West & Soda

west and soda
BRUNO BOZZETTO (1968)

final scene

VA BENE!!

CORREI, MORTAIS, CORREI
PARA O YOUTUBE.
ALVÍSSARAS PÚBLICAS
ÀS ALMAS GENEROSAS.



Otello
por Carmelo Bene














Agora ide, que há também AMLETO!

"...it all seems to evade from our present memory"

[film] memory
by Pedro Maia

SUPER 8 TRANSFERED TO BETACAM PAL, COLOR, STEREO, 7’, 2007

Film by Pedro Maia
Music by Panda Bear

Anna May Wong in

The Toll of the Sea
Directed by Chester M. Franklin (1922)

1/5

It's the first feature film produced using Technicolor.
Loosely based on Puccini's opera Madame Butterfly.

NEWSREELS.

ver online aqui:NEWSREELS

Importantes Newsreels americanos sobre a II Guerra Mundial, incluindo
os capítulos I e II da famosa série de sete episódios "Why we fight", produzida por Frank Capra

: Amor é

L'Ordre
JEAN DANIEL POLLET (1973)

O MÍNIMO GESTO.

Ode ao Cinema.


EL MÍNIMO GESTO
ELLES, ILS, ELLE, IL, TU, JE

Rouch.

Obituary: Jean Rouch

James Kirkup

THE CREATOR of at least 120 documentary films, all remarkable, the great French cineaste Jean Rouch and his works are known and appreciated by a select few among all the "fans" swarming to wallow in the latest trilogies of this and that. Though since my film-club youth I had always been enthusiastic about documentaries, it was not until June 1996 that I experienced the revelation of Rouch's incomparable cinematographic art at the Galerie du Jeu de Paume in Paris.

He was then in his 80th year, just one year older than myself, and this encounter with an unknown fellow spirit was one of the great events of my old age. The prospect of soon becoming an octogenarian filled me with excitement when I saw Jean Rouch's tall, upright figure and handsome face. It was the first of several sightings, mainly in the streets of Montparnasse and at the cafe known as Le Bal Bullier.

At the age of six, Jean was taken by his father, director of the Musee Oceanographique in Monaco, to a cinema in Brest showing Nanook of the North, Robert Flaherty's 1922 film about life in an Eskimo family. The next week, his mother took him to see Douglas Fairbanks as Robin Hood. The future film-maker was born under the twin stars of discovery and adventure.

In his youthful student days, back in Paris, he haunted cinemas and joined the circle of devotees organised by the future director of the Cinematheque Henri Langlois. However, in 1937 he entered L'Ecole des Ponts et Chaussees to train as a civil engineer. One year after the defeat of France in 1940, he managed to make his way to the West African state of Niger to construct roads and bridges.

It was there that he first succumbed to the fascination of traditional native rites. An elderly Sorko woman set out to purify the souls of 10 workmen struck by lightning - "a truly marvellous but horrifying ceremony", Rouch was later to recall -

and from that day on I realised that such an event could not be conveyed in writing or in photographs; it could only be captured on film, in colour and with sound.

In that great retrospective at the Jeu de Paume, I was entranced by the early works of what he called his "visual anthropology" from his first visionary masterpiece, paid for out of his own pocket, Au pays des mages noirs ("In the Land of the Black Seers", 1947), in which with a few friends he descends the Niger from its source to its magnificent espousals with the ocean.

By a miraculous concatenation of circumstances - through his fellow writer/ ethnologist Michel Leiris (whose L'Afrique fantome, 1934, had been an inspiration) and a joyous troupe of jazz fiends fired by black African rhythms - the film was brought to the bemused attention of the newsreel director of Actualites Francaises, who decided to schedule it, conditional upon the addition of commentary, music and the insertion of a few supernumerary indigenous animals, which gave what he considered was a suitably "colonialist" stamp of authority. The commentary was enthusiastically declaimed by the regular racing-cyclist authority on the Tour de France. Rouch rejected the result, though he accepted it as "a lesson in how not to approach the montage of a film".

His real entry upon the cinematic scene came one year later when Henri Langlois organised "A Festival of Forbidden Films" with the help of Jean Cocteau at Biarritz, where in 1949 the film that was awarded the Grand Prix du Documentaire was Rouch's ultra-realistic La Circoncision ("The Circumcision"), along with his Initiation a la Danse des Possedes ("Initiation to the Dance of the Possessed"). Rouch then composed a thesis on rituals of possession to accompany his film Les Maitres fous ("Masters of Madness", 1955), which was severely criticised for its "lack of objectivity" by certain academic ethnographers.

He was just as disrespectful of the current views of what "quality French cinema" should be with his preceding masterpieces Yenendi: les hommes qui font la pluie (Rainmakers, 1951), Cimetiere dans la falaise ("Cliff Cemetery", 1951), and Batailles sur le grand fleuve ("Battles on the Big River", 1950) - all three of which were later combined into a full-length feature entitled Les Fils de l'eau (The Sons of Water, 1958).

Jean Rouch's fame was spreading among film fanatics after he received the Venice Festival Grand Prix in 1957 for Les Maitres fous. In 1958, inspired partly by Jean Genet's 1958 play Les Negres, he made Moi, un noir (I, a Negro, 1958), which won the Louis Delluc Prize. His work had already attracted the young intellectuals and influenced the first films of the nouvelle vague including some who were to achieve fame and fortune - Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, who was the first to welcome him to the select band of the New Wave film-makers, and the philosopher Gilles Deleuze.

"Cinema verite" was one of the terms used to express the realism of "cinema truth", a term invented by Rouch himself. It reached its full expression in a film he made in collaboration with the young sociologist Edgar Morin in 1960, Chronique d'un ete (Chronicle of a Summer, 1961), a work of radical originality set in the period of Algerian decolonisation and created entirely in the streets of Paris by means of a hand-held camera with synchronised sound. New technology had made cinema verite more than ever true to the truth.

Jean Rouch at 86 had lost some of his youthful energy but none of his wit and enthusiasm. With another great film-maker still not subdued by the constraints of old age, the veteran Portuguese master Manoel de Oliveira (a Firbankian nonagenarian), he made a film in Oporto centred on that city's Pont Eiffel, based on a poem d'Oliveira had written as a script.

En une poignee de mains amies ("In a Fistful of Friendly Hands", 1997) was a symbolic return to his first employment as a builder of bridges - he who built bridges of the creative spirit between blacks and whites all over the world. And whose final bridge was crossed in a car crash in the night in his preferred province, Niger.

Jean Pierre Rouch, ethnologist and film-maker: born Paris 31 May 1917; Director of Research, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique 1966- 86; General Secretary, Cinematheque Francaise 1985- 86, President 1987- 91; married 1952 Jane George (deceased), 2002 Jocelyne Lamothe; died Konni, Niger 18 February 2004.

Copyright 2004 Independent Newspapers UK Limited

WATCH ONLINE

Cimetieres dans la falaise (1951)

Les Maîtres Fous (1955)

!

I Will... I Shant
: By Cioni Carpi



"Cioni Carpi, one of the most important artists of the twentieth century, used film like a canvas he could paint, producing cinematographic work akin to precious pieces of art. He is considered highly experimental and places particular emphasis on the relationship between sound and images. Recently Carpi's work was digitally restored by Cineteca Italiana, which is also the only place where this precious work is kept."YOUTUBE

SCAR TISSUE!

SCAR TISSUE
Su Friedrich

"Scar Tissue by Su Friedrich is a filmic version of a white canvas or a silent music piece.The fact that Friedrich never really shows the whole body, but rather plays off of body parts could be read as a desire to show less of the people on the screen, so that the viewer's reading can be generalized. If the "characters" existed as people, the images would inevitably read to be telling a story about these people. The legs and torsos do not signify people; it is the experience of these body parts and the rhythm with which they are portrayed that constitute the work."
for more: http://www.sufriedrich.com/

WATCH HERE

Festival Internacional de Curtas de 1 Minuto

filminute.com

: Amor Pedestre

Amor Pedestre
Marcel Fabre [1914]



Agradece-se ao Jorge Amaro!

This Is It!

"It's simple, inspired, and ecstatic. To watch Broughton's film you need a certain silence, a certain descending to the more subtle, more fragile levels of your being - otherwise, the film and its content will not reach you, it will break to pieces. I figure this is the main reason why films of the stature and subtlety and ecstasy of THIS IS IT never reach the New York Film Festival screen."
Jonas Mekas, The Village Voice

This Is It
JAMES BROUGHTON (1971)

AUTOGRAFIA

AUTOGRAFIA (DE MÁRIO CESARINY)
MIGUEL GONÇALVES MENDES (2004)

NOTA DO AUTOR:
Com este documentário pretende-se retratar, não o poeta e pintor Mário Césariny, mas sim a sua vida, o seu percurso e a sua individualidade.Sendo este um trabalho que vive sobretudo das questões colocadas (ausentes) e das respectivas respostas, optou-se por assumir como fio condutor um dos seus poemas "Autografia", que servirá de mote, através da sua análise para as questões intencionadas, de modo a que o filme assuma um carácter intimista, estabelecendo-se um diálogo entre quem vê e quem é retratado.
Neste documentário/registo existem vários planos: o de análise do poema; o das respostas; e do seu trabalho (exposto na sua intimidade) e o da nossa própria interpretação; uma espécie de respigar/reciclar de citações e de conteúdos que acabam por nos permitir uma apropriação de Mário Cesariny.



1/11

Antes de

"A History Of Mutual Respect", Gabriel Abrantes
já costurava mitos amazónicos :



Too Many Daddies, Mommies and Babies
GABRIEL ABRANTES (2009)

Too Many Daddies, Mommies and Babies: Clip from Gabriel Abrantes on Vimeo.

AMAZING!

Radiohead's Song NUDE
PERFORMED BY OLD HARDWARE

James Houston ( UK 2008)

Big Ideas (don't get any) from James Houston on Vimeo.

34ST NYC Buskers FULL MOVIE - a film by Chico Alice Peres aka O FóMóiRé

Sinopse

34ST NYC BUSKERS retrata performers de rua tocando no metro e ruas de Nova york.
Mostra a beleza destes momentos em que se quebra a rotina citadina. Vemos o encontro inesperado dos transeuntes com a Arte dos músicos profissionais e amadores que escolhem partilhar-se. Pessoas dispostas ao encontro e à troca, música por trocos, sorrisos por sorrisos, esforço por reconhecimento.
A recepção dos transeuntes varia, este filme permite amplificá-la. Por aqui chega ao espectador Nova Iorque num dos pormenores que define a sua essência.

Synopsis
34ST NYC BUSKERS portraits New York performers playing in the street and subway.
This film shows the beauty of the moments that break the city’s daily routine. It displays the unexpected meeting between passers and Art coming from professional and amateur musicians. People willing to meet and exchange… music per change, smile per smile, and effort per recognition. We see many different receptions; this film amplifies them and brings to the spectator one of the details that defines New York’s essence.

34ST NYC Buskers from chico PERES on Vimeo.

Nota de intenções
Este filme é o meu olhar sobre Músicos de Rua (Buskers), contemplo a musica focando-me na relação espectador/performer.
A monotonia da cidade vista através do olhar do musico que trabalha tocando em troca de esmola ou apenas de um sorriso.
Os Músicos de Rua como protagonistas deste filme, conseguem através da sua musica, criar um ambiente hipnótico que acalma e trás um pouco de cor ao dia dos habitantes da cidade que se deixam render.
A minha intenção ao fazer este filme é a de poder fazer um objecto audiovisual que possa ser visto por qualquer pessoa de qualquer idade, onde me proponho a partilhar a experiência de percorrer um caminho onde diferentes músicos, sem preconceitos ou pretensiosismo, nos vão oferecendo a sua musica apenas pelo prazer da partilha sincera da sua Arte com qualquer tipo de receptor/espectador.

Directors Statement
This film is my point of view of the 34ST NYC Buskers,
I explore the theme by focusing on the relationship spectator / performer.
We see the monotony of the city through the eyes of the working musician playing for charity or just a smile.
The protagonists of this film are the Buskers, who get through their days creating a hypnotic atmosphere, a soothing and colourful moment in the day of city residents that choose to surrender to this instantaneous beauty.
My intention with this film is to make an audio-visual object viewed by anyone of any age. My propose is to share a journey’s experience, a path with different musicians trading their music just for the sincere pleasure of sharing their Art with all receivers / viewers.

GRADIVA.

GRADIVA
de Raymonde Carasco
France, 1978, expérimental, 16 mm, coul., 25'.


Raymonde Carasco souhaitait réaliser une adaptation de la Gradiva de Jensen contre l'in terprétation de celui qui rendit ce texte inou bliable, Freud. Avec Bruno Nuytten, elle com mença par effectuer des essais sur le motif fétichisé par le protagoniste masculin de la nou velle, la pose gracieuse d'un pied de jeune fille passant sur une pierre à Pompéi. Raymonde Carasco expérimenta six vitesses différentes, de cinq cents à cinquante images par seconde. Le film se confondit avec son esquisse et devint une leçon d'adaptation de la pensée littéraire au cinéma: quel besoin de restituer l'entourage fic tionnel, alors que, dans la simple série des ralen tis différentiels qui décomposent le gracieux mouvement de la cheville, se prouve l'insuffisance de la démonstration freudienne ? On peut en effet comprendre ainsi la version carascienne de la Gradiva : s'arrêter sur un motif, le laisser revenir encore et encore, faire varier à son sujet les modalités descriptives en termes de défilement cinétique, de lumière et de son, tout cela ne relève pas d'une pathologie ; car il ne s'agit pas d'en feindre la résurrection, mais de témoi gner en faveur du caractère interminable des choses. Ici l'insistance rend hommage à la vibration profonde que produit tout phénomène vivant, aussi simple, aussi éphémère soit-il, lors qu'il est considéré avec l'attention que son pas sage dans le monde requiert. Gradiva propage la vibration de plusieurs façons : grâce à la série monumentale des ralentis ; grâce au souffle de la flûte ; grâce à l'envolée finale de la jeune fille courant dans les ruines nocturnes ; et grâce aussi, malicieusement, nous le découvrons en fin de générique, au fait que le personnage de la Gradiva est joué par deux jeunes filles au lieu d'une. Ainsi le fétichisme n'est plus ni fixation ni arrêt, il se voit réinterprété en laboratoire de la contemplation, et le tracé d'un pas devient le site d'un approfondissement à ce jour unique des vertus descriptives du cinéma. Gradiva est ce film sur la décomposition du sensible que le cinéma attendait depuis la fin des expériences inaugurales de Marey et Lucien Bull.
Jensen, qui animait les bas-reliefs, est un grand cinéaste ; Freud, qui maniait le verbe comme personne, un romancier génial; et Raymonde Carasco, théoricienne de la sensation, une ana lyste profonde

Article de Nicole Brenez, dans Une encyclopédie du court métrage français, Festival Côté court, Editions Yellow Now, Belgique, 2004.

DOWNLOAD HERE



thanks to
MUBARAK ALI
THE SOUND OF EYE
NICOLE BRENEZ

Röyksopp's Drug!!!

AMAZING VIDEO!


The Drug
Röyksopp (2010)

Directed by Noel Paul & Stefan Moore

Röyksopp - The Drug from thatgo on Vimeo.

OS ÍMPETOS DE RESGATE FONOGRÁFICO

DA PAISAGEM SONORA TRADICIONAL PORTUGUESA.

Com fervor, se recomenda:

SOUNDWALKERS
de RAQUEL CASTRO

Soundwalkers from raquel castro on Vimeo.

&
AS LIGAÇÕES :

: Phonography.org
: TRAILER de B fachada : Tradição oral contemporânea (de Tiago Pereira)
: Luis Antero - Myspace


O Videodroma agradece a Emanuel Cunha!

Starlite.

starlite-sample from ryufurusawa on Vimeo.

Starlite (Sample)
RyuFurusawa. (2009)

LE DERNIER CRI.

INTRODUCING
THE MOST AMAZING FRENCH ART DUO

: Le Dernier Cri

HÔPITAL BRUT



Ver Excerto Aqui


agradece-se ao Jorge Amaro!

Aço Bruto.

o gigantismo arquitectónico
ao serviço da estrutura nazi.



Brutalitat in Stein
Alexander Kluge & Peter Schamoni (1961)

Modern Times!

MODERN
TIMES
CHARLES CHAPLIN (1936)

"No Céu Tudo É Perfeito"

e r a s e r
head
DAVID LYNCH (1976)

parte 1

diabólicos.

the devils
: ken russell (1971)

Os Mistérios do Castelo de Dé.

Les Mystères du château de Dé
MAN RAY (1929)



WATCH ONLINE

A Poesia de

Artavazd Pelechian & Mikhail Vartanov


( Obrigatório!: Activa o fullscreen, resolução ao máximo e colunas ao alto para : )


THE SEASONS OF THE YEAR (1975)

PETER JACKSON'S CRAZY PUPPETS!!

MEET THE
feebles

PETER JACKSON (1990)

celebrating

Paul Glabicki
artist's bio

ARTIST'S STATEMENT:
In my work, an endless chain of new images, relationships, memories, experiences, and associations can be generated from a central image, object, or place. I look, read, observe, or remember from a personal perspective that filters and processes information, dissects relationships of parts to the whole, encodes layers of meaning and representation. Perception is a tool. Collecting, searching, listening, documenting experiences, discovering alternate viewings and readings of the familiar, responding with curiosity about the unfamiliar, revealing or imposing layers of information, and taking the risks that come with creative thought expand the process. Much of this process is keenly, obsessively analytical and objective, but it is also combined with the seemingly opposite strategy of applying intuition, chance, and improvisation.
There is even more, especially an eagerness to experiment. I like to organize space and time that draws from my interest and experience (and often concurrent work) in painting, drawing, photography, installation art, sound, filmmaking, and digital media. I attempt to create works that can only be created in the media of choice. There are critical reasons to explore an idea in a static composition (photograph, drawing, painting), or in a temporal one (sound, computer/film animation, film, video). In the end, the work, thinking and creative process are orchestrated by an eccentric drive to examine what I experience, and a personal need to shape form, space, and time – and make things. I also learn from looking at the things I make, collect, or document. Often time, an exhibition context, or work on a new project reveals new layers of meaning in an earlier work. Certain deliberate visual strategies also evolve. I often create complex abstract spaces that grow and expand from a figurative "anchor" image, sounds, or object. Some "anchors" have become thematic motifs in my work (I often use chairs to give viewers a reference point for human scale). There is an interest in collage, in juxtaposition, and in creating vivid, if often physically impossible relationships and situations. I've always focused on creating delicate balances between figurative and abstract representation that sometimes erupt into tense collisions, and at other times relax into lyrical harmony. There are other influences or models at work: semiotics, early Russian formalist cinema, Cubist cinema, principles of synesthesia, Oscar Fischinger, Hans Richter, cultural contexts and foreign environments, novels, pop culture, and more.
Whether an encounter with one of my works is an intense bombardment, an investigation of rational or seemingly irrational complexity, or an entry into an environment that is both alien and familiar, I hope that the work is challenging, playful, and indeed a visual and aural experience unique to the work and its medium.

Toute Revolution...

Obrigada ao Pedro Rufino por enriquecer assim o Youtube.

HÉLIO FÉLIX a partir de KLOSSOWSKI

Emoção Voluptuosa
HÉLIO FELIX (2010)

In love with

Projections
by ANDY HUANG

descobrindo

Jym Davis

http://www.jymdavisart.com

WHITE SPACE



FLUX

descobrindo

: Leighton Pierce
www.leightonpierce.com
http://vimeo.com/8637692

UVULA

UVULA: ANA DEUS
VIDEO DE AMARANTE ABRAMOVICI

CHANTAL + PINA BAUSCH

un jour Pina m'a demandé
CHANTAL AKERMAN (1983)


1/6 - versão italiana

BALKAN BAROQUE :

Balkan Baroque
PIERRE COULIBEUF (1999)

com
MARINA ABRAMOVIC








VER AQUI!


BALKAN BAROQUE: SYNOPSIS

Experimental fiction. The autobiography, both real and imaginary, of Marina Abramovic, Body Art artist. The film composes the life aesthetic of a woman in her era, with a personal history strongly marked by the Yugoslavia of Tito, everyday violence, the experience of physical and psychic limits... The voluntary evocation of the past makes something more secret, more intimate crop up: an unknown evolution that is embodied in fictions felt like authentic fragments of truth. Balkan Baroque jumps from one identity to another, from a true story to an imagination, from a dream to a ritual... - the language of the body often taking over from the word, interrupting it or, on the contrary, stimulating it.

(All the images in the film are original, whether inspired by performances or purely imaginary).


STATEMENT

Here and now

In the film Balkan Baroque, one has the impression that the character invents the past as she speaks, here and now. This past seems to have no reality outside the moment it is evoked with the force that is characteristic of film work. Here, in Balkan Baroque, it has become the present, the present of the film unwinding before the viewer's eyes.

What we see on the screen is in the process of happening-it is the very gesture that is given to us and not a report on it. The universe of the film is given in a perpetual present. In other words, this biography of Marina Abramovic, which implies a number of past things, is in process of unfolding before our eyes, here and now, as we watch Balkan Baroque. 'Elsewhere' and 'formerly' do not exist. There is no longer a true reality, inherent and external to the film, so there is no longer anything but the sole reality of the projected images. The film, the universe that it reveals, suffices by itself, at every instant, erasing itself as it goes along, within a loop that is literally never-ending.

We are therefore dealing with a subjective, mental unwinding. The work Balkan Baroque is not account of an exterior reality; it is its own reality. The only time to be considered for this biography is the projection time (63'). Balkan Baroque is pure fiction, an imaginary production in which Marina Abramovic plays different roles, including the role of the artist doing performances.


CONCEPTS

Balkan Baroque is guided by several principles: discontinuity (black and white as structuring elements); ritualisation and frontality; fiction (and not the documentary). The black of memory, from which arise the white images of the past (the artistic rituals). The images from memory are combined with fancies, fantasies and dreamlike waking images, as well as rituals of life (the kitchen, the dining room, the gymnasium...). The discontinuity of memory, which blends images from the past with imaginations, life rituals with artistic rituals. Depending on its visual component, the film becomes the equivalent of an 'involuntary memory', with its breaks, its oversights, its absence of chronology. Thus, one can consider the film of the image and the film of the chronological, narrative voice. (Thanks to the form of statement, the narrative voice gives rise to other images in the spectator's mind.) The visual and sound components are autonomous and constitute the audio-visual image. But the visual image and the sound image communicate with each other in an underground manner, with numerous effects of resonance.
The performances are adapted - in other words, transformed by the cinematic point of view (the shot imposes its law; Marina Abramovic becomes an actress). In the film, they take on a mental appearance, like memory-images or insistent, shimmering images that suddenly force their way through, climb as far as awareness and dilate the present.

Balkan Baroque creates a character whose identity is multifaceted and continually inventing itself. In this sense, the film creates its own reality, standing 'on the borderline' between real and imaginary, without one's truly knowing what is real and what is ima-ginary. Thanks to this distance, this interval, Marina Abramovic appears behind multiple masks. The film scoffs at representation and scrambles the codes.

NYC SIXTIES AVANT-GARDE :

Among my favourite...beauty and excitement..
Jonas Mekas



PEYOTE QUEEN
STORM DE HIRSCH (1965)





WATCH HERE

Parabéns, John!

Happy Birthday John!
JONAS MEKAS (1972)


From UbuWeb:
"16 mm film, 24 min

October 9, 1972 an exhibition of John Lennon/Yoko Ono's art, designed by the Father of Fluxus movement, George Maciunas, opened at the Syracuse Museum of Art (curated by David Ross, presently director of the Whitney Museum). Same day an unusual group of John's and Yoko's friends, including Ringo, Allen Ginsberg and many others gathered to celebrate John's birthday. This film is a visual and audio record of that event.

We hear a series of improvised songs, sung by John, Ringo, Yoko Ono, and their friends,--not a clean studio recording, but as a birthday singing, free and happy. This is the only recording of that event.

There are other images that are included in the film that develops like a "music video": the John & Yoko party at Klein's /their agent/ June 12, 1971; August 1972 at the Madison Square Garden; the Central Park Vigil on the day John was shot; and some other rare footage that I have taken on different occasions of John and Yoko.

The soundtrack, besides the unique recording of the Birthday Party singing, contains John's comments on his own film-making, his "home movies" he did on 8mm. The most catchy song, sung in an improvised manner, in the film, is the Attica Blues. The drummer for the last part of the film is Dalius Naujolaitis."

A importância

de
Robert Kramer

ICE - 1969

ver excerto de 20min aqui


One of American independent Robert Kramer’s strongest “underground” features (1969), arguably his best, made in and around New York before he resettled in Paris. This potent and grim SF thriller about urban guerrillas of the radical left, shot in the manner of a rough documentary in black and white, has an epic sweep to it. (Like many politically informed art movies of the period, starting with Alphaville and including even THX 1138, it was set in the future mainly as a ruse for critiquing the present.) Now as then, the power of this creepy movie rests largely in its dead-on critique of the paranoia and internecine battles that characterized revolutionary politics during the 60s; the mood is terrorized and often brutal, but the behavioral observations and some of the tenderness periodically call to mind early Cassavetes. A searing, unnerving history lesson, it’s an American counterpart to some of Jacques Rivette’s conspiracy pictures, a desperate message found in a bottle.
JONATHAN ROSENBAUM

PAUVRE PIERROT.

Pauvre Pierrot
Emile Reynaud (1892)

PAUL VECCHIALI.

Luc Moullet sur Paul Vecchiali

l y a chez Paul Vecchiali un côté vieille France. Ce polytechnicien a toujours géré ses maisons de production (Les Films de Gion, Unité trois, Diagonale) en bon père de famille, avec amour, rigueur et minutie, comme Truffaut, Rohmer, Tavernier, Varda ou moi, à l’opposé du plus grand nombre, qui ne craint pas les paris aventureux ou les risques de faillite. Ce traditionalisme à tous crins est quelque peu contredit par un regard humain et généreux sur le monde des homosexuels.

Le côté réactionnaire, droitier, voire pot-au-feu se traduit notamment par une grande attention envers la famille, les parents. Sur ce plan, je ne vois que Tavernier qui puisse lui être comparé (Daddy nostalgie, L’horloger de Saint-Paul), avec cette différence importante que Tavernier se situe dans un horizon politique tout à fait opposé.

Vecchiali est, je crois, le seul cinéaste au monde qui ait consacré un film à sa mère (En haut des marches) et un autre à son père (Maladie). Les deux sont d’ailleurs judicieusement couplés sur le même disque du beau coffret consacré à Vecchiali par Antiprod. Un traitement inégal en apparence, puisque le premier est un long métrage de fiction et le second un court métrage documentaire, mais ce dernier a l’avantage d’une plus grande rigueur, d’un pouvoir émotionnel et artistique plus affirmé.

Voici une orientation artistique insolite par rapport au contexte culturel national (le “Famille, je vous hais” de Gide) et par rapport à notre cinéma, qui a plutôt tendance à montrer la fracture entre les générations (Truffaut, Chabrol, Becker, Pialat) ou à omettre la génération d’avant (Rohmer, Godard, Rivette, Resnais).

Paul Vecchiali, dix-huit ans après le décès de son père Charles, a retrouvé son journal, qui relate l’évolution de sa maladie depuis 1952 jusqu’à sa disparition en 1959.

Il a donc filmé ce journal tenu sur un carnet. Les indications qu’il contient sont succinctes, précises. Elles ont une rigueur quasi militaire(1). Le défunt était d’ailleurs capitaine. Et l’émotion surgit de ce contraste entre la sécheresse du texte filmé, accentué par le ton neutre du récitant, et tout ce qu’il contient de dramatique. On a vraiment l’impression d’un mal inexpugnable (nous sommes prévenus dès le début de l’issue fatale) qui progresse sans trêve malgré de courtes accalmies. Tout commence par des crises d’asthme, qui semblent avoir entraîné des affections bien plus graves, puisque le capitaine Vecchiali allait mourir d’un cancer. À moins qu’il y ait eu concomitance fortuite.

Le texte est lu, avec quelques retouches, par Paul Vecchiali, d’une façon assez bressonienne. On pense d’ailleurs au redoublement écrit/voix du Journal d’un curé de campagne. Le spectateur lit plus vite l’écrit que le récitant. Ce qui fait que, souvent, pour garder le dyssynchronisme, Vecchiali commence à lire la quatrième ou la cinquième ligne du texte. Le spectateur doit alors faire un effort pour essayer de retrouver sur le cahier le texte qu’il vient d’entendre. Ce qui augmente sa participation au film.

Vers la fin, l’écriture, fort lisible jusque-là, devient brisée, maladroite. Aiguillés par quelques effets de métamorphose faciale dus à la maladie, que révèle un montage cut saisissant, nous prenons conscience de ce que Charles approche de sa fin, ce dont il se rend bien compte lui-même. Paul Vecchiali ajoute que son père relate son dialogue avec Dieu (il prétend l’avoir entendu), qu’il identifiait la vie à un passage, et que l’éternité constituait la vraie vie.

On retrouve ici l’itinérance des fins de vie. Charles Vecchiali erre de Toulon à La Roquebrussanne, au Luc et à Montpellier: les personnes très malades sont sans cesse à la vaine recherche – souvent contradictoire – d’un lieu, ou d’un hôpital où elles pourraient se trouver mieux…

Le mimétisme entre Charles et Paul demeure saisissant. La moustache commune y est pour beaucoup. Les photos de la famille sont en noir et blanc, tout comme une image de Paul, une photo semble-t-il. Mais soudain, elle s’anime(2). Il a voulu un moment se situer sur le même plan que son père. On croit un instant voir les doigts de Charles, mais ce sont ceux de Paul. Et en plus, Paul parle à la première personne en lieu et place du père, comme s’il voulait prolonger son existence.

Cela surprend dans l’œuvre de Vecchiali, où les protagonistes sont plutôt féminins, maternels (rien que des femmes dans Femmes femmes, Danielle Darrieux dans En haut des marches(3)).

Nous trouvons donc, pour l’essentiel, des plans en couleurs de Paul Vecchiali qui parle, des plans sur des photos de famille en noir et blanc et des plans sur le carnet, avec parfois, comme en surimpression, certaines photos. Mais il ne s’agit probablement pas de surimpressions: cela eut coûté trop cher par rapport à l’économie du film. Ce sont des jeux de miroirs qui renvoient l’image de la photo, quelque peu évanescente, sur les pages du carnet.

Maladie est en fait un no budget film. Vecchiali prétend l’avoir tourné en deux heures. Ce qui me vexe: j’ai passé plus de temps à rédiger ce texte. Nous avons ici la preuve qu’on peut réussir des chefs-d’œuvre touchants, émouvants comme Maladie, avec rien. C’est Maladie qui m’a incité à tourner à nouveau des courts métrages chaque fois que j’en avais envie. En 1978, les réalisateurs de longs métrages se sentaient dévalués s’ils revenaient au court métrage.

Voici, je crois bien, la première fois qu’un cinéaste consacre tout ou partie de son film à sa maladie (Charles étant ici l’alter ego de Paul). Depuis, il y a eu Nick’s Movie (Nicholas Ray, Wim Wenders, 1979), Journal intime (Moretti, 1983), Les derniers mots (Van der Keuken, 1998), Le fil de ma vie (Lionel Legros, 2002), L’insaisissable image (Hanoun, 2007). L’origine de cette complainte de la maladie se trouvait peut-être en fait dans Violence et passion (Visconti, 1975) et à travers l’œuvre de Dwoskin. Le cinéaste cherche à ne pas mourir pour pouvoir finir son film.

On m’opposera que tout était déjà dans le journal de Charles Vecchiali. Paul n’a pas eu grand-chose à faire. Peut-être. Mais c’est le résultat qui compte, peu importe d’où il provient. Il fallait beaucoup de tact, de sensibilité, pour traduire ce journal en film sans le trahir.

Et Maladie recoupe tout un cinéma moderne, fait sur l’écrit et la parole, qui est celui de Bresson et de Straub.

Luc Moullet


1. Dans ce contexte objectif, les très rares adjectifs qui mentionnent la douleur prennent une importance considérable.
2. Vecchiali, de façon discutable, nous trompe un instant : nous croyons avoir affaire à une photo du docteur, alors qu’il s’agit de Charles.
3. Lequel est vraiment le film jumeau : il débute précisément par des photos de famille.






a partir daqui, via Bruno Andrade. Obrigada!

INTERSTELLAR OVERDRIVE.

SAN FRANCISCO 1968

DIRECTED BY ANTHONY STERN
MUSIC BY PINK FLOYD



parte 1

( pedimos desculpa por publicar este vídeo com a pobre qualidade com que, infelizmente, se encontra disponível no youtube.
aconselha-se a que, por todas as suas qualidades particulares, procurem vê-lo com a melhor definição e som possíveis.)







+ para ver
San Francisco Redux: No. 1 (2008)
(Directed by Sadia Sadia, Anthony Stern, Stephen W. Tayler
UK:8 min)




+ para ler

For Anthony Stern, For Life
BY NICOLE BRENEZ
text in www.anthonysternglass.com. January 2009

The filmic work of Anthony Stern derives from a radical energy that reveals for us, in figural terms, the life-drive. In 1968, San Francisco, a masterpiece of psychedelic cinesthesia, explodes cinema, seeking a liberation not only of every sense but also of representation itself – which no longer seems indexed to what is recorded, but connected directly, organically, to the energy of history. How could this have happened? How can Stern’s films, following in the steps of Peter Whitehead, crystallise these precious moments of Western history, the apogee of the counter-culture and the joyous echoes of a Romantic revolution which was then still imaginable, with such justness, pertinence and ‘breath’?


To achieve such a laying-bare of the drive, such direct contact with the origin of desire and the image, obviously requires the highest level of poetic, musical and visual culture to support scopic instinct and historical intuition. This is exactly how Schelling defined intellectual intuition, the ‘mysterious and marvellous faculty of being able to withdraw into the most intimate part of ourselves, beyond all alteration that time brings’, so that ‘it is no longer we who live in time, but time – or rather, replacing time, pure absolute eternity – which is in us’. But Stern’s filmic work elaborates the exact opposite, which thus can be called material intuition: a continual, projective, almost pyrotechnical deployment of intimacy in time, which remodels our conceptions of the instant, the present, the immediate, of speed and history. San Francisco or Wheel concretise and sculpt time or rather the here-and-now, which Stern treats as it were a woman’s body whose every dancing vibration he must follow, whose least clearly outlined movement he must seize. Our life is woven from desires that are sometimes unbound, sometimes terrible, sometimes pathetic, in an unstoppable maelstrom of which Wheel – an intimate, multiple, noisy diary of 1969 – offers an amazing pill-pop, rather like a scientific ‘section’ of the complexity of our affects. Because it proceeds from deep intimacy rather than a priori certainty about things, because it knows that cinema, irremediably, cannot register every vibration (even the most negligible) of the instant, because there is too much to feel and describe in the universe, Stern’s cinema – seemingly asphyxiated by the world’s prodigiousness – adopts the discontinuous, the optical flash, permanent intermittence, the shaky, chopped and blurred, creating a vertiginous ‘cinetic’ compression which is far more faithful to the entwined stratigraphy of the sensible realm than a continuous contemplation of appearances.

Thus issued from an organic breath that is transposed by a magisterial savoir-faire on the levels of shooting and editing, an uncommon sense of rhythm dynamises Stern’s films – for example, Serendipity (1971), a serial documentary on contemporary English architecture, The Noon Gun (2004), a reworking of footage shot in Afghanistan in 1971 – and thus the record of a civilisation which has since largely disappeared – or Havana Jazz (2006).

On reseeing or discovering such radical energy – dead drunk, yet what lucid, translucent, sometimes ironic inebriation! – we ask ourselves a crucial question: where is the cinema of today going to get this kind of energy? In fact, we can keep drawing it from Stern himself. Having achieved fame, long ago now, as a master glass-blower, the maker of Baby Baby (1965) combines his know-how in the areas of poetic documentary and recycling (his 1974 Ain’t Misbehavin’ offers a precious panorama of cinema’s representations of women) with his mastery of glass, conjuring new chromatic, sensual and political marvels. With his collaborators Sadia Sadia and Stephen W. Tayler, he has taken apart that most carnal moment of San Francisco in 1968, reinterpreted it and placed it in historical perspective, thanks to a soundtrack that mixes emblematic political sound-grabs and speeches from the period with an original score. San Francisco Redux (2008) seems suddenly like a documentary on the affective sensuality of a shared memory. Anthony Stern’s festive vindications are as indispensable, as vital as those of Arthur Rimbaud, Maurice de Vlaminck, Herbert Marcuse or his mentor, Peter Whitehead. Stern has seized the bewitching phantoms of time and turned them into celluloid-children who establish, intensify, revive and set loose our collective history.

A morte de Maria Malibran

Der Tod der Maria Malibran
Werner Schroeter (1972)


WATCH ONLINE HERE

SUCRIC.

Des Fantastic Sucric
VICTOR HUGO BORGES (BRASIL, 2001)