287 posts
Latest Posts by cine-odyssey-blog - Page 8
Harakiri / Seppuku (1962) | dir. Masaki Kobayashi
Cinematography by Yoshio Miyajima
Do you know the legend about cicadas? They say they are the souls of poets who cannot keep quiet because, when they were alive, they never wrote the poems they wanted to.
John Berger (via memoryslandscape)
“Mean Streets” isn’t so much a gangster movie as a perceptive, sympathetic, finally tragic story about how it is to grow up in a gangster environment. Its characters have grown up in New York’s Little Italy, and they understand everything about that small slice of human society except how to survive in it. Scorsese places these characters in a perfectly realized world of boredom and small joys, sudden assaults, the possibility of death, and the certainty of mediocrity. He shot some exteriors in Little Italy, where he was born and where he seems to know every nuance of architecture and personality (though most of the movie was shot in Los Angeles), and his story emerges from the daily lives of the characters. They hang out. They go to the movies. They eat, they drink, they get in sudden fights that end as quickly as a summer storm. Scorsese photographs them with fiercely driven visual style. We never have the sense of a scene being set up and then played out; his characters hurry to their dooms while the camera tries to keep pace. There’s an improvisational feel even in scenes that we know, because of their structure, couldn’t have been improvised. The movie’s scenes of violence are especially effective because of the way Scorsese stages them. We don’t get spectacular effects and skillfully choreographed struggles. Instead, there’s something realistically clumsy about the fights in this movie. A scene in a pool hall, in particular, is just right in the way it shows its characters fighting and yet mindful of their suits (possibly the only suits they have). The whole movie feels like life in New York; there are scenes in a sleazy nightclub, on fire escapes, and in bars, and they all feel as if Scorsese has been there.
Roger Ebert
Mean Streets (1973)
Director: Martin Scorsese Writers: Martin Scorsese and Mardik Martin DoP: Kent L. Wakeford
Mean Streets (1973) | Dir. Martin Scorsese
Charlie / Harvey Keitel
The pain in hell has two sides. The kind you can touch with your hand. The kind you can feel in your heart.
Your soul, the spiritual side.
And ya know... the worst of the two ... is the spiritual.
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
Mean Streets (1973) | Dir. Martin Scorsese
Johnny Boy / Robert De Niro
Mean Streets (1973) | Dir. Martin Scorsese
Michael / Richard Romanus
Mean Streets (1973) | Dir. Martin Scorsese
Tony / David Proval
Robert De Niro photographed by Santi Visalli in NYC, 1973
The function of the image, as Gogol said, is to express life itself, not ideas or arguments about life. It does not signify life or symbolise it, but embodies it, expressing its uniqueness.
Andrei Tarkovsky, from “The Film Image,” Sculpting in Time, trans. Kitty Hunter-Blair (University of Texas Press, 1987)
Wassily Kandinsky (Russian, 1866 - 1944)
Black Relationship / Schwarze Beziehung , 1924
Watercolor and ink on paper
© 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris
http://www.moma.org
There is no approach, no recipe. Each thing has to be done differently.
Josef Sudek (via 4eternal-life)
“What is that American promise? It’s a promise that says each of us has the freedom to make of our own lives what we will, but that we also have obligations to treat each other with dignity and respect,” Barack Obama said at the Democratic National Convention in 2008. And that section of the speech opens Andrew Dominik‘s seething “Killing Them Softly,” as he cuts the audio between white noise and the silent black title screen, signifying the blind emptiness of Obama’s statement and the thematic current he’ll be taking for the film. We are not a changed nation. We are not a nation of equals...
Killing Them Softly - Cannes 2012
Killing Them Softly (2012) | Dir. Andrew Dominik
Killing Them Softly (2012) | Dir. Andrew Dominik
Killing Them Softly (2012) | Dir. Andrew Dominik
“Night, the beloved. Night, when words fade and things come alive. When the destructive analysis of day is done, and all that is truly important becomes whole and sound again. When man reassembles his fragmentary self and grows with the calm of a tree.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (via seabois)
Killing Them Softly (2012)
Director: Andrew Dominik DoP: Greig Fraser
Amelie (2001) | Dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Flora Guiet
August rain: the best of the summer gone, and the new fall not yet born. The odd uneven time.
Sylvia Plath , The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
‘The Godfather’ - Marlon Brando, James Caan, and Robert Duvall sharing a laugh off-camera during the filming of the famous wedding scene
via reddit
Every true thinker for himself is so far like a monarch; he is absolute, and recognises nobody above him. His judgments, like the decrees of a monarch, spring from his own sovereign power and proceed directly from himself. He takes as little notice of authority as a monarch does of a command; nothing is valid unless he has himself authorised it. On the other hand, those of vulgar minds, who are swayed by all kinds of current opinions, authorities, and prejudices, are like the people which in silence obey the law and commands.
Arthur Schopenhauer, “Thinking for Oneself”, Parerga and Paralipomena (via philosophybits)
The Godfather (1972)
Director: Francis Ford Coppola DoP: Gordon Willis
‘I believe in America’
Our life always expresses the result of our dominant thoughts.
Søren Kierkegaard (via philosophybits)
The highest and most beautiful things in life are not to be heard about, nor read about, nor seen, but, if one will, are to be lived.
Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or (via philosophybits)
Amelie (2001) | Dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Flora Guiet