| QUOTE (Divvey @ Jun 20 2008, 09:43 AM) |
| are any of these "enjoyable"?? or do they require study & introspection?? And why is Chitty Chitty Bang Bang not there??? :rant: :rant: |
| QUOTE (IanMcC @ Jun 20 2008, 08:27 AM) |
| Ive only seen 3 of these coz im pig ignorant. Night of the Hunter. |
| QUOTE (My Balloon @ Jun 20 2008, 07:58 PM) |
| Having said that, Kurosawa's Throne of Blood is a remake of Macbeth set in feudal Japan and is very hard work. If you are going to investigate Kurosawa start with Seven Samurai, The Hidden Fortress or Yojimbo. |
| QUOTE (snoweyuk @ Jun 19 2008, 09:01 PM) |
| Is this in order of the best film? I'll vote in part 2 & 3 perhaps.... |
| QUOTE (Hipper Still @ Jun 19 2008, 09:49 PM) |
| Ashes and Diamonds by Andrzej Wajda. It's the final one of his war trilogy, following A Generation and Kanal. It's actually the first two that I'd like to focu on, because the selection of the third as superior strikes me as a little strange. Kanal in particular is very interesting*, and the earlier one, A Generation, is a very solid story of one man's innduction and service within the Polish resistance. It also has a really masterly four-minute (or so) opening shot that's immensely impressive. My love for all things Polish is still growing, and we only recently discovered this guy and his films for ourselves. We've actually been watching them this week for the first time. It's nice to be able to cast a vote and mention him. Andrzej Wajda has a real talent. Practically every shot in his films is like a perfect little photograph, each scene memorable in itself. *I was going to write a little about Kanal, but I'll leave you with an imdb user's comment instead, because it sums things up: I loved ASHES AND DIAMONDS, by the same director, but this is the best of the trilogy. The images you will see are breathtaking. The characters are funny and tragic. The setting is amazing. The film does not have a normal structure. But once the film goes down into the canals, then you get a feeling of clausterphobia... a feeling of hell. Remember how brilliant DAS BOOT was? This is the same feeling. When the film is over, you will not forget what you just seen. A perfect film. |
| QUOTE (Derek Malcolm (The Guardian) @ Thursday May 6, 1999) |
| There was a time, and it now seems long ago, when Polish cinema was admired throughout the West. Before capitalism and the market had their evil way, it was characterised by a deep sense of a fractured national identity and by an extraordinarily sharp idea of how a tragic history affected ordinary people. This renaissance, in the Stalinist 50s, was substantially due to the emergence of a world-class director in Andrzej Wajda, whose wartime trilogy of A Generation, Kanal and Ashes and Diamonds remains one of the finest achievements of Eastern European cinema. A Generation is about a group of young men and women fighting in Occupied Poland; Kanal is the terrible story of the final, abortive Warsaw uprising. But arguably the greatest in the trilogy is Ashes and Diamonds, in which Zbigniew Cybulski became a star - almost a European James Dean. Maciek is a young soldier in the right-wing Nationalist Army and is ordered, at the conclusion of the war, to assassinate the newly arrived communist district secretary. Maciek is a slightly dandified Polish Hamlet who has fought in the uprising but is now uncertain about continuing to espouse an inevitably lost cause against the left. He bungles the murder, killing two bystanders. Told to try again, he is hopelessly riven between the demands of conscience and of loyalty, and is further up-ended by falling for a girl in the hotel at which he and the communist official are staying. She makes him feel that his lifestyle is meaningless in the new, post-war climate. Though he manages to accomplish his mission on the very evening that fireworks announce the end of hostilities (ironically, as his elderly prey is on his way to see his son who has been arrested as a member of a similar underground group to Maciek's own) he is accidentally shot when running from a military patrol. He dies alone on a rubbish dump in a scene reminiscent of Bunuel's Los Olvidados. Cybulski manages, through Wajda, to express a uniquely Polish sensibility - reflecting his nation's troubled history - as well as the kind of youthful frustrations that are still recognisable today. But Wajda's deeply romantic and personal vision, inspired by both Italian neo-realism and by the more baroque images of Expressionism, makes Ashes and Diamonds a gripping experience too. Once again, as in most of my 100 films, it is the cinematographer as much as the director who should be praised. Jerzy Wojcik's plastic work is outstanding. Wajda once said to me, when I asked him whether he would prefer the freedom of Western film-making to the artistic constraints of the Eastern bloc, that there were always ways of getting round political censorship but no way to avoid the censorship of money. Later in his career, when his disillusion with the Communist party was complete, he showed - with Man Of Iron, Man Of Marble and several other outstanding films - exactly what he meant. Ashes and Diamonds is not without irony, such as the moment when Maciek and the Party official fall almost ludicrously into each other's arms as the one kills the other; and the victory banquet at the hotel where the polonaise Farewell, My Homeland is played and where some know their careers are at an end while others prepare to accept government posts in Warsaw. The title of the novel by Jerzy Andrzejewski, who also wrote the screenplay, is taken from romantic poetry: 'Will there remain among the ashes a star-like diamond, the dawn of eternal victory?' Wajda doesn't attempt to answer this question. And it is the film's ambiguities, as the film-maker tries to come to grips with the myths and legends of the era, that continue to render it fascinating. |
| QUOTE (Divvey @ Jun 20 2008, 09:43 AM) |
| are any of these "enjoyable"?? or do they require study & introspection?? And why is Chitty Chitty Bang Bang not there??? :rant: :rant: |
| QUOTE (Derek Malcolm (The Guardian) @ Thursday February 4, 1999) |
| Jean Vigo made only four films before he died of tuberculosis in 1934, aged just 29. Yet no movie-lover, however eccentric, could compose a list of 100 films through which the cinema should be celebrated without including at least one of his works. The last and greatest was l'Atalante (1934), butchered for commercial release and, though partially restored, even now unable to be seen exactly as its director intended. He was the epitome of the radical, passionate film-maker who has to fight every step of the way against people of less imagination and sensibility. I'm willing to sweep up the stars' crap, he once wrote when trying for a job as an assistant. In the end, none of Vigo's films prospered until long after his death. But think of Renoir and of Bunuel, put the two together and you have Jean Vigo - the son of a militant anarchist who took the name Miguel Almereyda because it contained all the letters of ''merde'' (shit) and was almost certainly murdered in prison. L'Atalante was originally a simplistic story assigned to Vigo by Gaumont, despite the fact that Zero De Conduite, his astonishing evocation of an unhappy childhood, had been banned by the censors. He changed it utterly, at least in tone, but had by then become so ill that he constantly risked collapse as he was making it. There is, however, no sign whatever of his impending death in the film itself. L'Atalante is a barge in which two young newly-weds travel the waterways of France. The crew consists of an old eccentric with a passion for cats, and an equally peculiar boy. The wife loves her husband but soon grows tired of his waterbound obsessions and, longing for the excitment of Paris, is lured ashore by a peddlar. The distraught husband imagines his wife reflected in the water. Meanwhile, she tires of wandering the cruel streets of Depression-era Paris. There are prostitutes and beggars and thieves everywhere. Men try to pick her up, she has her handbag stolen and she goes forlornly in search of the barge. In the end she is found by the old man, and the lovers are reunited. The film is a masterpiece not because of the tragic story of its maker nor because of its awkward genesis, but be cause, as Truffaut has said, in filming prosiac words and acts, Vigo effortlessly achieved poetry. The beginning of the inarticulate young couple's life together has an erotic charge rare in the French cinema of the time. So have the sequences when, parted by their quarrel, they long for each other in silence. Vigo, said the French critic Andre Bazin, had an almost obscene taste for the flesh. As a result, the couple's final reconciliation is the stronger and more moving. Added to that, Vigo created characters who, though larger than life, seemed absolutely true to it. Michel Simon alone gave an amazing performance as the bargeman. But then, Simon was one of the greatest of screen presences. Vigo was not afraid of going beyond realism while still insisting on the grittiness of ordinary life. The poetic power of the film, however, had a lot to do with the cinematography of the Russian-born Boris Kaufman, who worked on each of Vigo's films and was said to be the youngest brother of Dziga Vertov, and a collaborator with him on the famous Kino-Pravda films. Kaufman later went to Hollywood, where he helped make On The Waterfront, but he always recalled the days of working so closely with Vigo as "cinematic paradise". The images he and Vigo created with l'Atalante were dreamlike but intense and entirely without sentiment. And the final shot of the barge, taken from on high, is an abiding triumph. Maurice Jaubert's superb score was a perfect match. Gaumont found the film commercially worthless, hacked it to pieces and retitled it Le Chaland Qui Passe (The Passing Barge), inserting a popular song of that name into the sound-track. It was advertised as "a film inspired by the celebrated sung so admirably song by Lys Gauty". Only a few days after the first, disappointing run ended, Vigo died. His beloved wife Lydou, lying beside him, got up from the bed and ran down a long corridor to a room at the end of it. Friends caught her as she was about to jump out of the window. |
| QUOTE (Divvey @ Jun 20 2008, 09:43 AM) |
| are any of these "enjoyable"?? or do they require study & introspection?? And why is Chitty Chitty Bang Bang not there??? :rant: :rant: |
| QUOTE (Buy Kurious!) |
| I haven't seen any of his films, but I know he's well thought-of. I think Polanski is in one of them. |
| QUOTE (Buy Kurious!) |
| The only Polish filmmaker I know something about is Krzysztof Kieslowski. He's one of the greatest filmmakers ever, along with Andrzej Wajda. His 'Dekalog' series (based on each of the 10 Commandments) and 'The Double-Life of Veronique' are some of the best films I've ever seen. |
| QUOTE (Dice Man @ Jun 20 2008, 12:42 PM) |
| Haven't seen most of them, so abstain. But thanks BK & Hipper for posting about Ashes and Diamonds. Don't want to hijack the poll, but can only recommend the book by Andrzejewski. And this poem by his compatriot Zbigniew Herbert sums Eastern Europe up (sorry, 'tis my pretentious post of the week): Elegy of Fortinbras (Zbigniew Herbert) for C.M. Now that we’re alone we can talk prince man to man though you lie on the stairs and see no more than a dead ant nothing but black sun with broken rays I could never think of your hands without smiling and now that they lie on the stone like fallen nests they are as defenceless as before The end is exactly this The hands lie apart The sword lies apart The head apart and the knight’s feet in soft slippers You will have a soldier’s funeral without having been a soldier the only ritual I am acquainted with a little there will be no candles no singing only cannon-fuses and bursts crepe dragged on the pavement helmets boots artillery horses drums drums I know nothing exquisite those will be my manoeuvres before I start to rule one has to take the city by the neck and shake it a bit Anyhow you had to perish Hamlet you were not for life you believed in crystal notions not in human clay always twitching as if asleep you hunted chimeras wolfishly you crunched the air only to vomit you knew no human thing you did not know even how to breathe Now you have peace Hamlet you accomplished what you had to and you have peace The rest is not silence but belongs to me you chose the easier part an elegant thrust but what is heroic death compared with eternal watching with a cold apple in one’s hand on a narrow chair with a view of the ant-hill and the clock’s dial Adieu prince I have tasks a sewer project and a decree on prostitutes and beggars I must also elaborate a better system of prisons since as you justly said Denmark is a prison I go to my affairs This night is born a star named Hamlet We shall never meet what I shall leave will not be worth a tragedy It is not for us to greet each other or bid farewell we live on archipelagos and that water these words what can they do what can they do prince (translated from the Polish by Czeslaw Milosz) |
| QUOTE |
| 'The Interrogation' for Witek Piatkowski They beat him all day, and the next. Nothing doing. They beat him 'round the clock, all week. "Talk, talk," they shouted, "we know everything! We know your alias! And your name!" They showed his ID, banged his head on the table. "Say just one sentence! just one word!" They showed him his passport, foreign visas, books and secret documents from the lining of his suitcase, but then when they showed him his English tommy gun he said, "take away the tablecloth, I'm going to throw up." That's all he said. He was black and blue. They took him to Majdanek, locked him behind the wire. At night he cut the wire, escaped right under the sentries' eyes. What use is glory if this memory dies? |
| QUOTE (Mere Pseud. @ Jun 20 2008, 02:07 PM) |
| Touch of Evil, not because it's on top of this list. The ultimate film noir. Not as ambitious as Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, nevertheless the best movie Orson Welles ever made IMHO. |
| QUOTE (Derek Malcolm (The Guardian) @ Thursday January 7, 1999) |
| It might seem a trifle eccentric to nominate Orson Welles's A Touch Of Evil above Citizen Kane or The Magnificant Ambersons as one of the best 100 of all time. The film, now substantially restored the way Welles wanted it, is by no means his most ambitious. But it remains a mature, complex and endlessly fascinating example of film noir, a genre that has produced more satisfying movies than most others, precisely because of its seeming lack of pretension. The film was made in 1958, between the infinitely less satisfactory Confidential Report and Welles's adaptation of Kafka's The Trial. It was long after Kane and Ambersons, either of which should have ensured Welles a lifetime of Hollywood finance but didn't. Like them, it was generally underrated by the American critics of the time, who saw in it merely an eccentric thriller rather than a calculatedly dramatic study of the corruption of power and the difference between morality and justice. Few seemed aware that the opening crane and tracking shot, which lasts over three minutes, would come to be regarded as one of the most extraordinary examples of Welles's technical mastery. No one, that is, except the French, who immediately proclaimed the film a masterpiece. Welles was aided with the dark, claustrophobic look of the film by Russell Metty's mastery of noir lighting and, of course, by his own remarkable performance as the oversize Hank Quinlan, the driven police captain who is "a great detective but a lousy cop". The man is sleazy, cynical and full of hatred, but still oddly likable. He knows that the criminals he wants to bring to justice by whatever means are that in equal measure. There is a Shakespearean ring about his final tragedy, as if Falstaff had been transmogrified in time. He is merely part and parcel of a corrupt world, and somehow pathetic in that he thinks he is basically on the side of right. The Mexican he frames for murder is, we finally learn, guilty. The story is set in a rundown border town that was actually Venice, Cali fornia, where Roger Corman was later to shoot The Wild Angels, and populated by as unlikely a cast as Albert Zugsmith, the producer, and Universal can ever have assembled for what was intended to be a B-grade police thriller. With Welles were Charlton Heston, Janet Leigh, Joseph Cotten, Marlene Dietrich, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Akim Tamiroff, Dennis Weaver and Mercedes McCambridge. It says a lot for Welles that he also got such good performances from Charlton Heston, as the upright, rather prim narcotics investigator for the Mexican government, from Janet Leigh, as his timorous new wife, who is almost raped, and from Marlene Dietrich, as the prostitute Tanya, who has those famous last words on Hank: "He was some kind of man." Dietrich's scenes in the brothel are made to seem as if Sternberg, the circus master of her career, was directing her again. But if the film is noir at its best, it was made at a time when American directors, especially Welles, still looked towards Europe as much as to their own cinema, and to the German Expressionism of Fritz Lang, the maker of M. The film is shot through a lens that gives great depth of focus and also deforms the perspective. It is the visual key to Quinlan's character throughout. The moral key is quite simple, though worked out in a unique way. It is that Quinlan, betrayed by his obsession and eventually killed by his only friend, should not be able to claim, like Raskolnikov in Crime And Punishment, that he can "march over corpses or wade through blood" to do what's right. Or as Heston says: "A policeman's job is only easy in a police state. That's the whole point, captain ? Who's the boss - the cop or the law?'' Plenty of films may have made this point. But Touch Of Evil (which Welles thought was a silly title) expresses it both more strongly and more delicately than most, because he lets us see both sides of the equa tion. There is a mixture of compassion and irony in all his films, and there's the feeling that the camera is also a character, watching with quizzical curiosity. Cocteau once said of Welles that he was a giant with the face of a child. Like a child, he didn't know the meaning of fear as far as film-making was concerned, and that was substantially why his career was stunted by those who did. Touch Of Evil could have been hopelessly melodramatic and simple-minded. It remains, however, even after repeated viewings, one of the most sophisticated, multi-faceted and watchable thrillers ever made. |
| QUOTE (duckpin236 @ Jun 19 2008, 08:56 PM) |
| I have a problem with listing the director if he did not write the movie. If he didn't write it, he's just a hired hand, imo Night of the Hunter, for instance, is more of a James Agee work than the director's, imo. Berman, Truffaut, Allen, Eric Rohmer wrote & directed for the most part. |
| QUOTE (Derek Malcolm (The Guardian) @ Thursday August 19, 1999) |
| Jean Pelegri, one of the non-professional actors in Bresson's Pickpocket, said of his director: "He knows what he wants but he doesn't know why. "Nobody could be less dogmatic or more obstinate than he. He relies entirely on his instinct." Most people think that Bresson, one of the few film-makers who has never had to compromise for commercial purposes, is an intellectual who knows precisely why he wants what he wants. Which is partly the reason why not everybody warms to his rigour and severity. But there's no doubt that he is a great film-maker, and that Pickpocket is one of his masterworks. It is, at base, about self-fulfilment and redemption through love - a common enough idea in films. But this 1959 epic has seldom been equalled as a philosophical treatise on the subject. The point is that the film is as much a visual argument as a spoken one. Michel (Martin Lasalle) is a petty thief who, after being arrested and then released, starts discussing the rights and wrongs of crime with the police inspector. The only way he can find a place for himself in society is to engineer a head-on collision with it. It gives him a reason to live. In that way, picking pockets becomes an exciting, almost sexual adventure. It is a kind of pact with the Devil. But he has to leave France for London when the band of thieves he joins is arrested. And when he returns he is also caught. It is only when he is visited in prison by Jeanne (Marika Green), the girl who looked after his mother before she died and is now abandoned with a child, that he realises that his whole life could be changed by love. The humiliation of prison inspires him to a desperate act of faith. The story is told in the form of Michel's diary, almost exclusively in mid and long shots with minimal camera movements and fade-outs as an alternative to editing. Only once does another way of working come into it when Bresson, who was fascinated by the methods used by pickpockets, describes the operations of a gang among the crowds at a railway station. He also pays great attention to the sounds of the city which resound in the small apartment in which Michel lives. The Longchamp races frame the story and one notable sequence follows another, so that the parable grips even at its most internal. Bresson is clearly not a film-maker for everybody, but he has pursued his own way remorselessly for the best part of 40 years and he has a very faithful audience. His literary adaptations - from Giraudoux, Diderot, Bernanos and Dostoevsky - are often merely points of departure. For him, "the most important ideas in a film are the most hidden", so the watcher has to look hard to find them. It is not an easy process but it is a rewarding one since you feel he has a profound understanding of what he is talking about. His films have little or nothing to do with those of the French New Wave but a lot to do with his Catholic background and the fact that he spent 18 months in a German prison camp during the second world war. Prison also features Les Anges du Péché, Un Condamné à Mort s'est Echappé and The Trial of Joan of Arc. And most of his central characters seem imprisoned, if only in the soul, either through their misfortunes or because society has made it inevitable. If this seems a gloomy process through which to journey, there are always points in his films where redemption and exaltation prevent glumness. |
| QUOTE (Buy Kurious! @ Jun 21 2008, 10:30 AM) |
| Tarkovsky's one of the filmmakers I should definitely look into more. |
| QUOTE (Dice Man @ Jun 20 2008, 10:36 PM) | ||
I'd recommend "Stalker". Probably said it before, but watched it in some East Berlin squat cinema in the early noughties. The closing sequence whilst a train passed by and made the ragged building tremble remains unforgotten. |