yes, this

Linklater // On Cinema & Time from kogonada on Vimeo.

Huge fan of R. Linklater and nearly his entire body of work. So very excited to see Boyhood in a short time. This will do in the interim.

meaning via Stanley Kubrick

       photo via this outstanding gallery on imgur

from 1968 playboy interview

"I feel very alone...

...but I derive no pleasure from that feeling."

altering landscape

Some great bits wash ashore from the internet and intersect in thematic ways. The general undercurrent is the constantly-changing-before-our-eyes-mode-of-film production/consumption and the how/what/why. This impacts filmmaker and audience alike.

first, this great interview w/ Jean Renoir about art v. technical progress, about how modernity and tech. advancement takes you further from artistic purity. (note: I drink this stuff up. sooo good)


h/t a bittersweet life

then, this excerpt from S. Soderbergh interviewing Gordon Willis

 h/t cinephilia and beyond

All of this is both enervating and depressing, the latter for (I presume/hope) obvious reasons and the former b/c cinema continues to evolve and endure. Despite the fact that you can now watch Kubrick or Tarkovsky on your ipad (read: not the intended final format) the central psycho-mythological core that impels it to exist will not diminsh.

Woody Allen on Bergman

the interviewer asks some very basic banal questions here but it's still worth checking out.

Bergman, AFI 1975

"It's not my role to give explanations"

amazing and brief interview w/ Alain Resnais (which i discovered via film school rejects)
which touches at the start on the ambiguous inscrutability of "Last Year at Marienbad" in particular and filmmaking in general. A very good reminder for me b/c I suspect that some who see 'the black sea' will find puzzlement and want/need explication. By design a movie that starts and ends in different ways, the black sea, features a disappearance and multiple protagonists and dips in and out of several POVs and is not exactly sewn up tidily by the end. 

I need to commit this to memory start saying it to everyone*. My new mantra:

"It's not my role to give explanations..each spectator can find his/her own solution and it will in all likelihood be a good one. But what's certain is that the solution won't be the same for everyone meaning that my solution is of no more interest than that of any other viewer."

*or rather to anyone who asks about the movie. I don't want to literally say it to everyone unprompted lest I resemble that man on the bus a couple weeks ago who was sharing his concerns about socialism as relates to city hall road-paving. or something.

numberless multitude

     from Conversations with Woody Allen by Eric Lax, p.72

Shane Carruth interview

I am an enormous fan of Shane Carruth's Primer and now cannot wait to see Upstream Color. in a world flooded with extended improv bits shot on HD and called film, he stands nearly alone, both in approach and voice. (note: not that there's anything wrong w/ HD! merely expressing my aversion for what passes for cinema these days)

watch this trailer
and now please kindly read this 2 part interview wherein he outlines parts of the process in arriving at/making this film as well as graciously and eloquently debunking the common insistence to decode every bit of a narrative, something I kind of pre-emptively am preparing to defend the black sea against as I am certain there are things that people won't 'get'. we'll see when we get there though.

an excerpt:

Speaking of getting the film "in one viewing" is that what you envisaged, or did you design it with an eye to repeat viewings?
My hope is that there will be by the end of one viewing a real emotional experience that's not un-understandable or obtuse: we know what we just experienced in terms of the emotional arc of the film. I think plot-wise, my feeling is that most of it's coming across [first time]. The thing is the storytelling is very dense and the way it's explored is lyrical, and that will tend to be not so on the nose.

part 1 is here

part 2 is here

____________________________________________
edited to add:

discovered this Primer review from Reverse Shot today, which is very worth the read. These sentences say it all: Years and multiple viewings later, the movie seems an inexhaustible resource—and, watched again today, even more miraculous than I remembered. It stands alone, an alien monolith in the landscape, unmoored to a cinematic school or movement, oblivious to fashion or trend. 

stills from 'Blood of a Poet'

Jean Cocteau

stills from L'Age D'Or

L. Bunuel

David Lynch on explication

David Lynch interviewed at BAFTA in 2007 can been seen here. while all 21 minutes are lovely for me the good stuff begins at 15:30 or so when he's asked for the millionth time to explain what exactly Mulholland Drive is about.

The film is the thing. You work so hard to get this thing built, all the elements to feel correct, this whole to feel correct in this beautiful language called cinema. And the second it’s finished people want you to change it back into words.

lynch, david

some excellent, raw non-epk behind-the-scenes stuff from mulholland drive

directors' roundtable

if you have 70 minutes to burn you could do a lot worse than clicking

here

to see the annual hollywood reporter directors roundtable, which seems to pop up every awards season.
this one features lisa cholodenko, david o. russel, tom hooper, derek cianfrance, darren aronofsky, and peter weir.

self-limitation

"The tortoise got stuck as it tried to squeeze under a plywood partition; its shell, which it can't visualize, is too high, but it stubbornly works away, scrabbling with its claws in a futile attempt to move forward."

from Conquest of the Useless, Werner Herzog

"...this rich stone forest..."

watch this. then watch again.
from F for Fake

man/camera

northern flicker

so, weird story. about a year ago i wrote a post about how i heard a ruckus upstairs and it turns out a blue jay had somehow gotten stuck in our fireplace. you can re-read that here. this morning i was working on my website, northern flicker films, trying to get things in order b/c of the new short. it's been a good few weeks, finally seeing this film to completion and having a good public showing and gearing up for the next ones and so forth. i am prone to hyperbole but i'll say this anyway: things i've been working toward my entire adult life are slowly crystallizing. to say the least it's felt important, these past couple weeks. so anyway i was moving some stuff around on the site when i hear a strange clawing sound from inside the fireplace. keep in mind that this is a different house and a different fireplace. in fact this isn't really even a fireplace it's a wood-stove more or less. i hear the sound again. there's definitely something alive in there. M comes into the living room and says the dog was sniffing at the stove last night in a tizzy but she thought nothing of it so whatever it is has been in there all night. we can't see into the stove b/c over the years the smoke and ash have darkened the window but we can hear it. We don't know what to expect: bird, rat, squirrel. I grab the handle and slowly pull the door and step back all in one fluid motion and out flies a Northern Flicker. It takes a few moments of encouragement to get it to the open front door - after all it's scared and exhausted - but we do. and finally free, it takes flight.

i'm your man

one more time around the sun

'yesterday it was my birthday, i hung one more year on the line'. so goes a song lyric. here's what happened:

woke up and ran up to the mt tabor reservoir. it was my first time running in several weeks (was sick, then busy, then sick and busy). felt important to mark the day w/ a run because i can. i thought of my 5 birthdays since diagnosis and i ran a little bit harder. i thought of those currently in battle who can't run and i began to sprint. a loop in my head: life is a gift, life is a gift...

got a ride downtown w/ m. dropped her at work and walked to stumptown. had a double americano and read the new york times book review.

walked to living room theaters and saw no one knows about persian cats - about, among other things, the rise of creative expression in oppressive regimes. loved it. in addition to having the theater to myself, i learned about an iranian hip-hop artist named Hichkas. watch this.



After the movie i went to nearby food carts and took my lunch to newly opened Director Park. Walked back to burnside and browsed at Powell's for an hour. it was difficult b/c i had about 40 bucks on a gift card (or rather i was entitled to half of an 80$ gift card, m has the other half) and i kept finding expensive books to buy.

went back to living room and saw the girl with the dragon tattoo, which i quite loved. seen several genre movies lately that were all expertly crafted (mother, north face, the ghost writer, memories of murder).

walked to m's building and got a ride home.
we threw tennis balls with the dog.
we rode bikes to montavilla and ate at country cat.
we came home
i finished off the bottle of single malt scotch that i received at last year's birthday
i felt that message from the universe, still thumping in my chest
life is a gift, life is a gift...