Way back when I made those pages I thought that I will have time to write my notes... Well, I do not have time to write -- and even to see films. I have no time for Film Club and for Film Festival...
I have no time... to think.
Go to Directors Forum, subscribe yourself and post your own thoughts about films and directing.
Folks, I started this page long ago for the UAF Film Club (I don't have time for them now) -- so, instead of making a new page, I will write a few words on my selections of films (videos and DVD).
I list only the titles I show in my classes (or would like to show), mostly the classics. I would like to have a vew separate lists to explain (show) the reasons, why I include this or that film. Mainly, because the goals of each course is different. In the 200X Aesthetics: Theatre, Art, Music Through Film -- an introduction to the language of cinema. In Film Directing is the practical applications of film theory. In Film & Drama -- the aim is to study the film narrative. In Film of the North -- the specifics (or even metaphysics) of the northern film schools. And so on...
Keep it in mind, when you go through the listings (same with the books), or better check the classes directory).
[See Listings at the bottom of the page]
From somewhere in the past: Yes, my friend, there are films and there are movies in this world. I post here the notes I take for films I show in my classes and for the Film Club discussions.
I still struggle with the idea of including American film-makers into the Films of the North. In my directing class I have them -- Lynch, Tarantino, Cameron, Coppola.
Kyle Erck: As part of their ongoing ambition to create a more cinema-literate environment in Fairbanks, The UAF Film club is presenting the Lars Van Triers film ,”Zentropa,” on Nov. 14 in the Salisbury Theatre at 7:00 p.m.
“Zentropa” is a German film that won the jury prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1996. It became known for the stylistic way in which it shows the story of a young American man looking for a job in Germany, 1945. According to Sean Bledsoe, the Film Club Vice President, the film is a must see.
“It really pushes convention, he said, “The whole movie is a hypnosis session and the audience are the ones being hypnotized. We’re trying to get people to read films instead of just simply watching them. Films like ‘Zentropa’ help.”
The Film Club has been known for choosing films that try to make artistic statements and entertain at the same time. With a list of movies that include David Lynch’s “Lost Highway,” Martin Scorcese’s, “The Last Temptation of Christ,” and Jean-Pierre Jeunot’s, “City of Lost Children,” the reputation comes well deserved says Tracy Campbell, the Film Club’s official Scribe.
“The movies we show are all the same in the fact that they all have a main question and try to explore possible answers, but urposefully leave you asking more questions. They become conversations instead of lectures. Too many mainstream films today just preach at you.”
The Film Club came into existence in the fall of 1997 with its screening of “Lost Highway,” and began moving its efforts more towards film-making with the “Black Days White Nights Film Festival” held annually on Valentine’s Day weekend. The festival includes screenings as well as film-making workshops and is held in the Great Hall Salisbury Theatre. This year’s festival theme is “Russian - America, American - Russia” contrasting the difference between the two country’s films about one another.
Not all the movies shown by the Film Club are of a serious nature however says Bledsoe.
“Last year for the festival we showed ‘Barbarella,’ and ‘Friday the Thirteenth’ just for fun,” he said, “There are a lot of fun films out there that are worth watching just for they way they tell the story.”
Film club members enjoy free screenings and popcorn (when available), and partake in discussions following each film. Meetings are held every Sunday at noon in theatre room 101 at UAF. The schedule for screenings after “Zentropa,” include Hal
Hartly’s “Trust” on Nov. 28, and Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Conversation” on Dec. 12. The film schedule for next semester has yet to be set.
To learn more about the Film Club or to get on their e-mail list check the Film Club website at https://members.tripod.com/~afronord/club.html
[They, the film students, graduated already]
SIDE BOX:
Highlights of Film Club Screenings:
-Burnt by the Sun
-Lost Highway
-Dead Man
-Natural Born Killers
-Lolita
-The Shining
-Barbarella
-Friday the 13th
-Casablanca
-Man Bites Dog
-The Last Temptation of Christ
-Easy Rider
-City of Lost Children
-Blue Velvet
My notes on one of Film Club Screening:
(Sorry, Film Club, the rest of this page is for
Film & Drama
class !
My Notes (Anatoly):
DEAD MAN
Jim Jarmusch, director
Blake passages, "Some are born to sweet delight; some are
born to endless night." Are there symbols of Blake? Milton?
When Blake is surprised that Nobody knows, they are being
followed, Nobody explains, "The evil stench of white man precedes
him."
White is not a color or skin, but the taste of thought.
Culture of Violence: violence as language (media). America is a real birth place of film.
[Violence as comedy. Spaghetti westerns were always comical in their stupidity.]
PM: Western as Reality. The spectators know the simulacra,
not life; so the art reflects of their "life" -- which is
fiction. They are ideological creatures. Never killed anyone, or
even shot at a man, never rode on the horseback, never were shot
at. They fantasized about living, about being male, about being a
hero. Western is a sublimation prescribed by Dr. Freud. "Dead
Man" is a reflection of this American ideology.
Dreams easily turn into lies. American Dream. Cowboy -- a
folk hero. What were his qualities for a hero? Simplicity or
stupidity. Where is he now? Gone. What is left is a cult of
physical power. Who is the target? Another man. not nature
anymore, it's domesticated.
An accountant turned into a serial killer. If Cleveland
wasn't dead enough. Dead = money. "Stupid White Man" -- they
don't live. They are dead before they die.
They point their gun at men, because they are impotent.
There are no women in Westerns. Woman is a whore, good for sex
only. But they could sex with each other. The World Wrestling
Federation -- the fakers. Bodybuilders are in love with their bodies,
spending more time pumping up than a woman on her makeup.
No birth, only KILLING. The only action and activity they
know and capable. America: Men Without Women. Coexistence.
Of course, they eat each other. Screwed up Animals.
Cannibalism of a bounty hunter.
"The Machine" city -- without Soul. Inferno isn't a
metaphor, we made it in a reality. We build the Hell, calling it
Civilization. No pity? Easy. No feelings. Period. Only fear
(Aristotle) -- that's a prescription for hell. Love in paradise
is killing, a mercy (Indian). Return to the world of spirits.
Being Dead is blessing in the kingdom of Death.
There's no time in hell. No reason, no logic. Composition:
use of fade-to-black to represents the passage of time. These
fades were frequently and consistently used, and they produced a
unifying effect (reference to b&w films). During the occasional
recollection scenes, Jim Jarmusch negates the fade, going to
white to indicate a memory....
Dead deer. Looks like DYING deer.
Who are they, American Indians? They are not smarter or
deeper, they are still mortals, living and that's their purpose
for existence. Nobody (Gary Farmer): What is yours?
Eight Eyes of God (including Milton, the awakened Humanity,
the only idea of the Supreme Being that will remain after the
Last Judgment), according to Blake.
Image of the invisible God (Christ) -- cinema, visions.
The painter maintains in his work a natural distance
from reality, the cameraman penetrates deeply into its
web. There is a tremendous difference between the
pictures they obtain. That of the painter is a total
one, that of the cameraman consists of multiple
fragments which are assembled under a new law. Thus,
for contemporary man the representation of reality by
the film is incomparably more significant than that of
the painter, since it offers, precisely because of the
thoroughgoing permeation of reality with mechanical
equipment, an aspect of reality which is free of all
equipment. And that is what one is entitled to ask from
a work of art. (Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, The
Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, p. 230)
Film is the language of the American Age, the time after the
end of the world. (Blake and the nature of cinema).
Evidently a different nature opens itself to the camera
than to the naked eye if only because an unconsciously
penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously
explored by man. Even if one has a general knowledge of
the way people walk one knows nothing of a person's
posture during the fractional second of a stride. The
act of reaching for alight or a spoon is familiar
routine, yet we hardly know what has really gone on
between hand and metal, not to mention how this
fluctuates with our moods. Here the camera intervenes
with the resources of its of its lowering and liftings,
its interruptions and isolations, its extensions and
accelerations, its enlargements and reductions. The
camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does
psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses. (236-237)
Does Nobody tell the story? Sees it even before he enters
the plot? Train. His POV (style of the film)?
I don't have time to post my notes on films/movies I saw (I don't even have time to write down my thoughts on many; like the most recent "Jackie Brown"). Tarantino has a (primitive) director's talent; I follow his work. He is a good writer. Something like "American Godard." He swims in commercial waters and lives, but I don't know for how long he can do it. There are "masters" like Speilberg, who can do it.
Yes, I put "masters" in quotation brackets because of my respect for the masters.
February 25, 2004
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Do You Recognize This Jesus?
By KENNETH L. WOODWARD
Watching "The Passion of the Christ," Mel Gibson's new movie, I kept
thinking the following: it is Christians, not Jews, who should be shocked
by this film.
Mr. Gibson's raw images invade our religious comfort zone, which has long
since been cleansed of the Gospels' harsher edges. Most Americans worship
in churches where the bloodied body of Jesus is absent from sanctuary
crosses or else styled in ways so abstract that there is no hint of
suffering. In sermons, too, the emphasis all too often is on the smoothly
therapeutic: what Jesus can do for me.
More than 60 years ago, H. Richard Neibuhr summarized the creed of an
easygoing American Christianity that has in our time triumphantly come to
pass: "A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without
judgment though the ministrations of a Christ without a cross." Despite
its muscular excess, Mr. Gibson's symbol-laden film is a welcome
repudiation of all that.
"The Passion of the Christ" is violent - no question. Although Mel Gibson
the believer identifies with a traditionalist movement that rejects
Vatican Council II, Mel Gibson the artist here displays a thoroughly
Catholic sensibility, one that since the Middle Ages has emphasized Jesus
as the suffering savior crowned with thorns. Martin Luther, too, would
have recognized in this film his own theology of the cross.
But there is a little twist here. In his prerelease screenings, Mr. Gibson
invited mostly conservative evangelical clergy. They in turn responded by
reserving huge blocks of movie tickets for their congregations. When the
film opens today, expect theaters around the country to be turned into
temporary churches.
And what's so strange about this? Unlike Mr. Gibson's film, evangelical
Protestantism is inherently non-visual. As spiritual descendants of the
left wing of the Reformation, evangelicals are heirs to an iconoclastic
tradition that produced the "stripping of the altars," as the historian
Eamon Duffy nicely put it. That began in the late 16th century, when
radical Protestants removed Christ's body from the cross. To the Puritans,
displays of the body of Jesus represented what they considered the idol
worship of the Papists. To this day, evangelical sanctuaries can be
identified by their lack of visual stimulation; it is rare to see statues
or stained-glass windows with human figures. For evangelicals, the symbols
are all in sermon and song: verbal icons. It's a different sensibility.
For this reason, I think, evangelical audiences will be shocked by what
they see. And, as Mr. Gibson has said repeatedly, he means to shock.
Catholics will find themselves on familiar ground: they, at least, have
retained the ritual of praying "the stations of the cross" - a Lenten
practice that, like Mr. Gibson's movie, focuses on the last 12 hours in
the life of Jesus. By contrast, Southern Baptists and other mostly
fundamentalist churches do not observe Lent, and even Catholics have muted
the ancient tradition of fast and abstinence that commemorated the Passion
of Jesus.
Indeed, Mr. Gibson's film leaves out most of the elements of the Jesus
story that contemporary Christianity now emphasizes. His Jesus does not
demand a "born again" experience, as most evangelists do, in order to gain
salvation. He does not heal the sick or exorcise demons, as Pentecostals
emphasize. He doesn't promote social causes, as liberal denominations do.
He certainly doesn't crusade against gender discrimination, as some
feminists believe he did, nor does he teach that we all possess an inner
divinity, as today's nouveau Gnostics believe. One cannot imagine this
Jesus joining a New Age sunrise Easter service overlooking the Pacific.
Like Jeremiah, Jesus is a Jewish prophet rejected by the leaders of his
own people, and abandoned by his handpicked disciples. Besides taking an
awful beating, he is cruelly tempted to despair by a Satan whom millions
of church-going Christians no longer believe in, and dies in obedience to
a heavenly Father who, by today's standards, would stand convicted of
child abuse. In short, this Jesus carries a cross that not many Christians
are ready to share.
It is easy, of course, to contrast third-millennium Christian mores with
the story of Christ's Passion. Like other Americans, Christians want
desperately to know that they are loved, in the words of the old
Protestant hymn, "just as I am." But the love of God, as Dorothy Day liked
to put it, "is a harsh and dangerous love" that requires real
transformation. It is not the sort imagined by today's spiritual seekers
who are "into" Asian religions.
Significantly, the Passion and death of Jesus is the chief element in the
Gospel story that other religions cannot accept. In Islam, Jesus does not
die on the cross because such a fate is considered unfitting for a prophet
of Allah. By Hindus and Buddhists, Jesus is often regarded as a spiritual
master, but the story of his suffering and death are considered unbecoming
of an enlightened sage. Like the Buddha, the truly liberated transcend
suffering and death. But Jesus submits to it - willingly, Christians
believe - for the sins of all.
Were we a nation of Bible readers, not just Bible owners, I don't think a
film like Mr. Gibson's would cause much fuss. While I do not think that
"The Passion of the Christ" is anti-Semitic, I do think it presents
Christians with a "teaching moment." But the lessons have more to do with
forgotten Christian basics than with who killed Jesus.
Kenneth L. Woodward, a contributing editor at Newsweek, is the author,
most recently, of "The Book of Miracles."
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
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