Daily green

вторник, 7 августа 2007 г.

Pedro Costa and Colossal Youth.

"For someone whose films have until recently gone largely unseen, the Portuguese director Pedro Costa has a pretty vociferous fan club," writes Dennis Lim in the New York Times. "His admirers include the French director Jacques Rivette (who called him 'genuinely great') and the Canadian photographer Jeff Wall (who claimed that Mr Costa's films improve on Robert Bresson's)... Staking out a radical middle between documentary and fiction, he has invented a heroic and quite literal form of Arte Povera, a monumental cinema of humble means.... Speaking by telephone from Lisbon, Mr Costa called his methods a throwback to, of all things, old Hollywood. 'It's like a studio system,' he said. 'We go to work every day. We have our economic structure - everyone gets paid the same - and we have our stars.'"
"With Colossal Youth, Anthology indulges local screenheads with a full Pedro Costa retrospective," writes Ed Halter, noting this "excellent opportunity to see the Portuguese director's vision emerge over time, from his more traditionally cinephiliac debut drama The Blood (1989) to his documentary on the auteurs of austerity, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? (2001), which doubles as a casebook of conceptual clues to Costa's own enigmatic esthetics."

суббота, 4 августа 2007 г.

The Willow Tree.

"The Willow Tree is the first film from Iranian director Majid Majidi to deal primarily with adults rather than children, but its main character - an awkward, laconic college professor named Youssef (Parviz Parastui) - is in many ways more childlike than any child," writes Julia Wallace in the Voice.
"Majidi's work (which includes Baran, The Color of Paradise and Children of Heaven) has always been based in folk tale and spiritual allegory, and The Willow Tree comes under the heading of 'Be careful what you pray for,'" writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "Developing a story of erotic fixation in a cinema that can't show so much as an ankle or a shoulder is challenging, but Majidi pulls it off with panache... A beautiful film, both simple and profound, which suggests that bargaining with God is a bad idea in all cultural traditions."

In the New York Times, Stephen Holden argues that Paradise and Willow should be viewed as a "matched pair": "Both films are explicitly religious, intensely poetic meditations, filled with recurrent symbols and suffused with a spirit of divine apprehension. Both are sad beyond measure, and both risk seeming mawkishly sentimental."

Into the weekend shorts.

"I first visited Kurdistan a year and a half ago, to film a documentary called Thank You for My Eyes about the Iraqi constitutional referendum," writes Bill Cody in the Stranger. "Then, in May, a Kurdish filmmaker named Jano Rosebiani sent me an email asking if I wanted to teach a filmmaking workshop in Iraqi Kurdistan. (Rosebiani won a director's prize at SIFF in 2002 for his film Jiyan.) The workshop - sponsored by Rosebiani's film company, Evini, and the Kurdish government - started in June. I said yes."
"Most of my colleagues consider Killer of Sheep to be [Charles] Burnett's greatest film to date, but I'm not so sure," writes Jonathan Rosenbaum. Don't get him wrong: he's still giving the film the four-star "masterpiece" rating in his Chicago Reader review. But: "My own favorite, which appeared on my last all-time ten-best list in Sight & Sound, is When It Rains (1995), a 13-minute short made for French TV. It has shown in Chicago more than once, but since it isn't on DVD or VHS, it's barely known. By the end of this year, when Milestone finally brings out its long-promised Burnett box set, this extraordinary film celebrating both jazz and community, made as a kind of respite and liberation after Burnett finished directing The Glass Shield for Miramax, will finally be available."

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