Ingmar Bergman Names the 11 Films He Liked Above All Others (1994)

in Film | December 10th, 2013

Image via Wikimedia Commons

You may remember our October post on Ingmar Bergman’s evaluation of his equally titanic colleagues in cinema, from Jean-Luc Godard (“affected”) to Alfred Hitckcock (“infantile”). Though the Bergman faithful and fans Andrei Tarkovsky often find much to disagree about, the Swedish director of pictures like Wild Strawberries and Persona had the absolute highest praise for the Russian director of pictures like Andrei Rublev and Solaris. (Watch Tarkovsky’s major films free online here.) “When film is not a document, it is dream,” said Bergman. “That is why Tarkovsky is the greatest of them all. He moves with such naturalness in the room of dreams. He doesn’t explain. He is a spectator, capable of staging his visions in the most unwieldy but, in a way, the most willing of media. All my life I have hammered on the doors of the rooms in which he moves so naturally.”

And now we have a few more words the older master spoke about the younger, whom he physically outlived — but, by his own admission, couldn’t artistically outdo — thanks to a certain Tyler Harris, who posted them to My Criterion. In his remarks there, Bergman continues with the metaphor of Tarkovsky an an inhabitant of a realm of dreams: “Suddenly, I found myself standing at the door of a room the keys of which had, until then, never been given to me,” Bergman said of first watching Andrei Rublev, which he named at the Göteborg Film Festival 1994 as a favorite. “I felt encouraged and stimulated: someone was expressing what I had always wanted to say without knowing how.” He also selected Federico Fellini’s La Strada, which prompted a background story about his ill-fated collaboration with Fellini and Akira Kurosawa under legendary producer Dino de Laurentiis. Kurosawa’s own Rashomon, which you can watch free online, also appears on this favorites list of Bergman’s, which runs, alphabetically, as follows:

Andrei Rublev (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1971)
The Circus (Charlie Chaplin, 1928)
The Conductor (Andrzej Wajda, 1980)
Marianne and Juliane (Margarethe von Trotta, 1981)
The Passion of Joan of Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928)
The Phantom Carriage (Victor Sjöström, 1921)
Port of Shadows (Marcel Carné, 1938)
Raven’s End (Bo Wilderberg, 1963)
Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950)
La strada (Federico Fellini, 1954)
Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950)

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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, Asia, film, literature, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on his brand new Facebook page.

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

in Film | December 4th, 2013

Susan Sontag’s fans would each describe her a little differently: many would call her a writer, of course, though some would opt for more specificity, calling her a novelist if they like her fiction or a critic if they don’t. Others, speaking more grandly, might prefer to simply call her an “intellectual.” Under this wide umbrella Sontag produced a variety of works for the page, the stage, and even the screen. Between 1969 and 1983, she made four films: 1969’s Duett för kannibaler (Duet for Cannibals), 1971’s Broder Carl (Brother Carl), 1974’s Promised Lands, and, above, 1983’s Unguided Tour, also known as Letter from Venice. Sontag adapted the Italian-language feature from her story of the same name, originally published in 1977 in the New Yorker. Promised Lands, her only documentary, meditates on Arab-Israeli relations at the end of the Yom Kippur War. The Bergmanesque, symbolism-filled Brother Carl takes place, suitably, at a Swedish island resort.

And her debut Duet for Cannibals, according to Dangerous Minds, embodies — or, if you like, cinematizes — her touted distaste for the interpretation of artworks. Sontag, they say, “sought to liberate art from interpretation (which is a bit ironic, of course, for someone who was essentially an exalted critic). When it came to her own film, she made something that intended to deliberately confound the notion that there was any sort of underlying meaning beyond exactly what the audience was seeing on the screen directly in front of them.”

Sontag’s famous 1966 essay “Against Interpretation” counts here as essential reading, not just before you watch her own films, but also before you watch through her list of favorite films. Richard Brody, posting in the New Yorker, recommends accompanying it with “The Decay of Cinema,” which Sontag wrote three decades later in the New York Times, and in which she declares that “you hardly find anymore, at least among the young, the distinctive cinephilic love of movies that is not simply love of but a certain taste in films (grounded in a vast appetite for seeing and reseeing as much as possible of cinema’s glorious past).”

Reading over the top fifty films she considered the greatest back in 1977 (and published in her volume of journals As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh), we find plenty of evidence Sontag herself, unsurprisingly, had such a cinephilic love of and vast appetite for movies, especially for European filmmakers but also the best-known Japanese ones of the day:

1. Bresson, Pickpocket
2. Kubrick, 2001
3. Vidor, The Big Parade
4. Visconti, Ossessione
5. Kurosawa, High and Low
6. [Hans-Jürgen] Syberberg, Hitler
7. Godard, 2 ou 3 Choses …
8. Rossellini, Louis XIV
9. Renoir, La Règle du Jeu
10. Ozu, Tokyo Story
11. Dreyer, Gertrud
12. Eisenstein, Potemkin
13. Von Sternberg, The Blue Angel
14. Lang, Dr. Mabuse
15. Antonioni, L’Eclisse
16. Bresson, Un Condamné à Mort …
17. Gance, Napoléon
18. Vertov, The Man with the [Movie] Camera
19. [Louis] Feuillade, Judex
20. Anger, Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome
21. Godard, Vivre Sa Vie
22. Bellocchio, Pugni in Tasca
23. [Marcel] Carné, Les Enfants du Paradis
24. Kurosawa, The Seven Samurai
25. [Jacques] Tati, Playtime
26. Truffaut, L’Enfant Sauvage
27. [Jacques] Rivette, L’Amour Fou
28. Eisenstein, Strike
29. Von Stroheim, Greed
30. Straub, …Anna Magdalena Bach
31. Taviani bro[ther]s, Padre Padrone
32. Resnais, Muriel
33. [Jacques] Becker, Le Trou
34. Cocteau, La Belle et la Bête
35. Bergman, Persona
36. [Rainer Werner] Fassbinder, … Petra von Kant
37. Griffith, Intolerance
38. Godard, Contempt
39. [Chris] Marker, La Jetée
40. Conner, Crossroads
41. Fassbinder, Chinese Roulette
42. Renoir, La Grande Illusion
43. [Max] Ophüls, The Earrings of Madame de …
44. [Iosif] Kheifits, The Lady with the Little Dog
45. Godard, Les Carabiniers
46. Bresson, Lancelot du Lac
47. Ford, The Searchers
48. Bertolucci, Prima della Rivoluzione
49. Pasolini, Teorema
50. [Leontine] Sagan, Mädchen in Uniform

“She was wrong,” Brody writes of Sontag’s epitaph for her kind of enthusiasm for film. “Cinephilia was there, but, for certain practical reasons, it was relatively quiet. It’s not quiet anymore, and great, distinctive movies were issuing from around the world.” As ever, “the narrative of nostalgia for a lost golden age is really one of the writer’s own nostalgia for youth” — but in her youth as well as afterward, Sontag saw some astonishing movies indeed.

Find a wide range of avant-garde films in our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.

via The New Yorker

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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, Asia, film, literature, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on his brand new Facebook page.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

Watch Jean Genet’s Only Film, the Censored A Song of Love (1950)

in Film, Literature | December 3rd, 2013

Petty criminal, outlaw writer, political radical, gay icon—the name Jean Genet means many things to many people, but filmmaker isn’t usually one of them. Yet Genet did direct a short film, A Song of Love (Un chant d’amour), in 1950. Silent and shot in grainy black and white, the film presents a passionate relationship between inmates, separated from each other by the prison walls. The prisoners express their estranged desire for each other in increasingly sensual ways until the frame is filled with writhing bodies. All the while, a lone guard watches, menacing and jealous.

Despite the fact that the film was banned for many years, and that Genet himself disowned it, it’s a foundational work for later gay filmmakers, from Andy Warhol to the early Derek Jarman, whose first feature Sebastiane (1976) surely owes a debt to A Song of Love. Genet’s choice of setting is no mere autobiographical detail; the previous year he faced a life sentence after his tenth conviction, and was only saved by the intervention of his respected supporters Jean-Paul Sartre, Pablo Picasso, and Jean Cocteau, who petitioned the president on his behalf. It’s possible to read A Song of Love in many ways, but it’s hard not to see it at least as Genet’s projection of the frustrated (yet hothouse) sexual tension he would know if incarcerated for the rest of his days.

Of course Genet began his writing career in prison, drafting his first novel, the pulpy yet profoundly lyrical Our Lady of the Flowers, while serving out a sentence in the early forties. Genet’s erotically charged, some might say decadent, fiction worked to reclaim and revalue his identity as a homosexual, social outcast, and criminal. In his autobiographical novel, The Thief’s Journal, written in 1949 while his fate was being decided, Genet defined himself thus:

Limited by the world, which I oppose, jagged by it, I shall be all the more handsome and sparkling as the angles which wound me and give me shape are more acute and the jagging more cruel.

The quote could almost serve as an epigraph for Genet’s only film, which, writes Fernando Croce, draws its “presiding image… of flesh against stone” from The Thief’s Journal. It’s an image Croce interprets as “metaphor for society-enforced division imposed on gay men, and also of the need for connection which encompasses all human existence.” Like all Genet’s work, A Song of Love takes pleasure from pain and finds arresting intimacy and unabashedly liberating sexual fulfillment in the Parisian sewers, garrets, and jails.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 8 ) |

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

in Film, Literature | December 3rd, 2013

Ray Bradbury, unlike many novelists who choose to reside in Southern California, didn’t support his fiction-writing career by taking screenplay work. With the likes of The Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451 to his name, he didn’t need to, not that it stopped him from adapting certain stories of his own for television and the movies. Only once did the prolific Bradbury undertake to write a screenplay based upon a book he didn’t write. But oh, what a book: Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, turned into the John Huston-directed 1956 film of almost the same name. Though ultimately stormy — working with Huston, even in the best of times and for the brightest of writers, tended to become an ordeal — the collaboration began auspiciously, with the writer an avowed fan of the filmmaker, and the filmmaker an avowed fan of the writer. Yet neither, ironically, had much time for the Melville novel to which they had dedicated their efforts.

“Have you tried to read that novel?” Bradbury asks his audience in the clip just above. “Oh my god! John Huston didn’t know any more about it than I did. He wanted to play Ahab. Give him a harpoon, and he would’ve done it.” Working on the script in Ireland, Bradbury spent “eight long months of agonizing work, subconscious work,” all of which prepared him for the next decisive moment in this particular writing process: “I got out of bed one morning in London, looked in the mirror, and said, ‘I am Herman Melville!’ I sat down at the typewriter, and in eight hours of passionate, red-hot writing, I finished the screenplay of Moby Dick, and I ran across London, I threw the script in John Huston’s lap, and said, ‘There! It’s done!’ He read it and said, ‘My god, what happened?’ I said, ‘Behold: Herman Melville.’ ”

You can now read the fruits of this act of artistic channeling in a new edition from Subterranean Press featuring an essay by William Touponce, director of the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. Cinephilia and Beyond has more, including a link to a PDF of Bradbury’s original final script.

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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, Asia, film, literature, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on his brand new Facebook page.

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A Young Jean-Luc Godard Picks the 10 Best American Films Ever Made (1963)

in Film | December 2nd, 2013

Creative Commons image by Gary Stevens

Like most of the Nouvelle Vague directors who remain interesting today, Jean-Luc Godard has played the role of film critic as often as he has the role of film director. While his cinematic compatriot François Truffaut got his start reviewing movies before he decided to make them, Godard never quite underwent the full conversion; his nonfiction works for the screen include the four-and-a-half-hour Histoire(s) du cinéma, a thoroughly idiosyncratic take on exactly the subject you would think it covers, and even most of his feature films turn back on their medium and “interrogate” it — to use, I suppose, an academic term fallen slightly out of fashion. Then agan, Godard himself has also gone somewhat out of style, not that it drains any of the fascination out of his filmography, and certainly not that it makes his opinons less relevant to fellow cinephiles.

You’ll find a collection of these Godardian judgments in the back pages of Cahiers du cinema, the journal that bred the lion’s share of these French New-Wave critics-turned-filmmakers. On a page of critics’ favorites lists maintained by a certain Eric C. Jonshson, you’ll find Godard’s top-ten rankings, as published by Cahiers du cinema for the years 1956 through 1965.

While he does use these lists to give the occasional (and well-deserved) prop to a colleague — Jean-Pierre Melville’s Deux Hommes dans Manhattan, Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima, mon amour, Truffaut’s Les Quatres cent coups, Claude Chabrol’s Les Cousins, and Agnes Varda’s Du cote de la Cote come in for honors in 1959 alone — he also pays his respects to the stolid virtues of American filmmaking, especially of the sensational variety: Orson Welles’ Mr. Arkadin (#1, 1956), Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (#8, 1960), Samuel Fuller’s Schock Corridor (#5, 1965.) He even put together a list of the Ten Best American Sound Films, which runs as follows:

Scarface (Howard Hawks)
The Great Dictator (Charles Chaplin)
Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock)
The Searchers (John Ford)
Singin’ in the Rain (Kelly-Donen)
The Lady from Shanghai (Orson Welles)
Bigger Than Life (Nicholas Ray)
Angel Face (Otto Preminger)
To Be or Not To Be (Ernst Lubitsch)
Dishonored (Josef von Sternberg)

I’ve often thought that it takes someone foreign to most clearly view America, and by the same token, it probably takes an outsider to most clearly view mainstream cinema. In this list, Godard characteristically provides both angles at once.

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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on cities, Asia, film, literature, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on his brand new Facebook page.

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Sergei Eisenstein’s Seminal Battleship Potemkin Gets a Soundtrack by Pet Shop Boys

in Film, Music | December 1st, 2013

Like many philistines, my familiarity with Sergei Eisenstein’s silent masterpiece, Battleship Potemkin—hailed by Cracked magazine as the “longest 70 minutes of communist propaganda every first year film school student will ever be forced to watch” —was largely limited to parodies of and homages to its famous “Odessa Steps” sequence.

The original scene is absolutely horrifying. There’s a reason this silent film never gets projected on the back walls of pizza parlors for the entertainment of waiting customers. I can also see why it has spooked various governments. The dramatic trampling of children and shooting of young mothers and old ladies definitely could spur citizens to action. (It’s important to note here that the famous scene is not a factual retelling. Eisenstein, the father of montage, combined a number of incidents, setting them in such a memorable location that this massacre easily passes for a matter of historic record.)

This 1920s clip features a score borrowed from Shostakovich. What might be the effect with a soundtrack supplied by the electronic duo Pet Shop Boys? (Can’t wait to find out? Click here.)

I’m not kidding. In 2004, London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts invited bandmates Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe to compose a new score to be performed with Dresdner Sinfoniker at a screening in Trafalgar Square. To no one’s surprise, they went with an electro-prog sound. What would the filmmaker, who died in 1948, have made of that?

In order to make an educated guess, let’s turn to critic and film historian Roger Ebert, who attended a more modest screening in Three Oaks, Michigan, featuring a live, original soundtrack by local band Concrete. (Who knew composing music for this near 90-year-old film would turn out to be such a thing?) Ebert approved of Concrete’s use of “keyboards, half-heard snatches of speech, cries and choral passages, percussion, martial airs and found sounds… played loud, by musicians who saw themselves as Eisenstein’s collaborators, not his meek accompanists.”

We may not be able to scare up further documentation of Concrete’s work, but you can view the film in its entirety with its Pet Shop Boys score. Their soundtrack is also available for purchase by those who would listen to it on its own merits.

You can find the original Battleship Potemkin here or in our collection of 600 Free Movies Online. And if you’re interested in another remix of a silent classic, please see The Pixies’ Black Francis Creates a Soundtrack for the Famous German Expressionist Film, The Golem

via Metafilter

The Power of Silent Movies, with The Artist Director Michel Hazanavicius

Ayun Halliday’s most recent book is Peanut, a graphic novel about a girl who fakes a peanut allergy. @AyunHalliday

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Watch the Rolling Stones Write “Sympathy for the Devil”: Scenes from Jean-Luc Godard’s ’68 Film One Plus One

in Film, Music | November 30th, 2013

After the Rolling Stones’ partly misguided, partly inspired attempt at psychedelia, Their Satanic Majesties Request, the band found its footing again in the familiar territory of the Delta Blues. But with the 1968 recording of Beggar’s Banquet, they also retained some of the previous album’s experimentation, taken in a more sinister direction on the infamous “Sympathy for the Devil.” In the studio, with the band during those recording sessions, was none other than radical French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard, who brought his own experimental sensibilities to a project he would call One Plus One, a document of the Stones’ late sixties incarnation—including an increasingly reclusive Brian Jones. Godard punctuates the fascinating studio scenes of the Stones with what Andrew Hussey of The Guardian calls “a series of set pieces—an incoherent stew of Situationism and other Sixties stuff”:

Black Panthers in a disused car park execute white virgins; a bookseller reads aloud from Mein Kampf to Maoist hippies; in the final scene the bloodied corpse of a female urban guerrilla is raised to the Stones’ soundtrack as Godard himself darts about like a demented Jacques Tati waving Red and Black flags. You just don’t find this sort of thing at the local multiplex anymore.

For all of its heavy use of leftist Sixties iconography, its anarchic attempt to fuse “art, power and revolution,” and its fascinating portraiture of rock and roll genius at work, the film crash landed in France, earning the contempt of arch Situationist theorist Guy Debord, who called it “the work of cretins.”

Critics and audiences apparently expected more from Godard in the wake of the abortive May ‘68 student uprising in Paris, and the general neglect of the film meant that Godard missed his chance to, as he put it, “subvert, ruin and destroy all civilised values.”

The film’s producer, Iain Quarrier, also found it disappointing. Without the director’s permission, Quarrier decided to retitle One Plus One with the more commercially-minded Sympathy for the Devil and tack a completed version of that song to the last reel, a move that provoked Godard to punch Quarrier in the face. But not everyone found Godard’s effort off-putting. In a 1970 review, the New York Times’ Roger Greenspun called it “heavily didactic, even instructional…. [T]he prospective text of some ultimate, infinitely complex collectivism.” Greenspun also decried Quarrier’s unauthorized interventions.

In his retrospective take, Andrew Hussey admits that Godard’s political posturing is “bollocks,” but then concludes that One Plus One is “great stuff: a snapshot of a far-off, lost world where rock music is still a redemptive and revolutionary force.” And it’s both—ridiculous and sublime, a powerful crystallization of a moment in time when all the Western world seemed poised to crack open and release something strange and new. Watch the trailer and scenes from Godard’s film above. You can also pick up a copy of the 2018 restoration of the film here.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 26 ) |

“Soda/Pop/Coke,” A Creative Visual Remix of Harvard’s Famous 2003 Survey of American Dialects

in Education, English Language, Film, Harvard | November 27th, 2013

Tomorrow, friends and relatives from far-flung corners of the country will gather as they do this time each year—stuff themselves silly, trim Christmas trees, watch football, online shop, etc. And depending on how far-flung those assembled are, there may be in certain homes some clandestine chuckling over a certain guest’s request for “pop” instead of soda, or the other way around, or some other funny way of saying things. Because in this gargantuan expanse we call the United States, we’ve got a wealth of regional variants—some differences subtle, some quite noticeable (though without necessarily the degree of socioeconomic baggage as the UK, I’m convinced).

I recall, for instance, moving to New York City over a decade ago and grappling for the next several years with New Yorkers’ insistence on saying “standing on line” instead of “in line.” As “online” acquired an entirely new meaning, this linguistic oddity took on an even more confusing dimension for outsiders. And having grown up hearing the second person plural as roughly half “you guy”s and half “y’all,”s I’ve been amused by the New York “youse.” As we learn from The Atlantic’s “Soda/Pop/Coke” above, these differences in wording correspond to regional differences in pronunciation of words like “bag,” “pecan,” and “coupon.”

Informing us that “at least 10 distinct dialects of English are spoken in the United States,” “Soda/Pop/Coke” draws on the 2003 Harvard Dialect Survey, conducted by linguist Bert Vaux. As the film’s interviewers ask callers Vaux’s survey questions, their regional affiliations appear graphically on a map of the continental United States, based on graduate student Joshua Katz’s heat mapping of Vaux’s work. You can see the more than one hundred variants Vaux’s survey measures here, and The Atlantic points us to U Penn’s dense (and specialized) National Map of the Regional Dialects of American English. It’s a complicated and rarefied science, linguistics, but we’re all at least amateur sociologists of language (sometimes bad ones) as we sort and size each other up—or completely mishear each other—based on completely unconscious choices in wording and pronunciation.

via Kottke

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Ingmar Bergman Names the 11 Films He Liked Above All Others (1994)

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

Watch Jean Genet’s Only Film, the Censored A Song of Love (1950)

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

A Young Jean-Luc Godard Picks the 10 Best American Films Ever Made (1963)

Sergei Eisenstein’s Seminal Battleship Potemkin Gets a Soundtrack by Pet Shop Boys

Watch the Rolling Stones Write “Sympathy for the Devil”: Scenes from Jean-Luc Godard’s ’68 Film One Plus One

“Soda/Pop/Coke,” A Creative Visual Remix of Harvard’s Famous 2003 Survey of American Dialects

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