บันทึก: ไปอินเดียหนึ่งเดือน

That religion which allows one to touch a foul animal but not a man is not a religion but a madness.
That religion which says one class may not gain knowledge, may not acquire wealth, may not take up arms, is not a religion but a mockery of a man's life.
That religion which teaches that the unlearned should remain unlearned, that the poor should remain poor, is not a religion but a punishment.
Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, Sources of Indian Tradition

14 ตุลาคม 1956 ดร. Ambedkar ซึ่งเป็นผู้นำทางความคิดของชนชั้นจัณฑาล (Dalit / The Untouchable) ในอินเดีย ได้ประกาศให้จัณฑาลในอินเดียหนีจากการกดขี่ของระบบวรรณะฮินดู ด้วยการหันไปนับถือศาสนาพุทธ ปรากฏว่ามีผู้ที่เปลี่ยนศาสนาพร้อมกันในครั้งนั้นกว่า 500,000 คน ในปัจจุบันผู้ที่นับถือศาสนาพุทธในอินเดีย 92% หรือกว่า 3 ล้านคน เป็นผลสืบเนื่องมาจากการเปลี่ยนศาสนาครั้งใหญ่ครั้งนั้น

[Andy Warhol] never directed anything... I cast it ["San Diego Surf" (1968)], I wrote it, I produced it. I did everything. Why don't they attribute it to Lady Gaga? She's much more famous than Andy.
Paul Morrissey, A Warhol Film Surfaces, but Is It His?, January 18, 2013

I do wonder if some of the sentiments alternately expressed about the film ["Zero Dark Thirty" ] might be more appropriately directed at those who instituted and ordered these US policies, as opposed to a motion picture that brings the story to the screen. Those of us who work in the arts know that depiction is not endorsement. If it was, no artist would be able to paint inhumane practices, no author could write about them, and no film-maker could delve into the thorny subjects of our time.
... This is an important principle to stand up for, and it bears repeating. For confusing depiction with endorsement is the first step toward chilling any American artist's ability and right to shine a light on dark deeds, especially when those deeds are cloaked in layers of secrecy and government obfuscation. Indeed, I'm very proud to be part of a Hollywood community that has made searing war films part of its cinematic tradition. Clearly, none of those films would have been possible if directors from other eras had shied away from depicting the harsh realities of combat.
Kathryn Bigelow, Kathryn Bigelow on Zero Dark Thirty: 'It's illogical to ignore torture', 16 January 2013

Mark  Boal and  Kathryn  Bigelow have offered two main responses to the criticism they have received. One is that as dramatists compressing a complex history into a cinematic narrative, they must be granted a degree of artistic licence. That is unarguable, of course, and yet the film-makers cannot, on the one hand, claim authenticity as journalists while, on the other, citing art as an excuse for shoddy reporting about a subject as important as whether torture had a vital part in the search for Bin Laden, and therefore might be, for some, defensible as public policy.
Steve Coll, Kathryn Bigelow on Zero Dark Thirty: 'It's illogical to ignore torture', 16 January 2013

I cannot vote for a film ["Zero Dark Thirty" ] that makes heroes of Americans who commit the crime of torture... [It] promotes the acceptance of the crime of torture, as a legitimate weapon in America's so-called War on Terror.
David Clennon, Academy member calls for Oscars boycott of Zero Dark Thirty, 14 January 2013

I already did my coming out about a thousand years ago, back in the stone age. In those very quaint days when a fragile young girl would open up to trusted friends and family, coworkers and then gradually, proudly, to everyone who knew her. To everyone she actually met.
... If you had been a public figure by the time you were a toddler, if you had had to fight for a life that felt real, and honest, and normal against all odds, then you too might value privacy above all else... Privacy. Some day in the future people will look back and remember how beautiful it once was.
Jodie Foster, Jodie Foster's Golden Globe acceptance speech, 14 January 2013

American Slavery Was Not A Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western. It Was A Holocaust. My Ancestors Are Slaves. Stolen From Africa. I Will Honor Them.
Spike Lee, Spike Lee Won't See 'Django Unchained,'..., December 23, 2012

So a couple days later I got this script called "Juno" and since I saw the name Diablo Cody I thought, "Well, this must be the 12-year-old girl." Who else would have a name like that, right? And I read it and thought, "Well this is pretty good for a 12-year-old girl trying to imitate 'Ghost World.' " So I told my producer, who went on to do it, "This is a retarded version of 'Ghost World.' I can't do it. I can't stomach it. Sorry."
... The studio wanted to mess with ["Bad Santa" ] and make it more mainstream and pour some fake sentiment on it for the people that stumble around the mall. Go to Target some day and look at who your target audience is. Look at the people who are out there going to films and you realize you are totally fucked, you don't want to do anything these people like. But that director's cut is exactly the script I got. I wanted to protect the script. I like writers a lot. It was a lot darker.
Terry Zwigoff, Terry Zwigoff Talks Battling Over 'Bad Santa,..., December 20, 2012

One time in Cannes, I arrived with Billy Wilder, and the woman who was running it was flustered and said 'I hope you don't mind waiting' and Billy Wilder said 'Do I mind waiting? I've spent my life waiting, waiting for the actors to read the script, waiting for the money, waiting for the sun to go in, waiting for the sun to go out, I did two movies with Marilyn Monroe!' And I asked him 'Did you mind waiting for Marilyn?' and he said 'No, I always wanted to read War and Peace.' In 50 years of filmmaking do you know how long the camera was running? Maybe two weeks. So did it make me happy? No…I started out making very simple documentaries, then bigger ones, then I started to dramatize them, and then I found myself actually trapped in this awful profession.
John Boorman, John Boorman Talks Almost Making 'Lord Of The Rings,'..., December 17, 2012

I feel funny explaining my approach to filmmaking. Everybody's description of it is different. The only way I know how to make a film is the way I know how, you know? I just know I don't want the actors to ever be fake, I don't want them to be full of shit. I want them to be real and I want them to feel alive. It has to feel alive. And sometimes once they keep doing it over and over again a spark happens. I don't call cut and I run a 20 minute film mag until it's out. I don't like hair and makeup people coming in. I don't like lighting adjustments. I don't like resetting, you just keep going until there's life.
... It may have been easier financially before the economic downturn [in 2008]. It was certainly easier to get a movie set up. But because of my own life it was not easier for me to be the best storyteller I could be. I think the difficulty and challenges that the last few years have presented to everybody economically and my own personal challenges have turned out to make me a more attentive storyteller and so that's a good thing. I know that if you can go into a zone where you feel like you're doing good storytelling, for me it always feels good to be in that zone. To me my first few films were harrowing experiences because you're terrified the whole time that you're going to fuck it up. You don't know what you're doing. There's still always that fear but now there's a more warm confidence that you're in a direction that is clear.
David O. Russell, The Playlist Interview, December 11, 2012

The essential difference between modernism and postmodernism is that for the former narrative is a problem, whereas for the latter narrative is a joke. The idea of responding unironically to the activities of fictional individuals has now been exposed as a hoax, and it is hardly surprising that the Coen brothers, Wes Anderson, Michael Haneke and Jim Jarmusch enjoy widespread acclaim from commentators of the 'hip' variety. In their different ways, these directors portray 'cool' detachment as an ideal we should all aspire to, expressing superiority towards not only their characters but also those viewers who fail to comprehend that both the characters and those narrative structures that make them available to us are nothing more than empty signifiers.
... Artists who refuse to follow this trend, whose work is notable for its absence of postmodern posturing, have inevitably paid the price critically and commercially. Why else have Abel Ferrara's last eight films received only marginal exposure in the US and so far failed to find any kind of UK distribution, even on DVD?
Brad Stevens, Playing It Cool , Sight & Sound, January 2013

I always say that film is closest to music, not literature or theatre. For me, if a film hasn't the feeling of music, it's not successful. A film lives by its rhythms; like music, it's a bit like an arrow passing through time. It begins its journey at a particular moment and ends at another, and between those two points is a route which has to be carefully directed. That structure is rhythmic; if we don't find the right rhythm to tell a story, it could be the best story in the world, but it won't work.
... When you write something, you have to protect your characters, be their advocate; actors should do that too. It's stupid for actors simply to criticise the character they're playing. A character must be interesting, but a total idiot or a shit isn't interesting. So I've always tried to show compassion for the people in my films, and give them some aspect that's fastinating or, at the very least, amusing. Shakespeare's Richard III may be a monster, but he's a very intelligent monster. A virtuoso monster!
... It's like when a character's telling a lie; in a mediocre film you can tell at once that they're lying. When you have someone lying, you must hide it, otherwise it's just not worth the bother of having them lie. This relates to why I don't like discussing with an actor the character they're playing. If you do that, you may reach opinions about the character, and the risk is that the actor consequently doesn't play the character but plays their opinion of the character - as a good guy, or as a shit. That's a common trap.
Michael Haneke, The Interview, Sight & Sound, December 2012

I started making films because certain films bothered me and I thought I could do better, and I don't know if I can. I was interested in things related to real life. I was against metaphorical films because the abuse of metaphor usually comes from people who think themselves very intelligent. There are others who play with metaphor with a sense of humour and I like that much more. Metaphor is getting old and it is not us [filmmakers] but the viewers who will build the new metaphors. They bring up things you never thought of. This is the act of communication, without which there is no sense in making films.
... Something that stayed with me after ["The Death of Mr.Lazarescu" ] was an English-language review in which somebody wrote that cinema has been hijacked by story. I find this to be true, especially in Romania, where literature is regarded as the queen of the arts. It's something I don't believe in. So my criteria were to stay inside cinema and get rid of all explanatory narratives, and while editing to think music and cinema.
Cristi Puiu, Murder In Mind, Sight & Sound, December 2012

I'm an artist like a diamond, a unit with many facets. I practise different arts from a body whose spine is poetry.
... My films, despite being nearly half a century old, are seen by an audience of young idealists, world-weary of the enslavement forced upon them since birth. My ideal audience is on the young side, eager to mutate and move to a higher level of consciousness. I want my images to turn the viewer's brain into what it is: a flying carpet.
... I wanted to turn the film [unfinished "Dune" ] into a prophet: an artistic medium to initiate the mutation of humans. Not a political revolution, but a poetic re-evolution! I wanted to create a movie-Messiah, as deep as a Gospel, or Sutra. The producers got scared because I proposed a script for a film that should last 16 hours.
... My films do not change in meaning for me, because I never give them meaning. They are not political or religious pamphlets, they are art. And art is like God: more unthinkable than anything you can say. My films are like clouds: their meaning keeps changing every minute.
... Fando and Lis (1967), in one presentation at the Acapulco Film Festival, broke all moulds, pulling rusty brains out of their burrows to dimensions they had never imagined. They were attacked, insulted, wounded by the film's artificial decency. They wanted to lynch me, then throw me out of the country and finally threatened to kill me. I was afraid, yes, but I was not a coward, I continued and continued.
... With Santa Sangre I have never received a penny for my copyright. With The Holy Mountain, [my producer] escaped with $300,000, fleeing to Israel and leaving me in danger of not completing my film. To achieve the filming of El Topo, I had to go to a desert, hiding from unions, with a small number of technicians.
Alejandro Jodorowsky, Alejandro Jodorowsky: "pulling rusty brains out of burrows to dimensions they never imagined", for nearly half a century , 2 November 2012

Most viewers can distinguish genuinely complex and weighty works from works that are flat and devoid of substance - even if they aren't able to unravel the complexity. Though many critics are still trying to convince themselves that The Master must have more to it than they can seem to articulate, much of the audience is expressing a well justified pushback in proclaiming that the Emperor has no clothes here.
... Everyone who has tried to analyze the complexity in The Master has come across as a pretentious college sophomore who finds deep artistic meaning in the most pedantic of works.
Comment by Justin Levine, The Master: What does it all mean?, October 1, 2012

I think I’m a very American director, but I probably should have been making movies somewhere around 1976. I never left the mainstream of American movies, the American mainstream left me. Really what I’m doing is an attempt to continue the best work of the people I adore, Francis Coppola and Scorsese  and  Robert Altman and Stanley Kubrick and those amazing directors whose work I grew up with and loved.  Because really American film was that! An American commitment to narrative with an interest in the creation of atmosphere that came probably from Japan or Asian cinema, with a commitment to thematic depth that comes from Europe... We lost that...
... [T]here is tremendously interesting cinema being made that is very small, and there are very huge movies which have visually astounding material in them, but you know Truffaut said that great cinema was part truth, part spectacle, so what's really missing is that. It's what United Artists would have made in 1978 or something.
... Like "Raging Bull" could not be a low-budget movie, it just couldn't, there's a certain scale that's involved in making it, and no one would make "Raging Bull" today. The last example of the industry doing this middle movie that I'm talking about, to me would be Michael Mann's film "The Insider" which I really like. That has scale and also a bit of truth it. What I don't see as part of the discourse is a discussion on the economic forces that have forced out the middle. There is some discussion, some awareness, but not enough, because to me that is the central crisis of American movies: the disappearing middle of the mainstream.
... My taste, I mean if I had to pick one movie, which I would  never want to do, I keep thinking about "La Strada," because there’s such a total commitment to those people and the movie never puts itself above any of the people in it. It’s a very Franciscan approach to the drama, and to me that’s very beautiful. 
... [Author] George Eliot said "the purpose of art is to extend our sympathies" which I think is very beautiful. Kubrick wished all movies were “more daring and more sincere.” A lot of directors today are focusing on what is daring, but are not really focused on what is sincere.
James Gray, Interview: James Gray Talks Working With Marion Cotillard, Joaquin Phoenix & The Central Crisis Of American Cinema , December 12, 2012

I had to grow up in the West [Germany] to make a picture of the East [Germany], and I want you [East Germans] to go to the West and make pictures there... They say if we don't have one identity, we're schizoid. But I think when you feel schizoid, it's a good time for art.
Christian Petzold, Summoning Halcyon Days of Failed Ideals, December 7, 2012

We all intellectually 'know' the brutality and inhumanity of slavery, but after you do the research it's no longer intellectual any more, no longer just historical record – you feel it in your bones. It makes you angry, and want to do something … I'm here to tell you, that however bad things get in the movie ["Django Unchained" ], a lot worse shit actually happened.
... When slave narratives are done on film, they tend to be historical with a capital H, with an arms-length quality to them. I wanted to break that history-under-glass aspect, I wanted to throw a rock through that glass and shatter it for all times, and take you into it.
Quentin Tarantino, Quentin Tarantino defends depiction of slavery in Django Unchained,
7 December 2012

[I thought that 3-D] might open up the space. Your mindset is different. Because 2-D is so sophisticated, you're so used to it, it doesn't open up the imagination and it doesn't bring the extra innocence or whatever. And also I have to wow the audience because there's this talk about the power of God. When you talk about God, the first thing that comes along is not love, it's fear. You have to fear, and be in awe. You have to be scared. Any religion, it's like first thing...
... Surreal and overpowering. Maybe ten years from now, 3-D doesn't do that anymore, but right now, it overpowers you. Because it's something [that's a] new sensation.
Ang Lee, Ang Lee Deconstructs Cross-Cultural Cinematic Feat 'Life of Pi' , November 21, 2012

[W]hatever [Hitchcock's] obsessions for these beautiful women were, it's probably just a projection of his own artistic sense of … I mean, feminine side which Jung talks about, the anima or the animus which we all possess, and the feminine in men is the most creative side the anima, the feminine side.
Anthony Hopkins, Playing 'Hitchcock,' Insecurities and the Dark and Feminine Sides of the Legendary Director , November 20, 2012

I spent so little time imagining the film. The whole thing took two weeks. It was a race. I didn't watch my dailies, I didn't read exactly what I was doing. I only went over it at the editing table. Although I don't make films for anybody, I do make films, therefore I do make them for someone: I make them for the dead. But then I show them to living people that I start to think about while I'm editing -- who'll watch them? So I start to get more reflexive at the editing table. Why did I imagine this science-fiction word? I did invent a genre that doesn't exist. But I don't have the real answers.
... In this world I invented, it's a way of telling the experience of a life without using a classical narrative, without using flashbacks. It's trying to have the whole range of human experience in a day.
... That's the only good thing about traveling with the film. The film still exists in space and time. The further I go from home or from people who are obviously going to go see it, especially in New York and festivals or in Paris or a few other rich cities, people get the film. Most people get it. Someone says it's so simple a kid would understand it, so bring your kid. but that's the way I feel about my films: They're very simple. If you're looking hard, you can get lost in my films. But kids don't get lost.
Leos Carax, Leos Carax Explains 'Holy Motors' and Why He Wants to Make a Superhero Movie ,
October 15, 2012

People say that I was one of the unlucky ones, but I always say that I was lucky to be exiled and uprooted by circumstance. I was thrown into New York at exactly the right moment when there was all this new energy and attitude erupting everywhere, not just in film, but literature, art, music. That is real good luck. So, really, I don't consider myself a victim, I consider myself one of the lucky ones. Place means nothing to me. I can be at home anywhere.
... No one was experimenting. Not Maya [Deren], not Stan Brakhage, and certainly not me. We were making different kinds of films because we were driven to, but we did not think we were experimenting. Leave that to the scientists…
... It is important to know that what I do is not artistic. I am just a film-maker. I live how I live and I do what I do, which is recording moments of my life as I move ahead. And I do it because I am compelled to. Necessity, not artistry, is the true line you can follow in my life and work.
Jonas Mekas, Jonas Mekas: the man who inspired Andy Warhol to make films, 1 December 2012

You have to understand what it was like to be a Roman empire and to find some barbarian tribe riding into Rome in 476 A.D. It's quite a shock. And that's what will happen to us unless we change our attitude about what our role in the world is. Every story out of most newspapers is 'the Americans think this, the administration thinks this.' It's always about our controlling the pieces on the chessboard. I think what the Arabs have shown us is that we don't control the chess pieces. And this is a shock to many people. But it's definitely in 'The Greatest Generation.' And it's in Spielberg's World War II film, and it's in Ridley Scott's 'Black Hawk Down.' These are wonderful-looking films, but the message is perverted.
Oliver Stone, Oliver Stone Rewrites History — Again, November 22, 2012

My upbringing is that of harmony, and not conflict, you know. If you have a big problem, reduce to small problem, to no problem. That's just the Eastern way I was brought up. My first culture shock, so to speak, or encounter with Western culture, was through dramatic studying. All those plays they choose for me in the theater department, they shocked me. They were sexual and conflicting, and some were sort of violent. Western plays maximize the conflict. But then there's a tug of war, my Chinese side will also bring me to tranquility and reducing the conflict. On the other side, I want the extremes — to see things demolish, break up, that makes good scenes. And from there to examine humanity, which is what I care about. ...
... [ In "The Life of Pi" ] I wanted to use water because the film is talking about faith, and it contains fish, life and every emotion for Pi. And air is God, heaven and something spiritual and death. That's how I see it. I believe the thing we call faith or God is our emotional attachment to the unknown. I'm Chinese; I believe in the Taoist Buddha. We don't talk about a deity, which is very much like this book; we're not talking about religion but God in the abstract sense, something to overpower you.
Ang Lee, Of water and Pi , November 17, 2012

Whether you're Godard or Almodovar or Scorsese, it's text, text, text. Everything begins with the text and this is a source of great anguish to me. So please let cinema get on with doing what it does best, which is expressing ideas in visual terms...
... It's a big criticism of Greenaway films that they are far too interested in formalism and not enough interested in notions of emotional content. It's a criticism I can fully understand from a public that has been brought up by Hollywood movies that demand intense emotional rapport. But look, we're here and we're talking, not because of emotional rapport but because of an intellectual ability to discuss the issues. And I think, if only to lighten the load or change the perspective, there's a place for that too. We have more than enough deodorised, over-the-top, sentimental cinema. Let's try to bring a little human intelligence into things. It can be very rewarding.
Peter Greenaway, 'I plan to kill myself when I'm 80' , 15 November 2012

บันทึก : ทวาทศมาส / Thawathosamat (2556 / 2013)

You can use your means in a good and bad way. In German-speaking art, we had such a bad experience with the Third Reich, when stories and images were used to tell lies. After the war, literature was careful not to do the same, which is why writers began to reflect on the stories they told and to make readers part of their texts. I do the same.
Michael Haneke, There's no easy way to say this… , 4 November 2012

In all of my work I'm trying to create a dialogue, in which I want to provoke the recipients, stimulate them to use their own imaginations. I don't just say things recipients want to hear, flatter their egos or comfort them by agreeing with them. I have to provoke them, to take them as seriously as I take myself. When I see a film or read a book, that's what I'm expecting, to be taken seriously. I want to be led to question myself, to question things I assume I know.
Michael Haneke, Words of Love From a Severe Director, November 2, 2012

Filmmaking isn't something you need to learn in school; it's about imagination. The best place to learn about it is on a set, not by studying. If a person has got no talent, it doesn't matter what you teach them. It's the same for stuff like crafting things with your hands, cooking or architecture: you either have a sense for it or not.
Koji Wakamatsu, Self-Taught Movie Director, Dies at 76, October 20, 2012

The average scene in a film, you have to shoot it 15, 20 times. That means you got to laugh or cry 15, 20 times. Now who tries to laugh? Only bad actors. How a character hides his feelings tells us something about him. No one tries to cry in real life; they try not to. So it's all about filling a space and creating a character. That's why I'm interested. It's still an adventure.
Martin Landau, From North by Northwest to Frankenweenie, 18 October 2012

You make films for the dead, but they're seen by the living.
... "Holy Motors" speaks the language of cinema, but it's not a film about cinema. I created a world — not our world exactly but not that far, either — and I tried to show the experience of being alive in this world.
... Cinema is a territory. It exists outside of movies. It's a place I live in. It's a way of seeing things, of experiencing life. But making films, that's supposed to be a profession.
Leos Carax, A Farewell to Celluloid With a Tribute, October 10, 2012

Leos's way of looking at things in this film ["Holy Motors" ] makes me think of Pier Paolo Pasolini, another great filmmaker who once said that he was like a bird in flight, which sees everything but doesn't forgive everything.
Denis Lavant, A Farewell to Celluloid With a Tribute, October 10, 2012

New Trailers

Amour (Michael Haneke)
Chicken with Plums (Marjane Satrapi, Vincent Paronnaud)
The Flat (Arnon Goldfinger)
In Another Country (Hong Sang-Soo)
In the House / Dans la maison (François Ozon)
Keep the Lights On (Ira Sachs)
Like Someone in Love (Abbas Kiarostami)
Reality (Matteo Garrone)
You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet (Alain Resnais)

[Source : Apple.com, CineMovies.fr, FilmUp, Movie-list]

I was shocked, when I was sixteen, when I first saw Halloween, by Carpenter. You think, you are the subject, watching someone. And then another person will step in front of the camera, and be looking, and suddenly your view is over their shoulder. Subjective becomes over the shoulder in the same shot, I was always shocked. It's very simple, but this is the story of cinema, yeah? What is the position of the camera and who is looking. I was always interested. I'm a Hitchcock learner, yeah?—but there's a big difference. Hitchcock needs actors who have a social life outside of his movies, like James Stewart and Cary Grant. Because his characters are really empty. Really empty. He needs empty characters to create this world where they are living, and for me, I'm not like him in this.
Christian Petzold, Spatial Suspense: A Conversation with Christian Petzold, 16 October 2012

Photography is the medium in which I feel the most comfortable because there's less of a risk of misunderstanding that you have in filmmaking because of this necessity of storytelling. I find the obligation of telling a story as an obstacle. Whenever people ask me what the story is for my next film, I won't tell and people feel it's because I'm being secretive or something, but it's actually because I'm ashamed to sum up a film in three sentences. I'm sure that true cinema-viewers don't come for the story, it's not about telling stories so why should I sum something up in a pitch? This embarrassment I feel is something that I get rid of through photography.
Abbas Kiarostami, Abbas Kiarostami Wants To Reteam With Juliette Binoche,... , October 10, 2012

Openings are difficult, you can tell from novels: if you go and check people's libraries you can see plenty of books whose first ten pages have been read and the rest are brand new and untouched. So openings are difficult, very often people leave after the beginning because they are disconcerted and they can't get into it. I finally decided to stick to it, although I knew it could be difficult and some people like you could appreciate it and consider it a good way to start the film, some others might feel uncomfortable for the whole film because of the way it started. But again, I knew it was faithful to reality—the story had already started. When you overhear a conversation in a cafe, things have started before you hear them, and you aren't sure where you're going and you still have to catch up with reality, and that's how I wanted the spectator to feel. Even for the mise en scène of that sequence, I knew that the more it goes, the more I don't like cuts, I don't like edited sequences in which the camera goes and finds the person, the person who the character is supposed to talk to. They must come to the camera, the camera is not supposed to go and find them. So I decided to have this [empty] chair and have the pimp's jacket on the chair so we'd know this is the chair where people would come. And the people would come one after another to have a conversation with the main character. All these aspects I was conscious of, I knew it was maybe a bit disconcerting; again, it's unusual. But I find it right for a conversation and a story that had started before us. When you are overhearing, when you are being indiscreet, you cannot ask people to come and explain to you. You are putting the parts together to see what's happening.
Abbas Kiarostami, Putting the Parts Together, October 10, 2012

In our real life there might be some sharp or sensitive issues that (censors) do not wish to touch upon. At such a juncture a writer can inject their own imagination to isolate them from the real world or maybe they can exaggerate the situation — making sure it is bold, vivid and has the signature of our real world.
Mo Yan, Chinese writer Mo Yan wins Nobel literature prize, October 11, 2012

People say I am stuck in childhood, but it's not that. I remember seeing a Matisse retrospective, and you could see he started out one way, and then he tried something different, and then he seemed to spend his whole life trying to get back to the first thing. The surprise. It's something like the fact that you only get to see the strangeness of life once, in a truly fresh way. I think the films are sometimes a kind of symbol for that. I often wonder about it, but I don't analyse it too much...
Tim Burton, 'The love and life and death stuff was stewing from the start' , 7 October 2012

You can look at queer film-making in the past 20 years and say we often reverted to using metaphor as a way of telling our stories and avoided the stories themselves. I wanted to invert the secretive nature of the story by making a film that was very open.
Ira Sachs, New-wave queer cinema: 'Gay experience in all its complexity' , 4 October 2012

Very, very occasionally I sense from somebody that they think I'm less capable because I am female. It's usually quite old-school people... I've gotten to direct and do what I do, which is a very privileged thing to be doing. How amazing is it that you get to travel and make films? But, in Britain in particular, I come from a working class background, and if you haven't been to certain universities, that can be very tough. People listen to your accent and make judgements about you based on where you have or haven't been. There is a hierarchy in Britain, a class system.
Andrea Arnold, Talks 'Wuthering Heights': Chaos, Class, Race, Gender & Women Directors ,
October 4, 2012

Right before that scene [ in 'Life of Pi' ], you hear the line "you don't know the strength of your faith until it's been tested." ... It's about disillusion, coming of age. In many movies I do, there is a loss of innocence -- I would call it the bar mitzvah scene – a father and his son. The zoo to the boy is a paradise -- he's innocent. He has all this imagination and all these stories and spiritual things in his head. And then he is thrown into the ocean, where he can't rely on organized religions, he is faced with the abstract idea of God. So the journey begins with that early disillusionment [at the zoo]. Without that disillusionment, he wouldn't have survived… All stories about the tests of faith start with that: Before you can take a leap of faith, you have to doubt…In making the movie I feel like the character in the book. All of us making the movie were also tested…we had moments when we thought why are we doing this? But once you overcome the obstacles and you look back, it seems like there was a reason, seems like there was a destiny, and you learn something. I think that's the first lesson, for the reader, for the viewer, and for me personally.
Ang Lee, Talks Logistics and Spirituality Behind 'Life of Pi' , September 28, 2012

I hate editing, it's the worst part of filmmaking. I like dreaming, which is writing a script, I like living which is shooting and I hate editing, because it's like death because you're killing things... Editing -- it's tricky because you can get lost in the details in the editing room. You can get lost in all of these moments that are great but the sum is not greater than their parts, ...
Derek Cianfrance, Talks The Pain Of Editing, The Influence Of 'Napoleon' & 'Psycho' & More In 'Place Beyond The Pines' , September 14, 2012

"If you're shocking by subject matter alone, it's not enough, and it never was enough," John Waters said. "It's easy to shock, but it's much harder to surprise with wit."
... To him the most shocking thing about "Pink Flamingos," his 1972 exploitation classic that depicted the drag queen Divine gleefully eating dog feces, was the fact that people laughed. "It was a commentary on censorship," he said. "It was about what was left once 'Deep Throat' became legal."
... "If you could think of something that would get an NC-17 rating with no sex or violence," he said, "you would have the most radical movie of the year."
Jennifer Schuessler, Shock Me if You Can, September 14, 2012

I've been accused of 'raping' the audience in my films, and I admit to that freely — all movies assault the viewer in one way or another. What's different about my films is this: I'm trying to rape the viewer into independence.
Michael Haneke, Minister of Fear, September 23, 2007

I hate the unknowingly ugly visual quality of many digital movies, including those that try to mimic the look of film. We're awash in ugly digital because of cost cutting and a steep learning curve made steeper by rapidly changing technologies. (The rapidity of those changes is one reason film, which is very stable, has become the preferred medium for archiving movies shot both on film and in digital.)
... We're seeing too many movies that look thin, smeared, pixelated or too sharply outlined and don't have the luxurious density of film and often the color. I am sick of gray and putty skin tones. The effects of digital cinema can also be seen in the ubiquity of hand-held camerawork that's at least partly a function of the equipment's relative portability. Meanwhile digital postproduction and editing have led to a measurable increase in the number of dissolves. Dissolves used to be made inside the camera or with an optical printer, but today all you need is editing software and a click of the mouse. This is changing the integrity of the shot, and it's also changing montage, which, in Eisenstein's language, is a collision of shots. Much remains the same in how directors narrate stories (unfortunately!), yet these are major changes.
Manohla Dargis, Film Is Dead? Long Live Movies, September 6, 2012

Part of the idea of the American Dream is an aspiration to luxury. David Siegel speaks to that so eloquently when he's talking about why people want to buy timeshares: they want to be rich, then the next best thing is to look rich and if you don't want to look rich then you might as well be dead. That is a part of American culture; even in the ghetto there are people buying fancy clothes and fancy cars. I often think of Fran Lebowitz, who said, "Americans don't hate the rich because they always imagine they will be rich some day – they are impending rich."
Lauren Greenfield, 'It's everything the British love to hate about Americans' , 2 September 2012

Saudi Arabia is a very traditional, conservative and tribal society. Men and women cannot be on the streets together, particularly if the woman is seen to be directing the men. People would come and tell us to stop filming. It was a challenging experience, to say the least.
Haifaa al-Mansour, Venice film festival: female film director defies Saudi prejudice, 31 August 2012

I sent [ Lars von Trier ] videotapes of me and my girlfriend having sex and that's how I got the job [ in "Nymphomaniac" ]... There's a disclaimer at the top of the script that basically says we're doing it for real. Everything that is illegal, we'll shoot in blurred images. Other than that, everything is happening.
Shia LaBeouf, Shia LaBeouf sent sex tapes to win part in Lars von Trier's Nymphomaniac,
31 August 2012

People have been telling me for years I do myself no favours by making movies that are difficult to classify, so I went all out to make a genre piece to push it through to blockbuster domination [ Dracula : Pages from a Virgin Diary ]. People had an idea of what they'd get, and they got it. People showed up for it. It was supposed to be a one-off thing for TV and ended up getting a theatrical release. The advice I had been given for decades was right: working in the genre mode really helped.
Guy Maddin, 'Keyhole will become crystal-clear upon your third viewing' , 30 August 2012

More often than not, innovation resembles deficiency. Jean-Luc Godard couldn't tell a story, Yasujiro Ozu never learned the 180 degree rule, Robert Bresson didn't know how to direct actors, D.W. Griffith first didn't understand that the audience wanted to see the whole actress and not just her face and then didn't understand how you were supposed to make a talkie—and, toward the end of his career, Tony Scott made movies the wrong way, never letting an image hold long enough for the viewer to figure out just exactly what was going on.
Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, Smearing the Senses: Tony Scott, Action Painter, 22 August 2012

Beasts of the Southern Wild is selling a fantasy, though it's not a fantasy about a little girl who cooks her dinners with a blowtorch or about magical alligator meat or friendly tugboat captains who collect fried chicken wrappers or prehistoric creatures emerging from Arctic ice. It's a fantasy of Hurricane Katrina—the imagery of which Beasts appropriates whenever it's convenient—as a natural disaster that brought out the best in people, rather than a man-made catastrophe that revealed the worst aspects of a society. Ironically, the film's FEMA stand-ins seem to be reasonably good at their jobs; it's the Bathtub's residents' decision to weather the storm and then later to return without aid. Beasts pretends to be celebrating gumption and resolve, but what it's ultimately selling is stubbornness and isolationism. There is a word for films like this: bullshit.
Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, Benh Zeitlin's "Beasts of the Southern Wild", 29 June 2012

Rumor has it the [Chinese] Film Bureau and Power Supply Bureau have merged. Perhaps I should take up the art of shadow puppetry.
Jia Zhangke, Beijing Indie Film Festival Goes Dark After Record Turnout, Heads Underground,
August 20, 2012

I've had as many conversations with people who have seen the film ['The Dark Knight Rises' ] the other way round. We throw a lot of things against the wall to see if it sticks. We put a lot of interesting questions in the air, but that's simply a backdrop for the story. What we're really trying to do is show the cracks of society, show the conflicts that somebody would try to wedge open. We're going to get wildly different interpretations of what the film is supporting and not supporting, but it's not doing any of those things. It's just telling a story. If you're saying, 'Have you made a film that's supposed to be criticizing the Occupy Wall Street movement?' – well, obviously, that's not true... If the populist movement is manipulated by somebody who is evil, that surely is a criticism of the evil person. You could also say the conditions the evil person is exploiting are problematic and should be addressed... I've got all sorts of opinions, but this isn't what we're doing here.
Christopher Nolan, The Politics & Influences Of 'The Dark Knight Rises' , July 24, 2012

No, I don't like directing. I only direct my own screenplays because there's no other way to protect them.
Kenneth Lonergan, The Changes In The New Cut Of 'Margaret' , July 10, 2012

Hitchcock's Rear Window Timelapse

The Occupy Gotham movement, as organised by gargly terrorist Bane, is populated by anarchists without a cause, whose actions are fuelled by a lust for destruction, not as a corrective to an unjust world. Such self-made characters as we meet in the film are, by and large, fishy – power-grabbers hiding behind a fig-leaf of philanthropism. Even someone who earns their crust nicking other people's stuff looks agog when the masses storm posh apartments to try and redistribute a bit of bubbly...
... But The Dark Knight Rises is a quite audaciously capitalist vision, radically conservative, radically vigilante, that advances a serious, stirring proposal that the wish-fulfilment of the wealthy is to be championed if they say they want to do good.
Catherine Shoard, Dark Knight Rises: fancy a capitalist caped crusader as your superhero?,
17 July 2012

NOTE on DIGITAL PROJECTION IN THEATERS for self release (.): People who don't know what the fuck they're talking about look at digital self release as the holy grail that'll save indies in theaters by allowing them to cheaply get their product to multiplexes, etc (no prints). I call bullshit on that. If, and this is increasingly becoming possible, you are doing a self release digitally… get ready for a world of hurt in getting your movie to comply to the DCI standards that typical theaters are using. You can check out the specs here. They won't make any sense to you, most likely (I understand them, and they make me angry) but the short explanation is that this spec has been designed specifically to make it hard for indies to get into theaters, and to preserve the status quo. Yes, you'll no longer have to get prints made… but their digital standards are a fucking nightmare, and there are a lot of middlemen and gatekeepers who all have their hands in your pocket that are actively preventing indies from getting into multiplexes with digital projection.
... The truth of the matter is that the future of indie theatrical lies in community screenings on Blu-Ray with one or two screenings at a time per city. Indie films need to follow the music business, and turn their films into tours, with the films serving like a new album.
Sam Mestman, Screening formats (why your film looks bad at festivals)

New Trailers

Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry (Alison Klayman, Documentary)
Caesar Must Die (Paolo Taviani, Vittorio Taviani)
Faust (Aleksandr Sokurov)
Found Memories / Historias que so existem quando lembradas (Júlia Murat)
Holy Motors (Leos Carax)
The Imposter (Bart Layton, Documentary)
Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present (Matthew Akers, Documentary)
Unforgivable (André Téchiné)

[Source : Apple.com, CineMovies.fr, FilmUp, Movie-list]

บันทึก : ใกล้แล้ว

You can usually get away with expressing yourself freely in art galleries in Thailand. For film, there's a mechanism in place for censorship. Raising questions in film scares them, because they fear the power of the medium. But we're safer in art.
Manit Sriwanichpoom, A Reluctant Provocateur Tweaks Thailand, July 4, 2012

You don't really begin working creatively until you are at a point where you don't know.
Vera Chytilova, An Audience for Free Spirits in a Closed Society, June 29, 2012

There are cases in which a film can stand on its own without music. But if music is used, it's better for it to touch the soul and create emotions that the rest of the film cannot do. Music should continue emotions where words finish. Unfortunately most films are flooded with music, due to mediocre scripts and to producers' and directors' lack of talent.
... I realised that success and pure creativity are not very compatible. The more successful you become, the more you become a product of something that generates money. Instead of being able to move forward freely and do what you really wish, you find yourself stuck and obliged to repeat yourself and your previous success.
Vangelis, Why Chariots of Fire's message is still important today, 1 July 2012

When a good idea occurs, it has been prepared by a long time of reflection. But you have to be patient. We all have what I call the invisible worker inside ourselves; we don't have to feed him or pay him, and he works even when we are sleeping. We must be aware of his presence, and from time to time stop thinking about what we are trying to do, stop being obsessed about answers, and just give him the room, the possibility, to do his work. He is tenacious, you see. He never loses hope.
Jean-Claude Carrière, 'If you want fame, don't be a screenwriter', 28 June 2012

Basically I don't know what I'm doing. I like to think I'm in control, but I'm not. We make films from our subconscious and there's no way of anticipating what they will provoke in the minds of others.
... That's why I like audience Q&As: they help me learn things about my own work. Take Etre et Avoir, for example, my documentary about a rural school in France. I always said that the real subject and theme of that film is about how we grow up and about how we learn to behave in society. Then one day a lady stood up in the audience and said: "You must realise that your film is about separation; about learning to separate." And when I thought about it, it was absolutely clear. It's the whole point of the film. It's the thing that is at the beginning and at the end and that sits right at the very heart of the story. To grow up is to experience separation. I knew it without knowing it. Sometimes nobody is more surprised by a film than the person who made it.
Nicolas Philibert, I have no idea what my films are about, 28 June 2012