I usually review new films on this blog, but I passed on a chance to see “Pirate Radio” this weekend, and with good reason: “Almost Famous” was barely tolerable, so the idea of “Almost Famous on a Boat” seemed a bit too precious. Whether or not it was that is irrelevant; even moviegoers in its native England stayed away in droves. If a film on such a small budget with such a big cast and such good music can’t make a profit, beware. Besides, I find rock movies in general a bit too hard to swallow as legitimate entertainment.

Anyway, I decided to lay out my first impression of the 2007 American cut of Guy Ritchie’s post-Snatch film “Revolver.” To be delicate, I’ll borrow a phrase from Richard Hammond: “Ambitious but Rubbish.” To be not-so-delicate: It made our heads hurt, and after what seemed like four hours we had to turn it off before they repeated the “formula” for the umpteenth time.

To paraphrase Ian Malcolm, Guy Ritchie seems bent on wielding the concepts and ideas of Kabbalah like a kid who’s found his dad’s gun. It’s fine to borrow religious concepts; Pi did a fine job of it; in only 84 minutes it was able to at least appear profound and mystique-y and dredge up questions. Revolver has no such success, because it doesn’t care if the audience is confused, and seems to relish their confusion Also, the film itself seems to be as confused as we are, so shows us Turkish going through a windshield backwards really slowly. I also don’t see why Guy Ritchie had to make a third film about professional criminals, especially one that was far worse than the other two.

And why did Jason Statham have to narrate this film as well? The whole time it sounded like Snatch with all the good bits removed and replaced with seemingly infinite number of scenes featuring Ray Liotta in various states of undress trying too hard to express his anger and frustration to his unflappable lieutenant, followed by a seemingly infinite number of scenes of Andre 3000 (dressed as…Andre 3000) apparently reading cue cards in monotone, punctuated by variations of “Shut the Fuck up” from Vincent Pastore. Again and again, Turkish tries to get an explanation out of these guys, and hits a wall. So do we. Interest is rapidly lost.

Yeah, there’s a white masculine pillar, feminine black pillar, and the Turkish green pillar in the middle, and chess has 32 pieces, ooooooooooo, so mystical. Too bad it all feels cheap and irrelevant and futile amongst all the horrible acting, longwinded musical interludes, and lack of direction. It feels, empty; hollow; a bunch of overly-styled nothing.

Maybe i just need to give it another watch, as is typical of Ritchie films, but to be frank, I and everyone watching wished we had stopped it a bit sooner, since there was still a half-hour of the stuff left to watch and we were already turned off of it. A rewatch sound like and even bigger waste of time.

I have no doubt Sherlock Holmes will be better (if for no other reason than Downey Jr.,) But after two very good and very watchable crime capers and one absolute stinker, my confidence in Guy Ritchie was definitely shaken. And he was with Madonna, who just looks wierd nowadays. Not so easy on the eyes anymore.

So yeah, I played Russian Roulette with “Revolver” and lost, badly. We had to watch “La Jetee” afterwards just to get the bad taste out of our mouths. Now that’s a movie…and only 28 minutes long.

La Jetée, as defined by Chris Marker, is neither a film, nor video, nor even an essay; instead, its own title sequence defines it as follows: ‘un photo-roman.’

If my limited knowledge of the French language serves me, Marker’s calling La Jetée ‘a picture book.’ Now, it might be my stream of consciousness or my stream of craziness writing this here and now, but whenever I hear picture book, my mind tends to drift towards the fantastic, of worlds decidedly beyond our own and of boundless imagination, the fictional, and in this case the science fictional.

My mind similarly drifts towards and invokes memories of childhood, of the first stories being encountered as those told not by means of reading a given text, but by the oral and visual experience of seeing, first-hand, the story play out in snapshots forwarded by the narration of my father over the book’s images.

And this is precisely where the narrative of La Jetée begins — with a memory, an image, from one’s childhood. A series of still photographs make up a memory, sparse in their continuity but organized so as to function in a linear fashion. Marker’s narrative guides us through the proverbial picture book of the mind’s eye — the fragmented nature of recall, of the own edits we impose perhaps partially selectively and others which disappear into the caverns of our consciousness.

I have long thought that our minds store the minimum amount necessary, only those moments (or images, in this case) necessary to complete the whole. If we were to recall every second of any given memory, surely our process of recall would be overlong and perhaps even mundane, whereas when we think back about an event, moments are encased in sensations that act as descriptors (ie. sight, sound, smell, etc.). Senses bind us to a moment, an instant — senses fill in the gaps of a moment, extend the memory by means of the complexities inherent in each sense; no sense is an instantaneous process, after all.

And perhaps this is what I love best about La Jetée, which is that it illustrates so elegantly how a picture might be worth a thousand words, that even a single image (in contrast to twenty-four frames per second) can be overwhelming in the detail it can communicate in five sustained seconds. It goes without saying that the perfect example of this contrast is held in the single, perfect moment of motion featured in La Jetée, when the woman appears to wake from the science fiction web of memory, the proverbial picture book that Marker has a stranger narrate for us. The image becomes real, a thing which a picture book by all restraints cannot do, except by means of imagination. The viewer either misses it entirely, mistakes it for an illusion or becomes so utterly taken aback that he or she might seize up in disbelief. Movement becomes shocking, alarming, overwhelming even. Either way, the power of a single image is made clear.

So, too, a single image serves as a vortex of sorts — an endless spiral as in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, a mesmerizing abstraction which traps the viewer in time. Or, rather, does looking at the image, engaging in the ferocity of nostalgia place oneself outside of the rings left by dendrochronology at a place on the outskirts of time? Does time spent reminiscing become stored in the same way as that original time does? Is a memory made of recall? Or… is time spent in rueful recollection time not worth remembering; uncollected, uncategorized, unavailable to the conscious mind?

I’ll let you know if I sit down today, tomorrow or a time in the coming years and remember the time that I remembered the time that I remembered the time that I remembered the time that I remembered the time and so on into infinity, when I look back into the picture book of my memories, the snapshots of the significant, those most special of days that deigned to be documented and fall away from time.

11. Julie Andrews might just be one of my favorites ever.  (Favorite what?  Favorite anything.)  The Sound of Music and Mary Poppins are up there in my list of top ten films for sure.

12. Others in my Top Ten Films list include Magic in the Water, Walk Don’t Run, The Iron Giant, 28 Days Later, The Lives of Others, La Jetée, Shallow Grave and Battle Royale.

13. I’m addicted to The Battle of the Berrics, and I’m not even a skateboarder, or know much about skateboarding.

14. My favorite thing about a skateboard video is during a slo-mo sequence, after a skateboarder lands a trick and the crew watching cheers.  In slo-mo audio, it sounds like a herd of dairy cows, or one of those mooing toys, and I like that.

15. I rarely buy into trends, no matter how comfortable they look. I don’t want to go through pictures, years from now, and shudder over what I’m wearing. I’ll be too busy shuddering over how I look weight-wise anyway.

Christopher Marker’s La Jetee is presented below in it’s entire length (broken into 3 parts from YouTube). My two favorite G’s: Gorgeous and Genius. Also, I’m not a big fan a science fiction for the futurists’ pleasure, but I find that when futuristic topics – such as this one – are abstracted to convey simple themes that all humans grapple with, films of these types move more mountains in me than the kid in Dr. Suess’s Oh the Places You’ll Go!

I’ve found two versions on the Internet. The first is probably more conveniant – the entire film in one view with English dubbing. Unfortunately, I feel a lot is lost in the aesthetic value in not hearing the film in its original, French intentions. Somehow, saying “and soon afterward…Paris was blown up…” in English doesn’t emote nearly as much as hearing the same statement in French. The first version does sport much, much better quality visually (and audibly).

The second version is the original format, French with hard (and sometimes nearly impossible) to read English subtitles. Again, I think the French modulation packs more of a dramatic punch – and in some instances I find the whir of the projector almost charming.

In all its Glory: La Jetee

English Version

French Version – w/Subtitles

Part I

Part II

Part III

Today was my first good day of being lived by Fernando.  I’m not sure what it is.  The company?  The light at the end of the tunnel?  Or the inevitable resignation to the week which comes, each week, by Monday?  Anyway, friends, it was good.  Or good enough.

I woke up early, as usual, but had to 1. stay in bed until 10:40 (up late with Jess [P] I didn’t make it to bed until 2:40 last night).  I find when I’m confined to bed until a particular hour, I experience a much greater sense of impotence than I did when “paralysed” & confined to a wheelchair, as in Week 6.  I tossed & turned, & read some of the Nicholson Baker book I picked up recently.

Then arose.  Did some light housework while Jess was in the shower & then made some tea for her (hot 2. water for me) & chatted before she left for lunch.

Jess, artfully backlit.

As she prepared to leave, I 3. prepared my breakfast of oatmeal.  By now you know the drill.  I 4. added some blueberries as it was cooking & then 5. sweetened the whole mess with honey.  Said my goodbyes to Jess & got on the phone with a future participant (not to give too much away, but it involves a vineyard!).

Meanwhile, Bella finished my mostly uneaten oatmeal.

Mairzy doats & dozy doats

Then I waited… & waited… & waited for Braden to arrive so we could 6. watch La jetée/Sans soleil.

Just as I gave up & started the movie(s) he arrived.  We had a grand old time with the films.

They seemed a little dull at first & throughout. I eventually liked the first one very much.  The second one made me awfully sleepy, & there was a particularly horrible moment in which I had to watch a dying giraffe with spurts of blood coming out of the gunshot wounds on either side of its neck.  That woke me up a little.

By the time the second film ended (& it seemed interminably long) I realized that the movie was not boring, exactly.  Rather, it so closely approximated a dream state that it was impossible not to feel very sleepy as it was going on.  I can’t say I exactly enjoyed watching it, but after it was over I felt I was in a heightened state of consciousness.  I’ve never seen a film quite like it before.  Nor a film quite like the other one (composed almost entirely of still snapshots & a voiceover).  Each worked within an entirely unfamiliar genre & I was certainly improved by watching them.  It’s hard to explain, though I’m sure I could do it if I wasn’t so tired right now.  If you’re curious, I recommend that you watch them for yourselves.

Bella & Braden fell into deep post-Sans soleil slumber.

I 7. Read the booklet that came with the DVD.  I liked it much better than the other one.  There was a short interview with Chris Marker (the director) & I appreciated his refreshing snarkiness.

Woke up Braden, & began my long 8. walk to the 7-11.  Then we sat in a park, where I was to 9. Write whatever came to mind. Prompted by Sans soleil, I decided to write a list of the first 10 things I saw which “quickened the heart.” I would have liked to take corresponding photographs, as it seemed only right, but I’d left my phone at home, sadly.  Here’s the list.

1. glint of bearded man’s septum piercing
2. pigeon coasting on an updraft
3. brown water moving over green tile inset in stone moat of fountain
4. tree with a knot in it, small manageable size
5. congregation of pigeons bathing on ledge of fountain
6. skull patch on arm of sweatshirt belonging to 1. as he leaves park
7. my shoelaces are still too long (I always appreciate this extravagance on part of designer)
8. shadows of pigeons on blue, sky-colored wall
9. long ears of Wiemaraner disappearing behind wall of red flowers, smoke coming out of owner’s nostrils
10. airplane noise? passing train? buses.  like movement of wind over mouth of cave/breath over neck of a bottle

So there, I’ve 10. posted what I wrote.

Then I went home, where I prepared my 11. no-carb lunch.  It’s an exciting new take on cucumber sandwiches.  I cut open a cucumber & scraped the seeds out, then put a can of tuna in the middle.  With some seasoning & mayonnaise for good measure, of course.

Curiouser. & curiouser.

I ate this bizarre concoction.  I 12. took my time, enjoyed it.

Then, after some more Nicholson Baker, I read a random page from 13. Luis Cernuda’s Written in Water. The poem was “Time.”  The final paragraph of the poem reads:

There, in the absolute silence of summer, underscored by the murmuring water, my eyes open to the clear half-darkness that heightens the mysterious life of things, I saw how time can hold still, suspended in air, like the cloud that conceals a god, pure and weightless, never passing.

Quite appropriate.  It encapsulated the strange sensory experience I’d been having since the movies ended very nicely. Right down to the murmuring water.

I went about my chores.

Then I finished my (somewhat pornographic) Nicholson Baker book on the couch.  As soon as I was done, I had a call from TD.  He was outside!  He’d finally arrived!  I took out the garbage & then joyfully went to greet him.

After I got dressed in normal clothing, we went for a 14. walk.  Where did we walk?  To 15. dinner.  It was delicious, if carb-less.  He consumed the entire contents of the breadbasket.  Good.  It was otherwise too tempting to me.  We got some oysters & he had some chowder & I had some steamed clams.  I would’ve taken a picture but I’d forgotten my phone again.

Upon returning home, TD took the dog for her nightly constitutional & I sat down to 16. write for an hour.  Here you see the result of that writing.

Tomorrow we have a very busy day.  Not only do I have to accomplish all of my directives for Day 7, I also have to run some errands, rent a car, & ferry over to Galiano Island, where a family friend has graciously agreed to lend me a house for the first few days of Week 8.  Quite excited.  Next week we will witness a new strain of vicarious living, perhaps more true to the intentions of the project.  It’s being choreographed by a certifiable stranger (only the second true stranger we’ve seen).

All I have left to do is 17. abstain from use of electronic devices in the hour before bed & 18. go to bed at 2:20am.  I’m at this point so well-versed in Week 7 that I have the whole schedule down by memory.  Staying up late will be hard to do– I have almost three empty hours looming before me, along with a house guest who will certainly be asleep well before 2:20am.

I suppose I will occupy myself by responding to comments, handing out a gold star, & maybe picking up another book to read before turning in.

Oh, the fun of it.

La Jetée was the first shoot I ever did, it was for the graduate collection from my talented friend Antonin Tron. The shoot is inspired on the movie La Jetée from Chris Marker. This are some backstage pictures who are never been published before.

Model: Zeno Wendelen @IMM

In 1962, French film-maker Chris Marker released the ground breaking 28-minute short La Jetee, a beautifully presented story told almost entirely through the use of still photo imagery and voice over narration. Set in post-apocalpytic France, a sinister ruling council experiment with time travel in an attempt to avert the Nuclear war that has forced humanity underground.

If you haven’t yet encountered this short within a film studies course I highly recommend you seek it out immediately and not just for its sheer brilliance; rather, if you have seen La Jetee you can then turn your attention to La Puppe, a loving 10-minute homage made by film student Timothy Green in 2003. Despite being told through the eyes of a stuffed toy dog, it is easy to look beyond the novelty factor and appreciate the humour  of the film. While perhaps not as philosophically ponderous as the original, it is nevertheless a clever re-imagining of the original story, and well worth watching. 

Find it here: La Puppe

I found this short film very interesting…..

Posted by: Shillz Da Realz Esq.

MIS  São Paulo apresenta Staring Back – Chris Marker, com curadoria de Bill Horragan e organizado pelo The Wexner Center for the Arts, Universidade de Ohio.

Marker é fotógrafo, diretor de cinema e escritor francês, desconhecido do grande público brasileiro, expõem pela primeira vez no Brasil. São 200 fotos em preto e branco, selecionadas de seu arquivo pessoal por Horragan e ele, feitas no período entre 1952 e 2006. A exposição está organizada em quatro temáticas: Beast Of, I Stare 1, I Stare 2 e They Stare . São imagens de importante fatos histórico, como Maio de 68 (França) ou a Marcha ao Pentágono em 1967 e fotos de pessoas desconhecidas a personalidades famosas e até mesmo alguns animais.

O artista, que vive recluso em Paris,  não concede entrevistas e quando solicitado uma imagem sua normalmente envia a de um gato, seu animal predileto.

Acesse aqui trechos de uma rara entrevista de Marker a Samuel Douhaire e Annick Rivoire, para o jornal Liberation, em 2003.

Role: Staring Back – Chris Marker

Quando: 15 de julho a 27 de setembro

Horários: terça a sábado, das 12h às 19h e domingos e feriados das 11h às 18h.

Paga: R$ 4,00 (inteira), R$ 2,00 (meia-entrada estudantes mediante apresentação de carteirinha) e entrada franca aos domingos e para maiores de 65 anos.

Pico: Museu da Imagem e do Som

Endereço: Av. Europa, 158 Jardim Europa

Mais Informações: (11) 2117 4777 (ramais 219 ou 220)

* Programação sujeita a alterações sem aviso prévio e são de responsabilidade do estabelecimento.

Tonight’s movie:

Sans Soleil, by Chris Marker, who’d previously done the short film La Jetée, which served as the inspiration for Terry Gilliam’s excellent 12 Monkeys.

The film is an experiment take on the documentary and the travelogue as a ficticious filmmaker sends footage and letters back to a woman, who narrates/shares with us his thoughts. It moves from place to place, not really concerned with narrative, and spends some time in Japan, Iceland, Paris, and San Francisco, where it pays homage to Alfred Hitchcock’s amazing Vertigo, probably my favorite film ever.

The film deals a lot with the ideas of travel and loneliness and memory (“remembering is not the opposite of forgetting“) and the idea that our memories can be replaced with film as a document, amongst other things. This is one of those movies I put on when I want to relax and it never fails to do the trick.

The English version of the film opens with this quote from T. S. Eliot’s Ash Wednesday:

“Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place”

Marker’s an enigmatic and reclusive filmmaker, mostly sticking to the documentary form, and careful to never let himself become the subject of the story. He refuses to do interviews and when he’s asked for a picture of himself, he instead sends along a picture of his cat, Guillaume. But that’s another story for another time. I’ll leave you with live footage of Blonde Redhead performing their song “Ego Maniac Kid” in front of a project of Marker’s Battle Of Ten Million…

The opening image in Chris Marker’s La Jetée is of the main pier at Orly airport in Paris.  The pier extends the length of the frame, and people are dotted upon it.  Ghostly, swelling choral music overwhelms the deceptively neutral photograph, and a feeling grows within us that something shattering has happened on this jetty.  The credits tell us this is “un photo-roman de Chris Marker.”  Translated literally this means, “a photo-novel by Chris Marker.”  The photographs that follow and that comprise the short film reveal a quietly luminous love story and a dark work of science fiction at once, a piece of cinematic art that desperately longs for an irretrievable peace and that comments on the very nature of film itself.

The premise of La Jetée is complex.  A young boy is at the pier at Orly, and he witnesses what he only later realizes is a man being murdered.  At some unidentified later point in time, Paris is devastated by a war, and the remaining French survivors are forced underground, where many become the guinea pigs to experimental scientists who whisper in biting Germanic tones.  One of these French victims is the boy now grown up (he is only ever referred to by the narrator of the film as “the man”), and he has been selected for the experiments because of the unusually vivid images tracked in his dreams.  The scientists hope to locate a peaceful time and place from the man’s dreams, and to see if they can send the man back in time to live in the world which he sees so clearly when he sleeps.

After ten days of being submitted to excruciating torture, the man’s vivid, loving memories of a time of peace begin to flood the film “like confessions.”  When one makes a confession, a truth is finally being admitted that for one reason or another was hard to summon.  As black-and-white photographs dissolve in and out of the frame like a heartbeat, the narrator repeats the word “real” many times.  We see a flock of real pigeons erupting from a set of steps in an explosion of furiously beating wings.  Real cats peer at us impassively from on top a striped blanket.  A real child with dirty blonde hair and a round face looks somewhere beyond the camera, searchingly.  This man’s memories of peacetime, which have seeped from his mind like relieving confessions, are real and true.  Unlike the nightmarish, surreal photographs of the Germans’ underground lair, where faces are half-illuminated and half-obscured in pitch darkness and men driven to insanity have skull-like bottomless pools for eyes, the images of peacetime are bright and tangible.  When the man finally meets the woman he has been longing for, the narrator tells us, “Now he is sure she is the one.  As a matter of fact, it is the only thing he may be sure of.”

The man and the woman meet many more times, their romance evoked through gestures as subtle as glances, slight tilts of the head, and mouths half open frozen in moments of laughter.  The two visit a museum filled with recreations of animals from a past, prehistoric time.  Perhaps some of the most symphonic, ineffable moments of La Jetée take place in this museum, where a man from the future and a woman from the past come together to be surrounded by, as the narrator puts it, “timeless” animals.  But this meeting will be their last.  The man is whisked back to the horrifying present, only to be catapulted again through time to a pacifist future.  The otherworldly members of the future offer to let him stay with them in their galactic paradise, with the knowledge that when and if he returns to war-torn Paris, he will be exterminated by his German captors who no longer have need of him.  Yet the man cannot shake the memory of the woman he loves, and asks instead to be sent back to the peace time of the distant past.  He longs for more time with her.  His wish is granted, and he finds himself deposited on the pier at Orly, which he finds strangely reminiscent of a moment he cannot quite articulate.  The man sees the woman at the end of the jetty, runs toward her, and is shot to death by a German who has followed him into the past.  We see the man at the moment of being shot, his body arched backwards, arms wide, the setting sun exposing his dying silhouette unforgivingly.  Somewhere in the crowd of onlookers is a confused young boy, a child who is unwittingly witnessing the death that later (presently?) awaits him.

Why the use of photographs in La Jetée?  Why these still images linked together, one after another?  La Jetée hinges on the visceral nature of memory, the way in which a memory from the past can be more immediate and more emotionally meaningful than the sometimes murky present.  Photographs act as captured memories.  Yet photographs framed and edited together are reminiscent of something else: film.  A reel of film is nothing if not many photographs linked vertically together, each picture minutely, indescribably different from the last, and each capturing the nuances of life that can move by in real time too quickly for us to notice.  When La Jetée shows us these images, we do not just see a heartbroken man’s memories.  We see the process of film.  One picture after another, each evocative, each unique, producing a story.

There is one moment of motion in La Jetée that breaks the series of photographs.  The woman sleeps naked in bed, a sheet pulled up to her shoulders.  Still images of her different positions of repose dissolve in and out like a tide.  Her face is sublimely tranquil.  Then, slowly, she opens her eyes and gazes out at us, welcoming us calmly as she does the man who slips in and out of her life like a reverie.  The moment passes, and we return to the world of motionless memory fragments.  As the narrator has said, the woman is the truest thing the man knows, her thoughtful face in that lost time of peace the most authentic image in his mind.  And so, for a few precious seconds, she is given the gift of movement.  She breathes, she blinks, she focuses her eyes in the morning light.

Uma senhora de preto caminha pela rua Gay Lussac em Paris. Atrás dela, carros incendiados, ferros retorcidos, restos da barricada da noite anterior. A senhora caminha com a expressão tensa e mal entrevê, por trás dos óculos escuros, a câmera de Chris Marker, que registra aquele flagrante de maio de 1968. Num instante, tudo se concentra: o passado conservador, o presente revirado e o futuro inscrito no olhar de quem passeia pela mostra “Staring back”, a primeira exposição de fotos, selecionadas do acervo de mais de 60 anos, de um dos reinventores da linguagem cinematográfica pós-segunda-guerra.

Duas mostras em São Paulo vão tentar jogar luz sobre Chris Marker. Começa nesta quarta-feira (24) no Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil um festival com 33 de seus filmes. Em julho, o Museu da Imagem e do Som abre mostra com 200 fotografias de Marker feitas entre 1952 e 2006.

Marker não se considera um cineasta, mas já ganhou o Urso de Ouro em Berlim por “Descrição de um Combate”, de 1960. Filmou com Alain Resnais e Jean-Luc Godard, mas diz que só eles são diretores de verdade. Também não se diz fotógrafo, como foi seu amigo Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Marker acredita na fabricação da narrativa e do real, usando a memória como motor estético. Em “La Jetée”, filme de 1962, seu melhor exemplo desse tempo desconstruído e refeito, usou só os fotogramas cruciais para contar a história.

“É preciso que o abandono seja uma festa, que o adeus receba também uma cerimônia.” 

El corto La Jetée (1962) de Chris Marker sirvió de inspiración a la película 12 monos de Terry Gilliam. Aquí dividido en tres partes y con subtítulos en español.

parte 1 – wilco82

parte 2 – wilco82

parte 3 – wilco82

también sirvió de inspiración para el video Jump They Say de David Bowie dirijido por Mark Romanek.

David Bowie – Jump They Say – OfficialDavidBowie

después me cuentan…

A mostra Chris Marker: Ensaísta Multimídia apresenta, pela primeira vez no país, parte primordial da produção audiovisual do artista francês Chris Marker, um dos nomes mais importantes do cinema e audiovisual contemporâneos. Muito pouco se sabe sobre Chris Marker no Brasil, e pouco no resto do mundo.

La Jetée

Chris Marker iniciou sua carreira como escritor, fotógrafo, cineasta e viajante, mas tais rótulos são antiquados desde o momento em que ele começou a trabalhar com as novas tecnologias (na década de 90), apresentando-se em museus e galerias, extrapolando os limites da instituição cinematográfica.

A retrospectiva reúne grande parte de sua importante obra audiovisual (cinema, vídeo e televisão). O artista francês é responsável por clássicos como o curtas-metragem  La jetée, de 1962, único filme de ficção do diretor.

La Jetée

La Jetée (França, 1962, 35mm, PB, 28min). A Terra está em ruínas depois de uma grande guerra nuclear. Os sobreviventes enviam um representante ao passado para que tente evitá-la. O eleito é um homem que guarda uma recordação da sua infância, um assassinato que viu no aeroporto de Orleans. O filme é uma referência para boa parte do cinema moderno, tendo o filme Os dozes macacos, de Terry Gilliam, sido baseado diretamente nele.

La Jetée condensa, em 29 minutos: uma história de amor, uma trajetória rumo à infância, um fascínio violento pela imagem única (o único da imagem), uma representação combinada da guerra, do perigo nuclear e dos campos de concentração, uma homenagem ao cinema (Hitchcock, Langlois, Ledoux, etc.), à fotografia (Capa), uma visão da memória, uma paixão pelos museus, uma atração pelos animais e, em meio a tudo isso, um sentido agudo do instante.

Teatro do CCBB
De 16 a 28 de junho
Entrada: R$ 4,00 e R$ 2,00
Terça a domingo, das 9h às 21h
Classificação: 12 anos

New in at Cinema Books: Chris Marker La Jetee by Janet Harbord, $16.00 paper.  Harbord focuses on this very influential experimental film espcially Marker’s treatment of time, narration, stillness and movement in this science fiction story made up almost entirely of  photographs.  Pace and rhythm in the editing techniques are brought to the reader’s attention in this new analysis.  Is there a broader context to this vision of a post-apocalyptic future? Can humanity wave itself through experiments in time? Join the debate.

La Jetée (1962) (aka The Pier)
Chris Marker
French

“Since humanity had survived, it could not refuse to its own past the means of its own survival.“

Who would have thought that one could make a sci-fi masterpiece in just 27 minutes? Well, I didn’t. I was wrong. La Jetée (1962) has left behind it, a legacy that many filmmakers have attempted to inherit, time and again, through the years. Its vision of the future of the world and its inhabitants – a sunless earth, cold expressionless faces and almost machine like emotional states – and the possibilities of experiment with cinematic and real time, that it has opened up, have become almost a standard template for sci-fi movies. If only a certain movie monument wasn’t made six years later, La Jetée, hands down, would stand out as the greatest sci-fi film ever made. The surprising fact is that the script of the film wasn’t adapted from some visionary short story, but one written loosely and directly for the screen by Chris Marker, the director, himself. And further, the script is just a minor contributor to the film’s success.  Here is the thing: The word has been destroyed by the ominous nuclear war and humans are forced to stay underground. The “victors” of the war are trying to find a way to contact the past and the future of mankind to prevent the imminent annihilation of the human race. One of the lab rats for this is The Man (Davos Hanich), who retains vivid memories of his childhood and carries with himself, puzzles from the troubled past.

The very nature of the plot, like the slick ones that play with time and its properties, is potent enough to lock its audience into eternal conversations about the science behind it and the implications that it presents. Scientifically, the basic issues of time travel – like the law of conservation of energy and mass-energy equivalent – are revived. At an emotional level, questions about the inner tension of The Man and about his (and ‘his’) perceptions during the “confrontation” come into the picture. Furthermore, the woman’s untroubled indulgence with the man, who not only lacks a past and a future, but lives an interrupted present, raises concern about the woman’s own identity. Is she one of the guinea pigs too? Is she the specimen of another similar experiment? Or is she one of “them”? Marker leaves such questions unanswered, for his concern is not the drama “of the moment”. Actually, Marker doesn’t even rely upon the convolutions of plot and time to make the film seem significant. As a matter of fact, Marker unravels the proceedings of the film in a lucid and patient manner in his soundtrack, where the narrator explains every action that takes place, till the last detail. Marker could have easily diverted his audience’s attention into a process of untangling the plot by having the narrator conceal some of the facts. But by providing complete information about what happens, Marker utilizes that attention to persuade the audience to recognize how it all happens. We process the aural data simultaneously without any effort as we also begin to note the significance of individual images and the relationship between them.

There is a remarkable scene in La Jetée where The Woman points at a cross-section of the tree trunk to denote her age. The Man jokingly (and self-referentially) points at a region outside the periphery of the trunk suggesting that he is from the future. This scene isn’t just an isolated homage to Vertigo (1958), but one of the many indicators that La Jetée is, in fact, laid on the very themes of Hitchcock’s film. Plainly, both films could well be seen as subjective accounts of treatments of psychological inhibitions – acrophobia and depression. In Vertigo, Scottie is a man who has lost his beloved (and whose face hypnotizes him for some reason) in an accident and is determined to reanimate her back to life, no matter what it takes. The Man, here, is no different from Scottie. The Woman could well be dead too (as he, also, suggests at one point). The Man’s tools for this “ritual” of resurrection are his memories and experiences, because of which he too, like Scottie, is nudged into the vicious cycle (rather, the Vertigo spiral) of resurrection and loss. In another extended sequence in La Jetée, The Man and The Woman visit a museum where stuffed animals are kept as exhibits. The range of animals there – giraffes, elephants and rhinos – make it seem more like a zoo than a hunter’s exhibition. The couple watches them with utmost fascination. Marker photographs the animals and the couple as if they were on the opposite sides of a mirror.  There is great contradiction at work here. Are these live animals trapped in a time frame that is outside their own or are these really dead creatures resurrected back to life by some passionate enthusiast? Either way, they only reinforce that The Man and The Woman are, in fact, one of them.

Surely, La Jetée’s glorious triumph is a consequence of three brilliant artistic choices by Marker. The first of them is the use of black and white imagery for his film (Note that Vertigo had already been made in colour four years before this film). For The Man, the past, the present and the future are essentially the three sides of a Penrose triangle – one leading to the other endlessly. Although he can make clear distinctions between the states he is in, he can’t possibly determine his future, his past or even his definite physical location in any given stage. Marker exploits the homogeneity of the monochrome to denote the plasticity and interchangeability of The Man’s memory and experience and the film’s narrative chronology. Incidentally, in his tour to the past, The Man is fascinated by a shop filled with plastics, ceramics and other fibrous materials – another token of the ever malleable world around and within him. Secondly of interest is Marker’s choice of employing voiceover instead of providing conversational dialogues to his protagonists. Surely, Marker is far removed from the concerns of momentary suspense and immediate gratification. Instead of developing an atmosphere for each scene, he creates a tone for the whole film. Alternating his musical score between expressionistic chorus and chilling, low-key drumbeats, Marker hijacks us away from the search for petty dramatic confrontations into the bleak one for a seemingly elusive resolution. Not surprisingly, the whole narration is in the present tense, as if pitching a story to the producer, for neither can Marker place it in the future since that would betray the tenets of realistic storytelling nor can he locate the tale in the past, thus guaranteeing a resolution. Incidentally, the film doesn’t close with “The End”.

But it is Marker’s use of still images for his narration, almost entirely throughout, that is the masterstroke. He could have used muted motion clips, but that would have added no vitality to the themes of the film. The Man is forced to go back to his past, even after all those traumatizing events of the world.  Predictably, his memory is fragmented, much like the images of the film. He synthesizes his “past” from his subsequent experiences, passionate fantasies and remaining shards of memory. His memory seems to document, eventually, not how the events were, but how he wants to believe they were. Marker uses an array of match cuts to emphasize the dependence of The Man’s memory and vision of past on the present state of his mind and of the world. In a critical scene in the film, The Man and The Woman visit a museum where they observe stone sculptures with missing heads or other parts of their bodies. Just then, an apparently tormented face in the sculptures is juxtaposed with The Man’s own distressed countenance. Are these the just figures of ancient art or are these “products” of the mutilated bodies of the war that The Man witnesses? Most of Marker’s images are spontaneous, with each of them seeming like a freeze-frame ending for intense moments. Each of these images seems like straight out of a dark comic book, with tension and horror oozing out of each pixel. Each one carries with it a past and a future that is as troubling as The Man’s own. Interestingly there is one single shot where motion photography is employed. The Woman, after assuming various poses during sleep, opens her eyes gradually. This is, perhaps, the only time where The Man really feels alive, witnessing movement, hence freedom and hence life. The only moment of escape from his physical existence in a world trapped under the surface of the earth – a world where people don’t live, they exist, a world where they don’t die, they expire.

[Watch the whole film below]

]]> http://daudavendauth.wordpress.com/2009/05/08/a-quoi-s-agrippa-le-singe/ Fri, 08 May 2009 11:00:47 +0000 Daud http://daudavendauth.wordpress.com/2009/05/08/a-quoi-s-agrippa-le-singe/

À la jetée

Comme une armée

Rencontrant onze autres soldats.

El halo mágico que rodea a la figura del cineasta francés Chris Marker es casi tan grande como el que rodea a sus películas. Poco sabemos en verdad sobre quién es. Las biografías en las enciclopedias se contradicen. Es el fotógrafo que evita la foto, el retratista que elabora un autorretrato polimórfico. Está claro que este director que interroga a sus propias imágenes hasta el infinito, no quiere ser descubierto, y es más, se divierte alimentando esa confusión.

Lo que sí parece cierto (todos los libros hablan de él con ese margen de duda “parece…”, “ se dice…”), es que empieza a hacer cine en los 50 y que ya se intuye su estilo único en colaboraciones como “Noche y niebla” o “Toda la memoria del mundo” de Alain Resnais. Lo que también sabemos con bastante certeza, aunque nos quiera despistar con seudónimos, es que es responsable de películas catalogadas como “obras maestras” en la Historia del Cine: “La Jetée” (1962) su único cortometraje de ficción e inspirador de “12 monos” de Terry Gilliam o “Sans Soleil” (1982) película más conocida y citada de Marker.

En las próximas dos semanas, ARTIUM nos ofrece la posibilidad de acercarnos a su cine impuro y siempre vivo, un cine de la emoción y el pensamiento que conecta el mundo exterior y colectivo con la intimidad del ser. Sin duda, una oportunidad única para conocer, debatir y profundizar en torno a uno de los creadores más fascinantes de nuestro tiempo.

Garbiñe ORTEGA

Más información sobre la programación en: www.artium.org

 son of a bricklayer | shitao

Release date: 2009
Label: Ground Floor Records (netlabel)

genre: hip-hop
style: instrumental hip-hop, abstract

That’s some dope hip-hop beats, a combination from Denmark and France. I don’t know which is better but you have to check them myspaces: Son of a Bricklayer’s and Shitao’s and download the album. Let me know who do you like more.

Tracklist:

01 Son of a Bricklayer – Spying On Dreams
02 Shitao – Voices
03 Son of a Bricklayer – No Memories, No Plans
04 Shitao – Time Scarfaces
05 Son of a Bricklayer – The Garden
06 Shitao – Peacetime Images
07 Son of a Bricklayer – On The 16th Day
08 Shitao – We

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