In this fascinating short interview released by The Criterion Collection, legendary D.P. Michael Ballhaus discusses working with Rainer Werner Fassbinder on one of the director’s best films, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. After talking about how Fassbinder didn’t like to shotlist, Ballhaus describes one particularly difficult move and the director’s reaction when it wasn’t done just the way he wanted it. And even if Ballhaus weren’t an erudite interview, the clips alone here would be worth watching. The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant is now out in standard def and Blu Ray from Criterion.
Ruben Ostlund’s Force Majeure is one of my top films of the year, so I share — albeit not to the same degree — the disappointment of Ostlund and producer Erik Hemmendorff over the film’s failure to be nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. But it is their reaction, not mine, that is liveblogged, as they video’d their watching the nominations and then their post-announcement reaction. The joke — if it is indeed one — is contingent on you having seen Force Majeure. However, even if you haven’t, the relative banality of the video, which documents the paltry […]
Michael Madsen’s “documentary from outer space” is at the top of our viewing list at Sundance this year. As it is described by production company NGF: THE VISIT is a documentary with comedy elements, and a philosophical exploration of our fear of strangers through the ultimate threat to our self-image: The discovery of Alien Intelligent Life. In Vienna lies the UN-city, with its late 1970’s architecture and its extra-territorial status not unlike a giant spacecraft that has landed in the middle of the civilized world. Inside this impressive institution representing our belief in humanity, resides the UN Office of Outer […]
While it may not be as consciously constructed as that of Quentin Tarantino’s, the film meta-world of Martin Scorsese would seem to at some point demand the pairing of his two most durable leading men, Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio. That time is now, apparently, as the two men appear in a short branded content film for the $3.2 billion City of Dreams casino in Manila Bay, Philippines. It may not be what we wanted, but it shouldn’t pass by unnoticed. The trailer for the film, The Audition, is posted above. Both actors have been reported to have received […]
“Inside every narrative film is a non-narrative film struggling to get out.” Here is a wonderfully distinctive video essay from critics Adrian Martin and Christina Álvarez López that reimagines Roman Polanski’s Repulsion as the work of Béla Tarr. Zeroing in on “the dank spaces and the dead moments, the images of food-as-object, the cycle of everyday activities, the endless, implacable passages of walking,” and other Tarr associated imagery, Martin and López explore filmmaking as elementary particles, tonally rearrangeable in line with a director’s vision and story. In a supplementary write-up at MUBI, the two cite Jonathan Rosenbaum’s review of The Tenant, wherein […]
“What’s clever here is that we don’t actually depict Muhammad. We can’t see Muhammad’s face. That’s a fact.” With the terrible attack on Paris’s Charlie Hebdo offices culminating in a two-fold siege earlier today, with the presumed perpetrators now dead, The New York Times has posted an Op-Doc that provides a haunting look inside the creative process behind one of the magazine’s most controversial covers. Shot in 2006, when the directors Jérôme Lambert and Philippe Picard were filming a documentary on the now deceased Jean Cabut, the short film parses the provocation that purportedly led to the death of Cabut and his colleagues. The film is […]
“Even when you’re falling in love with somebody, even when you’re having a beautiful kiss that you’ll remember for the rest of your life, something could still be terribly wrong.” That’s Andrew Bujalski (Funny Ha Ha, Computer Chess) in this brief video teasing his fifth feature Results, which premieres later this month at the Sundance Film Festival. We still don’t have all that much detail on Bujalski’s first film to feature honest to goodness name actors: Guy Pearce and Cobie Smulders topline, with Anthony Michael Hall and Giovanni Ribisi also part of the improbable cast. We know it’s a drama about gyms, working out, […]
Short and sweet: in this brief clip from a 1983 CBC interview, David Bowie — who turns 68 today — talks about wanting to be an actor and his “pretensions” of wanting to direct. “The inherent problem of being a rock star who wants to be a legitimate act or legitimate anything else, I think, is that the parts are restricted from the beginning,” he said, noting he’d been confined to a run of “green-eyed, out of space, rock-playing freaks.” That year, Bowie had a hit record with Let’s Dance and a very different kind of role in Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence; five years […]
The emphasis in this edited series of highlights from David Fincher’s recent BFI talk is, refreshingly, more on the actors than on his much-dissected, formidable technical acumen. One key takeaway from this brisk trot through his career is Fincher’s take on his infamous penchant for endless takes. “My philosophy is, you spend $250,000 on a set,” he explains. “Put it on a soundstage, it costs you $5,000 a day. You’re gonna put $8,000 of lights and you’re gonna bring a $150,000 crew in. You’re gonna bring actors in from all over the world, you’re gonna put them up in hotels, […]
“It is art that triumphs here, that speaks to the mystery of existence,” suggests the narrator of this new video essay from ::kogonada on Tarkovsky’s Solaris. Envisioning the filmmaker’s psychological meditation in stark contrast to the purported gadgets and gizmos of 2001: A Space Odyssey, “Auteur in Space” breaks down the humanity and pathos at the center of this most unusual sci-fi. Head to Sight&Sound to watch.