‘Lift’

Filmed inside the most exciting attraction of my little town: a cubicle of one square metre. This film will give you a lift: up and down, up and down. An anti-touristic movie of landscapes, vistas, disseminated reflections, glass and metal. An experiment combining one, two and three screens; a geometrical puzzle of horizontal and vertical lines. Lurches, bumps, pans, and tilts: all to the rhythm of a Kraftwerk medley. 

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...

‘As Tears Go By…’: Marianne Faithfull & Anna Karina

In this audiovisual essay, Anna Karina and Marianne Faithfull talk to themselves and to each other across six different films. Bitterly, blatantly, brutally: they muse—using words written by men and songs composed by men—on what it means (for all of us: there ain't escape from the culture) to perform, inside and outside the fiction, as women invented by men...

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...

The Audition: ‘The Killing of a Chinese Bookie’ (John Cassavetes, 1976)

What is a scene? Some books and manuals say that a scene is a portion of a film where the action has a spatio-temporal unity. Well, maybe that's what some people call a definition but, personally, I'm amazed that anybody can do anything with that. I like to think of a scene in terms of its internal movement: how it shifts parameters from one shot to the next; how it builds sections animated by different energies; how it introduces, combines and recombines its elements; how it brings something new to the atmosphere or transforms the atmosphere altogether...

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...

Playing with ‘Meshes of the Afternoon’

This January I taught – for the second year – a week of audiovisual criticism at EQZE. My program makes enormous sense to me (and hopefully to my students), but it does not follow pre-established paths – my group is studying curatorship, so I hope they'll appreciate the extravagant lines of my work of curation, here. We watch a number of audiovisual essays made by critics (me included), but also some fragments from film essays and found footage films, plus a couple of clips that are (plain and simple) amazing examples of montage...

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...

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...