Ulrich Thomsen (Christian Klingenfeldt), Henning Moritzen (Helge Klingenfeldt, father), Thomas Bo Larsen (Michael), Paprika Steen (Helene), Birthe Neumann (mother)
Deliver Us from father
DOGMA 95 is the new name of the Decalogue which subscribes to Thomas Vinterberg : "You do not poseras your camera, you will not use the music off, thou shalt not own image ... "As always with dogmas, the important thing is not to believe (no Roman Catholic seriously believes in papal infallibility), but force themselves to believe it, and engaging feet bound hand and to truths appearance. In this, the signatories of the charter still have a strong idea: the movie has to comply - with all the transgressions of use - to principles that are unlikely outside. These are not films that impose their form but the form that is imposed on the films.
Festen of Vinterberg very similar to Idiots, Lars von Trier of
, another Dogme film, except that Vinterberg is more virtuosic and its asserted more disturbing audacity. Result:
plays the game with a (fake) carelessness Aesthetics: cut and mounted in defiance of common sense, no matter how framed, not informed at all, but played admirably, proving if proof were needed that this negligence was not referred to the ugliness, but a new beauty. Beauty Democratic since renounces everything is about the technical mastery and advocates formal sloppy and amateurish. Dogmatic devil
Vinterberg
pretends to believe in the democratic art, he knows he must also know they do not know how. For the rest,
Festen
resembles a Nordic film as he had already turn away a lot and that the ideal model would
Fanny and Alexander ,
of Ingmar Bergman. A family above all suspicion, big bourgeois and Protestant, met to celebrate the patriarch. But everything goes wrong because one of the son decides to unpack the family secret: the father raped his children. It will take all the film for the guests decide to believe the son violated. Which shows that the question of dogma has practical applications. The truth is never a matter of belief, and the guests are not ready to challenge so easily patriarch who was the faith of their lives. It will take the son, symbolically named Christian , a healthy dose of tenacity and a complicated strategy to produce a new truth, aided by a caring staff, cooks and maids together - domesticity (it's a matter of class) who always another belief that the masters.
This use of the mansion kitchen as a place to comment about the action and hidden motor of the machine refers of course Mongolian cuisines
Hospital and its ghosts of
Stephane Bouquet
"Les Cahiers du cinema," June 1998
Dogma Hollywood
Marvel DO WE
to learn that Thomas Vinterberg
, born in Copenhagen in 1969, has grown into a community hippie with no common point with the bourgeois coterie crippled by taboos that demolishes in Festen ? Just backlash, the young Thomas became the first class and the youngest graduate of the Ecole nationale du cinema, one where Lars von Trier
himself had studied a decade ago.
If the family as a cell, a set of values, did not structure his imagination, yet it is a utopia family exposed in his first feature film. In Heroes, Thomas Bo Larsen and Ulrich Thomsen two marginal crazy, learn that one of them is the father of a 12 year old girl. Therefore, they are constantly saving the clutches of a violent stepfather for boarding their road trip to
Sweden. The bittersweet tale
is unconvincing, but the siblings
Festen
is found. concocted at a corner table with three other filmmakers, Dogma brings to every young Vinterberg stress productively. On March 20, 1995 at
Paris at the Odeon Theatre
, Lars von Trier Thomas Vinterberg and launch a package of red leaflets in the assembly celebrating the centenary of cinema. "is anti-bourgeois cinema itself became bourgeois , we read this manifesto anti-author recommends not signing films.
The other commandments of the "vow of chastity": natural scenery and lighting, live sound, camera-work, unity of place and time, additional music, rigging and prohibited firearms ... In addition, the Dogma filmmakers agree to refrain from personal taste and no longer claim artist! At the risk of an unexpected reconciliation, we must remember that Jean Renoir was in its infancy a similar reaction to the movement of the 1920s cinema pompously declaring themselves "artistic " " My classmates and I we hated that word artistic "," he recalls in an interview with Jacques Rivette
in
1966.
Caprice spoiled child? Remains Protestant education? Discourse on Method? Anyway, in terms of advertising, Dogma works, applications for labeling movies abound, even today, from around the world.
Festen, with its little family film turning sour, arises in such enticing the "purification" style effects. Yet, carried away by an unexpected success, Thomas Vinterberg
,
invited to Cannes in 1998 , deviated from the dogma by yielding to the sirens 'bourgeois' celebrity. He even forgot not to sign Festen ... Dogma will was for him a temporary sesame. Festen, by far his most successful film, it opens the doors of Hollywood for more compromise and a mawkish sentimentality also in Heroes with It's All About Love
(
2002). Even adapt in 2003, a scenario Lars von Trier , Dear Wendy, a parable about the use of firearms by American teenagers who did not, far from it The brilliance of the Elephant of Gus van Sant. Overthrow the bad father was not enough to enfant terrible Dogma become spoiled child. Charlotte Garson "Les Cahiers du Cinema"
Preview: Festen (1998) Thomas Vinterberg (Duration: 1 min 34 sec) http://7-art.blogspot.com
is the mid-50s we started hearing about a comedian named John Cassavetes . Coming from American Academy of Dramatic A rt
New York and marked by the method of Lee Strasberg , Man, Greek by his parents, but American in its own right, is right subsequently observed in a film of Martin Ritt , Edge of the City
(
The Man Who Shot fear ). Deserter and humanist, fiercely independent,
Cassavetes is already quite himself, but we do not know yet. Stage actor, television and film, charming and seductive as not, the future
Johnny Staccato
is designated to become a new James Dean or Marlon Brando , unless it is a successor of Humphrey Bogart , with whom he shares the small size and sharp intelligence.
Then came a bizarre event that disturbs the plans they had drawn for the future star. One evening in 1957, John Cassavetes
listening only to his impulses, which would later become legendary, decides to make a movie. He realized that but there will not. And better than that, he decided to finance the film public subscription. This will ultimately not really the case, but with the help of Maurice Mac Endres and Nico Papatakis , exiled in New York because of the war in Algeria, he will finish Shadows . As
Rouch,
Godard, Truffaut, Rivette in France, or Oshima Japan, Cassavetes brings a breath of air and life in film. Shadows as Breathless or later Love Crazy of Rivette, use methods of direct cinema to put them in the service of fiction. Yet both of them do not know each other and ignore the work that leads each of his side.
Shadows (1959)
But time is on
New Wave cinema and this moment is unique. Shadows defines, better than any other film, the axes of the method Cassavetes: complicity in the production and staging, refusal of submission to the technical relationship to the actor, explosive mixture Improvisation and writing, editing designed as a work in progress. In short, a film based on intuition and freedom controlled. A film where the human element triumph. Turn with Cassavetes for technicians like actors, requires availability at all times. Imagination is better than dry professionalism. The atmosphere is more important than the script and the actors are the princes of the film, true touchstones of the staging. From all this Shadows is completely impregnated and immediately present the quintessence of cinema
Cassavetes.
must stress one important point about this first movie is about him doubly risky for the time. First, there is interracial love between a white and a black girl, but views from the perspective of the black community. Audacity of a story that does not simplify the many ambiguities and tensions between races, and remains deeply committed to an ideal of interbreeding.
Then the brother-sister relationships are handled with subtlety, delicacy and implicitly contain rare dimension if not incestuous, or at least close to love. Slope of incest that grazed Cassavetes borrow again, twenty-five years later for his penultimate film Love Streams. But in Shadows like Love Streams is less the sexual attraction that haunts the secret affinity Cassavetes, indefinable linking a brother and sister. Concern that the close, on behalf of the cinema, the great novels that experiment the brother-sister like Pierre or the ambiguities of Herman Melville or The Man Without qualities of Robert Musil . Anyway, Shadows, which we had not seen in France for thirty years, has kept its freshness as if the 1958 New York captured live, remained eternally present. Last element of Shadows : music. Why? Simply because the author and the performer is
Charles Mingus
which improvises along with Shafi Hadi his saxophone at the time, throughout the image is so Mingus body with Shadows that we end up not knowing if the music that accompanies the plans or the reverse. In one case as in the other, phrasing, tone, pulse, pace Cassavetes as
Mingus wonders. Again, kinship with jazz when he will resume his next film, Too Late Blues , not to mention TV series Johnny Staccato where he played the title role. that Cassavetes is an independent filmmaker does not prevent it from being noticed by Hollywood.
. Experience the second film will still be traumatic for
Cassavetes. Dispossessed of mounting Stanley Kramer
his producer, he left the studios to find his freedom.
After a period of mild depression, Cassavetes, whose energy is as astonishing as that of a Bergman or Renoir, undertakes Faces , probably his masterpiece. On all fronts, this film is torrential and unforgettable. Faces has never been distributed in France. Its output is an event in more ways than one. Imagine Pierrot le fou remained unpublished until now and you'll see the blow is the discovery of Faces . Yet this film, shown and awarded at Venice in 1968, nothing spectacular in appearance. It is after all nothing but little bourgeois spree, women and men are deceiving each other. So where does his power, his character at once awful and vital? Certainly, this camera gestures of that intoxication, for sure, this camera gesture, which literally invades the film with the flow of speech unstoppable. There are a lot of hysteria in Faces, but she is still human too human and especially filmed without voyeurism. We viewers are involved in the experience and projected into the eye of the cyclone.
Faces is still important because it is the first film Cassavetes where the idea of troop plays a predominant role. We see at work two favorite actors of the tribe, Seymour Cassel and Gena Rowlands
. While the first had appeared in a jazz drummer in
Too Late Blues while the second involved in A Child is Waiting , second role behind the stars, Judy Garland and Burt Lancaster . But this time they are one and the other, finally free to move, capable of shortcuts, instant pulse invisible in traditional Hollywood films. I will add a special mention to Lynn Carlin , one of the leading actresses, who for the purpose of the film, passed the state secretary to the actress. As for John Marley , the last member of the quartet basis, we find later in The Godfather a bloody horse head in the middle of her bed. Faces
gave Cassavetes a form of recognition and a new autonomy. With this film, made friends and wrist strength, without money or nearly so, with production methods unconnected with the industry, begins the best period of Cassavetes. It connects Husbands (1970 ) who contributed a few years ago to get him back on the front of the French scene.
A Woman Under the Influence (A Woman Under the Influence, 1974)
In 1973 it turns A Woman Under the Influence with Gena Rowlands again and Peter Falk he had already met for Husbands. As
Faces, A Woman Under the Influence is a great film about America and its daily average. It shows invisible characters in all of American cinema. But this time it's Ordinary Madness dominates.
Faces
featured the frustrations of a man and a woman who tore. A Woman Under the Influence shows instead how a couple is recovering. Rarely has a film been both documentary as well as modest. Moreover, the film is not limited to the couple, it brings the excess at the heart of the family. It mobilizes all the relationships and emotions that oscillate incessantly family love to alienation. This time, the footage that dominates and allows Cassavetes beautifully capture the scenes group. Three examples unforgettable: the main stage where spaghetti Mabel (Gena Rowlands ) is facing a twenty workers; the sequence that precedes the internment where the step-mother, husband, doctor, children come to form clusters of people literally intractable: the return of Mabel home. Three classic moments that have nothing yet bravura. On madness, Cassavetes never the slightest glance moralizing. He is content to record behavior and leaves us free to try or rather watching. The secret Cassavetes is to let the speak life into its excesses and outbursts. A Woman Under the Influence emerges treasures of love and most important!
Killing of a Chinese Bookie (The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, 1976) The next film, Killing of a Chinese Bookie ( 1976, first released in France under the title The Young Rascals ) belongs to a genre codified in the extreme, film noir. This could be surprising, from a filmmaker who seems to sulk the rules in force in Hollywood.
is already forgotten that Minnie and Moskowitz had all the appearance of a wacky comedy in the Capra. Cassavetes plays the game of the genre film but with its own weapons. Far from re The Big Sleep or
Asphalt Jungle, it imposed its rhythm. Killing of a Chinese Bookie is a thriller Twilight, where Cassavetes likes to shoot a Los Angeles almost desert in which killers roam ramshackle.
We must safe to say a word about the main character, Cosmo Vitelli
, played by Ben Gazzara in great shape, which is back in the clan six years after Cassavetes Husbands . Cosmo Vitelli owns a striptease box but it is also the custodian of a morality of the spectacle of Jean Renoir Cancan or of Vincente Minnelli directed
All
n would not have denied and which could be summarized in one sentence: "The show must go on." But Cosmo Vitelli is also the prototype of the self-made man trying desperately to maintain the financial independence of his small company without success. So it's a portrait of the filmmaker as a craftsman, guided by its desire for independence but watched by the money power. Cosmo sign an IOU to the Mafia and this signature is as irrefutable proof of his insanity. Opening Night (1977)
Before returning to Hollywood just to talk Mafia for Gloria , Cassavetes will have time to achieve of her most ambitious Opening Night, we may consider his poetic art. The late release of this film is an event because it is simply one of the most important works of its author. First, because it shows a side of the filmmaker, theater, very important at the beginning and the end of his career. While Opening Night is not really a documentary on the theatrical work of Cassavetes , but in any case it allows to realize the importance he provided closely with cinema. Opening Night is the story of Myrtle Gordon (Gena Rowlands ), the narrative of a crucial period in the life of a theater actress in a crisis of identity, in confusion between life and the scene. It is also the story of a troupe with its director (Ben Gazzara
), actors (including John Cassavetes
), its author, its director of theater, stagehands, her dresser ... It's still a piece of history, The Second Woman , its repetition and its metamorphoses. Because of course in Cassavetes, the text is never sacred and life seeps through all sides of the stage for future change subtly or wildly theater. Opening Night is finally the second installment of a trilogy about the hysteria that begins with A Woman Under the Influence
and ending with
and Love Streams in which the presence of Gena Rowlands is exceptional. Here, the actress is extraordinary, playing behavioral disorders, mood changes, affective disorders and alcoholic hallucinations, nervous expenditure, with great presence Physical exceptional charge of his person literally to disgorge to the truth of the character. This gives the densest and most European films of Cassavetes, a tragi-comedy where the breath of indescribable drift away everything in its path. These five films - Shadows, Faces, A Woman Under the Influence, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, Opening Night - are shown together by the strongest of the work of Cassavetes. They are simple and direct as moments of our lives captured by a camera and friendly stalker at a time. Their discovery or rediscovery, will finally give John Cassavetes
its proper place, one of the first in modern cinema.
Thierry Jousse
------------------------- -------
VOSTF Preview: " Cinema, In Our Time - John Cassavetes "
(Time : 2 min)
Director André S. Labarthe / Authors: Andre S. Labarthe, Janine Bazin Producers: ARTE FRANCE, AMIP, INA
" For a long time Cassavetes is best known as an actor ( The Dirty Dozen
,
A blank , Rosemary's Baby ...), but obviously as a writer of films he appears here in the dawn of his career, even before he became the darling of movie buffs. Back in the 60s ... In 1965
, we are at home in Hollywood. It is surrounded by his staff. His garage was transformed into the editing room. Its editors are students at the UCLA
... " John Cassavetes 1929-1989
Filmography as Director: - Big Trouble (1986)
- Love Streams (1984) - Gloria (1980) -
Opening Night
(1977) - The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976) - A Woman Under the Influence (1974) - Minnie and Moskowitz (1971)
Past the 60 th Cannes Film Festival - Palme d'Or: 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days Cristian Mungiu - Grand Prize: The Mourning Forest by Naomi Kawase
- 60th Anniversary Prize: Gus Van Sant for Paranoid Park
- Best Screenplay: Fatih Akin for
Across - Award for Best Director: Julian Schnabel for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly - Best Actress: Jeon Do-Yeon in Secret Sunshine Lee Chang-Dong - Best Actor: Konstantin Lavronenko in The Banishment ( Izgnanie ) Andrei Zvyagintsev
- Jury Prize ex-aequo:
Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud and Silent Light by Carlos Reygadas - Golden Camera: Meduzot ( Jellyfish) by Etgar Keret and Shira Geffen
(special mention to
Control Anton Corbijn ) - Palme d'Or for short films : See
Cast: Jonathan Pryce ( Lowry said Samuel "Sam"), Robert De Niro
(Archibald Tuttle said "Harry"), Katherine Helmond (Mrs. Ida Lowry), Ian Holm
(Mr Kurtzmann), Bob Hoskins
(Spoor), Michael Palin (Mr. Warren), Peter Vaughan (Mr Helpmann). .. Info Movie:
A fly and an administrative error ... (Central Services): Archibald Tuttle / Archibald Buttle
A poster which says: Help the Ministry of Information help you ( Help the ministry of information to help you ). A Statue: The "shall make you free (The truth will set you free ). A Poster "Happiness > We're all in it together . Two aftershocks between Jonathan Pryce (Lowry said Samuel "Sam") and Robert De Niro
(Tuttle said Archibald "Harry"): "We're all in this together" and "We're all in it together "( We're all up to the neck ). Brazil: the song
true leitmotif of the film by Terry Gilliam, Brazil the song was sung In the late 30s by the popular Latin singer Arry Barroso. Indeed : Brazil music by Ary Barroso / SK Russell Français lyrics by / (1939 by Irmaos Vitale, Rio de Janiero, Brazil)
EXCERPT: "Brazil, Where Hearts Were entertained in june. We Stood Beneath That amber moon. And clung together, Then tomorrow WAS another day. The morning found me miles away. Still With a Million Things To Say. And Now, When twilight beams the sky Above ... "
TRANSLATION: " Brazil, where hearts were entertained in June We stood under the moon of amber. And we held on, so tomorrow was another day. Morning found me a thousand leagues away. With still a million things to say. When twilight shines in the sky above ... "
Allociné Information: a world of Kafka With his administration flooded to the absurd, Brazil is overwhelmingly think the work of Czech writer Franz Kafka in particular The Metamorphosis
. The sprawling city, its population and bustling spied remember it, 1984, the novel George Orwell's visionary . The inspiration for Gilliam By his own admission, Terry Gilliam was inspired by the coastal town of Port Talbot to create the world Brazil, a city whose factories have led gray To a imagine a tribute which the only escape would be the song
Brazil. A cameo by Terry Gilliam Terry Gilliam appears furtively in his film, cigarette smoker who crosses the path of Sam Lowry in turn Shang-ri La . A tribute to "Battleship Potemkin" The sequence End Brazil contains a tribute to Potemkin and its famous scene of the pram rolling down the stairs. This time, a pram down the stairs after the boy's mother was killed during the assault resulting from the release of Sam Lowry
. 2 Extracts film music to listen to the playlist 7 Art Cinema ...
ASSEMBLY: 
Festen is a film much more successful than idiots. Success, moreover, is perhaps not the word since the whole film Vinterberg 
June 1998 
James Dean or Marlon Brando 
Faces (1968) 
- Special Price Jury: 
Union Prize for composers of film music (UCMF) 
(Mr Helpmann). .. 
Brazil (1985) Terry Gilliam