Tilde Trampedach Juul: Der hvor lyden kommer fra

Titlen kan læses som et postulat, men den holder, hvad den lover. Filmen søger, men den finder også i sin konstruktion, sin forsøgsopstilling dette sted og handler altså om hvor i hvert fald bestemte lyde, dem sangerne skaber poesi af, kommer fra. Det er klassisk som opskrift, en film finder sit sted og det steds drama og dets nætter og dage bliver filmen, og således her også sanglydens sted.

Det er manden som spørger og kvinden som finder lydens sted i sangerens krop helt ud i neglene og det er kvinden som demonstrerer det, kvinden som er sikker. Tvivlen findes hos ham, kravene er hans, det er ham som stiller reglerne op. To stærke steder i forløbet anklager hun ham for at tale nedad. Selv er hun suveræn, ved hvad hun vil, hvor målet er, hvor stedet er.

Nu ved jeg ikke om der er særlige regler for hvad en afgangsfilm skal indeholde, den er vel ikke kun afgangsprojekt for instruktøren, også for de andre på holdet, fotografen (kameraernes placering, lyssætningen), klipperen (fortællerytmen, her dagens forløb, øvelsesrækkens forløb), komponisten (musikkens lyd i forhold lyddesign og – specielt krævende her – til sangens lyd). Instruktøren har måttet administrere den enkelte medarbejders lyst til i en eksamenssituation at yde noget særligt, vise hele sit repertoire og bøje den ambition ind i sin historie.

Dertil kommer at den historie her er etableret i en flerkameraproduktion, jeg forstår det ikke i traditionel form er en film, men et kunstnerisk mere end journalistisk bud på et tv-program, en reportage godt nok fra en øvedag på den nøgne scene men også en personlig skildring, et portræt af to kendte kunstnere, begge fremragende sangere og performere, som det forudsættes tv-seerne ved noget om i forvejen og ønsker at få mere at vide om, mere end seerne er optaget af filminstruktørens / tilrettelæggerens / det tekniske holds kunstneriske, journalistiske og håndværksmæssige problemstilling. Der er meget at holde styr på, og det lykkes, filmen er helstøbt og fascinerende.

Hertil kommer de to medvirkende sangere og performere som sikkert også har en egen dagsorden, som arbejder med en forestilling, træner, øver sig, afprøver forløb på en scene foran en tom teatersal. De er også, måske i begge virkeligheder to elskende som skal være i balance i forhold til min optagethed. Men er de det? Er kvinden her ikke stærkere end manden, når der vejes af på milligramvægten? Jeg oplever en ubalance som næsten vælter forløbet, eller charmeres jeg blot af hendes udsøgt velskabte fuglekvidder, af hendes udsøgt velskabte sætninger, hvor andre måske charmeres af mandens mere realistisk dagligdags fremtoning, hans instruktør- og erfarne lærerattityde. Det gør mig usikker på om der er tilstrækkeligt stof i manuskriptet eller om der overlades vel meget til de medvirkendes improvisation, og her er hun hurtigst, mest opfindsom og tillige strengest. Hendes strengere krav samler min interesse og sympati.

SYNOPSIS

En mand og en kvinde på rejse der hvor lyden skabes. (Filmskolens program)

”Grundlæggende er det en kærlighedshistorie: Om at se hinanden eller ikke at se hinanden. Om de forestillinger, man kan have om den anden, eller om man bare ser sig selv i den anden. Og så er det en fortælling om to fantastiske mennesker.” (Instruktøren til Ekko)

CREDITS

Instruktør: Tilde Trampedach Juul, medvirkende: Mija Milovich, Michael Rexen, fotograf: Annika Aschberg, klipper: Lars Sigsgaard Berg, tonemester: Stefan Garfield Rasch Holm, production design: Bertan Comert og Bogdan Stamatin, produktion og distribution: Den danske Filmskole.

http://www.filmskolen.dk/presse/afgangsfilm/dokumentar/2015/

Michael Moore, Marlon Brando, Orhan Pamuk

Some name dropping on a tuesday evening, tabloid maybe, but I expect all three films to be of quality… Realscreen anounces today that a new film by Michael Moore is to premiere at the TIFF, the festival in Toronto that runs September 10 to 20. The title is ”Where to Invade Next”, look at the fantastic photo… The article says nothing special about the content, the festival programmer Thom Powers is quoted like this “I can say it is very funny, it’s going to be a real conversation starter. It’s a culmination of lots of ideas that Moore has been working on for several years.”

“Listen to Me Marlon” = Brando is another upcoming film by Stevan Riley, written about in Danish newspaper Politiken today, based on around 300 hours of sound tapes recorded by the actor during decades, said to be a kind of self-psychoanalysis.

Finally I found a link on facebook to Turkish Hürriyet Daily News of today that announces the premiere of a film on Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence at the Venice Film festival (September 2-12). The title of the film is “Innocence of Memories”, director is Grant Gee. Pamuk in the article: “I wrote a 30-minute long original script… The new text tells the love story in the Museum of Innocence book from the eye of a secondary character. I do not tell which character it is now, but will in Venice… The documentary is both about the Museum of Innocence and Istanbul. My other books have also taken place in the documentary,” he said. 

http://realscreen.com/2015/07/28/tiff-15-toronto-bow-for-michael-moores-where-to-invade-next/#ixzz3hDSKSCH6

http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com

DocsBarcelona+Medellin

I have before on this site nominated my colleague at DocsBarcelona Joan Gonzalez as a true documentary pioneer – and he is unstoppable making quality documentaries be seen in Latin America, where he has been since June 28, doing a workshop in Valparaiso Chile, planning to build a festival there, and now he is in Medellin for the DocsBarcelona+Medellin.

A mail came in: He wants to share two news with me:

“First. We have today the Colombian premiere of Life is Sacred, directed by Andreas Dalsgaard, with the protagonist Antanas Mockus in the cinema.

Second. I have the numbers of the people attending the festival  the first 3 days. The festival runs 8 days. The average of people per screening is… 173 people. No mistake. 173!!!!

I think that it will be impossible to remain this numbers until the end of the festival but… We are very very happy!”

… as you can see on the photo. Joan Gonzalez is at the background, the boss of the festival is Juan, first row middle.

The festival, this is the third edition;  runs until July 30 with 22 long international documentaries, 12 national short films, invited directors, master classes and a marathon of interactive documentaries.

http://docsbarcelonamedellin.com/

Peter Bogdanovich Retrospective

The Danish Cinemateket re-opens in August with – as usual – a fine programme, including a retrospective of films by Peter Bogdanovich, mentioned in the post below and in reports from the Amdocs festival in Palm Springs in March. A director and a film historian and the one behind the documentary on John Ford.

Here is – in Danish – the presentation by Cinemateket:

I anledning af den danske premiere på screwball-komedien ’She’s Funny That Way’ fejrer vi veteranen Peter Bogdanovich og præsenterer en stribe værker, der understreger hans store spændvidde og viser udviklingen fra New Hollywood-håb til etableret genrefilmmager. Glæd dig til thrilleren ’Snigskytten’ (1968) på knitrende original celluloid, dramahovedværket ’Sidste forestilling’ (1971) i ny biografkopi, dens opfølger ’Texasville’ (1990) og en stribe glemte perler (’Paper Moon’ (1973), ’Daisy Miller’ (1974) m.fl.), der gerne refererer direkte til den klassiske amerikanske filmhistorie og mastodonter som Hawks, Ford, Lubitsch og Cukor.

Serien (8 film) vises 1. august-29. September

http://www.dfi.dk/Filmhuset/Cinemateket.aspx

Se Merry Doyle: John Ford: Dreaming The Quiet Man

Before I went to Amdocs (American Documentary Film Festival) in Palm Springs end of March this year I would have shaken my head if anyone had said to me that I should revisit some of the films by John Ford. But the presence of Peter Bogdanovich with anecdotes about the old master and the showing of his 1971 classic, now updated (in 2006) documentary, a very fine piece of film history, gave me appetite for ”Searchers”, ”Stagecoach” and so on – all the legendary Monument Valley films.

And now, thanks to an American family member, I have watched the lovely Irish produced work about Ford, making his personal film ”The Quiet Man” full of anecdotes but not only that, also intelligent analyses of scenes, how they were made, the use of colours and how he worked with the leading actors John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara (born 1920), who speaks wonderfully about the tough director and her playing with Wayne, the ”Duke”. Bogdanovich is there, as is Martin Scorcese, who again expresses his passion for film history and calls the film ”a work of art and poetry” at the same time as he claims that the fighting scene in which Wayne kills a man in a boxing match was an inspiration for his ”Raging Bull”

The film takes its viewer to the village Innisfree, where it was shot, to the ruins of a house that Ford’s father left for America, it’s very warm and sweet when locals remember the shooting in the beginning of the 1950’es. And of course there is a small tourist trip to take around the place, a shop and its female owner, quite a character, the pub, which was not a pub at that time but became after the film. Irish culture, enjoyable it is, and informative: John Ford will be on the agenda!

Available on dvd and blueray

Ireland, 2010, 90 mins.

Wojciech Staron: Brothers

This is a sneak preview review of a film that has its premiere beginning af August at the Locarno Film Festival written by an admirer of Polish cinematographer and director Wojciech Staron, an admirer who happily once more (after the films Siberian Lesson and Argentinian Lesson) is totally seduced. Staron proves to me again to be one of few European documentary poets, who believes in the power of the image and sequences without verbal explanation, he dares long scenes, he is a master in composition, he is a Filmmaker who paints with his camera, a visual artist…

… as one of the brothers, Alfons Kulakowski, who is a skilled painter. Alfons is the little brother, Mieczyslaw is some years older. They are both in their 90’es. Alfons is fit, Mieczyslaw is

frail and gets weaker as the film progresses. It’s about the two together, for a whole life, one gets the impression, helping each other in the twilight of their lives. That said, it’s more Alfons who helps his older brother to get around, well also to get dressed in a beautiful scene that follows one, where Mieczyslaw takes his time to put on a sock with the help of equipment from the kitchen. There are many such brilliant moments that serves one purpose: to show the love the brothers have to each other, and the love the director feels for his protagonists.

But there is also a story unfolded in a more classical sense so let me quote the introductory screen text: ”80 years after being exiled in Siberia the brothers Kulakowski decided to return to their homeland Poland to start a new life there.”

That’s about all you get to know up front, from which point you slowly, with the old men, are moved into their minds and piece by piece get hints on how their past lives have passed. In Siberia, but also in Almaty Kazakhstan, which is mentioned later on. That is in general done through cuts that goes from today to the past of 8 and 16 mm archive films shot by Mieczyslaw in which you – in magic sequences – see beautiful women, festive situations, helicopter bringing food to remore areas and you understand that they must have (had) families. And you see archive with Alfons, who paints landscapes, easy to recognise because of his beard that was black at that time.

The film takes the viewer to Brussels where a big exhibition of Alfons work is organised. The long-haired, white-bearded brothers are there, it is very official, they get pretty tired and when home – Oh Noooo – their house had caught a fire and is burnt totally down with all the paintings that we have seen in room after after room. Once again a new life has to begin for the old men…

And it does with Alfons embracing a tree, to find courage to go on. Staron lets them go on in ending scenes full of compassion, making it clear where the point of view of the director is and how he interprets the destinies of brothers in Life. Wow for a film!  

Poland, 2015, 68 mins.

http://www.semainedelacritique.ch/2015/brothers.html

Dokufest Prizren 2015/ 4

… and there are tributes to film and film history at the Dokufest in Prizren. The film star on the photo needs no further introduction, ”Ingrid Bergman, in Her Own Words”, a film that premiered at the Cannes festival this year, made by Stig Björkman, film critic and director, editor of the film magazine Chaplin 1964-72, which was one of my key tools in my film education. Björkman has written books and made films on Ingmar Bergman, Woody Allen and Lars von Trier. About the Ingrid Bergman film:

” Accessing Ingrid Bergman’s diaries and her own private footage, this film gives an inside perspective of one of our most distinguished actors and a woman who always chose her own path. Released in 2015, it marks the centenary of her birth.”

Another pearl in the section ”Films on Film” is ”Cinema: A Public Affair” by Tatiana Brandrup – the description is very appealing:

” A man in Moscow fights for his vision of cinema; he sees it as a way towards a better society. A cinematic journey through the world of Naum Kleiman, one of Russia’s most significant intellectuals alive today. A documentary collage, which combines excerpts from film classics and interviews with a portrait of contemporary Moscow.”

And there are films on Bertolucci, John Ford (of course the one made by Peter Bogdanovich), Raoul Walsh. I watched the two last mentioned Amdocs in Palm Springs – entertaining and informative pieces of film history.

http://dokufest.com/2015/program/films/

”Beyond the Fear” in Jerusalem/ 6

One more addition to the slate of posts on the premiere of ”Beyond the Fear” by Herz Frank and Maria Kravchenko, again from the Haaretz and again by Nirit Anderman, who wrote a competent review of the film.

This time Anderman launches the story that world famous director Herz Frank was a legend in the documentary community, ”but not in Israel”, where he lived from 1993. Anderman outlines his film carreer in broad terms (should however have mentioned the for many forgotten masterpiece ”235.000.000” that he made with Uldis Brauns) and declares that ”Beyond the Fear” is ”a natural continuation of his former work”, that is described like this “a curiosity to understand the human soul in a non-judgemental way, a readiness to expose himself to an audience and a strict maintenance of the visual language and quality filmmaking were always the cornerstones of Herz Frank’s movies.”

The article of course refers to the debate about the film in Israel and there is a critique expressed, that “the film’s producers kept their movie close to their chests in recent weeks, not showing it to anyone, refusing to let us see it in preparation for this story. The inevitable result was that the endless discussions around it often missed the truth…”

And it has some clever words from influential director Nurit Kedar, who was part of the team that recommended adding the movie to the Jerusalem Film Festival’s competition. “Frank accompanied her (Larissa, who married Amir, ed.) for a long period, perhaps six or seven years, trying to establish why she fell in love with him, how it happened. I didn’t feel any sympathy towards Amir while watching the film. All his images are known from media stories, and the only new thing is his voice during the conversations with his son.”

http://www.haaretz.com/life/movies-television/.premium-1.666722?utm_campaign=Echobox&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook

Dokufest Prizren 2015/ 3

 

 

 

 

 

 

Teddy Grouya, festival leader of Amdocs, the American Documentary Film Festival in Palm Springs, teamed up with Dokufest leader Veton Nurkollari and voilá a collaboration exists, where ”Amdocs at Dokufest” is one of the 15 interesting special programmes at the upcoming (starts August 8) festival in Prizren. With ”Dokufest at Amdocs” to be made in Palm Springs next year.

Amdocs presents 8 films in Prizren, let me put some words on the three that I saw in Palm Springs: Khinmay Lwin van der Mee’s ”Nigga Theory”, 21 mins. long about Jody David Armour (photo), who is a university professor, a writer and activist, a charismatic man, who talks so well and precise about the good black man and the bad black man judged very often by their looks. When I looked like Obama everyone accepted me, now with my Afro-American look, I sense suspicion around me, he says.

Another one to be warmly recommended is Esther Julie-Anne’s ”Out of Love”, about the father of the director, who is trying to find out why he married and divorced 5 times – about which I wrote back in March in Palm Springs: ”It is not easy to make a personal film – when does the private become interesting and thought-provoking for the rest of us? It needs cinematic skills and a good story and strong characters. This film covers all three elements.”

And the Hussin Brothers (Noah and Timothy) ”America Recycled”, an impressive film about another America, a road movie but even if ” It’s not the first time we are taken on the road in America and of course you think of Jack Kerouac and the Route 66 films. But it must be the first time that we are invited to experience a bicycle road movie!”

http://dokufest.com/2015/program/

Dokufest Prizren 2015/ 2

Yesterday the Dokufest festival in Prizren, Kosovo announced its programme for the festival that runs August 8-16. It is inviting and extremely well edited and both timely in its connection to the world we live in with MIGRATION as main theme and to the art of documentaries and short films. We have already written about the Albert Maysles retrospective and the music documentary selection by Pamela Cohn – now it’s all there…The press release gives a fine overview, we will come back with elements of the slate as the festival calls it. So here it is in a full version:  

Prizren, 20 July 2015 – DokuFest announced today its full slate of films for the 2015 festival, which runs from August 8 – 16 in the city of Prizren, Kosovo. Culled from a record number of over 3.000 submissions, festival will showcase a fine selection of 228 films from 43 countries across 6 competitive sections and more than a dozen specially curated programs.

Migration is central theme of the festival this year and its global, as

well as local social context and consequences, will be highlighted and explored through a number of events, including panels and discussions with filmmakers and invited international and local experts. A hand picked film program focusing on the issue of migration has been created and inimitable Bafta winning filmmaker Daniel Mulloy has created yet another striking visual campaign to match with this year’s theme.

Competitions are at the heart of the festival and this year’s selection brings some of the finest work of non-fiction cinema, as well as a great array of short fictions and experimental cinema to charming city of Prizren and its, now celebrated outdoor cinemas, to which we proudly announce the 5th installment, the Dream Cinema.

DokuFest is also very proud to be able to present record number of films made in Albanian, both by filmmakers living and working in Kosovo and Albania, but also abroad. Nearly a dozen short documentaries under the banner of DokuFest have also been produced and will be shown at the festival. But it is not in numbers as much as it is in their quality that we are proud of.

Festival will pay tribute to one the world’s greatest filmmaker Albert Maysles, with the screening of six of his films, including landmark films such as Gimme Shelter and Grey Gardens as well as his last two films, Iris and In Transit. Albert Maysles, who died earlier this year, aged 88, together with his brother David, redefined documentary filmmaking, and influenced a generation of filmmakers with their ability to capture reality as it was unfolding.

View From The World, non-competitive section of the festival will once again bring some of biggest films of the year, including, among others, CITIZENFOUR, winner of Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, The Wolfpack, Sundance sensation and winner of US grand jury prize and The Pearl Button, winner of Best Screenplay at this year’s Berlinale.

This year’s rich and varied program also includes film critic’s Neil Young survey of American independent scene in Uncharted States of America and Pamela Cohn’s now continuous exploration of music documentary landscape, albeit in very different form this year, in Sound of my Soul selection.

Plus a great number of other films to much delight of our audience!

“DokuFest is returning with yet another eclectic programme of films that is sure to amaze, move, question and surprise,” says Veton Nurkollari, Artistic Director of DokuFest. “We are delighted to be able to present works of highest quality, both from emerging filmmakers and masters of the craft, to our growing audience”.

http://dokufest.com/2015/program/