25 de Abril Sempre, Fascismo Nunca Mais

A true militant cinema

"Today I think that militant films have the same defect as militant groups - they have the "mania of the All": each film is total, all-inclusive. A true militant cinema would be a cinema which militated as cinema, where one film would make you want to see a hundred others on the same subject.

[...]

So the unification always happens on the basis of a kind of amnesia and the desire to nourish this amnesia with beautiful images (the red flags of 1900.) This amnesia is a paradoxical but important phenomenon in the lives of Franco-Italian intellectuals: these cultures imbued with Marxism are cultures where the history of the workers' movement is not well known, because it is the parties who write history.

On the other hand, for people haunted by writing like the CAHIERS, it's clear that writing divides, while images unify (through common fear or recognition.) Today, in France, in cinema, you have to divide. And it can only be done by making contemporary films (and not moving evocations.) For example, it's quite possible to make a Communist trade-unionist a fictional character; it's what Godard does in COMMENT CA VA. It's quite possible to film the suicide of a young person; it's what Bresson does in THE DEVIL, PROBABLY. But these are contemporary films, which do not surrender to the simulacrum of memory."

- Serge Daney

Farbkreis (Zur Farbenlehre)

Image of the Day: Interior with Young Man Reading

Vilhelm Hammershøi, Interior with Young Man Reading, 1898

yes

"...I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes. "

Prostitute in Naples, Italy 1920

source

a revelation

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False Consciousness

Grievances / Social Systems (Part 2)

Matthew Flanagan's contribution to The Daily Notebook's year-end feature, featuring a picture from London's Day X3 protests (December 9, 2010) against the rises in tuition fees:

NEW: Film socialisme (Jean-Luc Godard, Switzerland)
OLD: History Lessons (Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet, 1972)

WHY:

The Democratic organisations, on which he could still have leaned in the Autumn, were in ruins. The City had betrayed the little man according to all the rules of the art, except the one that prescribes that the victim shall not notice anything.
— the banker Mummlius Spicer, from Brecht’s The Business Affairs of Mr. Julius Caesar.

To show, above all. To show the possible. That's all.
— JLG

Not so much a fantasy double bill as two films, and three filmmakers, that meant a lot to me this year. Looking back, it seems the year’s great films about the political and spatial decay of the present — Patrick Keiller’s Robinson in Ruins, Thom Andersen’s Get Out of the Car — could only be paired with films by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet. I’ve clung to these two for their clarity, their abstractions, and their hope.

Grievances / Social Systems (Part 1)

Just published: The Daily Notebook's 3rd Writers' Poll: Fantasy Double Features of 2010

My contribution:

NEW: The Social Network (David Fincher, USA)
OLD: The Night Cleaners (Part 1) (Marc Karlin & James Scott, 1975)

WHY: Two films that use the act of giving depositions as a means to explore the interactions of individual emotions and history: David Fincher's The Social Network (2010) uses deposition-based set pieces to showcase the personal grievances that help drive the creation of a new form of social interaction, a sort of computer-powered social efficiency engine. In The Nightcleaners (Part 1) (1975), the Berwick Street Film Collective uses interviews to show the human cost of daily underpaid drudgery and unfairness—the personal grievances that result from participation in an engine of grand economic efficiency.

Image of the Day: The Smoker (1891)

Paul Cézanne, The Smoker, 1891

2010: A Year in Cinema

Films seen for the first time in 2010, or revisited and reconsidered, in rough order of preference:

Late Autumn (Yasujiro Ozu, 1960)
The River (Jean Renoir, 1951)
Toni (Jean Renoir, 1935)
Early Summer (Yasujiro Ozu, 1951)
A Day in the Country (Jean Renoir, 1936)
The Social Network (David Fincher, 2010)
Outer Space (Peter Tscherkassky, 1999)
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (F.W. Murnau, 1927)
The Naked Prey (Cornel Wilde, 1966)
L'avventura (Michelangelo Antonio, 1960)
Boudu Saved From Drowning (Jean Renoir, 1932)
Zoolander (Ben Stiller, 2001)
Heat (Michael Mann, 1995)
Little Boy Male, Little Girl Female (Pedro Costa, 2005)
I Can Feel the Sea Falling Over My Head (Matthew Swiezynski & Diane Granahan, 2010)
The Nightcleaners (Part 1) (Berwick Street Film Collective, 1975)
Ici et ailleurs (Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Gorin, Anne Miéville, 1976)
Sayat Nova (Sergei Parajanov, 1968)
Role Models (David Wain, 2008)
War Photographer (Christian Frei, 2001)
Exit Through the Gift Shop (Banksy, 2010)
Four Lions (Chris Morris, 2010)
The Long Day Closes (Terence Davies, 1992)
Runaway (Kanye West, 2010)
It Is Something Invisible (Matthew Swiezynski, 2010)
Where The Wild Things Are (Spike Jonze, 2009)
I Am Love (Luca Guadagnino, 2009)
Party Girl (Nicholas Ray, 1958)
Rambo: First Blood (Ted Kotcheff, 1982)
Black Knight (Gil Junger, 2001)
Treeless Mountain (So Yong Kim, 2008)
Catfish (Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, 2010)
The Meaning of Life (Don Hertzfeldt, 2005)
Framed (Andy DeEmmony, 2009)
The Box (Richard Kelly, 2009)
The Most Dangerous Game (Irving Pichel and Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1932)
City of Life and Death (Lu Chuan, 2009)
L'auberge espagnole (Cédric Klapisch, 2002)