Evan Kubota wrote:I frankly couldn't give a shit whether/how the film incorporates, explicitly or otherwise, commentary regarding the proletariat and socialism.
me neither. the thing is that in "european cinema" you *have* to address these things or you will always be heavily criticized. my opinion is that this is crippling us, not making american films duller or whatever. most of the best films have always come from america, and it's sad that a few big mommas houses and missions to mars can blind an entire continent so completely from that fact.
may i add that my own films have always been more successful on the festival circuits of the u.s. and scandinavia than in the rest of europe where nobody seems to like any of my art. :-)
mattias wrote:may i add that my own films have always been more successful on the festival circuits of the u.s. and scandinavia than in the rest of europe where nobody seems to like any of my art.
the most amazing period of European history being reduced into a high-school teen drama
you make that sound like it's a bad thing. what good is history if it doesn't tell us anything about our own lives today? and we've been over this before but you *really* need to dig deeper into american cinema. i mean how could know anything about it if you only watch the "generally dull" stuff? ;-)
1/ It is a bad thing. A high school teen drama tells me nothing, its a plastic representation of US culture (fictitious even in its native context) transposed onto another country and time. A waste of money and time.
2/ Please recommend me this quality US cinema. I appreciate some of its product, but there's not much out there I find really exciting. Evan recommends Gallo's stuff, which has never done much for me.
3/ Just to counter the nimpression I may be giving of being rabidly anti-American I will add that I think the US and Canada are most definately at the cutting edge musically, with nothing to rival a lot of the sounds coming from there.
...my use of the term "overproduced" was probably a bit careless since I didn't define what I mean by that. What I mean is I was under the impression American Zoetrope picked up the project primarily because Sofia is in the family. I'm glad they supported that project and "Lost in Translation" because I think Sofia is now finding her voice as a producer and director and I think she has a lot of important things to say.
RE: "high school teenage drama"
While I agree with Mattias here that *we need to show how history is situated in our own lives now*, I am also sensitive to the fact that cinema art, especially in the United States, is an art-form that is marketed to people who are in their eary to mid-twenties and to teenagers. That is the cinema-going demographic here in the States and since film profitability is greatly reliant on box-office receipts from the opening weekend in theatres, the corporate film distribution entities want films that will draw the teen-aged demographic..... (I know I'm not explaining something that you guys don't already know)... but it needs to be said to make my point here.
My point is that the current market-driven trend in cinema is to make films for teenagers rather than for adults. The problem with that is, in its short history, cinema has become a remarkably powerful medium for posing complex questions to complex problems that have a range of different explanations. The cinema *can be* a forum for filmmakers to pose questions on how and why cultural themes are produced and reproduced over time. Questions on racism, to take one potent example, can make for fascinating and *important* cinema. Its an important theme because I think the culture is losing sight of the inter workings of racist logic. When we do have films that deal with racism in contemporary American cinema, the producers make a project out of turning it into a political statement. The producers, and the corporate entities that pay for film distribution, might as well just pay for a giant billboard that says:
"we at Fill in the Blank Productions think racism is bad and you should to"
In other words, a production that makes attempts to be "socially responsible" and to engage ideas around difficult cultural realities like racism, end up being didactic works of propaganda designed to tell people what to think instead of posing questions that might encourage people to engage with their own thematics and learn to better understand the cultural phenomena that is racism in the context of their own lives. While I certainly agree with the premise that racism is bad for culture, as an adult, I'm left sitting there thinking *show me something I don't already know so that we can have a dialouge about that. Such a dialogue might actually be a productive movement toward a new discourse that helps the culture better understand the internal logic of racisms by learning to recognize the processes that work to produce the cultural phenomena that is racism.
When filmmakers miss this opportunity to pose new, and warranted, questions, something of great cultural significance is lost.
For me, this point ties into the larger debate on capitalism and culture. The film distribution entities only want films that can be sold to teenagers therefore producing films that engage questions or problems outside of the interest range of teenagers is not profitable under the current corporate arrangement. With this in mind, we can see how profit-driven logics work to *dumb-down* cinema-going culture. Filmmakers that dare work in adult subject matter, ( I think you know I'm not talking about porn here), are priced-out. The corporate entities always win because profits, for such entities are apparently more important to them than cultural significance.
While I agree with some of your views here, I think your ideas on film and geography are a bit old fashioned and out of touch with the current globalizing influences that mark the era we are living and working in.
There have been a lot of excellent films produced all over the world in the past decade and many of them are transnational efforts. Take the 2006 film "Tsotsi" as an example (my vote for best feature of 2006)
The film was made by a South African director who was educated at UCLA in Los Angeles. The story was written by a South African novelist of European descent. It is distributed by Miramax.
What about Gondry's new film. Is it American or French?
I don't think an artist have any responsibility towards whatever directions their artforms are taking in their countries. It's not even close to fair to judge people's work based on that. And why the angst of growing up would be less "important" than socialism or whatever is actually beyond me. /m
Btw, how come great european directors like kieslowski, bergman and kubrick get away with making films that are historically and culturally incorrect, set in fantasy universes, often with simplified plots, with the purpose of telling us something about what it is being human? You might argue that they're better, but i suggest you do that then. :-) /m
steve hyde wrote: because I think Sofia is now finding her voice as a producer and director and I think she has a lot of important things to say.
Please stop cutting her such slack..what does she have to say that is important?
I challenge you to find one important theme in Marie antoinette, which is even more vacous than Lost in Translation.
In regards to yor comments abot the infantalisation of cinema - I agree completely.
....since I haven't seen Marie Antoinette (and haven't commented on it in this thread) I'll have to wait until I see it before taking your challenge.
Lost in Translation had some important things to say about *loving* and she said them well. This second feature was so much more profound than her first effort. She deserves a bit of "slack" because, while it certainly helps to have a rich family in the business, it does take more than money to make a great film.
mattias wrote:I don't think an artist have any responsibility towards whatever directions their artforms are taking in their countries. It's not even close to fair to judge people's work based on that. And why the angst of growing up would be less "important" than socialism or whatever is actually beyond me. /m
.....not sure who these comments are pointed towards, but I'm not suggesting that films about the angst of growing up are somehow less important than anything else...and I don't think Nathan is saying that either when he makes reference to the *infantalisation of cinema*. I think there is a big difference between making cinema for adolescents and making cinema about adolescents. My own critical comments about capitalism have nothing to do with socialism and everything to do with the movie business.
mattias wrote:Btw, how come great european directors like kieslowski, bergman and kubrick get away with making films that are historically and culturally incorrect, set in fantasy universes, often with simplified plots, with the purpose of telling us something about what it is being human? You might argue that they're better, but i suggest you do that then. /m
Kieslowski, Bergman and Kubrick each made distinctly *singular* works of cinema. That is what I respect about their work. Yes, "simple plots", yet complex themes. I guess that is the argument I would attempt is: one built around the way these filmmakers used unique and creative ways to pose questions on their themes...
Kieslowski in particular was masterful at working with a theoretical structure which was built and suggested completely *through* the film but not *in* it. Paul Coates cites 'Rouge' as allowing simultaneous readings at multiple levels.
I'm not sure how often this is argued in the existing body of Kieslowski scholarship but it seems clear to me that quite a bit of the immediate power of his (later) films comes from appropriating aspects, formal and otherwise, from the Hollywood tradition.
The other point is that originally his plots were not that simple and his films were extensively grounded in a very concrete cultural reality that was depicted as accurately as possible... in fact everything until Dekalog (the start of a conscious depoliticization) followed this model. As long as he was working solely in Poland his work was not quite within the framework that mattias associates with Bergman and Kubrick.
mattias wrote:I don't think an artist have any responsibility towards whatever directions their artforms are taking in their countries. It's not even close to fair to judge people's work based on that. And why the angst of growing up would be less "important" than socialism or whatever is actually beyond me. /m
I think you're drawing out a false dischomy here. 'Fucking Amal' was a genuinely good film about teen angst because of its feeling of reality and interweaving of a lot fo other interesting themes. Teen angst isnt something that takes place against an abstract, movieland backdrop but is usually connected to time, place and class. Not that these need to be explicit or overbearing in relation to the universals of 'growing up' but for me they are essential for the depiction to be engaging.
That is a million miles away from the kind fo polished candy of 'Ten Things I Hate about about you' and incomparable to Marie antoniette loafing about shoe shopping.
steve wrote:
Lost in Translation had some important things to say about *loving* and she said them well.
While I disagree that it had much to say, Bill Murray's character carried whatever themes the film may claim to have... middle aged crises and all that.
The young Soffia Coppola character, played by Scarlett Johansen, did not engage me at all. I had zero empathy for her whiny, wide eyed, oh isnt it so terribe to rich and holed up in a five star hotel, character.
I'm ambivalent about this film. Many things to like and some to dislike. I think it's completely unfair to say that there's no ideas behind this film. As Tim suggested, the use of anachronistic clothing, music, and speech brings up the construction of history and how history is always being produced and reproduced. Apart from Barry Lyndon and its reverse zooms, it's not so often this is addressed in a historical epic or biopic film.
However, it's interesting to me that some liked the film for its interiority. I found it really hard to identify with the character Marie (not in an empathetic sense, with Marie's condition i.e. poor little rich girl, but in a film theory sense.) For me, there were no stakes for her character. Maybe that's the point, but if so, the film was too long to sustain the idea of her trapped by all the superficiality around her. I'm curious what people see as the paradoxes and contrasts and interiority this film brings out. To me the comparison to the Passenger, for instance, doesn't really work because the Nicholson characters does a lot of things, makes a lot of choices etc. Is the point of Marie Antoinette that Marie's only refuge and place to have agency is partying and shopping? If so, I thought her characterization was a little too flat to dramatize that (would have liked more of the swedish general affair). In the source material (book), does she deal with her boredom and entombment simply by shopping? I think the malick-y pastoral sequence gestures toward this, but there wasn't enough for me.
In terms of addressing the film, I don't think her biography is necessarily valid, and I think a lot of times it hinders analyzing the film as a text produced by many people and many forces. Though maybe her biography and the film's perspective have parallels, it's limiting to analyze the film based on her.
I agree that films have been infantilized to a degree in the US, and the target audience seems more and more to be teenage males. Has all adult dramatic programming moved to cable? And re: what seemed to be comments about Crash, I completely agree. I never seen a more self congratulory film about race and racism or one that had less to say about how the races actually interact. I would really like to go on a diatribe but...
As for Lost in Translation, for me there's a lot to relate to in Scarlett Johanson's character, and i think it's a huge hindrance to think of it as the sofia coppola character. Being lost in a place that's foreign, feeling like you're treading water in life, feeling around a relationship/infatuation that has no future or potential. Maybe it's partly a class issue, and all these issues are ones of privelege, but I know a lot of people who float around in their 20s trying to find their bearings.
