The Screengrab : alain resnais

Basterds in the Imaginarium: Cannes Lineup Unveiled

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 15:30:00 GMT

Quentin Tarantino, Ang Lee, Terry Gilliam, Pedro Almodovar, Lars von Trier and Jane Campion are among the big-name directors with films set to screen at the 2009 Festival de Cannes. Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds will have its premiere at the festival, where it will compete with von Trier’s Antichrist, Lee’s Taking Woodstock, Almodovar’s Broken Embraces and Campion’s Bright Star. Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus will screen out of competition.

“More recent Palme d’Or recipient Ken Loach will appear once again in Cannes with Looking for Eric, about a troubled young soccer fan and Gallic soccer sensation Eric Cantona. The film will vie for the Palme d’Or against Johnny To’s French-made Vengeance starring pop sensation Johnny Hallyday as a hitman out to avenge his daughter’s death,” per The Hollywood Reporter.

Other notable films screening in competition include Les herbes folles, directed by Alain Resnais, The White Ribbon, directed by Michael Haneke, and Enter the Void, directed by Gaspar Noe. The opening night film will be Pixar’s Up and the closer will be Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinski. The festival kicks off on May 13.

Related:
Tarantino's Ingluourious Basterds Unleashed
Terry Gilliam Bites Back

The World of Lists: Documentaries Get Their Due

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 14:30:00 GMT

Though we love movie-related lists as much as anybody -- indeed, as we love movie-related lists even more than anybody -- we've noticed a somewhat disturbing trend in the recent flood-tide of best-ofs: the documentary often gets the short shrift. Stuck somewhere between a feature film and an educational short, even with the new wave of populist docs that actually make money at the box office, doumentaries are rarely considered part of the mainstream corpus which gets shuffled around for various critics' Top Whatever lists, and thus, leave the average fan with no idea where to start when it comes to the medium.

That's something that Jonathan Kahana, a professor of cinema studies at NYU (and author of the recently released Intelligence Work: The Politics of American Documentary) aims to change with this list.

Originally created as a feature for an in-flight magazine and later severely truncated (a process all to familiar to those of us who have tilled that particular soil), Kahana's list contains a dozen of the finest documentaries in history from the 1920s to the present, available on DVD and otherwise. Compiled by the author to "pay it forward" to an upcoming generations of documentary fans, the list is a solid one -- we'll present it below in chronological order, but please do check out the link for Kahana's insightful commentary on each choice.

1. Manhatta (Charles Sheeler & Paul Strand, 1921) & Rain (Joris Ivens, 1929)
2. Nanook of the North (Robert Flaherty, 1922)
3. The Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929)
4. Night and Fog (Alain Resnais, 1955)
5. Salesman (Alfred & David Maysles, 1969)
6. Harlan County U.S.A. & American Dream (Barbara Kopple, 1975 & 1991)
7. Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1982)
8. The Thin Blue Line (Errol Morris, 1989)
9. Little Dieter Wants to Fly (Werner Herzog, 1998)
10. The Gleaners and I (Agnes Varda, 2000)
11. The Corporation (Jennifer Abbott & Mark Achbar, 2003)
12. Bright Leaves (Ross McElwee, 2004)

What do you think, Screengrab readers? What did Kahana include that you'd have left off, and what did he omit that you'd make sure got in? What are your 12 favorite documentaries?

Related Posts:

Doc Around the Clock

Bin-Laden 2, Documentary Filmmakers 0

Screengrab Q&A: Joachim Trier, Director of Reprise

Peter Smith — Fri, 16 May 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Joachim Trier's debut film Reprise centers on a pair of twentysomething best friends who drop their debut novels into the same mailbox to varied results. It's taken the writer/director on a very interesting journey. The film won Trier a Discovery Award at the 2006 Toronto Film Festival; it debuted in the States at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, and was later the featured film in the 2007 New Directors/New Films series, where Manohla Dargis of the New York Times declared it "one of the most passionately and intellectually uninhibited works from a young director I've seen in ages." It also went on to win Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Film at the Amanda Awards in Norway (the equivalent of an Oscar) in 2007. But only after support from superproducer Scott Rudin and Miramax will the film get a general release in American theaters today. Reprise is vibrant, inventive and original in both its ideas and its form, and is sure to be at the top of my own year-end list. — Bryan Whitefield

Foreign-language films typically have a hard time in America, and I remember someone at the MoMA screening asking if you had considered writing an English language version of Reprise. . .
[laughs] I've had offers, actually. But to me Reprise is perfect as it is now in its cultural setting. I'm interested in detail, and not because I'm trying to hone in on one particular part of the audience. You try to see things as they are — these are people who are living like that and have shoes like that and listen to music like this and this is the world where they live. You work to create it and you don't ask questions. To recreate that somewhere else would be absurd. But at the same time, some people were telling me, "This film reminds me so much of people I know on the Lower East Side." I get this even in Turkey. There were people there that were coming up to me to say, "We have boys like that in Istanbul that listen to Joy Division and everything."

You use some interesting formal devices in the film, like skewing timelines or having scenes play where the dialogue track doesn't match the action. How much of that was in the script and how much was done afterwards?
The screenplay is a lot like the film as a finished piece, but along the way you have to create something else and then come back to it. We would write a very intertwined, intercut scene to give the financiers an idea of how it would look. But then I would re-write it, with my co-writer, as a long linear scene that we would then cut up and go back to the initial idea. Dirty formalism, I usually call it. It needs to be alive and chaotic, yet it's also quite particularly planned.

The film plays very loose, but at the same time feels very focused.
I think those are the kind of contrasts we are always looking for when we do movies. I think it's the same for the actors. They go on set and they learn their lines and practice and run them again and again, and then they go on set and kind of lose them.

You're also dealing with the contrast between light and dark; the film balances very serious scenes with very funny ones.
It's kind of like music. In order to [fit in both tones], you need almost musical transitions.

That is how people actually deal with unhappy experiences. If you're going to pick your best friend up out of the mental hospital, you make a joke to deal with it.
Otherwise you won't survive. Compensational dynamics in people are more interesting. When the two boys are closest to each other, they can throw a lot of shit and say bad things to each other, but when they drift apart, they don't have that glue anymore. They end up trying to be polite; they're just not sure what to say anymore.

You cast mostly non-professional actors.
We looked at musicians or friends of friends or stand-up comedians, all sorts of people. In fairness, some of them are trained actors, but the lead parts are all people who have done other things. Like the guy that plays Phillip is a doctor. He worked with young teenage schizophrenics as part of his education as a doctor, so he had great experience, and he knew that madness isn't always excessive and screamy. It can sometimes be very drawn in.

Were there filmmakers or artists in general who inspired you?
Alain Resnais and Chris Marker are people who have meant a lot to me, because they made films that deal with almost the ground substance of cinema — memory, representation, identity — things that I think give themselves as themes to films particularly. Also Woody Allen, with Annie Hall. A lot of that stuff is seen as comedy but it's actually really good drama. But there are millions of references — a lot of music actually. The guy that did the score has a band called The White Birch, and we were listening to that all the time when we were writing. It was great when he said he would do the score for us since he'd never done feature film scores before.

Was he a friend of yours?
Not at the time, but we had some common friends.You know, it's a little ironic since Reprise is kind of about people who fall apart as friends, but I've made a lot of new friends through this process.

[SEMI-SPOILER ALERT] I thought it was refreshing to have an, in a sense, uplifting, almost happy ending.
Not everybody has interpreted it like that.

I kept waiting for something really dark to happen and I thought the way you tied things up was very nice. Did you struggle with that decision?
People interpret the ending differently. Some people see it as quite bleak and others see it as optimistic. I was always, in my mind, cheering for the characters; I just hope that people are open to an open ending.

One of the hallmarks of American indies seems to be that if you have a happy ending, you secretly wanted to make a commercial film.
I remember hearing acquisitions people talking about the films at Sundance: "Was it hopeful? Was it uplifting?" Those were the two words I kept hearing, and it struck me as so odd. . . I mean, what the fuck is hopeful? It makes me hopeful sometimes if a filmmaker can make a film that's truly sad and makes me feel less alone. But this idea of hopefulness I found very funny.

Alain Robbe-Grillet (1922-2008)

Phil Nugent — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 19:02:00 GMT

Alain Robbe-Grillet has died at the age of 85. As a novelist, Robbe-Grillet was one of the key figures associated with the fractured, free-associative literary style known as the nouveau roman, typefied by his early books such as The Erasers and The Voyeur. He also taught at the University of New York for many years and was elected to the Académie française in 2004. Robbe-Grillet was one of those modernist Europeans who regarded film as just one more potential avenue for creative expression, and between books he turned out a number of films that he wrote and directed, including Trans-Europe Express (1966), The Man Who Lies, and The Beautiful Captive (1986). He also appeared onscreen in a small role in Raul Ruiz's 1999 Proust adaptation, Time Regained. But his most important and enduring contribution to movie history is almost certainly his original screenplay for Alain Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad, a movie that set a new fashion for art cinema worldwide.

The Rep Report (January 15 - January 22)

Phil Nugent — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 20:00:00 GMT

BERKELEY: Pacific Film Archives pays tribute to the actor who, with no small degree of justice, can claim to be the face of the French New Wave with "Jean-Pierre Léaud: The New Wave and After" (January 18 - February 29). Leaud made his film debut at fifteen when Francois Truffaut cast him as Antoine Doinel, his youthful alter ago in the 1959 The 400 Blows. That would turn out to be a pretty steady gig, as he went on to reprise the character in three more features made between 1968's Stolen Kisses to the 1979 Love on the Run. All of them are included here, along with Truffaut's Day for Night and Two English Girls and Leaud's work for Godard (La Chinoise, Masculine Feminine, and Weekend, in which he has a cameo), Jacques Rivette (Out 1: Spectre), and Jean Eustache (The Mother and the Whore). The more recent films include Olivier Assayas' Irma Vep, which finds Leaud once again involved in making a movie within a movie, and another cameo appearance in La Vie de Boheme, arguably the funniest movie by the Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki.

Also at PFA: "Vegetable, Mineral: Recent Experimental Documentaries" (January 15 - February 26) will include evenings devoted to the work of James Benning, Maryam Kashani, Rene Daalder, and the radical media collective Paper Tiger TV. On February 5, the program will also incorporate a presentation and booksigning by Alexandra Juhasz and Jesse Lerner, authors of the news study F Is for Phony.

LOS ANGELES: The Los Angeles County Museum of Art spends the weekend trying to get to the bottom of that sweet mystery of life that is David Lynch. Friday night, the museum screens Lynch's short films, while Saturday it celebrates the thirtieth anniversary of Eraserhead with a showing of a restored print of the film, a bad dream we never get tired of hearing recounted. On both nights, they're showing the strange new documentary Lynch, in which our hero can be seen directing Inland Empire, explaining to Laura Dern why she should be flattered when he calls her "tidbit", talking about the bad old days in Philadelphia, and letting the cigarette butts pile up on the concrete floor of his office. Maybe if enough people show up, the museum will have a heart and buy the guy an ashtray.

NEW YORK: For two weeks starting January 18, Film Forum brings back Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad, the icy, beautiful 1961 film that did its part to make European cinema seem like a stylish thing to puzzle over. A style-setter in the area of fashion as much as in filmmaking, it has the not inconsiderable distinction of being the only film to win both the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and inclusion in Harry and Michael Medved's The Fifty Worst Films of All Time.