Trailer mad!

Hitchcock

Directed by Sacha Gervasi.

The story of Hitchcock and his wife Alma Reville, and how they shot psyhco. 

 

The Master. 

Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. 

"A Naval veteran arrives home from war unsettled and uncertain of his future - until he is tantalized by The Cause and its charismatic leader."

Trailer Tuesdays.

SIGHTSEERS

It’s a love story and road movie rolled into one, oh, and serial killer comedy. 

Directed by Ben Wheatley.

RUST AND BONE

Another love story, but beautifully done. 

Directed by Jacques Audiard 

GINGER AND ROSA.

Friendship and the cuban missile crisis. 

Directed and written by Sally Potter.

Well there you go three films I want to see in these coming weeks! 

1 ticket please

A life in moving image

               The Colour of Pomegranates.

A wonderful film, directed by Soviet filmmaker Sergei Paradjanov (1924-1989.)  With this film he explores the poetic potential of cinema, creating a series of autonomous images, directly inspired by the Armenian troubadour-poet Aruthin Sayadian (1712-1795) , who was known as Sayat-Nova.  Born in the capital Georgia, Tiblisi, Sayat-Nova began his career as a wool-dyer , educated by the Armenian Church, he composed hundreds of songs and poems. He rose to become a poet in the royal courts of Tiblisi and Telavi in Eastern Georgia. Later in life, after the death of his wife Sayat-Nova became a monk at Haghpat monastery; he lived there until his death at the hands of the Persian army, when Agha Mohammed Khan sacked Armenia. His songs are still sung in Caucasus today. 

Paradjanov has describes the film as a series of Persian miniatures. Camera fixed in place as in early cinema, and stylised animals and characters move closer and further away, objects relating to each other in a two-dimensional manner. 

"Paradjanov's style is punctuated by the blurring of the line between symbolic and ethnographic film making.."

The colour of Pomegranates is a heady mixture of styles and ideas both archaic and modernist- it is this iconoclastic director's masterpiece.   

Boredom

Hayao Miyazaki

HAYO MIYAZAKI- Born jan 1941.
Japanese manga artist, who co-founded the much loved Studio Ghibli with Isao Takahata. Miyazaki uses still traditional hand drawn animation as his primary technique, with the occasional dabble in computer animation. 

Miyazaki's narratives are notable for not pitting  a hero against an unsympathetic antagonist. In Spirited Away, Miyazaki states "the heroine (is) thrown into a place where good and bad dwell together. she mangoes not because she has destroyed the 'evil' but because she has acquired the ability to survive."  Miyazaki's films often emphasis environmentalism and the Earth's fragility, in an interview Miyazaki claimed that modern culture is "thin and shallow and fake" and looking forward to an apocalyptic age in which "wild green grasses" took over. He id critical of capitalism, globalisation and their impacts on modern life. Miyazaki has been called a feminist by Studio Ghibli President Toshio Suzki, in reference to his attitude to female workers and you can see this in his films, such as the all- female factories of Proca Rosso and Princess Monoke; this of course goes against gender roles common in Japanese animation and fiction. 

Miyazaki has sign up to Studio Ghibli for 3 more feature length films. 

Stan Brakhage 1933-2003

An american, experimental flim-maker. His apporaches varied from hand-held camera work, painting scratching directly onto the film, mutliple exposures, and many more. His flimology to date consits of 300 titles.

"I now no longer photograph, but rather paint upon clear strips of film – essentially freeing myself from the dilemmas of re-presentation. I aspire to a visual music, a ‘music’ for the eyes (as my films are entirely without sound-tracks these days). Just as a composer can be said to work primarily with ‘musical ideas,’ I can be said to work with the ideas intrinsic to film, which is the only medium capable of making paradigmatic ‘closure’ apropos Primal Sight. A composer most usually creates parallels to the surroundings of the inner ear–the primary thoughts of sounds. I, similarly, now work with the electric synapses of thought to achieve overall cathexis paradigms separate from but ‘at one’ with the inner lights, the Light, at source, of being human."

Last Nights Doodles.

Stains.

Working out some backgrounds for a new project. These are watercolour paintings.

The Brothers Quay.

Death, Decay, and Nothingness.
Stephen and timothy Quay, identical twins. Born in Norrisrown, near Philadelphia, 1947.
After Graduation from Philadelphia collage of art, they won a scholarship to the royal collage of art in london. They made their first few films (lost) with Keith Griffiths who collaborated with them again for the BFI funded project "Nocturna Articialia" (1979.)
Working a Koninck Studios the Quay Brothers have maintained a steady out-put of surrealist and fastidious puppet animations. They have also worked within the realms of theatre- designing sets- to help fund their avant-garde projects.
The films draw heavily on 20th century visual and literacy culture- Bruno Schulz, Max Ernst, and Jan Svankajen.
"The world invented by the Quay Brothers appears frozen in time, covered with dust and cobwebs, full of mirrors and strange machinery- a world stored in a locked room or glass cabinet that nobody has accessed in decades. The colour scheme often suggest hues of old photographs: sepias, browns and dirty yellows predominate."
The Quay Brothers remain directors- animators happy to live like their characters and objects, in remote, hermetic haze.