"I feel very alone...

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

"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.

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

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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. 

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.