlois played every year on Christmas day, filming the streets in '68 meant not filming the streets!

*

A French television broadcast, under the rubric Aller au cinema, of films by Louis Lumiere intercut with comments by Jean Renoir and Henri Langois provides a rare opportunity to learn how these two masters of cinema regarded the birth of a new art form. The "Lumiere parts" of those films are well described by Renoir's and Langois' comments about fantasy and reality, and the recreation of the atmosphere of a period, even of the soul of a society.

The program was assembled by New Wave director Eric Rohmer, who may be one of the two questioners we never see. What follows are quotes pulled or summarized from the program, with some indication of what films Rohmer chose to illustrate the comments. With only one exception, the comments are not laid over the films, which appear to have been shown in their entirety, without music, of course. This three-way conversation (including Rohmer's film selections) is also a reminder of why the French have a special place in the history and present of the art of film. ------- Bill Krohn


Jean Renoir : I don't feel that the cinematograph was just a way of putting the present in a box for the future. There is in these films a recreation of the atmosphere of the period that is exactly what we love today in Godard.


When we look at the very first films, they're almost all extraordinary. You feel like using the word "genius." But these cameramen weren't geniuses — they were helped by the fact that technique was still difficult.

I find more fantasy in certain Lumiere films than in paintings that aspire to fantasy. It's the creation of a world that exists in reality, but also of a world that exists in the imaginations of Theodore Rousseau or the Lumiere cameramen. The angle chosen by the cameraman — a humble servant of reality — is the work of his unconscious talent. Many great works of art are the result of the unconscious. I would even say that when a film we've made works, it's in spite of us.


[After a questioner mentions a comic strip that Lumiere imitated in "L'arroseur arose," adding that it is cut like a film would be today:]

That kind of cutting was easy to do with pen and ink, but not with a camera. That's what I mean when I say that the fact that the technique was difficult worked to their advantage. Because the cameraman can't cut, he has to compose more carefully.


Henri Langois : "As if by chance" a film begins with a tramway passing and ends when another one passes, close to the camera. In between you see the movement of people in the street. The cameraman saw that this set-up would give him a series of shots: You have a close-up, a long-shot and a medium shot and a movement linking them. That's not chance — it's science.


*Film: Liverpool - Church Street*


There was a big difference between Lumiere and the others at this period. There's nothing more boring on film than the inauguration of a monument, kings, queens and so on. The great thing about Lumiere is that he didn't show History — he showed Life. The force of his films is in the atmosphere of life, the ambience of life, the philosophy of the period — everything is there. When you see two little girls playing in the street, on the Champs-Elysee, you think of Proust, of Renoir.


*Film: Champs-Elysee*


Monet had painted the Gare St-Lazare before Lumiere filmed it. What you are seeing in Lumiere's film is the baton being passed from painting to film. The whole history of art from the mid-nineteenth century to the late nineteenth century leads up to Lumiere. Impressionist painting, everything that was greatest, newest in that period was absorbed by Lumiere's films. That's what gives them the quality of life. What Lumiere looked for was what is imponderable in life.


*Films: Le Bassin des Tulleries, Retour d'une promenade en mer*


[HL answering a question about improvisation and preparation in the Lumiere films:] The Lumiere cameramen when they got to a city would look for what would be best to film. They'd pick the spot, choose the angle. After that came improvisation. They didn't do it mathematically - they felt it in their hearts.


*Film: Milan - Place du Dome*


Painting describes society as it sees itself, but with Lumiere's films, for the first time we see it as it is. When I look at these films I'm often appalled. What is out of fashion in them? The bourgeoisie. What is modern? The people. Because of the evolution of society, we are more like them than like the bourgeoisie of the period, we feel closer to them.


*Films: Leaving in a car, Carpenters, Cultivation of the earth*

When a painter paints women wearing the fashions of the era, he paints them as they are supposed to fit and look. When Lumiere films them, we see what they really looked like.


*Films: Debarquement, Wedding party entering a church*


What about New York City in the Lumiere films? It isn't the city we see in fiction films, or period recreations. It's a city of business.


*Films: New York - Broadway and Wall Street, Le grand prix a Paris*


Whereas Paris in these films really is the Paris that Hollywood recreates when it wants to show this period. It really IS elegant. Look at a shot of Germany. The power of Germany shows through in it. You realize that the German empire was already there, whereas we were the flower of the nineteenth century. One observes a thousand little details like that.


*Films: Dresden: Auguste-Bencke Street, London: Westminster Bridge, Moscow: Tverskai Street*


When I see a woman walk past in a Lumiere film I see all of her psychology, all of her history, all of her life, her perspective, her "horizons." It's different in the films that are acted.


*Film: Card players watered *


Jean Renoir: In the little acted scenes it's obvious that it's Lumiere's family and employees "pretending." But it's not really being acted. What matters is not the characters; what matters is that Monsieur Lumiere has gotten them all together and had them do this. Monsieur Lumiere is filming himself. M. Lumiere expresses through their acting a certain wonderful naivete that often enters into French art. Much "good" acting is no less false.



*Films: The fake legless man, Battle of women, Nursemaids and soldier*


Henri Langois: [answering a question about whether a Lumiere cameraman was really the first to move the camera:] He didn't want to "move the camera." He wanted his camera with him in a gondola to show what he saw.


*Film: The Grand Canal in Venice*


If the filmmakers of the 20s had seen these films, people like [Fritz] Lang, they could have saved themselves a lot of time. But no one at the period of the Lumiere films thought that Lumiere's cameramen had invented the moving shot or the pan, because that's not what they saw. They saw "a shot of a tram moving."


*Film: Panorama of arriving in Aix-en-Bains taken from a moving train*


We see the genius of cinema popping up all over the place, but the spectators of that time didn't have the background to see that. [The following is the one time the voice over is overlaid, during the shot entering and leaving the tunnel:] Now, after the whole development of the cinematic language discovered in the 20s, we are approaching an art of cinema that is much closer to Louis Lumiere, who is the absolute of the art of cinema.


*Films: Passing through a tunnel, Liverpool: Panorama taken from an electric train*

[HL is asked to sum up his impression of the films]: What strike me is the lumiere (light), the quality of the light, the sunlit quality of the images, which they were obliged, I believe, to film at certain times of day. And the depth of field. In other French films of the period, [Louis] Feuillade, for example, there's depth, but the shot is composed for a flat surface, like a painting. There's something more scientific in the films of Lumiere that comes, I believe, from the light.


*Films: Goldfish bowl [amazing!], Marechal-ferrant, Disembarking from a ship*


They have to be developed using the procedures of the period for that to be seen, as they first were in Venice when a scientist I knew worked out a system for doing that. Seeing them properly developed, you understand that film is a plastic art.


*Films: Venice - Pigeons in Saint Marks' Square*


[HL answering a question about diagonal compositions:] It's not a diagonal - it's a triangle. All of silent film uses that triangular composition, not just the Lumiere films. There's never anything in the center, until you get to the style built around the plan americain and the close-up.


*Films: Transport d'une tourelle, Attelage d'un camion*


Jean Renoir: [Asked to sum up:] The precision and veracity that Henri Langois sees in these films shows, he says, that cinema is a resume of all the other arts. I see it differently. For me cinema is an art in itself, even though everything is linked. The world, as I never tire of saying, is one. And the world of Louis Lumiere is one.


For me the value of these films is that they are open to interpretation. Seeing one of them, I can make up the story I want, invent a before and after. You only have a work of art when the public is a collaborator. These films open a door to the imagination, permitting the spectator to invent part of what he sees. Which is also why the art of Getrmany in the 17th Century was music, since everyone in that society could be a musician. And why France is the art of painting, because of the atmosphere of painting that bathes it.