Cine-odyssey-blog - CINE Odyssey

Bad Guy - Billie Eilish

From The Method (Метод) TV Series

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The Virgin Suicides (1999) | dir. Sofia Coppola | USA

Cinematography by Edward Lachman

“I understood the necessity of beauty, of an atmosphere of silence, of a void even in which the imagination might blossom.”

— Meena Alexander, from “Fault Lines,” originally published c. 1993 (via violentwavesofemotion)

Scorsese’s “Mean Streets” is a true original of our period, a triumph of personal filmmaking. It has its own hallucinatory look; the characters live in the darkness of bars, with lighting and color just this side of lurid. It has its own unsettling, episodic rhythm and a high-charged emotional range, that is dizzyingly sensual. Movies generally work you up to expect the sensual intensities, but here you may be pulled into a high without warning. Violence erupts crazily, too, the way it does in life – so unexpectedly fast that you can’t believe it, and over before you’ve been able to take it in. The whole movie has this effect; it psychs you up to accept everything it shows you. And since the story deepens as it goes along, you’re likely to be openmouthed, trying to rethink what you’ve seen. Its about American life here and now, and it doesn’t look like an American movie, or feel like one. What Scorsese has done with the experience of growing up in New York’s Little Italy has a thicker-textured rot and violence than we have ever had in any American movie, and a riper since of evil.

The picture is stylized without seeming in any way artificial; it is the only movie I’ve ever seen that achieves the effects of Expressionism without the use of distortion. “Mean Streets” never loses touch with the ordinary look of things or with common experience; rather, it puts us in closer touch with the ordinary, the common, by turning a different light on them. Every character, every sound, is rooted in those streets. The back-and-forth talk isn’t little-people empty-funny; it’s a tangle of jeering and joshing, of mutual goading and nerves getting frayed. These boys understand each other too well. No other American gangster-milieu film has had this element of personal obsession; there has never before been a gangster film in which you felt that the director himself was saying “This is my story.” We’re so affected because we know in our bones that Scorsese has walked these streets and has felt what his characters feel. He knows how crime is natural to them.

Scorsese could make poetic drama, rather than melodrama laced with decadence, out of the schlock of shabby experience because he didn’t have to “dive below the polite level, to something nearer to the common life” but had to do something much tougher- descend into himself and bring up what neither he nor anyone else could have known was there. Though he must have suspected. This is a blood thriller in the truest sense.

Pauline Kael

As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (Jonas Mekas, 2000)

‘The Godfather’ - Marlon Brando, James Caan, and Robert Duvall sharing a laugh off-camera during the filming of the famous wedding scene

via reddit

THE SONG THE LEPER SINGS

I am one of those people whom everything has given up. Nobody in the city knows that I exist. Leprosy has happened to me. And I strike my wooden clapper, knock my sad theme song into the ear of every person who comes near. And those who hear that sound look certainly not here, and what is happening here they don’t care to know.

As far as the sound of my clapper reaches, there I am at home; but maybe you’re making my clapper so loud that they won’t trust my distance any more than they trust my nearness now. I’m able to go a very long way without coming on girl, woman, child, or man.

But it bothers me when I frighten animals.

Rainer Maria Rilke -  “The voices” / from Das Buck der Bilder

translated by  Robert Bly

FILMS IN 2022: Decision to Leave (2022) — dir. park chan wook

Hansel and Gretel (2007) | dir. Pil-sung Yim | South Korea

Cinematography by Ji-yong Kim

Jin Ji-Hee 

Jigoku /dir. Nobuo Nakagawa

Jigoku (Nobuo Nakagawa, 1960)