Le chinoise.Most serious writing about Jean-Luc Godard tends to be both high-flown and forbidding, rather like the films it’s discussing. Translations from French to English or vice versa can make things even dicier. But according to the literary scholar Fredric Jameson, who contributes an enthusiastic preface and afterword, Reading with Jean-Luc Godard—a compendium of 109 three-page essays by 50 writers from a dozen countries, announced as the first in a series—launches “a new form” and “a new genre.”The brevity of each entry tends to confirm Jameson’s claim. The book can be described as an audience-friendly volume designed to occupy the same space between academia and journalism staked out by Notebook while proposing routes into Godard’s work provided by his eclectic reading—a batch of writers ranged alphabetically and intellectually from Louis Aragon, Robert Ardrey, Hannah Arendt, and Honoré de Balzac to François Truffaut, Paul Valéry,...
- 1/30/2024
- MUBI
The best documentaries about artists exploit the visual powers of the storytelling medium to give us a tactile appreciation of what their work looks and feels, while also mining the depths of their souls and their relationships to history. Last year’s “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” Laura Poitras’ film about the life and work of activist/artist Nan Goldin, and 2011’s “Pina,” Wim Wenders’ portrait of choreographer Pina Bausch, come to mind, both straying far from the parameters of a talking-heads-driven nonfiction film to put us straight inside the work itself. These movies, too, stand as powerful cinematic and artistic exercises on their own terms.
Wenders now returns to the realm of 3D documentary he inhabited so gorgeously with “Pina” to explore the works of 78-year-old painter and sculptor Anselm Kiefer. Explicitly non-biographical, “Anselm” is instead a philosophical rendering of an artist in working mode, where he actively...
Wenders now returns to the realm of 3D documentary he inhabited so gorgeously with “Pina” to explore the works of 78-year-old painter and sculptor Anselm Kiefer. Explicitly non-biographical, “Anselm” is instead a philosophical rendering of an artist in working mode, where he actively...
- 12/8/2023
- by Ryan Lattanzio
- Indiewire
The first sculpture seen in Wim Wenders’s documentary Anselm is a wedding dress, its long train strewn over a massive bed of fallen leaves, perched in a lush forest on a cliff’s edge. All the while, the film cuts between intimate close-ups and long shots that take in the totality of the piece. More sculptures emerge across an expansive outdoor atelier in Croissy, on the outskirts of Paris, each subsequent wedding dress overflowing with harsh textures due to the various hard materials used within them. As if mimicking the experience of an in-person encounter with Anselm Kiefer’s confrontational work, the 3D camera glides past them all.
First glimpsed in the film cycling in his vast warehouse in Barjac, France, the seventysomething Kiefer appears as if he’s sprung from one of his enormous paintings. As Wenders’s mesmerizing portrait of the Austrian-German multimedia artist progresses, the experience...
First glimpsed in the film cycling in his vast warehouse in Barjac, France, the seventysomething Kiefer appears as if he’s sprung from one of his enormous paintings. As Wenders’s mesmerizing portrait of the Austrian-German multimedia artist progresses, the experience...
- 10/25/2023
- by Greg Nussen
- Slant Magazine
Though the Holocaust had no one architect, Rudolf Höss remains singularly responsible for the speed and efficiency of the atrocities committed at Auschwitz, later emulated at the other Nazi death camps, thanks to his approval of the use of the deadly Zyklon B gas. And for his efforts at the first Auschwitz camp in Oświęcim, Poland, he was rewarded by being made commandant of death camp administration throughout the Nazi-occupied lands. This is the monster on full display in Jonathan Glazer’s adaptation of Martin Amis’s The Zone of Interest.
While the novel’s protagonist is named Paul Doll, Glazer chose to name Christian Friedel’s character Rudolf Höss. This immediately point to Glazer’s interest in bringing in the weight of a well-recorded historical character living in a specific place and time: the Höss household next to Auschwitz I in Oświęcim from 1943 to 1944. Much of the film follows...
While the novel’s protagonist is named Paul Doll, Glazer chose to name Christian Friedel’s character Rudolf Höss. This immediately point to Glazer’s interest in bringing in the weight of a well-recorded historical character living in a specific place and time: the Höss household next to Auschwitz I in Oświęcim from 1943 to 1944. Much of the film follows...
- 9/27/2023
- by Zach Lewis
- Slant Magazine
Shot stereographically on ultra-high resolution rigs, Wim Wenders’ latest documentary Anselm offers a mesmerizing, cinematic catalogue of German painter-sculptor Anselm Kiefer’s deeply tactile, maximalist oeuvre.
As with Pina, Wenders’ luminous 2011 tribute to the late dancer-choreographer Pina Bausch, Wenders makes here the best case yet for arthouse theaters to keep their 3D projection kit up to date. For this is one of those rare movies that’s actually enriched by the use of the format, and not an excuse for a gimmicky thrill ride for the easily amused or very young.
As a career survey of its subject, Anselm overlaps with Sophie Fiennes’ exquisitely austere doc Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow, which also debuted at Cannes, albeit back in 2011. Wenders’ film, however, broadens its focus to take in Kiefer’s earliest and more recent work, and not just the monumental installation that is his former studio-cum-city-state in Barjac, France,...
As with Pina, Wenders’ luminous 2011 tribute to the late dancer-choreographer Pina Bausch, Wenders makes here the best case yet for arthouse theaters to keep their 3D projection kit up to date. For this is one of those rare movies that’s actually enriched by the use of the format, and not an excuse for a gimmicky thrill ride for the easily amused or very young.
As a career survey of its subject, Anselm overlaps with Sophie Fiennes’ exquisitely austere doc Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow, which also debuted at Cannes, albeit back in 2011. Wenders’ film, however, broadens its focus to take in Kiefer’s earliest and more recent work, and not just the monumental installation that is his former studio-cum-city-state in Barjac, France,...
- 5/18/2023
- by Leslie Felperin
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
Isabelle Tollenaere's Battles (2015) is exclusively playing on Mubi from March 28 - April 27, 2018 in most countries around the world. More than anything, I love walking into a cinema uninhibited. A fragment from a synopsis, an image from the film, or the recollection of the filmmaker’s previous work, are what draw me to the cinema. I don’t want to know or see anything more beforehand, I’d rather it’d be even less. Cinema as an unannounced world which unfolds itself, a window that lights up as soon as the lights of the cinema go down. Whenever I have to introduce Battles to an audience, I don’t reveal too much in advance. I want the spectator to dive into the darkness of the cinema equally unaware, and wake up to the universe of Battles. So that we only search for the words to express what we witnessed afterwards.
- 3/28/2018
- MUBI
The media-shy director provides rare insights into his process and philosophy.Photo: Ben Porter/Broad Green Pictures
In a surprising but characteristically nonchalant turn, media-shy filmosopher Terrence Malick appeared on a panel with Richard Linklater and Michael Fassbender at SXSW last week. The Q&A session, moderated with reverence and easygoing charm by Linklater, occurred after the festival premiere of Malick’s Austin music-scene romance Song to Song, in which Fassbender stars with Ryan Gosling, Rooney Mara, and Natalie Portman. No mention was made (at least in the 30-minute bootleg that made it to YouTube) of the obvious elephant in the room: Malick has essentially never done an interview to promote one of his films, let alone subjected himself to the unscripted questions of an eager audience. Though the mysterious auteur behind Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line, and Tree of Life has upped his output in recent years, his...
In a surprising but characteristically nonchalant turn, media-shy filmosopher Terrence Malick appeared on a panel with Richard Linklater and Michael Fassbender at SXSW last week. The Q&A session, moderated with reverence and easygoing charm by Linklater, occurred after the festival premiere of Malick’s Austin music-scene romance Song to Song, in which Fassbender stars with Ryan Gosling, Rooney Mara, and Natalie Portman. No mention was made (at least in the 30-minute bootleg that made it to YouTube) of the obvious elephant in the room: Malick has essentially never done an interview to promote one of his films, let alone subjected himself to the unscripted questions of an eager audience. Though the mysterious auteur behind Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line, and Tree of Life has upped his output in recent years, his...
- 3/15/2017
- by Jake Orthwein
- FilmSchoolRejects.com
Colin MacCabe on shooting Berger: "John absolutely refused to plan things." Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze
Author, artist, self-declared storyteller John Berger is the focus of the intricately woven strands that make up The Seasons In Quincy: Four Portraits Of John Berger. Produced by The Derek Jarman Lab as a quartet of individual film essays, directed by Tilda Swinton, Christopher Roth, Bartek Dziadosz and Colin MacCabe, the combination allows for fascinating interplay of concerns.
On the opening day in New York, Colin MacCabe and I had a conversation that led from Berger's kitchen to Ken Loach's I, Daniel Blake, The Spectre Of Hope on Sebastião Salgado, Chris Marker, Neil Jordan collaborator Patrick McCabe, Isaac Julien, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger, the editing by Christopher Roth and the cinematography of Bartek Dziadosz, apples, raspberries and cows, Brexit and Northern Ireland.
Tilda Swinton: "As soon as we finished the first one,...
Author, artist, self-declared storyteller John Berger is the focus of the intricately woven strands that make up The Seasons In Quincy: Four Portraits Of John Berger. Produced by The Derek Jarman Lab as a quartet of individual film essays, directed by Tilda Swinton, Christopher Roth, Bartek Dziadosz and Colin MacCabe, the combination allows for fascinating interplay of concerns.
On the opening day in New York, Colin MacCabe and I had a conversation that led from Berger's kitchen to Ken Loach's I, Daniel Blake, The Spectre Of Hope on Sebastião Salgado, Chris Marker, Neil Jordan collaborator Patrick McCabe, Isaac Julien, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger, the editing by Christopher Roth and the cinematography of Bartek Dziadosz, apples, raspberries and cows, Brexit and Northern Ireland.
Tilda Swinton: "As soon as we finished the first one,...
- 9/2/2016
- by Anne-Katrin Titze
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
Trying to sum up the life, and even more so the work, of a philosopher and intellectual with the stature and import of one Hannah Arendt is a very tall order, particularly when attempting to do so in one feature length film. One of the most influential thinkers of her time, Arendt, a German of the Jewish faith, fled for New York in 1941, only to pen important pieces like The Human Condition and even more importantly, The Origins Of Totalitarianism. She’s also arguably best known for “coining” the phrase “the banality of evil,” her attempt to ostensibly explain how (in her seminal 1963 work Eichmann In Jerusalem) a man like Adolf Eichmann, a man so seemingly ordinary and utterly bland, could be behind some of the most disgusting atrocities ever committed by man. With that phrase now becoming something even more lifeless than even a standard cliche, Arendt’s work...
- 4/8/2016
- by Joshua Brunsting
- CriterionCast
Sometimes I imagine that it is 1983 and Terrence Malick is somewhere in Paris, living a quiet, normal life. As he walks to one of his favorite cafes, he catches a glimpse of Gilles Deleuzes’ Cinéma 1: L’image-mouvemont in a bookstore window. Naturally, he’s curious. In an intellectual era dominated by Theory, the only other book of philosophy that had taken up cinema as a way to do philosophy was The World Viewed, written by his friend and one time academic advisor Stanley Cavell. I imagine that Malick seeks out Deleuze, who is lecturing at the University of Paris VIII. Two years later, he buys a copy of Deleuze’s Cinéma 2: L’image-temps. Deleuze confirmed what Malick has long suspected, but either forgotten or was distracted from in the hedonistic atmosphere of 1970s L. A. chronicled by Peter Biskind in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls—cinema “thinks” philosophically. Other...
- 8/3/2015
- by Reno Lauro
- MUBI
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