Music: DF Tram's "Movie Mix" journey through filmspace
by David Pescovitz
Boing Boing
My favorite DJ, DF Tram -- who draws from far-out jazz, psych, experimental ambient, soundtracks, avant-garde classical, and myriad other genres -- just posted this glorious "Movie Mix" that he describes as "a "a selection of sounds from films that have inspired me, audio from scenes that I enjoy, scenes imagined, and scenes discovered along the way." What a fantastic way to lose yourself for 90 minutes.
To Listen to the Mix
Showing posts with label Dialogue. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dialogue. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 18, 2013
Wednesday, July 10, 2013
Tag Gallagher -- Eclipse Series 14: Rossellini’s History Films—Renaissance and Enlightenment
Eclipse Series 14: Rossellini’s History Films—Renaissance and Enlightenment
By Tag Gallagher
Current
RELIVING HISTORY
“At a certain point, I felt so useless!” said Roberto Rossellini. Never before had technology accomplished such miracles. Yet everywhere the world was confronting crises. Never before had civilization so needed us all to understand the great problems—food, water, energy. Yet everywhere, especially in contemporary art, there was nothing but cruelty and complaining. The mass media, Rossellini charged, were accomplishing “a sort of cretinization of adults.” Rather than illuminate people, their great effort seemed to be to subjugate them, “to create slaves who think they’re free.”
And Rossellini himself? He felt useless.
“By 1958,” said François Truffaut, “Rossellini was well aware that his films were not like those of other people, but he very sensibly decided that it was the others who ought to change.”
“There doesn’t exist a technique for grasping reality,” Rossellini insisted. “Only a moral position can do so. The camera’s a ballpoint pen, an imbecile; it’s not worth anything if you don’t have anything to say. To discuss cinema today in strictly aesthetic terms is arid and useless. There’s only a single question: how to awaken consciences? ‘Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains,’ said Rousseau.”
He called a news conference and announced, “Cinema is dead.”
“He was as excited as a boy about television,” said director Ermanno Olmi, “but mostly he was fired up about putting history into images, the history of humanity, the facts, the fundamental and significant moments . . . And he told me about this history of iron, of how it had changed people’s economy and life.”
“A guy who starts filming the history of iron does look ridiculous,” Rossellini admitted.
Ridiculous or not, Rossellini’s efforts, from 1959 until halted by death in 1977, would yield some forty-two hours of “didactic” movies, mostly for television. Audiences would judge them boring, historians deficient, and critics unappealing; their emotional and artistic riches have still only begun to be acknowledged beyond a devout coterie. Even Truffaut told Rossellini he was wasting his time. And Rossellini, all the while denying (with patent hypocrisy) that he was trying to “make art,” would go ahead, determined to do what he could to “revise the whole conception of the universe,” as he put it.
Rossellini outlined a vast plan not to recount but to relive the history of human knowledge in hundreds of movies. “The slightest act of daily life contains extraordinary dramatic power,” he said. He wanted to send film crews all over the world. He could not understand why other filmmakers, Fellini in particular, were not willing to drop their own projects and undertake his instead. “The world should expect something from intellectuals and artists, a clarifying function, a compass,” Rossellini argued, not just navel-gazing.
To finance his project, Rossellini sought out corporations and appealed to the educational obligations of state television in Italy, France, Spain, Germany, Romania, and Egypt.
To say, as many have, that these movies lack acting, psychoanalysis, Murnau-like expressionism, overwhelming emotions, and the richest cinematic art is akin to closing one’s eyes at high noon and claiming the sun no longer exists.
THE AGE OF THE MEDICI
Said Rossellini around 1973: “I no longer consider myself to be an artist of the cinema, one of that godlike coterie of directors producing masterpieces to stun the world. I now see myself as scientist and craftsman. For me, Shakespeare and Rembrandt and Matisse were also scientists. The cinema must become scientific, it must learn to dispense knowledge and awareness.”
Accordingly, The Age of the Medici, made during the productive period of 1970–73, presents Renaissance art as an instrument of research rather than self-expression. Rossellini is attacking conventional attitudes toward art. His quattrocento Florentines admire Brunelleschi’s cathedral dome not for its beauty, like tourists today, but as a materialization of Brunelleschi’s wonderful calculations, which are wonderful because they show how intelligence can raise the level of human civilization. Art is politics. Obviously, too, it is money—“the root of all civilization,” according to Will Durant, an incomprehensible miracle, according to Rossellini: witness how the music chirps with delight at the apparition of a bag of gold.
A banker and an art theorist are the heroes of Rossellini’s movie: Cosimo de’ Medici (1389–1464) and Leon Battista Alberti (1404–72).
Is Rossellini’s reliving of Florence accurate? Of course not; how could it be? It is easy in a book to write, “Cosimo de’ Medici greeted the Venetian ambassador.” It is something else to provide the clothing, room, furnishings, ambience, lighting, not to mention the words, vocal tones, comportment, emotions, and actual bodies of Cosimo and the ambassador. All this must inevitably be inaccurate in a movie. What were people like then? What was Florence like? We can only imagine, like Walt Disney, Rossellini, or even Giotto.
To Read the Rest
By Tag Gallagher
Current
RELIVING HISTORY
“At a certain point, I felt so useless!” said Roberto Rossellini. Never before had technology accomplished such miracles. Yet everywhere the world was confronting crises. Never before had civilization so needed us all to understand the great problems—food, water, energy. Yet everywhere, especially in contemporary art, there was nothing but cruelty and complaining. The mass media, Rossellini charged, were accomplishing “a sort of cretinization of adults.” Rather than illuminate people, their great effort seemed to be to subjugate them, “to create slaves who think they’re free.”
And Rossellini himself? He felt useless.
“By 1958,” said François Truffaut, “Rossellini was well aware that his films were not like those of other people, but he very sensibly decided that it was the others who ought to change.”
“There doesn’t exist a technique for grasping reality,” Rossellini insisted. “Only a moral position can do so. The camera’s a ballpoint pen, an imbecile; it’s not worth anything if you don’t have anything to say. To discuss cinema today in strictly aesthetic terms is arid and useless. There’s only a single question: how to awaken consciences? ‘Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains,’ said Rousseau.”
He called a news conference and announced, “Cinema is dead.”
“He was as excited as a boy about television,” said director Ermanno Olmi, “but mostly he was fired up about putting history into images, the history of humanity, the facts, the fundamental and significant moments . . . And he told me about this history of iron, of how it had changed people’s economy and life.”
“A guy who starts filming the history of iron does look ridiculous,” Rossellini admitted.
Ridiculous or not, Rossellini’s efforts, from 1959 until halted by death in 1977, would yield some forty-two hours of “didactic” movies, mostly for television. Audiences would judge them boring, historians deficient, and critics unappealing; their emotional and artistic riches have still only begun to be acknowledged beyond a devout coterie. Even Truffaut told Rossellini he was wasting his time. And Rossellini, all the while denying (with patent hypocrisy) that he was trying to “make art,” would go ahead, determined to do what he could to “revise the whole conception of the universe,” as he put it.
Rossellini outlined a vast plan not to recount but to relive the history of human knowledge in hundreds of movies. “The slightest act of daily life contains extraordinary dramatic power,” he said. He wanted to send film crews all over the world. He could not understand why other filmmakers, Fellini in particular, were not willing to drop their own projects and undertake his instead. “The world should expect something from intellectuals and artists, a clarifying function, a compass,” Rossellini argued, not just navel-gazing.
To finance his project, Rossellini sought out corporations and appealed to the educational obligations of state television in Italy, France, Spain, Germany, Romania, and Egypt.
To say, as many have, that these movies lack acting, psychoanalysis, Murnau-like expressionism, overwhelming emotions, and the richest cinematic art is akin to closing one’s eyes at high noon and claiming the sun no longer exists.
THE AGE OF THE MEDICI
Said Rossellini around 1973: “I no longer consider myself to be an artist of the cinema, one of that godlike coterie of directors producing masterpieces to stun the world. I now see myself as scientist and craftsman. For me, Shakespeare and Rembrandt and Matisse were also scientists. The cinema must become scientific, it must learn to dispense knowledge and awareness.”
Accordingly, The Age of the Medici, made during the productive period of 1970–73, presents Renaissance art as an instrument of research rather than self-expression. Rossellini is attacking conventional attitudes toward art. His quattrocento Florentines admire Brunelleschi’s cathedral dome not for its beauty, like tourists today, but as a materialization of Brunelleschi’s wonderful calculations, which are wonderful because they show how intelligence can raise the level of human civilization. Art is politics. Obviously, too, it is money—“the root of all civilization,” according to Will Durant, an incomprehensible miracle, according to Rossellini: witness how the music chirps with delight at the apparition of a bag of gold.
A banker and an art theorist are the heroes of Rossellini’s movie: Cosimo de’ Medici (1389–1464) and Leon Battista Alberti (1404–72).
Is Rossellini’s reliving of Florence accurate? Of course not; how could it be? It is easy in a book to write, “Cosimo de’ Medici greeted the Venetian ambassador.” It is something else to provide the clothing, room, furnishings, ambience, lighting, not to mention the words, vocal tones, comportment, emotions, and actual bodies of Cosimo and the ambassador. All this must inevitably be inaccurate in a movie. What were people like then? What was Florence like? We can only imagine, like Walt Disney, Rossellini, or even Giotto.
To Read the Rest
Friday, February 22, 2013
Imogene Sara Smith: The Music of Words - Storytelling in Two Powell & Pressburger Films
The Music of Words: Storytelling in Two Powell & Pressburger Films
by Imogene Sara Smith
Bright Lights Film Journal
"In my films, images are everything," Michael Powell declares in his autobiography; "words are used like music to distill emotion." Powell was justly proud of tour-de-force sequences that rely exclusively on visuals, scoring, and editing, like the Red Shoes ballet or the climactic attempt by Sister Ruth to murder Sister Clodagh in Black Narcissus. These forays into what Powell called the "composed film" culminated in a feature-length cinematic opera, Tales of Hoffman (a film that, I must confess, I find airless.) With all respect, I would argue Powell's claim is too one-sided, and puzzling in some ways as well. What, for instance, does he mean when he says that the trial in heaven in A Matter of Life and Death — which involves extended speeches, battling wits, and even battling radios — is "essentially a silent film"?
For cinephiles, the silent era (when Powell got his start) can be a kind of lost Eden, a paradise of "pure cinema" from which the talkies have fallen. The conquest by sound, and the deadening limitations it initially placed on cameras, inspired many to reassert the primacy of images. Yet, given Powell's visual bent, it is striking how many scenes in earlier films by The Archers (as he and Emeric Pressburger named their filmmaking partnership) allow words to stand almost alone: Anton Walbrook's four-minute, single-take speech in the refugee office in Colonel Blimp; the anti- and pro-Nazi speeches by Walbrook and Eric Portman in The 49th Parallel; Portman's history lecture in A Canterbury Tale, Nancy Price's description of the Highland gathering at Oban in I Know Where I'm Going! While Powell and Pressburger were masters of the classic show-don't-tell method, they also daringly broke the rule by telling, not showing. Both techniques ultimately serve the same purpose. Despite the aesthetic of excess often attributed to the Archers' films, they gain power by withholding certain elements, requiring the audience to supply what's not there.
Powell and Pressburger both contributed to the scripts of their films, but Emeric Pressburger did the bulk of the writing. He is perennially overlooked and undervalued by fans of The Archers, partly because he was more retiring than Powell (spending his late years quietly in a cottage while his erstwhile partner hooked up with Scorsese and Coppola and produced his monumental autobiography), but also because the qualities he brought to their films were harder to define. Pressburger was a genius at structuring stories, a writer whose words have an extraordinary, multidimensional life, and who also knew when to use no words at all. David Low, creator of the Colonel Blimp character that inspired Pressburger's favorite Archers film, praised the screenwriter's "phenomenal power of story-telling," quipping, "He left Scheherezade standing." (Macdonald, 209) Scheherezade preserved her life by leaving her stories tantalizingly incomplete. Part of Pressburger's genius was to build into his screenplays chasms that the mind must leap, and blanks that the imagination must fill. These leaps of the mind create much of the joy and surprise you feel watching The Archers' movies: the thrill lies not in the arrow or in the target, but in the flight through space.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
by Imogene Sara Smith
Bright Lights Film Journal
"In my films, images are everything," Michael Powell declares in his autobiography; "words are used like music to distill emotion." Powell was justly proud of tour-de-force sequences that rely exclusively on visuals, scoring, and editing, like the Red Shoes ballet or the climactic attempt by Sister Ruth to murder Sister Clodagh in Black Narcissus. These forays into what Powell called the "composed film" culminated in a feature-length cinematic opera, Tales of Hoffman (a film that, I must confess, I find airless.) With all respect, I would argue Powell's claim is too one-sided, and puzzling in some ways as well. What, for instance, does he mean when he says that the trial in heaven in A Matter of Life and Death — which involves extended speeches, battling wits, and even battling radios — is "essentially a silent film"?
For cinephiles, the silent era (when Powell got his start) can be a kind of lost Eden, a paradise of "pure cinema" from which the talkies have fallen. The conquest by sound, and the deadening limitations it initially placed on cameras, inspired many to reassert the primacy of images. Yet, given Powell's visual bent, it is striking how many scenes in earlier films by The Archers (as he and Emeric Pressburger named their filmmaking partnership) allow words to stand almost alone: Anton Walbrook's four-minute, single-take speech in the refugee office in Colonel Blimp; the anti- and pro-Nazi speeches by Walbrook and Eric Portman in The 49th Parallel; Portman's history lecture in A Canterbury Tale, Nancy Price's description of the Highland gathering at Oban in I Know Where I'm Going! While Powell and Pressburger were masters of the classic show-don't-tell method, they also daringly broke the rule by telling, not showing. Both techniques ultimately serve the same purpose. Despite the aesthetic of excess often attributed to the Archers' films, they gain power by withholding certain elements, requiring the audience to supply what's not there.
Powell and Pressburger both contributed to the scripts of their films, but Emeric Pressburger did the bulk of the writing. He is perennially overlooked and undervalued by fans of The Archers, partly because he was more retiring than Powell (spending his late years quietly in a cottage while his erstwhile partner hooked up with Scorsese and Coppola and produced his monumental autobiography), but also because the qualities he brought to their films were harder to define. Pressburger was a genius at structuring stories, a writer whose words have an extraordinary, multidimensional life, and who also knew when to use no words at all. David Low, creator of the Colonel Blimp character that inspired Pressburger's favorite Archers film, praised the screenwriter's "phenomenal power of story-telling," quipping, "He left Scheherezade standing." (Macdonald, 209) Scheherezade preserved her life by leaving her stories tantalizingly incomplete. Part of Pressburger's genius was to build into his screenplays chasms that the mind must leap, and blanks that the imagination must fill. These leaps of the mind create much of the joy and surprise you feel watching The Archers' movies: the thrill lies not in the arrow or in the target, but in the flight through space.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
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