Since offi­cial­ly retir­ing from film­mak­ing last year, Steven Soder­bergh has filled his time writ­ing Twit­ter novel­las, cre­at­ing mashups of Alfred Hitch­cock and Gus Van Sant Psy­cho films, and post­ing a log of all the films, TV shows and books he immersed him­self in in 2009.

Now comes his lat­est side project: On his web site, extension765.com, Soder­bergh presents a short les­son in “stag­ing,” a term that refers in cin­e­ma “to how all the var­i­ous ele­ments of a giv­en scene or piece are aligned, arranged, and coor­di­nat­ed.” He tells us: “I oper­ate under the the­o­ry a movie should work with the sound off, and under that the­o­ry, stag­ing becomes para­mount.”

To illus­trate his point, he takes the entire­ty of Steven Spiel­berg’s 1981 film, The Raiders of the Lost Ark; turns it into a silent, black & white film (watch it here); and then adds this com­men­tary:

So I want you to watch this movie and think only about stag­ing, how the shots are built and laid out, what the rules of move­ment are, what the cut­ting pat­terns are. See if you can repro­duce the thought process that result­ed in these choic­es by ask­ing your­self: why was each shot—whether short or long—held for that exact length of time and placed in that order? Sounds like fun, right? It actu­al­ly is. To me. Oh, and I’ve removed all sound and col­or from the film, apart from a score designed to aid you in your quest to just study the visu­al stag­ing aspect. Wait, WHAT? HOW COULD YOU DO THIS? Well, I’m not say­ing I’m like, ALLOWED to do this, I’m just say­ing this is what I do when I try to learn about stag­ing, and this film­mak­er for­got more about stag­ing by the time he made his first fea­ture than I know to this day (for exam­ple, no mat­ter how fast the cuts come, you always know exact­ly where you are—that’s high lev­el visu­al math shit).

Ok, that’s prob­a­bly enough film school for today…

via Metafil­ter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Alfred Hitchcock’s Sev­en-Minute Edit­ing Mas­ter Class

Wern­er Herzog’s Rogue Film School: Apply & Learn the Art of Gueril­la Film­mak­ing & Lock-Pick­ing

Spike Lee Shares His NYU Teach­ing List of 87 Essen­tial Films Every Aspir­ing Direc­tor Should See

Luc Moul­let, a French New Wave film­mak­er and long-time crit­ic for the Cahiers du ciné­ma, makes films “known for their humor, anti-author­i­tar­i­an lean­ings and rig­or­ous­ly prim­i­tive aes­thet­ic.” Case in point, the 1984 short film Bar­res, which com­i­cal­ly doc­u­ments the best ways to jump the Paris metro. It’s some­thing of a sport in Paris. Arguably the sport most Parisians real­ly take part in. Unlike oth­er ver­sions of the film on the web, this one has Eng­lish sub­ti­tles. Enjoy.

h/t ubuweb

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Tui­leries: A Short, Slight­ly Twist­ed Film by Joel and Ethan Coen

Illus­trat­ed Eti­quette Guide Explains How to Ride the Paris Metro in a Civ­i­lized Way

Names of Paris Métro Stops Act­ed Out: Pho­tos by Janol Apin

Has any film­mak­er, of any era, had more influ­ence on doc­u­men­taries than Dzi­ga Ver­tov? We know the ear­ly 20th-cen­tu­ry Sovi­et cin­e­ma the­o­rist and direc­tor of avant-garde non-fic­tion films has a place high in the doc­u­men­tary pan­theon by virtue of his 1929 Man with a Movie Cam­era alone.

We’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured that motion pic­ture’s rise to Sight and Sound’s des­ig­na­tion of the eighth great­est of all time, and if you did­n’t watch it free online then, you can do so above now. Just after that, we fea­tured his unset­tling Sovi­et Toys, the first ani­mat­ed film ever made in that then-nation. But giv­en that the age of Ver­tov’s work — not that time has dimin­ished its aes­thet­ic rel­e­vance or excite­ment — has brought it into the pub­lic domain, why stop there?

Today we offer a roundup of all the Dzi­ga Ver­tov movies cur­rent­ly view­able free online, a col­lec­tion that allows you to watch and judge for your­self whether he and his col­lab­o­ra­tors suc­ceed­ed in mak­ing a dent in what he called “the film dra­ma, the Opi­um of the peo­ple.” Despite the thor­ough­ly low-tech nature of these pic­tures, even by doc­u­men­tary stan­dards, you may find your­self moved after hav­ing watched them — not nec­es­sar­i­ly by the Sovi­et caus­es he some­times extolled, but by his cin­e­mat­ic ral­ly­ing cry: “Down with bour­geois fairy-tale sce­nar­ios. Long live life as it is!”

• Kino Eye (1924) Ver­tov’s first doc­u­men­tary not made from found footage jour­neys, accord­ing to a con­tem­po­rary news­pa­per, “from the Pio­neer camp, through the peas­ant court­yards, through the fields, through the mar­kets and slums of the town, with an ambu­lance car to a dying man, from there to work­ers’ sports grounds, and so on and so forth, peer­ing into all the lit­tle cor­ners of social life.”
• Sovi­et Toys (1924) A “car­toon” that, in the words of our own Jonathan Crow, “dis­plays [Ver­tov’s] knack for mak­ing strik­ing, pun­gent images,” “yet those who don’t have an inti­mate knowl­edge of Sovi­et pol­i­cy of the 1920s might find the movie — which is laden with Marx­ist alle­gories — real­ly odd.”
• Kino-Prav­da #21 (1925) Also known as Lenin Kino-Prav­da, “a spe­cial, longer-than-usu­al issue of [news­reel] Kino-Prav­da,” as the Har­vard Film Archive describes it, “in which Ver­tov jumps with bold­ness and ease between news­reel and drawn ani­ma­tion to illus­trate Sovi­et Rus­si­a’s way up under Lenin’s lead­er­ship, the decline in Lenin’s health, and the year elapsed since his death.”

• A Sixth Part Of The World (1926) A mix­ture of news­reel and found footage that, accord­ing to the Inter­net Archive, the film depict­ed “through the trav­el­ogue for­mat [ … ] the mul­ti­tude of Sovi­et peo­ples in remote areas of USSR and detailed the entire­ty of the wealth of the Sovi­et land,” mak­ing “a call for uni­fi­ca­tion in order to build a ‘com­plete social­ist soci­ety.’ ”
• Stride, Sovi­et! (1926) “What began as a com­mis­sion by the sit­ting Moscow Sovi­et for a pro­mo­tion­al movie,” says the Har­vard Film Archive, “was trans­formed by Ver­tov into some­thing else entire­ly: a film exper­i­ment, an emo­tion­al film – any­thing but a pic­ture that would help the Mossovet be reelect­ed.”
• The Eleventh Year (1928) A cel­e­bra­tion of “the tenth anniver­sary of the Octo­ber Rev­o­lu­tion” which, accord­ing to the Har­vard Film Archive, presents that decade of social­ism “in the eyes of a left-wing artist of the twen­ties” as “a rad­i­cal social exper­i­ment [ … ] required to be pre­sent­ed in a rad­i­cal­ly exper­i­men­tal way.”
• Man with a Movie Cam­era (1929) “Made up as it is of ‘bits and pieces’ of cities from Moscow to the Ukraine,” writes Sens­es of Cin­e­ma’s Jonathan Daw­son, it “remains a per­fect dis­til­la­tion of the sense of a mod­ern city life that looks fresh and true still,” “the strongest reminder that, in spite of the extra­or­di­nary pres­sures on his per­son­al and work­ing life, Ver­tov was one of the great­est of all the pio­neer film­mak­ers.”
• Three Songs About Lenin (1934) Also known as Three Songs of Lenin and Three Songs Ded­i­cat­ed to Lenin, a deliv­ery of exact­ly what the title promis­es — but with a Ver­tov­ian styl­is­tic slant.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

200 Free Doc­u­men­taries Online, part of our col­lec­tion: 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More

65 Free Char­lie Chap­lin Films Online

35 Free Oscar Win­ning Films Avail­able on the Web

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Derek Jar­man was too old and too accom­plished to be a punk. By 1977, the open­ly gay film­mak­er and artist was already 36 and had an impres­sive CV that includ­ed doing set design for Ken Russell’s The Dev­ils and direct­ing Sebas­tiane, a land­mark in gay cin­e­ma, notable for not only its frank depic­tion of the male body but also for its dia­logue which was entire­ly in Latin. Nonethe­less, Jar­man gath­ered togeth­er nota­bles from London’s bur­geon­ing punk scene, includ­ing a young, lithe Adam Ant, to cre­ate Jubilee –the first and, arguably best, punk movie ever.

The plot, as such, cen­ters on Queen Eliz­a­beth I who, with the help of court occultist John Dee (played by Rocky Hor­ror Pic­ture Show’s Richard O’Brien), sees her land 400 years into the future. It’s a Britain filled with garbage and plagued with crime. Queen Eliz­a­beth II, for instance, was killed in a mug­ging. As Queen Eliz­a­beth I wan­ders around the wreck­age of the British Empire, she encoun­ters a bunch of leather-clad toughs includ­ing Amyl Nitrite (played by Mal­colm McLaren pro­tégé Jor­dan), Crabs (Lit­tle Nell, also from Rocky Hor­ror) and Mad (Toy­ah Will­cox, who would lat­er go on to delight a gen­er­a­tion of tod­dlers by voic­ing The Tele­tub­bies). The high­point of the movie is, with­out a doubt, is when Jor­dan per­forms a risqué dance to a glammed up ver­sion of Rule Bri­tan­nia.

Jar­man tapped into the same feel­ings of anger, dis­il­lu­sion­ment, and nihilism that the Sex Pis­tols artic­u­lat­ed. As Jar­man told The Guardian in 1978, “We have now seen all estab­lished author­i­ty, all polit­i­cal sys­tems, fail to pro­vide any solu­tion — they no longer ring true.” Jubilee feels like a John Waters movie with­out the gross-out gags. A Paul Mor­ris­sey movie but with a clear sense of polit­i­cal pur­pose. It’s gid­dy, unin­hib­it­ed, vio­lent and occa­sion­al­ly quite dis­turb­ing.

Reac­tions to the movie were, not sur­pris­ing­ly, mixed. Yet the peo­ple who real­ly despised the flick weren’t cul­tur­al con­ser­v­a­tives as you might expect. They would fret over the film when it final­ly aired on late night TV in 1986. But in 1978, when the film came out, the very peo­ple the film was about hat­ed it. Souxsie Sioux, of Souxsie and the Ban­shees fame, had a bit part in the film but nonethe­less thought that it was “hip­py trash.” Punk fash­ion­ista Vivi­enne West­wood hat­ed the movie so much she made an insult­ing T‑shirt about it. And Adam Ant, who went to the pre­miere with his moth­er, ini­tial­ly thought the film was ter­ri­ble. Jar­man didn’t give a toss. “I don’t par­tic­u­lar­ly want peo­ple to like the film or what it depicts,” he once told a reporter. “I sim­ply hope that it makes them feel that some­thing is going on.”

Yet over the years, the film’s rep­u­ta­tion has steadi­ly improved. Ant, for instance, has changed his opin­ion of Jubilee. “Today I think it’s an amaz­ing achieve­ment and tes­ta­ment to Derek Jar­man’s per­sis­tence and inge­nu­ity.” And his­to­ri­an Jon Sav­age, who lit­er­al­ly wrote the book on punk, declared that “it’s the best film about punk, for all its fail­ings.” British crit­ic Julian Upton went one step fur­ther:

Jubilee is the most impor­tant British film of the late ’70s. Okay, it faced lit­tle com­pe­ti­tion at the time — just a weak trick­le of ill-con­ceived co-pro­duc­tions, third-rate soft­core, and the usu­al her­itage and nos­tal­gia. Next to those, Jubilee, then as now, stands out like a sore thumb.

via Net­work Awe­some/ The Guardian

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Four Female Punk Bands That Changed Women’s Role in Rock

Wittgen­stein: Watch Derek Jarman’s Trib­ute to the Philoso­pher, Fea­tur­ing Til­da Swin­ton (1993)

Car­avag­gio, Derek Jarman’s Take on the Baroque Painter’s Life, Work & Roman­tic Com­pli­ca­tions (1986)

The Sex Pis­tols Do Dal­las: A Strange Con­cert from the Strangest Tour in His­to­ry (Jan­u­ary 10, 1978)

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing one new draw­ing of a vice pres­i­dent with an octo­pus on his head dai­ly.