Blackest Night
by Adam Hirsch
Green Lantern, dir. Martin Campbell (2011)
Full disclosure: the Green Lantern is my favorite comic book hero.
So I’m giving Green Lantern the benefit of the doubt, the benefit of the heart, because it’s a rare film that refuses to cross the line into cheap gags and cynicism and this film refuses to do either. Most people who’ve seen it dismiss it as hokey, and just plain bad, but there seems to be a depth that Green Lantern aims for and, well, misses. (more…)
RICKETS: Official Selection
by Adam Hirsch
Our very own Brian Barth has officially stepped on to the festival circuit!
His experimental film RICKETS (2010) will be premiering at the Boston Underground Film Festival ’11 and the Kansas City FilmFest ’11.
RICKETS explores a transformed landscape as it follows the simplest aesthetic narrative — white to black. The textures and rhythms of the image come from the serious digital distortion (achieved entirely in-camera) of the perfectly scenic setting of a boat trip down the Hudson River. The camera captures an alternate, underlying world, an almost microscopic vibration that pervades our existence.
Keep an eye out (for all our loyal Boston followers) – make sure to pick up some tickets for BUFF.
And while you’re there, be sure to also check out the extraordinary nunsploitation film Thy Kill Be Done (2010, dirs. Greg Hanson and Casey Reagan). It’s exactly what you think it is in the best way possible.
Our shoulders are all waxed and ready to rub. Come out and support Brian, the Company, Boston filmmaking, and, heck, just to see some really great film.
Ménilmontant (1925)
by Adam Hirsch
One of the great things about the internet is having access to things you wouldn’t ordinarily find.
In this case, it’s a 37 minute film by Dimitri Kirsanoff from 1925 called Ménilmontant. I saw it in a screening at Bard with the understanding that it was an “extremely rare film to ever see” and to savor it because the likelihood was that I’d never see it again (unless I, you know, checked it out from the Bard film library).
Ha! Here it is presented for you, in these holiday times. Incidentally, it’s also Pauline Kael’s favorite film (she, too, claimed it was impossible to find). A real gem.
Countdown to Milan
by Adam Hirsch
Well, it’s looking like the time has come for the Company to go international. I’m hopping the pond over to Europe to take Faith Healer to the Milan International Film Festival, where it’s nominated for Best Short Film. Check out the program here. It screens on Sunday May 9 at the Teatra Gnomo.
I’ll be posting updates on the blog periodically over the week, but if you want the play-by-play action follow me on Twitter.
Dispatches from the Circuit: Back of the Napkin
by Adam Hirsch
At around 6:00 p.m. yesterday, the shorts program ended here at the Geneva Film Festival and I walked over to the bar across the street. I sat down, got a drink, and on the back of the napkin began writing down the first things that came to mind after seeing my work screened (with other people’s hard, truthful work — but more on that in a later post). Here, unedited and unfiltered, is the list.
Double Feature: I
by Adam Hirsch
There are always films that fall through the proverbial cracks in every filmmaker’s viewing library, well-known and applauded films that we have claimed to have seen but actually have on our I’ll-eventually-sit-down-and-watch-it list. We all have these lists, myself as much as anyone.
Which is why last night, thanks in part to the wonderful advent of Netflix, I decided to start crossing a few films off the list with weekly double features of missed works. It certainly didn’t hurt that my girlfriend was out of town and I could unapologetically choose which films to watch.
I’m approaching these posts as impressions more than appraisals. I’m not going to write up synopses or review the filmmaking. The films that I’m going to watch are classics that have just passed me by — I’m choosing the ones I’ve heard are magnificent, and it follows that they are going to deliver on the promise. For this first week’s double feature, I chose to kick things off with a triple feature: Terrence Malick’s Badlands, Jerry Schatzberg’s Scarecrow and Robert Altman’s Gosford Park.
Lids
by Adam Hirsch
Every year they make the same mistake. They rinse off the pot, give it a quick dry, pop it on the burner and twist the heat to high. The prep work takes precedent, chopping the onions and slicing thin the meat, letting the pot heat all the while. Then the time comes for them to brown the meat and they pour in a few tablespoons of oil, which smokes for a moment, and then, with a sudden and heavy breath, pfoof! – fire. (more…)
Look At The Progression…
by Adam Hirsch
The Seitz brothers were commissioned by L Magazine to create a video essay on the decade in film. It’s in two parts, and great.
If this doesn’t get you excited about filmmaking, I don’t know what will.
Part One:
Part Two:
The Great Imitation [Part One]
by Adam Hirsch
“Remember that lost time does not return.”
It also covers the repercussions of her work, told in two interweaving narratives: Julia’s life in France and, forty years later, a neurotic writer-to-be living in New York named Julie who decides to spend a year cooking her way through Mastering the Art, write a blog about it, and inexplicably spends every single evening drinking several martinis without any dire effects. Meryl Streep, as always, is impeccable as Julia Child and Amy Adams is great as Julie. Although they both are extremely empathetic protagonists, it’s Julia who always manages to be the one in power. Julia draws meaning from life out of excellence; Julie draws meaning out of life from the replication of Julia’s excellence.
and gastronomic cookbooks — Child’s in particular — is that the former insist on the individual taking the lessons and making something new and unique; the latter asks that the cook follow the directions in order to produce a standard form of a dish.
Notes on Funny
by Giampaolo Bianconi
Roberto Bolaño was known to say that it was the writer’s duty to plunge headfirst into the void, into the darkness. I like to think that Funny People is the film where Judd Apatow walked to the edge of the void, looked down, and decided that it was enough. The director said he wanted to make a movie about death, but I wouldn’t have known it from watching Funny People. The film is made up of moments where Apatow plays chicken with the serious — and he’s the one to veer first. It follows much like the scene when the self-absorbed pseudo-star played by Jason Schwartzman shares the story of his grandfather’s death, only to be greeted with jokes by his friends.
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That Is The Smartest Pig I’ve Ever Seen.
by Matt Paley
I realized this morning that this blog is being misused. That is, underused.
I think it’s because Adam and I view a website as somewhat official—did you hear that everything uploaded to the internet is eternally accessible, in fact just barely hidden, FOREVER? Even if you delete it?—and therefore, not a place to admit that, yes, I had Shanghai Noon on VHS, and no, I’ve never seen La Strada, even though, not a week and a half ago, I acted like I had when Brian talked about it, as I do every time Adam mentions it. Oh, also, I own it. I took the plastic wrap off so that you couldn’t tell it hadn’t been watched. Like Gatsby.
Ahem. I’m here to explode our stiffness once and for all.
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To Let Us Both Get To Our Business [No. 2]
by Matt Paley
[a Letter to Robert Kelly:]
The film that taught me to cultivate silence — or, at least, made me aware of the flesh of the film itself — was Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love. Perhaps Wong Kar Wai doesn’t compare to Vigo or Epstein — his films certainly fall into the category of “sentimental loves stories in celluloid” — but I remember realizing, for the first time, that In the Mood for Love loses nothing from a subtitle-less viewing. I saw, in that, the hope of a fuller, richer, fleshier cinema.
Should cinema attempt to do all of its work visually? The question presupposes something essential to cinema about the moving image–that every art can be reduced to a single heart; painting to color, poetry to words (or, perhaps, their absence), drawing to the line, etc–and that the heart of cinema is not the dream of a complete representation of the world (as Bazin might argue).
Or, on the other hand, is cinema is in the unique position to utilize all of these languages? Should the film-maker, then, search every subject / idea / emotion /
To Let Us Both Get To Our Business
by Matt Paley
[a Letter to Robert Kelly:]
Many film theorists subscribe to some belief of primacy—the primacy of the image over sound, of image over language, of sound over image, of language over image. My feeling, swayed ever so slightly by a few of these arguments, is that there is some work that each of these languages has more trouble expressing than the others. Some content is best left to the visual (and iconic), some to language (the purely symbolic), and some to sound only (indexical, leaving the audience some work of imagining). Obviously, this neat semiotic differentiation is a gross oversimplification; yet they do all three have different properties and effects.
Too often, in the imitation of ‘real life’, the modern filmmaker uses all three where one will do. It is sensory overload—we comprehend the moment thus created only dimly, and feel our emotions manipulated artlessly. The great filmmaker, utilizing all three languages simultaneously, captures something we already know, and have felt, and allows us to experience it as if for the first time. He searches not for new stories—the greater the filmmaker, in fact, the older the story he tackles—for he knows that he makes every story new and interesting by using these languages in new and unexpected ways.
Let me say now that I too have a theory of primacy: that of feeling over thought. My art is not philosophy; it strains against the intellectual weight of Brakhage and Bresson, and shies away from innovation for its own sake. I stumble in the dark for moments of feeling, for connection and coincidence, and the less thinking I do is most often the better. I idolize Truffaut, and merely tolerate (all but the earliest) Godard. I hold Cassavetes somewhere deep, a fire in my gut. My art will never be about language, or the limitations of language. But I have stories to tell, and the great storytellers do not waste their tools.
It is commonly said that the photographic image cannot convey religious experience. Wasn’t it Maya Deren, after all, who, after be granted access to film the most intimate ceremonies of the voodoo practitioners of Haiti, went back to the United States with hours of footage and wrote an ethnography instead?
And so we discuss with the poet the limitations of poetry, with the musician the limitations of music, with the photographer the limitations of the photographic image.
I think of Cassavetes as embodying all, all that is wrong with film. Brakhage was not an intellectual — his IQ –he proudly boasted– was 84. He was an artist of the senses, specifically sight/vision, and the greatest of those who worked in moving sight in our time. He was not a bougeois pseudo-intellectual (Cassavetes, Truffaut…) trying to tell sentimental love stories in celluloid. Cassavetes is Capra without the happy ending — the film stuff, the actual flesh of film, is equally dull.
If you’re a storyteller, and love film, look at Renoir’s Toni, or Tati’s anything, or Pasolini — the film tells the stories, is not just some not pretty pictures to accompany a script.
Pale Fire
by Adam Hirsch
Fuel for heavy flames: where there is smoke, there is fire. In the due course of making a film, one wishes for the smoke to act as a sort of calling card, a beacon, a tolling bell in the distance to bring people in and help you from going under and drowning. So may these entries, then, be a form of a smoke signal, bell tower, jazz club and cathedral all in one.