An unjustly neglected gem from Renoir, easily one of his greatest films.
Jean-Luc Godard - "The second American Renoir to be shown after the Liberation. There begins the misunderstanding : a misunderstanding which was to turn the most admired of French film-makers into the most maltreated. The crowning paradox is that it was Renoir's warmest partisans who resolutely threw the first stone : a stone thrown earlier at La Regie du leu which, after five years of upheaval in the world, is still barely accepted, let alone understood.
Swamp Water can also boast of having revolutionized Hollywood in the long term. For the first time a big studio agreed to the idea - very reasonable, after all - of not shooting exteriors in interiors. Swamp Water follows the same principle as Toni, with twenty years of experience behind it. This is no longer a question of being willing to take risks, but the audacity of absolute assurance.
Booed at the Biarritz when it was first shown in Paris, Swamp Water is one of the seven or eight major turning-points in Renoir's career. The disconcerting thing is that this is not the start of a new turn, but its end. And everyone knows that when coming out of a bend, the champion presses down hard on the accelerator so as to set off again at top speed. Which is what Renoir does on an aesthetic plane.
Genius, Malraux wrote somewhere, is born like fire. Of what it consumes. If La Regie du leu was misunderstood at the time, it is because it consumed, destroyed, Le Crime de Monsieur Lange. And Swamp Water in its tum because it consumed A Regie du leu. In the same way, Elena will be dismissed by those who praise French-Cancan. Mistakenly, because Renoir demonstrates constantly that the only way not to be late is always to be early. So he destroys, even as one is still admiring the temerity of his structure."
Juraj Herz - "When I was in the concentration camp I experienced one scene. The first day I came into the concentration camp they undressed us and sent us into the showers. There were only a few children and the rest were men who started a terrible panic. At that time, it was already known what the showers meant. I was there looking at the panic-stricken adults and I knew there was no gas in the tubes because there were glass windows in the room. It would be easy to break them and let the gas out. So I knew it couldn't be a gas chamber. After a while, water started to come out from the tubes, and all the men were screaming that it is just water and not gas.
This scene you know from [Steven] Spielberg. But ten years before him, I shot this scene with women in the film Zastihla me noc. Spielberg copied the scene shot by shot from me. Also, the scene in Spielberg's film doesn't make any sense. I had two main characters in the showers, but in Schindler's List [1993] this is just an unrelated episode. I read the novel Schindler's List, and there is no such a scene. I asked for the script and there is also no scene like that there. I met an American lawyer and I sent him my scene and Spielberg's scene on videotape. He responded to me with a question: Why did I send him one scene from Schindler's List twice? When I explained to him the situation he told me that I will win the lawsuit for sure, but I would have to put into it a hundred or two hundred dollars. I would get the money back, but I would have to have it in the beginning. So I had to leave it. Spielberg is well-known for this kind of stealing. He had lawsuits with almost every film, and I just didn't know about it."
Hiroshi Teshigahara on the film - "This movie is about the breakdown of communication between people, not only in Japan, but universally. The protagonist loses his face once and finds a new face. It is a form of irony. He thought that his isolation was a result of not having a face, having to wear a mask. When he got the new face through plastic surgery, he thought this would mean that he could communicate with people once again. But he never recovers what he sought through this transformation. Not only couldn’t he obtain what he wanted, but even worse, his alienation deepened. I sought to convey the magnitude of human isolation and loneliness. He believed at first that he could not relate to others and to the society in which he lives (he quits his job) because he has lost his face. Despite his successful metamorphosis, he still cannot unite himself to others. This is the bitter irony. As you see, I wanted to show a triumph which was really a failure. On many occasions people have to face a bottomless pit at the very moment when they have obtained the thing for which they have yearned for a long time. I would hate to say what the major theme of a film is. I usually deal with many human problems at once and pursue many different human conditions. All of these are interlocked within the man in Face of Another."
Hiroshi Teshigahara on the film - "The woman who lives in the dunes and the teacher who visits her are not symbols of a backward element in society and an advanced one. The story could take place in any corner of the world. The sandpit is meant to have an international meaning, not one particular to the Japanese. It symbolizes society itself. You could find such a sandpit in New York or San Francisco, or anywhere in the world. Like society, it is ever shifting and continuously moving. It doesn’t rest a moment. It is relentless."
(...)
"In many cases living is comprised of continuing to do things the way they have always been done. Digging the sand reflects how people structure their lives according to custom. In this sense it is a metaphor. The society is the whole assembled by the small radius of each individual’s activity. The woman is not protecting herself against society. Rather, she is performing her duty as a member of society. You must remember that she is a very ordinary woman. She behaves as her ancestors had behaved. It is a simple primitive act. As a result, the young man joins in with her to sustain the obligation. Do not think that she is fighting against or protecting her life from something. The shoveling should be seen as the theme of the film. The shoveling of the sand is the symbol of the duty itself which should be performed as one’s function. I would offer you one more example. We have a fishing rights problem in the Northern Sea. These fishermen have to catch fish to live. Suppose a Russian vessel comes by and catches the boat and the fishermen. Their survival is threatened, so they try to manage somehow. The woman in the dunes is doing just that. She has to shovel sand; otherwise she would lose the house, and hence the village would eventually be destroyed. She has no choice but to do what she is supposed to do."
I'm kind of shocked at the level of criticism I'm seeing the film receive online. It appears to be the new "film I love to hate!" It looks to me like it's become the unfortunate victim of Scorsese's stupidly infamous "Marvel comments". If you look for instance, at the user reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, this is the only film reviewed by many of those who gave it a negative rating.
I'm going to catch flak for this, but so be it. There are people criticizing the film for being "too long" and "repetitive". However, people seem to never tire of gazing at their social media wall or watching the most meaningless videos on YouTube or TikTok. You don't hear people calling TV shows that run for 5 or more seasons "too long" or "repetitive", even after they've binge-watched a whole season of very "repetitive" content. But when a film like Killers of the Flower Moon has a runtime of 206 minutes, there are people who start losing their minds and lash out against it.
Edit 12/9/2023: And I am not saying that "social media" is to blame as one comment states. I am calling out the hypocrisy of people who call a 3-hour film "too long", but never say the same about TV shows or sports broadcasts, and fail to consider that many people spend more time each day on "social media" than they would watching this film. If you don't like the film, that's fine. But before worrying about Killers of the Flower Moon being "too long" and "repetitive", maybe stop and think about how many things we do in life that are much more deserving of that criticism.
Michaelangelo Antonioni discussing the film - "It's too simplistic to say—as many people have done—that I am condemning the inhuman industrial world which oppresses the individuals and leads them to neurosis. My intention ... was to translate the poetry of the world, in which even factories can be beautiful. The line and curves of factories and their chimneys can be more beautiful than the outline of trees, which we are already too accustomed to seeing. It is a rich world, alive and serviceable ... The neurosis I sought to describe in Red Desert is above all a matter of adjusting. There are people who do adapt, and others who can't manage, perhaps because they are too tied to ways of life that are by now out-of-date."
A visual tour-de-force by Jissoji, and the most accessible of his so-called Buddhist Trilogy. A marvelous film dealing with Japanese culture in conflict with their postwar materialism. While depicting with disdain, the rigidity of the nationalistic culture of Japan, symbolized in the absurdity with which Jun, the houseboy, devotes himself to serving his masters and undertaking his studies, Poem is ultimately a film about the destruction posed by Western consumerist mentality on the values of Japanese culture.
A reverend suffering from ailment (Diary of a Country Priest), begins conversing with a troubled man at the request of the troubled man's pregnant wife,
but the troubled man ultimately concludes with killing himself
(Winter Light). Schrader simply changed the man's fear from nuclear to climate change. The opening scene is likewise almost identical to the opening scene in Winter Light, and the scene
with the reverend expressing his disgust for the woman who loves him right to her face, is also taken from Bergman's film.
And this was nominated for an Academy Award for "best original screenplay". Blatant plagiarism is what it is.
A rich and breathtaking work of profound thought and beauty. This is not a film you simply watch, it's a film to experience. Tarkovsky never made films merely to be watched, he made films to submerge yourself within, films that challenge the viewer to think beyond the material. His films are a journey through the inner man and a quest for the spiritual nature of life, and with his films, he invites us to join in that journey and quest. His films don't tell you what to think, they challenge you to think, to think about existence, beauty, and art. He never set himself the task of explaining anything, he was a spiritual observer, and his films are philosophical meditations on the meaning of life.
This is one of the key films that shaped my understanding of what cinema is. The pace of it may be gradual, but it's never tedious. The pacing is all part of the effect as it allows you to meditate on the philosophy and sheer beauty of the film. Ingmar Bergman once said of Tarkovsky that he was "moving freely and fully at ease" in a room that he had always wanted to enter. I understand this sentiment, as Tarkovsky did achieve something that is beyond the realm of say, Bergman. He created a world on film that goes beyond what can just be seen or explained but felt deep within - a world deeply rooted in the poetry of life, the ground between reality and dreams, the inner and outer spaces of human beings. And not to say that Bergman can't also take us here, but Tarkovsky takes us further into a place where nature and spirituality are in unity. Faith and reason aren't at odds here but interwoven.
In this film, Tarkovsky deals with man's technological progression and goal to explore outer space, but our failure to understand our own state of existence, that is to say in other words, our looking outward and forgetting to look inward. The men of the space station are experiencing a unique phenomenon brought on by a mysterious space ocean which brings to form their subconscious, and each reacts to this in their own way based on their personal psychological/spiritual state. The protagonist here is a man in despair over his dead wife, who's committed suicide. Upon arriving at the station, she reappears before him because of the phenomenon. First, he rejects it because it's further troubling to his conscience but soon accepts her, because one, she represents what he needed from his wife, and two, because it's easier to accept the reappearance than cope with reality. Through all this, the viewer is allowed to glimpse into who this man is, as well as reflect on ourselves.
That is part of the film's immense power, it challenges the viewer to question themselves in the situation of the space station; what are your greatest memories, desires, and fears? What appearances would you face? Would they be happy, depressing, dark, etc.? How would you react to, and handle them? These are some of the questions I've walked away asking myself since watching it. It's definitely a film that demands your patience and attention, but in the end, it's a hugely rewarding experience and a film I'll continue to return to over the years because it takes us into the purest realm of cinema, a realm that allows us to reflect on ourselves and our state of existence.
The cinematography is phenomenal...the framing, angles, and camera movements are simply exquisite. Yet beneath the aesethical beauty, is a world of sickness. Deeply disturbing.
"In 'Blow-Up,' a lot of energy was wasted by people trying to decide if there was a murder, or wasn't a murder, when in fact the film was not about a murder but about a photographer. Those pictures he took were simply one of the things that happened to him, but anything could have happened to him: He was a person living in that world, possessing that personality."
"In my other films, I have tried to probe the relationship between one person and another--most often, their love relationship, the fragility of their feelings, and so on. But in this film, none of these themes matters. Here, the relationship is between an individual and reality--those things that are around him. There are no love stories in this film, even though we see relations between men and women. The experience of the protagonist is not a sentimental nor an amorous one but rather, one regarding his relationship with the world, with the things he finds in front of him. He is a photographer. One day, he photographs two people in a park, an element of reality that appears real. And it is. But reality has a quality of freedom about it that is hard to explain. This film, perhaps, is like Zen; the moment you explain it, you betray it. I mean, a film you can explain in words, is not a real film."
Yoshishige Yoshida - "The fundamental theme is: how to change the world, and what is it that needs to be changed? Reflecting on the present situation through the medium of an era already past, I came to believe that Osugi’s problems continue to be ours. Osugi is very well known in Japan – one could say almost legendary: he is someone who spoke of free love. He was assassinated in 1923 by an official of the state, massacred by the power of the state. This is what all Japanese historians believe; but this historical estimation only enlightens the past, and not the future. In making this film, I wanted to transform the legend of Osugi by means of the imaginary. Sure enough, Osugi was oppressed by the power of the state in his political activities. But most of all, he spoke of free love, which has the power to destroy the monogamous structure, then the family, and finally the state. And it was this very escalation that the state could not allow. It was because of this crime of the imaginary (or “imaginary crime”) that the state massacred Osugi. Osugi was someone who envisioned a future."
Jacques Becker - "The fascinating thing about this story is that it is completely true. About ten years ago, I read a newspaper account of an attempted escape from La Santé Prison and of how five prisoners spent four months digging their way into the Paris sewers. They were caught within minutes of freedom because one of them betrayed the plan to the prison authorities. The ingenuity of their scheme and the courage of the undertaking intrigued me both as a man and as a filmmaker. I prepared a rough draft of a scenario based on the incident; however, due to a previous work commitment, I had to set it aside. Several years later, I discovered that José Giovanni had used the same story as the basis for a best-selling novel. My interest in the project was immediately rekindled. I contracted the book's publisher (Gallimard) and expressed my interest in the screen rights to the novel. Giovanni, himself a former prisoner, was most particular about how his book should be filmed and we spent many long hours discussing the project. Finally, the author agreed that I should make the film and he became my principal collaborator in the preparation of the screenplay. So that the film could be as authentic as possible, we enlisted as technical consultants three members of the original escape who, having served their sentences, were now living in Paris. Among these three men was Jean Keraudy, who plays Roland in the film.
In keeping with our aim to make Le trou totally realistic, I cast the five leading roles with nonprofessional actors. I avoided 'known' personalities because I wanted five men audiences could identify as real people and not as stars 'play-acting' in a new part.
I desired the same sense of naturalism which Vittorio De Sica obtained so perfectly from his amateur players in The Bicycle Thief. Most of the film was shot in the sections of La Santé where the original escape attempt had taken place. Our studio sets, built under the supervision of our three experts, were authentic to the smallest detail.
During the three months of filming, we worked and lived together very much like a family. I feel that this very close personal and professional relationship between cast and crew added much to the production and enabled me to obtain the maximum from both sides of the camera."
Michelangelo Antonioni - "La notte is a story that goes back two years. Long ago, I had approached a producer about doing a film called Party. It was about what happened during a reception at a bourgeois home. I had been to a party of that type a short time earlier and had been struck by certain episodes, certain small incidents I had noted. Or, more specifically, apparently small, but not if you considered the significance they held for those who were their protagonists.
The film was not made. Perhaps that was for the best. I returned to the idea two years ago, but several successive drafts left me unsatisfied. Something was missing that I could not find.
Meanwhile, the idea for L’avventura came to me, and I threw myself into that film, body and soul.
Yet I was still obsessed by the other story, and I got back to work on it. I was unable to get enough distance from certain autobiographical aspects; I could not reinvent them.
The protagonist was a woman who could not be beautiful; I offered the part to Giulietta Masina. I went to meet her and told her my idea for the film. Fellini was there; he told me the film could be very beautiful. But I still wasn’t convinced. I got back to work.
One day, I finally understood what I had to do. A woman who wasn’t beautiful was a mistake because it limited the film’s meaning.
One could think that her lack of beauty might be the only reason her husband’s feelings for her came to an end. So I changed the character once again, while simultaneously giving the man’s role more weight. I also eliminated the characters that surrounded them. It was to be the story of a couple, more in depth, more precise psychologically. Finally, I liked the film, and I went to work to direct it.
One question I am often asked is why the women in my films are more lucid than the men. I was raised among women: my mother, my aunt, and lots of cousins. Then I got married, and my wife had five sisters. I have always lived among women; I know them very well.
Yet this is only the anecdotal aspect of my answer. Speaking for myself, I find that the feminine sensibility is a far more precise filter than any other to express what I have to say. In the realm of emotions, man is nearly always unable to feel reality as it exists. Having a tendency to dominate woman, he is tempted to hide some of her aspects from himself and see her as he wants her to be. There is nothing absolute in this area, but it seems to me that is at the heart of it.
I was already busy shooting La notte when I started rereading Thomas Mann’s On Marriage, in which the author of Death in Venice pays such a beautiful tribute to the love and steadfast devotion his wife surrounded him with throughout his life. It was then that I became convinced, once and for all, that I was on the right path, by thinking of the weight of masculine egotism implied by such a total abstraction of his wife’s personality to his own benefit.
Five or six years ago, the audience would have had difficulty tolerating a film like La notte. I am happy about the reception La notte has received, not only for me but for cinema in general. It means that something has changed. For the better."
Michelangelo Antonioni's Cannes statement - "Today the world is endangered by an extremely serious split between a science that is totally and consciously projected into the future, and a rigid and stereotyped morality that all of us recognize as such and yet sustain out of cowardice and sheer laziness. Where is this split most evident? What are its most obvious, its most sensitive, let us even say its most painful, areas?
Consider the Renaissance man, his sense of joy, his fullness, his multifarious activities. Those were men of great magnitude, technically able and at the same time artistically creative, capable of feeling their own sense of dignity, their own sense of importance as human beings, the Ptolemaic fullness of man. Then man discovered that his world was Copernican, an extremely limited world in an unknown universe.
And today a new man is being born, fraught with all the fears and terrors and stammerings that are associated with a period of gestation. And what is even more serious, this new man immediately finds himself burdened with a heavy baggage of emotional traits that cannot exactly be called old and outmoded but rather unsuited and inadequate. They condition us without offering us any help; they create problems without suggesting any possible solutions. And yet it seems that man will not rid himself of this baggage. He reacts, he loves, he hates, he suffers under the sway of moral forces and myths that today, when we are at the threshold of reaching the moon, should not be the same as those that prevailed at the time of Homer, but nevertheless are.
Man is quick to rid himself of his technological and scientific mistakes and misconceptions. Indeed, science has never been more humble and less dogmatic than it is today. Whereas our moral attitudes are governed by an absolute sense of stultification. In recent years, we have examined these moral attitudes very carefully, we have dissected them and analyzed them to the point of exhaustion. We have been capable of all this, but we have not been capable of finding new ones. We have not been capable of making any headway whatsoever toward a solution to this problem, of this ever-increasing split between moral man and scientific man, a split that is becoming more and more serious and more and more accentuated.
Naturally, I don’t care to, nor can I, resolve it myself; I am not a moralist, and my film is neither a denunciation nor a sermon. It is a story told in images whereby, I hope, it may be possible to perceive not the birth of a mistaken attitude but the manner in which attitudes and feelings are misunderstood today. Because, I repeat, the present moral standards we live by, these myths, these conventions, are old and obsolete. And we all know they are, yet we honor them. Why? The conclusion reached by the protagonists in my film is not one of sentimentality. If anything, what they finally arrive at is a sense of pity for each other. You might say that this too is nothing new. But what else is left if we do not at least succeed in achieving this? Why do you think eroticism is so prevalent today in our literature, our theatrical shows, and elsewhere? It is a symptom of the emotional sickness of our time. But this preoccupation with the erotic would not become obsessive if Eros were healthy, that is, if it were kept within human proportions. But Eros is sick; man is uneasy, something is bothering him. And whenever something bothers him, man reacts, but he reacts badly, only on erotic impulse, and he is unhappy.
The tragedy in L’avventura stems directly from an erotic impulse of this type: unhappy, miserable, futile. To be critically aware of the vulgarity and the futility of such an overwhelming erotic impulse, as is the case with the protagonist in L’avventura, is not enough or serves no purpose. And here we witness the crumbling of a myth that proclaims it is enough for us to know, to be critically conscious of ourselves, to analyze ourselves, in all our complexities and in every facet of our personality. The fact of the matter is that such an examination is not enough. It is only a preliminary step. Every day, every emotional encounter gives rise to a new adventure. For even though we know that the ancient codes of morality are decrepit and no longer tenable, we persist, with a sense of perversity that I would only ironically define as pathetic, in remaining loyal to them. Thus moral man, who has no fear of the scientific unknown, is today afraid of the moral unknown. Starting out from this point of fear and frustration, his adventure can only end in a stalemate."
Masaki Kobayashi - "As a sort of shorthand description, one could say it was a horror film. My main intention in the film was to explore the juxtaposition between man's material nature and his spiritual nature, the realm of dream and aspiration. I wanted to create a drama that dealt directly with the spiritual importance of our lives. I also enjoyed conveying the sheer beauty of traditional Japan. Anyway, I am not really satisfied with the designation of "horror film." It's spiritual concerns are the center of the drama."
Wong Kar-wai discussing the film: "[T]he role of Tony in the film reminds me of Jimmy Stewart's in Vertigo. There is a dark side to this character. I think it's very interesting that most of the audience prefers to think that this is a very innocent relationship. These are the good guys, because their spouses are the first ones to be unfaithful and they refuse to be. Nobody sees any darkness in these characters – and yet they are meeting in secret to act out fictitious scenarios of confronting their spouses and of having an affair. I think this happens because the face of Tony Leung is so sympathetic. Just imagine if it was John Malkovich playing this role. You would think, 'This guy is really weird.' It's the same in Vertigo. Everybody thinks James Stewart is a nice guy, so nobody thinks that his character is actually very sick."
Comments 1 - 25 of 36
Movie comment on Yoru no henrin
K.
An obscure masterpiece. The cinematography and lighting is beautiful.Movie comment on Swamp Water
K.
An unjustly neglected gem from Renoir, easily one of his greatest films.Jean-Luc Godard - "The second American Renoir to be shown after the Liberation. There begins the misunderstanding : a misunderstanding which was to turn the most admired of French film-makers into the most maltreated. The crowning paradox is that it was Renoir's warmest partisans who resolutely threw the first stone : a stone thrown earlier at La Regie du leu which, after five years of upheaval in the world, is still barely accepted, let alone understood.
Swamp Water can also boast of having revolutionized Hollywood in the long term. For the first time a big studio agreed to the idea - very reasonable, after all - of not shooting exteriors in interiors. Swamp Water follows the same principle as Toni, with twenty years of experience behind it. This is no longer a question of being willing to take risks, but the audacity of absolute assurance.
Booed at the Biarritz when it was first shown in Paris, Swamp Water is one of the seven or eight major turning-points in Renoir's career. The disconcerting thing is that this is not the start of a new turn, but its end. And everyone knows that when coming out of a bend, the champion presses down hard on the accelerator so as to set off again at top speed. Which is what Renoir does on an aesthetic plane.
Genius, Malraux wrote somewhere, is born like fire. Of what it consumes. If La Regie du leu was misunderstood at the time, it is because it consumed, destroyed, Le Crime de Monsieur Lange. And Swamp Water in its tum because it consumed A Regie du leu. In the same way, Elena will be dismissed by those who praise French-Cancan. Mistakenly, because Renoir demonstrates constantly that the only way not to be late is always to be early. So he destroys, even as one is still admiring the temerity of his structure."
Movie comment on Zastihla me noc
K.
Juraj Herz - "When I was in the concentration camp I experienced one scene. The first day I came into the concentration camp they undressed us and sent us into the showers. There were only a few children and the rest were men who started a terrible panic. At that time, it was already known what the showers meant. I was there looking at the panic-stricken adults and I knew there was no gas in the tubes because there were glass windows in the room. It would be easy to break them and let the gas out. So I knew it couldn't be a gas chamber. After a while, water started to come out from the tubes, and all the men were screaming that it is just water and not gas.This scene you know from [Steven] Spielberg. But ten years before him, I shot this scene with women in the film Zastihla me noc. Spielberg copied the scene shot by shot from me. Also, the scene in Spielberg's film doesn't make any sense. I had two main characters in the showers, but in Schindler's List [1993] this is just an unrelated episode. I read the novel Schindler's List, and there is no such a scene. I asked for the script and there is also no scene like that there. I met an American lawyer and I sent him my scene and Spielberg's scene on videotape. He responded to me with a question: Why did I send him one scene from Schindler's List twice? When I explained to him the situation he told me that I will win the lawsuit for sure, but I would have to put into it a hundred or two hundred dollars. I would get the money back, but I would have to have it in the beginning. So I had to leave it. Spielberg is well-known for this kind of stealing. He had lawsuits with almost every film, and I just didn't know about it."
Movie comment on Tanin no kao
K.
Hiroshi Teshigahara on the film - "This movie is about the breakdown of communication between people, not only in Japan, but universally. The protagonist loses his face once and finds a new face. It is a form of irony. He thought that his isolation was a result of not having a face, having to wear a mask. When he got the new face through plastic surgery, he thought this would mean that he could communicate with people once again. But he never recovers what he sought through this transformation. Not only couldn’t he obtain what he wanted, but even worse, his alienation deepened. I sought to convey the magnitude of human isolation and loneliness. He believed at first that he could not relate to others and to the society in which he lives (he quits his job) because he has lost his face. Despite his successful metamorphosis, he still cannot unite himself to others. This is the bitter irony. As you see, I wanted to show a triumph which was really a failure. On many occasions people have to face a bottomless pit at the very moment when they have obtained the thing for which they have yearned for a long time. I would hate to say what the major theme of a film is. I usually deal with many human problems at once and pursue many different human conditions. All of these are interlocked within the man in Face of Another."Movie comment on Suna no onna
K.
Hiroshi Teshigahara on the film - "The woman who lives in the dunes and the teacher who visits her are not symbols of a backward element in society and an advanced one. The story could take place in any corner of the world. The sandpit is meant to have an international meaning, not one particular to the Japanese. It symbolizes society itself. You could find such a sandpit in New York or San Francisco, or anywhere in the world. Like society, it is ever shifting and continuously moving. It doesn’t rest a moment. It is relentless."(...)
"In many cases living is comprised of continuing to do things the way they have always been done. Digging the sand reflects how people structure their lives according to custom. In this sense it is a metaphor. The society is the whole assembled by the small radius of each individual’s activity. The woman is not protecting herself against society. Rather, she is performing her duty as a member of society. You must remember that she is a very ordinary woman. She behaves as her ancestors had behaved. It is a simple primitive act. As a result, the young man joins in with her to sustain the obligation. Do not think that she is fighting against or protecting her life from something. The shoveling should be seen as the theme of the film. The shoveling of the sand is the symbol of the duty itself which should be performed as one’s function. I would offer you one more example. We have a fishing rights problem in the Northern Sea. These fishermen have to catch fish to live. Suppose a Russian vessel comes by and catches the boat and the fishermen. Their survival is threatened, so they try to manage somehow. The woman in the dunes is doing just that. She has to shovel sand; otherwise she would lose the house, and hence the village would eventually be destroyed. She has no choice but to do what she is supposed to do."
Movie comment on Killers of the Flower Moon
K.
I'm kind of shocked at the level of criticism I'm seeing the film receive online. It appears to be the new "film I love to hate!" It looks to me like it's become the unfortunate victim of Scorsese's stupidly infamous "Marvel comments". If you look for instance, at the user reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, this is the only film reviewed by many of those who gave it a negative rating.I'm going to catch flak for this, but so be it. There are people criticizing the film for being "too long" and "repetitive". However, people seem to never tire of gazing at their social media wall or watching the most meaningless videos on YouTube or TikTok. You don't hear people calling TV shows that run for 5 or more seasons "too long" or "repetitive", even after they've binge-watched a whole season of very "repetitive" content. But when a film like Killers of the Flower Moon has a runtime of 206 minutes, there are people who start losing their minds and lash out against it.
Edit 12/9/2023: And I am not saying that "social media" is to blame as one comment states. I am calling out the hypocrisy of people who call a 3-hour film "too long", but never say the same about TV shows or sports broadcasts, and fail to consider that many people spend more time each day on "social media" than they would watching this film. If you don't like the film, that's fine. But before worrying about Killers of the Flower Moon being "too long" and "repetitive", maybe stop and think about how many things we do in life that are much more deserving of that criticism.
Movie comment on Il deserto rosso
K.
Michaelangelo Antonioni discussing the film - "It's too simplistic to say—as many people have done—that I am condemning the inhuman industrial world which oppresses the individuals and leads them to neurosis. My intention ... was to translate the poetry of the world, in which even factories can be beautiful. The line and curves of factories and their chimneys can be more beautiful than the outline of trees, which we are already too accustomed to seeing. It is a rich world, alive and serviceable ... The neurosis I sought to describe in Red Desert is above all a matter of adjusting. There are people who do adapt, and others who can't manage, perhaps because they are too tied to ways of life that are by now out-of-date."Movie comment on Triangle of Sadness
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Basically just a combination of The Admirable Crichton and Wertmüller's Swept Away.Movie comment on Le souffle au coeur
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A teenage boy's journey to becoming a motherfuckerMovie comment on Mission to Mars
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Poor Woody wanted to be like BuzzMovie comment on Body Double
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Rear Window + Vertigo exploitation style.Movie comment on Uta
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A visual tour-de-force by Jissoji, and the most accessible of his so-called Buddhist Trilogy. A marvelous film dealing with Japanese culture in conflict with their postwar materialism. While depicting with disdain, the rigidity of the nationalistic culture of Japan, symbolized in the absurdity with which Jun, the houseboy, devotes himself to serving his masters and undertaking his studies, Poem is ultimately a film about the destruction posed by Western consumerist mentality on the values of Japanese culture.Movie comment on First Reformed
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A reverend suffering from ailment (Diary of a Country Priest), begins conversing with a troubled man at the request of the troubled man's pregnant wife,Movie comment on Solyaris
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A rich and breathtaking work of profound thought and beauty. This is not a film you simply watch, it's a film to experience. Tarkovsky never made films merely to be watched, he made films to submerge yourself within, films that challenge the viewer to think beyond the material. His films are a journey through the inner man and a quest for the spiritual nature of life, and with his films, he invites us to join in that journey and quest. His films don't tell you what to think, they challenge you to think, to think about existence, beauty, and art. He never set himself the task of explaining anything, he was a spiritual observer, and his films are philosophical meditations on the meaning of life.This is one of the key films that shaped my understanding of what cinema is. The pace of it may be gradual, but it's never tedious. The pacing is all part of the effect as it allows you to meditate on the philosophy and sheer beauty of the film. Ingmar Bergman once said of Tarkovsky that he was "moving freely and fully at ease" in a room that he had always wanted to enter. I understand this sentiment, as Tarkovsky did achieve something that is beyond the realm of say, Bergman. He created a world on film that goes beyond what can just be seen or explained but felt deep within - a world deeply rooted in the poetry of life, the ground between reality and dreams, the inner and outer spaces of human beings. And not to say that Bergman can't also take us here, but Tarkovsky takes us further into a place where nature and spirituality are in unity. Faith and reason aren't at odds here but interwoven.
In this film, Tarkovsky deals with man's technological progression and goal to explore outer space, but our failure to understand our own state of existence, that is to say in other words, our looking outward and forgetting to look inward. The men of the space station are experiencing a unique phenomenon brought on by a mysterious space ocean which brings to form their subconscious, and each reacts to this in their own way based on their personal psychological/spiritual state. The protagonist here is a man in despair over his dead wife, who's committed suicide. Upon arriving at the station, she reappears before him because of the phenomenon. First, he rejects it because it's further troubling to his conscience but soon accepts her, because one, she represents what he needed from his wife, and two, because it's easier to accept the reappearance than cope with reality. Through all this, the viewer is allowed to glimpse into who this man is, as well as reflect on ourselves.
That is part of the film's immense power, it challenges the viewer to question themselves in the situation of the space station; what are your greatest memories, desires, and fears? What appearances would you face? Would they be happy, depressing, dark, etc.? How would you react to, and handle them? These are some of the questions I've walked away asking myself since watching it. It's definitely a film that demands your patience and attention, but in the end, it's a hugely rewarding experience and a film I'll continue to return to over the years because it takes us into the purest realm of cinema, a realm that allows us to reflect on ourselves and our state of existence.
Movie comment on Mandara
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The cinematography is phenomenal...the framing, angles, and camera movements are simply exquisite. Yet beneath the aesethical beauty, is a world of sickness. Deeply disturbing.Movie comment on Dead Poets Society
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A group of students are told to think for themselves...not once are they told why they should think for themselves.Movie comment on Blow-Up
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Statements by Michelangelo Antonioni on Blow-Up"In 'Blow-Up,' a lot of energy was wasted by people trying to decide if there was a murder, or wasn't a murder, when in fact the film was not about a murder but about a photographer. Those pictures he took were simply one of the things that happened to him, but anything could have happened to him: He was a person living in that world, possessing that personality."
"In my other films, I have tried to probe the relationship between one person and another--most often, their love relationship, the fragility of their feelings, and so on. But in this film, none of these themes matters. Here, the relationship is between an individual and reality--those things that are around him. There are no love stories in this film, even though we see relations between men and women. The experience of the protagonist is not a sentimental nor an amorous one but rather, one regarding his relationship with the world, with the things he finds in front of him. He is a photographer. One day, he photographs two people in a park, an element of reality that appears real. And it is. But reality has a quality of freedom about it that is hard to explain. This film, perhaps, is like Zen; the moment you explain it, you betray it. I mean, a film you can explain in words, is not a real film."
Movie comment on Erosu purasu gyakusatsu
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Yoshishige Yoshida - "The fundamental theme is: how to change the world, and what is it that needs to be changed? Reflecting on the present situation through the medium of an era already past, I came to believe that Osugi’s problems continue to be ours. Osugi is very well known in Japan – one could say almost legendary: he is someone who spoke of free love. He was assassinated in 1923 by an official of the state, massacred by the power of the state. This is what all Japanese historians believe; but this historical estimation only enlightens the past, and not the future. In making this film, I wanted to transform the legend of Osugi by means of the imaginary. Sure enough, Osugi was oppressed by the power of the state in his political activities. But most of all, he spoke of free love, which has the power to destroy the monogamous structure, then the family, and finally the state. And it was this very escalation that the state could not allow. It was because of this crime of the imaginary (or “imaginary crime”) that the state massacred Osugi. Osugi was someone who envisioned a future."Movie comment on Le trou
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Warning! Spoilers ahead.Jacques Becker - "The fascinating thing about this story is that it is completely true. About ten years ago, I read a newspaper account of an attempted escape from La Santé Prison and of how five prisoners spent four months digging their way into the Paris sewers. They were caught within minutes of freedom because one of them betrayed the plan to the prison authorities. The ingenuity of their scheme and the courage of the undertaking intrigued me both as a man and as a filmmaker. I prepared a rough draft of a scenario based on the incident; however, due to a previous work commitment, I had to set it aside. Several years later, I discovered that José Giovanni had used the same story as the basis for a best-selling novel. My interest in the project was immediately rekindled. I contracted the book's publisher (Gallimard) and expressed my interest in the screen rights to the novel. Giovanni, himself a former prisoner, was most particular about how his book should be filmed and we spent many long hours discussing the project. Finally, the author agreed that I should make the film and he became my principal collaborator in the preparation of the screenplay. So that the film could be as authentic as possible, we enlisted as technical consultants three members of the original escape who, having served their sentences, were now living in Paris. Among these three men was Jean Keraudy, who plays Roland in the film.
In keeping with our aim to make Le trou totally realistic, I cast the five leading roles with nonprofessional actors. I avoided 'known' personalities because I wanted five men audiences could identify as real people and not as stars 'play-acting' in a new part.
I desired the same sense of naturalism which Vittorio De Sica obtained so perfectly from his amateur players in The Bicycle Thief. Most of the film was shot in the sections of La Santé where the original escape attempt had taken place. Our studio sets, built under the supervision of our three experts, were authentic to the smallest detail.
During the three months of filming, we worked and lived together very much like a family. I feel that this very close personal and professional relationship between cast and crew added much to the production and enabled me to obtain the maximum from both sides of the camera."
Movie comment on La notte
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Michelangelo Antonioni - "La notte is a story that goes back two years. Long ago, I had approached a producer about doing a film called Party. It was about what happened during a reception at a bourgeois home. I had been to a party of that type a short time earlier and had been struck by certain episodes, certain small incidents I had noted. Or, more specifically, apparently small, but not if you considered the significance they held for those who were their protagonists.The film was not made. Perhaps that was for the best. I returned to the idea two years ago, but several successive drafts left me unsatisfied. Something was missing that I could not find.
Meanwhile, the idea for L’avventura came to me, and I threw myself into that film, body and soul.
Yet I was still obsessed by the other story, and I got back to work on it. I was unable to get enough distance from certain autobiographical aspects; I could not reinvent them.
The protagonist was a woman who could not be beautiful; I offered the part to Giulietta Masina. I went to meet her and told her my idea for the film. Fellini was there; he told me the film could be very beautiful. But I still wasn’t convinced. I got back to work.
One day, I finally understood what I had to do. A woman who wasn’t beautiful was a mistake because it limited the film’s meaning.
One could think that her lack of beauty might be the only reason her husband’s feelings for her came to an end. So I changed the character once again, while simultaneously giving the man’s role more weight. I also eliminated the characters that surrounded them. It was to be the story of a couple, more in depth, more precise psychologically. Finally, I liked the film, and I went to work to direct it.
One question I am often asked is why the women in my films are more lucid than the men. I was raised among women: my mother, my aunt, and lots of cousins. Then I got married, and my wife had five sisters. I have always lived among women; I know them very well.
Yet this is only the anecdotal aspect of my answer. Speaking for myself, I find that the feminine sensibility is a far more precise filter than any other to express what I have to say. In the realm of emotions, man is nearly always unable to feel reality as it exists. Having a tendency to dominate woman, he is tempted to hide some of her aspects from himself and see her as he wants her to be. There is nothing absolute in this area, but it seems to me that is at the heart of it.
I was already busy shooting La notte when I started rereading Thomas Mann’s On Marriage, in which the author of Death in Venice pays such a beautiful tribute to the love and steadfast devotion his wife surrounded him with throughout his life. It was then that I became convinced, once and for all, that I was on the right path, by thinking of the weight of masculine egotism implied by such a total abstraction of his wife’s personality to his own benefit.
Five or six years ago, the audience would have had difficulty tolerating a film like La notte. I am happy about the reception La notte has received, not only for me but for cinema in general. It means that something has changed. For the better."
Movie comment on L'avventura
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Michelangelo Antonioni's Cannes statement - "Today the world is endangered by an extremely serious split between a science that is totally and consciously projected into the future, and a rigid and stereotyped morality that all of us recognize as such and yet sustain out of cowardice and sheer laziness. Where is this split most evident? What are its most obvious, its most sensitive, let us even say its most painful, areas?Consider the Renaissance man, his sense of joy, his fullness, his multifarious activities. Those were men of great magnitude, technically able and at the same time artistically creative, capable of feeling their own sense of dignity, their own sense of importance as human beings, the Ptolemaic fullness of man. Then man discovered that his world was Copernican, an extremely limited world in an unknown universe.
And today a new man is being born, fraught with all the fears and terrors and stammerings that are associated with a period of gestation. And what is even more serious, this new man immediately finds himself burdened with a heavy baggage of emotional traits that cannot exactly be called old and outmoded but rather unsuited and inadequate. They condition us without offering us any help; they create problems without suggesting any possible solutions. And yet it seems that man will not rid himself of this baggage. He reacts, he loves, he hates, he suffers under the sway of moral forces and myths that today, when we are at the threshold of reaching the moon, should not be the same as those that prevailed at the time of Homer, but nevertheless are.
Man is quick to rid himself of his technological and scientific mistakes and misconceptions. Indeed, science has never been more humble and less dogmatic than it is today. Whereas our moral attitudes are governed by an absolute sense of stultification. In recent years, we have examined these moral attitudes very carefully, we have dissected them and analyzed them to the point of exhaustion. We have been capable of all this, but we have not been capable of finding new ones. We have not been capable of making any headway whatsoever toward a solution to this problem, of this ever-increasing split between moral man and scientific man, a split that is becoming more and more serious and more and more accentuated.
Naturally, I don’t care to, nor can I, resolve it myself; I am not a moralist, and my film is neither a denunciation nor a sermon. It is a story told in images whereby, I hope, it may be possible to perceive not the birth of a mistaken attitude but the manner in which attitudes and feelings are misunderstood today. Because, I repeat, the present moral standards we live by, these myths, these conventions, are old and obsolete. And we all know they are, yet we honor them. Why? The conclusion reached by the protagonists in my film is not one of sentimentality. If anything, what they finally arrive at is a sense of pity for each other. You might say that this too is nothing new. But what else is left if we do not at least succeed in achieving this? Why do you think eroticism is so prevalent today in our literature, our theatrical shows, and elsewhere? It is a symptom of the emotional sickness of our time. But this preoccupation with the erotic would not become obsessive if Eros were healthy, that is, if it were kept within human proportions. But Eros is sick; man is uneasy, something is bothering him. And whenever something bothers him, man reacts, but he reacts badly, only on erotic impulse, and he is unhappy.
The tragedy in L’avventura stems directly from an erotic impulse of this type: unhappy, miserable, futile. To be critically aware of the vulgarity and the futility of such an overwhelming erotic impulse, as is the case with the protagonist in L’avventura, is not enough or serves no purpose. And here we witness the crumbling of a myth that proclaims it is enough for us to know, to be critically conscious of ourselves, to analyze ourselves, in all our complexities and in every facet of our personality. The fact of the matter is that such an examination is not enough. It is only a preliminary step. Every day, every emotional encounter gives rise to a new adventure. For even though we know that the ancient codes of morality are decrepit and no longer tenable, we persist, with a sense of perversity that I would only ironically define as pathetic, in remaining loyal to them. Thus moral man, who has no fear of the scientific unknown, is today afraid of the moral unknown. Starting out from this point of fear and frustration, his adventure can only end in a stalemate."
Movie comment on Kaidan
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Masaki Kobayashi - "As a sort of shorthand description, one could say it was a horror film. My main intention in the film was to explore the juxtaposition between man's material nature and his spiritual nature, the realm of dream and aspiration. I wanted to create a drama that dealt directly with the spiritual importance of our lives. I also enjoyed conveying the sheer beauty of traditional Japan. Anyway, I am not really satisfied with the designation of "horror film." It's spiritual concerns are the center of the drama."Movie comment on Fa yeung nin wah
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Wong Kar-wai discussing the film: "[T]he role of Tony in the film reminds me of Jimmy Stewart's in Vertigo. There is a dark side to this character. I think it's very interesting that most of the audience prefers to think that this is a very innocent relationship. These are the good guys, because their spouses are the first ones to be unfaithful and they refuse to be. Nobody sees any darkness in these characters – and yet they are meeting in secret to act out fictitious scenarios of confronting their spouses and of having an affair. I think this happens because the face of Tony Leung is so sympathetic. Just imagine if it was John Malkovich playing this role. You would think, 'This guy is really weird.' It's the same in Vertigo. Everybody thinks James Stewart is a nice guy, so nobody thinks that his character is actually very sick."Movie comment on Akahige
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One of Kurosawa's finest films...One of the supreme masterpieces of cinema! Beautiful, profound, and so tremendously human.Movie comment on Jôen
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Beautiful cinematography!Showing items 1 – 25 of 36