Because We Were Born’s co-director Jean-Pierre Duret began his career in the mid-80s as a boom operator and sound assistant on the films of Louis Malle and Jacques Doillon, and more recently, he’s led the sound work on the films of Francois Ozon, Agnes Jaoui and the Dardennes Brothers. This pedigree surely helped Born, Duret and Andrea Santana’s thrid nonfiction film set in Northeast Brazil, land a premiere slot last fall at the Venice Film Festival, a placement that even the Variety review admitted “may have minimized the attention it garnered as it may have gotten lost among the large number of films showing there.” After moving on to Rotterdam and opening theatrically in France, Born’s future festival schedule is currently somewhat up in the air. It’s hard to say what the ideal showcase for this game-changing work of neo-verite might be — it’s probably not the pizza-and-beer Alamo Drafthouse atmosphere of SXSW, nor the “issues only, please” doc programs of some, well, less fun festivals –– but if it ends up in your town, you’d be well served to run toward it as fast as you can.
“If this is confusing, let’s make the comparison to the airlines — the cost of travel is up and the cost of providing travel is way up. So the business is down. Only the best routes work. And only the best films work. Economics explains it all.” In a post on the IndiePix blog, Bob Alexander re-frames Mark Gil’s by-now-legendary LAFF “the indie film sky is falling” speech––not to mention the vigorous head-nodding that followed––as, essentially, don’t look-behind-the-curtain propaganda designed to buy time for a failing business model whilst attracting attention away from viable alternatives.
When Netflix announced it was going to take away the ability for subscribers to keep profiles on their website, writes Lia LoBello at Radar, “Calamity followed. Petitioners petitioned. Conspiracy theories took hold. Blogs were set ablaze with the fire of DVD rental righteousness. Today, the company announced that the plans to keep, yes, keep, the feature. You did it, people!”
Finally, a way to celebrate Bastille Day that doesn’t involve tempting the food poisoning gods with discount moules frites: Vinyl is Heavy is hosting a blogathon. Quoth Ryland Walker Knight: “if any of our beloved, if mostly silent, readers want to offer any Francophilic thoughts on July 14th, let me know, either via links in the comments or via emails. Until then, go see Wall-E on a big screen when you aren’t out and about, eating cheese or throwing cake or dancing in the woods or driving into the Mediterranean.”
Sympathy for the Devil has a bad reputation. Like most of the work produced during Jean-Luc Godard’s so-called “revolution” period in the late-60s and 70s, it rarely screens without a disclaimer advertising its difficulty. The synopsis selling last month’s screening of the film at New York’s Film Forum (as part of a month long tribute to Godard’s work of the 1960s) was just 55 words long, but it managed to contain three red flag inferences of Sympathy’s “difficulty” (italics all mine): the “camera endlessly prowls,” it’s “shot in long, long takes,” it’s “deadening and hypnotic.” A Reverse Shot blog entry led off with the poster quote: “One helluva cocktease.”
One million critics with a common case of blue balls can’t be entirely wrong, but writing off the film formerly known as One Plus One as a novelty from a filmmaker determined to be difficult (not to mention attempting to sell it by scaring the audience away) is a lot easier than actual engagement. Certainly, Sympathy is a provocation––political, formal, pop cultural––before it’s a coherent work of narrative drama; certainly, most of its most memorable moments involve juxtaposition of political critique with infantile sex farce. But the same could be said for the average YouTube video, and the kids seem to be able to eat those up without a warning label. If it comes off as impenetrable, it may just be because no penetration is needed––everything Godard wants to say is laid into the film’s surface. If anything, Sympathy for the Devil is a blatant (and, at times, blatantly transparent) cinematic flail from a filmmaker at a crisis point.
La Vie Moderne, playing here on the Un Certain Regard sidebar, is the third documentary portrait of a group of rural French dairy farmers that Raymond Depardon has made this decade, and as such, comparisons between Depardon’s overall project and Michael Apted’s 7 Up series are not unapt. But where Apted’s seven films across forty years have come to define a changing Britain through the personal evolutions of a single generation, Depardon paints a portrait of a region and a way of life that seems on the verge of almost certain collapse due to nothing more than the natural passage of time and collision of generations. Taking on the triple role of interviewer, cameraman and narrator, the filmmaker’s affection for and rapport with his subjects is obvious, his tenacious patience a welcome contrast to the aggression employed by so many self-referential documentarians.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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“If this is confusing, let’s make the comparison to the airlines — the cost of travel is up and the cost of providing travel is way up. So the business is down. Only the best routes work. And only the best films work. Economics explains it all.” In a post on the IndiePix blog, Bob Alexander re-frames Mark Gil’s by-now-legendary LAFF “the indie film sky is falling” speech––not to mention the vigorous head-nodding that followed––as, essentially, don’t look-behind-the-curtain propaganda designed to buy time for a failing business model whilst attracting attention away from viable alternatives.
