to return

Writing about film

Bordwell and Thompson – Film Art, McGraw-Hill Publishing, US, 1997 (5TH ed.)
Mamet, D. – A Whore’s Profession, Faber & Faber, London, 1994
Turim, M.- The Flashback in Film, Routeledge, London, 1989
Robbe-Grillet, A. – Last Year at Marienbad, (text for the film by Alain Resnais), Grove Press Inc. New York,1962Film Catalogue
Angelopoulos, T. (Dir.)-Eternity and a Day, Independent joint French/Italian/Greek production, 1998
Axel, G. (Dir.) – Babette’s Feast, Independent Danish production, 1998
Davies, T.(Dir.) – The House of Mirth, Film 4, US/British, 2000
Haas, P. (Dir.) – The Music of Chance, US production (Transatalantic Entertainment), 1993
Hirokazu, K.- Afterlife, Japanese production, 2000
Kurasawa, A. (Dir.) – Rashomon, Japanese production, 1950
Resnais, A. (Dir.) – Last Year at Marienbad, French production, 1961
Schlondorff, V. (Dir.)– The Tin Drum, German/French production, 1979
Tarkovsky, A. (Dir.)– Nostalgia, Independent Italian/Russian production, 1983
Tarkovsky, A. (Dir.)– The Mirror, Independent Italian/Russian production, 1974

 

References:

With reference to Last Year at Marienbad: “the whole film is the story of a persuasion; it deals with a reality which the hero creates out of his own vision, out of his own words” (Robbe-Grillet, A. p.10.)

“what are these images actually? They are imaginings; an imagining, if it is vivid enough is always in the present. The memories one sees again the remote places, the future meetings, or even the episodes of the past we mentally re-arrange to suit our convenience are something like an interior film continually projected onto our minds as soon as we stop paying attention to what is happening around us” (ibid p.13.)

“Documentaries take basically unrelated footage and juxtapose it in order to give the viewer the idea the filmmaker wants to convey. They take footage of birds snapping a twig, they take footage of a fawn raising his head…..the filmmaker juxtaposes the images to give the viewer the idea of great alertness”(Mamet, D. p.348)

“We should all want to be documentary filmmakers. And we shall have this advantage: we can go out and stage and film exactly those uninflected images we require for our story and then juxtapose them”(ibid. p.348)

“The images in a dream are vastly interesting. And mostly uninflected. It is their juxtaposition that gives the dream its strength…the same should be true of a movie. The great movie can be as free of being a record of the progress of the protagonist as is a dream”(ibid. p.350)

Mamet draws a parallel between filmmaking and psychoanalysis: “both studies are basically the same. The dream and the film are juxtapositions of images in order to answer a question”(ibid, p.350)

“The job of the film director is to tell the story through the juxtaposition of uninflected images because that is the essential nature of the medium. It operates best through that juxtaposition because that’s the nature of human perception: to perceive two events, determine a progression and want to know what happens next…….it is in the nature of human perception to connect unrelated images into a story, because we need the world to make sense”(ibid, p.383)