Eric Rohmer, one of the French New Wave film directors, is the focus of a new book by Antoine de Baecque titled Eric Rohmer: A Biography Baecque visited NYU Tisch Cinema Studies department yesterday evening to discuss the book in which he explores how Rohmer's life influenced his films. I found out that Eric Rohmer was beholden to his mother and didn't want her to know that he was a filmmaker since film, and this was a surprise to me too even though I've heard it before, get this, film at one point in the 1960s was considered a decadence.
Of course this was before iPhones. In fact, Rohmer went as far as to change his name so that his mother did find out he was a filmmaker. That's right his real name is not Eric Rohmer. Also Baecque noted that in Rohmer's films there is a struggle against temptation, a pull and tag that is reflective of Rohmer’s Catholic upbringing. Rohmer's films are saturated with biographical details and this personal essay style film shows Rohmer adhering to the mantra of that time that prophesied that the camera should be used as a writer uses a pen to express thought. I am a big fan of the filmmakers of the French New Wave and I can only hope to approach aesthetics while creating a style for my upcoming feature as they did in their films.
The playful and experimentally techniques of the French New Wave are very inspiring. This video captures some of the cinematic specificities of that time.
In their book Francois Truffaut(1998) Diana Holmes and Robert Ingram describe Truffaut’s deliberate playful use of the camera. In this scene where the three lovers race across a bridge, they observe that the spectator is made to participate in the race when the camera, “focuses solely on Catherine’s face and ‘runs’ alongside her in a jerky, blurring motion ...” (Holmes & Ingram, 1998, p. 69). Truffaut, Holmes and Ingram note, treats the camera itself as “poetic text” as he uses, "the New Wave techniques of mobile camera, unexpected point-of-view shots, freeze frames, fast editing with a variety of transitional devices,” (p. 68). In Jules et Jim Truffaut captures the essence of the French New Wave aesthetic in which the narrative dictates the form instead of just relaying on a classical narrative structure.
I recently saw "The Annihilation of Fish" a film by Charles Burnett at MOMA and it was refreshing to see a film about an elderly couple that had so much life. Burnett is a Neorealist whose oeuvre is one of empathy and compassion. Bravo Mr. Burnett and may you finally get the attention you deserve.
TOUSSAINT L'OUVERTURE became my secret lover at the age of 8 i entertained him in my bedroom widda flashlight under my covers way inta the night/we discussed strategies
For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When The Rainbow is Enuf Ntozake Shange
I found Tyler Perry's experimental approach to "For Colored Girls" refreshing, and after reading the play I think he's created an accurate and wonderful adaptation. Although confusing at first, the way he positions Jo's (Janet Jackson) wealth as modern in comparison to some of the other ladies poverty as 1970ish is definitely a musing on the disparity between the haves and the have nots. Although some of the acting is a bit lukewarm, I really enjoyed the film. Did you know that Tyler Perry's films have generated over a half a billion dollars? As a friend of mine said when chatting about Tyler Perry's work, "I'm not mad at his hustle." Trailer
In the last episode of "Fringe" Olivia Dunham was left in a despondent state as she finally discovers that Peter Bishop is from a parallel universe. Could it be that the catastrophe the FBI’s “Fringe Division” works so hard to halt (two universes colliding) was initiated by Walter Bishop in order to save his son?
Fox's serial sci-fi drama, The Dollhouse, has, as it's resumed in the second season, a nice turn. It would seem with the shuffling of alliances for key characters, addition of first season finale back-stories for "weak" characters, and the removal of uncharismatic characters, the producers have managed to give the show a nice kick of with a little attitude adjustment and a modest face-lift.For those who haven't followed the show or been put off by its galm-bam image in the first season, The Dollhouse is an eponymous "secret" lair who recruit delinquent young men and women who, to avoid prison or court mandates, elect to spend their sentances by freely giving up their memories and personalities for a contractual period of time. Their bodies are then given engineered personalites and memories whose purpose is to fulfill the fantasies of The Dollhouse's "clients." In short, they re-pay their debt to society by becoming glorified rubber girls (or guys ... but more on that a bit later).
When the show is good, it picks up threads of previous episodes, slowly uncovering further "secrets" of this clearing house of flesh and its role in high society, business and government. As such, it, like many other shows that have been released as of late like Fringe and FlashForward, satisfied the greedy appetite that a modern viewer has for watching programs that base their drawma on a plublic unaware of the puppet strings that bind it.
The Dollhouse's only opposition up until the second season was that of a maverick, lone-wolf FBI agen, Paul Ballard (Tahmoh Penikett). Driven by an almost psychotic compulsion (sometimes alluded to as love for the central doll, Echo (Eliza Dushku), he alienates his peers and potential love interests in search of this fabled institution. While a seemingly shrewd investigator, he seems more of fumbling crusader for no reason and no real threat to this megalithic conspiracy he tries to uncover. Meanwhile The Dollhouse, headed by shrewed and calculating woman, Adelle DeWitt (Olivia Wiliams) has problems of its own. It has, by allowing a doll-gone-rougue escape, jeapordized its standing amidsts other flesh clearing houses in its network.
Standing in relief is the no-nonsense employee Echo's bodyguard, Boyd Langton (Harry Lennix), who seems to ally himself with what's right, and the Topher Brink (Fran Kranz), the boy genius in charge of the machinery that swaps personalities into the dolls. On the sidelines are a smattering of other mainstay dolls (all named after Greek letters which should have significance as the series continues with plot twists or the writers get stumpped) and a meek doctor with scars on her face, Claire Saunders (Amy Acker) who, finally, deligtfully starts taking center stage as season two opens.
"Vows," the season opener, solidifies the role Paul Ballard as part of the "conspiracy." While he has, as the episode opens, been now "using" the dolls, and particularly Echo as a tool in his vigilante crime fighting bindge, he finally gives in to his "staunch" principles and becomes part of the organization. Frankly this was a good move on the writers' part since his character was too proud to be a mosquito pecking at the The Dollhouse, and too Bourne Supremicy in skill and combat to be this weakling agent in the FBI world. Now he is well placed as a character with all the conscience and bodyguard accumen that all the backing of his new employer's special interests lend to the potency of his characters. Not to mention, his background could provide for the writers the thread that finally begins to unravel the knot of having a diabolical organization be made our drama's hero.
Also, the doctor, Saunders, discovers in the cliff hanger that she is nothing more than a doll, and to that end, her sidelined figure in the teleplay has now seemed to share center-stage if not trump Echo. This is cause for a good "Bravo" to the writers because, in so far as the dolls had represented prostitution for both the male and female ones, depictions of "missions" was generally reserved only for the female bunch per common sterotype. As such, Saunders character who had been originally presented to the audience as a mutilated professional, has a score to settle; and, she will, presumably, do this without the sense, at least in the audience's mind, that she had been once an object of ... well, just another typical female object.
As the season goes into swing with such promise as, on the one hand, buttressing some of the show's original shortcomings, and, on the other hand, giving more "feminist" power to its meekest female role, there's promise that the close of season two might have us clamoring for more.
