A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
A film blog by Allan Berg Nielsen & Tue Steen Müller
The never ending discussion of what is a documentary… Do you remember the story about the good old direct cinema icons (Leacock, Maysles, Drew, Pennebaker…) were sitting together on the first row at a festival, where Werner Herzog “attacked” them…
In “Spoon” (2019) and “Homes” (2021) Latvian director Laila Pakalniņa worked with cinematographer Gints Bērziņš, a collaboration that continued with “Termini”, that is as the previous films formally interesting due very much to the work of Bērziņš following the ideas…
IT’S NOW OR NEVER OG HOW TO INVENT REALITY (1996) Når Jon Bang Carlsen i It’s Now or Never lader de medvirkende i Vestirland spille løs, ikke deres egne liv, men digtede liv, ikke i deres egne huse, men i…
Lovely to have a correspondent who was at the celebration of legendary master of Latvian documentary Ivars Seleckis at his Birthday feast and the premiere of “To be Continued. Teenhood”. I wrote words to Ivars here In that text…
90 minutes at the Nordisk Panorama yesterday afternoon. With a great filmmaker, Swedish Göran Hugo Olsson, who together with Cecilia Lidin gave the audience an excellent introduction to his working method, and who characterised himself as a documentarian of existing…
Dear Ivars. Paldies for your extraordinary life-long documentary work and congratulations on this birthday! If anyone, you have introduced me to your country, its history and culture and its citizens, in all ages. Much appreciated that you with “To Be…
The film of one of the world’s most significant documentary filmmakers, Nicolas Philibert, screened at the Berlin Film Festival as a distinctive, masterfully made, auteur documentary. Nénette is a charming orangutan, an unusual and irresistible being. She is the oldest…
I take the opportunity to copy paste – again – a text from FilmNewEurope of yesterday, written by Alexander Gabelia about a Latvian director, whose documentary carreer I have been following for decades: Dāvis Sīmanis. here iot goes: RIGA: The…
MajorDocs 2024 focuses on cinematography with Nicolas Philibert as guest of honor Palma – With just three months to go before the start of its sixth edition, the MajorDocs festival is beginning to reveal some of the ingredients of its…
Af Tue Steen Müller, tidl. filmkonsulent ved Statens Filmcentral Børnelivet På gulvet i børnehaven ved Sankt Hans Torv sidder instruktøren, den pædagoguddannede Lise Roos. ”I de næste to uger fjerner vi legetøjet, men I kan jo stadig tegne og male og…
Eyal Sivan is a documentary filmmaker, theoretician, and lecturer, renowned for his uncompromising political stances and for using cinema as a tool to question and review dominant narratives of the past and present. A noteworthy figure among politically engaged filmmakers,…
The International Documentary Film Festival of Barcelona, DocsBarcelona, will pay tribute to the french filmmaking couple Raymond Depardon and Claudine Nougaret during its upcoming edition, which will take place from May 2 to May 12, 2024. The award recognizes Depardon’s…
Filminstituttet inviterer alle interesserede til reception og fejring af Lea Glob, når hun modtager dette års Dreyer Prisen. Lea Glob er uddannet dokumentarfilminstruktør fra Den Danske Filmskole i 2011. Hun blev Robert-nomineret for afgangsfilmen ‘Mødet med min far Kasper Højhat’…
Of course the best is to meet face to face onsite but I have got used to online meetings via zoom. To say good morning “how are you” or “where are you”. I prefer the mornings and I also like…
Every day of the Christmas/New Year holidays, my wife and I enjoy a wonderful book “Solisterne” by Joakim Garff, where the author brings our Danish literary heroes, Søren Kierkegaard and Hans Christian Andersen together on a trip down Europe with…
Retrospective and masterclass with one of the absolute masters of Cinema today, Portuguese Pedro Costa, at the legendary Festival dei Popoli that starts in two days. The festival site has this introduction to Costa: “To go back on Pedro Costa’s…
In 2007 Marc Isaacs made ”All White in Barking”, in 2020 “The Filmmaker’s House” and now “This Blessed Plot”. You should know, when reading this article that I am a big admirer of Isaacs having seen, loved and written about…
It was one of those moments he has called “The Authentic Now”, Danish editor Niels Pagh Andersen. In the Docudays online seminar the other day with Andersen and Dana Bunescu. The latter showed clips from the masterpiece she did with…
”Most of what follows is true, but reality and dreams are like conjoined twins, if one dies both will perish”, a text from, who else, Danish master Jon Bang Carlsen, a text he could have used already almost 50 years…
One of my Russian friends wrote this to me not long ago: “A few days ago…Two women and their five children aged 7 to 11 were detained at the Ukrainian Embassy in Moscow yesterday. The children drew a poster “No…
The courage to address the world with ambiguity never stooping to easy answers, can also be attributed to the Russian filmmaker, Victor Kossakovsky, who never tires of reminding us that film is an emotionally charged medium, and even when it…
… a major threat for freedom, a major threat for cinema Is the headline for at text I received from filmmaker Avi Mograbi, who wants readers/filmmakers outside Israel to know about a proposal put forward by the Minister of Culture…
… fra Statens Kunstfond – ”Hædersydelser fra Statens Kunstfond er livsvarige og kan tildeles kunstnere, der har en sådan kunstnerisk produktion bag sig, at de har placeret sig afgørende som kunstner.” Og det kan man da vist godt sige at…
… and the euphoric discovery of “direct cinema” (you will never make me say “cinema verité”) and on the crew’s day off, I photographed a story I didn’t completely understand. (Chris Marker) JUXTAPOSITIONEN I et interview med Chris Marker…
– tekster om film og liv, … redigeret og med forord af Lars Movin, som I 2012 skrev en monografi om instruktøren: “Jeg ville først finde sandheden”. Den fik 6 penne, det højest opnåelige på dette sted med disse ord:…
Det er en bog. Det er en film. Det er nat. (Marguerite Duras: Elskeren fra Nordkina, 1991/2012) Lars Johansson er den anden af de to fotografer (den første som jeg har skrevet om i forgårs er Finn Larsen) med udstillingen…
En handling, en facade, et beboelsesrum, et ansigt – hver af disse er altid en opsummering. (Sune Jonsson: “Ni funderinger over 1/125-delen”, 1978) Finn Larsen er den ene af de to fotografer (den anden er Lars Johansson) med udstillingen i Øksnehallen,…
… ønsker vi her fra Filmkommentaren. Vi gør det med et af vores yndlingsportrætter af dig, det er godt nok dit, fra din blog, men vi tilegner os det lige, for det er et af de mest inspirerende, et af…
Always provoking, always exaggerating as part of the provocation, and yet there is always some truth in what he says – Peter Greenaway, this time as part of his getting a BAFTA recognition for his work at an event in…
”… Mograbi is exactly as his films are: tense, sometimes comic, but always dealing with the embarrassing reality of the country he lives in. A frustrated artist, as he says himself, who wants to move something, raise a debate in…
Som alle andre har vi her på Filmkommentaren meget længe været optaget af Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Look of Silence og den tidligere The Act of Killing. Jeg har samlet det meste af det vi skrevet om de to film her:…
Always with a camera at hand, be it to catch a moment in life… THE JEWISH STREET (1992) by Allan Berg Nielsen The camera from high above shows me Riga. The city set in its landscape. I’m drawn…
… it becomes indirectly an adaption of Ginsberg’s poem. And at the same time it is a film about Frank’s doubts about filming this. It sounds wild and it is. It is radical and most unique. Avant-garde and uncompromising, not as…
Newsletter from DocAlliance with generous offers to watch films FOR FREE in the month of May. Strong recommendation from me to (re)watch Jørgen Leth and Ole John’s ”66 Scenes from America” (photo: Andy Warhol and Jørgen Leth). This classic was…
”A World of Troubled Beauty…” HEADLINE NY Times brought the most precise headline to an article about the films of Austrian filmmaker Michael Glawogger’s impressive work: A World of Troubled Beauty – referring to his…
“For me documentaries are no more real than fiction and fiction films no more invented than documentaries,” the filmmaker says of his approach, which he consistently developed since graduating from the National Film School of Denmark in the mid-1970s. (TSM)…
One more generous free offer from ”your online documentary cinema”, the vod DocAlliance, starts tomorrow and runs until June 23: 7 films by Nicolas Philibert, who once wrote the following about his method: ”I feel the need to create a…
… Over sådanne særprægede menneskeliv ude i det almindelige liv bygger Sønderby Jepsen i klipperummet ved optagelser han har lavet som fluen på væggen under lange samvær med den medvirkende gennem måneder og år et drama, som skildrer dette hver…
Fulde af trodsalthumør behandler hendes film alvorlige sager og konstruerer verdener, hvor udveje og lyssyn overalt er til stede som konkret iagttaget realitet – og den vamle sentimentalitet og organiserede bedreviden helt ukendte størrelser… Ulla…
Always with a camera at hand, be it to catch a moment in life… THE JEWISH STREET (1992) by Allan Berg Nielsen The camera from high above shows me Riga. The city set in its landscape. I’m drawn…
… Filmen er i stilfærdig blidhed ved sin skildring af himmelnattens poetiske sammenhæng en nænsom trøst. Det skal blive værre i de følgende film, rejsen fortsætter, metoden ligger fast: Opsøge og skildre stedet, spørge de kloge, være nysgerrig, fordomsfri naiv,…
Myterne, legenderne, ritualerne, det er omkring det, jeg ser Stonys hele oeuvre dreje sig: det irrationelle, det uforklarlige, det spirituelle, det som ikke kan og ikke skal forklares. I utallige sammenhænge har jeg som ordstyrer ved filmforevisninger forsøgt at få…
Janus Metz and Lars Skree seek and succeed perfectly, from a humanistic point of view, to bring us into a world that we could not imagine existed in the way it is documented and interpreted here. Even the most horrendous…
To be repeated: You can watch 7 of Jørgen Leth’s films for free on the vod Docalliance (link below), a – too use one of the director’s favourite words – generous offer to film lovers all over to see ”A…
… the Danish director, who has been an inspiration for generations of Danish filmmakers. With Lars von Trier as number one as readers will know from the film”The Five Obstructions”. (Tue Steen Müller) TIL LYKKE MED FØDSELSDAGEN ……
They kiss and embrace. I watch through the window, out in the yard. It’s a ritual. Indeed, it’s love, the terminal behaviour of a marriage in an erotics of thrift. They undress. The camera tracks him. He brushes his teeth.…
Hun er den, som i sine film hele tiden er til stede, stiller sig med kameraet det rigtige sted. Filmer de sarteste, de mest sjældne øjeblikke… DET SIDSTE DØGN (8 min, 2005) Det er meget nøgternt, det her.…
Præsten i Vrensted, Karsten Erbs, havde den torsdag i oktober 2012 inviteret pensionistforeningen og alle ældre til en eftermiddag i præstegården. Han skrev på sin hjemmeeside, at noget særligt havde været på færde: ”Vi havde bagt boller og lavet lagkage.…
Scene efter scene stilles i kø i disciplineret række og forbindes kontrapunktisk med interview- og dialogmateriale, dokumentariske beretninger i løsreven fastholdelse. Det er meningsfuldt i en ganske anden form for filmfortælling end den normale danske tradition; og det er befriende,…
…jeg kan roligt sætte mig ned og fordybe mig i noget af det klogeste, der er lavet på dansk film. Tilsyneladende blot fire kunstnerportrætter. Men nej, de fire film lukker sig op som én sammenhængende tanke om livets omfang og…