Arquivos mensais:abril 2011

Feliz Noite de Walpurgis

Um druída Maio ri! O bosque está livre de céu e geada. Os druídas Maio ri! O bosque está livre de céu e geada. A neve desapareceu! Numa paisagem verde ressoam cantos de júbilo. Um druída Uma neve muito branca cobre o cume; apressemo-nos rumo ao alto, festejam-se os velhos e sagrados costumes, ali seContinuar lendo “Feliz Noite de Walpurgis”

24 Frames: Toccata and Fugue in D Minor (Fantasia, Samuel Armstrong, 1940)

“You will be able to SEE the music and HEAR the picture,” said Walt Disney of his hopes for Fantasia; and you can read, in excerpts from the transcripts of their story meetings, how Disney and Stokowski and their associates worked toward achieving that aim. In a story meeting on the Toccata and Fugue held on Tuesday afternoon, November 8, 1938, John McLeish, a story artist with the manner of John Barrymore (his stentorian tones can be heard narrating the opening of Dumbo), began talking about the contrast between the screen and the music.” In the Fugue, suggested McLeish, why not “picture a huge form moving slowly against a counterpoint in the music? Or just the opposite, when you have a slow, heavy chord, picture little, light forms playing against that.”

Travelling (Auf Reisen, Emeric Pressburger)

At that time a village stood on the site of this town, the mail coach was running instead of the fast train and my grandfather was travelling instead of me. A young lady and an old man were sitting opposite him. The man was snoring, drawing deep, heavy breaths. A signet ring glittered on oneContinuar lendo “Travelling (Auf Reisen, Emeric Pressburger)”

Marie-France Pisier (1944 – 2011)

Isso foi um susto, de repente você começa a pensar que Karina, Adjani, Huppert, Deneuve vão morrer um dia. Belmondo vai morrer, meu deus! Top-dúzia, então: Nota: Deveras peculiar ela estar naquela específica sequência de Fantasmas da Liberdade e anos mais tarde encarnar Madame Verdurin no Proust do Ruiz, a idéia que permeia ambas personagensContinuar lendo “Marie-France Pisier (1944 – 2011)”

Centenário de Ronald Neame

In a directorial career stretching for over forty years, Ronald Neame proved to be a reliable and versatile commercial film-maker but also one who defies easy categorisation. Efficient and craftsman-like, his films are well made but have lacked the individualism seemingly required to achieve auteur status. Instead he has been the epitome of the mainstream studio director, a model of professionalism whose output has often mirrored the ups and downs of the industry.
He was born in London on 23 April 1911. His father was the noted portrait photographer and film director Elwin Neame and his mother the actress Ivy Close. After his father’s early death in a car accident, he had to leave public school and went to work for an oil company. With his mother’s help, he entered the film industry at the Elstree studios of British International Pictures in 1927 and worked his way up from clapperboy to focus puller and eventually cinematographer. He photographed many quota quickies in the 1930s, along with a number of George Formby vehicles at Ealing. He established a solid reputation, winning his first Oscar nomination for his work on Powell and Pressburger’s One of Our Aircraft Is Missing (1942). With Major Barbara (1941), he began an association with the film’s editor, David Lean. He worked initially as his director of photography on three Noël Coward projects (he was nominated for a second Oscar for Blithe Spirit in 1945). In 1943 they founded the production company Cineguild with Anthony Havelock-Allen which operated under the Rank umbrella. After a fact-finding trip to Hollywood on behalf of Rank, Neame switched to producing and scriptwriting, making important contributions to Lean’s two Dickens adaptations and to the classic romance Brief Encounter (1945), picking up further Academy Award nominations in these new roles. Unfortunately, his partnership with Lean ended rather acrimoniously when Lean took over the direction of The Passionate Friends (1948) from Neame.
He made his debut as a director for Cineguild with Take My Life (1947), a more than competent Hitchcock-style thriller which showed Neame’s technical skill as a film-maker. Throughout his career his work was uneven, so that the routine action hokum of The Golden Salamander (1949) was followed by the excellent sub-Ealing comedy The Card (1952) featuring Alec Guinness. Based on Arnold Bennett’s novel, it is a sympathetic account of the nefarious rise of a humble clerk as he finds various ways to take advantage of the hierarchies of the British class system. Neame showed a real lightness of touch handling comic subjects, spinning out the thin premise of The Million Pound Note (1953) with some style and again drawing a fine performance from Guinness as an idiosyncratic painter in his pleasing adaptation of Joyce Cary’s novel The Horse’s Mouth (1958). In the 1950s he also made the intriguing wartime espionage tale The Man Who Never Was (1955), as well as having a brief, unsuccessful stint in Hollywood where he was eventually replaced as director on The Seventh Sin (1957).
Neame’s liking for non-conformist characters reaches its height in his most acclaimed film Tunes of Glory (1960), a compelling barrackroom melodrama which also shows his skill in handling actors; here he is rewarded with memorable performances by John Mills and Alec Guinness as the two officers engaged in a violent clash of personalities. Like The Horse’s Mouth, it was made for his own production company Knightsbridge Films. His 1960s output continued to be extremely variable. It included two Swinging London films, the amiable caper movie Gambit (1966) with Michael Caine and Shirley MacLaine and the instantly dated risqué comedy Prudence and the Pill (1968), on which he worked uncredited. He directed Judy Garland in her last film, I Could Go on Singing (1963), and had another spell in the States where he completed two unremarkable projects, Escape from Zahrain (1961) and A Man Could Get Killed (1966). The best-received work from this period was The Prime of Miss Jean Brody (1969). This popular adaptation of the stage version of Muriel Spark’s novel provided Maggie Smith with a show-off role which duly won her an Oscar, but the film has considerable difficulty dealing with the essential theatricality of the story and characters.
After the middling musical Scrooge (1970) with Albert Finney in the title role, Neame took up permanent residence in Hollywood, eventually becoming an American citizen. He was responsible for establishing the ‘disaster movie’ genre with the immensely successful The Poseidon Adventure (1972), although he followed it with one of the worst examples of this cycle, Meteor (1979). He also made two enjoyable, lightweight pieces with Walter Matthau, Hopscotch (1980) and First Monday in October (1981). The best of his limited British work in this period is the tautly effective thriller The Odessa File (1974), from Frederick Forsyth’s bestselling novel, with Jon Voight uncovering a Neo-Nazi group. Nothing can forgive the atrocious sex comedy Foreign Body (1986) which looks like a relic from another era. His final film was The Magic Balloon (1990), a children’s adventure designed to show off the new ShowScan widescreen format which consequently only had a limited release.
Throughout his career Neame was always a smoothly professional film-maker, adopting an unostentatious approach which relied greatly on his actors and which frequently left him at the mercy of the script. When these were good he produced highly effective films which often showcased outstanding acting performances. Even on his poorer commercial assignments there is an ability to serve the narrative no matter how inadequate this might be. His achievements, which include his active role in the industry union ACT and with the British Society of Cinematographers, were recognised with a BAFTA Fellowship and the CBE, both awarded in 1996.

Guide of British Film Directors – Robert Shail

24 Frames: O juiz e o assassino (Le juge et l’assassin, Bertrand Tavernier, 1976)

The titles fill the screen: “Between 1893 and 1898,” they tell us, “Bouvier killed twelve children. In those same years more than 2,500 children under fifteen died—assassinated—in mines and textile factories.”
The closing titles, of course, merely underscore the social and political message that has pervaded the entire film. Bouvier may be an assassin, but the world he inhabits—and which condemns him—is populated by assassins who are far more deadly than he. Indeed, this point is made explictly by the judge’s clear-sighted Royalist friend; citing an observation taken from Octave Mirbeau, a popular author of the period, he says, “We are all assassins, at least potentially, only we channel this criminal impulse through legal means: industry, colonial trade, war, anti-Semitism.” Reiterating this message in somewhat different terms, in one interview Tavernier described the confrontation between the judge and the assassin as the clash of “two violences: a crazy, tormented, uncontrollable, and unconscious violence and a legal, repressive, and hidden one.”

Admirável Mundo Novo por Emily Carroll

“Embryos are like photograph film,” said Mr Foster waggishly, as he pushed open the second door. “They can only stand red light.” And in effect the sultry darkness into which the students now followed him was visible and crimson, like the darkness of closed eyes on a summer’s afternoon. The bulging flanks of row on receding row and tier above tier of bottles glinted with innumerable rubies, and among the rubies moved the dim spectres of men and women with purple eyes and all the symptoms of lupus. The hum and rattle of machinery faintly stirred the air.

A um Gato – Jorge Luis Borges

Os espelhos não são mais silenciosos,
nem mais furtiva a alva aventureira;
sob a lua, tu és essa pantera
que de longe avistamos, cautelosos.
Por obra indecifrável de um decreto
divinal, procuramos-te vãmente;
mais remoto que o Ganges e o poente,
são teus a solidão e o mais secreto.
Teu lombo condescende com a amorosa
carícia desta mão, já admitido
tens desde a eternidade que é olvido
todo o amor da mão tão receosa.
Em outro tempo estás. És tu o dono
de um âmbito fechado como um sonho.

Grandes Tumblrs da Humanidade: Fuck Yeah! Peter Cook

Hitler was a very peculiar person, wasn’t he. He was another dominator, you know, Hitler. And he was a wonderful ballroom dancer. Not many people know that, he was a wonderful little dancer, he used to waltz around with a number “8” on his back. The only trouble was, he was very short, and peopleContinuar lendo “Grandes Tumblrs da Humanidade: Fuck Yeah! Peter Cook”

24 Frames: Mildred Pierce (Todd Haynes, 2011)

Within a week, the Beragon mansion looked as though it had been hit by bombs. The main idea of the alterations, which were under the supervision of Monty, was to restore what had been a large but pleasant house to what it had been before it was transformed into a small but hideous mansion. ToContinuar lendo “24 Frames: Mildred Pierce (Todd Haynes, 2011)”

Is it too late to go back to Technicolor?

Advancements in digital filmmaking are very exciting but having just seen ‘Black Narcissus’ again, is it too late to go back to Technicolor? Edgar Wright, ontem, via twitter Outro pensamento inevitável ao ver o dito cujo: por que raios os “efeitos especiais” de um filme dos anos 40 (basicamente luz, filtro e tinta) são melhoresContinuar lendo “Is it too late to go back to Technicolor?”

He leaps.

– I’ll take Cary Grant, myself.
– Oh, so will I.
– Capricorn, the goat. He leaps, divine!
– So much “oomph.”
– Yes.
– Absolutely.
– He was thrilling with Bergman.
– What was it called? “Something of the something.”
– No, that’s the other one. This was just plain “Something.”
– You know, it was sort of, you know.
– It was right on the tip of my tongue.
– Mine too. It was just plain “Something” I’m sure. I adored it.
– And Bergman!
– She’s the Virgo type!
– Like all these, you know.
– Oh, I think she’s lovely.

Isherwood & Huxley

Interviewer: Did you first meet Aldous Huxley out here? Isherwood: Yes, I met him when I first came out here, in 1939. I had never known him in England. Interviewer: Would you talk a little about your association with Huxley. Isherwood: Huxley was a person who was at once seemingly remote and yet extremely loveableContinuar lendo “Isherwood & Huxley”