Video Essay: "The Martin Scorsese Film School" from Flavorwire on Vimeo.
Between SCMS and Black Clock, the cinetrix engaged in so much real-life film nerdery last week she's been faced with a beyond daunting backlog of Internet to swim through ever since. If only one could put it on hold, like newspaper delivery*, to recommence on one's return...
The good, the bad, and the...
Still Whit Stillman [I am gonna watch the holy hell out of Damsels and try not to dwell on the Jamaica movie]:
- A look back at the '90s films of Whit Stillman by Flaherty friend Colin Beckett
- Whit Stillman in distress
Tik Tok, Marclay's Clock
- Watching “The Clock” at these obscure hours might also turn you into a feminist film critic.
- As gifted as Marclay is in joining cinematic fragments together, his greatest editing feat lies in creating a seamless transition between reality and fantasy—when it’s 11:24 P.M. off-screen, it’s 11:24 P.M. onscreen. Sliding into the slipstream of “The Clock” is the closest I’ve come to replicating those uncanny moments, in Haruki Murakami’s novels, when characters cross over into a parallel universe: “the other side.”
- Marclay's 24-hour video assemblage "confirmed Joan Didion's dictum that 'we tell ourselves stories in order to live' while reminding us that we are all going to die." Pretty great, huh? Or as Big Joe Turner put it, "You so beautiful, but you got to die some day."
- A window looked down on a courtyard, containing a tangled mass of crashed cars, where Fire Brigade members simulated extracting accident victims. Marclay was regularly rattled by fake cries of “Help!”
[via]
Mondo Kane:
- The scene ends as the three adults walk back towards the window. "Stop! The chair moved!" somebody shouted. "Just as the camera tracks past the chair on the lower right," the voice said, "the chair moves out of the way."
We reversed the film and looked at it again. The voice in the dark was correct. The chair movement isn't even subtle. An unseen hand clearly yanks the chair away from the path of the camera. But because our attention is naturally on the moving actors and not on an obscure chair in the corner, we miss it. We miss it so completely that in my 30 years of "Kane" shot-by-shots nobody had ever spotted it. Until now. "Thank you for the chair," I told the audience, quite sincerely.
- [B]y far the best anecdote, corroborated in triplicate, is the news that Siskel and Ebert began every taping with a boisterous round of patty-cake. "They performed it with complicated hand/knee slaps and everything," recalls an associate producer.
- Also, a map detailing the opening shot location [Venice!] in Touch of Evil. [via]
Auteurs 'R' Us!
- "Gertrude Stein punched me in the mouth."
- Hut, hut, hike! Altman.
- The Red Bucket boys direct Lee Renaldo.
- Zoom, zoom, zoom, let's go back to Kubrick's room. Or, er, not.
- Mr. Scorsese’s mini-film school, if you will.
Gazes:
- Why 1995 Was Probably the Best Year Ever for Movies
- Hey, girlfriend! [I love everything about this lineup.]
- Featured Meals From Steig Larsson’s “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” In a word: SANDWICHES
- The 50 greatest cartoons
The Conversation:
Oh, old people. Swift? Carroll? Chagall? Picasso? Enough with the stranglehold on the culture already!
Palate cleanser!
*Kids, ask your parents.
