The cinema thread

[endersgame]

has anyone seen that banksy film yet? is it at all worth checking out?
I mean, I read great stuff about it, but then what little I've seen isn't appealing at all

i think the positive reviews are from fans who appreciate banksy. i personally don't follow this stuff. and after watching the film half-way, you kinda knew the whole thing was a hoax and i kinda just fast-fowarded the last half-hour. it's made to be cute and mock the people who bought into the hype. and that's pretty much it..

[marco-von]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/nov/19/banksy-oscar-nomination

i enjoyed it, i reckon it was a hoax too but we can never be sure the same way as we will never know if carol dips his penguin biscuit in his coffee during tea breaks and if altieri wears slippers and reads OK magazine before he goes to bed....just total mindfuck mania really.

mulder and scully would know.

[MoFiya]

R.I.P.

[Enaml]

Propaganda.

[Acéphale]

[MoFiya]

For the German fellows: there is a Jean-Luc Godard marathons coming up on TV! Sunday night, 3sat from ~11pm to 5am or so. Plus, tonight at 11pm or so Le Mépris.

[Fade to Black]

revisited Full Metal Jacket, and I must say the first half at Paris Island has gotta be Kubrick's most elaborately framed work in cinematography...some of the compositions are really something.

[sam_tem]

anyone interested in the new criterions:




forgive me, i just now came across the link:

http://fakecriterions.tumblr.com/

[Fade to Black]

i was wondering, Gigli going to Criterion somehow feels poignant and poetic. I believed it.

[Fade to Black]

watched Anton Corbijn's The American today, I enjoyed it a lot, the deliberately sparse approach to narrative worked well with the photography, was kind of like a somewhat quicker Antonioni.

[KM80]

Watched the last dragon the other day, it was pretty Incredible and I would highly recommend it if you like trash from the 80s.

[maldoror]

[Acéphale]

[Faust]

holocaust films of the narrative variety have always been far too problematic for my liking. there's just something inherently foul about the structural nature of narrativity that doesn't quite lend itself to approaching and representing an event like the holocaust. i can't quite put a handle on it just yet, but perhaps it lies in the deceit of literalness and the correspondence to a representational economy that shits me the most. presumptuously economical - a tightly woven nugget. as opposed to a poeisis of articulation - something predisposed and sensitive to an obliqueness, often with a profound sense of ellipsis, and often resulting in something too literal for those who look for literalness could ever deal with. like the way poetry, rather than prose, has been far more emphatic in dealing with the holocaust, eg. celan and sachs.

to that end, i think the 3 best films on the holocaust are alain resnais' night and fog (nuit et brouillard), claude lanzmann's shoah, and harun farocki's respite. they are certainly not films of the narrative variety. often placed within the bracket of "documentaries". hardly that, i'd say, at least not in the conventional sense. "cine-essays" would probably be more of an apt description.

outside of those 3, there are other favourites but they're of the narrative sort (fictional or adaptational). namely,

alfred rodok's the long journey
jan nemec's diamonds of the night
andrzej wajda's korczak
andrzej munk's the passenger
gillo pontecorvo's kapo
louis malle's lacombe, lucien
(easily one of malle's best)

all highly recommended.

Going back to this - caught on NPR today that Shoah is being re-released in NYC for its 25th anniversary. Any self-respecting Jew (and non-Jew) must see this.

[Faust]

Any SZ member reviews for Black Swan?