287 posts
Latest Posts by cine-odyssey-blog - Page 9
Amelie (2001)
Director: Jean-Pierre Jeunet Cinematography by Bruno Delbonnel
Amelie (2001) | Dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Flora Guiet
Cinematography by Bruno Delbonnel
Give more facts 😍❤️
hahah but give me some clues as to what you want to know please :3
- He… he partially learned how to play the saxophone for New York, New York
- He lived in Sicily for about two months to learn his lines for The Godfather
- He auditioned for the role of Sonny in the Godfather, but got the role of young Vito instead
- He learned how to drive to act as a Taxi Driver
- To prepare for his role on Taxi Driver he actually worked as a taxi driver lol
He loved three things in life:
Evensong, white peacocks
And old maps of America.
He hated it when children cried,
He hated tea with raspberry jam
And women's hysterics.
. . . And I was his wife.
Anna Akhmatova
Taxi Driver (1976)
Director: Martin Scorsese Writer: Paul Schrader DoP: Michael Chapman
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
A loyal subject of these second-rate years, I proudly admit that my finest ideas are second-rate, and may the future take them as trophies of my struggle against suffocation. I sit in the dark. And it would be hard to figure out which is worse; the dark inside, or the darkness out.
Joseph Brodsky, from Sit By The Window (via 4eternal-life)
“Paul and I in a cottage, up a hill, near Penrith 26 years ago in a Polaroid.”
babes <3
Of Freaks and Men (1998) | dir. Alexei Balabanov
... Shot in a glittering, wintry monochrome, which attains a heavy sepia tint, Of Freaks and Men is set in turn-of-the-century St Petersburg. It imagines the bourgeois origins of Russia's fledgling porn industry: specifically that catering for images of flagellation and sado-masochism - catching this industry on the cusp of its movement from still photography to rudimentary moving pictures. The film's periodic silent-movie captions and its daguerreotype-hue are in homage to both media... What is most striking about this disturbingly dark satire is Astakhov's masterly cinematography, which not only evokes the primitive photography look of the era, but suggests the passing of an age of innocence, when weakness and trust were not rewarded with abuse and degradation...
The weird rapture of the beatings, which are first photographed, and then filmed, are overlaid with a sadness and an absurdity...
Balabanov's proto-Freudian bad dream Of Freaks and Men stands out as a compelling experience, sinuously original and deeply refreshing - although refreshing is perhaps not the exact word for this uniquely unsettling movie. Balabanov's brutal study of modern Russian gangsterism, Brother, is already on release here, and now this director's later picture marks him out as a distinctive and very remarkable talent.
There is something very gamey and very kinky in the way Balabanov represents the consumers of Johann's wares as being women, and this conceit has its own element of pornographic whimsy. Balabanov's juxtaposition of pornography with the trim, prim world of stage performance and bourgeois musical taste - in the form of Tolya and Kolya's sensational career on the stage - endows this secret theatre of sexuality with a vulnerability and a terrible pathos.
The weird rapture of the beatings, which are first photographed, and then filmed, are overlaid with a sadness and an absurdity as Balabanov reveals the emotional relationship that exists between Johann and the old woman - "nanny" - who is wheeled out on camera to administer the punishment.
Balabanov's St Petersburg is shown as having something in common with Arthur Schnitzler's Vienna, in which heavily furnished front parlours, upright pianos, mob-capped maids and antimacassars are the primal scenes for unacknowledged yearnings and sexual awakenings, both real and imagined. In Of Freaks and Men, Balabanov parodically invents a kind of prehistory of pornography, or a prehistory of sexual modernity: a deadpan world of suppression, displacement and exclusion in which nameless desires have an intensity for being hidden, but also a mortal and overwhelming sadness.
Of Freaks and Men is close to early David Lynch in its grotesqueness and Balabanov's images are faintly reminiscent of the photographs of Diane Arbus, with a suggestion of Joel-Peter Witkin, though they have always the solvent of tenderness. And, as in Balabanov's early movie Happy Days (released here last year), the bowler-hatted Johann and Victor have Beckettian severity and absurdity...
Alexei Balabanov on the set, 2007
Of Freaks and Men (1998) | dir. Alexei Balabanov
Cinematography by Sergey Astakhov
"Of Freaks and Men" is both a dark gem and a perplexing marketing conundrum. Pic will get fest kudos, but it's too much ribald fun for "serious"art film lovers and too offbeat in its birth-of-Russian-porno subject matter and stylized cinematography to catch any significant arthouse B.O. Its outside chance of success rests upon savvy exploitation of its undeniable qualities and quirky period parlor hijinx.
References for this picture, shot almost entirely in a tinted-sepia re-creation of period daguerreotypes, are tough to find, but one could look to David Lynch’s penchant for dwarves and Canadian cult auteur Guy Maddin’s oddball musings. Pic also bears strong stylistic resemblance to Steven Soderbergh’s ill-fated B&W “Kafka.” But “Freaks” contrasts strongly with all of the above in its fidelity to its sympathetic characters and the central premise that sex is the sinister undoing of both the innocent and the evil...
Thought-provoking, funny, disturbing and utterly involving, “Freaks” marks a terrific follow-up to Balabanov’s award-winning ’97 Russian box office hit, “Brother.” Cinematographer Sergei Astakhov’s carefully modulated and composed sepia-tone images are both disconcerting and hypnotically mood-enhancing. While the distancing effect may be counterproductive to the drama, it does lend an aura of the faded, forlorn days when the combination of sex and photography was new.
Viciousness in the kitchen! The potatoes hiss. It is all Hollywood, windowless, The fluorescent light wincing on and off like a terrible migraine.
----------
I'm doped and thick from my last sleeping pill. The smog of cooking, the smog of hell Floats our heads, two venomous opposites.
from Lesbos by Sylvia Plath - The New York Times
I like you to be exactly the way that you are, because in all my experience, I have never known anyone like you.
Tennessee Williams,A Streetcar Named Desire (via thelovejournals)
Toys, 1914, Oleksandr Bogomazov
Size: 71x71 in Medium: oil on canvas
I’m just sick of ego, ego, ego. My own and everybody else’s. I’m sick of everybody that wants to get somewhere, do something distinguished and all, be somebody interesting… I’m not afraid to compete. It’s just the opposite. Don’t you see that? I’m afraid I will compete — that’s what scares me… Just because I’m so horribly conditioned to accept everybody else’s values, and just because I like applause and people to rave about me, doesn’t make it right. I’m ashamed of it. I’m sick of it. I’m sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody.
J. D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey (via derakhtesokoot)
The Falsification of Photographs in Stalin’s Russia
Zelensky ’s defaced photograph comes from a photographic album in possession of artist Alexander Rodchenko, who defaced the photo in 1937 in order to avoid arrest and possible imprisonment.
Isaak Abramovich Zelensky (1890–1938)
photo source
The Pop Group / Justice // For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder?
And they'll bring in the army To break up the strikes And they'll bring the legal terrorists To control civil disorders Ireland is their practice ground To control civil disorders Our very own Vietnam Who guards the guards Who polices the police
Who
‘There is something that might be called cinematic beauty. It can only be expressed in a film, and it must be present in a film for that film to be a moving work. When it is very well expressed, one experiences a particulary deep emotion while watching that film. I believe it is this quality that draws people to come and see a film, and that it is the hope of attaining this quality that inspires the filmmaker to make his film in the first place. In other words, I believe that the essence of the cinema lies on cinematic beauty.’
--- Akira Kurosawa - On Cinema in General
Seven Samurai (1954)
Directed by Akira Kurosawa Cinematography by Asakazu Nakai
“ It seems to me that the purpose of art is to prepare the human soul for the perception of good. The soul opens up under the influence of an artistic image, and it is for this reason that we say it helps us to communicate—but it is communication in the highest sense of the word. I could not imagine a work of art that would prompt a person to do something bad…Perhaps you have noticed that the more pointless people’s tears during a film, the more profound the reason for these tears. I am not talking about sentimentality, but about how art can reach to the depths of the human soul and leave man defenseless against good.”
--- Andrei Tarkovsky
from Against interpretation: an interview with Andrei Tarkovsky / Spring 1981
The Scientists - Swampland
every day at dusk when the sun fades my mind returns to the everglades a place alive with green mangroves and vine shotguns and snakes, alligator wine. nobody knows so they never think to visit where the atmosphere's so thick that you could kiss it I've never seen copper heads darting from their graves a once mighty oak’s red roots… in decay
In my heart there's a place called swampland nine parts water - one part sand...
”What matters to me is that the feeling excited by my films should be universal. An artistic image is capable of arousing identical feelings in viewers, while the thoughts that come later may be very different. If you start to search for a meaning during the film you will miss everything that happens. The ideal viewer is someone who watches a film like a traveler watching the country he is passing through: because the effect of an artistic image is an extra-mental type of communication. There are some artists who attach symbolic meaning to their images, but that is not possible for me. Zen poets have a good way of dealing with this: they work to eliminate any possibility of interpretation, an in the process a parallel arises between the real world and what the artist creates in his work.”
--- Andrei Tarkovsky
from Against interpretation: an interview with Andrei Tarkovsky / Spring 1981
I don’t know how many souls I have. I’ve changed at every moment. I always feel like a stranger. I’ve never seen or found myself. From being so much, I have only soul. A man who has soul has no calm. A man who sees is just what he sees. A man who feels is not who he is.
Attentive to what I am and see, I become them and stop being I. Each of my dreams and each desire Belongs to whoever had it, not me. I am my own landscape, I watch myself journey - Various, mobile, and alone. Here where I am I can’t feel myself.
That’s why I read, as a stranger, My being as if it were pages. Not knowing what will come And forgetting what has passed, I note in the margin of my reading What I thought I felt. Rereading, I wonder: “Was that me?” God knows, because he wrote it.
Fernando Pessoa, I don't know how many souls I have
When I speak of poetry I am not thinking of it as a genre. Poetry is an awareness of the world, a particular way of relating to reality.
Andrei Tarkovsky - Sculpting in Time
Withnail & I (1987)
Directed by Bruce Robinson
Cinematography by Peter Hannan