On the Channel: Jonas Mekas on Split Screen

VIDEO

Underground cinema icon Jonas Mekas has been a witness to the changing landscape of New York’s film culture since arriving in the city in 1949. Today, at ninety-four, he remains one of its most venerated figures. In addition to winning acclaim for pioneering diary films such as Walden (1969) and Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1971), the Lithuanian-born artist has long been an indefatigable advocate of his comrades in the avant-garde, finding ways to collect, distribute, and exhibit their work through the two institutions he was instrumental in establishing, the Film-Makers’ Cooperative and Anthology Film Archives. In the clip above, excerpted from a 2000 interview, Mekas sits down with independent-film trailblazer John Pierson to recount the wealth of viewing possibilities he enjoyed as a moviegoer in midcentury New York, from the experimental showcases at Amos Vogel’s Cinema 16 to the silent classics screened at the Theodore Huff Memorial Film Society.

Watch the interview in full now on the Criterion Channel on FilmStruck, where it streams as part of the sixth season of the TV series Split Screen, Pierson’s vibrant chronicle of American film culture at the turn of the millennium. And check out some of the other episodes we’ve just premiered from the show, including segments with Billy Wilder, George Kuchar, and Guy Maddin.

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[The Daily] Sam Shepard, 1943–2017

Broadway World has broken the sad and startling news that “playwright, actor, author, screenwriter, and director Sam Shepard has passed away. Shepard, who had been ill with ALS for some time, died peacefully on July 27 at his home in Kentucky.” He was seventy-three.

“One of the most important and influential early writers in the Off Broadway movement, Mr. Shepard captured and chronicled the darker sides of American family life in plays like Buried Child, which won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1979, and Curse of the Starving Class, and A Lie of the Mind,” writes Sopan Deb for the New York Times. “He was widely regarded as one of the most original voices of his generation, winning praise from critics for his searing portraits of spouses, siblings and lovers struggling with issues of identity, failure and the fleeting nature of the American dream. He was nominated for two other Pulitzers, for True West and Fool for Love, which both received Broadway productions.”

“Shepard was already an established name in the theater when he began appearing in movies,” writes Kate Erbland, “and he first major credited role was as The Farmer in Terrence Malick’s 1978 opus Days of Heaven. While always remaining steadfast in his affection for the stage, he went on to star in such films as Resurrection, Country, Baby Boom, and Steel Magnolias.” Also for IndieWire, Michael Nordine gathers tweeted tributes from Ava DuVernay, Jeff Daniels, and many more.

“His name and image earned widespread recognition via film, including his Oscar-nominated turn as U.S. Air Force test pilot Chuck Yeager in 1983’s The Right Stuff, director Philip Kaufman’s acclaimed adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s book about the Mercury 7 astronaut program,” writes Andrew Husband for Uproxx.

“Shepard wrote the screenplays for Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas, and Robert Altman’s Fool For Love, a film version of his play of the same title,” writes Elbert Wyche for Screen. “As a writer-director, he filmed Far North and Silent Tongue in 1988 and 1992, respectively.

For Deadline, Jeremy Gerard writes that “Shepard, like Bob Dylan, a Midwest transplant to New York’s creatively roiling, devoutly anti-Establishment downtown scene of the 1960s, came of age in the anarchic, off-off-Broadway theaters—Theatre Genesis, Caffé Cino, Judson Poets’ Theatre and La Mama Experimental Theatre Club. His early plays grafted the energy and often the music of rock ‘n’ roll onto the free-wheeling open verse of protest and youth worship. His affair and collaboration with poet and rocker Patti Smith resulted in Cowboy Mouth, whose hero was described in semi-mythic terms (‘a rock-and-roll Jesus with a cowboy mouth’).”

Speaking of Dylan, though, Duane Byrge and Hilary Lewis note in the Hollywood Reporter that Shepard “made his screen acting debut in Bob Dylan's movie Renaldo and Clara. . . . Shepard also played drums in a band he formed called The Holy Modal Rounders, who were featured in Easy Rider, and he accompanied Bob Dylan on the Rolling Thunder Revue tour.”

Gordon Cox for Variety: “Born Samuel Shepard Rogers III, in Fort Sheridan, Ill., he worked on a ranch as a teen and discovered Samuel Beckett—as well as jazz and abstract expressionism—at Mt. San Antonio College before he dropped out to join a touring theater repertory troupe. Later in life, he had a nearly 30 year relationship with Jessica Lange, whom he met when he collaborated with her on 1982 movie Frances. They separated in 2009. Shepard is survived by his children, Jesse, Hannah, and Walker Shepard, and his sisters, Sandy and Roxanne Rogers.”

For news and items of interest throughout the day, every day, follow @CriterionDaily.

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Dark Passages: Fatal Women and the Fate of Women

No woman ever looked more conscious of her fatal power than Ava Gardner in her first scene from The Killers (1946). Posing herself artfully at a piano, near a lamp that makes her dark locks and black satin dress shimmer like an oil slick, she has her back to the smitten boxer Swede (Burt Lancaster) but knows exactly the effect she is having on him. His dazed fixation makes the scene funny, and her knowing performance as Kitty Collins gives it a darker comic edge. In a sweet, girlish voice—polished by Hollywood speech lessons that expunged Gardner’s southern accent—she talks about how she hates brutality and could never bear to see a man she cared about being hurt. Nothing could be further from the truth: she likes to see men suffer, and her selfishness leaves deeper bruises than a fighter’s fists. She’s fully revealed in her last scene, when she crouches over a man who’s just been shot and demands that he use his last breaths to falsely exonerate her—prompting a great, sorrowful rebuke from Sam Levene’s police lieutenant: “Don’t ask a dying man to lie his soul into hell.”

What is the defining characteristic of the femme fatale, that film noir archetype of the scheming woman who preys on men? Even more than greed or coldheartedness, it might be deceit: a virtuosic ability to manipulate men with lies and playacting. The femme fatale is spawned by male anxiety—not prompted by women’s wartime emancipation, as many have argued, but arising from the age-old fear of being fooled by women, and the misogynistic belief that they are inherently duplicitous and inscrutable. This shapes the way actresses play femme fatales: they are often giving a performance of a performance, enacting a charade of feminine sweetness and frailty that satisfies the expectations and desires of their marks. In Eddie Muller’s Dark City Dames, Jane Greer recalls that when she played the enchanting thief, liar, and killer Kathie Moffat in Out of the Past (1947), director Jacques Tourneur wasted no time on the character’s psychology, simply instructing her: “First half—good girl. Second half—bad.” He told her to play it “impassive,” conveying the depths of her evil through a shocking depthlessness. A woman like Kathie or Kitty almost doesn’t seem to have a real self beneath the layers of lies: she is, as a disgusted Jeff Bailey (Robert Mitchum) tells Kathie, “like a leaf the wind blows from one gutter to another.”

Such women play the damsel in distress to appeal to men’s chivalry—as Kitty turns on the tears, getting Swede to take the rap for her when she’s caught with stolen jewelry. She morphs in an instant from a laughing sophisticate to a frightened little girl; she is a different person in every scene, seductive or sullen or demure, adopting the guise that will suit her purposes. In the end, when she comes face to face with Edmond O’Brien’s insurance detective Riordan, who has been excavating her past, she launches into yet another whopper, starting off shamelessly: “I want you to believe something . . .” But some truth slips out amid the lies. In this account, she describes how easily she tricked Swede, and when Riordan confronts her with this double cross, she gives a carefree little shrug and gloating smile. This tiny moment of pleasure may be Kitty at her worst, and her most sincere.

VIDEO

Some actresses could precisely calibrate degrees of duplicity, like Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity (1944). One of cinema’s great slayers of hypocrisy, Stanwyck crafts an act that’s as false as her character’s platinum wig, as transparent as her white sweater, yet convincingly deadly, all while letting us glimpse the dark pit of corruption beneath her glossy allure.

Now and then, noir gave actresses a chance to play something rarer than sweet-voiced, two-faced sirens: women who don’t even try to hide their rottenness. Honesty gives these misogynistic caricatures an exhilarating, liberating charge; they earn shock laughs with their brazen awfulness. Ann Savage’s Vera in Detour (1945), a relentless harpy who is endless fun to watch, set the standard followed by dames like Hazel Brooks in Sleep, My Love (1948), a sexy pinup with the personality of an ice pick. Perhaps the most unabashedly venal woman in film noir is Lorraine Minosa (Jan Sterling) in Billy Wilder’s corrosive masterpiece Ace in the Hole (1951). Lorraine refuses to play the role expected of her as the wife of a man trapped in a collapsed cave. When the flamboyantly cynical reporter Chuck Tatum (Kirk Douglas) wants to photograph her at church praying for her husband’s safety, she sets him straight: “I don’t go to church. Kneeling bags my nylons.” (Wilder credited this line to his wife, pointing out that he wouldn’t know from nylons.)

Jan Sterling was a classically trained actress from a patrician background who perfected a nasty sneer, a grating whine, and a look of voracious vacancy that made her the definitive “what’s in it for me?” girl. Even in the tawdriest guises, Sterling retained an astringent hauteur, suggesting a lifetime of resentments steeped into a venom as harsh as the bleach she used on her hair. She never flinches from Lorraine’s ugliness, but she doesn’t play it up as campy villainy, either: she gets into the skin of this coarse, sullen, grasping bitch and makes her the most real person on-screen. She’s very funny, nailing Lorraine’s cheap sarcasm and ingenuous vanity, slinging her lines in a voice that could strip paint off a wall. But it’s far from a one-note performance: her eyes shine with pure, childlike joy as she contemplates the money piling up in the cash register, then glisten with tears of shock and humiliation when Tatum slaps her.

Lorraine is not very bright—she never quite understands the brilliant, morally conflicted Tatum, or why it’s a bad idea to show how happy she is at cashing in on her husband’s misfortune—but in a world of people who lie to themselves and everyone else, her inability to dissemble feels radical. It’s why Tatum hates her so much. She reflects back at him the worst of himself, and despite his cynicism he can’t face the truth, so he takes out his own mounting guilt on her. Their mutual hatred is mingled with attraction, open on her side and channeled into violence on his. Alone in a dusty, bleak dawn soon after his arrival, they take each other’s measure. Watch how the dynamic between them suddenly shifts at the end of this scene: after carelessly airing her own greed and rattlebrained solipsism, she triumphantly reveals that she sees right through him, and knows his heart is as arid and rocky as hers. Poor Leo Minosa, buried in a cave, is in a warmer, softer place than he was in his marriage to Lorraine.

VIDEO

Marriage and family life tend to get short shrift in film noir. A wife often hovers in the background, keeping her husband’s supper warm, lending a sympathetic ear to his troubles, sleeping in the other twin bed—rarely rising above one-dimensional domesticity. An exception, and one of the most real and moving marriages in noir, comes in The Breaking Point (1949), Michael Curtiz’s tough-minded, razor-sharp adaptation of Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not. John Garfield’s Harry Morgan is no glamorous loner like Bogart’s in the earlier Hawks version of this story; he’s a stubborn, frustrated working-class guy trying to support his family and hold onto his fraying independence and self-respect. He is caught between two women: his loyal but careworn wife, Lucy (Phyllis Thaxter), and Leona (Patricia Neal), a good-time gal who seductively needles him. But these two women go so far beyond the standard dichotomy of nice girl/femme fatale—a trope that noir overuses but also questions—that the cliché dissolves.

Phyllis Thaxter had the wholesome, freshly scrubbed prettiness typical of postwar Hollywood housewives, but here she takes that template and stays within the lines—Lucy is supportive, virtuous, always in the kitchen—while ridding it of any false notes. Her performance is plain and clear like water, as honest about the strain of poverty and domestic bickering as it is about how physically excited this woman still is by her husband. Lucy has plenty of spine, but she’s also insecure enough to dye her hair platinum when she fears Harry is falling for the sexy Leona. The scene where she comes home with her new hairdo, nervous and embarrassed, to face her daughters’ disapproval and her husband’s bewilderment, cuts you to the quick.

When she finally confronts Harry, who has been sucked into crime, she pierces his self-justifying, tough-guy façade with scathing insight: “You’ve got that stubborn, stupid look you always get when you know something’s wrong but you’re going to do it anyway.” This is a film that decisively rejects the myth of heroic self-reliance (“A man alone ain’t got no chance,” Harry finally realizes), and it is Lucy who breaks through the wall of male pride to make him acknowledge his need for her.

With her sardonic, drawling voice and lushly knowing smile, Patricia Neal brings a more common noir sound and sensibility into the film’s workaday setting; she represents the easy way out. But when Harry finally succumbs to her persistent come-ons, their long-awaited tryst turns out to be an awkward fizzle. Her reaction allows a glimpse into her bitterness and regret (“I don’t like to think I’m not exciting, I haven’t got much else”), the way she gets through the “other woman” racket by letting everything roll off her, only to find that perhaps she’s incapable of feeling or inspiring real feeling. She’s as proud of her irresistibility as Harry is of his toughness, and in this moment of unexpected candor they both face the limits of their power.

Honesty is the one thing Lucy and Leona have in common; in this scene, the only time they meet, they spar cattily but find a small common ground of respect. They both see more clearly than Harry, who has crawled into the comfort of a bottle.

VIDEO

Women in the postwar era faced shrinking options and stifling constraints; film noir lets us see them pacing their cells and calculating how to make the most of their slender leverage. But in noir, everyone’s power, however fatal it may first appear, is dwarfed by the force of bad choices and indifferent fate. The real dichotomy is, perhaps, not between good and bad women—or tough and not-so-tough guys—but between those who know this and those who haven’t found it out yet.

Imogen Sara Smith is the author of In Lonely Places: Film Noir Beyond the City and Buster Keaton: The Persistence of Comedy. Her writing has appeared in Sight & Sound, Cineaste, Film Quarterly, Reverse Shot, and other publications.

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Addio a Sam Shepard

Ci lascia uno dei grandi attori e commediografi americani.

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Borg/McEnroe aprirà in prima mondiale il Toronto Film Festival 2017

Uno degli incontri più entusiasmanti della storia dello sport.

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mother!, ecco il primo teaser dell'horror di Darren Aronofsky con Jennifer Lawrence

Il film sarà in concorso al Festival di Venezia 2017.

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Nanni Moretti incontrerà il pubblico della Festa del Cinema di Roma 2017

Sì, il dibattito sì.

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Venezia 2017 - Il programma completo

Nel corso della conferenza stampa di presentazione della 74esima edizione della Mostra Internazionale d'Arte Cinematografica di Venezia (30 agosto-9 settembre), il direttore del Festival Alberto Barbera ha dichiarato: "Siete abituati a sentirmi dire che il cinema italiano produce tanto a discapito della qualità, ma quest'anno le cose sono andate diversamente. Ci sono tanti film italiani, e la qualità è molto alta."
I film italiani in concorso a cui allude Barbera sono Ella & John - The leisure seeker di Paolo Virzì, Ammore e malavita dei Manetti Bros., The whale di Andrea Pallaoro e Una famiglia di Sebastiano Riso. Spetterá alla giuria presieduta da Annette Benning giudicare il migliore, in un Festival che per questa edizione fissa lo sguardo nella zona centrale dell'Europa (su tutti Gran Bretagna, Francia e, appunto, Italia), mentre si ravvisa scarsa presenza di titoli asiatici e sudamericani, ma pur sempre in maggioranza rispetto a quelli provenienti dall'est Europa; completamente assenti film di produzione africana.
Una sorta di "europeizzazione", che affievolisce l'eclettismo della kermesse cinematografica piú importante dopo Cannes, puntando i riflettori su grandi nomi e produzioni ad alta risonanza: attesissimi Darren Aronofsky, George Clooney, Hirokazu Kore->Eda, Paul Schrader, Abdellatif Kechiche, Guillermo Del Toro e Frederick Wiseman (al suo esordio al Lido). Prima volta in assoluto per la nuova mini-sezione dedicata alla realtá virtuale.
Aprirá le danze Alexander Payne con il suo Downsizing.
Ecco, dunque, il programma completo:

IN CONCORSO:
(Concorso internazionale di lungometraggi in prima mondiale)

"Human flow", di Ai Weiwei (Germania, Usa, 140')
"Mother!", di Darren Aronofsky (Usa, 120')
"Suburbicon", di George Clooney (Usa, 104')
"The shape of water", di Guillermo Del Toro (Usa, 119')
"L'insulte", di Ziad Doueiri (Francia, Libano, 110')
"La villa", di Robert Guédiguian (Francia, 107')
"Lean on pete", di Andrew Haigh (Gran Bretagna, 121')
"Mektoub, my love: canto uno", di Abdellatif Kechiche (Francia, Italia, 180')
"Sandome no satsujin (The third murder)", di Koreeda Hirokazu (Giappone, 124')
"Jusqu'à la garde", di Xavier Legrand (Francia, 90')
"Ammore e malavita", di Manetti Bros. (Italia, 133')
"Foxtrot", di Samuel Maoz (Israele, Germania, Francia, Svizzera, 113')
"Three billboards outside ebbing, Missouri", di Martin McDonagh (Gran Bretagna, 110')
"Hannah", di Andrea Pallaoro (Italia, Belgio, Francia, 95')
"Downsizing", di Alexander Payne (Usa, 140')
"Jia nian hua (Angels wear white)", di Vivian Qu (Cina, Francia, 107')
"Una famiglia", di Sebastiano Riso (Italia, 105')
"First reformed", di Paul Schrader (Usa, 108')
"Sweet country", di Warwick Thornton (Australia, 112')
"The leisure seeker", di Paolo Virzì (Italia, 112')
"Ex libris. The New York public library", di Frederick Wiseman (Usa, 197')

FUORI CONCORSO:
(Opere firmate da autori di importanza riconosciuta)

"Cuba and the cameraman", di Jon Alpert (Usa, 113')
"Casa d'altri", di Gianni Amelio (Italia, 16')
"Our souls at night", di Ritesh Batra (Usa, 101')
"My generation", di David Batty (Gran Bretagna, 85')
"Il signor Rotpeter", di Antonietta De Lillo (Italia, 37')
"Piazza Vittorio", di Abel Ferrara (Italia, 82')
"Victoria & Abdul", di Stephen Frears (Gran Bretagna, 149')
"The devil and the father amorth", di William Friedkin (Usa, 68')
"La mèlodie", di Rachid Hami (Francia, 102')
"Outrage coda", di Takeshi Kitano (Giappone, 104')
"Making of Micheal Jackson's Thriller", di Jerry Kramer (Usa, 45')
"Micheal Jackosn's Thriller 3D", di John Landis (Usa, 14')
"Loving Pablo", di Fernando León De Aranoa (Spagna, Bulgaria, 123')
"Zama", di Lucrecia Martel (Argentina, Brasile, 115')
"This is Congo", di Daniel McCabe (Congo, 91')
"Wormwood", di Errol Morris (Usa, 300' - Miniserie tv, sei episodi)
"Ryuichi Sakamoto: coda", di Stephen Nomura Schible (Usa, Giappone, 100')
"Diva!", di Francesco Patierno (Italia, 75')
"Le fidèle", di Michaël R. Roskam (Belgio, Francia, Paesi Bassi, 130')
"Jim & Andy: The great beyond. The story of Jim Carrey, Andy Kaufman and Tony Clifton", di Chris Smith (Usa, Canada, 90')
"Il colore nascosto delle cose", di Silvio Soldini (Italia, Svizzera, 115')
"The private life of a modern woman", di James Toback (Usa, 71')
"Happy winter", di Giovanni Totaro (Italia, 91')
"Brawl in cell block 99", di S. Craig Zahler (Usa, 132')

ORIZZONTI:
(Concorso internazionale dedicato a film rappresentativi di nuove tendenze estetiche ed espressive)

"Apia (Aria)", di Myrsini Aristidou (Cipro, Francia, 13')
"Napadid shodan (Disappearance)", di Ali Asgari (Iran, Qatar, 89')
"By the pool", di Laurynas Bareisa (Lituania, 16')
"Espèces menacées", di Gilles Bourdos (Francia, Belgio, 105')
"The rape of Recy Taylor", di Nancy Buirski (Usa, 91')
"Caniba", di Lucien Castaing-taylor, Verena Paravel (Francia, 90')
"Gros chagrin", di Céline Devaux (Francia, 15')
"Les bienheureux", di Sofia Djama (Francia, Belgio, 102')
"Marvin", di Anne Fontaine (Francia, 115')
"Invisible", di Pablo Giorgelli (Argentina, Brasile, Uruguay, Germania, 87')
"Brutti e cattivi", di Cosimo Gomez (Italia, Francia , 87')
"Ha ben dod (The cousin)", di Tzahi Grad (Israele, 92')
"Ha edut (The testament)", di Amichai Greenberg (Israele, Austria, 91')
"Bedoune tarikh, bedoune emza (No date, no signature)", di Vahid Jalilvand (Iran, 104')
"Los versos del olvido", di Alireza Khatami (Francia, Germania, Paesi Bassi, Cile, 92')
"The knife salesman", di Michael Leonard, Jamie Helmer (Australia, 10')
"La nuit où j'ai nagé - Oyogisugita yoru", di Damien Manivel, Igarashi Kohei (Francia, Giappone , 79')
"Futuro prossimo", di Salvatore Mereu (Italia, 18')
"Tierra mojada", di Juan Sebastian Mesa Bedoya (Colombia, 17')
"Meninas formicida", di João Paulo Miranda María (Francia, Brasile, 12')
"Lagi senang jaga sekandang lembu (It's easier to raise cattle)", di Amanda Nell Eu (Malesia, 18')
"Nico, 1988", di Susanna Nicchiarell (Italia, Belgio, 93')
"Krieg", di Rick Ostermann (Germania, 93')
"L'ombra della sposa", di Alessandra Pescetta (Italia, 11')
"Awasarn sound man (Death of the sound man)", di Sorayos Prapapan (Thailandia, Myanmar, 16')
"West of sunshine", di Jason Raftopoulos (Australia, 78')
"Gatta Cenerentola", di Alessandro Rak, Ivan Cappiello, Marino Guarnieri, Dario Sansone (Italia, 86')
"Astrometal", di Efthimis Kosemund Sanidis (Grecia, 15')
"Himinn opinn", di Gabriel Sanson, Clyde Gates (Belgio, 19')
"Undir trénu (Under the tree)", di Hafsteinn Gunnar Sigurðsson (Islanda, Danimarca, Polonia, Germania, 89')
"Mon amour, mon ami", di Adriano Valerio (Italia, 15')
"La vita in comune", di Edoardo Winspeare (Italia, 110')
"8e epeiros (eighth continent)", di Yorgos Zois (Grecia, 11')

VENICE VIRTUAL REALITY:
(Sezione competitiva di film realizzati in Realtà Virtuale, con una selezione di titoli fuori concorso)

"Melita", di Nicolás Alcalá (Usa, 24')
"La camera insabbiata", di Laurie Anderson, Huang Hsin-Chien (Usa, 20')
"The last goodbye", di Gabo Arora (Usa, 20')
"My name is Peter Stillman", di Lysander Ashton, Leo Warner (Gran bretagna, 6')
"Alice, the virtual reality play", di Mathias Chelebourg (Francia, 20')
"Arden's wake expanded", di Eugene Vk Chung (Usa, 16')
"Greenland melting", di Nonny De La Peña (Usa, 11')
"Dongducheon (Bloodless)", di Gina Kim (Corea del sud, Usa, 12')
"Nothing happens", di Uri Kranot, Michelle Kranot (Danimarca, Francia, 14')
"Shi meng lao ren (The dream collector)", di Mi Li (Cina, 11')
"Neferiti", di Richard Mills, Kim-Leigh Pontin (Gran Bretagna, 15')
"Snatch vr heist experience", di Rafael Pavón, Nicolás Alcalá (Usa, 5')

VENEZIA CLASSICI:
(Selezione di film classici restaurati e di documentari sul cinema)

"Il deserto rosso", di Michelangelo Antonioni (Italia, 120' - 1964)
"Novecento", di Bernardo Bertolucci (Italia, 317' - 1976)
"L'oeil du malin (L'occhio del maligno", di Claude Chabrol (Francia, 91' - 1962)
"Batch '81", di Mike De Leon (Filippine, 108' - 1982)
"Non c'é pace tra gli ulivi", di Giuseppe De Santis (Italia, 107' - 1950)
"La donna scimmia", di Marco Ferreri (Italia, 93' - 1964)
"Cerný petr (L'asso di picche)", di Miloš Forman (Cecoslovacchia, 89' - 1963)
"Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle (Due o tre cose che so di lei)", di Jean-Luc Godard (Francia, 87' - 1967)
"Daïnah la métisse", di Jean Grémillon (Francia, 48' - 1932)
"Les baliseurs du désert (I figli delle mille e una notte)", di Nacer Khemir (Tunisia, Francia, 95' - 1984)
"Idi i smotri (Va' e vedi)", di Elem Klimov (Urss, 143' - 1985)
"Into the night (Tutto in una notte)", di John Landis (Usa, 115' - 1985)
"Chikamatsu monogatari (Gli amanti crocifissi)", di Kenji Mizoguchi (Giappone, 102' - 1954)
"Sanshô dayû (L'intendente sansho)", di Kenji Mizoguchi (Giappone, 126' - 1954)
"Ochazuke no aji (Il sapore del riso al tè verde)", di Yasujirô Ozu (Giappone, 115' - 1952)
"Close encounters of the third kind (Incontri ravvicinati del terzo tipo)", di Steven Spielberg (Usa, 137' - 1977)
"Zéro de conduite", di Jean Vigo (Francia, 20' - 1933)
"The revolt of mamie stover (Femmina ribelle)", di Raoul Walsh (Usa, 93' - 1956)
"The old dark house (Il castello maledetto)", di James Whale (Usa, 72' - 1933)

CINEMA NEL GIARDINO:
(Film, incontri, visioni)

"Manuel", di Dario Albertini (Italia, 97')
"Controfigura", di Rä Di Martino (Italia, Francia, Marocco, Svizzera, 75')
"Woodshock", di Kate Mulleavy, Laura Mulleavy (Usa, 116')
"Nato a Casal Di Principe", di Bruno Oliviero (Italia, Spagna, 96')
"Suburra. La serie", di Michele Placido, Andrea Molaioli, Giuseppe Capotondi (Italia, 100')
"Tueurs", di François Troukens, Jean-François Hensgens (Belgio, Francia, 86')

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Festa del Cinema di Roma | Nanni Moretti protagonista di un incontro con il pubblico

Nanni Moretti sarà protagonista di un Incontro ravvicinato con il pubblico nel corso della dodicesima edizione della Festa del Cinema che si svolgerà dal 26 ottobre al 5 novembre 2017, prodotta dalla Fondazione Cinema per Roma presieduta da Piera Detassis, con la direzione artistica di Antonio Monda.

Il cineasta, da quaranta anni lucido osservatore e intransigente critico della nostra società e delle sue derive culturali e politiche, ripercorrerà assieme agli spettatori la sua lunga avventura sul grande schermo, che lo ha visto incarnare, con successo, numerosi ruoli: quello di regista-attore di tutti i suoi film (da Ecce bombo a Caro Diario, da La stanza del figlio a Mia madre), di interprete (da Il portaborse a Caos calmo), ma anche quelli di produttore ed esercente, di spettatore e giurato.

“Sono entusiasta che Nanni Moretti sia fra i protagonisti della prossima Festa del Cinema – ha detto Antonio Monda – La sua straordinaria carriera rappresenta una delle pagine più vive e interessanti della storia del cinema non solo italiano. Sono onorato di ripercorrere con il pubblico la sua vita di artista e di approfondire con lui tutti gli aspetti della sua professione”.

Fra gli incontri già annunciati alla prossima Festa del Cinema, ci saranno David Lynch, che riceverà il Premio alla carriera, Ian McKellen, Xavier Dolan, Chuck Palahniuk e Vanessa Redgrave.

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È morta a 89 anni l’attrice Jeanne Moreau

Seducente interprete di pagine indimenticabili del cinema francese.

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[The Daily] Jeanne Moreau, 1927 – 2017

Jeanne Moreau, who appeared in over 130 films over a period of sixty-five years and was declared “the greatest actress in the world” by none other than Orson Welles, has passed away in Paris at the age of eighty-nine. She worked with Jean Gabin in Jacques Becker’s Touchez pas au grisbi (1954), and took the lead in Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows (1958). François Truffaut immortalized her iconic visage in Jules and Jim (1962), and she would work with him again on The Bride Wore Black (1968). She appeared in Michelangelo Antonioni’s La notte (1961), Welles’s The Trial (1962) and Chimes at Midnight (1965), Joseph Losey’s Eva (1962), Jacques Demy’s Bay of Angels (1963), Luis Buñuel’s Diary of a Chambermaid (1964), Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Querelle (1982), Wim Wenders’s Until the End of the World (1991), François Ozon’s Time to Leave (2005), Tsai Ming-liang’s Face (2009), and Manoel de Oliveira’s Gebo and the Shadow (2012).

Among the many awards honoring her work are the Best Actress Award in Cannes for her performance in Peter Brook’s Seven Days... Seven Nights (1960), the BAFTA Award for Best Foreign Actress for Viva Maria! (Malle, 1965), and the César Award for Best Actress for The Old Lady Who Walked in the Sea (Laurent Heynemann, 1992). Moreau was the only actress to have twice chaired the Cannes Film Festival jury, in 1975 and 1995.

More soon.

For news and items of interest throughout the day, every day, follow @CriterionDaily.

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Spider-Man sopravvive imbattuto in vetta al boxoffice italiano

Classifica praticamente invariata rispetto alla scorsa settimana, con incassi in generale molto bassi.

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Bryce Dallas Howard esordirà alla regia con Sorta Like a Rock Star

Il film sarà tratto dall'omonimo romanzo di Matthew Quick, autore de Il lato positivo

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[The Daily] Interviews: Loznitsa, Defa, and More

“Everybody knows what’s wrong with Hollywood—the vacuous parade of tentpole blockbusters; the refusal to diversify both in front of and behind the camera; the confusion in the face of disruptions by Netflix and Amazon; the single-minded lust for the 13-year-old-male dollar . . . one could go on and on.” And so, for GQ, Brett Martin does, discussing these issues and more with Bong Joon-ho (Okja), Ava DuVernay (13th), Cary Fukunaga (True Detective), James Gunn (Guardians of the Galaxy), Patty Jenkins (Wonder Woman), Jeff Nichols (Loving), Jordan Peele (Get Out), Dee Rees (Mudbound), Taylor Sheridan (Wind River), and Edgar Wright (Baby Driver).

“I have absolute confidence in my acting abilities, since the beginning,” Isabelle Huppert tells Anne-Sylvaine Chassany during a twelve-course meal. The Financial Times is picking up the €463 tab. “It may sound arrogant. I never doubt. I have absolutely no fear. I have unlimited self-confidence. There are so many other areas where I am not that, I am not ashamed to say it.” Chassany wonders what makes her doubt. “Crossing the street, meeting people . . . Everything that’s vital. But acting, nothing can intimidate me. Acting is never an obstacle. I do it without thinking. It’s like eating or drinking. It’s a non-event . . . Of course it’s an enormous pleasure, but there’s no stress.” And by the way, she very much wants to work with Woody Allen: “Frankly, what would it cost him to do one with me, vite fait, bien fait? It’s really not a big deal. He doesn’t know what he is missing. I do. He will when it’s too late.”

“Ben Barenholtz’s many credits—though he dismisses them with a wave—include kick-starting the careers of David Lynch, the Coen brothers and John Sayles.” That’s a grabber. As John Anderson explains, Barenholtz, “sometimes a producer, more often a distributor and exhibitor,” bought Eraserhead “after seeing only half of it,” co-distributed Sayles’s Return of the Secaucus Seven (1979), distributed the Coens’ Blood Simple (1984) and executive produced two more. Now 82, Barenholtz has directed his first feature, Alina, “about a wide-eyed Russian in the wilds of immigrant Manhattan” and starring Darya Ekamasova (The Americans).

Also in the New York Times, Cara Buckley meets Charlize Theron, currently “deploying a brand of female empowerment and ferocity that audiences crave now more than ever. Like Furiosa [in Mad Max: Fury Road], and also Cipher in the most recent Fast and Furious film, Ms. Theron’s Atomic Blonde character is unapologetic and cunning, wholly owning her space, rather than merely populating or decorating a world defined by men.”

“If we compare the Dostoyevskian era to our contemporary situation, I feel that we are in a worse position now,” Sergei Loznitsa tells Vassilis Economou at Cineuropa. Meantime, he’s “working on two documentaries. The first, entitled Victory Day, was shot in Treptower Park in Berlin on 8 and 9 May; it’s a place that ex-Soviet citizens, now German residents, visit to commemorate the victory in WWII. The second is a montage of archive footage of the show trials that were held in Moscow during the Stalinist period. The film will be called The Trial. I’m also preparing a new feature film, and I just came from a location-scouting trip in Central Ukraine.”

VIDEO

With Marjorie Prime and Escapes coming out, Filmmaker’s Vadim Rizov talks with Michael Almereyda. “Emotions and intelligence are not disconnected,” he says. And “we all love movies because they have a certain kind of kinetic power that doesn’t have to do with words and ideas. At best, they embody ideas rather than illustrate them. I’ve been grateful when people come up to me and say they were in tears watching Marjorie Prime. I don’t normally hear that about my movies. I won’t reject it.”

Almereyda, by the way, is one of ninety people Adam Fitzgerald and Emily Skillings have approached for the Literary Hub to ask for a favorite line from poet John Ashbery, who’s just turned ninety, and write about it in no more than ninety words. Also playing along is Jim Jarmusch.

Back in Filmmaker, Brandon Harris talks with Laura Poitras about Risk, her documentary about WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, and Peter Rinaldi interviews Dustin Guy Defa, noting that, in Person to Person, “Defa delicately interweaves multiple stories taking place over one day in the lives of New Yorkers portrayed by an ensemble of legendary performers (Phillip Baker Hall, Isiah Whitlock Jr.), name actors (Michael Cera), newcomers (Abbi Jacobson, Tavi Gerivson, George Sample III), and so-called ‘non-actors’ (Bene Coopersmith). It’s a bighearted, hilarious and impressive display of Defa’s directorial skills and the kind of film that can jump start a career.”

VIDEO

Stephen Saito also talks with Defa; and Ricky D'Ambrose’s interview for the Notebook is on video (10’22”).

Julia Yepes finds it’s pretty easy to get Alejandro Jodorowsky to tell story after story. They’re joined by Jodorowsky’s son, Adan, who plays Alejandro in Endless Poetry.

Also in Interview, Zuzanna Czemier talks with Daily Show vet Jessica Williams, currently appearing in The Incredible Jessica James.

Wag the Dog (1997) “was in the area of satirical absurdism and now we are living in absurdism,” director Barry Levinson tells Patrick Shanley in the Hollywood Reporter. But humor is “the best way” to deal with scary times. “So, there were two films made within months of each other: Dr. Strangelove and Failsafe. Failsafe was a very well-done film, a drama about the dangers of nuclear proliferation. And Strangelove was the darkly comedic version of the same subject. Almost exactly the same story, and Strangelove is the one that lived on.”

“For me, I’ve always been really inspired by De Sica, Satyajit Ray and the Dardenne brothers, and Kelly Reichardt, and just all the ways that people have used the best parts of documentary and then captured incredible films from that,” Joshua Z Weinstein tells Christopher Llewellyn Reed at Hammer to Nail. For NPR, Robert Siegel also talks with Weinstein about his debut narrative feature, Menashe (‘7’37”).

VIDEO

The release of the new Nine Inch Nails EP Add Violence has prompted a round of interviews with Trent Reznor. He’s on the cover of the Village Voice, for example, and when Lizzy Goodman mentions the Academy Award for Best Original Score he and Atticus Ross won for The Social Network (2010), he calls it “a nice little statue to have that I keep hidden because I feel like an asshole.” But Goodman does get director David Fincher talking about his friend: “There can be incredibly beautiful melodies, but there’s always this tendency for what’s underneath it to be haunting. You have this beautiful melody sitting on top of this thing that is making you somehow dissatisfied with the beauty of it, and that’s a really interesting conundrum. It’s like those two things are nesting together. And that feels like the human condition to me.” For more with Reznor on a wide range of topics, see David Marchese’s interview with Vulture.

Angelina Jolie is on the cover of Vanity Fair, and Evgenia Peretz talks with her about her new film, First They Killed My Father, and of course, the breakup with Brad Pitt. At Vulture, David Canfield passes along a statement from Jolie claiming that Peretz has misreported a crucial detail involving an improvisational game played with the children cast in her film.

For Slant, Peter Goldberg interviews Kyle Mooney, who co-wrote and stars in Brigsby Bear.

For news and items of interest throughout the day, every day, follow @CriterionDaily.

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MONSIEUR VERDOUX: Lethal Lothario

DB here:

The newest installment of our Criterion Channel series on FilmStruck is now up. There I try to look at Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux (1947) from a fresh perspective: as a perverse contribution to the serial-killer cycle of the 1940s.

 

The killers inside them

When we say that we take up a new perspective on a film, or any artwork, what are we doing? I think the process involves at least two things. First, you need categories, some fresh conceptual groupings that allow for a perspective shift. Second, you relate the film in question to other particular films—that is, you pick prototypes of the categories. People don’t realize, I believe, the extent to which picking prototypes shapes our reasoning about nearly everything. (Is your prototype of a horror film Cat People, Halloween, or Saw? You’ll think of the genre differently.)

Take film noir. The category didn’t exist in 1940s Hollywood; no producer or director or writer set out to make a noir. A film might be a thriller, crime melodrama, even a horror movie. I discuss the elasticity of these categories here. When French, then American critics started talking about film noir, they were creating a perspective shift. The new category “film noir” pulled together several aspects of films that hadn’t seemed so salient in their day: skepticism about orthodox authority, for example, or suspicion of women’s sexuality. Similarly, the critics elevated certain films, like Double Indemnity and The Big Sleep and Possessed, to the status of prototypes, and less vivid examples were situated in relation to them.

Something like this perspective shift occurred to me when I was writing my book, Reinventing Hollywood: How 1940s Filmmakers Changed Movie Storytelling. I tried to come up with some categories that could show continuity and change in film narrative of the period. I looked for strategies of plotting and narration that cut across received categories like genre. Among the categories I explored are block construction, multiple-protagonist plots, subjective viewpoint, non-chronological story sequence, voice-over narration, and others. Some had come to be associated with certain genres (thanks again to prototypes), but I found that they were quite pervasive. Several of these I’ve tried out on the blog.

Once I was peering through the lenses of these categories, my prototypes changed too. Now little-discussed films like Our Town (1940) and Tales of Manhattan (1942) and The Human Comedy (1943) and The Chase (1946) became surprisingly central. I couldn’t ignore the classics, but they were now lit by a crosslight that brought out fresh aspects. And with these categories of narrative technique in mind, we can discover some new sides of well-known auteurs, like Welles, Hitchcock, Sturges, and Mankiewicz.

One broader category I tried out was that of “murder culture.” Mystery and suspense are perennial narrative appeals, but they took on new power in in fiction, film, and theatre of the Forties. (An early version of the chapter’s case is made here.) Part of murder culture was the rise of the serial-killer tale—not new in the 1940s, of course, but more common than in earlier Hollywood eras. Films like Shadow of a Doubt (1943), The Lodger (1944), Bluebeard (1944), Hangover Square (1945), Lured (1947), Follow Me Quietly (1949), and others became prototypes for my purposes.

Then Monsieur Verdoux appeared in a new light. What better evidence of the pervasiveness of murder culture than the effort by the most-loved film star in history to play a serial killer?

 

Landru in LA

Orson Welles and Charles Chaplin, Brown Derby restaurant, March 1947.

It was Orson Welles who prompted Chaplin to make Monsieur Verdoux. Welles was a thriller fan. He carried a trunkload of crime novels around on his travels. One of his early RKO projects was an adaptation of Nicholas Blake’s Smiler with a Knife, and after the debacle of It’s All True, his work as a freelance director consisted of thrillers (The Stranger, The Lady from Shanghai, Mr. Arkadin) and Shakespeare adaptations (Macbeth, Othello). Indeed, he treated Shakespeare’s plots as thrillers, in accord with his belief that the Bard wrote not classical tragedies but blood-and-thunder melodramas.

According to biographers, Welles wrote a screenplay based on the wife-murderer Landru and offered the role to Chaplin. Chaplin at first accepted, then decided to direct the film himself and bought the idea from Welles. There was apparently some dispute about giving Welles credit; early prints are said to have lacked acknowledgment of Welles’ idea as the source.

By late 1941, the trade press reported that Chaplin was preparing the film, then called “Lady Killer.” A year later, it was still discussed as a “plan.” Chaplin didn’t finish the screenplay until 1946, and the film was shot between May and September. By then it was entitled “A Comedy of Murders,” although Chaplin toyed with “Bluebeard” and “Bluebeard Rhapsody.” It wasn’t released until spring of 1947.

This long gestation period is significant because when Chaplin started, the idea of a comedy about killing would have been fairly fresh. By the time Verdoux was released, however, Arsenic and Old Lace (1944) and Murder, He Says (1945) had already shown that audiences would accept humor mixed with homicide. The original stage production of Arsenic and Old Lace had opened to great success in January of 1941, and it’s interesting to speculate that it might have encouraged Chaplin to buy Welles’ Landru idea.

Both Arsenic and Murder, He Says treat murder with a consistently farcical tone. I suggest in my FilmStruck Observations episode that Chaplin risks something more complex. For one thing, he takes the conventions of the serial-killer film more seriously than the other films do. He goes on to amplify and exaggerate those conventions in fascinating ways. For instance, he makes the policemen more or less stick figures, so we don’t care if they’re in jeopardy. In turn, Verdoux tries to win our allegiance through clumsy efforts to be debonair. (Uncle Charlie in Shadow of a Doubt is far more poised.) Chaplin’s use of the cycle’s conventions gets pretty specific. There were dead narrators in 40s films before Sunset Blvd. (1950), but we tend to forget that Chaplin uses the same device in Verdoux.

Going further, I discuss how Chaplin’s treatment of serial killing mixes different sorts of comedy—social satire and slapstick, the traditional comedy of manners and the comedy of ideas associated with George Bernard Shaw. This mix is rather discordant, and it’s responsible, I think, for much of the criticism the film attracted, then and now.

 

The Tramp as provocateur

Verdoux failed in the US for several reasons. Reviews were mostly unsympathetic, even harsh. Chaplin had been back in the headlines thanks to a messy paternity suit filed by Joan Barry. His reputation as a seducer of young women had unpleasant associations with Verdoux’s conquests. He was also known for his support for liberal causes and his strong stance against fascism. After the war, he was more and more reviled by right-wing politicians and activists. Chaplin’s defense of civil liberties made him seem too much a Communist dupe, or an active sympathizer. Charles Maland has suggested that the film’s promotion completely mishandled Chaplin’s star image.

The disgraceful New York press conference on the film was chronicled in the New Republic:

He couldn’t have expected the shockingly rude, sustained impertinence of the attack that followed. Reporters were there, not discuss his work with him, but to discredit and vilify and ridicule him personally—to hound him on his own opinions and habits. Was it true that one of his good friends (I am omitting names), a great musician, was a radical? Did this mean that he, Chaplin, condoned treason to this country, since his friend’s brother was accused of being a spy? Was Chaplin a Communist? Why, then, had he shown so little regard for the United States that, although he had paid taxes here for years, he was still a British subject? Even though two of his sons fought for this country in the war, and he did war work himself, why didn’t he do more? Exactly what percentage of his vast income made in the US had gone to alleviate the suffering of humanity?

While two perambulating mikes broadcast these questions and others, a swarm of cameramen set off lights in Chaplin’s face, so that in an hour he was not only knee-deep in spent flash bulbs, but practically blinded. His patience and couresy were astounding, since his disgust must have at least compared to that of the few of us who could only be ashamed of what ugly, hostile liberties can be taken in the name of the freedom of the press.

The final scenes of Verdoux only heightened the suspicion that Chaplin was a danger to patriotic values. Soon he was subpoenaed by the House Unamerican Activities Committee, though he never testified. In 1952, after he and his new wife Oona left for Europe, his re-entry permit was rescinded. He went into exile in Switzerland.

The reviewers’ most common complaint was that the film refused to jell, but the film had eloquent defenders and brought forth some of the subtlest critical commentary of the period. James Agee, the only person to defend Chaplin during the press conference, wrote a famous three-part appeciation of the film that, I think, represents an early instance of in-depth film interpretation. Theatre historian Eric Bentley argued against those who found the movie a jumble of sentiment and slapstick. It was, he claimed, in the vein of Pirandello, where comedy gives way to the more philosophical mode, that of humor.

Reflection turns the merely funny into humor. . . . Thus, Pirandello argues, humor breaks up the normal form by interruption, interpolation, digression, and decomposition; and the critics complain of lack of unity in all humorous works from Don Quixote to Tristram Shandy—and we might add from Little Dorrit to Monsieur Verdoux.

Going still wilder, Parker Tyler speculated that in a parallel universe, Verdoux wasn’t executed. He abandoned his wife and son and took off on the road. Charlie the Tramp “had a past like anyone else. . . . Verdoux is . . . how Charlie came to be.”

 

Tyler’s flight of fancy isn’t surprising. This film can drive you a little nuts. It’s not ingratiating. It’s less perfect than provocative. It’s like the name itself, ver-doux, which translates as “sweet worm” or “gentle worm”—a little pleasant and a little creepy. The film is an obstinate thing that insists on being its contradictory self, not what you want it to be. For me, it’s perversely unlovable, and that unlovability is part of the Chaplin myth too. We should remember that the earliest Chaplin films show the Tramp as fairly nasty.

I suspect that Monsieur Verdoux can’t become a prototype; it flouts too many cherished categories. Or maybe the best category for it is that of experimental Hollywood movie. After all, the 1940s furnished more than its share of them.

---

Thanks as usual to Kim Hendrickson, Grant Delin, and Peter Becker of Criterion. Our complete Observations on Film Art Criterion series is here. (I think you need to be logged in to see it.)

Welles discusses Shakespeare as blood-and-thunder melodramatist in This Is Orson Welles (HarperCollins, 1992), 217, and in a little more detail, in audiocassette number 4 accompanying the book, side A, 18:37. I draw my information about the preparation of Verdoux from Frank Brady, Citizen Welles (Scribners, 1989), 416-417;  “Chaplin Announces Bluebeard Film,” Motion Picture Herald (29 November 1941); and Glenn Mitchell, The Chaplin Encyclopedia (Batsford, 1997), 191-198. Charles Maland’s reflections on Verdoux‘s promotional problems are in Chaplin and American Culture: The Evolution of a Star Image (Princeton, 1989), 250-251. The coverage of the Monsieur Verdoux press conference is by Shirley O’Hara in “Chaplin and Hemingway,” New Republic (15 May 1947), 39. Bentley’s 1948 essay is “Monsieur Verdoux and Theater,” In Search of Theater (Vintage, 1953), 154.

I’ve argued in The Rhapsodes that Agee’s critique displays the interpretive techniques borrowed from literary New Criticism. In the same book I discuss Tyler’s Chaplin book as an ultimate flight of performative criticism.  One consequence of 1940s murder culture was the crystallization of the suspense thriller, a genre that has flourished ever since, for several reasons.

There’s more on my forthcoming book on the 1940s here.

Monsieur Verdoux.

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Il Cinema Ritrovato al cinema: 'Eraserhead'

La quinta stagione del progetto della Cineteca di distribuzione di classici restaurati in prima visione si apre con l'opera prima di David Lynch, nella sale italiane dal 4 settembre.

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A SETTEMBRE IN CINETECA Dunkirk in 70mm, Eraserhead e il cinema di Lynch, i restauri di Venezia, carta bianca a Nolan e tanto altro. On-line il programma.

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Lost in America with Albert Brooks

Modern American life found one of its wittiest chroniclers in Albert Brooks, who translated the comedic skills he honed in his early career in stand-up to the big screen in a series of landmark films. A work of both effortless charm and biting cultural critique, Brooks’s third feature, 1985’s Lost in America, takes a hard look at the collision of Reagan-era values and counterculture aspirations through the story of a thirtysomething married couple (Brooks and Julie Hagerty) who abandon their stifling yuppie lives in Los Angeles, buy a Winnebago, and hit the open road. As their Easy Rider–inspired search for adventure grows ever more hopeless after they gamble away their “nest egg,” the film’s uproarious antics become a showcase for Brooks’s ability to juggle his brilliant sense of control as a writer and director and his uninhibited persona on-screen.

This week, we welcomed Lost in America as the first Brooks film in our collection. The supplements on our edition offer multiple perspectives on what makes him an essential voice in American cinema. In this excerpt from an interview with Brooks, the director chats with filmmaker Robert Weide about how he arrived at the concept for the film and what led to his decision to star in it.

VIDEO

And in this video, Academy Award winner James L. Brooks shares his insights on the “Albert-esque” talent for creating magic from both behind and in front of the camera.

VIDEO

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Pablo Schreiber raggiunge Dwayne Johnson in Skyscraper

Nel film di Rawson Marshall Thurber reciterà anche Neve Campbell

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Schermi e Lavagne

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Cinema del presente

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I restauri di Venezia

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Road to Dunkirk. Carta bianca a Christopher Nolan

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No ordinary People: i mostri al cinema

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Paesaggi dell'incubo

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Il Cinema Ritrovato al cinema

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This Week on the Criterion Channel

One of the most influential American films of the 1960s turns fifty this year, and we’re celebrating with a spotlight on our complete edition, now streaming on the Criterion Channel on FilmStruck. A bitingly funny tale of postcollegiate existential confusion, Mike Nichols’s The Graduate stars Dustin Hoffman as a young man who stumbles into an affair with an older, married friend of the family (Anne Bancroft). Alongside the film you’ll find an audio commentary with Nichols and Steven Soderbergh, screen tests, a program on Harold Michelson’s innovative storyboards, and more.

Also up this week: a conversation with a contemporary animation master, a pair of films that explore female youth, a close analysis of Charlie Chaplin’s most unsettling comedy, and a double bill of thrillers inspired by Georges Simenon.

Adventures in Moviegoing with Brad Bird and Joe Morgenstern

The director of Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol and some of the most acclaimed animated movies of the past few decades (Ratatouille, The Incredibles, The Iron Giant), Brad Bird speaks with Pulitzer Prize–winning film critic Joe Morgenstern about his personal journey through cinema and curates a selection of films that have had an impact on his life, including The Red Shoes, Yojimbo, and Stranger Than Paradise. In this preview of the episode, the director talks about how he came to discover the “dream language” of auteurs like Alfred Hitchcock and Billy Wilder.

*****

Tuesday’s Short + Feature: Kitty and Fat Girl

Actor Chloë Sevigny made her directorial debut with Kitty, a luminous adaptation of a 1980 Paul Bowles short story in which a young girl finds herself transformed into a cat. The film, which had its premiere at Cannes last year, serves as a prelude to a provocative feature that the director has selected herself: Catherine Breillat’s 2001 Fat Girl, a shocking depiction of adolescent sexuality and strained sisterhood. In this introduction, Sevigny recounts her experience on the set of Kitty and the thrill of being a first-time filmmaker.

*****

Observations on Film Art No. 9: Chaplin’s Comedy of Murders

Our Channel-exclusive series Observations on Film Art offers thought-provoking doses of film school for movie lovers, delivered by professors David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson, and Jeff Smith, the authors of the canonical textbook Film Art: An Introduction. This month’s episode features Bordwell examining how Charlie Chaplin jettisoned his iconic tramp persona to portray a cold-blooded serial killer in the 1947 satire Monsieur Verdoux. Check out this excerpt from the episode, in which Bordwell highlights the innovative ways in which the great actor-director mixes moods and genres.

*****

Friday Night Double Feature: La tête d’un homme and Stray Dog

Go on the chase with some of cinema’s most charismatic detectives in this pair of thrillers inspired by the writing of Georges Simenon. In Julien Duvivier’s 1933 La tête d’un homme, Harry Baur stars as the author’s most iconic creation, Inspector Maigret, who spends the film investigating an American woman’s murder in Paris. Toshiro Mifune’s rookie homicide detective scours a sweltering Tokyo for his stolen gun, with the help of a seasoned detective (Takashi Shimura), in Akira Kurosawa’s 1949 psychologically penetrating drama Stray Dog.

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[The Daily] Goings On: Woody Allen, Walter Murch, and More

We begin with the news, reported for days but now officially confirmed, that the New York Film Festival, whose fifty-fifth edition runs from September 28 through October 15, will close with the world premiere of Woody Allen’s Wonder Wheel. For the Film Society of Lincoln Center, Jordan Raup sets the scene: “We’re in Coney Island in the 1950s. A lifeguard (Justin Timberlake) tells us a story that just might be filtered through his vivid imagination: a middle-aged carousel operator (James Belushi) and his beleaguered wife (Kate Winslet), who eke out a living on the boardwalk, are visited by his estranged daughter (Juno Temple)—a situation from which layer upon layer of all-too-human complications develop. Allen and his cinematographer, the great Vittorio Storaro, working with a remarkable cast led by Winslet in a startlingly brave, powerhouse performance, have created a bracing and truly surprising movie experience.”

In other festival news, Locarno, whose seventieth edition opens on Wednesday and runs through August 12, has rolled out its juries:

• Concorso internazionale: Olivier Assayas (president), Miguel Gomes, Christos Konstantakopoulus, Jean-Stéphane Bron, and Birgit Minichmayr, whom most know as Gitti in Maren Ade’s Everyone Else (2009).
• Concorso Cineasti del presente: Yousry Nasrallah (president), Matías Piñeiro, Paola Turci, Katrin Pors, and Johanna ter Steege.
• Pardi di domani: Sabine Azéma (president), John Canciani, Yuri Ancarani, Verónica Echegui, and Kristijonas Vildžiūnas.
• Signs of Life: Chris Fujiwara, Jordan Cronk, and Maria Bonsanti.
• First Feature: Clarence Tsui, Birgit Kohler, and Diego Batlle.

“The Council of Europe’s Eurimages Fund has joined forces with the Locarno Film Festival this year to present the second edition of its Audentia Award for best female director,” reports Alice Thorpe at Women and Hollywood. “Hosted by a different international film festival each year, the Audentia Award takes its name from the Latin for ‘courage’ or ‘bravery’—‘vital qualities for any woman wishing to pursue a career in film directing,’ in the words of the press release. The prize intends ‘to celebrate women who have had the courage to make that choice, by giving their work greater visibility and inspiring other women to follow in their footsteps.’”

Meantime, it’s been a busy week for lineup announcements. You might catch up this weekend on the titles slated to screen in Venice (as well as in the Venice Days and Critics’ Week sidebars) and the first round for Toronto.

MORE GOINGS ON

New York. A new restoration of Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Gai Savoir (1969) opens at the Quad today and, as J. Hoberman notes in the New York Times, it began as an adaptation of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “novelistic treatise on education, Émile, published in 1762, for television.” TV wouldn’t have it, but French theaters would. “Mr. Godard occasionally cites Rousseau, along with contemporary philosophers like Jacques Derrida, but as a thinker he has a greater affinity for Lewis Carroll. Le Gai Savoir would be hectoring if it were not so playful. (One sequence is a bit of Etch A Sketch scribble-scrabble accompanied by fragmented Mozart.) It is also movie mad.”

Jonas Mekas will be at Anthology Film Archives tonight to introduce the opening night screening of Georges Rouquier’s Farrebique (1946), a chronicle of farm life “governed by the seasons.” Anthology is presenting an archival 35 mm print, “followed by additional screenings showcasing Les Documents Cinematographiques’ brand-new DCP restoration.” Through Thursday.

On Tuesday, Light Industry presents Jem Cohen and Peter Sillen's Benjamin Smoke (2000) on 16 mm.

Back in the NYT, Ben Kenigsberg spotlights MoMA’s presentation on Wednesday of the late George A. Romero’s The Crazies (1973) and, on the same bill, Mike Kuchar’s The Craven Sluck (1967), “a 20-minute camp fest,” as part of the ongoing series Future Imperfect: The Uncanny in Science Fiction; and Lois Weber: First Auteur, a mini-series at Film Forum: The Blot (1921) on Sunday, Shoes (1916) and the short Suspense (1913) on August 6, and The Dumb Girl of Portici (1916) on September 16.

The Film Society of Lincoln Center series Shot by Carlo Di Palma, from Rome to New York opens today, as does the new restoration of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966) at Film Forum.

Los Angeles. In the LA Weekly, Nathaniel Bell recommends Barbet Schroeder’s Barfly (1987) and Reversal of Fortune (1990), both screening tonight at the Aero Theatre, and, to celebrate the man’s seventieth birthday this weekend, the Arnold Schwarzenegger movies at the New Beverly. He also notes that Philip Baker-Hall will be at Cinefamily on Tuesday for the presentation of Robert Altman’s Secret Honor (1984) on Tuesday as part of the series Impeach the President: Watergate on Film.

VIDEO

On the same page, Siran Babayan notes that LACMA’s presenting a free screening on Sunday afternoon of Lisanne Skyler’s personal documentary BRILLO BOX (3¢ OFF), screening in conjunction with the exhibition Los Angeles to New York: Dwan Gallery, 1959–1971. Julie Jacobs talks with Skyler for WhereToWatch.

Chicago. On Wednesday, the Chicago Film Society presents a 35 mm print of Jonathan Demme’s Melvin and Howard (1980).

London. Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation won 1974 BAFTA awards “for best film editing and best sound mixing (the first time those awards went to the same person on a single film).” That would be Walter Murch, who will be at the Curzon Soho on Wednesday for a Q&A following the screening.

Bristol. “Over the final weekend in July, Cinema Rediscovered will return for its second edition, boasting a bevy of classics and lesser-known gems from cinema history,” writes Christina Newland for Little White Lies. “Based at Bristol’s Watershed Cinema and a handful of other venues across the city, the retrospective mini-festival was founded as a British homage to Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna, and its program once again includes films plucked directly from the Italian rep festival.” On Sunday, Ehsan Khoshbakht will present In Search of Color, a program of new restorations from original Kinemacolor black and white nitrate positive prints.

VIDEO

UK. “Twenty-five years on, Howards End is rereleased in cinemas,” announces the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw, calling it “a sumptuous piece of heritage prestige cinema produced by Ismail Merchant, directed by James Ivory and adapted from EM Forster’s 1910 novel by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. . . . The film is interestingly and valuably explicit on the subjects of class and snobbery and the struggles of the emerging bourgeoisie . . . In its own severe and occasionally stolid way, Howards End offers real passion.”

Berlin. In conjunction with the exhibition Robby Müller – Master of Light, on view at the Deutsche Kinemathek through November 5, the Arsenal is presenting a series of films shot by the master cinematography from August 4 through 17. The Arsenal will also spend all August pairing films with Manifestos and Pamphlets: “All these writings revolve around nothing less than a fundamental renewal or a liberation of cinema from restraints and conventions of a commercial, aesthetic, narrative or political nature.”

Writing for the Berlin Film Journal, Mike T. West recommends “a monthly ‘surprise’ event where a dear friend called Anastasia, from France, selects a secret and fairly unknown or overlooked picture of her choosing. In general it tends to be foreign, can often be black and white, but never, ever, bad. . . . The night is hosted at the excellent Il Kino in Neukölln where the staff are friendly and the drinks are sexy.”

For more goings on, see Wednesday’s roundup. And for news and items of interest throughout the day, every day, follow @CriterionDaily.

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Assegnati all'Isola del Cinema di Roma i Premi Opera Prima e Seconda

Isola del Cinema di Roma: il regista Roberto de Paolis vince il premio Groupama Assicurazioni Opera Prima e Seconda con “Cuori Puri”. Premiato anche il regista Simone Godano per “Moglie e Marito” con il Premio del Pubblico

Grandi emozioni di fronte ad un'Arena gremita di pubblico ed ad un parterre di numerosissimi ospiti, accolti dal Direttore Giorgio Ginori e da Francesca Piggianelli, collaboratrice e responsabile nuovo cinema italiano. L'Isola del Cinema ha celebrato il Premio Opera Prima e seconda con le diverse categorie ed il Premio Groupama Assicurazioni miglior film, un riconoscimento alla nuova cinematografia italiana, linfa vitale di una creatività in grande fermento.

Nel corso della serata evento condotta da Viviana Altieri, il Direttore artistico Giorgio Ginori ha premiato Roberto de Paolis, regista del film “Cuori Puri”, opera prima uscita nelle sale italiane lo scorso maggio 2017 per aver messo in scena un film che entra nella realtà e sa raccontarla in modo avvincente e mai banale o retorico.

Premio del pubblico, invece, per Simone Godano con la commedia “Moglie e Marito”. Il film ha registrato le maggiori presenze all'Isola tra quelli in concorso opera Prima e Seconda coinvolgendo il pubblico e facendolo divertire.

Sono stati inoltre assegnati i seguenti premi:

• Premio Speciale come attore e regista L'Isola del Cinema e Giuria: CLAUDIO AMENDOLA per il film il permesso: 48 ore fuori
• Premio L'Isola del Cinema migliore attrice: Sara Serraiocco per il film La Ragazza Del Mondo
• Premio L'Isola del Cinema regista rivelazione 2017: Fabio Mollo [nella foto di Marco Bonanni] per il film Padre d'Italia
• Premio al Cast 2017: Edoardo Leo, Valerio Aprea, Paolo Calabresi, Lorenzo Lavia, Valeria Solarino per il film Smetto Quando Voglio – Masterclass
• Premio L'Isola del Cinema Attrice Rivelazione 2017: Miriam Leone per il film In Guerra D'amore
• Premio L'Isola del Cinema Attore Rivelazione 2017: Edoardo Pesce per il film Cuori Puri

I premi sono stati assegnati da una giuria composta da professionisti della cinematografia e della cultura - Gloria Satta, Fulvia Caprara, Laura Delli Colli, Claudia Catalli, Arianna Finos, Giulia Bianconi, Stefano Amadio

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Venezia 74: per la prima volta sbarca "La Pellicola d'Oro"

“La Pellicola d'Oro” di Enzo De Camillis sbarca per la prima volta alla Biennale di Venezia durante la 74. Mostra Internazionale d'Arte Cinematografica tra i Premi Collaterali.

Saranno il “Migliore direttore di Produzione Italiano de La Biennale di Venezia” e il “Migliore direttore di Produzione Internazionale de La Biennale di Venezia” i due riconoscimenti de “La Pellicola d'Oro”, che saranno consegnati a due film in concorso, durante la 74. Mostra Internazionale D'Arte Cinematografica La Biennale di Venezia, tra i premi collaterali.

Il prestigioso premio cinematografico è promosso ed organizzato dall'Ass.ne Cult.le “Articolo 9 Cultura e Spettacolo” e dalla “Sas Cinema” di cui è Presidente lo scenografo e regista Enzo De Camillis.

“La Pellicola d'Oro” è un riconoscimento, giunto alla sua VII edizione, che ha come obiettivo portare alla ribalta quei “mestieri” il cui ruolo è fondamentale per la realizzazione di un film ma che, allo stesso tempo, sono praticamente “sconosciuti” o non correttamente valutati dal pubblico che frequenta le sale cinematografiche o guarda i film sui canali televisivi. Accanto a questi riconoscimenti però, non mancano premi speciali che vengono assegnati ad altri esponenti del cinema, dello spettacolo e della cultura, che si sono particolarmente distinti nella loro carriera anche in relazione al positivo rapporto instaurato con le maestranze, tecnici e artigiani che operano sul set.

Dallo scorso anno, inoltre, “La Pellicola d'oro, ha varcato i nostri confini con due appuntamenti importanti a Lisbona (Portogallo) e a Sofia (Bulgaria) in cui si è tenuta la prima edizione del Premio Cinematografico.

La presenza di questo premio alla 74. Mostra Internazionale d'Arte Cinematografica La Biennale di Venezia segna un grande traguardo per far conoscere ancora di più al pubblico un premio dedicato a chi fa il cinema ma lavora sempre dietro le quinte.

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[The Daily] In the Works: Reboots, Revivals, and More

A new 4K restoration of James Cameron’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), converted to 3D, is heading to theaters on August 25. Now James Wigney of the New Corp Australia Network reports that “Cameron says he is in negotiations to oversee a new ‘three-film arc’ if the ongoing issues with the rights to the franchise can be resolved. The rights to make the films have changed several times since the release of the first film, but under U.S. copyright law some rights will revert to Cameron in 2019.” Arnold Schwarzenegger, who turns seventy tomorrow, “would be involved ‘to some extent’ in the proposed trilogy but the plan would be to introduce new characters to ‘pass the baton.’”

That’s via the Playlist’s Kevin Jagernauth, who also reports that Tom Hardy “has signed up to produce and star in My War Gone By, I Miss It So. Based on the book by war correspondent Anthony Loyd, the film will tell his true story of leaving the British army, and heading to the front lines of the Bosnian conflict, then returning home, where he battled heroin addiction.”

“Former President Bill Clinton will come to Hollywood this week with James Patterson, his writing partner on the upcoming novel The President Is Missing,” reports Deadline’s Mike Fleming Jr. “Sources said that Clinton and Patterson will be meeting with studios and networks to pitch the book for a movie or TV deal.”

Fleming also has the latest on J. C. Chandor’s Triple Frontier, which has been in and out of development hell for nearly seven years now. This “thriller set in the notorious border zone between Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil where the Iguazu and Parana rivers converge” began as a Paramount picture written by Mark Boal for Kathryn Bigelow (Detroit) to direct. Tom Hanks, Will Smith, and Johnny Depp all circled for a while; Tom Hardy, Channing Tatum, and most recently, Ben Affleck have been attached and detached. Now it’s revived as a $70 million Netflix project with a cast led by Mark Wahlberg (still in talks), Charlie Hunnam, and Garrett Hedlund.

Paul Feig (Bridesmaids, Ghostbusters) will direct Anna Kendrick, Blake Lively, and Henry Golding in A Simple Favor. The Hollywood Reporter’s Rebecca Ford: “The story follows mommy blogger Stephanie (Kendrick), who seeks to uncover the truth behind her best friend Emily's (Lively) sudden disappearance from their small town. Stephanie is joined by Emily's husband, Sean (Golding), in this thriller filled with twists and betrayals, secrets and revelations, love and loyalty, murder and revenge.”

VIDEO

“Danny Glover, David Cross, and Patton Oswalt have joined the cast of writer/director Boots Riley’s directorial debut Sorry to Bother You,” reports Deadline’s Anita Busch. It’s “about a black telemarketer with self-esteem issues who discovers a magical key to business success, propelling him to the upper echelons of the hierarchy just as his activist comrades are rising up against unjust labor practices. When he uncovers the macabre secret of his corporate overlords, he must decide whether to stand up or sell out.”

“Nick Offerman will star in Brett Haley’s upcoming musical drama Hearts Beat Loud opposite Kiersey Clemons,” reports Variety’s Dave McNary. Haley says it’s “about the connective power of music and the unexpected friendship that blossoms between a father and daughter as they are brought closer together through their songs, at a pivotal point in their lives when they are both about to make important decisions about their future.”

SERIES

“Wonder Woman director Patty Jenkins is set to direct the new TNT drama One Day She’ll Darken, which reunites her with star Chris Pine,” reports Michael Schneider for IndieWire. “TNT has given a straight-to-series order to the six-episode hour-long show . . . inspired by the autobiography of Fauna Hodel, a white woman who was given up by her teenage birth mother and ended up being raised in an African American family. She eventually discovers that she was actually the product of incest and that her real-life father was Dr. George Hodel, the man who is often suspected to be the real-life ‘Black Dahlia’ killer responsible for the murder of Elizabeth Short. (Some have also suggested he might have been the Zodiac Killer.)”

Moonlight actor Mahershala Ali “has closed a deal to star” in Season 3 of True Detective. Deadline’s Nellie Andreeva notes that HBO president of programming Casey Bloys has said that “a third season of True Detective is much further along than a potential second installment of The Night Of.” Deadwood creator David Milch is working on True Detective with its creator, Nic Pizzolatto.

“In this age of endless reboots, reimaginings and revivals, small-screen versions of Citizen Kane and Cat People might offend purists but could make absolute sense to content-hungry programmers—depending on how a new lawsuit against RKO Pictures gets resolved.” Deadline’s Dominic Patten explains.

Ben Affleck and Matt Damon are executive producing City on a Hill for Showtime. As Elbert Wyche reports for Screen, it’s “a fictional account of what was called the ‘Boston Miracle.’ At the center is an African-American district attorney who comes in from Brooklyn advocating change and the unlikely alliance he forms with a corrupt yet venerated FBI veteran who is invested in maintaining the status quo. Together they take on a family of armored car robbers from Charlestown in a case that grows to encompass and eventually upend Boston’s city-wide criminal justice system.”

VIDEO

Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon “are attached to star in an untitled series exploring morning shows and the larger New York media scene that they inhabit.” Lesley Goldberg has more in the Hollywood Reporter.

John Crowley (Brooklyn; and currently working on a feature adaptation of Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch) will direct playwright Nick Payne’s adaptation of Rupert Thomson’s 1987 novel Dreams of Leaving, reports Orlando Parfitt for Screen. It’s “set in the fictional English village of New Egypt; an idyllic haven of traditional values and attitudes. However, by resisting change with an iron fist, it has secretly made prisoners of its inhabitants. Moses is one villager who escaped the village as a boy and has grown up in contemporary London. Questioning his identity, he begins to unearth chilling secrets of his past that will lead him back to the village of his birth.”

“Jon Stewart will return to stand up comedy in a special for HBO, the former Daily Show host’s first such special in over 20 years,” reports Joe Otterson for Variety.

For news and items of interest throughout the day, every day, follow @CriterionDaily.

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LBJ: Woody Harrelson è il Presidente degli USA Lyndon Johnson nel primo trailer del film di Rob Reiner

Debutterà nelle sale americane il prossimo 3 novembre.

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via Cinema Studi - Lo studio del cinema è sul web

Detroit, un altro trailer per il film di Kathryn Bigelow

Si mostra ancora la cronaca delle rivolte di Detroit del 1968, con Johny Boyega e Will Poulter.

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Tilda Swinton poteva essere Pennywise in IT

Il film dal romanzo culto di Stephen King poteva avere un clown omicida di prim'ordine.

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On the Channel: Chaplin’s Comedy of Murders

A far cry from the tramp persona Charlie Chaplin made iconic in films like The Kid, City Lights, and Modern Times, the cold-blooded murderer at the heart of Monsieur Verdoux pushed the great actor-director’s brand of humor into disturbing new territory. Released in 1947, this tale of deception stars Chaplin as an enigmatic family man who, in an attempt to support his wife and child, starts killing off wealthy, middle-aged widows for their money. The film is not only one of the most unsettling comedies of its era but also a showcase for Chaplin’s extraordinary talent for blending and contrasting various modes of comedic performance. In the latest episode of Observations on Film Art, now streaming on the Criterion Channel on FilmStruck, professor David Bordwell analyzes the mix of tones and genres that makes Monsieur Verdoux such a provocative film, one whose brilliance has taken decades to be fully recognized. Watch the full video on the Channel, and check out previous episodes in the series, whose topics include editing in Akira Kurosawa’s Sanshiro Sugata, camera movement in Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colors: Red, and staging in Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game.

VIDEO

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Repertory Pick: Ghostly Mizoguchi in Missouri

Next Monday, as part of its monthly Director’s Choice series, the Ragtag Cinema in Columbia, Missouri, will screen a supernatural fable from Japanese master Kenji Mizoguchi, selected by filmmaker David Lowery for its influence on his acclaimed new drama A Ghost Story. Made just a few years before Mizoguchi’s untimely death at fifty-eight, the 1953 Ugetsu proved one of the crowning achievements of a nearly four-decade career bridging silent and sound cinema, applying the sinuous long takes that had become his signature to a haunting story about the tragic dynamics between men and women. In the film, two couples wind up torn apart during a devastating sixteenth-century civil war, the foolhardy husbands’ thirst for fame and fortune carrying them forth toward strange and spectral destinies, while their wives are forced to fend for themselves on an increasingly ravaged home front. “One might say that Mizoguchi’s detached, accepting eye also resembles that of a ghost, looking down on mortal confusions, ambitions, vanities, and regrets,” writes Phillip Lopate in his liner essay for our edition of the film, in which he finds “a powerfully anchoring stillness at its core, a spiritual strength no less than a virtuoso artistic focus.”

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Andrea Marotti: un talento italiano oltre i confini

Non è di molto tempo fa, ormai, la cerimonia di consegna dei David di Donatello 2017.
Al di là delle considerazioni che si possono fare circa i riconoscimenti assegnati, a qualcuno non sarà sfuggito un elemento a nostro modo di vedere importante: la vittoria nella categoria che premia i Migliori Effetti Visivi del team dei VFX di Veloce come il Vento (film di di Matteo Rovere), un team nato, secondo una congiuntura produttiva che con il tempo potrebbe rivelarsi assai feconda, dalla collaborazione tra un'équipe statunitense e un'équipe italiana.
Questa collaborazione che alla lunga si è rivelata vincente è stata sin dall'inizio fortemente voluta da Andrea Marotti, un talento nostrano la cui esperienza in ambito cinematografico è così singolare da meritare un sia pur breve racconto.
Laureatosi in Fisica nell'Università della California, Marotti, tornato in Italia, ha per qualche tempo diretto una scuola di cinema facendosi le ossa nella produzione di molti video musicali a segno di orizzonte di interessi già di suo piuttosto poliedrico.
Compiuto il salto nell'ambito della produzione cinematografica, Andrea ha cominciato sin da subito a orientare il suo lavoro verso progetti di respiro internazionale che mettessero in relazione paesi, continenti e, soprattutto, pratiche e modi di intendere il lavoro differenti.
Questa propensione al mutuo scambio esperenziale, pur maturati nel solo ambito cinematografico, è la cifra distintiva di un talento professionale in grado di incrociare e far dialogare saperi specialistici e artistici eccezionali. Si aggiunge a questo una notevole attenzione anche per le più recenti innovazioni tecnologiche che portano alla creazione di effetti visivi imprevisti e impressionanti, ben calati nello spirito dei film, come avviene appunto nel già citato Veloce come il vento che era stato preceduto, nel 2014 sempre in Italia, dagli effetti speciali, anch'essi nominati al David, per Dracula 3D di Dario Argento.
Grazie a queste qualità Marotti continua una collaborazione a cavallo tra realtà culturali diverse, che non dimentica l'origine italiana, ma al tempo stesso si allarga nel contesto internazionale con collaborazione a film come Nightcrawler (con Jake Gillenhal, nominato agli Oscar 2015), il pluripremiato It Follows, e importanti film come Monumental (con Jeremy Irons e Maria Bello).
In questa serie di esperienze matura la fondazione di una casa di produzione e post-produzione, la TUNNEL Inc. a Santa Monica, per la quale sta producendo importanti film.
Un cittadino del mondo, insomma, estraneo a tanto provincialismo italiano, del quale sentiremo ancora parlare.

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