The 10 Favorite Films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder

in Film | November 21st, 2016

Despite liv­ing for only 37 years, and with­in that hav­ing a career that last­ed for only fif­teen, the Ger­man auteur Rain­er Wern­er Fass­binder cre­at­ed so pro­lif­i­cal­ly that his final list of accom­plish­ments includes direct­ing forty fea­ture films, three shorts, and two tele­vi­sion series, as well as appear­ing in 36 dif­fer­ent roles as an actor — to say noth­ing of his works in oth­er media and his con­sid­er­able influ­ence on sub­se­quent gen­er­a­tions of film­mak­ers around the world. Sheer pro­duc­tiv­i­ty aside, many of these works have either stood the test of time, like The Bit­ter Tears of Petra von Kant and Berlin Alexan­der­platz or, like philo­soph­i­cal sci­ence fic­tion World on a Wire, enjoyed recent redis­cov­er­ies.

What could have inspired in Fass­binder such unre­lent­ing cre­ativ­i­ty? His list of ten favorite films, drawn up a year before his death in 1982, pro­vides some clues. “Fassbinder’s very favorite was Visconti’s The Damned, a visu­al­ly sump­tu­ous panora­ma of soci­etal col­lapse and decay in Third Reich Ger­many and no doubt an influ­ence on the Ger­man auteur’s own “BRD Tril­o­gy,” in par­tic­u­lar the bawdy, bor­del­lo-set Lola,” writes Indiewire’s Ryan Lat­tanzio. He also “loved Max Ophuls’ 1955 Lola Montes, the sad sto­ry of a kept woman shot in the kind of glo­ri­ous­ly ren­dered col­or Fass­binder would lat­er employ in his own work. As with many top 10 lists com­piled by con­fronta­tion­al film­mak­ers, Pasolini’s beau­ti­ful­ly ugly descent into hell Salò was also close to his heart.”

Fass­binder’s final favorite-films list runs, in full, as fol­lows:

  1. The Damned (1969, Dir: Luchi­no Vis­con­ti)
  2. The Naked And the Dead (1958, Dir: Raoul Walsh)
  3. Lola Montes (1955, Dir: Max Ophuls)
  4. Flamin­go Road (1949, Dir: Michael Cur­tiz)
  5. Salò, or the 120 Days Of Sodom (1975, Dir: Pier Pao­lo Pasoli­ni)
  6. Gen­tle­men Pre­fer Blondes (1953, Dir: Howard Hawks)
  7. Dis­hon­ored (1931, Dir: Josef von Stern­berg)
  8. The Night Of The Hunter (1955, Dir: Charles Laughton)
  9. John­ny Gui­tar (1954, Dir: Nicholas Ray)
  10. The Red Snow­ball Tree (1973, Dir: Vasili Shuk­shin)

If one qual­i­ty unites all of Fass­binder’s motion pic­tures of choice, from all the afore­men­tioned to the stark, near-Expres­sion­ist noir of Night of the Hunter to the super­hu­man­ly snap­py com­e­dy of Gen­tle­men Pre­fer Blondes to the West­ern genre rein­ven­tion, high­ly appre­ci­at­ed in Europe, of John­ny Gui­tar, it might well be vivid­ness. All of these movies, each in their own way, allowed Fass­binder to release the vivid­ness — and cin­e­ma his­to­ry has remem­bered him as a mas­ter of the vivid as well as the vis­cer­al — res­i­dent in his imag­i­na­tion. Alas, no mat­ter how much he man­aged to real­ize, a great deal more of it sure­ly passed away with him.

via Indiewire

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Aki­ra Kurosawa’s List of His 100 Favorite Movies

Woody Allen Lists the Great­est Films of All Time: Includes Clas­sics by Bergman, Truf­faut & Felli­ni

Mar­tin Scors­ese Reveals His 12 Favorite Movies (and Writes a New Essay on Film Preser­va­tion)

Stan­ley Kubrick’s List of Top 10 Films (The First and Only List He Ever Cre­at­ed)

Andrei Tarkovsky Cre­ates a List of His 10 Favorite Films (1972)

Susan Sontag’s 50 Favorite Films (and Her Own Cin­e­mat­ic Cre­ations)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Franz Kafka Story Gets Adapted into an Award-Winning Australian Short Film: Watch Two Men

in Film, Literature | November 18th, 2016

“When you go walk­ing by night up a street and a man, vis­i­ble a long way off — for the street mounts uphill and there is a full moon — comes run­ning toward you, well, you don’t catch hold of him, not even if he is a fee­ble and ragged crea­ture, not even if some­one chas­es yelling at his heels, but you let him run on.” Good advice, you might think, “for it is night, and you can’t help it if the street goes uphill before you in the moon­light, and besides, these two have maybe start­ed that chase to amuse them­selves, or per­haps they are both chas­ing a third, per­haps the first is an inno­cent man and the sec­ond wants to mur­der him and you would become an acces­so­ry.”

Or “per­haps they don’t know any­thing about each oth­er and are mere­ly run­ning sep­a­rate­ly home to bed, per­haps they are night birds, per­haps the first man is armed. And any­how, haven’t you a right to be tired, haven’t you been drink­ing a lot of wine? You’re thank­ful that the sec­ond man is now long out of sight.” So goes the entire­ty of “Passers-by,” a very short sto­ry — one might now use the label “flash fic­tion” — writ­ten some­time between 1908 and 1913 by none oth­er than Franz Kaf­ka. If short sto­ries make more suit­able bases for fea­ture-length films than nov­els do, sure­ly extra-short sto­ries do the same for short films. Direc­tor Dominic Allen test­ed that idea in 2009 with Two Men, the adap­ta­tion of “Passers-by” above.

Allen has also made the bold move of trans­plant­i­ng the sto­ry from Kafka’s home turf of a vague and alle­gor­i­cal Europe to the Kim­ber­ley, the north­ern tip of West­ern Aus­tralia and one of the first set­tled parts of the con­ti­nent — not by Euro­peans, but prob­a­bly by pre-Indone­sians of 41,000 years ago. “My hope was that by retelling a hun­dred year old philo­soph­i­cal tale set in Euro­pean city at night in such a dif­fer­ent con­text as deep in the Aus­tralian Kim­ber­ley in the heat of a sun­ny day and by hav­ing it retold by a mod­ern Indige­nous thinker,” writes Allen, “I would affirm an ele­ment of human­i­ty’s com­mon­al­i­ty.”

Two Men also hap­pened to win him the Emerg­ing Aus­tralian Film­mak­er Award at the Mel­bourne Inter­na­tion­al Film Fes­ti­val and the 2009 Inside Film Ris­ing Tal­ent Award, but his oth­er more imme­di­ate goals includ­ed cel­e­brat­ing “the robust and healthy youth of Fitzroy Cross­ing,” the town in which he and his col­lab­o­ra­tors filmed, and to “rein­force Kafka’s point that it’s impos­si­ble to ever tru­ly know anoth­er’s moti­va­tions.” Or, in the local­ly inflect­ed words of the short­’s motion­less observ­er-nar­ra­tor, “You just bloody nev­er know.”

Two Men will be added to our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Franz Kaf­ka: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to His Lit­er­ary Genius

Franz Kaf­ka: The Ani­mat­ed Short Film

Orson Welles Nar­rates Ani­mat­ed Ver­sion of Kafka’s Para­ble, “Before the Law”

Kafka’s Night­mare Tale, ‘A Coun­try Doc­tor,’ Told in Award-Win­ning Japan­ese Ani­ma­tion

Vladimir Nabokov (Chan­nelled by Christo­pher Plum­mer) Teach­es Kaf­ka at Cor­nell

Prague’s Franz Kaf­ka Inter­na­tion­al Named World’s Most Alien­at­ing Air­port

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Watch Moebius and Miyazaki, Two of the Most Imaginative Artists, in Conversation (2004)

in Animation, Art, Film | November 11th, 2016

The worlds so thor­ough­ly imag­ined by the French com­ic artist Jean Giraud, bet­ter known as Moe­bius, and the Japan­ese ani­ma­tor Hayao Miyaza­ki, imme­di­ate­ly rec­og­nized the world over by his fam­i­ly name alone, could have arisen from no oth­er artis­tic minds. It stands to rea­son not only that appre­ci­a­tors of one would appre­ci­ate the oth­er, but that the two men would hold each oth­er’s work in high regard. “Japan­ese ani­ma­tion is impres­sive,” Moe­bius once said to Miyaza­ki as the two expressed their mutu­al appre­ci­a­tion. “I real­ly think it is the best in the world, and Miyaza­k­i’s work is top in Japan.”

“Moe­bius first dis­cov­ered Miyaza­k­i’s work in 1986, when his son Julien (then a school­boy) showed him a pirate copy of a video con­tain­ing a title­less, author­less, and undubbed ani­mat­ed fea­ture,” writes Dani Cav­al­laro in The Ani­me Art of Hayao Miyaza­ki. “The French artist was instant­ly seduced by the film’s graph­ic vig­or and tech­ni­cal inven­tive­ness but took it to be the one-off accom­plish­ment of an unfamed ani­ma­tor. When he even­tu­al­ly dis­cov­ered that the film’s name was Nau­si­caä of the Val­ley of the Wind and that its cre­ator’s name was Hayao Miyaza­ki, Moe­bius endeav­ored to delve deep­er into the Japan­ese ani­ma­tor’s oeu­vre and to pub­licly voice his admi­ra­tion.”

And Miyaza­ki turns out to have drawn inspi­ra­tion from Moe­bius when he focused on ani­ma­tion. Miyaza­ki, who began as a com­ic artist him­self, remem­bers dis­cov­er­ing Moe­bius through Arzach, his series of word­less visu­al sto­ries of a hero who rides a ptero­dactyl through oth­er­word­ly and for­bid­ding­ly sub­lime land­scapes. “It was a big shock,” says Miyaza­ki. “Not only for me. All man­ga authors were shak­en by this work. Unfor­tu­nate­ly when I dis­cov­ered it, I already had a con­sol­i­dat­ed style. So I could­n’t use his influ­ence to enrich my draw­ing. Though, even today, I think he has an awe­some sense of space. I direct­ed Nau­si­caä under Moe­bius’ influ­ence.”

In 2004, the exhi­bi­tion Miyazaki/Moebius pre­sent­ed brought them togeth­er in Paris. Cav­al­laro describes it as “a panoram­ic sur­vey of the two artists’ careers through 300 works includ­ing water­col­ors sto­ry­boards, cels and con­cept designs, the­mat­i­cal­ly arranged, drawn from their per­son­al col­lec­tions,” includ­ing a draw­ing of Nau­si­caä by Moe­bius and one of Arzach by Miyaza­ki. They also sat down there for the con­ver­sa­tion record­ed in the video above. “The 21st cen­tu­ry is a tricky time,” says Miyaza­ki. “Our future isn’t clear. We need to re-exam­ine many things we’ve tak­en for grant­ed, whether it’s our com­mon sense or our way of think­ing.” The sheer imag­i­na­tive pow­er of artists like the both of them con­tin­ues to show us the way for­ward.

You can read tran­scripts of their record­ed con­ver­sa­tions here and here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

In Search of Mœbius: A Doc­u­men­tary Intro­duc­tion to the Inscrutable Imag­i­na­tion of the Late Com­ic Artist Mœbius

French Stu­dent Sets Inter­net on Fire with Ani­ma­tion Inspired by Moe­bius, Syd Mead & Hayao Miyaza­ki

Moe­bius Gives 18 Wis­dom-Filled Tips to Aspir­ing Artists (1996)

Watch Hayao Miyaza­ki Ani­mate the Final Shot of His Final Fea­ture Film, The Wind Ris­es

Watch Ground­break­ing Com­ic Artist Mœbius Draw His Char­ac­ters in Real Time

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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An Animated Version of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner Made of 12,597 Watercolor Paintings

in Art, Film | November 10th, 2016

Three years ago Swedish artist Anders Ram­sell cre­at­ed this 35 minute con­densed ver­sion of Blade Run­ner, frame by frame, using water­col­ors. Blade Run­ner: The Aquarelle Edi­tion con­tains 12,597 impres­sion­is­tic works on water­logged artist paper that togeth­er present, if not a faith­ful rep­re­sen­ta­tion of Rid­ley Scott’s film, then a remem­brance of the film.

It’s as if you boot­ed up a repli­cant film fan and had them try to recon­struct Blade Run­ner from mem­o­ry. (Ram­sell him­self calls it a “para­phrase” of the film.) It’s rec­og­niz­able, but due to the light­ness and fuzzy lines of water­col­or, there’s also a mag­ic to these images. (This is also due to the small size of each frame, 1.5 x 3 cm.)

The film is a jump for­ward from Ramsell’s oth­er works. Before 2011, he was dab­bling in var­i­ous media: nudes in ink on can­vas, abstract acrylic splotch­es, sur­re­al draw­ings that explore hors­es and preg­nan­cy. Div­ing into Blade Run­ner and the amaz­ing amount of work to pro­duce this film did the trick. Ram­sell has tak­en on this tech­nique as wor­thy of fur­ther explo­ration and made a new­er film, Gen­der­ness, which explores trans­sex­u­al­i­ty, and fea­tures a nar­ra­tion by none oth­er than Rut­ger Hauer, who decid­ed to work with Ram­sell after see­ing, Blade Run­ner: The Aquarelle Edi­tion. Watch it above.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Blade Run­ner Sketch­book Fea­tures The Orig­i­nal Art of Syd Mead & Rid­ley Scott (1982)

Blade Run­ner is a Waste of Time: Siskel & Ebert in 1982

Wes Ander­son Movie Sets Recre­at­ed in Cute, Minia­ture Dio­ra­mas

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

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Is The Big Lebowski a Great Noir Film? A New Way to Look at the Coen Brothers’ Iconic Movie

in Film | November 9th, 2016

The Big Lebows­ki, Joel and Ethan Coen’s sev­enth and most polar­iz­ing film, has raised every feel­ing in its view­ers from imme­di­ate and utter devo­tion to sim­ple puz­zle­ment. When some­one says “I don’t get it,” fans may find them­selves tempt­ed to quote Louis Arm­strong on the nature of jazz — but they’ll prob­a­bly quote Wal­ter, Don­ny, or the Dude him­self instead. The film’s very quota­bil­i­ty, longevi­ty, and ambi­gu­i­ty have enthralled some and frus­trat­ed oth­ers, sug­gest­ing that, as with any impor­tant work of art, you can see The Big Lebows­ki in a num­ber of dif­fer­ent ways. The Film School’d video essay above exam­ines one of those ways with the ques­tion, “Is The Big Lebows­ki a Film Noir?”

“We know film noir for its black-and-white cin­e­matog­ra­phy, grit­ty voiceovers, venet­ian blinds, detec­tives in trench coats, trou­bled dames, and femme fatales with legs that go all the way up,” says its nar­ra­tor, begin­ning in an imi­ta­tion of the mid-Atlantic accent so often heard in movies of the noir era. “But what if a film does­n’t imme­di­ate­ly qual­i­fy as film noir? What if that film uti­lizes all the major ele­ments, but car­ries a sar­don­ic tone that, at times, still takes itself very seri­ous­ly? What if that film does­n’t real­ly look like a film noir right away? What if, on the sur­face, that film appears to be an absur­dist ston­er com­e­dy about mis­tak­en iden­ti­ty, bowl­ing, and a stolen rug?”

We’ve cov­ered lists of the essen­tial ele­ments of film noir here at Open Cul­ture, and this video essay does a com­par­a­tive study, lin­ing aspects of The Big Lebows­ki against those of such clas­sics of the genre — or maybe move­ment, or maybe just fad — as The Big Sleep, Touch of Evil, The Big Heat, D.O.A., and Mur­der My Sweet. Like those pic­tures, Lebows­ki also uses the much-pho­tographed city of Los Ange­les in a strik­ing­ly dif­fer­ent way from its con­tem­po­raries, and it pro­vides the Coen broth­ers a gold­en oppor­tu­ni­ty to indulge their skill for repur­pos­ing 20th-cen­tu­ry genre con­ven­tions (most recent­ly on dis­play in the 1951 Hol­ly­wood-set Hail, Cae­sar!).

“The Big Lebows­ki is about an atti­tude, not a sto­ry,” wrote Roger Ebert , who also once drew up his own list of the rules of film noir, upon induct­ing The Big Lebows­ki into his pan­theon of great movies. “It’s easy to miss that, because the sto­ry is so urgent­ly pur­sued.” He could have said the same about the pic­tures in the core film noir canon, which you can kick back and catch up on from the com­fort of your own pad with our free film noir col­lec­tion. The Dude, and Ebert, would most cer­tain­ly abide.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

60 Free Film Noir Movies

The Essen­tial Ele­ments of Film Noir Explained in One Grand Info­graph­ic

The 5 Essen­tial Rules of Film Noir

Roger Ebert Lists the 10 Essen­tial Char­ac­ter­is­tics of Noir Films

The Two Gen­tle­men of Lebows­ki: What If The Bard Wrote The Big Lebows­ki?

The Big Lebows­ki Reimag­ined as a Clas­sic 8‑Bit Video Game

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Edgar Allan Poe’s the Raven: Watch an Award-Winning Short Film That Modernizes Poe’s Classic Tale

in Film, Poetry | November 8th, 2016

In 1909, ear­ly cin­e­mat­ic auteur D.W. Grif­fith offered his sev­en-minute inter­pre­ta­tion of Edgar Allan Poe com­pos­ing his acclaimed and wide­ly-read poem “The Raven.” In 2011, film­mak­er Don Thiel offered his twelve-minute inter­pre­ta­tion of an encounter between a writer named Poe, appar­ent­ly young and not long out of the mil­i­tary, and a state­ly talk­ing raven — an encounter that takes place not in the mod­ern day, nor in the first half of the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry dur­ing which the real Poe lived, but in the win­ter of 1959, over a cen­tu­ry after Poe died — and in a Hol­ly­wood room, no less.

Poe made his name on tales of mys­tery and imag­i­na­tion; Edgar Allan Poe’s the Raven adds anoth­er lay­er of mys­tery and imag­i­na­tion atop it all. The effort won the film sev­er­al awards, includ­ing Best Short at the H.P. Love­craft Film Fes­ti­val.

That might at first seem like an odd place for an adap­ta­tion of a poem of long­ing like “The Raven,” how­ev­er delib­er­ate­ly skewed, to earn its hon­ors. But you could see Love­craft, who launched his own life’s career in elab­o­rate explo­rations of dread beyond man’s direct com­pre­hen­sion almost exact­ly a cen­tu­ry ago, as Poe’s lit­er­ary heir.

But then, unlike Poe and “The Raven,” Love­craft nev­er claimed to have writ­ten any­thing delib­er­ate­ly and sin­gle­mind­ed­ly to max­i­mize the sat­is­fac­tion of the widest pos­si­ble audi­ence. Indeed, Love­craft’s work, how­ev­er influ­en­tial on that of lat­er imag­i­na­tive writ­ers, remains in the shad­owy realm of the “cult,” while Poe’s has ascend­ed onto the plane of required read­ing. Edgar Allan Poe’s the Raven, which envi­sions Poe’s most famous piece of work with booze, cig­a­rettes, yel­low­ing pat­terned wall­pa­per, lurid light­ing, eight-mil­lime­ter film, a Coro­na type­writer, and oth­er arti­facts of mid­cen­tu­ry dis­so­lu­tion, shows us that they’ve done so in part by tran­scend­ing time and place. Long­ing, it seems, nev­er gets old.

Edgar Allan Poe’s the Raven will be added to our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load The Com­plete Works of Edgar Allan Poe: Macabre Sto­ries as Free eBooks & Audio Books

The First Biopic of Edgar Allan Poe: 1909 Film by D.W. Grif­fith Shows the Hor­ror Mas­ter Writ­ing “The Raven”

Edgar Allan Poe Ani­mat­ed: Watch Four Ani­ma­tions of Clas­sic Poe Sto­ries

The Simp­sons Present Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” and Teach­ers Now Use It to Teach Kids the Joys of Lit­er­a­ture

Hear the 14-Hour “Essen­tial Edgar Allan Poe” Playlist: “The Raven,” “The Tell-Tale Heart” & Much More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Decoding the Screenplays of The Shining, Moonrise Kingdom & The Dark Knight: Watch Lessons from the Screenplay

in Film, Writing | November 3rd, 2016

“A screen­play isn’t meant to be read,” said no less a direct­ing-screen­writ­ing auteur than Stan­ley Kubrick. “It’s to be real­ized on film.” The quote comes up in “The Shin­ing — Qui­et­ly Going Insane Togeth­er,” an episode of the video essay series Lessons from the Screen­play. Cre­ator Michael Tuck­er uses it to explain his lack of access to the actu­al “shoot­ing script” of the film, mean­ing the sort of script typ­i­cal­ly writ­ten before pro­duc­tion and then more or less adhered to on set. But Kubrick worked dif­fer­ent­ly. On his projects “the words of the script and the design of the film were cre­at­ed togeth­er.” (Or as star Jack Nichol­son says in a bit of archival footage, “I quit usin’ my script. I just take the ones they type up each day.”)

Tuck­er goes on to break down The Shin­ing’s writ­ing process in a way that will fas­ci­nate not just screen­writ­ers but any­one with an inter­est in artis­tic struc­ture, begin­ning with the seg­men­ta­tion implied by the film’s mem­o­rably stark title cards: “THE INTERVIEW,” “THURSDAY,” “8am,” and so on. He does this in ser­vice of one impor­tant over­ar­ch­ing ques­tion: “What, exact­ly is so creepy about The Shin­ing?” (I’ve been ask­ing it myself ever since watch­ing it at a Hal­loween par­ty near­ly twen­ty years ago.) In “Moon­rise King­dom: Where Sto­ry Meets Style” he gets into the ques­tion of what sto­ry­telling func­tions Ander­son­’s sig­na­ture abun­dance of vivid, whim­si­cal, or askew details per­form, and how they do it effec­tive­ly.

As far as what makes Christo­pher Nolan’s sec­ond Bat­man movie The Dark Knight work so well, Tuck­er has the answer in two words: the Jok­er. Dif­fer­ent actors have por­trayed Bat­man’s most famous rival with dif­fer­ent lev­els of effec­tive­ness, with Heath Ledger’s Jok­er gen­er­al­ly acknowl­edged as the Jok­er, or at least one of the Jok­ers, to beat. But like any char­ac­ter, this Jok­er began on the page, and in “The Dark Knight — Cre­at­ing the Ulti­mate Antag­o­nist,” we learn which screen­writ­ing guru-approved qual­i­ties instilled there give him so much pow­er: his excep­tion­al skill at attack­ing Bat­man’s weak­ness­es, how he pres­sures Bat­man into dif­fi­cult choic­es, and how he and Bat­man ulti­mate­ly com­pete for the same goal, the soul of Gotham, and become two sides of the same coin.

You can learn oth­er lessons that Tuck­er draws from the screen­plays of movies like Night­crawler, Gone Girl, Inde­pen­dence Day, Ghost­busters, and a two-parter on Amer­i­can Beau­ty. While ele­ments of cin­e­ma like the direct­ing, the act­ing, the edit­ing, and even the music might cap­ture our atten­tion more aggres­sive­ly, we should­n’t for­get that every nar­ra­tive film, large or small, tra­di­tion­al or uncon­ven­tion­al, grows from words some­one wrote down. “It’s not what a movie is about,” declared Roger Ebert, “it’s how it is about it” — and the deci­sions of how to be about it hap­pen in the screen­play.

via The Over­look Hotel

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Aki­ra Kurosawa’s Advice to Aspir­ing Film­mak­ers: Write, Write, Write and Read

10 Tips From Bil­ly Wilder on How to Write a Good Screen­play

Woody Allen’s Type­writer, Scis­sors and Sta­pler: The Great Film­mak­er Shows Us How He Writes

How Ray Brad­bury Wrote the Script for John Huston’s Moby Dick (1956)

Ray­mond Chan­dler: There’s No Art of the Screen­play in Hol­ly­wood

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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When Akira Kurosawa Watched Solaris with Andrei Tarkovsky: I Was “Very Happy to Find Myself Living on Earth”

in Film, Sci Fi | November 2nd, 2016

tarkovsky-kurosawa

Image of Kuro­sawa and Tarkovsky via NPR

Though Aki­ra Kuro­sawa and Andrei Tarkovsky occu­py the same plane in the pan­theon of auteurs — the high­est one — nei­ther their lives nor their films had much obvi­ous­ly in com­mon. The old­er, longer-lived Kuro­sawa start­ed his career ear­li­er and end­ed it lat­er, but dur­ing those cin­e­mat­i­cal­ly glo­ri­ous decades of the 1960s and 70s, the two brought into the world such pic­tures as Yojim­bo, Ivan’s Child­hood, High and Low, Red Beard, Andrei Rublev, Dodesukaden, Solaris, The Mir­ror, Der­su Uza­la (Kuro­sawa’s sole Japan­ese-Sovi­et co-pro­duc­tion, though Tarkovsky was­n’t involved), and Stalk­er.

They actu­al­ly met around the mid­dle of that peri­od, when Kuro­sawa came to vis­it the set of Solaris (watch Solaris online along with many oth­er major Tarkovsky films). “Tarkovsky guid­ed me around the set, explain­ing to me as cheer­ful­ly as a young boy who is giv­en a gold­en oppor­tu­ni­ty to show some­one his favorite toy­box,” Kuro­sawa writes in an essay orig­i­nal­ly run in the Asahi Shin­bun in 1977 and repub­lished at Cinephil­ia & Beyond.



“[Direc­tor Sergei] Bon­darchuk, who came with me, asked him about the cost of the set, and left his eyes wide open when Tarkovsky answered it. The cost was so huge: about six hun­dred mil­lion yen as to make Bon­darchuk, who direct­ed that grand spec­ta­cle of a movie War and Peace, agape in won­der.”

But the work, as Kuro­sawa soon found out, mer­it­ed the cost and then some:

Mar­velous progress in sci­ence we have been enjoy­ing, but where will it lead human­i­ty after all? Sheer fear­ful emo­tion this film suc­ceeds in con­jur­ing up in our soul. With­out it, a sci­ence fic­tion movie would be noth­ing more than a pet­ty fan­cy.

These thoughts came and went while I was gaz­ing at the screen.

Tarkovsky was togeth­er with me then. He was at the cor­ner of the stu­dio. When the film was over, he stood up, look­ing at me as if he felt timid. I said to him, “Very good. It makes me feel real fear.” Tarkovsky smiled shy­ly, but hap­pi­ly. And we toast­ed vod­ka at the restau­rant in the Film Insti­tute. Tarkovsky, who didn’t drink usu­al­ly, drank a lot of vod­ka, and went so far as to turn off the speak­er from which music had float­ed into the restau­rant, and began to sing the theme of samu­rai from Sev­en Samu­rai at the top of his voice.

As if to rival him, I joined in.

For I was at that moment very hap­py to find myself liv­ing on Earth.

Solaris makes a view­er feel this, and even this sin­gle fact shows us that Solaris is no ordi­nary SF film. It tru­ly some­how pro­vokes pure hor­ror in our soul. And it is under the total grip of the deep insights of Tarkovsky.

Kuro­sawa pays spe­cial atten­tion to the sequence, which you can watch above ana­lyzed by film schol­ars Vida John­son and Gra­ham Petrie, filmed in his own home­land: “What makes us shud­der is the shot of the loca­tion of Akasakamit­suke, Tokyo, Japan. By a skill­ful use of mir­rors, he turned flows of head lights and tail lamps of cars, mul­ti­plied and ampli­fied, into a vin­tage image of the future city. Every shot of Solaris bears wit­ness to the almost daz­zling tal­ents inher­ent in Tarkovsky.”

Like all of Tarkovsky’s fea­tures, Solaris only holds up more firm­ly with time and thus still enjoys revival screen­ings all over the world, but you can also watch it free online right now. Just get ready, when you descend to Earth after­ward, to feel your own grat­i­tude at find­ing your­self back here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Aki­ra Kuro­sawa to Ing­mar Bergman: “A Human Is Not Real­ly Capa­ble of Cre­at­ing Real­ly Good Works Until He Reach­es 80”

Aki­ra Kuro­sawa & Gabriel Gar­cía Márquez Talk About Film­mak­ing (and Nuclear Bombs) in Six Hour Inter­view

Watch Aki­ra Kuro­sawa & Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la in Japan­ese Whiskey Ads from 1979: The Inspi­ra­tion for Lost in Trans­la­tion

Watch Solaris (1972), Andrei Tarkovsky’s Haunt­ing Vision of the Future

Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris Shot by Shot: A 22-Minute Break­down of the Director’s Film­mak­ing

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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