Below are the 7 most recent journal entries recorded in The Daily Notebook's LiveJournal:

Friday, January 3rd, 2014
5:09 pm	The Best of “Movie Poster of the Day,” Part 5 http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/the-best-of-movie-poster-of-the-day-part-5 Above: Fan art poster for Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón, USA, 2013); designer: Peter Stults.  In this latest run-down of the most popular posters on my Movie Poster of the Day Tumblr—covering the last four months of daily posts—I’m not leading off with the number one most liked and reblogged poster (the Hitch-centric Rear Window, below) because that was the main poster in my loquacious posters post a couple of months ago. So I’m starting with the second most popular: a superb retro take on Gravity by artist Peter Stults which was one of a number of alternative takes on the film commissioned by the UK magazine ShortList back in October. The rest of the top 20 are a pleasingly eclectic grab bag, with  posters from nine different countries and seven different decades. Three of my very favorite recent discoveries appear all in a row: that French La notte, the Polish Desire, and the German Black Narcissus. The ninth most popular poster, that Czech morning-after-the-night-before take on The Seven Year Itch, I only posted two days ago on New Year’s Day and it’s still racing up the charts. Above: 1962 re-release poster for Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, USA, 1954) Above: 1967 Japanese poster for La Chinoise (Jean-Luc Godard, France, 1967); designer: Kiyoshi Awazu (b. 1929). Above: US one sheet for The Wind Rises (Hayao Miyazaki, Japan, 2013). Above: Canadian poster for Blue is the Warmest Color (Abdellatif Kechiche, France, 2013); designer: Karine Savard.  Above: 80th anniversary poster for King Kong (Merian C. Cooper & Ernest B. Schoedsack, USA, 1933); designers: La Boca. Above: 1970s French re-release grande for The Great Dictator (Charles Chaplin, USA, 1940); designer: Leo Kouper (b. 1926). Above: 1963 Czech poster for The General (Buster Keaton & Clyde Bruckman, USA, 1926); designer: Vladimír Fuka (1926-1977). Above: 1964 Czech poster for The Seven Year Itch (Billy Wilder, USA, 1955); designer: Zdenek Kaplan (b. 1940).  Above: US poster for Let’s Get Lost (Bruce Weber, USA, 1989); designer: Sam Shahid; photographer: William Claxton (1927-2008).  Above: US poster for The Grand Budapest Hotel (Wes Anderson, USA, 2014). Above: Unused design for Venus in Fur (Roman Polanski, France, 2013); designer: Akiko Stehrenberger.  Above: Japanese poster for The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Jacques Demy, France, 1964). Above: French grande for La notte (Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy, 1961). Above: 1959 Polish poster for Desire (Vojtech Jasny, Czechoslovakia, 1958); designer: Jerzy Flisak (1930-2008). Above: 1948 German poster for Hamburg premiere of Black Narcissus (Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger, UK, 1947). Above: Swedish poster for The Woman in Red (Robert Florey, USA, 1935).  Above: UK quad for Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach, USA, 2012); designer: Sam Ashby. Above: US one sheet for The Incredible Journey (Fletcher Markle, USA, 1963). Above: US one-sheet for Nebraska (Alexander Payne, USA, 2013); designers: BLT Communications. You can also see the ten most popular posts of the entire year here. Poster sources are all credited on Movie Poster of the Day; click on the titles for more information. If you’re not on Tumblr you can follow me on Twitter and Facebook and get daily updates there. And every Friday I post a link back to my more in-depth pieces here. (Comment on this)
Thursday, January 2nd, 2014
11:42 pm	Video of the day. New Behind the Scenes Footage of "The Day the Clown Cried" http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/video-of-the-day-new-behind-the-scenes-footage-of-the-day-the-clown-cried Out of all the films that are unfinished, lost, or out of reach of cinephiles, there is none more infamous than Jerry Lewis' The Day the Clown Cried—which means whenever any tidbits surface, it's an event. Also of note is this interview with Lewis during pre-production: (Comment on this)
Wednesday, January 1st, 2014
10:41 am	The Noteworthy: Goodbye 2013/Hello 2014, Badiou's "Cinema", Making "One From the Heart" http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/the-noteworthy-goodbye-2013hello-2014-badious-cinema-making-one-from-the-heart Editor's Note: We're kicking 2014 off with a bit of a format change in this here column. We'll be consistently posting separate, self-contained news posts in the Notebook, so we're taking out the news section here (not that some things won't be somewhat newsy) and making this more of a freewheeling zone of new/old bits of film criticism, images, videos, and whatever else we feel is "noteworthy" on any given week (which, to be honest, is in the spirit of the initial concept). Oh, and Happy New Year, everyone! Above: the official poster of the 64th Berlinale. After scrupulously rounding up every notable end-of-year list (and surely there is more yet to come!), David Hudson has published his personal list of 2013's ten best films. Of course, a myriad other lists keep pouring in: Boris Nelepo's Top 25 Ben Sachs' Top 10 La Furia Umana's Top 10 (to go along with their new issue, online now!) An incredible collection of best-ofs including lists by Nicole Brenez, Adrian Martin, and Jonathan Rosenabum. Above: Adrian Curry has posted the 10 most popular posters he shared this year over at his Movie Poster of the Day Tumblr. It's impossible to escape the debate and various takes on Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street—and since there's so much being said, here are a few relevant pieces deserving of your perusal: Here's Nick Pinkerton's take, the most exhaustive and persuasive of the bunch. The "Wild, Brilliant Wolf of Wall Street" by Richard Brody. What does the director himself have to say? For Hitfix, Kristopher Tapley interviews editor Thelma Schoonmaker about Wolf as well as her history of collaborating with Scorsese. Above: issue #57 0f Cinema Scope is now available in print & digital formats, with some content available online for free. For Screening the Past, Terence Blake writes on Alain Badiou's Cinema: "In Cinema Badiou uses his philosophical meta-language in a freer, more fluid, more poetic style than in his more systematic works. Being, event, multiplicity, and truth are employed in a way not incompatible with his system but that resonates more widely. Herein lies the distinctive contribution of Cinema both to Badiou’s oeuvre and to contemporary thought. The book allows him to traverse various ideas and experiences of the cinema, and to elevate them to a poetic beauty and a synthetic power that move us both affectively and intellectually. If cinema is a 'metaphor for contemporary thought', and if we are contemporary with a movement towards 'philosophy as cinema', as Badiou concludes, then Badiou’s philosophy is itself a metaphor for that thought, a synthesis of diachrony and multiplicity which we may call 'cinematic pluralism'." Above: I have to admit I find the teaser for Matt Reeves' Dawn of the Planet of the Apes to be more convincing than I would have expected. For his blog, David Bordwell has put together "a sort of aggregate of chatty tailpieces to certain entries over the last year or so." For Film Comment, Jonathan Romney "sorts through the year in cinema to find the best, the overlooked, the best-overlooked, and the just plain weird." Above: via Cinephillia and Beyond, the making of Francis Ford Coppola's criminally underrated One From the Heart. And finally, Neil Bahadur closes out 2013 with images from Jean-Luc Godard's King Lear: (Comment on this)
Monday, December 30th, 2013
5:11 pm	From Sketch to the Screen: "La Chartreuse de Parme" (1948) http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/from-sketch-to-the-screen-la-chartreuse-de-parme-1948 The bloodless Cahiers du cinéma wars induced a vague but hugely influential criterion for what was to be considered good and bad in film. Elaborate sets, one of French cinema’s major traits that, in certain genres, could compete with Hollywood, were deemed stifling and were rejected in favor of urban spaces and real locations. The infamy that Cahiers du cinéma’s critical bombardment brought to certain filmmakers, at least among a small circle of cinephiles, took years to reverse. While Cahiers du cinéma happened to be more generous to American cinema, fewer French directors were allowed to enter their cannon. If, for instance, one Robert Bresson did, otherwise many Jean Delannoys did not. While the art of some great filmmakers was acknowledged and they were given the throne, many others, who were less stylistically consistent, fell into oblivion. Today, more than half a century after the Cahiers wars, and regardless of their accomplishments, revisiting what was rejected (Claude Autant-Lara, Jean Dellannoy, René Clément, Yves Allégret) may seem as urgent as what was alternatively celebrated. Throughout the years, one of my personal preferences for returning to the classic era of French cinema has been following the architectural trends in those films with their dense spaces, wide use of existing decorative elements, paneling, fireplaces, mirrors, and ornamented surfaces, all now part of a bygone era. “The question is not one of architecture but of existence,” wrote Cahiers critic Ayfre Amédée1. Mine, at least in these series of posts exploring the grand sets of cinéma de papa, is of architecture. *** An example of the forgotten splendor of architectural films is Christian-Jaque, the director of some 70 films made between 1932 to 1985, who, not so fortuitously, started as an architect. After studying at Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs, Christian-Jaque’s early affiliation with cinema in the late 1920s happened to be working as production designer for Julien Duvivier. Later he turned to direction and had success in pleasing both critics and the audience before, during and after the war. Already established as a major figure in French cinema, in 1948 he directed La Chartreuse de Parme, a Franco-Italian co-production based on the story of the same name by Stendhal, which chronicled the life a debonair Italian nobleman, played by James Dean’s and Alain Delon’s precedent, Gérard Philipe. If it took 52 days for Stendhal to write the book, making the film, thanks to a detailed recreation of the castles, prisons and bars by Jean d'Eaubonne, turned out to be a longer creative process. Jean d'Eaubonne (1903-71), who graduated from the same school as Christian-Jaque and apprenticed with him in the ateliers of the legendary set designers Jean-Barthélémy Perrier and Lazar Meerson, was invited to design the sets for La Chartreuse de Parme. Around the same time that Jaque’s career took off as a director, D'Eaubonne proved to be almost a divine gift to French cinema whose design perfectly matched the world of collaborators such as Jean Cocteau, Jean Grémillon, Raymond Bernard, Marcel Carné and Max Ophüls. For the latter figure, D'Eaubonne, with a nod to theatre, designed La Ronde (1950), Le Plaisir (1951), Madame de... (1953), and Lola Montes (1955), and conveyed a sense of baroqueness which was further explored in director’s dazzling tracking shots. During the 50s, in any of D'Eaubonne’s portable walls, heavy doors, half-built staircases and smothering curtains, a sense of oneness, an almost sculptural approach to space grew (D'Eaubonne had actually studied with the sculptor Émile Antoine Bourdelle). His saw the cinematic space as one piece carved from a bigger entity rather than assembling pieces and creating a collage of spaces for the story. Many of these qualities are perfectly manifested in La Chartreuse de Parme, a film one can watch for its set as much as its actors, gorgeous photography or the renowned story. La Chartreuse de Parme’s design is aligned toward creating long corridors and suffocating rooms of one-point perspective which stage a corrupt, treacherous world and set apart the lovers in the story. The vigorous architecture of the castles, in contrast to the pastoral landscape, remains hostile to any idea of love and serenity. A tower imprisons Fabrice, the protagonist, and huge dance halls separate him from his love. In a sense, the whole film is divided between stunning, tyrannical shots of architecture with close ups of angelic Philipe. Like the cinema of Jean-Pierre Melville and his iconography of Delon against a backdrop of cold, bluish, steely modern architecture, Jaque’s hero is detached from his surroundings. Thus the last shot of Fabrice is almost devoid of any ornaments and leave us with an iconic face fading into the darkness. 1. Ayfre, Amédée: 'Neo Realisme et Phenomenologie', Cahiers du Cinema 17, November 1952 (Comment on this)
Sunday, December 29th, 2013
4:11 pm	Wojciech Kilar, 1932 - 2013 http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/wojciech-kilar-1932-2013 Wojciech Kilar, a classical pianist and composer who also wrote soundtrack music, has passed away. His score for Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) is one of cinema's greats.  (Comment on this)
Friday, December 27th, 2013
6:09 pm	The Limits of Seeing http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/the-limits-of-seeing This year’s Frequency Festival, held in the city of Lincoln in the United Kingdom, featured a screening of the first audio-visual work by The Society for Ontofabulatory Research. Airminded is an 18-minute essay film which counters the unchecked celebration of aviation heritage that is a defining part of the county of Lincolnshire, where the biennial digital arts festival took place over nine days. This part of rural England boasts links to the Dambusters raid and was home to many historic aircraft during the Second World War, giving rise to its nickname ‘Bomber County.’ The war efforts of the past, however, have been followed by the more recent, publicised and protested use of Lincolnshire as a base for the deployment of drones. Reaper unmanned aerial vehicles based in Afghanistan are currently operated from RAF Waddington, where a protest was staged earlier this year by campaigners opposed to the use of drones. Invisible to those eager to reinforce the heroic view of local history, the new hidden military activities are aligned uncomfortably with the familiar icons of air power in Airminded. The elusive and destructive power of today’s remote-controlled military technology, and the vastly expanded scope of often invisible airpower is referred to in Airminded through a simulation of starlings flocking and dispersing, a murmuration of uncontainable black clouds whose force ultimately sweeps across the screen, ending the film. Aviation, avian and .avi are here compressed into a portentous image of the migratory potential of unpiloted military vessels organised by digital applications to administer an attack. That power, supported by aerial photography, mapping, targeting and their use in warfare, nevertheless has its limits—details are dissolved by distance and the photographic evidence can leave stark traces to those who are left to reflect on its efficacy after the fact. The form which Airminded takes is visually aimed at approximating the bank of data monitors that a drone pilot is required to analyse and act on, with multiple screens feeding a continual flood of information which viewers cannot be expected to process in a single sitting. And so, the film asks implicitly: how can the pilot be expected to organise and act on this data coherently? Using original aerial footage shot by the filmmakers, photographs and film excerpts from local film archives, press articles, and documents from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and the Air Ministry and Colonial Office of the British Government 1919–37, Airminded is reflective of the current availability of information from the past and of tools to create new film images today. The potential of these resources to aid detailed objective analyses is contrasted with the fragmentation, misdirection and missed details that frequently characterise their handling. The film is both historical and speculative in its approach, exploring Lincolnshire’s relationship with flight and revealing the complexity of geographical vectors along which control is exercised today and how much further the reach of such control might be extended in the future. Airminded's ominous soundtrack mixes droning jet engine sounds—both field recordings and samples—effectively conveying the nauseating experience of flight, with additional spoken words throughout; though it is overly reliant on a ‘glitch’ effect, repeatedly used in the film, to punctuate the audio narrative. The film’s visual hyperactivity is approximated aurally by the inclusion of three voices of narration—a woman speaking in the neutral tone of a newsreader, recounting some of the earliest attempts at flight within the county and diagnosing the commonplace, Lincolnshire sentiment as regards the role of the local Air Force stations; the voice, of an origin other than English, of an eyewitness to drone attacks in the Middle East; and that of a young girl articulate beyond her years who at one point states, memorably: ‘You don’t need me to tell you about Boolean logic.’ It’s an odd statement, the inclusion of which is not immediately comprehensible. But, if anything, this mathematical reference explicitly introduces a key binary distinction: truth or falsity. The truth and falsity of images—as well as other oppositions, between the general and the particular, and here and there—are brought under consideration in the film. Above: Images of the World and the Inscription of War Soon after seeing Airminded I recalled Harun Farocki’s Images of the World and the Inscription of War (1989) and its similar references to the wartime uses of aerial photography, power and the limits of images. Viewed back to back, the connections between the two rise quickly to the surface and in particular the problem of the unseen. Despite technological advances, the ever-widening scope of our vision and the reaches of photography, these films remind us that an observer is still prone to miss seeing something crucial, even when it is directly within their gaze. The effects of this can be devastating, as revealed in the Allies’ images of the I.G. Farben plant shown in Farocki’s film. In these reconnaissance photos, the lines of newly arrived prisoners at Auschwitz, as well as the concentration camp’s main buildings, go unrecognised. Important visual details are also lost to us through distance, both vertically and horizontally: the effects of local acts on distant co-ordinates can remain unseen and unfelt in an age of remote operation and imperfect resolution. Above: Images of the World and the Inscription of War But every image speaks volumes, if only we could see past what we expect to see, or do not see due to a lack of interest. And the relative safety of looking at an image far from its point of origin; from the specific locale and historical context in which it was taken—which may be a perilous one—can diminish one’s emotional response to ‘elsewhere’. Our view of everything is limited, from the state of a landscape to the depth of a culture, including that of cinema. Yet many try to place a frame around things in a way that allows them to feel that they understand; or maybe others choose to place multiple frames side by side, as Airminded does, to detect patterns, to make sense, to form narratives. Images of the World and the Inscription of War is not the only film which shares Airminded's interest in considering the scrutiny of images removed geographically or temporally from their point of capture, alongside the implications of photography and video as used in military engagements. Ici et ailleurs (1976), made by Jean-Luc Godard, Anne-Marie Miéville and Jean-Pierre Gorin originally for the Palestinian army, also sees the filmmakers expressing their relationship to images of war, in a similarly experimental and self-interrogating manner. The repetition of scenes, shots and sounds in Ici et ailleurs as well as its concern with complacency versus action, and how best to organise the audio and the visual so as to shift the meaning of images gives it a surface resemblance to Airminded: at times it even arrives at a similar multi-screen format. The Society for Ontofabulatory Research, like the Dziga Vertov Group, show an interest in using film to raise political concerns, disperse the concept of the single author and wrench cinema from its conventional forms and modes of address. Above: Ici et ailleurs But connecting Airminded so readily with these other, widely recognised examples of the essay film or its intersection with militant cinema of the past, is to aim for that bigger picture—within film history—and risks neglecting the significance of its blunt, local address. Screened within a museum which is a popular tourist attraction within a city renowned for its place in English aviation history, Airminded took a rare, daring look at the more unpalatable and underrecognised aspects of Lincolnshire’s role for the Air Force and the rapidly advancing and unseeable technology that can be put to uses both beneficial and highly questionable. It is a film that is meant to be seen locally. Although it is easy to see its similarities with other works, which might leap to mind so readily in a media culture where so much is available to see, Airminded opposes the drifting rumination that characterises many popular essay films. Airminded's polemic is aimed at specific co-ordinates—though its message might readily provoke engagement further afield. (Comment on this)
Monday, December 23rd, 2013
5:10 pm	Filthy Rich in the Comedy of Kings: Martin Scorsese's "The Wolf of Wall Street" http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/filthy-rich-in-the-comedy-of-kings-martin-scorseses-the-wolf-of-wall-street "For a brief, fleeting moment, I’d forgotten I was rich and lived in America." The Wolf of Wall Street—Martin Scorsese's first out-and-out comedy since After Hours—transforms the rise and fall of real-life stock swindler Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) into three hours of drug freak outs and privileged misbehavior. It wouldn't be too hard to turn Belfort's story into a tragic cautionary tale—a young man overwhelmed by the lure of sex, drugs, and power, etc.—but Scorsese, DiCaprio, and screenwriter Terence Winter play him up as an overtly comic, ridiculous figure: a big-time brat, incapable of controlling his impulses, who runs his penny stock empire like a demented Greek-letter fraternity, entertaining his pledges / employees with competitions, marching bands, strippers, and rah-rah pep rallies. Surprisingly, the movie is less decadent style-wise than any of Scorsese's recent work, set mostly in offices and generic mansions lit with realistic, inexpressive flat whiteness. The music cues are eclectic even by the director's standards (the theme song from Goldfinger, Cypress Hill's "Insane in the Brain," the Foo Fighters' "Everlong"), but never gel with the action in any kind of significant way. And yet, even while operating in this kind of low-power mode, Scorsese is able to pile on enough eccentric flourishes—hearing multiple characters' thoughts, monologues addressed directly to the viewer—to create a sense of narrative energy that plays off of DiCaprio's deranged lead performance.  Scorsese's big, long, hopped-up movies have a tendency to end on abrupt minor notes. Whether it's Ace Rothstein staring out out from behind thick, grandpa-ish prescription sunglasses at the end of Casino, "schnook" Henry Hill grabbing his morning paper at the end of Goodfellas, or Howard Hughes repeating a phrase ("the way of the future") to his reflection at the end of The Aviator, these scenes feel disconnected from the narrative flow of the film. They are deliberately off-rhythm, and reveal a sad emptiness which the protagonist has been hiding inside of himself all along. All of the relationships the protagonist formed over the course of the film are now gone; the hole he was trying to fill is all that he has left. It's difficult to say whether The Wolf of Wall Street works as anything more than a series of comic set-pieces without bringing up the ending, which finds Belfort re-enacting an earlier scene from the film in a different tone of voice and with a new audience. The familiar Scorsese-coda loneliness registers, but it's only meaningful in context, and the fact is that—for all of its gonzo narrative and performative energy—Wolf doesn't seem to create much of a psychological context for Belfort. In the film, he functions first and foremost as an entrypoint into a certain kind of behavior; his whys are less important than his hows. At lunchtime in a tony restaurant, Belfort's first boss, Mark Hanna (Matthew McConaughey), shares with his newest employee the secret to stock-trading success: develop a cocaine habit and have at least two orgasms a day; if you have to go to the bathroom to jerk off while at work, think about money. Hanna oozes dopey Zen calm, sitting at his corner table, snorting blow in full view of the customers and staff. The young Belfort sits across from him, awestruck. The Wolf of Wall Street never bothers to explain why Belfort set out to become a stock trader in the first place, why he ended up quitting drugs, or why he married his first wife, but it establishes early on why he wanted to become successful: so that he could afford a life like Hanna's, where he could do or say anything without immediate repercussions.  Belfort loves to boast about having “done everything,” at least as far as sex and drugs are concerned; over the course of the film, he hosts orgies on private jets, snorts cocaine from every possible surface and orifice, and—during a standout sequence—consumes enough Quaaludes to regress into a semi-primordial form, Altered States-style. One gets the sense, though, that he’s isn’t getting off on the acts themselves, but from his ability to do them. He can, so he does; his motivations are circular. They’re also psychologically vague: whatever originally motivated Belfort to start the cycle of wanting and doing—and whatever allowed him to break it later on—remains off-screen. Belfort's crimes are only marginally less obscure. During one of his fourth-wall-breaking monologues, he tells the audience that it doesn't matter if they understand what's actually going on in his financial empire—the only thing they need to know is that it's all very illegal. Wrongness—social, legal, emotional—becomes the subject of the film. These people can do this, it seems to say, and it doesn't matter why. Money can't buy happiness, but enough of it can buy a degree of freedom from consequences. There's a certain smugness to Belfort's tone in the final scene of the film; he seems lonely and empty, but also strangely satisfied. Once rich, he is now infamous—meaning that he still gets to lead a life where no one expects him to behave morally.  (Comment on this)