le greatest foreign language films

[Blarg]

Yeah, Paloma Picasso and Isabela Rosselini and Mussolini's daughter all did quite well on the coattails of their folks. As did many, many t.v. and movie stars and more and more politicians. And people still travel to the houses of favorite personalities after their deaths, hopefully finding whatever it was they were looking for.

[pryor15]

in related news, i'm thinking of changing my name to Lucas Cassavetes...i can't do any more damage to the name than his real kids

[thecincykiddo]

Blarg,

It's too bad there aren't more art salons, more fostered communities. Where are the Gertrude Steins and George Sands of today?

Lucas Cassavetes,

Yeah, I haven't seen it, but I've read a bit of the hysteria over Broken English. Is it that bad?

Or were you thinking of Nick?

[pryor15]

Broken English has a 61 on metacritic, so it's doing pretty well

yeah, mostly i meant Nick

[Dominic]

[ QUOTE ]
yeah, everyone has this need to feel like their opinion matters, but it doesn't always, and that's hard for people to hear.

if it were engineering or quantum mechanics, people don't mind. but since everyone watches movies, they feel like they have a valuable opinion. obviously, that isn't always the case.

[/ QUOTE ]

this is what I always thought about writing. No one ever thinks to tell the DP he should use a different lens, but the suits never had any problem telling me "this scene needs to be a page shorter." They think because they know the alphabet they know how to write.

[ChipWrecked]

[ QUOTE ]
Andrei Rublev directed by Andrei Tarkovsky

[/ QUOTE ]

I'm no filmie but I loved this. Hope it makes the cut.


When I retire, I wanna cast a bell.

[thecincykiddo]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
yeah, everyone has this need to feel like their opinion matters, but it doesn't always, and that's hard for people to hear.

if it were engineering or quantum mechanics, people don't mind. but since everyone watches movies, they feel like they have a valuable opinion. obviously, that isn't always the case.

[/ QUOTE ]

this is what I always thought about writing. No one ever thinks to tell the DP he should use a different lens, but the suits never had any problem telling me "this scene needs to be a page shorter." They think because they know the alphabet they know how to write.

[/ QUOTE ]

Somehow, this mindset has settled into writing as well. There's this fraudulent maxim circulating that shorter equals better, and young writers too insecure and misguided to know any better swallow it. That happened to me for a while in my late teens, early twenties. It took years to rearrange so much of what I had been told and sort it all out into any sort of sense.

Can we blame Hollywood for this? I guess that's one of the great things about foreign language films, but even filmmakers in other countries are under budget constraints and the like. So it's nice to get closer to seeing who the true auteurs are and compare notes.

Take Les Enfants du Paradis for example. I have this one in my meager collection, too. Compare it to almost any Bergman film in terms of how the writing fills out the framework of the film itself and you'll notice a very tight script that a filmmaker tried to translate to screen -- with mostly successful results. Bergman's Smiles of a Summer Night adheres more closely to that same style -- tight dialogue and scene set-ups -- but even by 1955 he had started to break away from thinking about the film in terms of a cascade of visual information and moving on to real vision.

Essentially, to me, right now, it's the difference between roping a film down and saying, "Look at what I have captured!" and happening upon a film that the director let breathe.

[Blarg]

Nice observations. American film is wedded to the principle of narrative economy, which keeps visuals organized, but it also suggests being programmatic. Filmmakers with different visuals and values can be extremely unsettling and even irritating to people weaned on typical American films, and even as though through the "transgression" of having their own style and pacing, they're flipping the bird to their audience. It's rewarding and liberating to come to the realization that there is room for difference, and that there can be value in many different styles.

Some filmmakers that immediately spring to mind whose pacing is all wrong in terms of American expectations are Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders. Their films can be very different for Americans to sit through, because that audience can feel its expectations for a compact, driving narrative thwarted. Once they realize that having such a narrow set of expectations limits their ability to enjoy all the different ways a film can be made, the very same people who had before been most agitated will sometimes find themselves trying to judge a film and a style for what it is, and enjoying it on that basis, rather than rejecting it outright because its style is outside their experience and expectations. Then a world of new discovery, and even fun, unfolds before them.

I've often found myself happy to go back to books, poems, and movies I wrote off when younger, wondering if they really were as noxious as I remembered, or if I'd be delighted to find that they weren't, because I had grown.

[thecincykiddo]

Nice reply. I don't know what to say about audience expectations. I know that having the freedom to navigate your own weaknesses and strengths as a writer and to feel and test them out based on your own instincts results in stronger writing that's more likely to develop into a recognizable style; but in terms of the audience, I don't know how much they really fit into that.

If you're talking about consumer expectations about formulaic writing (I've promised myself that I'll never write a teleplay even as an exercise) then audience expectations don't matter anyway because the writers providing content aren't feeling themselves out, they're feeling out a formula.

If you're talking about a somewhat more discerning -- more literate, more informed, more cautious -- audience, the kind that constantly wants something better, then you're getting into a wide variety of tastes and expectations for not just "better" films (however they might be defining that) but for movements within the realm of filmmaking itself. Mainstream or indie, business decisions or artistic ones all become part of that discussion it seems.

What more often than not seems to happen as a result of that process is that people are so busy trying to push the "new" forward that they're not willing to take a look backward. It's more than just an ADDS-type quality that can be found in American social consciousness, it's part and parcel of capitalism; so, essentially, no matter how much the discerning audience would like to see things change and evolve at a more timely, reasonable pace, they're still inflicting the same kind of damage to the realm of filmmaking (and that includes film watching) because they're really no better than the consumers.

Enter the artists...

That's not to say that there aren't other people like you out there, people who maybe experienced life enough to find themselves less than absolutely thrilled with Spielberg, but I would not put you anywhere near the norm on that count. It's been my personal, regional experiential observation (say that three times fast) that most Americans seem to enjoy being insulted by their entertainment preferences as a means of "fitting in" ... I think the concept of the purpose of art has been lost on much of this continent. Thankfully, not by everyone.

[slaytanic]

Letters From Iwo Jima

Haute Tension