The Observer's Philip French receiving BFI Fellowship

On Wednesday I had the pleasure to attend my first BFI Fellowship ceremony. And this honour is even greater when received by a film critic for his stunning contribution to the film industry.
Philip French, the legendary The Observer's film critic, retired after 50 years at the age of 80. His career had begun back in 1963, and he has been defined as Britain's "greatest living movie analyst."
Not only did he lead one of the best and most read columns of the country, but he is also the author of great books such as:

• I found it at the Movies: Reflections of a Cinephile
• Westerns: Aspects of a Movie Genre 
• The BFI Film Classics on Wild Strawberries

The interview was great, first of all because it was conduced by Mr French's choice of some of his favourite moments in films. You will have the chance to watch them in a few lines.
One of the things I was most pleased with was the relevance he has as a critic especially because he is capable of making connections between films and different forms of art: theatre, literature, etc. which is what I am always trying to do. So I want to thank this wonderful writer, for being another great inspiration.

The first moment Philip French chose is from his favourite genre: the Western. Sequence from the delightful Stagecoach (1939) John Ford's first western after the coming of sound.
Since I couldn't find the sequence, keep reading and it will be explained.
After the clip there was a reflection on the importance of John Ford and this film, quoting the famous words of Orson Welles:

"I prefer the old masters, by which I mean John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford."

(And his statement about watching Stagecoach over 40 times while writing Citizen Kane.)

Also the novel that inspired French's love for films, The Movie Goer (1961) by Walker Percy, quotes the film:

“The fact is I am quite happy in a movie,even a bad movie...What I remember

is the time John Wayne killed three men

with a carbine as he was falling to the

dusty street in Stagecoach, and the time

the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in The Third Man.”

The following clip is, in fact, from The Third Man (1949) by Carol Reed:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKKq5LPnpIM

The following three moments where then connected to the uncredited cameo appeareances by three of his favourite writers:

1. Raymond Chandler in Double Indemnity (1944) by Billy Wilder (watch out for the man reading the newspaper):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vN9THMXxndw

2. Jorge Luis Borges in Performance (1970) by Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg , I couldn't find the exact scene but here are a video about the making of the film, and the link to the Borges' reference in it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGmZYKm7FGo

http://www.themodernword.com/borges/borges_film_performance.html

3. Graham Greene in Day For Night (1963) by Francois Truffaut, I wasn't able to find this one either, but here's Philip French's review:

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/feb/20/day-for-night-francois-truffaut-review

Mr. French moved then to the British realism, with a beautiful sequence from Secrets & Lies (1996) by Mike Leigh: ( I apologize for the bad quality of the video).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNmJNjJkOpg

I really liked the definition he gave of this clip: "It's an highly cinematic clip." All in long-take as you can see, which makes it so cinematic because, as Mr. French said, "you see the characters reacting to each other."

The clip from The Chess Players (1977) by Satyajit Ray, was incredible, I apologize because I couldn't find it. However, I am glad this meeting basically gave me a whole list of films to watch.

And, then, one of the last clips, the most significant one. It isn't only a film clip, it is a reflection on life, on a life-time career, and also a salute to 50 years of unforgettable words. Clip from A Late Quartet (2012) by Yaron Zilberman.
Watch it, and then you will feel as I felt in the cinema, it really moved me, so I cannot even imagine how emotional and thrilling that moment must have been for Mr. French.
Thank you again for your reviews, your humour, your kindness and honesty. As The Observer's editor John Mulholland said:

"There are readers who will feel that his writings are simply irreplaceable."

I leave you, as he did, with his last chosen clip, which I fortunately found. From Woody Allen's Hannah and her Sisters (1986):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftiIPJky_Vs

David Forgacs on Dirt and Order in Pasolini

Thanks to the King's College of London the BFI hosts a lecture on a topic/director, and so on, with different scholars and professors from all over the world. Back in March I had the pleasure to attend the talk of David Forgacs, Professor of Italian Cultural Studies at the New York University, and author of the BFI Classics on Pier Paolo Pasolini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Roberto Rossellini and Federico Fellini. The talk was lead with the help of visual examples from films' clips, which helped both in terms of textual analysis, and in understanding the changes of context.


I will give you a summary of the main points of the lecture, which will certainly increase your knowledge of Pasolini's work, or, arouse your curiosity in it.
Professor Forgacs introduced the talk by stating the recurrency of two elements in Pasolini's productions: dirt of various kind, material or not, opposed to order, representing symmetry. These two elements could be interpreted as the director's divided self. There are interrelations between the two, concerning the meaning of dirt, especially, which is influenced by the changes in the historical context.

First of all, DIRT, meaning matter out of place, is subject of shifts in meaning and value. In Pasolini's early works dirt is positive element, whereas in the later Pasolini, dirt really becomes "dirty".
There are four types of dirt which can be recognized in his works:

1. Earth and mud
2. Trash
3. Excrement
4. Contamination 

1. The first kind of dirt in strictly connected to the Roman landscape, and to the Italian language, which contains a rich vocabulary of words to define this term. In the landscape of Pasolini's Rome, that of the Borgata, mud is everywhere. In his first novel, Ragazzi di Vita (1955), he plays with the different Italian expressions for dirt. The positivity of dirt is expressed in the children playing in the borgata, their strong connection to earth, and use of mud as a playing tool. In Una vita violenta (1959) he represents the beauty of the landscape spoiled with dirt.

In Accattone (1961), the ambivalence of dirt is reflected in the ambivalence of the main character, torn between sacred and profane, angelic and diabolical, in the ambiguous gesture of self-mortification.
Another famous mud scene is the one in Teorema (1968), experimented by Emelia's character. This scene can have multiple associations. Lastly, Petrolio (published posthumous in 1992), his last and unfinished novel, portrays the capitalist corruption, the end of the borgate, and the predominance of a dirty dirt.

2. Trash, in the early period, is considered a source of vitality. It is another concept which allows the writer/director to play with the numerous Italian words: immondizia, immondezzaio, ecc. This concept is firstly represented as the redemption of rubbish, recycling to make order out of waste.
In his later work though, he talks about "sconfinato immondezzaio", he transfers the term's connotation to people. In his Trilogy of Life (Decameron, Canterbury Tales, Arabian Nights) he represents an insincere eroticism, he defines young people as "immondizia umana". The ultimate level of the negative side of trash is expressed in Salò (1975), turning into aggressiveness and mysanthropy.

3. In Una vita violenta, excrements were represented as comic outcomes in the texts. This completely changes in Salò, in the dark comedy scene of eating shit. He wanted that film to be very difficult to watch. In the end, it became an allegory about consumption.

4. The contamination element started, once again, from the language, the Italian dialects, which Pasolini saw as enrichments of the language, were often used together with high literary language. There was the elevation of the poor characters etc. Ultimately, the contamination became of another kind: in films/documentaries such as Le Mura di Sana'a (1971), he represents the personal struggle against modernization. The deturpation, negative contamination.

Second, the element of ORDER divided into its two connotations:

1. Positive (frontal visual style, openness)
2. Negative (symmetrical, closure, oppression)

1. In the first case, to give some examples, he used close-ups in the middle of the frame, and short-takes. In this stylistic choices he was influenced by Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) with Maria Falconetti's close-ups.

2. In the second case, the negativity is expressed through an excessive symmetry: through architectural features (archs), for example. The term becomes negative when the films are about entrapment, giving a claustrophobic feeling.
In Salò, for example, there is an opposition between open and close spaces. It is an allegory about the control of body and behavior.

In conclusion, Professor Forgacs stated some general points while answering the audience's questions. Pasolini was very perceptive in his writing about Italy. His advice is to use Pasolini without thinking through Pasolini in relation to everything. He was a conservationist with radical beliefs, he did not follow a linear trajectory. The Libertines in Salò are Pasolini, the projection of his anger.



Thanks to David Forgacs, for an insightful talk and making we Italians in the audience proud of our culture, richness of language, and epic figures such as Pasolini.

If you are interested have a look at:
http://artbookscinema.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/london-gay-and-lesbian-film-festival.html

Seven months of BFI Southbank

Since I live at at five-minute walk from the Southbank, I could spend seven months in the cultural heart of
London. In this second semester, unfortunately, I couldn't go to many events, because of essays, readings and tests which took all my time.
However, I still have all my tickets from the events I attended between September and January. Here's a brief summary of them together with films' and readings' suggestions.

What's a MacGuffin? This was the very first event I attended. Since one of my biggest  interest is screenwriting, I wanted to learn more about writing thriller films. The lecture consisted in a nice pastiche of Hitchcock's clips to analyse how the suspense is built through film form and characters. That suspense that Hitch defined as an exquisite torture for the audience. The MacGuffin object is essentially this: a plot device on which to hang the tension in a film, but that in itself could be anything and nothing. Some of the most famous ones in Hitchcock's filmography are: the lighter in Strangers on a Train, the ring and the newspaper in Shadows of a Doubt, the government secrets in North by Northwest, the first Mrs. De Winter in Rebecca, the uranium in Notorius, the suspected murder in Rear Window, the necklace in Vertigo, the $40.000 cash in an envelope and Arbogast's phone booth call in Psycho, the colour red in Marnie, the reason the birds attack in The Birds. As guest star in the last part of the meeting we had the pleasure to meet David Freeman Hitchcock's last screenwriter,who worked with him on Family Plot (1976), he also wrote a book about this collaboration called: The last days of Alfred Hitchcock.


Creative Collaborations: Edith Head and Alfred Hitchcock, see my old post about it here:
http://artbookscinema.blogspot.it/2013/02/characters-come-first.html

Caesar Must Die:
It's always good to feel proud of your own country, this was my feeling when I saw that both Paolo and Vittorio Taviani's film (also winner of the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2012) and Marco Bellocchio's
The Sleeping Beauty (La Bella Addormentata) were being presented at the London Film Festival. The film is a splendid homage to Shakespeare, to the richness of the Italian language, and, above all, to humanity.


 
The Art of Frankenweenie:
Tim Burton's Frankenweenie opened the London Film Festival last year, and the director left the stop - motion characters with all their clothes and settings used on the film plus pictures taken during the creation of them to the BFI for one-month free exhibition. It was fantastic, and the young people working there were all Disney Studios' employers who worked on the film and were ready to explain every single step of the creation of a stop-motion feature-length film. The work behind it is unbelievable, to all those who say Tim Burton is "only" a mainstream director etc., please believe me, he is an artist, with his visionary point of view on the world, and he takes care of every moment of his films until everything meets his taste. Read Burton on Burton if you still have doubts.


Im Kwon-Taek in Conversation - Run Far, Fly High:
The South-Korean director is the winner of the Honorary Golden Berlin Bear (2005) and nominated twice for the Golden Bear with Gilsoddeum (1986), and The Taebaek Mountains (1995) at the Berlin International Film Festival. Moreover, he won as Best Director at Cannes Film Festival with Chihwaseon (2002). He is a key figure to learn about the meaning of working in the film industry during a regime in which most of the topics were taboo. His films reflect on Korean society, on Buddhism, culture, Japanese colonial power. One of the reasons of his success is that he improved throughout his career by always trying something new. Extremely interesting to learn about the battle against censorship from a voice that saw and portrayed history in the moving pictures for 50 years. Suggested viewings: Mandala (1981), The Surrogate Woman (1986), Come, Come, Come Upward (1989), General's Son (1990), and Seopyeonje (1993).Here's the conversation: http://www.bfi.org.uk/live/video/1013

BAFTA Screenwriters' Lecture Brian Helgeland: always connected to my interest in screenwriting I wanted to attend this event which is part of a collaboration between the British Academy of Film and Television Arts and the BFI. 2012 was the third year in which those two institutions celebrate the artistic role of screenwriters in films. My lecture was with Brian Helgeland. Celebrated Oscar-winner for his script of L.A. Confidential. He talked about his career, obstacles and success, and about his personal style. For example, he is not concerned with the camera movements in his scripts, but he focuses on the psychology of the characters. He also talked about adaptations and said that you have to admire a book to do it, it's useless to rewrite something you don't even like. One of the most interesting things he said was that he fell out of love with movies after seeing how they are made, and, at that point, he fell in love with making movies. You can find his biography here:
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/celebrity/brian_helgeland/biography.php
If you're interested in the topic you can watch some other screenwriting's lectures here: http://www.bfi.org.uk/live/video/872


Horror Europa with Mark Gatiss: preview for BFI Members of this BBC 4 programme with Mark Gatiss (author of the series A History of Horror, 2010):
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFJXeVtHrkE
The screening consisted of his trip around Europe to research the roots of the horror genre in the 20th century: from the castle of Nosferatu and the German Expressionism, to the Italian giallo followed by the Belgian lesbian vampires and the ghosts of the Spanish Civil War to the 70s Italian horrors with De Palma, Dario Argento and Emilio Bava. Full of content and very rich with directors' interviews done for the occasion, visits on film's locations, and a proper narrative behind it exploring less-known films, totally worth watching. To conclude the meeting had a Q&A with Gatiss.

Screen Epiphanies: John Landis introduces 2001: A Space Odissey.
The director of The Blues Brothers and Animal House, films which shaped my childhood and that I rewatch whenever I can plus one my favorite director's masterpieces. Each month the BFI presents the Screen Epiphanies in which a big film director, producer, actor, etc. introduces the film that made them love cinema, and took them into that world. Here is the director's introduction:
http://www.bfi.org.uk/live/video/1016

Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures.
I have always wanted to see this documentary, and I had a very special chance. Introducing it and sitting among us there was nonetheless than Jan Harlan, Kubrick's friend and producer throughout his career. Every time I meet someone who played such a big role in the films I love the most, I feel very honoured, because it motivates me to keep on loving my subject, and hoping for the future. The documentary presents a very personal and well-rounded portrait of Stanley Kubrick, it was directed by Harlan, after the director's death (1999) and released in 2001. It narrates and celebrates his career, his attitude during the films' creation, and his actors talking about him along with his wife, Christiane Kubrick, his daugther, Vivian Kubrick and Jan Harlan (it was such a weird feeling to watch him on the screen and then turn my head and see him sitting there.) Here is the link to the complete documentary: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FR-loS9MHww

 
The Shining: nothing more to add, I love Kubrick, I love Jack Nicholson, and I love love love The Shining, I went to see the director's cut which was released by the BFI for the first time. Just amazing. And, actually, a few days ago, thanks to a classmate's presentation on Swedish cinema, I found out that the sequence of Jack breaking the door with an axe is inspired by a silent horror film: The Phantom Carriage (Victor Sjostrom, 1921). You can find it on Youtube, I watched it and it's awesome, I highly recommend it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hg7hAwUGQmo

Amour : certainly not a film for everyone, you have to enter the cinema being aware that you are about to watch something psychologically very strong and disturbing. I started crying just at the beginning, because I couldn't think of a better title to express what we see rather than AMOUR. Watch it if you feel ready, but bare in mind that it is not an easy experience, but one that is definitely worth the effort. Absolutely deserved Palme d'Or at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival and the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar plus other four Oscar nominations. Thanks Michael Haneke.