July 2012
A film recommendation
26 07, 12
When students ask me for suggestions about recent films that might be worth watching, analyzing, and learning from, I often reply by saying that they should turn their attention away from cinema and direct their young curious minds to something else: television (see my previous post about this topic).
However, there is one film that I like to recommend to everyone who’s looking to experience an original cinematic approach to storytelling. I’m talking about Mr. Nobody (2009), one of the most fascinating, intelligent, and underestimated films of the previous decade (1). Poorly marketed in Europe and ignored by every distributor in the U.S., this spectacular $47 million dollar Belgian-French-German-Canadian co-production in English language is a rich and complex tale of parallel narratives that springs from the mind of the main character, Mr. Nemo Nobody (Jared Leto), a 118-year-old man who recounts the story of his life in form of three possible existences that he might have lived.
As writer-director Jaco van Dormael (Toto the Hero and The Eighth Day) explained, the starting point for this project was a 12-minute short he made in 1982 (È pericoloso sporgersi). “A kid runs behind a train with two possible choices: to go with his mother or with his father. From there we follow two possible futures. I started one version based on the fact that a woman jumps or doesn't jump on a train. Then Sliding Doors by Peter Howitt came out, followed by Run Lola Run by Tom Tykwer. I had to find something else. And that's when I realized that the story I was trying to tell was not binary, that I was above all interested by the multiplicity and complexity of choices. With this screenplay I wanted to make the viewer feel the abyss that is the infinity of possibilities. Beyond this, I wanted to find a different way of telling a story.” (2)
One could argue that similar experiments in parallel narratives had been conducted prior to (and even more successfully than) the aforementioned Sliding Doors and Run Lola Run. In 1948, for example, Preston Sturges had brought to the screen Unfaithfully Yours, a sophisticated comedy of hypothetical narratives based on a screenplay he had been working on since the early 1930s (see my analysis of the film in this book); and in 1993 Alain Resnais turned Alan Ayckbourn’s epic "what if" play(s) Intimate Exchanges into two films (Smoking/No Smoking), which are the results of the possible permutations that originate from the protagonists' choices.
Broadly speaking, already in the 1950s and 1960s, the literary experiments of Alain-Robbe Grillet and the French Nouveau Roman, as well as the works of the Oulipo group (see Raymond Queneau and his Exercises de Style) seemed to have exhausted the possibilities of parallel storytelling and hypothetical narratives. However, not only the narrative structure devised by Jaco van Dormael is infinitely more complex and better laid out than most of the aforementioned works, but he also succeeds where many of his predecessors have failed, since the final result is not a a self-conscious exercise in meta-narrative, but it’s primarily a fascinating and highly entertaining film that grabs the viewer’s attentions from its opening montage of possible stories to the final narrative twist(s) that unveil the mystery behind Nemo’s recollections.
(1) The film is now available on Amazon on DVD and Blu-Ray.
(2) Errera, Isabelle (Documentalist) (August 2009). "Mr. Nobody, a film by Jaco Van Dormael". Pan-Européenne (PDF). Unifrance. Retrieved June 7, 2012, pp. 5-6
However, there is one film that I like to recommend to everyone who’s looking to experience an original cinematic approach to storytelling. I’m talking about Mr. Nobody (2009), one of the most fascinating, intelligent, and underestimated films of the previous decade (1). Poorly marketed in Europe and ignored by every distributor in the U.S., this spectacular $47 million dollar Belgian-French-German-Canadian co-production in English language is a rich and complex tale of parallel narratives that springs from the mind of the main character, Mr. Nemo Nobody (Jared Leto), a 118-year-old man who recounts the story of his life in form of three possible existences that he might have lived.
One could argue that similar experiments in parallel narratives had been conducted prior to (and even more successfully than) the aforementioned Sliding Doors and Run Lola Run. In 1948, for example, Preston Sturges had brought to the screen Unfaithfully Yours, a sophisticated comedy of hypothetical narratives based on a screenplay he had been working on since the early 1930s (see my analysis of the film in this book); and in 1993 Alain Resnais turned Alan Ayckbourn’s epic "what if" play(s) Intimate Exchanges into two films (Smoking/No Smoking), which are the results of the possible permutations that originate from the protagonists' choices.
Broadly speaking, already in the 1950s and 1960s, the literary experiments of Alain-Robbe Grillet and the French Nouveau Roman, as well as the works of the Oulipo group (see Raymond Queneau and his Exercises de Style) seemed to have exhausted the possibilities of parallel storytelling and hypothetical narratives. However, not only the narrative structure devised by Jaco van Dormael is infinitely more complex and better laid out than most of the aforementioned works, but he also succeeds where many of his predecessors have failed, since the final result is not a a self-conscious exercise in meta-narrative, but it’s primarily a fascinating and highly entertaining film that grabs the viewer’s attentions from its opening montage of possible stories to the final narrative twist(s) that unveil the mystery behind Nemo’s recollections.
(1) The film is now available on Amazon on DVD and Blu-Ray.
(2) Errera, Isabelle (Documentalist) (August 2009). "Mr. Nobody, a film by Jaco Van Dormael". Pan-Européenne (PDF). Unifrance. Retrieved June 7, 2012, pp. 5-6
Comments
American Film Renaissance: Television
23 07, 12
Then David Lynch came forward, with a very simple idea: why not exploiting the possibilities offered by the medium (serialization) in order to create an organic, lengthy film, structured in chapters? After all the idea had proved to be successful long before television was even conceived, when writers of the caliber of Charles Dickens, Henry James, Gustave Flaubert, Leo Tolstoy, or Fyodor Dostoevsky had published their complex and organic works in installments for newspapers and periodicals. Cinema too had known a fortunate season of serials in the silent period. Twin Peaks (created by David Lynch and David Frost) was an immediate success, but the execution proved to be less fascinating than the original idea, as it became clear that the undefined and obscure storylines that had captivated the audience in the first episodes remained mysterious to the shows’ creators themselves, who had no clue what to make of the possible stories that Lynch had barely drafted.
True, differently from the classic literary serials, some of these productions tend to drop their creators after 1 or 2 seasons, quickly turning from gold to dust during the summer hiatus--I think of a brilliant dramedy such as Brothers and Sisters which, by the end of the third season, had become the equivalent of an 18th century feuilleton). As a consequence, some seasons turn out better than others (see the wonderful second season of Diablo Cody’s United States of Tara or the first one of Lie To Me, a fascinating adaptation of Paul Ekman’s scientific studies on facial expressions into a series of moral tales on deception); some mediocre shows are kept alive for 3 or 4 seasons, while far more promising works are cancelled mid-season or even just after a couple of episodes, depending on the audience’s reception (I would trade the entire Lost saga to find out what Lone Star could have been).
A Kiss by Alfred Hitchcock
15 07, 12
Ivor Novello and June Tripp in a sequence from Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927). The film has been recently restored by BFI and it should be available in Blu-Ray by the end of the year. Scroll down to view the trailer of the restored version.
Trailer for the new release of The Lodger, restored by the British Film Institute
Trailer for the new release of The Lodger, restored by the British Film Institute
Bordwell on Andrew Sarris
09 07, 12
From David Bordwell’s blog Observations on Film Art
The death of Andrew Sarris last week isn’t just a saddening moment for those of us who admire exhilarating film criticism. It also reminds us how much American culture can owe to a single person.
Everyone who writes about Sarris writes about how they came to know his work. It was that powerful, and if it hit you young, you were never the same. (You never hear about the sixty-year-old who suddenly becomes an auteurist.) The period of his greatest impact was the 1960s-1970s when, to borrow a phrase from Dave Kehr, movies mattered. But his influence has lingered, powerfully, a lot longer.
I think that the best way to honor Sarris is to take his ideas–not just his opinions, but his ideas–seriously, so that’s what I’ve tried to do in this tribute. First, though, some comments that are obligatory in any discussion of Sarris.
READ MORE...
The death of Andrew Sarris last week isn’t just a saddening moment for those of us who admire exhilarating film criticism. It also reminds us how much American culture can owe to a single person.
Everyone who writes about Sarris writes about how they came to know his work. It was that powerful, and if it hit you young, you were never the same. (You never hear about the sixty-year-old who suddenly becomes an auteurist.) The period of his greatest impact was the 1960s-1970s when, to borrow a phrase from Dave Kehr, movies mattered. But his influence has lingered, powerfully, a lot longer.
I think that the best way to honor Sarris is to take his ideas–not just his opinions, but his ideas–seriously, so that’s what I’ve tried to do in this tribute. First, though, some comments that are obligatory in any discussion of Sarris.
READ MORE...
Saul Bass
06 07, 12
by Cinefamily.org
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“Saul Bass wasn’t just an artist who contributed to the first several minutes of some of the greatest movies in history — in my opinion his body of work qualifies him as one of the best filmmakers of one of this, or any other time.“
Steven Spielberg
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