Flaherty NYC Season at Anthology Film Archives

It’s nice when a text is free of conventional promotion clichés, is well written and has an interesting point of view and an inviting programme. As the one below, copy-pasted from the Flaherty Newsletter, with Sukhdev Sandhu (more about him via the link below) as the programmer for a series called “The Infinite Child”, starting Monday Oct. 5 and running every other Monday. Programme details to be found later, check the website of the very active film cultural The Flaherty, that is headed by Danish Anita Reher, with whom I worked for many years at the EDN (European Documentary Network). Actually Anita was the first one employed in August 1996, when it started – I came in one month later. Memories, but back to Flaherty and the fine text: 

To be a child is to be a member of a social minority to which everyone has belonged. And yet, far from this endowing them with hallowed status, children today are increasingly under attack: they are enclosed and spatially squeezed; relentlessly tested at school; targeted by capitalism; patronized as technology-obsessed brats. THE INFINITE CHILD tells a different story: it highlights filmmakers – avant -garde, activist, Direct Cinema legends – who have explored the freedom, defiance, illegibility, inner strength and radicalism of children. These artists – sometimes lyrical, sometimes wonderfully maniacal – not only treat children as experimental spaces and with a tenderness that is lacking in more generic representations; they search for the enduring and liberating spirit of childhood on stage and in institutions such as art schools.

Artists include: Nicolas Philibert, D.A. Pennebaker, Narimane Mari, Redmond Entwhistle, Patricia Holland, Leslie Thornton, Guy Sherwin, Katie Halper, Anna Lucas, John McManus.

 http://flahertyseminar.org

Steve James: Life Itself

”It would be a major lapse to have a documentary that doesn’t contain the full reality. I wouldn’t want to be associated. This is not only your film”, legendary film critic Roger Ebert e-mails to Steve James during his making of the film that carries the title of Ebert’s memoirs and is shot during the last months of his life.

Indeed, the film contains the full reality – in an interview at Indiewire, James says: ” With that first shot you see of him in the present part of the story – I purposedly wanted to use a shot where he’s asleep and you can see through his jaw, through the bandage, and it’s kind of a sobering shot”. It is quite shocking to watch before you get Ebert’s incredible appetite on Life, his work on the MacBook with a voice synthesizer, his conversations with his wife Chaz, his efforts to rehabilitate, on the background of the many operations he has gone through due to his cancer.

James has made a very rich film. It includes the biography of Ebert, his way into film criticism, his loyalty to his newspaper Chicago Sun-Times after he received many attractive offers when  receiving the Pulitzer Prize – with quotes from his book as the narrative backbone and with many interviews with close friends and with filmmakers, who adores him like Scorcese, Morris and Werner Herzog, who with his special accent calls him ”a soldier of Cinema”!

What I enjoyed mostly, however, was the story of the love/hate relationship between the two critics Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel (PHOTO), who ran a tv show together, firstly ”Sneak Preview” and later ”At the Movies”. The clips from the show and the rehearsals are hilarious, Siskel being the one who was part of the jet-set around Hugh Hefner, far away from the social environment of Ebert. The clips show often an Ebert getting more and more irritated over Siskel’s approach and judgements. Wonderful sequences from a tv show that in the beginning was only for Chicago but became a huge success in all USA. Ebert was called a mainstream reviewer (contrary to the intellectual Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris) but the truth is that if anyone he brought non-Hollywood independent films, including documentaries, to the attention of the audience – pleases me, as an example, to see his enthusiasm of the 7Up-series after he had watched the 56Up part at the hospital, if I got it right.

I saw the film on Netflix with Danish subtitles, you can find dvd’s and blueray’s – and IMPORTANT you can read reviews by Ebert (from 1967!) on the website that carries his name, link below.  

USA, 2014, 2 hours

http://www.ebertmovie.com/

http://www.rogerebert.com/

http://www.indiewire.com/article/life-itself-director-steve-james-explains-why-roger-ebert-deserved-a-documentary-20140705

 

 

Cinemateket August-September 2015

Jeg skrev om Helmut Berger, som Luchino Visconti gjorde til stjerne med ”Ludwig”, skuespilleren som blev kaldt for verdens smukkeste mand. Og så åbner jeg det danske Cinematekets katalog for august og september og ser en anden Visconti-skuespiller på forsiden, Alain Delon, som er født i 1935, bliver 80 i november måned! ”Leoparden” (1963, 185 minutter)… dansen med Claudia Cardinale, spillet med Burt Lancaster, et af Viscontis mange mesterværker, for glem ikke også at se ”Rocco og hans brødre” (1961, 177 minutter), hvor han spiller overfor Annie Girardot og med Renato Salvatori i rollen som broren, som går i hundene i norditalienske Milano, hvortil den sicilianske familie er flyttet fra fattigdommen.

… to af 10 film med Delon, to andre der lige skal nævnes er Jean-Pierre Melvilles stilsikre, elegante ”Ekspert i Drab” (1967) og samme instruktørs ”Den røde cirkel” (1970), hvor også stilsikre og elegante Yves Montand deltager i det store kup.

Det er den rene fryd at bladre i Cinematekets indbydende 64 sider store katalog, kuglepennen kommer frem, der bliver sat krydser, diskuteret med den bedre halvdel, vel vidende at vi alligevel ikke får tid til alt det vi gerne vil se eller gense.

For det er hvad kataloget byder på – retrospektive serier (Delon, Bogdanovich, Hasse og Tage, Rifbjerg på film…) og nye film, som aldrig vil kunne ses i biograferne. Lad mig nævne ”Arabian Nights”, som udover den berømmede dokumentarfilm ”The Square” af Jehane Noujaim (2013) også viser ”Mother of the Unborn” (2014) af ægyptiske Nadine Salib, som fik en Jury Special Award i First Appearance afdelingen ved IDFA 2014. Jeg havde fornøjelsen at være en af hendes konsulenter ved en workshop i Cairo for et par år siden, hun brændte for sin film, som hun i et interview i forbindelse med IDFA beskrev således:

“I was intrigued by the Egyptian ancient tradition of naming infertile women ‘Mother of the Unborn’, or ‘Um Ghayeb’ in Arabic,..
I’d heard this term used a lot in Upper Egypt and decided to investigate the issue. These women are often stigmatised, even sometimes accused of bringing bad luck.I wanted to make a film about the Mother of the Unborn, but I didn’t exactly know what it would be about. Deep in me, I wanted to meditate on why it was so important for the women in the region to have a baby and why the women in the region were so keen to carry on living in such a harsh environment.”

Og for at blive i regionen… I går havde vi besøg af min kones bror, som bor i New York og spurgte ham om han havde set nogle gode film for nylig. Han nævnte en palæstinensisk film fra Vestbredden om 18 køer, som de israelske myndigheder havde fundet farlige for sikkerheden… og voilá, her er den i kataloget i forbindelse med Salaam Filmfestival, ”The Wanted 18” er titlen og instruktøren Amer Shomali er til stede ved forevisningen af filmen, som svogeren fandt morsom og flot lavet.

Jeg kunne blive ved – foreløbig har vi booket os ind til Richard Linklaters Before-trilogi, et marathon-arrangement med pauser og middag. Og de gratis børnefilm, vi kommer med den fire-årige! Han kalder det for ”Bedstes Biograf”.

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

 

 

Listen to Me Marlon/ Reviews

The film opened theatrically in New York, but had its premiere beginning of this year at the Sundance Festival. Reviews below, click and get them in full length. Many superlatives but if you read the full review from NY Times, you will find several reservations made. Anyway, looking fwd to watch this one about (one of?) the greatest screen actors, a story more or less told by himself through the sound tapes he recorded.

Sure to hold surprises for even those obsessives whove absorbed every Brando performance and factoid.

Dennis Harvey·Variety

It’s a blast to hear Marlon Brando talking about his life in “Listen to Me Marlon,” which is almost entirely narrated by the actor, largely through snippets of audio recordings he made over decades.

Manohla Dargis·New York Times

The man himself is endlessly fascinating, so it’s hard to fault a movie that ditches anything extraneous (especially talking-head testimonials) in order to let him tell his own story in his own words.

Mike D’Angelo·A.V. Club

Although movies about celebrities are often fatuous and superfluous, that’s anything but the case with Stevan Riley’s “Listen to Me Marlon.”

Joe Morgenstern·Wall Street Journal

Stevan Riley’s Listen to Me Marlon is the greatest, most searching documentary of an actor ever put on film, and it’s no coincidence that it’s about film’s greatest and most searching actor.

David Edelstein·Vulture

It’s as if Marlon Brando knew someday someone would go through the tape archive to try to discover what made him tick.

Jordan Hoffman·New York Daily News

Photo from ”A Streetcar Named Desire”, Elia Kazan, 1951.

Wiseman, Janis Joplin, Helmut Berger

To continue some name dropping after receiving today’s realscreen newsletter that announces ”the slate of docs” to be screened at the Venice International Film Festival, edition 72nd!

World class name Frederick Wiseman presents ”In Jackson Heights”, which was pitched at the Hot Docs accompanied by a Kickstarter campaign! Amy Berg has made a film on ”Janis” (photo) – oh when will I run into that!

And I discover that Austrian Andreas Horvath has made a film on Helmut Berger, 71 years old, once called the most beautiful man in the world, whose career is closely connected to the master, the fantastic director Luchino Visconti, especially with the film ”Ludwig” from 1972, 4 hours long, a film that I saw with my friend Kjell Væring in a cinema on Champs Elysées. We went back to Copenhagen and wrote an enthusiastic article to the Danish newspaper Politiken… memories.

Apart from the three mentioned there are documentaries by Gianfranco Pannone, by Sergei Loznitsa and one on Brian de Palma – the festival runs September 2 to 12.

http://realscreen.com

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.