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My scavengings from Jonathan Rosenbaum's book
Keywords | Text | Date | ID |
|---|---|---|---|
| FIlm: Tati / Narrative | Rosenbaum on Tati's "Playtime" and its composition for the frame: "[I]f we let our eyes roam, wander and gambol about the screen, scanning the totality of the action ... we'll discover multiple relationships between people, people and objects, live moments and dead moments, real gags and potential gags that are hystercally funy: a geometric vaudeville. Viewed individually, details might be dull or interesting; seen together, they become cosmically funny -- comic in a philosophical sense." also, similarly: "In the restaurant [sequence], the apparent conflicts between separate points of interest become resolved when we realize that all the wandering strands are bound up in the same fabric, and *every* detail on the screen is privileged in relation to the whole" | 09/25/07 | 12199 |
| Film / Narrative | critic Robert Warshow, in 1948 [!] pinpoints that there is a tension that art-film directors face: "the conflict between a love for the purely visual and the tendencies of a medium that is not only visual but also dramatic" | 09/25/07 | 12256 |
| Film: Akerman / Narrative / To See | Rosenbaum identifies Chantal Akerman as a filmmaker attempting to reconcile love for the purely visual (as in her nonnarrative feature "Hotel Monterey," 1972) with the "narrative and relatively unpainterly" (as in "Je, Tu. Il, Elle," 1974) many of her features, beginning with 1975's "masterpiece" "Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai De Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles" are "different attempts at synthesis" of these two poles "News From Home" (1977) "a nonnarrative study of Manhattan exteriors accompanied by Akerman reading letters she received from her mother ... material that inevitably introduces narrative elements" "Golden Eighties" "defines narrative as an interlocking series of mini-plots" "Toute Une Nuit" (1982) "is also made up of multiple mini-plots, but other than occurring over a single night most of them don't interlock" | 09/25/07 | 12268 |
| To See / Performance / Representation / Film | Rob Tregenza's "Talking to Strangers" "The movie consists of nine ten-minute takes ... and though all of these sequences were carefully rehearsed, Tregenza insisted on shooting each of them only once. His basic rule was that each sequence would consist of ten minutes of uncut fim (all that would fit in the camera)" "This adoption of a virtual one-to-one shooting ratio ... aims to maximize a sense of performance and presence and involve us fully in the contours of an *event* rather than oblige us to regard its idealized representation as we would in a Hollywood movie" Not at Netflix, sadly | 09/25/07 | 12280 |
| Film / To Read | Susan Sontag - "Against Interpretation" Rosenbaum: "Sontag made popular art, movies in particular, a suitable subject in serious discussions of art, literature, and philosophy" | 09/25/07 | 12314 |
| Film / Media / Representation / Fashion / Reality | Rosenbaum on Pulp Fiction, Natural Born Killers, Ed Wood, and Forrest Gump: "[A]ll these movies imply that life can only be what we already see in the media; and since what we see there is invariably false and concocted, all that ultimately matters is the stylishness and purity of gestures, not what these gestures yield or produce." (173) | 09/25/07 | 12326 |
| To See | Hou Hsaio-hsien's The Puppet Master Rosenbaum: "[I]f a more awesome and affecting new picture then The Puppet Master has turned up in Chicago this year [1993]--a movie more relevant to the future of cinema and the twenty-first century--I haven't seen it." | 10/13/07 | 13078 |
| Film / Genre | "I do not believe that the cinema has genres -- the cinema is *itself* a genre." -Tarkovsky | 10/14/07 | 13123 |
| To See / Film / Africa / Timeline | 1965 (or 1966?) Ousmane Sembene's "Black Girl" "It's at this point that African cinema begins." -Rosenbaum | 10/14/07 | 13135 |
| Film: Godard | Rosenbaum: "[Godard] insisted from the beginning that his writing and filmmaking were essentially alternate vehicles for the same discourse; his early movies functioned as film criticism the same way his reviews anticipated much of his film criticism." | 10/14/07 | 13147 |
| Juxtaposition / Editing / Television | allegedly,Medvedkin wept "when he found he could put two pieces of film together and have it mean something." (Rosenbaum) Chris Marker's commentary: "Nowadays, television floods the whole world with senseless images and nobody cries." | 10/14/07 | 13159 |
| To See / Paranoia / Improvisation / Postmodernism / Experience / Time | Rivette Out 1 Rosenbaum lists the themes thusly: "Paranois versus Antiparanoia ... The Lure of Nineteenth-Century Masterplots ... in Twentieth-Century Mythology. Improvisation and the Fear of Acting in Relation to Existentialism. Duration and Lived Experience." Sounds grand. Unfortunately never released domestically | 10/19/07 | 15224 |
| To See / Body / Experience / Mental Illness | Rivette L'amour fou (1967) features a passage in which an actor (Pierre Kalfon) self-lacerates with a razor -- "a disturbing piece of self-exposure in which the fictional postulates of the character seem to crumble into genuine pain and distress, representing ... a dangerous crossing of certain boundaries into what can only be perceived as madness" | 10/19/07 | 15236 |