kagablog

keep reading this article here: http://acousticstringsafrica.blogspot.com/2013/04/django-unchained-unfortunate-scapegoat.html

keep reading this wonderful article here: http://www.patriciapisters.com/files/Alphaville_filmdetective_final.pdf

It was Nelson Mandela who said “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.”

The voiceover is the language of the film. If it speaks in English it speaks to the audience’s head. If it speaks in chiVenda it speaks to our souls.

This is the paradox of subtitling. It seems like we need an intellectual step in order to read. But it is US who are making that intellectual step. Whereas the narrator is speaking directly from the soul – and hence the film itself speaks from its own, unique soul. This soul speaking is the greatest gift of the cinema experience. Is there a single Japanese film that has a voiceover in English? Korean film? Italian film?

The sound of Elelwani speaking her own language is the authentic root of our compassion for her predicament. It is exactly that sound that we care about. When she narrates her name in English there is a remove, a step away from her soul, that prevents the film from touching the great emotional depths it is capable of.

Most importantly the name Elelwani is about memory, about remembering. But it is always in the mother tongue that we remember most deeply, that we feel most deeply. If her voiceover is in Venda then the film takes us to the deepest places of memory, the deepest register that the character is capable of reaching. English does not go there.

aryan kaganof

first published here: http://wordsofkatarina.blogspot.com/2011/10/sexy-existentialist-action-kinshasa.html

i heard that there were 7000 films submitted to the berlin festival this year.

7000

the digital thing has made everybody and their aunty a film maker.

the thing is to stand out from the crowd.

but how?

this great african film blog is here: http://wordsofkatarina.blogspot.com/

Memory is always fiction, in the sense in which I intend it: the construction of a relationship between something visible and some meaning, between heterogeneous spaces and times. On the other hand, insistence on fictional labour assumes its full significance when what’s involved are those destructive phenomena that transform their victims into pure objects of a documentary gaze. Godard used to say ironically that epic was for the Israelis and documentary for the Palestinians. The artistic work of memory is that which accords everyone the dignity of fiction.

http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v2n1/jrinterview.html

The very logic of cinema, that of the spectator, is precisely that the elements which occur are filtered; that people construct their own poem, their own film, with what is in front of them; and then they prolong it in words. This means that film, like literature, is not simply an art but constructs a world. About a world you don’t construct some theory but your own poem.

http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v2n1/jrinterview.html

jimmy rage

blackexploitation like segregation was cinema of the coloured kind..

made by black handed resistance with black faces shuffling punching and getting up and getting down..

cus cinema at the time gave brothers and sisters no screen time save to die amidst the bullet of dialogue that was shit or the bullet of the guns while being chased by whitey cops..

niggardly they were strutted on screen and shoot in first or last scene.there were no roles for black heroes in white stories so they created them for dem selves.. dig..

never was the man ready for sex and blood and gore committed by said brother or sister actors
remember in gone with the wind
hattie got an oscar for being the mammy slave..

while the films themselves often time were violent and laced with all kinds of disrespect for gender and race and dialogue..
“nigga dis and “nigga dat..

generally it was good for the black ego by and large to see black actors working and being involved on all levels..

pimps hustlers and hoes strutted across screens screaming..

cotton came to harlem and pam grier became stuff legends were made of..

she generally got her man with a shotgun or saturday night special in her hand.superfly was the new term.. on the streets

needless to say downtown and in hollywood directors and businessmen looked on as the marketplace for such films grew and actors in such films gained notoriety and fame outside the main of hollywood..

later those said dealers of good and bad taste would jump in the foray and create their own hollywood africans.

still from the brief and lucrative history of blackexploits.. the theatres all over cities lit up with fired up brothers and sisters laughing and enjoying seeing images of themselves on the screen. funny thing was the stories started out bad and eventually had many riveting movies..

gordon parks fashioned shaft and the whole van peebles empire was born..too. there were many more directors but the names slip my mind now..

as cinema today it stands as testament of persistent perseverance.. and always the films that myths and styles and movements are made of. james brown wrote film scores for them. black caesar and marvin gaye..trouble man.. and many more.

they were essential forms of spreading a kind of racial coolness..that later became a kind of black militantness ..that later became fashion..

as in now.. indeed it spawned and bred unlikey supporters and made unlikely idols and ideals..

but again that is what cult does.. and will continue to do.. seen.

In long form, not everything can be equally interesting. There have to be so-called boring parts, in some ways. Or shots that are more noise than signal. Or redundancies in the short run, but add cumulative weight in the long run. And that really pays off in the end.

read the full interview here: http://www.worldpicturejournal.com/WP_7/SolomonInterview.html

first published here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/oct/18/sylvia-kristel-emmanuelle-actor-dies

“Academia is the death of cinema. It is the very opposite of passion. Film is not the art of scholars, but of illiterates.”
- Werner Herzog

The angles are the director’s thoughts. The lighting is his philosophy. Even to this extent: long before Wittgenstein and some of my contemporaries learned to distrust language as a true medium and interpreter of reality. So I learned to trust my eyes rather more than the windiness of words.

see the full 100 here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BFI_Top_100_British_films

the conversations: walter murch and the art of editing film
michael ondaatje
2002
alfred a. knopf
isbn 0-375-70982–7

the conversations: walter murch and the art of editing film
michael ondaatje
2002
alfred a. knopf
isbn 0-375-70982–7

the conversations: walter murch and the art of editing film
michael ondaatje
2002
alfred a. knopf
isbn 0-375-70982–7

BEAUTY AND THE BEAST
by Douglas Messerli

Claude Chabrol (writer and director) Le boucher (The Butcher) / 1970

Despite the statements of numerous critics that Chabrol’s film Le boucher is filled with questions that are slowly answered over the course of the movie and, as Netflix’s site quotes Adam Gai, “The audience is kept in suspense up until the last shot,” I would argue that in this work Chabrol has created his most unthrilling thriller. For it is a work that has utterly no surprises, and because of that fact Chabrol is freed to show us film-making at its most abstract. We witness the process without having to be emotionally involved in plot.

Some of this lack of suspense occurs because, basically, there are only two characters in the film. The young married couple of the first scenes appear only briefly, despite the fact that the male is supposed to be a teacher in the same school where the central character, Helene Daville teaches. Although some of her students are more memorable than others, particularly the young man to whom she is trying to teach mathematics one late night, they are, nonetheless, as are the inhabitants of the small village near the Cougnac Caves where she lives, ancillary figures, unimportant to events. Even the mildly bothersome Police Inspector Grumbach offers little in the way of substance. Other than the beautiful and emotionally reserved Helene (Stéphane Audran) there is only her suitor, Popaul (Jean Yanne), a war-veteran who has just returned to his hometown to take up his father’s business as a butcher.

From the earliest scenes in the film, we recognize Popaul as being facile with knives—at the wedding ceremony with which the film begins he insists upon slicing the large roast by himself—and early on we recognize that he has been embittered by the gruesome violence of his war experiences:

Popaul: I’ve seen a corpse or two—their heads in the wind, cut in half, mouth
open. I’ve seen three or four piled together. Kids with their eyes punctured.
Indo-Chinese as old as Madame Tirrant completely torn to bits. I’ve seen pals
of mine rotting in the sun, being eaten by maggots.

Were we to encounter Popaul today, I would guess that many of us might suggest he seek help from a psychiatrist.

Accordingly, despite his gentle demeanor with Helene, when word of a brutal murder reaches the village, we have no choice but suspect Popaul. There is literally no one else to suspect, and any “reader” of such a work knows that it would a ridiculous and absurd tale if the murderer was someone whom he had never met. It is as if Chabrol has taken the old whodunit story and emptied it of all save two figures, one of whom we cannot imagine as the murderer, and whom we know cannot have committed the second murder since she is on an outing with her students when she and they discover the body, its blood dripping from it, almost comically, upon a young girl’s sandwich.

Chabrol takes this even further by having Helene discover at the scene of the crime a lighter (or one exactly like it) that she has given as a gift to Popaul. Since we know it must therefore be Popaul who has committed the two murders, any suspense of the film must depend less upon the discovery of the killer than the gradual discovery of who these two people are. It is their inner selves, not their grand actions that bring any meaning to the work.

Chabrol carries this idea of “no surprises” even further, comically commenting on it when, at the funeral of the second woman killed, Popaul, exiting the church, looks up at the rainy sky to say, “What a surprise!” Helene may have been surprised; she does not have an umbrella. But he and everyone else does, which they simultaneously open, recalling a similar scene from Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent, a parallel to the earlier reference, with the discovery of the lighter, to Hitchcock’s Strangers on the Train. No, it is no surprise that at such a sad occasion, rain should fall. And the natives have expected it.

What is surprising in this film is that Helene pockets the lighter without mentioning it to anyone. She is not only tampering with evidence but, by squirreling away the object, she is endangering her own life.

She has already spoken of the importance of Cro-Magnan man to her students, noting that if he had not brutally killed out of a need to survive that modern man would not be there today. We can only suspect, accordingly, that she sees her courtier-murderer, Popaul, as a necessary evil, someone who must do what he does in order to save the world, perhaps restoring the love she has relinquished.

Yet it makes no logical sense, and when she does encounter him that same evening, she is clearly terrified. Only when he produces a lighter exactly like the one she has found, can she again breathe easier, laughing behind her tears in relief.

If Popaul is psychologically disturbed, we now perceive that, in her inability to begin another relationship, she is psychologically scarred by her past as well. While she remains emotionally and sexually aloof from Popaul, she is also a kind a seductress, a woman seeking love despite her denial of it. As she quite straight-forwardly answers Popaul’s challenge:

Popaul: But, shit, if I kissed you now, what would you say?
Helene: I’d say nothing, but please don’t.

In short, she will not out rightly reject love were it to make its demands; she is simply attempting to protect herself so that love will make no demands. She is, in other words, a passive being; unlike Popaul, who makes things happen, who brings her food, fixes her lights, paints her rooms, who, in fact, admits that he wants to “look after her,” Helene can do nothing but exist, glowing in her beauty much like the light(er) she gives him. It is no accident that she provides the fire for the cut of meat his has brought her.

Only when Popaul discovers the hidden lighter, and, perceiving suddenly that she has found him out, steals it back, does Helene accept the reality that we have known all along. And it is only then that she can begin to function for herself, madly racing from door to door to lock herself away from the beast calling out. It is at that moment also when we perceive that Chabrol’s tale is not that of a murderer on the loose, but a kind of fable like Beauty and the Beast.

It is not her murder he seeks, but out of embarrassment for being the beast, ritual death. Even his sudden plunge of his knife into his own belly is not a surprise as much as an inevitability. It is only now that Helene can truly come into her own, reaching out to save him, to protect him from himself, just as she has mothered her students.

This time she allows him the kiss, but it is the kiss of death, too late to redeem the animal within.

Los Angeles, November 20, 2010
Copyright (c) 2010 by International Cinema Review and Douglas Messerli

this review first published here: http://internationalcinemareview.blogspot.com/2010/10/claude-chabrol-le-boucher-butcher.html