The Actor’s Body—A Constellation of French Cinema: ‘Le Doulos’ / ‘À bout de souffle’ / ‘Mauvais sang’

Jean-Pierre Melville, Jean-Luc Godard and Leos Carax belong to the same lineage of filmmakers and the same family of French cinema. This audiovisual essay remixes three scenes from their films to study their connections and the work of their actors: Serge Reggiani, Jean-Paul Belmondo and Denis Lavant.

John Cassavetes: A Primer

In a Cassavetes film, everything is an event. The way someone enters a room, a scene, or a shot. The way that the drama rises or subsides. The framing of an image, the way it moves. The play of light and darkness, colour and hue, the grain of the film stock. The interplay of views from multiple, simultaneous cameras (one of them frequently worked by Cassavetes himself). The violence of the soundtrack, open to waves and intensities of every kind of voice, noise or musical note. And the amazing work on editing, to which Cassavetes and his collaborators could literally devote years...

That Cube Caught My Fantasy…

Some months ago, I found in YouTube this wonderful video of Carl Gustav Jung at his Bollingen Tower. The footage prominently features a stone that he carved and put in his garden, next to the lake, as an offering for his 75th birthday. Following the trail of two sets of image-associations, this essay goes from Telesphoros (the bewitching figure carved in one of the sides of the stone) to Nicolas Roeg's 'Don't Look Now' and Krzysztof Kieślowski's 'Dekalog I'.

Launching our ‘Multimedia Lectures On Film’ series

What we do in these videos are in-depth analyses of major films in film history  ('major' meaning, simply, that we love them: bear with us and you might be surprised by some of our future choices, since the only canon we'll follow is that of our own desire). There are no windy, textbook generalities about genre, auteur or historical context; we go straight to the material details that (in our view) illuminate the films, how they work and how they feel...

‘Birth’

This is the first film I've made using, entirely, digital superimpositions. I guess you could say that this is a film about my birth. My mother told me once that my father became another person the moment I was born. I believe her because, if I try to remember a time when I might have felt any connection with my father, I can't: it's as if there was never any. I've heard details about that period before, but I've never had a full-on narration by her to which I could re-listen...

Brain Massage

Usually, I would have cringed in disbelief and horror at the mere suggestion of a vague link between "what I feel" and the state of the world at large. (It's a long story, but to make it short: if you've lived feeling acutely the separation between you and others, between you and a world without a place for you, this idea just does not make much sense; in fact, this idea is deeply offensive.) I've learnt that this belief in the separation between oneself and the world is a quite common delusion. But knowing I am delusional doesn't stop me feeling how I feel...

F

In 2009, I became fascinated by a young man – I'll call him F – who lived in the streets and used to beg for money near my workplace. The year before, I had walked past him several times. There was a group of about ten people – mostly Eastern-European women – who used to line up at the front and back doors of a cathedral, asking for money from the visitors (sometimes, also stealing wallets via tricks that were so crude I could not believe tourists let themselves be fooled so easily). Amongst these people was F, whose looks and manners were different...

The Outline: Milner/Watkins/Munch

A word/image collage on the outline. With quotes by Marion Milner, Peter Watkins, and Edvard Munch...

Notes on Film Criticism (II): A Small Plot of Land

There are film critics who like to move across wide extensions. They are cartographers; they map territories. Their writing is not earthbound, but enlivened by everything aerial: winds, leaps, flights. I sometimes enjoy reading these writers, provided their pirouettes are beautiful and their landscapes are imaginative. I enjoy reading them if the lines they trace and the connections they make trigger enough vibrations and resonances. But this is not how I write. I'm happier on a small plot of land...

White of the Origins: ‘Liberté, la nuit’ (Philippe Garrel, 1984)

Blown by the wind, a white sheet enters the frame, like a candle swelling and shrinking. Its hypnotic and unpredictable movements obliterate (sometimes partially, other times entirely) the action in the background. It is a spectacle of heightened, Epsteinian poetry that demands to be read under the lens of Jacques Rancière's “thwarted fable”...

Isak’s Tale: ‘Fanny and Alexander’ (Ingmar Bergman, 1982)

The sequence is part of the fifth chapter – titled “Demons” – of the TV version of 'Fanny and Alexander'. When it takes place, we have already been immersed in the misfortunes of the Ekdahl family for more than four hours. Isak Jakobi has managed to rescue Fanny and Alexander from their wicked stepfather, Vergérus, whose abuses have become intolerable. Isak shelters the siblings at his labyrinthine residence, shows them the room where they will sleep and proceeds to read them a story...

Missing, Misunderstanding, Noticing: ‘Le Cercle rouge’ (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1970)

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about one shot from Jean-Pierre Melville's 'Le cercle rouge'. The first thing I must confess about this shot is that I had never really seen it before – at least, not properly. It belongs to this scene happening 35 minutes into the film. The scene is the culmination of a particular idea: using intercutting to bridge the gap between Corey and Vogel – two characters that have never met, but whose destinies are, thanks to a magnetic parallel montage, intertwined from the very beginning...