cinearchive-blog

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Anti-100 Years of Cinema Manifesto by Jonas Mekas

As you well know it was God who created this Earth and everything on it.  And he thought it was all great.  All painters and poets and musicians sang and celebrated the creation and that was all OK.  But not for real.  Something was missing.  So about 100 years ago God decided to create the motion picture camera.  And he did so.  And then he created a filmmaker and said, “Now here is an instrument called the motion picture camera.  Go and film and celebrate the beauty of the creation and the dreams of human spirit, and have fun with it.” But the devil did not like that.  So he placed a money bag in front of the camera and said to the filmmakers, ‘Why do you want to celebrate the beauty of the world and the spirit of it if you can make money with this instrument?”  And, believe it or not, all the filmmakers ran after the money bag.  The Lord realized he had made a mistake.  So, some 25 years later, to correct his mistake, God created independent avant-garde filmmakers and said, “Here is the camera.  Take it and go into the world and sing the beauty of all creation, and have fun with it.  But you will have a difficult time doing it, and you will never make any money with this instrument.” Thus spoke the Lord to Viking Eggeling, Germaine Dulac, Jean Epstein, Fernand Leger, Dmitri Kirsanoff, Marcel Duchamp, Hans Richter, Luis Bunuel, Man Ray, Cavalcanti, Jean Cocteau, and Maya Deren, and Sidney Peterson, and Kenneth Anger, Gregory Markopoulos, Stan Brakhage, Marie Menken, Bruce Baillie, Francis Lee, Harry Smith and Jack Smith and Ken Jacobs, Ernie Gehr, Ron Rice, Michael Snow, Joseph Cornell, Peter Kubelka, Hollis Frampton and Barbara Rubin, Paul Sharits, Robert Beavers, Christopher McLaine, and Kurt Kren, Robert Breer, Dore O, Isidore Isou, Antonio De Bernardi, Maurice Lemaitre, and Bruce Conner, and Klaus Wyborny, Boris Lehman, Bruce Elder, Taka Iimura, Abigail Child, Andrew Noren and too many others.  Many others all over the world.  And they took their Bolexs and their little 8mm and Super 8 cameras and began filming the beauty of this world, and the complex adventures of the human spirit, and they're having great fun doing it.  And the films bring no money and do not do what's called useful. And the museums all over the world are celebrating the one-hundredth anniversary of cinema, costing them millions of dollars the cinema makes, all going gaga about their Hollywoods.  But there is no mention of the avant-garde or the independents of our cinema. I have seen the brochures, the programs of the museums and archives and cinematheques around the world.  But these say, “we don't care about your cinema.”  In the times of bigness, spectaculars, one hundred million dollar movie productions, I want to speak for the small, invisible acts of human spirit: so subtle, so small, that they die when brought out under the Klieg lights.  I want to celebrate the small forms of cinema: the lyrical form, the poem, the watercolor, etude, sketch, portrait, arabesque, and bagatelle, and little 8mm songs.  In the times when everybody wants to succeed and sell, I want to celebrate those who embrace social and daily failure to pursue the invisible, the personal things that bring no money and no bread and make no contemporary history, art history or any other history.  I am for art which we do for each other, as friends. I am standing in the middle of the information highway and laughing, because a butterfly on a little flower somewhere in China just fluttered its wings, and I know that the entire history, culture will drastically change because of that fluttering.  A Super 8mm camera just made a little soft buzz somewhere, somewhere on the lower east side of New York, and the world will never be the same.

The real history of cinema is invisible history: history of friends getting together, doing the thing they love.  For us, the cinema is beginning with every new buzz of the projector, with every new buzz of our cameras.  With every new buzz of our cameras, our hearts jump forward my friends.

(VIA)

[cinearchive-blog]

Imagining tomorrow’s America today, FUTURESTATES is a series of independent mini-features — short narrative films created by established filmmakers and emerging talents transforming today’s complex social issues into visions about what life in America will be like in decades to come.

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Abbas Kiarostami on making "Five Dedicated to Ozu"

Part: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4

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Aki Kaurismaki on Ozu

“I’ve made 11 lousy films, and it’s all your fault.”

Criterion linked to this video yesterday, but it’s well worth dragging out all over again. what makes Kaurismaki’s tribute to Ozu so endearing and eminently watchable is that he not only vocalizes his affection for the Japanese master, but also cinematically expresses Ozu’s impact on his art and worldview… i mean, this little slice of sentimental fun is a Kaurismaki film to the bone, dripping with his dry wit, and it bows to Ozu while reminding us via formal illustration how the great japanese filmmaker contributed to a brand of cinema that is indistinguishably Kaurismaki’s own.

it’ll be curious to see if the epitaph on Kaurismaki’s grave really is  ”I was born, but…” (though i obviously hope we don’t find out for a long time)

[cinearchive-blog]

Storyboard sequence from the shower scene in Psycho (1960)

[cinearchive-blog]

Pepsi Commercial with James Dean, 1950

13th December 1950 -

‘This is the first tv appearance, and the first paid job, of a joung James Dean. Jimmy is the guy who puts the money into the piano/jukebox’

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The Psycho Prelude by Bernard Herrmann

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Psycho music notes by Alfred Hitchcock

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Draft copy of a letter Hitchcock sent to Grace Kelly.

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Handwritten letter from Grace Kelly to Hitchcock.

[cinearchive-blog]

SAUL BASS: TITLE CHAMP

Set to a bebop jazz beat, this documentary brings to life the extraordinary work of graphic designer Saul Bass, whose groundbreaking title sequences for Hitchcock's films transformed the art of movie titles. Through interviews with directors such as Martin Scorsese and Guillermo del Toro, this film reveals why Bass is still considered the medium's greatest artist.

[cinearchive-blog]

criterioncorner:

Short Film: OVERNIGHT (dir. Chris Marker) 2011

90 year-old Chris Marker fashions a brief, droll, and stirring film out of before & after pictures from the recent London riots. 

(via @HeathKillen)

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Stanley Kubrick wrote the following gushing letter of praise in 1960 to the man he considered to be "the greatest film-maker at work today," and who he later cited as a major influence on his work: Ingmar Bergman.

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A telegram received in 1968 by Stanley Kubrick shortly after the release of his cinematic tour de force, 2001: A Space Odyssey; sent to him by fellow filmmaker, Federico Fellini.

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see what movies Akira Kurosawa liked

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Tarkovsky's Polaroids (via)

“In 1977, on my wedding ceremony in Moscow Tarkovsky appeared with a Polaroid camera. He had just shortly discovered this instrument and used it with great pleasure among us. He and Antonioni were my wedding witnesses. According to the custom of the period they had to choose the music played during the signing of the wedding documents. They chose the “Blue Danube”. At that time Antonioni also often used a Polaroid camera. I remember that in the course of a field survey in Usbekistan where we wanted to shoot a film – but finally did not do it – he gave to three elderly Muslims the pictures he had taken of them. The eldest one as soon as he took a glance at the photos, immediately returned them with these words: “What is it good for, to stop the time?” This unusual refusal was so unexpected that it took us by surprise and we could not reply anything.

Tarkovsky thought a lot about the “flight” of time and wanted to do only one thing: to stop it – even if only for a moment, on the pictures of the Polaroid camera.”

Tonino Guerra

[cinearchive-blog]

Eduard Artemiev - Andrey Tarkovsky movies soundtrack

ZERKALO & STALKER Toei Music CD, 199?

Download the soundtrack here