FM3 - Auteur Theory

Auteur Theory

You can't really be an auteur until you've got your type!

Tim Burton's Dark Shadows may have received a kicking from critics, but one person has emerged from the dust-up unscathed: Eva Green, the French actress who plays the evil witch Angelique Bouchard. With her red-lacquered lips, her crazy-beautiful eyes and possessed-marionette limbs, Green's lolling vamp represents the perfection of a type Burton has long been trying to get right – from Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman in Batman Returns, to Lisa Marie Smith's bosomy Martian in Mars Attacks!, to Anne Hathaway's White Queen in Alice in Wonderland.

Critics may be tired of the rest of Burton's directorial signatures – the ornate production designs, the seventies kitsch, the collaboration with Johnny Depp – but he's finally perfected his vamps: peroxide-blonde, big-chested, cinch-waisted, eyes like Bambi's.

All film directors have their types. Everyone knows Steven Spielberg for his suburban settings, alien visitations, and Godlike shafts of light, but equally consistent is his taste for hot moms in long T-shirts, cut-off jeans and morning-sexy hair: Teri Garr and Mellinda Dillon in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, JoBeth Williams in Poltergeist, and Dee Wallace in ET (dressed as Catwoman for Halloween, she even sends ET into a swoon).

Scorsese scholars find rich pickings in the director's Catholism, his taste for violence, his bruisers, misfits and loners, but less so the women in orbit around them, whether sexily-damaged like Rosanna Arquette in After Hours and Illeana Douglas in Cape Fear, or spitfires like Lorraine Bracco in Goodfellas and Sharon Stone in Casino, giving as good as they get.

To which we could add Tarantino's foot fetish ("He gave her a foot massage!"), Fellini's breast-love, the lifelong connoisseurship Michaelangelo Antonioni brought to women's legs, David Lynch's thing for misapplied lipstick, Darren Aronofsky's taste for brainy brunettes and David Fincher's love of skinny Goth girls viewed from the rear. As New York film critic David Edelstein concluded recently: "Fincher is an undies-and-butt man." You could be forgiven for concluding that the most enduring definition of an auteur is a film-maker who populates his movies with women he wants to boff.

The big guns of auteur theory are strangely silent on the matter. In his seminal essay Notes on Auteur Theory in 1962, the influential American critic Andrew Sarris determined that auteur status was conferred by meeting the following benchmarks: technical competence, personal style and something called "interior meaning", which he variously defined as a director's "vision of the world", his "attitude to life", and "élan of the soul." He said nothing about sexual pecadilloes.

Even though the two film directors hoisted highest by the French and touted as auteurist poster boys – Howards Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock – are famous for their taste in women, bequeathing us, respectively, the Hawksian woman and the Hitchcock blonde.

In his groundbreaking 1953 Cahiers du cinema essay, The Genius of Howard Hawks, Jacques Rivette identified Hawks as "a bundle of dark forces and strange fascinations" – his "obsession with continuity", his "obsession with primitivism" and "bouts of ordered madness which give birth to an infinite chain of consequences" – but passed over his equally fervid obsession with insolent, self-possessed foxes, lounging against doorways in tailored suits like Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not ("You know how to whistle, don't you, Steve? You just put your lips together and … blow.")

Read more @ The Guardian Film Blog

Spectatorship - Koyaanisqatsi: Experimental and Expanded Film/Video

In the latest of The Guardian's writers' favourite film series, Leo Hickman is bowled over by the elemental force of Godfrey Reggio and Philip Glass's 1982 environmental masterpiece.

It's a film without any characters, plot or narrative structure. And its title is notoriously hard to pronounce. What's not to love about Koyaanisqatsi?

I came to Godfrey Reggio's 1982 masterpiece very late. It was actually during a Google search a few years back when looking for timelapse footage of urban traffic (for work rather than pleasure!) that I came across a "cult film", as some online reviewers were calling it. This meant I first watched it as all its loyal fans say not to: on DVD, on a small screen. If ever a film was destined for watching in a cinema, this is it. But, even without the luxury of full immersion, I was still truly captivated by it and, without any exaggeration, I still think about it every day.

Koyaanisqatsi's formula is simple: combine the epic, remarkable cinematography of Ron Fricke with the swelling intensity and repeating motifs of Philip Glass's celebrated original score. There's your mood bomb, right there. But Reggio's directorial vision is key, too. He was the one who drove the project for six years on a small budget as he travelled with Fricke across the US in the mid-to-late 1970s, filming its natural and urban wonders with such originality.

Personally, I view the film as the quintessential environmental movie – a transformative meditation on the current imbalance between humans and the wider world that supports them (in the Hopi language, "Koyanaanis" means turmoil and "qatsi" means life). But Reggio has rightly refused to define the film's specific meaning; he even fought unsuccessfully with the distributor for the film to have no title. (Incidentally, it was only Francis Ford Coppola's last-minute support that helped push it into mainstream cinemas.)

"It's meant to offer an experience, rather than an idea," said Reggio in a 2002 interview (included with the DVD as a special feature). "For some people, it's an environmental film. For some, it's an ode to technology. For some people, it's a piece of shit. Or it moves people deeply. It depends on who you ask. It is the journey that is the objective."

It may look hackneyed now, as we've become so used to Koyaanisqatsi's much-imitated techniques – Madonna's Ray of Light video, high-definition slow-motion footage of sport, Adam Curtis documentaries. Our minds have been seared by images of the Twin Towers falling and the Challenger and Columbia space shuttles exploding – both prophetically foreshadowed in the film. But still, 30 years on, Koyaanisqatsi can connect with us, perhaps more than ever. And you can't overstate how much Glass's score sets the tone and rhythm for the film's rolling, relentless cycle of imagery.

"I didn't want to show the obviousness of injustice, social deprivation, war, etc," said Reggio. "I wanted to show that which we're most proud of: our shining beast, our way of life. So [the film] is about the beauty of this beast." He clearly thought he might partially disguise his concerns about the direction of mankind within the film. But other statements reveal his true feelings:

"What I tried to show is that the main event today is not seen by those who live in it. We see the surface of the newspapers and the obviousness of conflict, social injustice, the market, the welling up of culture. But for me, the greatest and most important event of perhaps our entire history has fundamentally gone unnoticed: the transiting from old nature – or the natural environment as our host of life for human habitation – into a technological milieu, into mass technology, as the environment of life."

Full review here.

What to do with a degree in Film Studies

The film industry is notoriously competitive, but graduates will have developed a highly transferable range of skills.

You don't need a film studies degree to be the next Alfred Hitchcock or Quentin Tarantino, but it could put you on the right path.

Film studies degrees offer the chance to gain hands-on experience of film-making and also touch on topics such as film history, theory and criticism. Students study everything from Hollywood blockbusters to art house movies, taking in screenwriting, critiquing and directing along the way.

Famous graduates include Paul WS Anderson, director of video game adaptation Mortal Kombat. Anderson graduated with a degree in film and literature from Warwick University and is also behind such box-office successes as Resident Evil and Alien vs. Predator.

What skills have you gained?

As well as practical film-making skills such as how to operate a camera and edit footage, you will have developed skills which will make you attractive to employers in a wide variety of fields. These include good research and communication skills, critical thinking, project management and the ability to organise your time effectively and work to deadlines.

What jobs can you do?

Almost 60% of film studies graduates went into full-time employment in 2009. Of those, 12.5% found jobs within the art/design/culture sector and, within the film industry itself, 2.1% became directors, 1.2% video/film recorder operators and 1.4% broadcasters. Some 34% found work in retail/catering, perhaps as a temporary measure and an indication of the competitive nature of the industry.

The focus of your degree is an important factor, says Margaret Holbrough of Graduate Prospects. "Careers within the film industry are fiercely competitive and opportunities to pursue a technical or practical career will depend on the graduate's experience and the content of the degree, and whether it focuses more on hands-on film production skills as opposed to the appreciation, analysis and interpretation of films and film genres," she says.

"Within the film, TV and video industries the roles may include film/video/television editor, camera operator, photographer, art director, TV or film producer or production assistant, runner, location/props manager or programme researcher.

"In addition, the publishing industry, including printed newspapers, magazines, online publications and websites, may offer opportunities to write about films as a journalist, content manager or editor, or to work in film and picture research and archiving."

Some business areas, such as advertising, marketing and communications, may also utilise the creative and analytical abilities of film studies graduates in roles such as art directors, account managers, copywriters and market researchers.

Teaching and lecturing are also potential career options and require a postgraduate teaching qualification.

Postgraduate study?

Of those who graduated in 2009, 6% went on to study for a higher qualification. There are many masters and postgraduate diploma courses available in film studies, providing an opportunity to specialise in areas such as scriptwriting, directing, producing and final editing. Some jobs require a postgraduate qualification, such as teaching or journalism. There is also the chance to do postgraduate research in film-making.

Data supplied by the Higher Education Careers Services Unit and Graduate Prospects

Source: The Guardian 2011

French film-maker Chris Marker dies

The controversial Left Bank Cinema director scored an arthouse hit with Sans Soleil and made the brilliant, haunting, highly influential La Jetée.

• Chris Marker obituary

Chris Marker, the enigmatic master of left-field French cinema, has died at the age of 91. The artist and film-maker was best known for his award-winning documentary Sans Soleil and for his haunting drama La Jetée, charting the quest for memory in the aftermath of a nuclear apocalypse.Marker's other notable pictures include 1985's AK, an essay on the work of the Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, and 1977's A Grin Without a Cat, charting the socialist struggle in the period before and after the 1968 Paris uprisings. He scored an arthouse hit with 1983's Sans Soleil, his elliptical meditation on travel and memory that darted from Japan to Africa via an appreciation of the 1958 thriller Vertigo. Hitchcock's movie, said the director, was the only film "capable of portraying impossible memory, insane memory".

Born Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve, Marker fought for the French Resistance and then cut his teeth as a journalist and a critic for Cahiers du Cinéma. He made his film debut with Olympia 52, a documentary on the 1952 Helsinki Olympics, and went on to become a leading light of the Left Bank Cinema movement alongside his friends Agnès Varda and Alain Resnais. In 1961 he sparked controversy with the documentary Si Cuba, a film that praised Fidel Castro, denounced America and was promptly banned in the US.

Yet Marker's most influential production remains 1962's La Jetée, a 29-minute drama composed almost entirely of still images and tracing one man's attempt to reclaim an image from his past. Marker's poetic, provocative meld of global catastrophe and human frailty went on to inspire the 1987 drama The Red Spectacles and Terry Gilliam's 1995 blockbuster 12 Monkeys.

The teasing, elliptical nature of Marker's work was reflected in the man himself. He refused to give interviews, hated being photographed and claimed to have born in Mongolia despite contradictory sources that suggested he was a native of Paris. All of which, wrote the critic David Thomson, fostered the notion of Marker as "some mysterious if ideal figure, a hope or a dream more than an actual person". He was, Thomson added, "the essential ghost".

guardian.co.uk, Monday 30 July 2012

Patience (After Sebald)

This modest, immensely enjoyable documentary is about The Rings of Saturn by the German poet and critic WG Sebald, who was born in 1944, taught for much of his adult life in this country, mainly at the University of East Anglia, and was killed in a motor accident in 2001. It was first published in German in 1995, translated into English three years later and is an account of a walking tour of Suffolk, the people he meets, the places he visits, and the historical and literary reflections prompted by what he sees and senses, taking his mind around the world. Suffolk becomes a sort of palimpsest for his eloquent, precise, lugubrious, often drily witty meditations about war, death, destruction and decay, about memories and continuities and the feeling that nothing entirely disappears.

The film is largely shot in grainy grey-and-white, which matches the photographs, etchings and documents that illustrate the author's text, though from time to time small frames of colour film are imposed on these monochrome images. Jonathan Pryce reads from the book, and these words are occasionally imposed on the film. A variety of admirers, friends and students of Sebald comment on his work, some highly personal (Andrew Motion, a one-time colleague at UEA, talks of visiting the vanished town of Dunwich as a child), some scholastically (cultural historian Marina Warner discusses Saturn and the roots of melancholy), and sometimes from the perspective of a fellow practitioner (Iain Sinclair, who has made not wholly dissimilar psycho-historical journeys).

Grant Gee's film should make anyone want to read The Rings of Saturn and the rest of Sebald's relatively small but exquisite oeuvre, some eight or nine books in all. Cinephiles in particular should look out the essay "Kafka Goes to the Movies" in Sebald's collection Campo Santo.

Film Trailers by Filmtrailer.com

Philip French

The Observer, Sunday 29 January 2012

FM4 - Urban Stories: La Zona

Review: The Guardian

La Zona (The Zone): 2007 Directors: Rodrigo Pla, Rodrigo Plá

La Zona is a contemporary satirical thriller by director Rodrigo Plá, contrasting the poverty of modern Mexico with heavily fortified, gated communities for the wealthy overclass and their families. For many, myself included, that description hoists a warning flag. Since the huge success of City of God, many movies from and about Latin America have developed the cliches and mannerisms of favela chic and favela porn: aerial shots of the vast hillside shanty towns, crime, sexy violence, kids with guns etc, habitually topped off with perfunctory gestures of concern for all those people whose misery and poverty have underwritten the movie's seriousness.

This is different. It is an intriguing, dystopian drama with a coolly unsentimental attitude to villain and victim alike. The film is a little like something Ira Levin might have written, and I can well imagine it being remade by Hollywood, set in some spiffy development of Los Angeles bordering a tricky neighbourhood - written and produced by Michael Crichton, perhaps.

The title refers to a fictionalised posh district in Mexico City, an arcadia of beautiful homes, resplendent lawns and kids in smart school uniforms, fenced off from the slums with razor wire, surrounded by security guards and CCTV, and boasting legal exemptions from conventional police access, signed off by judges who have links with the rich lawyers who live inside.

The community is horrified when a wealthy woman is brutally beaten, robbed and murdered by a trio of criminals who have somehow breached the perimeter: two of them are shot dead by guards and armed citizens, but the third, a boy, is still at large somewhere in their creepy Westworld. What embarrasses the citizenry of La Zona is that one of the thugs was from their security force. It looks like an inside job. So they decide to settle their own business their own way, and have in any case nothing but contempt for a feckless police force drawn from the same class as the wrongdoers.

When a suspicious cop finally gains access to ask questions about gunshots heard from over the fence, he is stonewalled; the burghers cover up the fact that there was ever a murder at all, they get rid of the bodies and initiate a huge manhunt to find the boy - and kill him.

It is a shrewd study in group pathology, and has the arresting feel of a movie set five minutes into the future: it is not entirely clear that this is a fantasy, a what-if setup, or whether it is being proposed as simply a dramatic variation on something that everyone knows is the case. In the vast lawless sprawls imagined by this movie, the police are ineffectual in rich areas as well as poor: this could well be accurate - or perhaps simply on the verge of being accurate. Either way, it is a smart movie, dramatically lean and mean, exciting and often shocking.

FM4 - Urban Stories: City of God

Here are two very good reviews for 'City Of God'. They appeared in The Guardian and The Independent at the time of the films release.

'The sacrificial purpose of the chicken conveys with the force of a blunt instrument how cheap life has come to be in the ghetto, and how victimhood and aggression have become fused together. The wiseguys, their cowering subordinates, their stoic womenfolk and the dead bodies around them are all chickens - and they are mostly all children.'

'Whenever guns are waved around on screen, especially by young excitable men, critics reach for the handy term "cycle of violence", but it's rarely been so apposite as it is here. The violence in City of God is relentless and cyclical; the narrative rests on a structure in which each generation of juvenile hoods lines up to be slaughtered by the next, younger and more ruthless. Although the film has a causal plot in which one event triggers another, events in Fernando Meirelles's gang-war saga escalate so bewilderingly fast that you feel as though you're watching one of those speeded-up microscope shots of multiplying amoebae.'