mistresses of the universe

Thank you Universe!

2012-02-14T03:16:00.007-08:00

Thirty Six reasons to be grateful:

1. An 8am phone call from an 80 year old lady to tell you Happy Birthday.

2. The three Birthday / Valnetine cards you got from the most delicious man in the world.

3. To be alive

4. To be loved.

5. An 8 30am phone call from your parents on the other side of the Atlantic.

6. If no one called it would be okay too. Love is what you do when you don't have to. And love accepts people for whoever they are. Everything else is b***shit.

7. We are getting married.

8. Bergman week in Faro in April.

9. The taste of butter melted on toast.

10. Cup of Brazilian coffee with Japanese soya milk.

11. The street you live in and the people who live and work in it.

12. London.

13. Aeroplanes - those fantastic machines that take you to places you dream of.

14. The ocean in between lands - never a barrier but the soft, temperamental, liquid link between continents.

15. Music, always music.

16. Love

17. Love

18. Love

19. To have your Birthday on St. Valentin day when you wished you were a troubadour at the age of 13

20. Patti Smith on Vinyl

21. To finally learn how to spell vinyl correctly.

22. Solitude in the day and Love Date in the evening.

23. Weekdays off as paid holiday.

24. To work hard for something and see the tree bare fruit.

25. Fearlessness

26. Selflessness

27. Grace

28. Story telling

29. What you don't tell but feel.

30. Our pet spider (RIP)

31. Our plants happy to get all the moisture from the bathroom.

32. Cakes at Cakey Muto

33. Books about the Sea, Science, Poetry.

34. The Moon and its phases

35. Charity

36. The Universe for allowing us to experience of such wonderful things.

Patti by Joan - Happy New Year!

2012-01-02T13:20:00.000-08:00

Patti Smith playing live at the Bowery Ballroom in New York City on her 65th birthday (Dec 30th). Photo by Joan Wasser.

Happy New Year!

"Soon We'll Be Found" - song by Sia

2011-12-05T13:32:00.000-08:00

from the album Some People Have Real Problems (2008)

Bjork's Moon, Sylvia Plath's shoes and Kate Bush's snow

2011-11-21T05:17:00.000-08:00

"So rememeber, if you wander the desert, and its near sundown, and you are perhaps a little bit lost, and certainly tired, that you are lucky, for La Loba may take a liking to you and show you something - something of the soul." (Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run With The Wolves, p.24)

Bjork, Moon, from the new album Biophilia

Bell Jar, drawing by Sylvia Plath, part of the exhibition of unseen drawings by the poetess now being exhibited at the Mayor Gallery in London until December 17th 2011.

Kate Bush on a rare interview for BBC Radio 4's Front Row, 2011 (please click on the link that is this post's title for the full interview with Kate).

Worshipping at the Altar of Dance

2011-11-04T14:20:00.000-07:00

"Dance, dance...otherwise we are lost."

Whether you love dance as a practice in itself, or possess a latent desire to express yourself, I could not reccomend this film enough.

But is it a film, is it a documentary? I can tell you what PINA is not: It is not a chronological nor literally biographical depiction of Pina Bausch's life and carrer.

PINA is in fact a fitting, moving and inspirational tribute to one of the major figures in (contemporary) dance in the world. A woman who has broken the boundaries and influenced the worlds of dance and theatre - and will continue to do so on the years to come.

This film was originally intended to be a joint effort between film maker Wim Wenders and Pina Bausch herself. Her unsuspected passing charges the documentary, especially through the genuine grief on many of her dancers' commentaries. And yet, even under the palpable longing for Pina' strength and presence, the film succeeds at being alternatively light hearted and passionate in equal measure.

It's said no one was really aware of Pina's health condition until the time of her death. It can be said then that whatever is visible from Pina inner world it is so through her art alone.

Her dancers enable the external manifestation of her inner landscape; a snapshot from a distant but colourful land perhaps. A land paved at times with water, sand or lunar surfaces; populated with chairs, arms outstretched, embraces, whispers and fall from grace. Tight dresses, suits, torsos, legs, arms, blood. Nakedness, expansion and restraint. For me persnally, these are enough reasons to encourage the witnessing of Pina Bausch's fortitude.

And if after watching it you don't feel like dancing, you might at least feel like you should be living your life more fully.

PINA by Wim Wenders is out now on DVD. For more information, interviews and clips, visit the movie's official website by clicking on this post's title.

One Voice - Patti Smith

2011-10-19T11:39:00.000-07:00

In the garden of consciousness
In fertile mind there lies the dormant seed
When blooming as charity
Conscience breathes a sigh of relief
The confessions of sleep
The awakening seed
Moved by love to serve
We celebrate all
Merit in life
Ah, the confessions of sleep
Unfolding peace
As we extend
According to need
And you will hear the call
All action great and small
Received joyfully
Heaven abounds
Let love resound
If he be mute
Give him a bell
If he be blind, an eye
It he be down, a hand
Lift up your voice
Lift up your voice
Lift up your voice
Give of your mind one mind
Give of your heart one heartGive of your voice
One voice

song by Patti Smith and Jay Dee Daugherty.

from Patti Smith's album Gung Ho (2000)

Nobel Peace Prize 2011

2011-10-17T03:39:00.000-07:00

A post long overdue.

The Nobel pecae prize of 2011 was awarded to

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf (Prseident of Liberia),

Leymah Gbowee (from Liberia) and

Tawakkul Karman (from Yemen)

"for their non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women’s rights to full participation in peace-building work".

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2011 is to be divided in three equal parts between Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Leymah Gbowee and Tawakkul Karman for their non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women’s rights to full participation in peace-building work. We cannot achieve democracy and lasting peace in the world unless women obtain the same opportunities as men to influence developments at all levels of society.

In October 2000, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1325. The resolution for the first time made violence against women in armed conflict an international security issue. It underlined the need for women to become participants on an equal footing with men in peace processes and in peace work in general.

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf is Africa’s first democratically elected female president. Since her inauguration in 2006, she has contributed to securing peace in Liberia, to promoting economic and social development, and to strengthening the position of women. Leymah Gbowee mobilized and organized women across ethnic and religious dividing lines to bring an end to the long war in Liberia, and to ensure women’s participation in elections. She has since worked to enhance the influence of women in West Africa during and after war. In the most trying circumstances, both before and during the “Arab spring”, Tawakkul Karman has played a leading part in the struggle for women’s rights and for democracy and peace in Yemen.

It is the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s hope that the prize to Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Leymah Gbowee and Tawakkul Karman will help to bring an end to the suppression of women that still occurs in many countries, and to realise the great potential for democracy and peace that women can represent.

Oslo, October 7, 2011

find out more about their work and about the Nine Nobel Women by clicking on the links on this post's tile.

text and images source: www.nobelprize.org

Niki de Saint Phalle at Gimpel Fils

2011-10-11T15:01:00.000-07:00

An exhibition with works by late artist and visionary Niki de Saitn Phalle (1930 - 2002) has opened tonight at Gimpel Fils in London.

vive l'amour

Spanning over 40 years of creative endeavours of this great artist, the exhibition encompasses with its key artworks the pain, fun, darkness, colours, boldness and child-like eccentricity conveyed on St Phalle's sculptures, drawings and paintings.

Gimpel Fils has a long tradition of representing de artistic avant gard in London (Yves Klein, Susan Hiller, Josef Albers amongst many other illustrious names).

The exhibition goes until November 12th and it's free. If the weather in London starts to get too grey for your liking, drop by and discover that even from the darkest corners of our souls, we can find colours to express the resiliance of the human heart.

Gimpel Fils is located just behind Bond Street Station (central Line).
30 Davies Street London W1K 4NB UK
tel. +44 (0)20 7493 2488
fax. +44 (0)20 7629 5732
email. info@gimpelfils.com

Kate Bush to release new album

2011-10-11T03:34:00.000-07:00

"50 Words For Snow" is the title of Kate Bush eagerly anitcipated follow up to Aerial (2005). Six years is not such a long time waiting considering how long it took for Kate Bush to return to the studio since her 1993 release, The Red Shoes (1993).

The album is out on the 21st of Novemeber, and for those who cannot wait that long, you can pre-order on through Kate Bush's official website www.katebush.com (click on the link that is this post's title and you'll get there!)

The album's first single Wild Man, was broadcast exclusively on BBC Radio 2 yesterday (Oct 10th). You can listen to the track here http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0156ky4 (the track starts at 1:46:35 in case you do not fancy listening to 2 hours of radio on the computer!)

Book of the Month

2011-10-11T03:21:00.001-07:00

I will try and share some suggestions for interesting and enlightening reads. This one's on my Christmas wish list!

I stumbled upon a review of this particular book on the latest issue of BBC History magazine - from which I present an extract here on this post. For the original review, please click on the link that is this post's title.

Dreamers of a New Day: Women who Intevented the Twentieth Century
by Sheila Rowbotham
RRP: £10.99

review by Sue Wingrove

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries a confluence of factors encouraged women to envisage changes in their circumstances.

Discoveries in science and technology, the rise of global trade and a world war were among developments which inspired – and seemed to offer the chance for – real political and social change.

In this book Sheila Rowbotham, professor of gender and labour history at the University of Manchester, looks at how, from the 1880s to the 1920s, women “armed with only the sketchiest of maps” tried to take control of their destinies. She covers not just Britain but also the United States where besides the politics of gender and class was added that of race, as African-American women struggled to bring that onto the agenda.

The author has deliberately “sought out obscure dreamers” who questioned prevailing assumptions, adding to the pantheon of women’s history a whole new cast of characters. This is a story of hundreds of different movements, campaigning on everything from welfare reform to the right to ride a bicycle.

On every aspect of change there were conflicting ideals, typified by that surrounding the right to practise contraception – or even the right to write about it. Did it allow women to choose motherhood or did it simply enable men to expect sex whenever they wanted?

Those who sought to keep women from taking a wider role liked to characterise the vanguard as unsexed, oversexed or simply deranged. So although campaigners may have had different agendas, they would all learn, in the words of reformer Mary Beard in 1912, that “everything that counts in the common life is political”.

It was a message the world would hear again, in another great period of struggle for women’s rights: “the personal is political” was a frequently heard feminist rallying cry in the 1960 and 1970s.

Sue Wingrove is former deputy editor of BBC History Magazine

!WAR Premiere at the Whitechapel Gallery

2011-09-30T06:51:00.000-07:00

Finally, after 40 years in the making, the documentary tracing the history of the Feminist Art Movement in the United States is, as they say, in the can!

"!WOMEN ART REVOLUTION A Secret History" by Lynn Hershman Leeson will be screened at the Whitechapel Gallery on October the 15th at 3PM; followed by a discussion with the director lead by Whitechapel's Chief Curator Achmin Borchardt-Hume.

Tickets are £6 (there are also concessions for members, students and OAPs)

To book tickets, please click on the link that is this post's title.

Visit: www.womenartrevolution.com

Don't miss the opportunity to witness history!

Coming Soon...New Album by Cat Power

2011-09-30T03:12:00.000-07:00

Cat Power (aka Chan Marshall) is currently adding the finishing touches to the eagerly antecipated follow up to her last album, The Greatest (2006).

In the meantime, get yourself acquainted with the soulful frailty of this great American chanteuse.

Performed on Later with... Jools Holland, 2006.

The Price of Sex - a film by Mimi Chakarova

2011-09-29T13:23:00.000-07:00

The real price of human trafficking:

from Women Make Movies' YouTube Channel.

www.wmm.com

www.catwinternational.org (Coalition Against Trafficking of Women International)

Dorothy Parker - Writer (1893 -1967)

2011-09-29T03:49:00.000-07:00

I've recently purchased (on one of my meandering through the local Chatsworth Market) a second copy of Dorothy Parker's biography "What Fresh Hell Is This?" by Marion Meade. I have just started reading it, but I can tell already I'm in for a treat.

I do not know much about Parker's life at all - apart from the bohemian lifestyle which became part of her legend; and of course her sharp wit and melancholic cynicism at life's many disaventures.

I thought it'd be nice to share some of the wit for which she became renowned for and synonimous of. Her writing was a clear verbal portraiture of the carelessness and dissatisfaction of the times she was living in - the 1920s - the days in between the ravages of the WWI and WWII, when the former needed to be forgotten and the latter was seemingly unforseen.

A Certain Lady (1924)

Oh, I can smile for you, and tilt my head,
And drink your rushing words with eager lips,
And paint my mouth for you a fragrant red,
And trace your brows with tutored finger-tips.
When you rehearse your list of loves to me,
Oh, I can laugh and marvel, rapturous-eyed.
And you laugh back, nor can you ever see
The thousand little deaths my heart has died.
And you believe, so well I know my part,
That I am gay as morning, light as snow,
And all the straining things within my heart
You'll never know.

Oh, I can laugh and listen, when we meet,
And you bring tales of fresh adventurings, --
Of ladies delicately indiscreet,
Of lingering hands, and gently whispered things.
And you are pleased with me, and strive anew
To sing me sagas of your late delights.
Thus do you want me -- marveling, gay, and true,
Nor do you see my staring eyes of nights.
And when, in search of novelty, you stray,
Oh, I can kiss you blithely as you go ....
And what goes on, my love, while you're away,
You'll never know.

Search - Video

2011-09-26T04:55:00.000-07:00

Video by Luciana Saldanha

Andrea Arnold's film version of Bronte's classic novel

2011-09-25T13:18:00.000-07:00

Edna St. Vincent Millay - Poet (1892 - 1950)

2011-09-25T13:02:00.000-07:00

An Ancient Gesture

I thought, as I wiped my eyes on the corner of my apron:
Penelope did this too.
And more than once: you can't keep weaving all day
And undoing it all through the night;
Your arms get tired, and the back of your neck gets tight;
And along towards morning, when you think it will never be light,
And your husband has been gone, and you don't know where, for years.
Suddenly you burst into tears;
There is simply nothing else to do.

And I thought, as I wiped my eyes on the corner of my apron:
This is an ancient gesture, authentic, antique,
In the very best tradition, classic, Greek;
Ulysses did this too.
But only as a gesture,—a gesture which implied
To the assembled throng that he was much too moved to speak.
He learned it from Penelope...
Penelope, who really cried.

Bjork - Cosmogony

2011-09-25T10:22:00.000-07:00

Heaven, heaven's bodies
Whirl around me, make me wonder
And they say back then our universe was an empty sea
Until a silver fox and her cunning mate
Began to sing a song that became the world we know

Heaven, heaven's bodies
Whirl around me make me wonder
They say back then our universe was a coal black egg
Until the god inside burst out and from its shattered shell
He made what became the world we know

Heaven, heaven's bodies
Whirl around me make me wonder
And they say back then our universe was an endless land
Until our ancestors woke up and before they went back to sleep
They carved it all into the world we know

Heaven, heaven's bodies
World around me make me wonder
And they say back then our universe wasn't even there
Until a sudden bang and then there was light, was sound, was matter
And it all became the world we know

Heaven, heaven's bodies
Whirl around me
Dance eternal .

source: booboolaRM's YouTube channel.

from the new album Biophilia

Bjork on Biophilia - BBC Radio Interview 2011

2011-09-25T10:17:00.000-07:00

Broadcast on BBc Radio on the 13th 0f July 2011.

Bjork - Crystalline

2011-09-25T10:14:00.000-07:00

from the new album Biophilia

The exceptional Krystle Warren

2011-09-14T04:24:00.000-07:00

I must confess I haven't heard of her immaculate performance at Jools Holland in 2009,nor have I heard of the concert at the Soho Theatre last year.

So I was in for a very special introduction to this extraordinary singer and performer as she entered the stage - in her shorts and plimsoles, carrying her estimated acoustic guitar - at the Shepherds Bush Empire prior to the eagerly anticipated performance of Joan as Police Woman that evening.

The voice, ladies and gentleman, this lady has it. And as with the late and much missed Jeff Buckley, dare I say, it's not only the earnest poetry of the lyrics but the way she delivers them; it's her singing that gets you. She sings with her face, her throat, her lips, her nostrils. And she cracks good jokes in between songs too. A talent that makes you feel at ease in her presence, not intimidated by it. Refreshingly inspiring, to say the least.

Krystle Warren performing Circles, on later with Jools Holland in 2009.

For the Love of Joan!

2011-09-14T04:11:00.000-07:00

If you were at one of the gigs on the current tour you will know what I am talking about. If you were not, I urge you to catch this lady live.

Joan Wasser (aka Joan as Police Woman) is, unashamedly and generously, emotional and equally dignified and kick ass in her performances. Her concert (accompanied by Tyler Wood on his magic keyboards and Parker Kindred on his understatedly talented drumming) in London last Friday (Sept 09th 2011) was pretty much the most complete; the best performance I have ever seen - and I've seen a few.

I will do a separate mention to her mate, the exceptional Krystle Warren, next.

Gwyneth Lewis - Poet and Writer (b. in Wales in 1959)

2011-08-16T13:57:00.000-07:00

SEA VIRUS

I knew I should never have gone below
but I did, and the fug of bilges and wood
caught me aback. The sheets of my heart
snapped taut to breaking, as a gale
stronger than longing filled the sail
inside me. To be shot of land
and its wood smoke! To feel the keel
cold in a current! To see the mast
inscribing water like a restless pen
writing a fading wake! It’s true,
I’m ruined. Not even peace will do
to keep me ashore now. Not even you.

Lewis delivering the Wales Millennium Center key source: www.gwynethlewis.com

Please click on the link that is this post's title to listen to the "Great Lives" programme of today (16th August 2011) on BBC Radio 4 where Lewis has chosen Emily Dickinson as her "Great Lives" topic.

Nancy Wake (1918- 2011) Resistence Fighter

2011-08-11T07:55:00.000-07:00

As read on The Independent on the 8th of August 2011.

Australian Nancy Wake, who as a spy became one the Allies' most decorated servicewomen for her role in the French resistance during World War II, has died in London, officials said today. She was 98.

Code named "The White Mouse" by the Gestapo during the war, Wake died Sunday in a London nursing home, Prime Minister Julia Gillard said.

"Nancy Wake was a woman of exceptional courage and resourcefulness whose daring exploits saved the lives of hundreds of Allied personnel and helped bring the Nazi occupation of France to an end," Gillard said in a statement.

Trained by British intelligence in espionage and sabotage, Wake helped to arm and lead 7,000 resistance fighters in weakening German defenses before the D-Day invasion in the last months of the war.

While distributing weapons, money and code books in Nazi-occupied France, she evaded capture many times and reached the top of the Gestapo's wanted list, according to her biographer, Peter FitzSimons.

"They called her the 'la Souris Blanche,' 'the White Mouse,' because every time they had her concerned ... she was gone again," FitzSimons told Australian Broadcast Corp. radio on Monday.

"Part of it was she was a gorgeous looking woman," he said. "The Germans were looking for someone who looked like them: aggressive, a man with guns — and she was not like that."

France decorated her with its highest military honor, the Legion d'Honneur, as well as three Croix de Guerre and the Medaille de la Resistance.

The United States awarded her its Medal of Freedom and Britain, the George Medal. Her only Australian honor did not come until 2004, when she was made a Companion of the Order of Australia.

Born Aug. 30, 1912, in the New Zealand capital of Wellington, Nancy Grace Augusta Wake was the youngest of six siblings. When she was 2 the family moved to Sydney, but her father left the family soon after and returned to New Zealand.

Wake became a nurse before an inheritance from a New Zealand aunt enabled her to run away from home in 1931 and fulfill her dream of traveling to New York, London and Paris, she said in an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corp. in 1985.

After studying journalism in London, she became a correspondent for The Chicago Tribune in Paris and reported on the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany. A 1933 trip to interview Hitler in Vienna led her to become committed to bringing down the Nazis.

"I saw the disagreeable things that he was doing to people, first of all the Jews," she told Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio in 1985. "I thought it was quite revolting."

When World War II broke out in 1939, she was living in the French city of Marseille with her first husband, French industrialist Henri Fiocca. She helped British servicemen and Jews escape the German occupying force.

Her husband was eventually seized, tortured and killed by the Gestapo. But Wake managed to escape in 1943 through Spain to London, where she received the espionage training before helping to lead the French resistance in its final days.

Wake continued working for British intelligence in Europe after the war until 1957, when she moved back to Australia and married British fighter pilot John Forward. She moved back to Britain in 2001, four years after Forward's death. She never had children.

According to her wishes, Wake's body is expected to be cremated privately and her ashes scattered next spring at Montlucon in central France, where she fought in a heroic 1944 attack on the local Gestapo headquarters.

Pernille Fischer Christensen - Film Director, Writer, Actress

2011-08-02T11:05:00.000-07:00

Born in Denmark in 1969.

trailer from Christensen's 2006 feature film "A Soap"

Summer Read Tip: Pauline Black memoir "Black by Design"

2011-07-13T05:40:00.000-07:00

When as a young girl brought up by white parents in Britain, Pauline was told by her mother that she was adopted. The revelation sparked Pauline's search for her own cultural identity, as well as those of her original parents.

You can listen to the interview with Pauline on today's Midweek on Radio BBC4:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b012fqn2 (or click on the link that is this post's title).

The text below was taken from Pauline's official website: www.paulineblack.co.uk

"Pauline Black born 23rd October 1953, Coggeshall, ENGLAND of Anglo-Jewish/Nigerian parents.

Pauline Black has spent the last 30 years maintaining the fierce independence that she first forged in her early days as lead vocalist with legendary platinum selling 2-Tone band 'The Selecter'.
During that time she has always tried to do what she fells is right, honest & true. She considers her female mixed race status gives her a unique insight into the twin evils of racism and sexism that still beset the world and render the original message of the 2-tone movement as relevant today as it was in 1979.

Since then, she has built her considerable reputation through singing, songwriting, acting, presenting, broadcasting and writing.
She has garnered several singing and acting awards along the way. Never content to just rest on her laurels or pursue the road of easy celebrity, Pauline has delivered 9 studio albums throughout her career, chronicling her particular view of the precious world that we inhabit.

In 2007, eager to expand her musical repertoire still further, she toured "The Very Best of Nina Simone & Billie Holiday" with her "Blue Jazz Trio", to critical acclaim. 2008 saw her pursue another musical passion when she presented and performed on BBC4 TV's "Soul Britannia" series and then joined the "This Is Soul Tour 2008" performing alongside soul legends Eddie Floyd & Geno Washington.

In 2009, the "30th Anniversary of the 2-Tone Movement", she elected to return to her first love ska music, not in a nostalgic re-union mood, (although she is very proud of her 'Selecter' past & is still eager to celebrate that history in the future), but as a respected solo artist, forging new relationships with musicians in Argentina, Brazil & Australia. On Oct 3rd 2009, she headlined at the "100 Nicetos Festival" in Buenos Aires, Argentina in front of 30,000 people backed by Hugo Lobo's ska/reggae influenced band, "Dancing Mood", plus a 30 piece string orchestra, choir and Nyabinghi drummers.

At the start of the new decade, 2010 finds Pauline building on last year's success. Concerts & festivals have been booked throughout the year, showcasing new & old material from her entire career, with her new 6-piece band. Highlights of her solo show include old favourites like "On My Radio" & "Missing Words", new songs "Eyes On The Prize" & "Total Control" and a brilliant ska/reggae salute to Amy Winehouse's "Back To Black" ("obviously written for me", jokes Pauline at concerts).

A new recording project with her new band is currently in the pipeline & her long-awaited memoir "Black By Design" is finished & has a firm publishing offer. A movie "Three Minute Hero" is at the script writing stage and will tell the story of Pauline, Neville Staple & ex-boxer Errol Christie back when Coventry was gripped by 2-tone fever . These three projects will give her many fans a chance to see what makes this singular artist tick. Pauline Black is a unique woman with a multi-faceted talent."

"From the left: Chrissie Hynde (The Pretenders), Deborah Harry (Blondie), Viv Albertine (The Slits), Siouxsie Sioux (Siouxsie & the Banshees), front: Poly Styrene (X-Ray Spex), Pauline Black (The Selector).

Harking back to the famous photograph taking by Michael Putland for the New Musical News in 1980, Pauline Black, lead singer of two tone band The Selector interviews Viv Albertine (The Slits), Poly Styrene (X-Ray Spex), Siouxie Sioux (Siouxie and the Banshees) and Gaye Advert (The Adverts) about their experiences as female musicians of the “new wave” in the late 70s, early 80s."
(Photo and caption source: 'Slow Songs and Fast Hearts' website: www.fasthearts.com)

WSPA Humane Chain : Help stop the cruel live animal export trade

2011-07-12T04:32:00.000-07:00

Please take only fiv minutes of your time to sign this petition.

WSPA Humane Chain : Help stop the cruel live animal export trade

Dame Daphne Sheldrick (b. June 1934)

2011-06-13T07:36:00.000-07:00

Please take time to listen to this wonderful broadcast of an interview with the extraordinary Dame Daphne Sheldrick from today's Woman's Hour on Radio BBC4.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b011tz8k

A documentary about her life "Born to be Wild" and work is out now on BFI IMAX cinema.

Nerina Pallot " History Boys"

2011-06-13T07:30:00.000-07:00

from her forthcoming album "Year of the Wolf".

STOP PRESS: She's back!

2011-05-05T11:12:00.000-07:00

Hey Tori fans,

We have some exciting news to report. Tori has a new album titled Night of Hunters set for September release. The album will coming out via the world’s most celebrated classical label, Deutsche Grammophon.

Here’s how Tori describes the new record:

"It's a 21st century song cycle inspired by classical music themes spanning over 400 years. I have used the structure of a song cycle to tell an ongoing, modern story. The protagonist is a woman who finds herself in the dying embers of a relationship. In the course of one night she goes through an initiation of sorts that leads her to reinvent herself allowing the listener to follow her on a journey to explore complex musical and emotional subject matter. One of the main themes explored on this album is the hunter and the hunted and how both exist within us.”
Hear exclusive tracks from Night of Hunters via the website and email soon.

EXCLUSIVE TOUR DATES

Tori will be heading out on tour this Fall in both Europe and the US.

The first of shows are listed below. Links to buy tickets and on sale dates can be found at toriamos.com/tours

9/28 Finland, Helsinki, Ice Hall

9/30 Russia, St Petersburg, Oktyabrsky Hall

10/2 Russia, Moscow, Crocus Hall

10/4 Luxembourg, Den Atelier

10/5 France, Paris, Le Grand Rex

10/7 Italy, Milan, Teatro Smeraldo

10/8 Italy, Rome, Auditorium Parco della Musica

10/10 Germany, Hamburg, Laieszhalle

10/11 Germany, Berlin, Tempodrom

10/13 Poland, Warsaw, Sala Kongresowa

10/17 Holland, Amsterdam, Carre

10/20 Norway, Oslo, Sentrum Scene

10/21 Denmark, Copenhagen, The Royal Theatre

10/24 Switzerland, Lucerne, KKL

10/25 Austria, Vienna, Stadthalle F

10/26 Germany, Frankfurt, Alte Oper

10/28 Belgium, Antwerp, QEH

10/29 Belgium, Brussels, Bozar

10/31 Germany, Essen, Philharmonie

11/2 UK, London, Royal Albert Hall

11/4 UK, Manchester, Apollo

11/6 UK, Glasgow, Royal Concert Hall

11/8 UK, Belfast, Waterfront

11/9 Eire, Dublin, Grand Canal Theatre

EXCLUSIVE MERCH DISCOUNT:

Limited Edition LOMO “Tori” (Camera, CD & Lens) Box Set

NOW $150 – from $185

In celebration of all of this, we are discounting the small amount of LOMO Limited Edition “Tori” Film Camera Box Set’s we have remaining at the Tori Store. This set comes with an unreleased double CD of Tori’s first ever performance in Moscow, Russia called ”From Russia With Love”. It also comes with an Exclusive “China Edition” lens set to use with the “Tori” camera (Wide Angle and Close Up). Box set also comes with exclusive Tori photo taken in Moscow, Tori Edition Lomo book as well as film. To get yours, visit the Tori Store: store.toriamos.com

Keep up to date with Tori via Facebook and Twitter!

www.facebook.com/toriamos

www.twitter.com/therealtoriamos

"Veronica's song"

2011-02-02T10:46:00.000-08:00

Dear readers,

My computer has been broken for awhile now, hence my lack of reply to some posts and comments. I dont feel like writing posts from work like I am doing now.

This will be my last post UNTIL SUMMER 2011 when, as well as have sorted out my computer situation, I will have finished what I am currently working on.

The blog will go on as usual, but for now, it's time to take a deep breath and unravel along different pastures.

I will leave you with a song by Joan as Police Woman whose work has been featured here a few times before.

I could not believe my ears when I heard this. It was a moment of complete satori; everything clicked - and of course, I cried.

By Summertime "Mistresses" will be back with more inspirational women and their work. But there is no point in me trying and praise other women if I don't realise my OWN work, right?

Take care and see you in the Summer!

"I will never be careful what I wish for, because what I wish for is always right" "Kiss the Specifics" by JAPW

Niki de Saint Phalle (b. France 1930 - USA 2002)

2011-01-21T13:32:00.000-08:00

A friend mentioned Phalle's work when we were discussing my next creative endeavour.

Find out more at her official website: http://www.nikidesaintphalle.com/

LS X

Sister Rosetta Tharpe (1915-1973)

2011-01-15T14:33:00.000-08:00

This lady influenced Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis, amongst others.

Ladies and Gentleman, Sister Rosetta Tharpe!

Follow the link to documentary on BBC IPlayer:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/i/xf8k7/

Ólöf Arnalds & Björk - Surrender - NEW SONG

2010-12-30T04:27:00.000-08:00

New Song By Bjork: Surrender.

Thank you Diego for this!

Happy New Year to all Mistresses out there!

PJ Harvey: Let England Shake - New album announcement

2010-11-25T13:30:00.000-08:00

PJ Harvey: Let England Shake - New album announcement

Happy Halloween!

2010-10-31T04:43:00.000-07:00

For all the witches, black cats and pumpkins out there!

PJ Harvey & John Parish: Black Hearted Love - from the album A Woman A Man Walked By (2009)

Katharine Towers' poem "The Way We Go"

2010-10-18T11:45:00.000-07:00

Read this on the underground today. I took it as a very much yearnt for gift from the Universe.

Lisa Cholodenko's new film (from The Guardian Film Review)

2010-10-10T09:29:00.000-07:00

Interview with filmmaker Lisa Cholodenko - director of "High Art" - about her new film "The Kids are Alright", starring Juliet Moore and Annette Bening.

(For the full article and for more interviews with filmmakers Debra Granik, Nannette Burstein and Sanaa Hamri, please follow the link that is this post's title.)

Lisa Cholodenko: 'I wanted to make a film that was not sanctimonious or sentimental'

Photograph: c.Focus/Everett / Rex Features

For all that she was once a keen student of gender studies, film director Lisa Cholodenko isn't much of a one for hand-wringing. Ask her about Hollywood and she looks you hard in the face and tells it like it is. Yes, it's plastic. Yes, it's sexist. But what is a girl to do? Moaning will you get nowhere. Besides, the simple truth is that she just does not have any particular desire to make, say, a film about an alien invasion, featuring laser guns, copious gloop and plastic body suits.

"You know, I get asked why there aren't more female directors all the time," she says. "I'm kind of reluctant to talk about it. That's not because I think the question is irrelevant or stupid. It's just that there are so many mitigating factors. Here, the dollar is the final frontier and it's men who are typically attracted to the kind of material that brings in the masses: comic books, thrillers, special effects. Women tend to be more interested in character, in psychology. Are there women out there who are rabid to make those [more macho] kind of movies? I don't know. Maybe. Maybe they just can't get into the system. But that's not at all my sense of what's happening."

When, last March, Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to pick up a best director Oscar – she won for her tense Iraq drama, The Hurt Locker – Cholodenko felt only mildly pleased. "It was cool," she recalls. "I mean, I'm glad it went to her and not to James Cameron [for Avatar]; if that had happened, it would have been too weird. But, on the other hand, it felt so long overdue, the announcement itself was almost… dusty. I liked Kathryn's film. I liked that it was quite macho. But I still think that it's lopsided, the value we give to things. Why should a film have to have all that stuff in it: the guns, the special effects? Why does a film like, say, Lost in Translation by Sofia Coppola get called 'petite'?

"Of course, this whole Oscar thing is so political. It's about how much a film grosses, and who's in it, and how well it has been promoted. But still, the more salient point is: do we value highly enough the aesthetic to which women are attracted? We valued it in the 70s, when films like The Graduate, Five Easy Pieces and Coming Home got made. But now? I don't think that we do."

Cholodenko's new movie, The Kids Are All Right, was made for just $4.5m. Extremely funny and replete with deft and touching performances, it has so far made about $21m at the box office. The American critics loved it and there is already talk that Annette Bening will receive an Oscar nomination for her role. Cholodenko says she would be disappointed, now, if the film was not to be nominated in some category or another. But is she hoping it will be her ticket to working for a big studio? Not even remotely.

The Kids Are All Right is about what happens when two children who were conceived by artificial insemination decide to bring their donor father (Mark Ruffalo) into their lives, and the lives of their lesbian mothers (played by Bening and Julianne Moore), and it is probably fair to say that no studio would have looked at the script twice given its subject matter. Cholodenko believes she can only make the movies she wants to make in the independent sector, though even there it's hardly easy.

"Oh, it was super-painful to get it made," she says. "Even after Annette and Julianne were attached, when it came down to people wanting to write a cheque… well, there were a lot of conversations, but they just never committed."

If, by some miracle, a studio had been involved, it isn't too hard to work out how much tweaking there would have been to Cholodenko's script. A joke about oral sex between two women? No thanks. We have audiences in the midwest to consider. A scene in which two women get off on watching male gay porn? Ditto. As for the film's ending… suffice to say that The Kids Are All Right does not have a Hollywood ending, at least not in the heterosexual sense of the term; Cholodenko would doubtless have been asked to rewrite it. "I wanted to make a film that was not sentimental, sanctimonious or apologetic; so did Annette and Julianne. So that's what we did. It is a political film, in the sense that it's saying: this marriage is as messy and flawed and complicated as any other marriage. I couldn't have done that anywhere other than in the independent sector."

A studio might also have been tempted to mess with casting. Hollywood is nothing if not obsessed with youth, though, alas, this passion extends only to female cast members (positively ancient men still get to play opposite women young enough to be their daughters; Bening is 52 and Moore is 49).

"I was painstaking about casting. I thought, if this isn't spot on, it isn't going to work. When I was talking to my casting director [about a particular actor], I would say, has she had work? And if they told me 'maybe', I would say, in that case, no. I wanted the film to say this is what a 52-year-old woman looks like and she's still sexy. It took me so long to cast. I mean, I didn't want to cast Kate Winslet. Who would buy that she had an 18-year-old daughter? And I like Helen Mirren, but she's just so intent on being older and sexy…

"The problem is that most of them [Hollywood actresses] have had work and it's just horrible! There's no way you can say that they don't look different. They don't even look younger – they just look weird. They say, oh, my eyes are drooping. But is it really any better to have them so high to your forehead?"

The shooting of The Kids Are All Right took just 23 days and Bening and Moore spent very little of that in make-up. "When the film was finished, Annette watched it with her husband [Warren Beatty] and a few other people. I was, like, for fuck's sake! I hope she isn't pissed. I hope she doesn't say, I didn't know you were shooting me like that, or, how dare you show my arms? But she just loved it. Bravo to her. She is so cool."

Cholodenko and her co-writer, Stuart Blumberg, began working on their script in 2004. But the delay in getting the film made wasn't only to do with the laborious process of financing. In 2006, Cholodenko and her partner, Wendy Melvoin, had a baby by a sperm donor themselves and though the project had by then been given the green light, she put work on hold while she was pregnant. The film, then, deals with something that Cholodenko might one day have to cope with herself, though unlike Nic and Jules, the characters in her film, Cholodenko did not use an anonymous donor. I had worried that she would want to separate her life and the film quite decisively, but she is delightfully straightforward when it comes to it.

"I think the loss of anonymity for all donors eventually [in the US, as in the UK, children can now trace their fathers when they reach 18] is great," she says. "I'm all for openness. It's not important for the parents. But it is for the kid. In the US, you can choose [initial] anonymity or you can choose to have an open donor. I feel sad when I talk to moms who are, like, 'Ugh! I don't want anything to do with that person.' Really? Because I don't think your kid is going to feel that way. They will want to feel complete, that their life is OK. I have a massive dossier on my donor, he has committed to being available one day, and I know, too, that my kid has half siblings and it's all much less sad. It's a modern world out there!"

Tori Amos: I Can't See New York

2010-10-01T07:53:00.000-07:00

From here
no Lines are
drawn
From here
no lands
are owned
13,000 and Holding
swallowed
in the purring
of her Engines
tracking the Beakon
here
"is there a Signal
there
on the other side"
on the other side?

what do you mean side of
what things?

and you said
and you did
and you said
you could find me
here and you said you would
find me even in Death
and you said
and you said
You'd find me
But

I can't see New York
as I'm circling down
through white cloud
falling out
and
I know his lips
are warm
but I can't seem
to find my way out
my way out

I can't see New York
as I'm circling Down
through white cloud
falling out
and
I know his
lips are warm
but I can't
seem to find
my way out
my way out
of
this Hunting ground

From here
crystal meth
In
metres of millions
In
the end
all we have,
soul blueprint.
did we get
lost in it
do we
conduct a
search
for this

"from the other
side"
from the other
side?
what do they mean side of
what things...

and you said
and you did
and you said
you would find me
here and you said that you would
find me even in Death
and you said
and you said
You'd find me
But

I can't see New York
as I'm circling down
through white cloud
falling out
and
I know his lips
are warm
but I can't seem
To find my way out
my way out

I can't see New York
as I'm circling down
through white cloud
falling out
and
I know your lips
are warm
but I can't seem
to find my way
my way out
of your hunting ground

you again
It's you again
I can't see
I can't see
New York
from the other side
from the other side

I Hum
from the
other side

Music and Lyrics by Tori Amos, from the album Scarlet's Walk (2002)

Lais Bodanzky (b. 1969)

2010-10-01T04:47:00.000-07:00

Delicia de artigo com a cineasta brasileira Lais Bodanzky, diretora de 'O Bicho de Sete Cabecas', 'Chega de Saudade' e, mais recentemente, 'As Melhores Coisas do Mundo', que lotou cinemas no Brasil.

foto: O Estado de Sao Paulo

Aos 40 anos, Laís Bodanzky é um dos nomes mais respeitados do cinema nacional. Filha do cineasta Jorge Bodanzky, ela já rodou o Brasil para levar cinema a lugares esquecidos. Além de ter lançado Rodrigo Santoro em Bicho de Sete Cabeças e mergulhado no universo da terceira idade em Chega de Saudade, ela entra com tudo no mundo dos adolescentes com As Melhores Coisas do Mundo, que anda lotando sessões desde que estreou.

Laís gosta do silêncio, do subtexto, do que não é dito. “Me interessa o mundo interno, das emoções”, confirma a própria. Só que, hoje, aos 40 anos, comemora o fato de estar exausta de tanto falar nas últimas semanas. O assunto é um só: As Melhores Coisas do Mundo, seu novo longa (inspirado na série de livros Mano, do jornalista Gilberto Dimenstein), que revela a realidade de adolescentes da classe média paulistana e toca em temas como bullying, homossexualismo e preconceito.

Vencedor de oito prêmios no Cine PE Festival do Audiovisual deste ano, o filme, que custou R$ 6 milhões, foi visto, até o fechamento desta edição, por cerca de 250 mil pessoas. É também sucesso de crítica – sobretudo dos mais ferrenhos críticos de todos os tempos, os adolescentes. De posts em blogs a twitts ligeiros (como “cabei de ver As Melhores Coisas do Mundo sério... é a minha vida contada num filme... em TODOS os detalhes”), o triunfo do longa está na rede.

Eram esses adolescentes que, em uma quinta-feira à noite, lotavam a sala de um Cinemark paulistano. Assim que o filme começa, os espectadores comentam cenas, tomam partido e acompanham baixinho a música tema, “Something”, dos Beatles. Para descobrir que uma das bandas preferidas em sua juventude ainda é das mais ouvidas pelos garotos de hoje, Laís passou dois meses se encontrando com alunos de sete escolas particulares de São Paulo. Depois, assistiu em vídeo às 2.500 entrevistas com os jovens a fim de integrar o elenco. Por fim, testou 500 finalistas, escolhendo o estudante Francisco Miguez e Fiuk, filho de Fábio Jr., para protagonizarem a história.

Mundos paralelos

O hábito de disparar a falar, como fez Laís nas cinco horas de papo com a reportagem da Tpm na sala de seu apartamento, é recente. Quem conta é Luiz Bolognesi, marido dela há 15 anos, pai de suas meninas (Carolina, 7 anos, e Mariá, 5) e sócio na Buriti Filmes. Filha única do cineasta Jorge Bodanzky (diretor de Iracema, uma Transa Amazônica, censurado pela ditadura nos anos 70) com uma professora de história da arte, Laís cresceu brincando sozinha e acompanhando o pai em sets. Formou-se em cinema pela Faap, mas antes passou pelo CPT (Centro de Pesquisa Teatral) de Antunes Filho e cursou um semestre de geografia na USP. Aos 18 anos, começou a fazer vídeos de casamentos e palestras e, em seguida, filmes institucionais. Em 1994, lançou seu primeiro curta-metragem profissional, Cartão Vermelho.

Foi por causa desses vídeos institucionais, para os quais Luiz escrevia roteiros, que o casal se conheceu. Em 1995, Laís fez assistência para o curta Pedro e o Senhor, dirigido por ele, e os dois se casaram. Um ano depois, resolveram levar cinema para periferias da Grande São Paulo e, mais tarde, para o interior do Brasil, criando o Cine Mambembe. O projeto, que ganhou patrocinadores e mudou de nome para Cine Tela Brasil, hoje leva duas salas de cinema de verdade Brasil adentro – em 14 anos foram mais de 700 mil espectadores.

Mas o idealismo de Laís tem os pés no chão. A bagunça de seu escritório mistura uma pilha de livros, DVDs e roteiros que chegam às suas mãos. Ela não parece preocupada em ganhar muito dinheiro, fazer muito sucesso ou impressionar intelectuais. Prefere seguir no sossego de seu emocionante mundo interior.

Lais filmando, gravida de sete meses (foto arquivo pessoal)

Tpm. Você acaba de dirigir As Melhores Coisas do Mundo, e o Luiz (Bolognesi), seu marido, assina o roteiro. Vocês trabalham juntos e são casados há 15 anos. O fato de você ser mais reconhecida do que ele gera algum incômodo na relação?
Laís Bodanzky. Ah, dura pouco eu ser mais reconhecida, porque o Luiz fala bastante e muito bem, então, quando a gente vai a algum lugar, eu fico quieta e ele fala, fala, fala. E as pessoas babam. Não tem a questão da mulher com o marido. Mas tem uma coisa profissional que a gente traz pra casa que é a figura do diretor em relação ao roteirista. Os roteiristas, inclusive nos Estados Unidos, reivindicam também a autoria do filme. Mas a verdade é que, independente de eu aparecer mais na mídia, muitas vezes eu é que acabo cobrando do Luiz um reconhecimento da minha autoria.

As Melhores Coisas do Mundo é o terceiro longa-metragem de vocês. E, como nos anteriores (Bicho de Sete Cabeças, 2000, e Chega de Saudade, 2008), vocês mergulharam no universo do filme, no caso, dos adolescentes. De onde vem essa intensidade?
Já dirigi muito vídeo institucional para pagar o aluguel. E, uma vez, fazendo um filme para uma empresa de elevadores, ouvi dois técnicos conversando sobre Inferno na Torre [longa de John Guillermin, 1974]: “Você viu por que o elevador despencou naquela cena? As travas um e dois não funcionaram, e ele ficou preso pela trava três”. Pensei: “Cara, o especialista em elevadores acreditou que aquele elevador caiu”. E então, quando fiz o Bicho de Sete Cabeças, lembrava disso. Nos testes era desesperador, as pessoas berravam e se jogavam no chão. Eu falava: “A loucura não é isso. Ela é pra dentro, é silenciosa, sutil, é um olhar”. E então, depois de o filme pronto, uma enfermeira de hospital psiquiátrico falou: “Como você filmou num hospital funcionando?”. Achei o máximo, enganei uma especialista. Do mesmo jeito, uma frequentadora de salão de baile assistiu a Chega de Saudade e perguntou como liguei a câmera lá no meio sem ninguém reconhecer os atores. E agora, em As Melhores Coisas do Mundo, escutei adolescentes dizendo que nunca foram tão entendidos quanto por esse filme. O adolescente é meu especialista, é o ser mais “cri-cri” que existe.

O que você viu, nas pesquisas para o filme, sobre bullying, preconceito e homossexualismo entre os adolescentes?
Percebemos que, claro, tem uma diferença no homossexual de uma geração pra outra, mas não é uma aceitação. O homossexual que se declara é o extrovertido. Mas, se a pessoa não tem clareza, é classificada na escola e isso pode ter consequências graves. Ao mesmo tempo, tem um certo “oba-oba”, um modismo entre as meninas de se beijarem, um pouco para dizer: “Olha como sou liberada”. Mas não é uma consciência sexual. Por isso, quando aparece uma menina que seja mesmo diferente, a tendência é ser isolada. O bullying já existia na minha geração, mas ganhou outra ferramenta, a internet, e uma intensidade maior. Hoje o aluno que é isolado do grupo vira piada e pode mudar de colégio, até de cidade, que a informação sobre ele vaza. É um pesadelo kafkiano. E isso acontece na surdina, só os adolescentes percebem. Existe um medo geral entre eles de ser diferente, de ser vítima do bullying. Então, muitos falam de alguém antes que falem dele. Independente das mudanças tecnológicas, eu entendo tão bem o que eles estão dizendo... É um sentimento eterno, que vai pular de uma geração para outra.

Você acredita que por falar desses sentimentos universais é que seus filmes emocionam pessoas de idades variadas?
Minha praia são acontecimentos internos. Tanto que em As Melhores Coisas do Mundo só tem duas cenas de ação. Dou espaço para o silêncio cheio de informação. Por exemplo, a cena dos irmãos [vividos por Francisco Miguez e Fiuk] é, para mim, de uma intimidade que só é possível entre irmãos, com a intimidade de uma vida. Tem as dores do mundo que você vai dividir com aquele que acha que te entende mais. Quando a gente fez a pesquisa perguntava para os adolescentes: “Você tem alguém que admira?”. Muitos falaram: “Meu irmão”.

Você tem irmãos?
Tenho duas meias-irmãs, por parte de pai. Sou do primeiro casamento dele, e elas são do segundo. Nasceram no Rio de Janeiro, e eu sempre morei em São Paulo. Cresci filha única, sempre desejando ter um irmão. Quando a Alice nasceu eu já tinha 12 anos. Mesmo assim foi tanta alegria... Tenho duas filhas, observo, acho maravilhosa a relação entre irmãos.

Sua primeira filha foi planejada?
Sim. Eu queria engravidar quando a gente fez a viagem pelo interior do Brasil com o Cine Mambembe. Eu achava que já estava na hora de engravidar, mas não engravidei. Quando voltei, ia começar a filmar o Bicho de Sete Cabeças, e uma amiga falou: “Não engravide agora!”. Ela me convenceu de que não tinha nada a ver um set com uma mulher barriguda, que pode precisar de cuidados. O cinema não tem essa de “espera um pouquinho”. Aí me cuidei e, depois que lancei o Bicho, veio a Carolina.

E a Mariá, também foi planejada?
Foi. Mas não me imaginava mãe de meninas. Acho que porque nunca fui vaidosa. Essa coisa da unha [mostra as unhas curtas pintadas de verde] é novidade. Nunca fui a mãe que quer o cor-de-rosa, o frufru, achava que ia ter mais empatia com menino. Mas descobri que é uma delícia ser mãe de menina. Para mim, teve um lado também de me permitir ser mulher, comprar um batom, fazer uma maquiagem, coisa que eu não ligava.

Como é sua rotina e a do Luiz, trabalhando com cinema e pais de duas filhas pequenas?
A gente é muito presente. Almoço em casa todo dia, faço lição de casa junto. Ontem a Mariá ficou com febre, e eu passei o dia com ela. Desde que tivemos as filhas, resolvemos seguir a antroposofia [linha de medicina baseada em conceitos do pensador austríaco Rudolf Steiner]. E essa é uma escolha que exige muito da família porque você tem que ter um comportamento alinhado a todo o tratamento, que não é só quando a criança está doente. Tem que segurar uma barra porque os remédios antroposóficos não cortam nada imediatamente, não é simplesmente dar aquelas gotinhas. Então esse lado mãe ficou muito forte. Já nos momentos de filmagem – que não acontecem toda hora –, são dois meses que eu desapareço, e aí o Luiz dá o suporte. Mas elas sentem bastante, eu percebo.

Você sente a tão falada culpa da mulher que se divide entre profissão e filhos?
Me policio para não sentir, mas sinto. Ter filho é barra-pesada, no sentido de continuar sendo você mesma. Existe uma cobrança: “Como não vai dar conta de ser mãe e trabalhar? Dar à luz e fazer o supermercado, deixar a casa linda...?”. Por mais que eu tenha consciência de que é uma bobagem querer ser uma “supermulher”, na hora do vamos ver, acho que tenho que dar conta de tudo sim. Por causa disso neste momento estou exausta. Não cuido de mim, não faço ginástica, não arrumo meu escritório, não... me respeito. Tudo que é pra mim, penso: “Ah, deixa pra depois”. Sabe aquilo que falam, na hora do voo, que, se acontecer uma pane, primeiro coloque a máscara de oxigênio em você e depois na criança? Eu sempre pensava: “Por que não antes na criança?”. Depois é que percebi: se o adulto não está bem, como vai cuidar da criança? Eu ainda estou na busca de colocar a máscara primeiro em mim. Quando você quer dar conta de tudo, quer é não fazer feio para os outros. Acontece que às vezes faz feio para você mesma. Mas tem um lado engraçado: o meu banheiro não tem a tranca, então, cara, elas entram até no banheiro, e sem claquete [risos]. É divertido, um agito que não tive na infância.

E como é passar o dia falando de trabalho com o Luiz e à noite deitar com ele?
Quando vejo, estou fazendo reunião de trabalho na mesa da sala, à noite. Se estamos em casa, deveria ser um momento de desligar, mas esse momento nunca existe. Então vai criando uma panela de pressão. Pra você ter uma ideia, na época de Bicho de Sete Cabeças a gente mudou para o apartamento que era do meu avô. Como não tínhamos um escritório e o apartamento era grande, decidimos abrir a Buriti lá mesmo para produzir o filme. Aí acabou a filmagem, mas ainda tinha a Buriti, que continuou funcionando com o Cine Mambembe. As pessoas que trabalhavam com a gente tinham a chave. Até que teve um sábado, à meia-noite, em que estamos eu e o Luiz indo dormir, quando eu escuto um barulho na porta, alguém entrando. Era uma produtora: “Vim pegar uma coisa”. Lembrei que tinha que falar com ela e disse: “Vem cá”. Ela entrou e fizemos uma reunião: eu e o Luiz na cama, debaixo do lençol, conversando com ela sobre coisas do trabalho. Aí falamos: “Chega”. E montamos um escritório do lado.

Como surgiu a ideia do Cine Mambembe?
O Luiz e eu temos um encontro muito feliz de ideias que conseguimos tirar do papel. A gente tem um lado empreendedor, então falamos: “Vamos levar cinema para as periferias?”. Primeiro saímos pela Grande São Paulo: praça da Sé, Santo Amaro, São Miguel Paulista, Taboão da Serra... Depois, pelo interior do Brasil. Foi muito forte a experiência, só nós dois. Fizemos isso em 1997 e 1998. Agora o negócio cresceu e acabamos cuidando mais da burocracia, dos números. E foram criadas também as oficinas de vídeo e, mais recentemente, as oficinas virtuais - www.telabr.com.br

Seus filmes agradam o grande público, mas também são considerados de qualidade, não apenas comerciais. Como atingir esse equilíbrio?
O Luiz, principalmente, tem uma experiência com o universo de comunicação empresarial. Isso deu a ele a capacidade de traduzir um raciocínio complexo para um operário, sem perder a classe, mas se fazendo entender. Da minha parte, eu não saberia fazer um filme cabeça, fechado, hermético, nas referências ou nas citações, porque eu não me considero uma teórica, uma cinéfila. O cinema que faço é como sou, mais ligada às emoções.

Do mesmo jeito que As Melhores Coisas do Mundo chegou às suas mãos como uma ideia pronta, chegam outros convites de direção?
Chegam. Na época do Bicho começou a chegar muito roteiro, mas só tragédias [risos]. E eu querendo engravidar, ficar leve. Mas nunca aceitei nenhum convite. As Melhores Coisas é o primeiro projeto que encarei, mas só porque era com o Fabiano e o Caio, da Gullane Filmes, que são meus amigos de faculdade, e porque a gente ia criar o roteiro do zero. Eu vou fazer poucos filmes na minha vida, sei disso. Tenho que ser muito sincera com minhas escolhas, porque todo mundo quer te seduzir.

O que te motiva a fazer cinema?
O desejo de tocar, comunicar uma pessoa. Ter a sensação de que deu tanto trabalho, mas no fim está tudo bem. Ontem uma amiga me disse que achou As Melhores Coisas parecido com meu primeiro curta, Cartão Vermelho, mas mais maduro. Achei legal reconhecer uma coerência no que faço há 20 anos.

Para re portagem na integra, visite o site da TPM (Trip para Mulheres), ou clique na link que e' o titulo deste post

Joan As Police Woman - Start Of My Heart

2010-09-19T04:17:00.000-07:00

Can you breathe and listen to this song at the same time?

She makes me want to make music so bad.

Have a great Sunday everyone!

!WAR: WOMEN ART REVOLUTION

2010-09-14T12:29:00.000-07:00

A film by Lynn Hershman Leeson.

About !WAR:

"For over forty years, Director Lynn Hershman Leeson has collected hundreds of hours of interviews with visionary artists, historians, curators and critics who shaped the beliefs and values of the Feminist Art Movement and reveal previously undocumented strategies used to politicize female artists and integrate women into art structures.

!Women Art Revolution elaborates the relationship of the Feminist Art Movement to the 1960s anti-war and civil rights movements and explains how historical events, such as the all-male protest exhibition against the invasion of Cambodia, sparked the first of many feminist actions against major cultural institutions. The film details major developments in women’s art of the 1970s, including the first feminist art education programs, political organizations and protests, alternative art spaces such as the A.I.R. Gallery and Franklin Furnace in New York and the Los Angeles Women’s Building, publications such as Chrysalis and Heresies, and landmark exhibitions, performances, and installations of public art that changed the entire direction of art.

New ways of thinking about the complexities of gender, race, class, and sexuality evolved. The Guerrilla Girls emerged as the conscience of the art world and held academic institutions, galleries, and museums accountable for discrimination practices. Over time, the tenacity and courage of these pioneering women artists resulted in what many historians now feel is the most significant art movement of the late 20th century.

Carrie Brownstein composed an original score to accompany the film. Laurie Anderson, Janis Joplin, Sleater-Kinney, The Gossip, Erase Errata and Tribe 8 are some of the gifted musicians who contributed to our soundtrack."

I say, "Bring it on!"

find out more on www.womenartrevolution.com

About Lynn Hershman Leeson:

Over the last three decades, artist and filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson has been
internationally acclaimed for her pioneering use of new technologies and her
investigations of issues that are now recognized as key to the working of our society: identity in a time of consumerism, privacy in an era of surveillance, interfacing of humans and machines, and the relationship between real and virtual worlds.

In 2007 a retrospective at the Whitworth Gallery in Manchester, Autonomous Agents,
featured a comprehensive range– from the Roberta Breitmore series (1974-78) to
videos from the 1980s and interactive installations that use the Internet and artificial intelligence software. Her influential early ventures into performance and photographyare also featured in the current touring exhibition WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, organized by the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.

Secret Agents Private I, The Art and Films of Lynn Hershman Leeson was
published by The University of California Press in 2005 on the occasion of
another retrospective at the Henry Gallery in Seattle. Her three feature films-
Strange Culture, Teknolust, Conceiving Ada- have been part of the Sundance Film Festival and The Berlin International Film Festival, among others, and have won numerous awards.

Work by Lynn Hershman Leeson is featured in the public collections of the
Museum of Modern Art, the William Lehmbruck Museum, the ZKM (Zentrum fur
Kunst und Medientechnologie), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the
National Gallery of Canada, the Walker Art Center and the University Art
Museum, Berkeley, in addition to the celebrated private collections of Donald
Hess and Arturo Schwarz, among many others. Commissions include projects for
the Tate Modern, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, De Young Museum, Daniel Langois and Stanford University, and Charles Schwab.

Recently honored with grants from Creative Capital and the National Endowment
for the Arts, she is also the recipient of a Siemens International Media Arts
Award, the Flintridge Foundation Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Visual
Arts, Prix Ars Electronica, and Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Feature Film Prize. In
2004 Stanford University Libraries acquired Hershman Leeson’s working archive.

Hershman Leeson is Chair of the Film Department at the San Francisco Art Institute, Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Davis and an A.D. White Professor at Large at Cornell University.

source: www.lynnhershman.com

Female Playwright Finally Appears on Globe Stage

2010-09-13T10:19:00.000-07:00

From Women & Hollywood by Mel Silverstein.

www.womenandhollywood.com

Female Playwright Finally Appears on Globe Stage

Sofia Coppola Wins Top Prize at Venice Film Festival

2010-09-13T10:17:00.000-07:00

From Women & Hollywood by Mel Silverstein.

www.womenandhollywood.com

Sofia Coppola Wins Top Prize at Venice Film Festival

Pina Bausch / Cafe Muller / extract 1/5 / intro

2010-09-13T09:59:00.000-07:00

Cafe Muller. (part I)

Choreographed by Pina Bausch.

Pina Bausch / Cafe Muller / extract 2/5

2010-09-13T09:58:00.000-07:00

Cafe Muller. (part II)

Choreographed by Pina Bausch.

Pina Bausch / Cafe Muller / extract 3/5

2010-09-13T09:57:00.001-07:00

Cafe Muller. (part III)

Choreographed by Pina Bausch.

Pina Bausch / Cafe Muller / extract 4/5

2010-09-13T09:57:00.000-07:00

Cafe Muller. (part IV)

Choreographed by Pina Bausch.

Pina Bausch / Cafe Muller / extract 5/5 / final

2010-09-13T09:55:00.000-07:00

Cafe Muller. (part V)

Choreographed by Pina Bausch.

Kate Bush "The Sensual World" (1989)

2010-09-06T06:05:00.000-07:00

Mmh, yes,

Then I'd taken the kiss of seedcake back from his mouth
Going deep South, go down, mmh, yes,
Took six big wheels and rolled our bodies
Off of Howth Head and into the flesh, mmh, yes,

He said I was a flower of the mountain, yes,
But now I've powers o'er a woman's body, yes.

Stepping out of the page into the sensual world.
Stepping out...

To where the water and the earth caress
And the down of a peach says mmh, yes,
Do I look for those millionaires
Like a Machiavellian girl would
When I could wear a sunset? mmh, yes,

And how we'd wished to live in the sensual world
You don't need words--just one kiss, then another.

Stepping out of the page into the sensual world
Stepping out, off the page, into the sensual world.

And then our arrows of desire rewrite the speech, mmh, yes,
And then he whispered would I, mmh, yes,
Be safe, mmh, yes, from mountain flowers?
And at first with the charm around him, mmh, yes,
He loosened it so if it slipped between my breasts
He'd rescue it, mmh, yes,
And his spark took life in my hand and, mmh, yes,
I said, mmh, yes,
But not yet, mmh, yes,
Mmh, yes.

Dara Birnbaum (b. 1946 - )

2010-08-26T05:16:00.000-07:00

E. B. Browning (Elizabeth Barrett) -(1806 - 1861)

2010-08-12T16:27:00.001-07:00

Just recently discovered her poetry. Browning is considered of the most prominent poets of the Victorian era - having influenced and inspired both Edgar Allan Poe and Emily Dickinson.

For all you ladies out there. Here is Browning's "Mother and Poet".

I.
Dead ! One of them shot by the sea in the east,
And one of them shot in the west by the sea.
Dead ! both my boys ! When you sit at the feast
And are wanting a great song for Italy free,
Let none look at me !

II.
Yet I was a poetess only last year,
And good at my art, for a woman, men said ;
But this woman, this, who is agonized here,
— The east sea and west sea rhyme on in her head
For ever instead.

III.
What art can a woman be good at ? Oh, vain !
What art is she good at, but hurting her breast
With the milk-teeth of babes, and a smile at the pain ?
Ah boys, how you hurt ! you were strong as you pressed,
And I proud, by that test.

IV.
What art's for a woman ? To hold on her knees
Both darlings ! to feel all their arms round her throat,
Cling, strangle a little ! to sew by degrees
And 'broider the long-clothes and neat little coat ;
To dream and to doat.

V.
To teach them ... It stings there ! I made them indeed
Speak plain the word country. I taught them, no doubt,
That a country's a thing men should die for at need.
I prated of liberty, rights, and about
The tyrant cast out.

VI.
And when their eyes flashed ... O my beautiful eyes ! ...
I exulted ; nay, let them go forth at the wheels
Of the guns, and denied not. But then the surprise
When one sits quite alone ! Then one weeps, then one kneels !
God, how the house feels !

VII.
At first, happy news came, in gay letters moiled
With my kisses, — of camp-life and glory, and how
They both loved me ; and, soon coming home to be spoiled
In return would fan off every fly from my brow
With their green laurel-bough.

VIII.
Then was triumph at Turin : Ancona was free !'
And some one came out of the cheers in the street,
With a face pale as stone, to say something to me.
My Guido was dead ! I fell down at his feet,
While they cheered in the street.

IX.
I bore it ; friends soothed me ; my grief looked sublime
As the ransom of Italy. One boy remained
To be leant on and walked with, recalling the time
When the first grew immortal, while both of us strained
To the height he had gained.

X.
And letters still came, shorter, sadder, more strong,
Writ now but in one hand, I was not to faint, —
One loved me for two — would be with me ere long :
And Viva l' Italia ! — he died for, our saint,
Who forbids our complaint."

XI.
My Nanni would add, he was safe, and aware
Of a presence that turned off the balls, — was imprest
It was Guido himself, who knew what I could bear,
And how 'twas impossible, quite dispossessed,
To live on for the rest."

XII.
On which, without pause, up the telegraph line
Swept smoothly the next news from Gaeta : — Shot.
Tell his mother. Ah, ah, his, ' their ' mother, — not mine, '
No voice says "My mother" again to me. What !
You think Guido forgot ?

XIII.
Are souls straight so happy that, dizzy with Heaven,
They drop earth's affections, conceive not of woe ?
I think not. Themselves were too lately forgiven
Through THAT Love and Sorrow which reconciled so
The Above and Below.

XIV.
O Christ of the five wounds, who look'dst through the dark
To the face of Thy mother ! consider, I pray,
How we common mothers stand desolate, mark,
Whose sons, not being Christs, die with eyes turned away,
And no last word to say !

XV.
Both boys dead ? but that's out of nature. We all
Have been patriots, yet each house must always keep one.
'Twere imbecile, hewing out roads to a wall ;
And, when Italy 's made, for what end is it done
If we have not a son ?

XVI.
Ah, ah, ah ! when Gaeta's taken, what then ?
When the fair wicked queen sits no more at her sport
Of the fire-balls of death crashing souls out of men ?
When the guns of Cavalli with final retort
Have cut the game short ?

XVII.
When Venice and Rome keep their new jubilee,
When your flag takes all heaven for its white, green, and red,
When you have your country from mountain to sea,
When King Victor has Italy's crown on his head,
(And I have my Dead) —

XVIII.
What then ? Do not mock me. Ah, ring your bells low,
And burn your lights faintly ! My country is there,
Above the star pricked by the last peak of snow :
My Italy 's THERE, with my brave civic Pair,
To disfranchise despair !

XIX.
Forgive me. Some women bear children in strength,
And bite back the cry of their pain in self-scorn ;
But the birth-pangs of nations will wring us at length
Into wail such as this — and we sit on forlorn
When the man-child is born.

XX.
Dead ! One of them shot by the sea in the east,
And one of them shot in the west by the sea.
Both ! both my boys ! If in keeping the feast
You want a great song for your Italy free,
Let none look at me !

More MINA

2010-08-10T16:45:00.000-07:00

song: "Grande Grande Grande" (1972)

Get that bottle of wine, put your feet up and enjoy!

For more information on this unstoppable force of nature, got to www.minamazzini.com

The Surreal House at the Barbican

2010-08-10T16:15:00.000-07:00

"There was a door
There was a key
I opened the door and
the key wouldn't stop
Bleeding"

I wrote the poem above after I have started re-re-re-reading the indispensable book by Clarissa Pinkola Estes- Women Who Run with the Wolves.

I first heard of the book back when I was teaching English in an independent school in Sao Paulo over 15 years ago. All the girls were talking about it - either reading it or intending to.

On my copy of the book, thanks to my semi-obsessive mania of writing on it and adding the date when I read it - I can tell how much this book has been through with me over the years. Also I can see how some lessons take years and years to be assimilated and learnt.

But the funny thing is that I got a text message today from a friend whom I have not seen in a long time telling me about a current exhibition at the Barbican, The Surreal House -showcasing the works of artists like Francesca Woodman and Rebecca Horn and the late Louise Bourgeois.

Rebecca Horn's Piano

Somehow, for me, this highly personal and probably generally irrelevant occurrance is connected to the news of the show.

Here's the link for the Barbican website and the exhibition: www.barbican.org.uk/artgallery

MINA

2010-08-10T16:04:00.001-07:00

I am delighted to share the news that Pedro Almodovar is currently working on a biopic about the Italian songstress Mina, due to be released in 2012.

I was introduced to her work by an Italian friend - Diego, you know it's your fault! And I have come to love her passionate and dramatic style.

Her song "La Voce del Silenzio" was key for the authentic characterization of longing of the character Estela in my first play, "The Sea at Night".

Mina has been a musical phenomenon for over 50 years. All I can do here is to share a taster of her talent.

Joan Wasser sings Nico

2010-08-03T05:25:00.000-07:00

When I grow up, I want to sing, play and look like that.

Sandra Nettelbeck (b. 1966)

2010-08-01T05:36:00.000-07:00

Read an interview with German film director Sandra Nettelbeck on the excellent "Women & Hollywood" blog by Melissa Silverstein.

In it Nettelback talks about her new film "Helen" which tells the story of a woman who seemingly has it all. But the reality is that Helen (played by the always charmingly beautiful Ashley Judd) struggles with severe depression.

To read the review of the film and the full interview, just click on the link that is this post's title!

Silverstein says: "Though it’s tough to watch Helen’s journey, the film is not depressing, in fact it’s a film about hope and shows all of us that it is possible to get better. It takes time, help, patience and love."

Catherine Breillat (b. 1948)

2010-07-30T07:33:00.000-07:00

Below is an extract of an interview with Breillat from the "Electric Sheep" magazine as published on the 16th of July 2010.

In the interview, the fearless French film director talks about her latest film, "Bluebeard", based on the eponymous nightmarish fairy tale by Charles Perrault which tells the story of a girl trapped as a bride of an extremelly violent man. For the full interview click on the link that is this post's title.

Although the film was one of the highlights on last year’s festival circuit, it has taken a while for Catherine Breillat’s Bluebeard to get a UK theatrical release. Originally scripted and produced for French television, Bluebeard is a subtly suggestive retelling of Charles Perrault’s fairy tale about an ugly and extremely wealthy lord whose wives disappear under mysterious circumstances, until he falls for the much younger Marie-Catherine, who agrees to marry him in order to escape the shadow of her beautiful, talented older sister. What makes this understated, low-budget film a pure pleasure is the bold, teasing dialogue between the two sisters in the film’s framing plot, set in modern time, in which Catherine, the younger girl, thoroughly enjoys terrifying her older sister Anne by reading her the infamous tale from a book found in their attic. Playfully grim and increasingly disturbing, with a wonderfully cruel narrative that hints at the fiercely, sexually provocative spirit of Breillat’s previous work, Bluebeard slowly inveigles you before hitting you hard.

Pamela Jahn took part in a round table with Catherine Breillat at the 2009 Berlin Film Festival, where the film had its world premiere.

Q: Of all fairy tales, what is it that fascinated you so much about the story of Bluebeard?

Catherine Breillat: When I was a child this was my favourite fairy tale, but I was always astonished that this tale was actually told to little girls, because it’s a fairy tale in which women are killed – Bluebeard is a real serial killer. In fairy tales, you often find a protagonist who is an ogre, like in Little Red Riding Hood for instance, who feels the urge to eat the victims in order to feed himself. But in the case of Bluebeard, you are talking about a human being who marries his victims, including this young woman. But in a way, he is as innocent as Marie-Catherine.

If you look at my films, you will see that I am somewhat obsessed by the relationship between victims and their executioner, but as if the relationship was a rational thing in a physical sense, a relationship between two different forces that measure themselves. And therefore I’ve always wanted to make a movie about Bluebeard. I had decided to make it before I started shooting The Last Mistress. I went to Arte and told them that I wanted to make the movie in five months, and within three or four weeks I wrote the script and organised the shoot. But then I had my stroke and all of a sudden I got a little scared about making the film. But eventually, my desire to make it was stronger and I decided to go ahead with it.

source: www.electricsheepmagazine.co.uk

Homework for Women: Hollywood Pioneers

2010-07-30T03:35:00.000-07:00

available on amazon.co.uk

MakingOf - Catherine Corsini's new film "Leaving"

2010-07-09T05:06:00.000-07:00

Click on the link below to access an interview with filmmaker Catherine Corsini. Here she talks about her new film, "Leaving" - starring Kristin Scott Thomas.

MakingOf - Interview - Catherine Corsini - Partir - Catherine Corsini discusses "Partir"

Lucrecia Martel (B. 1966)

2010-05-03T07:56:00.000-07:00

Maria Onetto in The Headless Woman

The resurgence of Latin American Cinema became evident in the late 90s, early 2000. Until then LAC has been marred by decades of censorship, lack of funding, and overturn by Hollywood movies.

Nowadays the story is, both literally and figuratively, quite different. Not only has cinema been revitalised by an injection of funding and international interest, there’s also been the realization that women are powerful players in the industry, both in front and behind the cameras.

From this “new wave” of Latin American movies, one of the main figures in the past decade has been Lucretia Martel. Born in Argentina in 1966, Martel made home movies as a kid but never intended for this to be her profession. In 1988, Martel moved to Buenos Aires to study Communication, and there it was where she started making short films - one of her shorts entitled “The Dead King”, received various international awards.

Lucrecia Martel

During the late 1990s, Martel directed documentaries for TV as well as children’s programmes which were widely acclaimed by the Argentinean press for their dark sense of humour.

In 1999, she realised her first feature, Le Cienaga (2001), about two families living in the northern region of Argentina - where Martel is from - during one of the hottest summer in Argentinean history. The film received worldwide acclaim.

Martel has also written and directed The Holy Girl (2004) and The Headless Woman (2010) – both equally haunting and compelling movies. Martel’s work seems to explore not only human condition through the individual’s senses and desires, but also it questions the reliability of the visual medium as external evidence.

text by Luciana Saldanha

source: Reverse Shot (Reverse Shot is a quarterly, independently published film journal)

access an exclusive interview with Martel on: www.reverseshot.com/article/interview_lucrecia_martel

Still celebrating Bigelow's victory...

2010-03-08T06:55:00.000-08:00

Kathryn Bigelow makes history as first woman to win best director Oscar

Iraq war film The Hurt Locker wins six awards including best picture and best original screenplay

Kathryn Bigelow (left) celebrates her best director Oscar with Barbra Streisand. Photograph: Matt Sayles/AP

Article by Matthew Weaver

Kathryn Bigelow today became the first woman in history to win the best director award at the Oscars.

Her low-budget Iraq war film, The Hurt Locker, about a bomb disposal team, was the big winner at the ceremony. It took six academy awards, including those for best picture and best original screenplay.

The Hurt Locker triumphed the over the 3D blockbuster Avatar, directed by Bigelow's former husband, James Cameron.

Cameron, who sat behind Bigelow at the ceremony in the Kodak theatre in Hollywood, was one of the first to offer congratulations when he reached over to tap her on the shoulder.

Bigelow described the award as a "moment of a lifetime" and dedicated her Oscar to the servicemen and women in Iraq and Afghanistan. "May they come home safe," she said.

The Hurt Locker is an apolitical film focusing on the heroism of bomb disposal experts. It was critically acclaimed but not a box office success and was attacked as unrealistic by bomb experts.

Bigelow was only the fourth woman to be nominated for best director in the 82-year history of the Oscars.

The previous female nominees were Sofia Coppola for Lost in Translation in 2003, Jane Campion for The Piano in 1993, and Lina Wertmuller for Seven Beauties in 1975.

Barbra Streisand, the director of films including Yentl and The Prince of Tides, presented the award.

In interviews after the ceremony, Bigelow resisted reporters' attempts to encourage her to gloat about her victory over Cameron. "I think he is an extraordinary film-maker," she said.

Much of the build-up to the Oscars had focused on the rivalry between the former couple, who married in 1989 and divorced two years later.

It was the subject of jokes from the hosts of the ceremony, Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin.

"She was so pleased to be nominated with him she sent him a beautiful gift basket – with a timer," Baldwin said.

Bigelow has for decades been a female pioneer in the male-dominated world of action movies.

Her previous films include Point Break, Strange Days and K-19: The Widowmaker. "I'm drawn to provocative characters," she told the Guardian in video interview last year.

At the Directors Guild of America Awards, where she also won the top honour, Bigelow said: "I suppose I like to think of myself as a film-maker", rather than as a female film-maker.

source: The Guardian

And The Winner Is...

2010-03-08T02:55:00.001-08:00

Mo'Nique won an Academy Award for her outsdanding portrayal of an abusive mother in "Precious".

source: The Independent (Getty Images)

And The Winner Is...

2010-03-08T02:50:00.000-08:00

Kathryn Bigelow and her historic Academy Award for Best Director for the film "The Hurt Locker", one of the six she won in Los Angeles last night.

source: The Independent (Getty Images)

Lea Pool (b.1950)

2010-03-01T06:25:00.000-08:00

source: Agence Goodwin.

Born on September 8, 1950 in Geneva, Switzerland, Léa Pool emigrated to Québec in 1975.

In 1978, she completed a bachelor’s degree in Communications at Université du Québec à Montréal. Since then, she has directed numerous videos, shorts films, films and television programs.
Léa Pool has pursued a unique cinematographic path. In 1978, she co- directed and edited Laurent Lamerre, portier and in 1979, she wrote, shot, produced and directed a one-hour fiction film, Strass Café, which won awards in four festivals, including Sceaux, in France, in 1981.

From 1980 to 1983, she directed ten programs on cultural minorities for Radio-Québec, and the following year, Eva en transit, a program on the French singer, Éva.
From 1978 to 1983, she gave cinema and video classes at Université du Québec à Montréal.

In 1984, she wrote and directed her first feature film, La Femme de l'hôtel, which was enthusiastically acclaimed by the critics and the public. It won seven awards, including the International Press Award at the World Film Festival, the award for best actress, Louise Marleau, at the Genie in Toronto, and the Public's Award for fiction at the Women's Film Festival in Créteil, France. She then wrote and directed Anne Trister, in 1986, the last volume in a trilogy on the complex issue of feminine identity. This film was invited to fifteen
international festivals, including the Berlin Festival (official competition) and won, amongst others, the People's Choice Award at the Women's Film Festival in Créteil (France), the Critic's Award at the Troia Festival in Portugal, and the Genie Award for best cinematography in Toronto.

À corps perdu, shot in 1988, an adaptation of Yves Navarre's novel Kurwenal, confirmed the importance of Léa Pool on the Canadian film scene. It garnered First Prize from Première magazine at the Festival of Namur and the Award of Excellence at the Atlantic Film Festival in Halifax; it was also chosen for official competition at the Venice Festival, the World Film Festival, and at the International Film Festival, in 1988. In 1990, Léa Pool shot her first documentary film, Hotel Chronicles, part of the series of the National Film Board of Canada, Talking about America. It won the Gold Medal in the documentary category, at Chicago’s 26th International Film Festival, and participated in numerous international festivals. In 1991,

Ms. Pool directed her fourth fiction film, La Demoiselle sauvage, co-written with Michel Langlois and Laurent Gagliardi, adapted from a short story by Corinna Bille. The film was presented in the official competition at the Montréal World Film Festival, where it won the Super Écran Award for best Canadian film and the award for best artistic contribution (photography). It also won the award for best direction at the French film festival in Saint-Martin, West Indies.

In 1992, she wrote Rispondetemi, one of the sketches of the movie Montréal vu par..., codirected by Patricia Rozema, Denys Arcand, Michel Brault, Atom Egoyan, and Jacques Leduc.

In 1992-1993, she wrote and directed her fifth fiction film, Mouvements du désir,
nominated in eight categories at the Genie Awards, including Achievement in Direction and Original Screenplay. It was also presented at the Sundance Film Festival in California, in 1994.

In October 1994, the Bloies Festival (France) presented a retrospective of the cinematographic work of Léa Pool, and the "Ordre des Arts et des Lettres de France" awarded her the title of "Chevalier".

In 1994-1995, she directed two documentaries for a six episode bilingual television series titled Women: A True Story, on the emancipation of women, based on scenarios by Rina Fraticelli and Léa Pool, and hosted by Susan Sarandon. In 1996, she directed a short fiction film, Lettre à ma fille, for Le Musée de la civilisation (Québec).

In 1997-1998, she directed a documentary film on the life of one of Canada’s most important authors, Gabrielle Roy.

In 1998-1999, she co-wrote with Nancy Huston and directed her sixth feature film entitled Emporte-moi. This wildely acclaimed film was selected for the opening of Les Rendez-vous du cinéma québécois and won the Special Prize of the ecumenical jury of Berlin’s 49th International Film Festival.

Since 1989, she received many honors around the world, from Switzerland, France, Japan(Tokyo), Belgium, Sweden, Canada (Toronto), and in the United States from Denver, Berkeley, Princeton, Chicago, Boston, New York (at the Museum of Modern Art) and Seattle, to name a few.

In 1993, she received the Prix d'excellence Émergence from Université du Québec à Montréal.

In 2000, she directed Lost and Delirious, starring Piper Perabo, Jessica Paré, Mischa Barton and Graham Greene. It was a co-production between Québec and Ontario, written by Judith Thompson, based on the novel The Wives of Bath by Susan Swan.

In 2002, she directed the feature film The Blue Butterfly, starring William Hurt and
Pascale Bussière, a co-production between Québec and England, written by Peter McCormack, based on the life of George Brossard.

In 2004-2005, she gave acting workshops for UDA members and in 2004-2006, she teaches
film directing at Université du Québec à Montréal.

In 2006, she is honoured with three life achievement awards; the first from Université du Québec à Montréal (Prix Reconnaissance), the second from the Foundation of the Woman's Y(Prix Femmes de mérite) and the third from the Quebec government (Prix Albert-Tessier),

Quebec's most important award in recognition of her exceptional talent and contribution to the Quebec cinematography.
In 2007, Léa Pool wrote and directed for CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Company) one of the series of documentaries entitled Hidden Lives, inspired by the stories of our neighbours and she will direct a feature film entitled Maman est chez le coiffeur, written by Isabelle Hébert and, in 2008-2009, she writes Une belle mort, an adaptation of Gil Courtemanche’s novel, coproduced by Quebec/Luxembourg.

Karyn Kusama (b. 1968)

2010-03-01T06:20:00.001-08:00

This is the first part of an interview published on cinematical.com (to access the full text click on this post's title).

Interview: 'Jennifer's Body' Director Karyn Kusama (Part One)
by Todd Gilchrist - Sep 17th 2009

There's a sort of amazing nexus of visibility that Jennifer's Body is enjoying as it moves towards its opening day: men and women alike are obsessed with any- and everything Megan Fox does, and critics and audiences are curious to see how successfully Diablo Cody will follow-up her Oscar-winning script for Juno. Meanwhile, director Karyn Kusama bears the burden not only of shepherding the result of their efforts and the test for those expectations into theaters, but is in herself in search of a project that can both fulfill and overcome the preconceptions of viewers familiar with her two previous films, the acclaimed independent film Girlfight and the decidedly less-acclaimed studio opus Aeon Flux.

Cinematical recently sat down with Kusama for an epic conversation about her latest film, Jennifer's Body. In addition to discussing the project's origins and inspirations, she talked about tapping into expectations without acquiescing to them, examined the high-profile careers of her collaborators, and offered a few insights into her own creative process. (Check back tomorrow for part two, which further delves into her own feelings about the film's themes and her execution of its ideas.)

Cinematical: How did you process Diablo's writing style when you were directing and maybe even editing? Because she was kind of an unknown quantity when you started working on this but now she obviously has a style that polarizes audiences.

Karyn Kusama: I think Diablo was a part of seeing what the process had to be for the movie in terms of certain dialogue, even when it was really funny, really entertaining, we either had to cut entirely just – in studio terms – to get to the story faster, or there were moments when particularly certain elements of comedy, we had to sort of dial back a little because it upset the balance of what actors were doing emotionally. I think Diablo is really interesting because she writes with a very distinctive voice, but she's not particularly precious either, so she can know that something has been cut, but judge it again without even lines she really cherishes to sort of see how it operates on the whole. So I think she's pretty skilled at letting go of certain stuff, and then saying, 'this is important to me. I want to protect this.'

If anything, I think my director's cut is more authentically representational of the script and I'm proud that there's a director's cut that exists because it's a little bit closer to what both Diablo and I had imagined the finished movie would be. But that being said, I also think she often talks about, when she would see a cut and there would be something missing, she often writes in a very interesting, kind of rhythmic style – a joke that builds on a joke that builds on a joke, so it's sort of these trios of ideas. For her, it wasn't about losing any one part of the trio, it was about losing the shape of the trio itself, so she would often say, 'if I had to choose as the writer, I would rather lose everything than retain two parts of what should be a triangle.' So it was very interesting because she was more able to articulate a sort of formal understanding of her work than a lot of people are, and she was also really willing to articulate the most important thematic ideas, and kind of give up on the ephemera.

I feel like the issue of her voice being strong and people having a problem with it is very interesting to me because I think there are plenty of writers whose work generates that discussion. I have just never heard Quentin Tarantino or David Mamet or Shane Black be called a whore in people's blogs; I am shocked sometimes by the vitriol. It makes very little sense to me. [But] I think with Diablo it will be very interesting to see because I know she loves young people and she loves youth movies, so maybe she'll stick to that, but at a certain point it would be really interesting to get Diablo's take on grown-ups, because she herself is a really interesting grown-up. I think she's got a sh*tload of very real talent, and maybe it's not everybody's cup of tea, but what is?

Cinematical: Perhaps not dissimilarly, how did Megan's own visibility affect the production? I visited the set just a few days after those photos were leaked, and I'm not interested in asking about that, but how does something like that creatively affect the set, or change the way that you direct her to make her feel comfortable?

Kusama: It's incredibly damaging to a set when one of your lead actors feels like their privacy has been completely violated and betrayed. I think she felt understandably defensive and angry and self-protective, but the problem with an actor being self-protective on a set where they're supposed to be playing a character who at certain times can't be protecting anything of themselves, it just affects everyone's ability to work. So I was trying to make her feel as comfortable as I could and give her the space she needed while still making our day. So it was a little bit of a balancing act. But her visibility in a way comments back on the movie itself somehow, and in that regard, it's intellectually interesting to me. I would think to be Megan Fox right now would be hellish – to always be looked at, critiqued, commented on. She's in a no-win [situation]. That's the problem with being put on a pedestal – there's always going to be a lot of grubby hands trying to pull you down, and I think Megan is fascinating because as much as she is able to put herself in the spotlight, she really wants to be invisible, and it's going to be a tricky balance for her to strike personally and professionally.

Cinematical: What do you think are her emerging strengths that you think she brings to this film or to the films she's in?

Kusama: I can only speak to our experience together, and I remember really vividly when we talked about the sacrifice scene and she said as a very off-handed comment, 'a lot of young girls are going to see this movie, and it would be socially irresponsible for me to do anything but play it straight.' I thought that's a pretty sophisticated take, because so much of the script is so sort of hyper-real and theatrical and walking this sort of absurdist-comic tone that she could have easily looked at her dialogue in that scene and not played it straight. I thought I was gearing up for a conversation about moving her towards this sort of more realist depiction of that event, and here she had already gotten there on her own, and she didn't feel that there was any other way to do it. I just thought, that's her strength – she has innate intelligence, and a sense of respect for the character she's playing. In a funny way, of course shooting that scene was pretty difficult and kind of uncomfortable, and here the whole dynamic of the scene is that she is freaking out while everybody else is joking around her and treating her like a thing, and so I think one of her strengths is that she can go deeper than you think, particularly if you just ask for it.

I think she's really game to go deeper and try new things; I don't think she'll ever get to play the ugly girl, which maybe is in its own way limiting. I think you just have to accept that beauty is a natural component of her because she's actually naturally beautiful, and if anything the sort of glamour girl is another kind of mask for her and a way to hide, in my opinion, but I think she has the possibility of a very bright future. It's just, will celebrity eat her alive before she gets the chance to really create that body of work?

Kusama: It's incredibly damaging to a set when one of your lead actors feels like their privacy has been completely violated and betrayed. I think she felt understandably defensive and angry and self-protective, but the problem with an actor being self-protective on a set where they're supposed to be playing a character who at certain times can't be protecting anything of themselves, it just affects everyone's ability to work. So I was trying to make her feel as comfortable as I could and give her the space she needed while still making our day. So it was a little bit of a balancing act. But her visibility in a way comments back on the movie itself somehow, and in that regard, it's intellectually interesting to me. I would think to be Megan Fox right now would be hellish – to always be looked at, critiqued, commented on. She's in a no-win [situation]. That's the problem with being put on a pedestal – there's always going to be a lot of grubby hands trying to pull you down, and I think Megan is fascinating because as much as she is able to put herself in the spotlight, she really wants to be invisible, and it's going to be a tricky balance for her to strike personally and professionally.

Cinematical: What do you think are her emerging strengths that you think she brings to this film or to the films she's in?

Kusama: I can only speak to our experience together, and I remember really vividly when we talked about the sacrifice scene and she said as a very off-handed comment, 'a lot of young girls are going to see this movie, and it would be socially irresponsible for me to do anything but play it straight.' I thought that's a pretty sophisticated take, because so much of the script is so sort of hyper-real and theatrical and walking this sort of absurdist-comic tone that she could have easily looked at her dialogue in that scene and not played it straight. I thought I was gearing up for a conversation about moving her towards this sort of more realist depiction of that event, and here she had already gotten there on her own, and she didn't feel that there was any other way to do it. I just thought, that's her strength – she has innate intelligence, and a sense of respect for the character she's playing. In a funny way, of course shooting that scene was pretty difficult and kind of uncomfortable, and here the whole dynamic of the scene is that she is freaking out while everybody else is joking around her and treating her like a thing, and so I think one of her strengths is that she can go deeper than you think, particularly if you just ask for it.

I think she's really game to go deeper and try new things; I don't think she'll ever get to play the ugly girl, which maybe is in its own way limiting. I think you just have to accept that beauty is a natural component of her because she's actually naturally beautiful, and if anything the sort of glamour girl is another kind of mask for her and a way to hide, in my opinion, but I think she has the possibility of a very bright future. It's just, will celebrity eat her alive before she gets the chance to really create that body of work?

Ava DuVernay (b. 1972)

2010-03-01T06:11:00.000-08:00

source: LA Sentinel, March 2009 (click on the post's title to access the original text)

Ava DuVernay has worked in the world of film as a marketer and a publicist for more than 14 years, forming The DuVernay Agency in 1999. Her award-winning firm has provided strategy and execution for more than 80 film and television campaigns for acclaimed directors such as Steven Spielberg, Michael Mann, Robert Rodriguez, Bill Condon, Raoul Peck, Gurinder Chadha and Reggie & Gina Bythewood. Here, the brainy and beautiful businesswoman-turned-filmmaker discusses her directorial debut, “This is the Life,” which offers a rare insider’s view of the underground urban music movement in Los Angeles. Already the winner of Audience Awards in Toronto, Los Angeles and Seattle, this riveting documentary about the roots of rap has just been released theatrically by Forward Movement and is set to debut on Showtime in April.

Sentinel: Hi Ava, thanks for the time.

AD: No, thank you, Kam. I’m a big fan.

Sentinel: Congratulations on your directorial debut! How was the premiere party at The House of Blues?

AD: It was unbelievable and unforgettable… Truly a remarkable night... To have all these amazing artists reunite in celebration of our documentary was a dream come true.

Sentinel: What interested you in making This Is the Life?

AD: Well, I was a part of The Good Life movement as a young artist. Eventually, I went on to handle publicity for studios and networks, to work all over the world, execute huge premieres and red carpet events, but in all that time, I never experienced anything as creatively pure as I had at The Good Life. When it was time to make my first doc, I knew it had to be about that very special place.

Sentinel: What prior experience did you have with directing?

AD: I’ve directed two shorts previously, a short narrative and a short doc. My short narrative, “Saturday Night Life,” starred Melissa De Sousa of “The Best Man.” It toured the festival circuit and eventually was selected for the Showtime Network’s Black Filmmaker Showcase, and aired in February, 2007.

Sentinel: How did you prepare to shoot this movie?

AD: The most extensive preparation was in connecting with and relaying my vision of the story to all the participants. This film is the true story of many people’s lives, so beyond the obvious technical preparation, it was the personal connection and building of trust that was at the forefront for me throughout the process.

Sentinel: How was it seeing old friends over the course of the shooting? Had you kept in touch with most of them?

AD: It was wonderful to not only see all the old friends, but to have the opportunity to sit down and have long conversations, really delve into the memories. It was a beautiful time for me personally.

Sentinel: You were once an aspiring rapper? How would you describe your style?

AD: I don’t know if I was ever an aspiring rapper, as in aspiring to have a record deal and be a rap star. I liked to express myself through rhyme and to practice lyrical patterns that were unusual. I liked to hang with my friends who were all rhyming. I liked being a part of The Good Life family. At the time, I was doing what I loved, and not really thinking much beyond that – in terms of commercial viability or aspirations.

Sentinel: Were you disappointed when you didn’t make it as a rapper? How did you feel when Eve exploded with your rap nickname?

AD: No, not at all. I never pursued it like that. I was a student at UCLA and was just a local young woman enjoying the hip hop scene. It was never really meant to be more than that.

Sentinel: What famous rappers would you say were influenced by performers in This Is the Life?

AD: In the film, we explore the connections between several emcees of note and their Good Life counterparts. Particularly, Ice Cube and Bones Thugs & Harmony. We lay it all out for the viewer to judge the influences for themselves.

Sentinel: Do you still get up on stage anywhere on open mic night?

AD: No, I’m no longer performing.

Sentinel: Then, where can folks go to hear a sample of your rapping?

AD: Nowhere! The evidence is long gone. [Laughs]

Sentinel: Which do you enjoy more, rapping, directing or being a publicist?

AD: Oh wow! What an interesting question. I’m proud to say that I am someone who very much tries to remain in the moment. At each of those moments – as an emcee, as a publicist and now as a director – I am completely immersed, completely present, completely enjoying it. I can’t say I love one over another because as I was doing each, I loved it through and through.

Sentinel: The Columbus Short question: Are you happy?

AD: I am happy, and hopeful, and healthy, and here! What more can we really ask for?

Sentinel: The “Realtor to the Stars” Jimmy Bayan question: Where in L.A. do you live?

AD: I live in what Angelenos call “The Valley.” Sherman Oaks, California to be exact.

Sentinel: The bookworm Troy Johnson question: What was the last book you read?

AD: “A Strange Freedom” by Howard Thurman

Sentinel: The Tasha Smith question: Are you ever afraid?

AD: Yes, whenever my ego starts to get the best of me – I know that’s just fear rearing its ugly head.

Sentinel: The Rudy Lewis question: Who’s at the top of your hero list?

AD: My Mother.

Sentinel: How do you feel about Barack Obama’s becoming President?

AD: I feel empowered to do just about anything. If he can achieve his dream, I can achieve mine, and you can achieve yours. Whatever they may be.

Sentinel: The Laz Alonso question: Is there anything your fans can do to help you?

AD: Don’t buy bootleg. And please support black films on the first weekend.

Sentinel: What was the biggest obstacle you have had to overcome in life?

AD: Fear of failure.

Sentinel: Teri Emerson would like to know when was the last time you had a good belly laugh?

AD: Last night, at a screening of THIS IS THE LIFE. An emcee performed an amazingly hilarious freestyle after the show and we all fell out of our chairs.

Sentinel: What advice do you have for anyone who wants to follow in your footsteps?

AD: Be not afraid.

Sentinel: Do you have a website?

AD: www.goodlifelove.com

Sentinel: Thanks again for the interview, and best of luck with all your endeavors.

AD: Thanks, Kam. It’s an honored to be interviewed by you. Keep up the great work!

Lisa Cholodenko (b.1964)

2010-03-01T06:07:00.000-08:00

source: Movie City News (2002/3)

Five years ago, in her critically acclaimed debut film, High Art, writer-director Lisa Cholodenko introduced audiences to a group of tragically hip Manhattan artists and photographers, whose only relief from the ravages of terminal boredom came from heroin and kinky sex.

Her second feature, Laurel Canyon (opening Friday in limited release) may have been set in a far sunnier and infinitely more casual corner of NeverNeverland, but the featured sybarites are every bit as determined to keep reality at bay for as long as is humanly possible. Instead of heroin, marijuana and beer are the primary intoxicants ingested by a group of musicians working feverishly to complete an album, under the watchful eye of a record producer who might have been around when Joni Mitchell first wrote "Ladies of the Canyon."

Frances McDormand delivers another smashing performance as Jane, the free-spirited producer who refuses to act her age. Complications arise when her conservative son, Sam (Christian Bale), returns home after graduation from Harvard Medical School with his rich fiancé, Alex (Kate Beckinsale), who's trying to complete on a research project. The idea of sharing the house with his mother and her much-younger boyfriend doesn't appeal to Sam, especially when Alex allows herself to be seduced by the rock 'n' roll lifestyle he abhors.

Just as she did in High Art, Cholodenko paints a remarkably detailed portrait of a highly dysfunctional group of artists and musicians cohabitating in the timeless oasis that is Laurel Canyon. She again resists the temptation to moralize or critique the lifestyles of her characters. It is a stance that's as refreshing as it is unusual.

This interview with the 38-year-old Valley native took place at the Le Meridien Hotel, last month.

by: Gary Dretzka

Movie City News: The Peter Pan male is a familiar character in the movies. Jane seems to possess all the characteristics of a Peter Pan female ... someone who lives in the Never-Neverland of Laurel Canyon, and has no real desire to grow up.

Lisa Cholodenko: Yeah. I didn't want to design a character that would come off as being some kind of desperado. It would have to be more of an unconscious thing.

MCN: Living in Laurel Canyon, and working in the music industry, there was very little pressure on Jane to stop smoking pot, find different friends, or dress and act like other women her age.

LC: Exactly. I didn't want her to be hung up on sex or drugs. Male characters in similar circumstances never are.

MCN: It seems as Jane could have stepped right out of Joni Mitchell's song, Laurel Canyon.

LC: I wanted to construct a character that might have lived through that period, and embodied some of the spirit of the women in that song.

MCN: Of course, she also had a home in Malibu, where her ex-boyfriend was camped out.

LC: Yes, a very booshie one.

MCN: Did the positive response to your first film, High Art,help grease the wheels for Laurel Canyon?

LC: Things were very weird for me in Hollywood that year, so the whole process took a long time. Then, when it looked as if the actors might go out on strike, we thought we'd have to put the project on hold for a while.

MCN: Considering that Frances played a rock 'n' roll mother - albeit of a very different sort - was it difficult to persuade her to play Jane?

LC: Someone suggested Frances to me for the part. I loved her work, and was really happy to hear she might be available. After her agent gave her the script, Frances was eager to do the part. We met with her the next day, and it seemed as if she was courting it.

MCN: And Jane wasn't required to experience the usual assortment of guilt feelings, second-guesses and anxiety that Hollywood normally expects from free-spirited women characters.

LC: When you think about, it's a juicy part for a woman of a certain age to play ... a sex object.

MCN: Did Jane's laissez-faire attitude toward drugs, sex, rock 'n' roll and motherhood - and Hollywood's traditional skittishness toward such permissive behavior in women - narrow the talent pool?

LC: Ironically, there weren't that many great actors for Kate's role. Maybe, that's because it's a less sympathetic role than Jane, in some way.

MCN: It reminded me, in some ways, of the risks Ally Sheedy took in High Art.

LC: The part of Jane is a great star role for a woman in her 40s. It required work to keep her sympathetic in all the usual ways ... she couldn't be sleazy, but she had to be sexy and have a great sense of humor. Frances embodies that better than any woman I could have imagined.

MCN: It isn't too much of stretch for me to believe that someone who grew up in the Valley could draw a persuasive portrait of this particular Lady of the Canyon. It surprised me, though, that you seemed to have such a handle on New York's heroin-chic art crowd.

LC: Well, I attended graduate school at Columbia and was living in New York before I made that movie. I knew that scene and modeled some of the characters from my friends there.

MCN: Recreational drug use was prevalent in both movies. Even so, it was presented in a very matter-of-fact and non-gratuitous way. In New York, the drugs of choice were heroin and cocaine, while the Laurel Canyon crowd preferred pot and booze. Did you get any feedback on this seemingly neutral POV?

LC: People were skittish about drug use in High Art. Not viewers, per se, but the companies we brought it to before it was made.

MCN: In High Art, the heroin use ultimately proved to be destructive to the lead character. Even so, these were the attractive people, and they looked good doing the drug. Some viewers might have found it difficult to "just say no" to heroin chic.

LC: I didn't see it that way. But I can understand how some people might have interpreted it that way. Lucy's death was a tragedy.

MCN: One of the recurring themes in your movies involves the complications that come from intimacy.

LC: I'm getting the feeling that people in our age group - I'm pushing 40 - are the ones who are going to respond to this movie most. I find it interesting that the only intelligent questions I've gotten on the movie are from people who are old enough to remember the '60s.

MCN: Maybe younger viewers are uncomfortable with Frances' character ... an unrepentant sybarite old enough to be their mother.

LC: Maybe. If you didn't live through that "if I feels good, do it" period, it's tough to envision what it was like. Things are different today.

MCN: Jane has a much younger boyfriend ... a rock singer who's closer in age to her son. I kept waiting for him to turn into a schmuck and dump her, but it doesn't happen.

LC: I liked him. He was a normal guy, not some cliché hair rocker. I suppose, some people will think he's adolescent, but I didn't. He was just one slice of Jane's pie. Some of the people in this movie might have been reckless pleasure seekers, but they weren't evil or malicious people. Ian really wanted to be with Jane.

MCN: Her home, with its lush vegetation and sprawling swimming pool, was just as important a presence in the film as any character. The Chateau Marmont also played an important role.

LC: People around the country only know about the Chateau because it was John Belushi died of a drug overdose. But, in L.A., it's known more as a hangout for artists and musicians. For me, it was more of a fun, personal location.

MCN: Not a product placement?

LC: No, no. Jane is the kind of L.A. woman who would have homes in Laurel Canyon and Malibu, but would crash at the Chateau when things got too crazy. We were shooting on location, anyway ... so, why not do it for real?
.

Susanne Bier (b. 1960)

2010-03-01T05:56:00.000-08:00

source: The New Tork Times (access original text by clicking on this post's title)

A Director Comfortable With Catastrophe

interview by Sylviane Gold (2007)

THERE’S something about the way the Danish director Susanne Bier says the word “comfortable” that tells you a lot. She’s trying to explain why, even though she likes working with actors she knows, she always casts unfamiliar ones too. “I’ve got this fear of becoming comfortable,” she says, carefully pronouncing all four syllables and letting her face, her tone and her body language convey complete distaste.

You could guess as much from her recent movies, in which happy, comfortable characters are jolted by events of unfathomable sadness. In “Open Hearts” (2002) a devastating automobile accident smashes the future of a newly engaged couple. In “Brothers,” which won her an audience award at Sundance in 2005, a seasoned soldier endures a horrific captivity that comes close to destroying him and those he loves. And in her latest, the Oscar-nominated “After the Wedding,” family secrets wreak havoc in the lives of former lovers who have been apart — continents apart — for 20 years.

That film (which opens Friday in New York and Los Angeles) stars Mads Mikkelsen, the cold-eyed villain of “Casino Royale,” as a Dane who has been helping to run an orphanage in the slums of Mumbai. His life takes a 180-degree turn when a Danish tycoon (Rolf Lassgard) offers the orphanage a large contribution but insists that the expatriate return home to pick it up himself. A seemingly casual invitation for the visitor to attend the wedding of the businessman’s daughter reveals that despite their very different circumstances, the two men have much in common.

Catastrophe is always right around the corner in her movies. But Ms. Bier, whose last name rhymes with peer and who pronounces her first name su-ZAHN-a, is herself decidedly cheery. In New York to edit her first English-language movie, “Things We Lost in the Fire,” she’s taking a break near the Midtown postproduction facility where she has been poring over freeze frames of Halle Berry and Benicio Del Toro in yet another story of family disruption and pain. Strikingly pretty and easily carrying off a pair of tight jeans at the age of 46, she says there’s nothing autobiographical about her dark themes.

“I’ve had a very fortunate, very privileged life,” she says. “I say it with all humility, because it could change tomorrow. But I have a very strong ability to empathize, to understand what things feel like.”

It’s a quality her collaborators have noticed. The writer and director Anders Thomas Jensen calls it her “humanness” and says, “She’s very good at putting herself in a character’s place, which is really a gift.”

Mr. Mikkelsen, who played a tormented doctor in “Open Hearts” before he took the role of Jacob in “After the Wedding,” says he spent many draining days trying to evoke the emotion that Ms. Bier was looking for at a given moment. On the phone from Denmark, he says, “She is very aware of human nature in general, and she can tell when it’s not there.” Sometimes it’s not there for 10 hours at a stretch, he says. But, he adds, “it’s comfortable to know we’re not leaving the scene until it feels right.”

There’s that word again: “comfortable.” Maybe it’s a Danish thing, this finding comfort in the uncomfortable. Mr. Jensen, who wrote the scripts for Ms. Bier’s last three films, is in New York to work on their next project, about the Holocaust. They like to hole up together to hammer out the stories. “Then,” he says, “I rewrite and rewrite and rewrite.” He agrees that neither one of them is particularly morose. “Every time we start doing a script,” he notes with a laugh, “we say, ‘Now we have to do a comedy.’ But we never end up doing a comedy. Somehow when we work together, we go in that other direction. I don’t know why.”

Ms. Bier has a suggestion about why her films are the way they are, with their keen portrayal of both happiness and despair. “I think that being Jewish has generated an extremely strong sense of the importance of family,” she says. “If I look at my Scandinavian colleagues, they don’t have that urgency about family. All my movies are about that.” And, she adds, she doesn’t think she would be the director she is if she hadn’t had her children, a son who is 17 and a daughter who is 11.

Her Jewish heritage left her with another legacy. Her father fled Germany with his family in 1933. “They were part of German society,” she says of her grandparents. “They had a lot of non-Jewish friends. And then suddenly society turned against them. I think the lack of automatically feeling, ‘Yes, the future is going to be like the present’ — that is very much a Jewish thing.”

And it certainly is the operating principle of her films. In “After the Wedding,” which was a box-office hit in Denmark and which earned its Oscar nomination in the foreign-language category, Jacob’s surrogate family in India is as susceptible to loss as the wealthy family in Denmark. And its sunny newlyweds have only the briefest of honeymoons before an almost casual betrayal sours the marriage.

Despite the painful situations she explores, Ms. Bier says she is scrupulous about ending her movies on a hopeful note. And she makes it a point not to alienate audiences. “I do believe that movies need to have an ability to communicate,” she says. “For me moviemaking is not pure art. It is a mass medium, even if it should be artistically coherent. I’ve had a lot of spanking from my European colleagues. They really don’t agree. But I believe that.”

Nonetheless she also embraces the “nuclear bomb” that the Dogme theorists, led by her countryman Lars von Trier, exploded in the film world in 1995. “They told us we have to get back to basics, to get back to telling stories about human beings for other human beings,” she says. “They’ve been immensely influential.”

“Open Hearts” was a Dogme film, but Ms. Bier says she’s too enamored of the “richness in the language of movies” to adhere to the austere Dogme aesthetic, which forbids the use of background music, set design and other artificial enhancements. “We don’t necessarily have to obey all the rules,” she says. “We’ve learned the lesson.”

Raised in Copenhagen in what she calls an observant Jewish family, she imagined that she would eventually “marry a Jewish lawyer and have six kids.” But as she grew older, “I was looking for something else in life,” she says. “Also, all the nice Jewish boys I met were too boring. I was consistently falling in love with not-so-nice non-Jewish boys.”

She studied religion, then architecture, which led to an interest in set design. When she started reading scripts, it gradually dawned on her that she wanted to direct them. She graduated from Denmark’s state-run film school in 1987 and became part of the small but active Danish film industry.

Leaving that cocoon to make “Things We Lost in the Fire,” to be distributed by Paramount this year, was not a decision she took lightly. “As a European director you hear all these horror stories about European directors working in Hollywood,” she says. “They’ve done great movies in their own country, and then they go to America, and you can’t even tell that they ever were involved in that movie.”

She also worried because she often changes dialogue as she shoots and encourages improvisation. “I was concerned,” she says. “Was my English sufficient for doing that?”

She decided to go ahead because she wanted to work with Sam Mendes, who is one of the producers, and she liked the script, by Allan Loeb. Its broken family and extreme emotions offered enough familiarity to offset the challenges of working in a foreign language, in a foreign country, with a crew of 200 instead of 40. In other words, comfortably uncomfortable.

Yasmina Benguigui (b. 1957)

2010-03-01T05:50:00.000-08:00

source: Film Movement (filmmovement.com)

Born in Lille, France to Algerian parents, film director Yamina Benguigui is renowned for her penetrating cinematic treatises on gender issues related to the North African immigrant community in France, particularly the Maghreb.

Benguigui began her career as assistant to Jean-Daniel Pollet for four years before beginning to write and direct her own films including the documentaries Women of Islam in 1994 and Immigrant Memories—The North African Inheritance in 1997. It was The Immigrant Memories- the North African Inheritance that marked her success in the film industry. This stunning reflection on the memory and the exile of North African immigrants was welcomed favorably by critics and the general public. Since then, Benguigui has realized a series of short films and documentaries including The Perfumed Garden (2000), Pimprenelle (2000) and Pas d'histoire! A Look at Everyday Racism (2000). In 2001, she made her first feature-length fiction film Inch'Allah Dimanche.

Despite her success, it took Benguigui awhile to be accepted both by her family and the general public as a prominent Algerian female filmmaker. According to her, "It was extremely difficult for me. One price I had to pay was that I had to be willing to cut myself off from my father. My father was not willing for me to follow this career, and it's only recently that I've been able to reestablish contact with him […] Because you're cut off to some extent from French society, you have to really impose yourself, you have to really fight to be able to work on subjects like this, subjects and realities that France isn't necessarily willing to acknowledge. It's a constant struggle, and you're constantly juggling several different hats: the hat of a woman, a director, the daughter of immigration. It's not easy."

Amma Asante (b. 1969)

2010-03-01T05:44:00.000-08:00

"Financially there really aren't any rewards when you're a first-time filmmaker at this level"

Amma Asante has taken an unusual route into film direction. After appearing on TV screens as a child actor in Grange Hill, she moved behind the camera, writing New Year Jamdown and the BBC Two series Brothers And Sisters. Now she's making her directorial debut with the gritty but compelling South Wales racism drama A Way Of Life, which she also wrote. She recently won the UK Film Talent Award at the 48th Times bfi London Film Festival.

Interviewed by Adrian Hennigan

Where did the idea for A Way Of Life come from?

Two ideas hit me at the same time. The press was focusing a lot on girl-led gang crime - boy gangs with maybe one girl running things. I suppose, having been an actress in my late teens, I was always interested in that area. When I'd written my soap, those late teen characters were the age range I enjoyed writing about the most. At the same time, the Bradford/Burnley riots were happening and the news was focusing quite a bit on that. I was listening to the young Asian guys, and then listening to what the young white guys were saying, and to me they were saying the same thing. But all they could see were their differences. I found myself wanting to challenge the stereotypes, and show that people who seem different can be incredibly similar. I wanted to find the humanity that links us all, really. That's what a good film is all about.

Why is it set in South Wales?

Again, a couple of things. I'd always been interested in South Wales because it has some of the oldest black communities in Europe. Those who came to Bristol were mainly slaves, but those who went to Cardiff had come more through free will, and I thought that must have made a difference over how those multicultural communities were going to be living together. As I started doing my research, I found out that, at one point, Newport was number two for hideous race crimes in the country. So it wasn't necessarily all as rose-tinted as perhaps I was painting it. As I started to dig further and further, issues of poverty clearly began to stand out - because a lot of these multicultural communities were often living in the poorest areas of South Wales.

Also, my niece and nephew are half black, half white, half English, half Welsh. Quite often when you think about mixed-race children, it's the side of them which represents the minority that you're worried about honouring. The obvious way to go was the black side. But then I realised, when my brother was talking about moving to Wales, what makes that side any more or less important than the Welsh side? I don't have any children of my own, and I really wanted to write something - in the craziest way, I know - that paid tribute to their Welsh side. I wanted to be able to say, "I'm writing this because you are half-Welsh, and that is as important as your black side, and here's a way that I can honour that," albeit in a hard-hitting story.

It's interesting that Hassan, the victim of racial abuse, is a long-time Turkish immigrant and not even someone you'd stereotypically class as 'black'...

I think A Way Of Life is very much a film about the grey areas. You know, that area between child and woman, boy and man, and definitely the area between black and white. And the only way to not make this a black and white issue was to make Hassan as close to [the kids] as possible, but still different. Because I really felt that, in many ways, the issue of racism in the film was being used to explore themes and issues surrounding poverty. I think black and white racism has been explored before on film, but it hadn't been done in a way where those issues of identity were a lot more smudged and smeared.

The Leanne character is that much-maligned tabloid figure, the teenage single mother. How important is it for you that she's a very caring, considerate mother?

Incredibly important. I was deeply, deeply in love when I was Leanne's age [17], and I always felt that the fact that I was young and a teenager in love somehow made it not as important, that I didn't know how to love. So I wanted to show in the film that babies can be made in teenage lives through loving relationships. But also I wanted to make Leanne quite powerful in one way. In her group, she's the only one who has the ability to give life. All of them have the ability to take life, but she can give life. I had to show that Leanne had the ability to value something in her life.

I didn't want to be condescending in the other way. Sometimes you see working class characters and they're just the salt of the earth, you can't fault them in any way. I also didn't just want to make her the most horrendous creature you'd ever seen on screen. Although she can be extremely difficult to watch, I actually wanted to show that, gosh, even murderers love. When the Yorkshire Ripper's wife used to go out at night, he'd say, "Be careful, because it's dangerous out there." That boggled my mind, but I suppose sometimes, to get to the bottom of our problems, we have to understand that people who commit these crimes are human beings.

The casting of Leanne is crucial to the film's success. How did you find Stephanie James?

In looking for the character of Leanne, I first went about it in completely the wrong way. What I was looking for was someone who was tough, who could have moments of vulnerability. And I realised after quite some time - after quite a few people had come in and actually scared me! - that this wasn't what I should be looking for. What I should have been looking for was someone who was utterly and completely vulnerable, but who would spend all of her time putting her front up. Stephanie was not what I was looking for at all in my head. I'd imagined Leanne to be quite scrawny, with greasy lank hair, and I suppose a stereotype in many ways.

We saw hundreds and hundreds of kids, and as I started to see lots of these young potential actors - many of them coming from a not-too-dissimilar world to the one which I was creating - I realised that there was something quite aesthetically beautiful about catching that moment between child and adult. Stephanie is very shy, very beautiful to look at, but - even though it maybe wasn't expressed at her first, second, third or even fourth audition - I just knew there was a talent in there that I could play with. I think it's like when you're house hunting or flat hunting and you walk into the corridor; you haven't even seen the rest of the place but you just know that it's right. It was an instinct I had. I love the way she looked; I love the fact that she looks like a healthy teenage girl; and there's something very pure when you look at her. Stephanie's next part could be in a costume drama playing somebody as pure as the snow, and it would work.

One of the things people say about Ken Loach is that he casts unknowns who are very similar to the characters they play in the movie, and that subsequently they don't go on to develop acting careers because they don't have the necessary range. Do you think that's true here?

I would say that's the complete opposite for all of my young actors. None of them are remotely - character-wise - like the characters they play. I think it's sad in many ways that that's said about actors - that they're playing characters that are quite close to themselves - because I think we take away from the really hard work that they do. Whatever happens with this film, I think these actors are faces that you're going to see for a long, long time to come. My hope for them, actually, is that it doesn't happen too quickly, it doesn't happen overnight, and that they're able to build steady careers.

How do you gauge success on a movie like this, because it's probably not going to make £10 million at the box office...

I certainly wasn't trying to make a calling card movie that might get great reviews but nobody would ever see, that financiers would say, "Oh, she got good reviews on that, let's give her some more money to do another one." I really wanted to make a movie that people will hopefully go and see. It's difficult when you're a first-time director. I mean, I saw the poster and I thought that was success. The first good review you get, you think that's success. The boundary gets pushed along all of the time.

How would I gauge it? You know what, bums on seats are important to me, because I made it for an audience, I didn't make it for the critics. Ultimately, I don't think a movie becomes a movie until it meets its audience, and if it had a decent audience, that to me would be successful. Success to me is if it touches an audience, and if it touches a big enough audience so that people are talking about it out there. We made this film and all I get out of it is to express my creativity. Financially there really aren't any rewards when you're a first-time filmmaker at this level. I'm sure my financiers won't like me saying this, but the finance... I've put that to one side at this stage in my career.

David Gray penned the film's soundtrack. How did he get involved?

I think the great thing about being a first-time director is that you really have no ego, and if someone says no to you, you haven't lost anything. I wrote to David and just said, "I know this is a crazy long shot, but please just read the script and, if it moves you, please consider writing as little or as much as you like." Three or four days later we got a call from David's management saying he wanted to do it. We went along to meet him, and it was a scary meeting, to be honest. He's a most unscary man, but I'm a fan; I had been listening to his music for a long time. On the train, going back and forwards to Wales, I would have White Ladder playing in my ears, so his voice became synonymous with the piece that I was writing, and it was an absolute bonus that he was Welsh as well.

Someone asked me what advice I would give to young, up-and-coming writer/directors, and my biggest piece of advice is to ask. You have absolutely nothing to lose, and certainly in my career as a writer and now a director, there have been seven or eight key people who have made a difference to my career purely because they've decided to put their own neck on the line and take a risk on me - and David was one of them. I think that those people exist for everybody, but you don't find them unless you ask.

source: bbc.co.uk (click on this post's tilte to access the original text)

Dorothy Arzner (1897-1979)

2010-03-01T05:25:00.000-08:00

by Theresa L. Geller

When I went to work in a studio, I took my pride and made a nice little ball of it and threw it right out the window.

—Dorothy Arzner (1)

Dorothy Arzner was one of the very few women (including Ida Lupino) who established a name for herself as a director in the film industry of the 1920s and '30s. Despite the extreme sexism prevalent in Hollywood, Arzner was able to establish what remains to this day the largest body of work by a woman director within the studio system. Nonetheless, she has been virtually ignored in most film histories. It was only with the emergence of the "herstory" projects of '70s feminism that scholars began to reclaim women such as Arzner from relative obscurity. Her career in Hollywood is approached today mainly for its exceptionalism, as for years she was the sole female member of the Directors Guild. Yet, her innovative work is central to any number of film history sub-headings: the studio system, the genre film, the development of sound technology, the star system, the representation of women in the Hollywood mainstream.

Though born in San Francisco, Dorothy Arzner's life was shaped by Hollywood from her early life, when her parents moved to Los Angeles and opened a café frequented by many silent film stars and directors. Arzner spent two years studying medicine at USC and worked for a time as an ambulance driver, but a visit to a movie studio inspired her to go into the film industry. She had connections with William DeMille, who at the time was a major director at Famous Players-Lasky Corporation, the parent company of Paramount Studios. She started as a typist, but within three years had moved up, first to screenwriter, and then to editor. Women frequently held these positions in early Hollywood, and Arzner distinguished herself as an editor, most notably in the Rudolph Valentino vehicle, Blood and Sand (Fred Niblo, 1922). In her work on the film's bullfighting scene, she saved the studio thousands of dollars by intercutting stock footage with original material in several scenes, impressing director James Cruze, who employed her as a writer and editor for several of his films. Arzner had garnered a great deal of leverage through this and her work on over fifty other films at Paramount, eventually threatening to move to rival Columbia unless given a directorial position. In 1927, Paramount conceded, putting her in charge of the silent Fashions for Women, which became a commercial success.

Her subsequent features also performed well, and in 1929 she directed Paramount's first talkie, The Wild Party, with established star Clara Bow and Frederic March in his first leading role. For Arzner, this was familiar material, as she had edited a silent version of the same story. This film is particularly important to the history of sound technology in that Arzner had technicians rig a microphone onto a fishing rod, essentially creating the first boom mike, which allowed Bow to move more freely on the set. The Wild Party was a success both critically and commercially, and, set in a women's college, it introduced some of the coded lesbian themes often cited in Arzner's work (Leontine Sagan would make Mädchen in Uniform in Germany just two years later). Her films of the following three years are prime examples of Hollywood before the Hayes Code. Anybody's Woman (1930), follows the consequences of a wild night for chorus girl Ruth Chatterton, the star of many of Arzner's films, and Working Girls (1931) is a stark, knowing portrayal of women trying to get by in New York during the depression. Interestingly, the feminist director Lizzie Borden would use this same title for her filmic exploration of the daily lives of sex workers fifty-five years later.

Arzner made eleven features at Paramount from 1927 until 1932, when she left to begin work as an independent director for several of the studios. The films created in this period are her best known, and they also established Arzner's talent for launching the career's of young actresses including Katherine Hepburn in Christopher Strong (1933), Rosalind Russell in Craig's Wife (1936), and Lucille Ball in Dance, Girl, Dance (1940). She was linked romantically with a number of actresses, but lived much of her life with Marion Morgan, choreographer for Dance, Girl, Dance. She stopped directing features in 1943, for reasons that remain unclear (although playwright R.M. Vaughn has speculated on this question in his play “Camera, Woman”). Arzner continued working over the next three decades, making Women's Army Corps training films and commercials for Pepsi, at the request of her friend and rumored lover Joan Crawford. She also produced plays, often for one of her favorite actresses to work with, Billie Burke (famous for her role as Glenda the Good Witch in The Wizard of Oz). In the '60s and '70s, she was a popular professor at the recently established UCLA film school, teaching screenwriting and directing until her death in 1979.

Feminist film historians, using feminist literary revisionary models established by women such as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, rediscovered the oeuvre of Dorothy Arzner in their attempts to recuperate women from the past as part of the larger project of feminist film studies. Historians reclaimed the body of Arzner's work in the name of adding women to the dominant canon of directors that had been instantiated with the auteur theory of the '40s and '50s by (male-centered) film critics such as Andrew Sarris. These feminist film critics were equally invested in establishing a canon of women filmmakers to argue that there existed a separate, identifiable female, or feminine, aesthetics of film. Exemplifying this position is Claire Johnston's 1975 collection Dorothy Arzner: Towards a Feminist Cinema, and this has set the terms for much of the work on Arzner that followed. Yet, this idea of a clearly ascertainable set of codes that distinguish a woman-made from a man-made film is premised upon assumptions that have been scrutinized for some time now. The founding belief operating here is that a female director (like a female writer) will make a distinctively different film than a male director because of some essential and unmediated relationship between gender identity and artistic production. Problems arise from such a presupposition; for example, this presumes that "woman" is a stable, coherent category that has not changed in different historical and cultural contexts. Yet, feminist and poststructuralist insights concerning the instability of identity and the performativity of gender have come to challenge the essentialist foundations of gender-specific author studies.

Still, the question of the relationship of film practice to gendered producers and receivers of film text cannot be left behind. For one, as long as the paradigm of film analysis based on auteurism prevails, the study of women directors remains an important part of feminist interventions into canonical film studies. But in the wake of the move from essentialist theories to social constructionist models for understanding the production of gendered subjects, the kinds of questions asked of film have significantly changed. In discussing the films of Dorothy Arzner, the question has moved from 'how do her films represent a female worldview' to 'how do these film-texts interrogate or even disrupt the hegemonic (read: masculinist) ideology of dominant Hollywood cinema?' Still, it is important to complicate even this question in order to avoid reducing the analysis of her films to a simple dialectic: is Arzner simply a female dupe of the studio system or a feminist rebel in a male-dominated system? Many of Arzner's critics have taken up one side of this debate or the other (usually, the former). Different questions must be asked of Arzner's work in order to alter the terms of such Arzner criticism. One significant question is how does Arzner appropriate the Woman-as-Image upon which dominant Hollywood cinema relies and to what effect?

Arzner considered herself a Hollywood director, directing what the studio needed, and to which her prolific output at Paramount is a testament. She succeeded in the studio era through her skill and drive, but she was helped by her 'mannish' style and appearance (she almost always dressed in men's suits and ties), which ironically made her stand out less among directors of the day even while she departed from the feminine image. Her ability to defuse her exceptionality allowed her to succeed as a director within Hollywood codes and expectations. Even after leaving Paramount in 1932 and working independently, her films were primarily melodramas, but these were still produced within the studio system. Perhaps somewhat more successful than any attempt to label her as an overtly proto-feminist director has been the movement to categorize Arzner as a director concerned with the cinematic workings of femininity. In this respect, her identity as butch lesbian may have allowed her a certain distance from and perspective on her on-screen heroines. Her films, for the most part, fall under the rubric of Woman's Melodrama, and as such reflect paradigmatic women's roles. Still, as a studio director, this may have had more to do with what the studio felt was appropriate to assign to a woman then what Arzner herself was interested in or capable of working with (as her screenwriting in genre features such as action films and westerns proves). Nevertheless, the thematic of women's private and public lives is clearly evident in the titles of her feature films, Fashions for Women, Sarah and Son (1930), Working Girls, Craig's Wife, and The Bride Wore Red (1937), for example. Even in her last film, a spy thriller entitled First Comes Courage (1943), a woman is cast as the 'hero' of a Casablanca-like tale (though both films were in production simultaneously, so the question of influence is moot). A critique of performative female sexuality, often explicitly built into the narrative, and the possibility of women's community emerges in much of her work.

The melodrama Craig's Wife exemplifies these themes and brings Arzner's active role as auteur to the forefront. It centers on Harriet Craig, a woman obsessed with control over her home. Yet, unlike the one-note play upon which the film is based, Arzner made significant changes to alter the anti-feminist sentiment of the original. This was common for Arzner to revise original source material to stress the complexity of women's lives. She often worked closely with scriptwriters, almost always women, keeping them on the set with her as she shot. In this case, Arzner worked with scriptwriter Mary McCall to depathologize the character of Harriet Craig, originally intended to be vilified by the audience and side instead with the put upon husband. Harriet Craig is characterized as a cold woman who cannot connect with the human beings around her. Yet, under Arzner's direction, Rosalind Russell gives a much more complicated performance, which becomes a subtle critique of the institution of marriage and the limits imposed upon women under patriarchy. Harriet speaks of the role she plays as wife to Walter Craig in exchange for the security of a home. And although Harriet certainly dominates her home and those who occupy it, including her husband, the emphasis on the performative nature of her role as wife makes the question of her “betrayal” difficult to resolve. The movie utilizes the trope of “honesty” to trouble the heterosexual contract. Harriet's niece, Ethel, refers to Harriet's “practical-minded” description of the marriage contract as “bargain” she must strike in order to secure the permanence of her home as “dishonest”. Yet, the film places “honest” heterosexual relationships under scrutiny. The direct comparison the film makes is to the Passmores, a married couple whose “dishonesty” is built on the woman's sexual indiscretions that lead to the murder-suicide committed by the husband. This is reframed by Harriet's emotional comparison to her own mother, who was abandoned by Harriet's father for a younger woman. Harriet's teary speech, detailing her mother's loss of home and ultimate death of “a broken heart” shows well the costs of entering into the marriage contract “honestly”. These two women's deaths certainly challenge the naïve “honesty” Ethel clings to in her own romantic relationship.

Yet, as Arzner often does in her films, the distanciation from the heterosexual romance is coupled with the alternative posited by the possibility of women's community. Harriet's “dishonesty” is ultimately punished within the narrative by her being left alone in the house. She is abandoned in a series of scenes by all the occupants of the house: first Mazie, a servant and her (unemployed) boyfriend, then Ethel and her professor boyfriend, Aunt Austen and another servant, Mrs. Harold and, eventually, Walter himself. What is notable in these pairings is the least ambivalent is the one non-heterosexual coupling—Aunt Austen and Mrs. Harold, who are to commence a trip around the world. It is they alone who represent a connection that is not defined by the heterosexual contract and its subsequent domestication of women. Whereas the married couple is tainted by the deaths of Mrs. Passmore and Harriet's mother (as well as Harriet's sister), the female couple becomes a life-affirming alternative route. This route is also presented to the audience as way out for Harriet from her domestic entombment.

Arzner and McCall made significant changes to the script in regards to Billie Burke's character, the neighbor Mrs. Frazier. Instead of a one-dimensional bitter widow, as originally written, Burke's Mrs. Frazier is a life-affirming grandmother, seen frequently in her fecund rose garden rather than inside her own home, standing is opposition to Harriet. Mrs. Frazier, though a peripheral character, is central to the film's recuperation of Harriet. After everyone leaves Harriet to her house, she receives a telegram of her sister's death. This moment allows Arzner to redeem Harriet from condemnation. Earlier in the film, Aunt Austen is skeptical of Walter's belief that Harriet “will be heartbroken” if her sister dies. The narrative sets Aunt Austen as the wisest of the characters (along with Mrs. Harold), introducing the audience to the manipulative Harriet the audience eventually sees themselves. Yet, this moment in the conclusion of Harriet's quite visible (and quite beautiful, as filmed in close-up with a lingering shot of Russell's tear-stained face) “broken heart” finally breaks with Aunt Austen's otherwise accurate description of Harriet's demeanor. The Aunt's total condemnation of Harriet becomes impossible to swallow in this moment. Since this is one of the only scenes we see Harriet without an observer of any kind, the audience is asked to reconsider what has come before as performance, and this break as representative of the “true” Harriet.

Significantly, Harriet's breakdown in this melodrama is not over Walter's walking out but rather over the loss of a sister. Against Aunt Austen's earlier speculations, we see that Harriet truly loved her sister. This paves the way for the entrance of Mrs. Frazier, who comes in and sympathizes briefly with Harriet but leaves soon after, not knowing how to handle this unexpected moment of vulnerability. Mrs. Frazier leaves without Harriet's knowledge, before Mrs. Frazier hears Harriet's request for her to stay (for the first time). Harriet's “honest” love for her sister leads her to act on her desire for community with women. Although Harriet never chases Walter out the door as he leaves, she distinctly chases after Mrs. Frazier. In fact, having taught this film for some years, it always surprises my students how much more they wanted Mrs. Frazier to return to Harriet than Walter. For much of Arzner's work, sexuality stands as a threat to women's community. Women, in the heterosexual contract, must play their part, as opposed to the more “honest' form of love between women. To this extent, Harriet is often seen posing for Walter, especially in the shrine of her living room. Surrounded by classical Greek sculptures, the pivotal scene shows Harriet posed by the mantle, draped in a white toga-like dress with gold details. She appears the Vestal Virgin guarding the hearth.

This image stands as a motif for Arzner; many of her films use the trope of virginity as that which allows women's community to thrive—the sisters in Working Girls before May becomes pregnant, or, in The Wild Party, the bond between Helen and Stella, before Stella mistakenly climbs into Gil's berth. Nowhere is the threat of sexuality more evident than in Christopher Strong, which introduces Cynthia Darrington (Katherine Hepburn in a role that would come to be her stock in trade), an independent aviatrix, as a woman over twenty-one who has never had a love affair. Her love affair with Christopher Strong is ultimately her undoing and she dies in a suicide plane crash, pregnant with his child. Arzner's films expose that strain of the heterosexual “bargain” that “shackles” women (referred to in the dialogue of Christopher Strong where Christopher gives a bracelet to Cynthia, the bracelet appearing in a close-up as a signifier of their lovemaking). As June says in Working Girls, virginal women have to learn “to say yes and no” at the same time in order to remain unshackled to the heterosexual contract. Of course, implicit in such a statement is the acknowledgement of the performative aspects of romantic love for women. This is the “dishonesty” of Harriet's love is her conscious distance from her own performance. She plays the role of the good wife (unlike Mrs. Passmore), all the while aware that it is a role, in order to guarantee her security. Although Craig's Wife does not justify her fears within the narrative, Arzner's other films make the threat clear. Harriet's counterpart, for example, in Christopher Strong is Mrs. Strong, notably played by Billie Burke. Her security is clearly threatened by Cynthia and Christopher's affair. This threat is underscored by the Strongs' daughter Monica and her own affair with married man Harry, who eventually seeks a divorce to marry Monica. It appears that the heterosexual contract is hemmed on all sides by the threat of abandonment or, indeed, death. It is only in women's community that such threats are held in abeyance, for example, Cynthia's suicide appears to be a sacrifice made for Mrs. Strong rather than Christopher, or Stella's sacrifice for Helen in The Wild Party, or June's securing of a proposal for May so she is not abandoned in Working Girls.

With Todd Haynes directing an upcoming biopic about Dorothy Arzner, hopefully these films (those that are still available) will be introduced to a whole new audience beyond the student of the odd feminist film class or the frequenter of women's film festivals. It may provide an incentive to re-master and re-release some of the lesser-known films such as The Wild Party and Working Girls, mentioned above. The most popular films for the feminist venues have certainly been Craig's Wife, Christopher Strong, and Dance, Girl, Dance. This last film is Arzner's best-known work and rightfully so as it is paradigmatic of her oeuvre in that it is preoccupied the themes named above, that is, “with the shifts from modes of interaction and community based on opposite-sex, versus same-sex, relationships.” (2) Further, it deals with these shifts in the context of women's explicit work of performance—in this instance, dance. This film starring Maureen O'Hara and Lucille Ball foregrounds dance as women's avenue to self-expression and economic independence. In doing so, it also highlights another consistent theme of Arzner's films, the contrast of social paths for women, usually embodied in two central but opposed characters, and the class distinctions that underlie this opposition. In Dance, Girl, Dance, Judy is a struggling ballet student trying to make it into the world of professional dance; Bubbles is also a dancer but makes a success of it in the world of burlesque, performing vamp routines as “Tiger Lily White”. Both simultaneously pursue romantic and work lives that will hopefully allow them some mobility of social class. Yet, even though the spectator is meant to identify with Judy's refusal to sacrifice artistic expression for economic gain, the film nevertheless refuses to vilify Bubbles for doing so.

Dance, Girl, Dance is a fascinating study for feminists to this day because it stands up to the developments within feminist film theory as it has developed over the decades from heterosexist notions of voyeurism through queer revisions of sexual difference to more complicated versions of racial and class ambivalences which frame questions of sexual representation. First recovered for woman-centered film festivals, this film was used in women's film classes as a test case for the study of the male gaze. Its penultimate scene of Judy, who has been hired as a 'stooge' for Bubbles burlesque show, confronting the mocking audience has been lauded as representing a palpable refusal of the male gaze. Judy's stopping the narrative to “return” the gaze of the diegetic audience has been interpreted as a filmic metaphor for a feminist critique of voyeurism. Yet, this interpretation has been complicated over the years, as film theorists have revised it to accommodate the growing field of feminist criticism. Centrally, it has been pointed out by Mayne and others that the audience Judy confronts is not only men; indeed, there are women among the audience, and it is a woman who initiates the applause for Judy's speech.

This recognition has led to broader interpretations of the film's workings, in that dance is not simply accepted as way to speak of femininity as a performance of sexual difference for a presumed male desire. Arzner's significant change to the script when she took over the project as director was to replace the male dance teacher with a woman, a female coded very much like Arzner herself. Madame Basilova, Judy's dance instructor, dresses in ties and appears quite “butch” in demeanor. The film's presentation of the relationship between Judy and Basilova in the film has inspired comparisons between the many photos of Arzner with her “femme” actresses as well as drawing from biographical connections to Arzner's life partner, Marion Morgan, a choreographer in her own right. There is certainly a number of “looks” exchanged between Judy and Basilova which center around their distinction from each other; in fact, when Basilova puts on a frilly hat, putting her on the side of “femininity”, she is killed by a bus.

Yet, this “queer” interpretation itself needs to be complicated further by the class dynamics of the Bubbles–Judy comparison, which turns upon Bubbles' lower class encodings to build our identification with Judy. Yet, even Bubbles is constituted by racial markers which stress her particularly “white” femininity when the film casts black actors in the periphery to underscore who can and who cannot cross class lines, who is and is not constituted as desirable. The use of blackface in a key dance sequence, performed by the American Ballet Company, drives this point home; new “hybrid” forms of dance may make the link between Bubbles' form of burlesque and Judy's more classical form of ballet, but it nevertheless is built upon the appropriation of Afrocentric forms that cannot be allowed center stage, so to speak. So, the matter of who can be subject to the gaze and who cannot needs to be revised by taking into account the complex discourses which constitute gender, such as race, class, and sexuality.

The question of the male gaze (and the woman's refusal of it) has been a particular fecund point of debate in Arzner's films. With the emergence of Queer Film Theory, authors have used feminist revisions of Arzner's films to expose the compulsory heterosexist strain in hegemonic feminist film theory such as the now infamous essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” by Laura Mulvey. Queer film theorist Judith Mayne has been at the forefront of reclaiming Arzner's film texts and the feminist-fetishized image of Arzner herself in order to make the point that the figure of the lesbian, particularly the butch, troubles the heterosexual presumptions underlying the male gaze. Further, her argument allows for the reintroduction of desire and the exchanges of gazes between women—a much-ignored possibility in the pantheon of feminist film theory. It also challenges the assumptions, stated above, concerning Arzner's own appropriation of masculine drag. When Laura Mulvey casts the female spectator as a form of “transvestism”, Arzner's unique position as a female director dressed in male drag stands in sharp contrast to the essentialist, heterosexist presuppositions built into the concept of the “male gaze”. In light of the writings of Judith Butler and others, the question of Arzner donning men's clothes becomes less of a desire to “fit into” the male world than an act of masculine performativity which speaks to the historical and discursive relations of gender to film production, that is, how gender must be “performed” on both sides of the camera.

Filmography

As director:

Fashions for Women (1927)

Get Your Man (1927)

Ten Modern Commandments (1927)

Manhattan Cocktail (1928)

The Wild Party (1929)

Anybody's Woman (1930)

Sarah and Son (1930)

Paramount on Parade (1930)

Working Girls (1931)

Honor Among Lovers (1931)

Merrily We Go to Hell (1932)

Christopher Strong (1933)

Nana (1934)

Craig's Wife (1936)

The Bride Wore Red (1937)

Dance, Girl, Dance (1940)

First Comes Courage (1943)

OTHER CREDITS

Blood and Sand (Fred Niblo, 1922) editor

The Covered Wagon (James Cruze, 1923) editor

Inez from Hollywood (Alfred E. Green, 1924) editor

The No-Gun Man (Harry Garson, 1924) screenwriter

When Husbands Flirt (William A. Wellman, 1925) screenwriter

Red Kimono (Walter Lang, 1925) screenwriter

Old Ironsides (James Cruze, 1926) screenwriter

source: Sense of Cinema, 2003 (for further bibliography and references click on the link is on this post's tilte)

Theresa L. Geller is currently a Ph. D. candidate at Rutgers University. Her dissertation, entitled “Cinema in the Present Tense,” is an exploration in feminism, critical theory, and film studies. She has published on Twin Peaks and given papers addressing the construction of race, gender, and sexuality in The X-Files, The Matrix, and The Long Kiss Goodnight.

from Ruth Torjussen @ Film Directing 4 Women

2010-02-25T03:26:00.000-08:00

Date: Mon, 22 Feb 2010 09:40:37 +0000
> From: info@filmdirecting4women.com
>
> Subject: The Baftas - what a night for women directors!
>
>
> Our heartfelt congratulations to:
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> Kathryn Bigelow - Best Director 'The Hurt Locker',
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> Martina Amati - Best short film 'I do air'
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> Emma Lazenby - Best short animation 'Mother of many'
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> Andrea Arnold - Outstanding British film 'Fish Tank'
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> All wonderful films directed by fabulous, talented and inspirational women!!
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> filmdirecting4women is officially on Cloud 9.
>
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> This has been a long time coming. Kathryn is the very first woman to win the Best Director Award and lets hope she goes on to do the same on Oscar night on March 7th.
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> Celebrations this Wed 24th at The Female Lens, The Long Acre Bar, Long Acre, Leicester Sq Tube.
>

For further information on Film Directing 4 Women, its memebrship, the Female Lens events held monthly, and its breakthrough courses and approach to film making, please check the website: www.filmdirecting4women.com

Bigelow does it again!

2010-02-22T04:09:00.000-08:00

Kathryn Bigelow has done it again, this time, at the BAFTAs, held yesterday in London.

Her feature "The Hurt Locker" won six BAFTAs awards, including Best Film and Best Director.

The mega bock buster "Avatar", directed by Bigelow ex-husband James Cameron, won two awards (one being the self-explanatory, Best Visual Effects).

The BAFTAs are definetly not a 'taster' for the Academy Awards, but it's been clear that "The Hurt Locker" has been consistently gathering acclaim and awards along the way.

What ome cannot fail to mention, is the outstanding contrbution Bigelow has made to the live of all female film makers everywhere, in more ways than she might imagine. If there was such an award, that would also be definetely hers.

Watch the video of the BAFTAs at the Guardian website on the link below:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/feb/21/hurt-locker-avatar-baftas

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Congratulations to Kathryn Bigelow!

2010-01-31T08:15:00.000-08:00

source: www.reuters.com

Bigelow wins Directors top award for "Hurt Locker"

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to win the best director award from the Directors Guild of America on Saturday with her Iraq war thriller "The Hurt Locker," a low-budget film gathering awards steam ahead of the Oscars.

The winner of the Guild's top award has gone on to take the best director Oscar all but six times in the last 61 years.

Oscar nominations will be announced next Tuesday and "The Hurt Locker" is expected to garner several nods, including best film and best director.

Bigelow beat out four other directors, including her former husband James Cameron, who had won the Golden Globe for best director this month for his mega-budget blockbuster "Avatar."

"I am so deeply stunned and honored and proud," Bigelow told the celebrity-heavy crowd of Hollywood directors and actors.

"I think we all felt a really deep responsibility to tell this story with as much honesty as possible, given the courage of the men and women in the field," she added.

"Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" by Laura Mulvey

2010-01-29T04:44:00.000-08:00

Seminal, as in "must-read", text by theorist and writer Laura Mulvey. This text encapsulates the way women have been perceived in the visual arts, and how we have come to perceive ourselves as a consequence of this constructed version of femininnity via the 'male gaze'.

I would recommend this text plus John Berger's "Ways of Seeing" as the two most fundamental texts to assist us on a better understanding of our perception of the visual image, and ultimately of women ourselves.

Filmmakers of the world, please do read this!

Extract:

III. Woman as Image, Man as Bearer of the Look

A. In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female form which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness. Woman displayed as sexual object is the leit-motif of erotic spectacle: from pin-ups to striptease, from Ziegfeld to Busby Berkeley, she holds the look, plays to and signifies male desire. Mainstream film neatly combined spectacle and narrative. (Note, however, how the musical song-and-dance numbers break the flow of the diegesis.) The presence of woman is an indispensable element of spectacle in normal narrative film, , yet her visual presence tends to work against the development of a story line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation. This alien presence then has to be integrated into cohesion with the narrative. As Budd Boetticher has put it:

"What counts is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she represents. She is the one, or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, who makes him act the way he does. In herself the woman has not the slightest importance."

(A recent tendency in narrative film has been to dispense with this problem altogether; hence the development of what Molly Haskell has called the 'buddy movie,' in which the active homosexual eroticism of the central male figures can carry the story without distraction.) Traditionally, the woman displayed has functioned on two levels: as erotic object for the characters within the screen story, and as erotic object for the spectator within the auditorium, with a shifting tension between the looks on either side of the screen. For instance, the device of the show-girl allows the two looks to be unified technically without any apparent break in the diegesis. A woman performs within the narrative, the gaze of the spectator and that of the male characters in the film are neatly combined without breaking narrative verisimilitude. For a moment the sexual impact of the performing woman takes the film into a no-man's-land outside its own time and space. Thus Marilyn Monroe's first appearance in The River of No Return and Lauren Bacall's songs in To Have or Have Not. Similarly, conventional close-ups of legs (Dietrich, for instance) or a face (Garbo) integrate into the narrative a different mode of eroticism. One part of a fragmented body destroys the Renaissance space, the illusion of depth demanded by the narrative, it gives flatness, the quality of a cut-out or icon rather than verisimilitude to the screen.

B. An active/passive heterosexual division of labor has similarly controlled narrative structure. According to the principles of the ruling ideology and the psychical structures that back it up, the male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification. Man is reluctant to gaze at his exhibitionist like. Hence the split between spectacle and narrative supports the man's role as the active one of forwarding the story, making things happen. The man controls the film phantasy and also emerges as the representative of power in a further sense: as the bearer of the look of the spectator, transferring it behind the screen to neutralise the extra-diegetic tendencies represented by woman as spectacle. This is made possible through the processes set in motion by structuring the film around a main controlling figure with whom the spectator can identify. As the spectator identifies with the main male protagonist, he projects his look on to that of his like, his screen surrogate, so that the power of the male protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic look, both giving a satisfying sense of omnipotence. A male movie star's glamorous characteristics are thus not those of the erotic object of the gaze, but those of the more perfect, more complete, more powerful ideal ego conceived in the original moment of recognition in front of the mirror. The character in the story can make things happen and control events better than the subject/spectator, just as the image in the mirror was more in control of motor coordination. In contrast to woman as icon, the active male figure (the ego ideal of the identification process) demands a three-dimensional space corresponding to that of the mirror-recognition in which the alienated subject internalised his own representation of this imaginary existence. He is a figure in a landscape. Here the function of film is to reproduce as accurately as possible the so-called natural conditions of human perception. Camera technology (as exemplified by deep focus in particular) and camera movements (determined by the action of the protagonist), combined with invisible editing (demanded by realism) all tend to blur the limits of screen space. The male protagonist is free to command the stage, a stage of spatial illusion in which he articulates the look and creates the action.

C.1 Sections III, A and B have set out a tension between a mode of representation of woman in film and conventions surrounding the diegesis. Each is associated with a look: that of the spectator in direct scopophilic contact with the female form displayed for his enjoyment (connoting male phantasy) and that of the spectator fascinated with the image of his like set in an illusion of natural space, and through him gaining control and possession of the woman within the diegesis. (This tension and the shift from one pole to the other can structure a single text. Thus both in Only Angels Have Wings and in To Have and Have Not, the film opens with the woman as object the combined gaze of spectator and all the male protagonists in the film. She is isolated, glamorous, on display, sexualised. But as the narrative progresses she falls in love with the main male protagonist and becomes his property, losing her outward glamorous characteristics, her generalised sexuality, her show-girl connotations; her eroticism is subjected to the male star alone. By means of identification with him, through participation in his power, the spectator can indirectly possess her too.)

But in psychoanalytic terms, the female figure poses a deeper problem. She also connotes something that the look continually circles around but disavows: her lack of a penis, implying a threat of castration and hence unpleasure. Ultimately, the meaning of woman is sexual difference, the absence of the penis as visually ascertainable, the material evidence on which is based the castration complex essential for the organisation of entrance to the symbolic order and the law of the father. Thus the woman as icon, displayed for the gaze and enjoyment of men, the active controllers of the look, always threatens to evoke the anxiety it originally signified. The male unconscious has two avenues of escape from this castration anxiety: preoccupation with the re-enactment of the original trauma (investigating the woman, demystifying her mystery), counterbalanced by the devaluation, punishment or saving of the guilty object (an avenue typified by the concerns of the film noir); or else complete disavowal of castration by the substitution of a fetish object or turning the represented figure itself into a fetish so that it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous (hence over-valuation, the cult of the female star). This second avenue, fetishistic scopophilia, builds up the physical beauty of the object, transforming it into something satisfying in itself. The first avenue, voyeurism, on the contrary, has associations with sadism: pleasure lies in ascertaining guilt (immediately associated with castration), asserting control and subjecting the guilty person through punishment or forgiveness. This sadistic side fits in well with narrative. Sadism demands a story, depends on making something happen, forcing a change in another person, a battle of will and strength, victory/defeat, all occurring in a linear time with a beginning and an end. Fetishistic scopophilia, on the other hand, can exist outside linear time as the erotic instinct is focused on the look alone. These contradictions and ambiguities can be illustrated more simply by using works by Hitchcock and Sternberg, both of whom take the look almost as the content or subject matter of many of their films. Hitchcock is the more complex, as he uses both mechanisms. Sternberg's work, on the other hand, provides many pure examples of fetishistic scopophilia.

C.2 It is well known that Sternberg once said he would welcome his films being projected upside down so that story and character involvement would not interfere with the spectator's undiluted appreciation of the screen image. This statement is revealing but ingenuous. Ingenuous in that his films do demand that the figure of the woman (Dietrich, in the cycle of films with her, as the ultimate example) should be identifiable. But revealing in that it emphasises the fact that for him the pictorial space enclosed by the frame is paramount rather than narrative or identification processes. While Hitchcock goes into the investigative side of voyeurism, Sternberg produces the ultimate fetish, taking it to the point where the powerful look of the male protagonist (characteristic of traditional narrative film) is broken in favour of the image in direct erotic rapport with the spectator. The beauty of the woman as object and the screen space coalesce; she is no longer the bearer of guilt but a perfect product, whose body, stylised and fragmented by close-ups, is the content of the film and the direct recipient of the spectator's look. Sternberg plays down the illusion of screen depth; his screen tends to be one-dimensional, as light and shade, lace, steam, foliage, net, streamers, etc, reduce the visual field. There is little or no mediation of the look through the eyes of the main male protagonist. On the contrary, shadowy presences like La Bessiere in Morocco act as surrogates for the director, detached as they are from audience identification. Despite Sternberg's insistence that his stories are irrelevant, it is significant that they are concerned with situation, not suspense, and cyclical rather than linear time, while plot complications revolve around misunderstanding rather than conflict. The most important absence is that of the controlling male gaze within the screen scene. The high point of emotional drama in the most typical Dietrich films, her supreme moments of erotic meaning, take place in the absence of the man she loves in the fiction. There are other witnesses, other spectators watching her on the screen, but their gaze is one with, not standing in for, that of the audience. At the end of Morocco, Tom Brown has already disappeared into the desert when Amy Jolly kicks off her gold sandals and walks after him. At the end of Dishonoured, Kranau is indifferent to the fate of Magda. In both cases, the erotic impact, sanctified by death, is displayed as a spectacle for the audience. The male hero misunderstands and, above all, does not see.

In Hitchcock, by contrast, the male hero does see precisely what the audience sees. However, in the films I shall discuss here, he takes fascination with an image through scopophilic eroticism as the subject of the film. Moreover, in these cases the hero portrays the contradictions and tensions experienced by the spectator. In Vertigo in particular, but also in Marnie and Rear Window, the look is central to the plot, oscillating between voyeurism and fetishistic fascination. As a twist, a further manipulation of the normal viewing process which in some sense reveals it, Hitchcock uses the process of identification normally associated with ideological correctness and the recognition of established morality and shows up its perverted side. Hitchcock has never concealed his interest in voyeurism, cinematic and non-cinematic. His heroes are exemplary of the symbolic order and the law-- a policeman (Vertigo), a dominant male possessing money and power (Marnie)-but their erotic drives lead them into compromised situations. The power to subject another person to the will sadistically or to the gaze voyeuristically is turned on to the woman as the object of both. Power is backed by a certainty of legal right and the established guilt of the woman (evoking castration, psychoanalytically speaking). True perversion is barely concealed under a shallow mask of ideological correctness-the man is on the right side of the law, the woman on the wrong. Hitchcock's skillful use of identification processes and liberal use of subjective camera from the point of view of the male protagonist draw the spectators deeply into his position, making them share his uneasy gaze. The audience is absorbed into a voyeuristic situation within the screen scene and diegesis which parodies his own in the cinema. In his analysis of Rear Window, Douchet takes the film as a metaphor for the cinema. Jeffries is the audience, the events in the apartment block opposite correspond to the screen. As he watches, an erotic dimension is added to his look, a central image to the drama. His girlfriend Lisa had been of little sexual interest to him, more or less a drag, so long as she remained on the spectator side. When she crosses the barrier between his room and the block opposite, their relationship is re-born erotically. He does not merely watch her through his lens, as a distant meaningful image, he also sees her as a guilty intruder exposed by a dangerous man threatening her with punishment, and thus finally saves her. Lisa's exhibitionism has already been established by her obsessive interest in dress and style, in being a passive image of visual perfection; Jeffries' voyeurism and activity have also been established through his work as a photo-journalist, a maker of stories and captor of images. However, his enforced inactivity, binding him to his seat as a spectator, puts him squarely in the phantasy position of the cinema audience.

In Vertigo, subjective camera predominates. Apart from flash-back from Judy's point of view, the narrative is woven around what Scottie sees or fails to see. The audience follows the growth of his erotic obsession and subsequent despair precisely from his point of view. Scottie's voyeurism is blatant: he falls in love with a woman he follows and spies on without speaking to. Its sadistic side is equally blatant: he has chosen (and freely chosen, for he had been a successful lawyer) to be a policeman, with all the attendant possibilities of pursuit and investigation. As a result. he follows, watches and falls in love with a perfect image of female beauty and mystery. Once he actually confronts her, his erotic drive is to break her down and force her to tell by persistent cross-questioning. Then, in the second part of the film, he re-enacts his obsessive involvement with the image he loved to watch secretly. He reconstructs Judy as Madeleine, forces her to conform in every detail to the actual physical appearance of his fetish. Her exhibitionism, her masochism, make her an ideal passive counterpart to Scottie's active sadistic voyeurism. She knows her part is to perform, and only by playing it through and then replaying it can she keep Scottie's erotic interest. But in the repetition he does break her down and succeeds in exposing her guilt. His curiosity wins through and she is punished. In Vertigo, erotic involvement with the look is disorienting: the spectator's fascination is turned against him as the narrative carries him through and entwines him with the processes that he is himself exercising. The Hitchcock hero here is firmly placed within the symbolic order, in narrative terms. He has all the attributes of the patriarchal super-ego. Hence the spectator, lulled into a false sense of security by the apparent legality of his surrogate, sees through his look and finds himself exposed as complicit, caught in the moral ambiguity of looking.

Far from being simply an aside on the perversion of the police, Vertigo focuses on the implications of the active/looking, passive/looked-at split in terms of sexual difference and the power of the male symbolic encapsulated in the hero. Marnie, too, performs for Mark Rutland's gaze and masquerades as the perfect to-be-looked-at image. He, too, is on the side of the law until, drawn in by obsession with her guilt, her secret, he longs to see her in the act of committing a crime, make her confess and thus save her. So he, too, becomes complicit as he acts out the implications of his power. He controls money and words, he can have his cake and eat it.

VISUAL PLEASURE AND NARRATIVE CINEMA

Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975) - Laura Mulvey

Originally Published - Screen 16.3 Autumn 1975 pp. 6-18

Gabriela Mistral (Nobel Prize of Literature)

2010-01-21T15:49:00.001-08:00

For me, Gabriela Mistral is a road in the borough of Penha, where I was born, in Sao Paulo, Brasil. I might have, at some point when I was very young, heard that she was a writer. But I do not remember so.

Today, I am hungry for music, and poetry. And I found by chance this lady's life and work on the internet.

I found it to be, like most Latin American poetry (Mistral was from Chile), of a passion and strength beyond the polished and carefully selected words of European or British poets.

Even if you read this poem in English (as it is here) you shall 'feel' the bright red and hot texture of the language.

Like a punch I would not mind taking to my face once in awhile.

Enjoy!

The Stranger (La Extranjera)

She speaks in her way of her savage seas

With unknown algae and unknown sands;

She prays to a formless, weightless God,

Aged, as if dying.

In our garden now so strange,

She has planted cactus and alien grass.

The desert zephyr fills her with its breath

And she has loved with a fierce, white passion

She never speaks of, for if she were to tell

It would be like the face of unknown stars.

Among us she may live for eighty years,

Yet always as if newly come,

Speaking a tongue that plants and whines

Only by tiny creatures understood.

And she will die here in our midst

One night of utmost suffering,

With only her fate as a pillow,

And death, silent and strange.

poem source: www.poetseers.org

The first ever bakery in Penha, Gabriela Mistral Avenue, Sao Paulo. (A Primeira Padaria da Penha)
source: http://saopauloabandonada.com.br

Virginia Mckenna (b. 1931 in England)

2010-01-12T03:54:00.000-08:00

Mckenna rained at the Central School of Speech and Drama and then went to the Dundee Rep. Her career quickly took off and, in 1952, she appearing both in the West End in plays including Charles Morgan’s 'The River Line' at the Strand Theatre and in a film 'The Second Mrs. Tanqueray' (1952). For the next couple of years, she successfully combined theatre, film and television work. In 1954, with short-cropped hair, she starred at the Aldwych as Cassandra in Dodie Smith’s 'I Capture the Castle'. Her performance was highly praised but the production survived for only four weeks. During the 1954/5 season, she was part of the Old Vic Company, playing parts including Rosaline in Love’s Labours Lost.

She really came to filmgoers' attention with her sensitive performance as the wren in ‘The Cruel Sea’ (1952), becoming perhaps the most popular British female star of the 50s. Along with Sylvia Syms she is, for me, one of the most beautiful screen actresses of at least that decade. She continued with two more major successes in physically arduous roles, ‘A Town Like Alice’ (1956) won her the BAFTA of that year as best actress. Two years later she was an Anglo-French spy Violette Szabo in ‘Carve Her Name With Pride’ (1958) - here she was nominated again for a BAFTA as best actress.

Both of these films confirmed her as one of Britain’s key exports. Seeming she could combine a tough resource charter – stretched to the point of breaking, and yet holding together. Somehow through both she continued to smoulder on screen – perhaps unwittening she (even in serious roles) could not help being every school boys dream girl. During this time she was heaped with awards including: the BBC Best Actress Award for Juliet in the TV production of 'Romeo and Juliet' (1955).

She was married to actor Denholm Elliot (whom she met on the filming of 'The Cruel Sea') but this was short lived. Virginia married again in 1957 to Bill Travers, who became her leading man onscreen as well as off in films like ‘The Smallest Show on Earth’ (1958) and ‘Ring of Bright Water’ (1969).

For 'Born Free' (1966) she won the Variety Club Best Actress Award . Making Born Free in 1964 which told the true story of George and Joy Adamson, as they returned Elsa the lioness to the wild ,profoundly affected Bill and Virginia and it was a key influence in their lives. They realised that wild animals belong in the wild and should be protected there, not imprisoned in captivity.

But it took the premature death in London Zoo of Pole Pole a young elephant who had featured in their film An Elephant Called Slowly which led to the founding of Zoo Check in 1984. The Trust was dedicated to preventing the abuse of captive wild animals and strove to protect and conserve them in the wild. Zoo Check grew to become a major force in the animal welfare movement and was renamed The Born Free Foundation in 1991.

She was awarded the OBE in the New Year's Honours List in 2004 for services to wildlife and the arts.

source: www.britishcinemagreats.com and bbc.co.uk/radio4

Who is a Happy Housewife?

2010-01-12T03:27:00.000-08:00

This morning, on the wonderful "Women's Hour" broadcasted daily on Radio 4, there was an interview with the film lecturer, critic and theorist Melanie Bell.

In her new book "Femininity in the Frame", Bell argues that during the 1950s, British Cinema portrayed women in much more varied and complex roles than in contemprorary cinema. By arguing this, Bell is contesting a lot of inheritted and unilateral media stereotypes of women in the 50s as dutiful housewives, whose chores was making sure the house is clean and that dinner is promptly served as their husbands come back home exhausted from a day's work.

Bell also traces cinematic analogies of the 1950s with the 1950s and the insurgence of feminism in the 1970s ( a veryu intersting parallel, and the subsequent (and unnattended) demand of women for more accurate representation in the industry.

The issue with the representation of women in Cinema is a complex one. Not only aren't women represented ONscreen, there are not enough women working behind the lenses, nor in film criticism and literature.

Jane Campion is a tireless spokesperson for the equal representation fo women in Cinema. To paraprhase her, women make 51% of the world's population, so why aren't ther at least 50% women in the Film Industry?

Back to Bell's book, it serves us as an important reminder that we might be now living in times as conservative if not even more conservative that the days of our grandmothers.

Especially if we consider flicks like "Sex and the City" as an expression of our hard earned freedom (sigh), and this so-called 'freedom' comes at the literal expense of how much, or how many dresses and bags and shoes, you can afford.

Bell expalins how in the 50s veteran and pioneer actresses like Virginia Mckenna (who has also founded the Born Free Foundation!) had consistently demanded the versatile portrait of women in careers as police officers, for instance.

It seems like a great read, and I am looking forward to getting myself a copy.

Ladies, dont forget that by removing our historical pink glasses we might also end up getting read of our social leashes!

X LS

From the Women and Hollywood Blog

2010-01-10T04:36:00.000-08:00

by Melissa Silverstein

Yesterday, Kathryn Bigelow earned her first DGA nomination for directing The Hurt Locker. She’s not the one who made history yesterday. Seven women — Lina Wertmuller (“Seven Beauties”), Randa Haines (“Children of a Lesser God”), Barbra Streisand (“The Prince of Tides”), Jane Campion (“The Piano”), Sofia Coppola (“Lost in Translation”) and Valerie Faris (who was nominated with Jonathan Dayton for “Little Miss Sunshine” — came before her but keep in mind NONE have won. Lee Daniels was the surprise nominee for Precious making him the first black person to be nominated for a DGA honor. (Only John Singleton has been nominated for an Oscar.)

Now we all know that everyone has written ad nauseum about how Kathryn Bigelow has made a career of directing so-called “non-female” films. Films with action, and stuff blowing up. There are other women in her camp most notably Karyn Kusama. I for one am fucking sick of this conversation. We need to move on. There are men who direct movies that have more of a female sensibility like Ken Kwapis (Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, He’s Just Not That Into You) and Nick Cassavetes (The Notebook, My Sister’s Keeper) and NOBODY ask if they are a male director.

Why is it when a woman ventures out of the safety of girlworld does her gender get talked about over and over but the same conversation never happens to the guys?

IndieWIRE’s new piece Is Kathryn Bigelow a Female Director? also lays out the contradictions. And the thing about this conversation is that it is rife with contradictions. I have them myself all the time. I’m as conflicted as Caryn James who said recently on this site when talking about the Golden Globe nominations (and picked up in the IndieWIRE piece) “real progress will come when we stop looking at poetic films as if they exist in some lesser, female category.”

Don’t get me wrong, I’m thrilled that we are going to have the 4th potential best directing nod for a woman and maybe the first win and I’m really glad that lots of critics and bloggers have woken up to the fact that Hollywood doesn’t really respect women in the same way as men. I think that just having these conversations will help improve things for women directors because FINALLY this issue is being discussed in more places that just the feminist world.

The bottom line to me is that we have made progress in people feeling comfortable with a woman director through Bigelow’s work, but we have minimal progress in how we look at films with a female sensibility. Granted we have Precious and An Education which are in the year end hunt, but remember they are both about young women coming of age. Hollywood is much more comfortable with young women’s lives and experiences than older women.

But let’s be real, Hollywood is not any different from the rest of the culture. We still have a hard time seeing women and women’s experiences as universal. We are “other” and the male experience is the “norm”.

I think it was naive to hope that the first woman to win the best directing Oscar would be a director of a more “female” type movie. We’re just not ready for that. This could be one of the big reasons why Kathryn Bigelow will be the breakthrough female director. She’s a woman who doesn’t threaten the universal vision of the world — that boys rule.

Andrea Arnold (b. 1961 in England)

2010-01-06T06:07:00.000-08:00

Andrea Arnold has won an Academy Award for her short fim WASP, which we have the opportunity to watch during our first class at the Film Directing 4 Women course.

I can honestly say that WASP is nothing short of exceptional - regardless of the award.

Arnold manages to portray her characters without any pity or judgement. The hand held camera moments (nothing like Dogma, if not better done) keep the action, and the characters feelings up front. And the harshness and grittiness of contemporary society and its entrapments are exposed in a style of filming that makes documentaries look partial and outdated.

This is a fine example of the potency of fiction as an medium to express life in greater veracity than documentaries.

The following article is an interview with Arnold by Danny Leigh from The Guardian newspaper (Oct 2006), during the release of her first feature Red Road (made two years after WASP). Her second feature "Fish Tank" was released last year to great acclaim.

'I like darkness'

Andrea Arnold is aware she will for ever be the woman who said "bollocks" at the Oscars. The glorious moment came at last year's ceremony, where her film Wasp was nominated as best live action short. She was, she recalls, sick with nerves at the thought of having to make a speech. When she was announced as the winner, clutching her statuette, she declared to the assembled beautiful people and a billion live TV viewers that the victory was, in short, the dog's aforementioned.

Dartford-born Arnold - affably upfront, quick to grin, red-blonde hair down her back - winces at the memory. "I've thought a lot about how that got out of my mouth," she says, "and the truth is, it was just the most honest expression I could find for how it felt. The whole scenario was so bizarre, so removed from real life, that it was a way of making the moment mine. No one else was going to say it, were they?"

This is true. Yet, not for long is she likely to remain best known for her profanity (or, for those who spent the 1980s watching kids TV, as a former presenter of various Saturday morning programmes). At 45, her film-making is now getting attention, with her debut, Red Road, cementing her status as one of British cinema's brightest new lights, particularly after winning the Jury Prize at this year's Cannes.

A startling Glasgow-set drama of obsession and revenge, Red Road centres on an operator of the city's myriad CCTV cameras - emotionally disconnected until a face from the past appears on her screens. Thereafter, her life spirals into a welter of illicit surveillance that finally leads her to Red Road, the grimly iconic clump of tower blocks on Glasgow's northern frontier, scheduled for demolition but still, for now, a brutalist monster on the skyline.

With its jittery images and free-floating paranoia, the film could have simply been a techno retread of Rear Window. But, among the eerie freeze-frames and grainy knee-tremblers, something far more original emerges - infused with the tension of a thriller, but also depth and complexity.

Animated on almost any other subject, Arnold becomes sober when she talks about her film. Mindful of how the press "muddle things", her words come carefully. "I try and be truthful. With endings, beginnings, the million choices in between. To me, that's the point of it all, making those choices honestly. Black coat or brown? Naked or dressed? Films are all about decisions, and that's what I love." She hesitates. "I mean, I hate watching mine afterwards, because they're full of moments that didn't come off, but I love the trying."

Indeed, one of Red Road's most impressive qualities is its sense of identity - although her career is still in its early stages, the film instantly seems like an Andrea Arnold movie - her signature being keeping the story vice-tight while conjuring a succession of haunting images from the most unlikely sources (a beery party in a barren flat, a lava lamp accompanying a fearsomely raw sex scene).

This is all the more remarkable since it wasn't entirely hers to begin with. Red Road is the first of three films made at the behest of The Advance Party, a Danish project inspired by the mercurial Lars von Trier, who challenged Arnold and two other new directors to create films with the same group of characters. Flattered by the approach and intrigued by the concept, Arnold says she relished developing her characters from the outlines provided by The Advance Party, then folding them into her own story. It was, she says, "invigorating".

When she agreed to take part, Arnold was simply the maker of three shorts little seen outside the festival circuit, although Wasp - the striking tale of a single mother on a Kent estate attempting to woo back an ex - attracted serious acclaim. Now, post-Oscar, Red Road has stirred expectations, with the world as interested in her as her movie. After leaving school in the late 1970s, Arnold worked as a dancer on TV shows including Top of the Pops. Soon she was presenting children's knockabouts Number 73 and Motormouth. None of this appears in the publicity accompanying Red Road. There's no embarrassment about her former career; it's just that, fatalistic about the public's response to her films, she's almost phobic about their gaze falling on her. As soon as the subject is raised, she looks as if a large, pointed stick has been brought into the room: "I'm uncomfortable with it. Yes. I am. Obviously, I want people to know about the film - I just don't get why anyone would want to know about me." She laughs and hugs her knees to her chest.

Dutifully, she details her activities after quitting TV in the early 1990s - "I went to film school, I had my daughter, I wrote" - before making the short films that would eventually lead to one of cinema's slower, weirder overnight success stories. She is, however, not having much fun recounting this. I tell her it's strange that someone with her background should be leery of the spotlight. She looks at me like I've picked up the pointed stick and jabbed her in the ribs.

"It was a long time ago," she says. "I was very young. I was 18 when I got my first TV job. I'd just moved to London, and I was never comfortable with it. I loved drama and dance at school, so I thought I'd love TV - but it just made me horribly self-conscious." Dancing, she says, should be "pure escape" - dancing on TV was not. Presenting was worse. "Don't get me wrong, I'm grateful I did it, because essentially I was paid good money to have a laugh. But the older I got, the more uneasy I became. The whole time I'd been writing, just putting down ideas, until eventually I thought, maybe I shouldn't do this any more - maybe I should do that."

Relief colours her face when the conversation returns to Red Road. It's funny, she says, but when foreign journalists talk to her about the film, they assume she's invented the massed cameras above Glasgow, that this must be some sci-fi concoction rather than everyday Britain. Yet, for all the Orwellian overtones, her film stresses that the people monitoring us aren't fascist snitches - they're underpaid drudges calling ambulances for stabbing victims.

"When I started my research, I was very worried, and I've certainly heard a lot of unsettling stories about CCTV. But the people I met watching the screens were the kind of people you see in the film. That was the truth of it, so it was important to reflect that. Nothing's ever simple, is it?"

Nothing's ever simple - it could be a subtitle for the whole film. Broad strokes aren't Arnold's bag. Moreover, for all the creeping alienation that has seen Red Road compared to Von Trier and Michael Haneke, maker of the acclaimed Hidden, it shares little of their cynicism. A misanthrope she is not. To her, people screw up, but judgment is a mug's game. "That's just how I feel," she says. "Dramatically, I like darkness, I like conflict - but I don't see the world as defined by them. And why would I pretend to? That's not who I am."

She starts talking about shooting in Glasgow, unfamiliar to her beforehand. Filming around the deprived Red Road, she was all too aware this was someone else's home. "It's something that's dear to my heart, trying not to descend on an area and take it over. Film crews are incredibly invasive. I mean, a car went past us one day, and the guy shouted out, "You bunch of fannies!" And all I could think was, 'He's right. Look at us. We are a bunch of fannies.'"

She shakes her head: "Again, nothing's simple. The thing about Red Road is, everyone who sees the film says it looks terrible. Nightmarish. But to a lot of the people there, it's not so straightforward - they grew up there, raised their families there. It's hard sometimes to put anything that complex across, but you've got to try. You've got to try and present the truth, haven't you?"

There's a pause. Then she smiles: "Whatever that is."

WOMEN MAKE MOVIES

2010-01-04T07:31:00.000-08:00

Look what I have found!
Please enjoy this amazingly enlightening website on all those issues we constantly think about but never seem to discuss openly!

Highly informative, concise and necessary.

www.wmm.com

X LS.

About Women Make Movies

Established in 1972 to address the under representation and misrepresentation of women in the media industry, Women Make Movies is a multicultural, multiracial, non-profit media arts organization which facilitates the production, promotion, distribution and exhibition of independent films and videotapes by and about women. The organization provides services to both users and makers of film and video programs, with a special emphasis on supporting work by women of color. Women Make Movies facilitates the development of feminist media through an internationally recognized Distribution Service and a Production Assistance Program.

Ann Hui On-Wah (b. 1947 in China)

2010-01-04T06:55:00.000-08:00

trailer: Night and Fog, 2009

Filmography as Director

The Secret (1979)
The Spooky Bunch (1980)
The Story of Woo Viet (1981)
Boat People (1982)
Love in a Fallen City (1984)
Princess Fragrance (1987)
The Romance of Book and Sword (1987)
Starry Is the Night (1988)
Song of the Exile (1990)
Swordsman (1990)
My American Grandson (1991)
Zodiac Killers (1991)
Boy and His Hero (1994)
Summer Snow (1995)
Ah Kam (1996)
As Time Goes By (1997)
Eighteen Springs (1997)
Ordinary Heroes (1999)
Visible Secret (2001)
July Rhapsody (2002)
Goddess of Mercy (2003)
The Postmodern Life of My Aunt (2006)
The Way We Are (2008)
Night and Fog (2009)
Seung Seung Ha Ha (2010)

extract from Song of Exhile, 1990

Lana Gogoberidze (b. 1928 in Georgia)

2010-01-04T06:30:00.000-08:00

Lana Gogoberidze is a prolific director whose films primarily focus on the realistic, nonsentimental, portrayal of women's lives. Before enrolling in the State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK) in Moscow, she attended the University of Tbilisi where she had originally planned on becoming a literary scholar. She wrote her doctoral thesis on American poet Walt Whitman. Upon graduating from VGIK, she made her first feature film, Pod odnim nebom (1961). Her first film to gain international recognition was Neskolko interviu po lichnym voprosam (1979). In 1984, her film Den Dlinnee nochi was entered into the Cannes Film Festival by her government. In 1986 her film Krugovorot won the director's award at the Tokyo Film Festival.

still from: Some Interviews on Personal Questions, 1978

Gogoberidze's Filmography:

Valsi Pecoraze (1992)- Screenplay, Director

Krugovorot (Full Circle)(1986) - Screenplay, Director

Den' Dlinneje Notchi (Day Longer Than the Night)(1984)- Screenplay, Director

Neskolko Interwju Po Litschnym Soprosam (Some Interviews on Personal Questions)(1978) - Screenplay, Director

still from: Full Circle (1986)

source: The New York Times (www.nytimes.com - by Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide)

Judit Helek (b. 1937 in Hungary)

2010-01-04T05:58:00.000-08:00

Judit Elek is no stranger to connoisseurs of Hungarian cinema. She is largely known for her historical epics of the 1980s, such as Tutajosok (Memories of a River, 1989), which examined Hungary's Jewish past. Today, Elek continues to explore Jewish identity in Hungary through the medium of documentary, as evidenced by her latest film Egy szabad ember - Fisch Erno elete (A Free Man - The Life of Erno Fisch, 1998).

Elek, who was a contemporary of future Oscar-winner Istvan Szabo at the Academy of Theatre and Cinematography, has been making films since the 1960s. Following a long tradition of Hungarian directors who owe a debt to documentary film, Elek developed her own method called Direct Cinema. Under the influence of Truffaut, Elek used improvisation and non-professional actors to create films such as Istenmezejen (A Hungarian Village, 1974) and Egy tortenet (A Commonplace Story, 1975), two intense and powerfully involved works which were sufficiently deep to keep the audiences well away from them.

After this, Elek returned to fiction and started employing a more engaging style which brought her a larger following. However, she still remained rooted in the documentary tradition and her fiction films have a documentarist's eye for historical accuracy. It is now increasingly less feasible to convince backers to finance the kind of lavish visually appealing films that Elek made in the 1980s and she has since gone back to the more economical medium of documentary, making Mondani a mondhatatlant - Elie Wiesel uzenete (To Speak about the Unspeakable - The Message of Elie Wiesel) between 1993 and 1995.

Egy szabad ember... sees Elek sticking to her documentary phase but also continuing her exploration of Hungary's, and indirectly her own, Jewish roots.

Erno Fisch has one of those lives that documentarists dream about. Born in a small Transylvanian town in 1903, Fisch grew up in an era in which the Austro- Hungarian Empire was still surviving, if not exactly in full swing. He went to a Catholic school for the delightfully pragmatic reason that it was closer than the Jewish one and Fisch's mother did not want her son to have too far to walk in the winter. There was little or no discrimination in those days, and the Fisch family considered themselves Hungarian first and foremost: they spoke Hungarian at home and young Erno knew little Yiddish. Like all Hungarians at the time, Fisch looked to the West. He travelled to Vienna to study and was flung into two worlds, mixing with both with Viennese low-life and the aristocracy, the latter of which he met through his landlady, Schubert's niece.

Historical vantage point

From the joint perspective of rural Transylvania and cosmopolitan Vienna, Fisch was able to witness the full drama of the unfolding century: Bela Kun's early experiment with Communism in Hungary in 1919, the right-wing back lash, the depression, the rise of fascism, Anschluss, the Beldevere award which gave Transylvania back to Hungary, and the lowest point - World War II. Fisch was the only Jew in his village to survive, having cannily fled to the hills just before the deportations began and played an instrumental role in helping to return life to some semblance of normality in the hectic post-war days.

Fisch is an amiable and friendly character and his story quite remarkable. Elek makes it very easy for us to sit back in our chairs and take in Fisch's tale. This is precisely the film's problem. For all the astonishing perspectives Fisch has had on this century, Elek has been unable to form them into anything which actively engages the audience. The effect is not unlike that of a great-grandfather reading a bedtime story to his great-grandchildren.

This in turn has repercussions for what Elek has to say about freedom. Fisch is, of course, a free man in the sense that he is still alive: he has had brushes with danger many times and at several points in his life could have had the freedom to live removed from him. Elek also paints him as a free thinker, a secular cosmopolitan Jew who has a brain between his ears but is not afraid of hard honest work or getting his hands dirty.

However, Elek seems to have a rather lower opinion of her audience. Throughout her film the medium works in only one direction, pouring facts from the screen into the audiences mind. Some of these facts do challenge - for example, the description of the Hungarian army entering Transylvania, causing revulsion as they go by, burgling and looting. The overall thrust of Elek's presentation of Fisch's life, however, gives the audience little freedom to think about and challenge our own view of the twentieth century.

Egy szabad ember... is a charming and fascinating film which fills in some interesting details in our picture of modern Hungarian history. It does not, though, attempt to redraw the boundaries of what we already know.

article by Andrew J. Horton (1999) on Central Europe Review (www.ce-review.org)

Doris Dorrie (b. 1955 in Germany)

2010-01-04T05:48:00.000-08:00

Doris Dörrie was born in 1955 in Hanover. She attended drama, acting, and film at University of the Pacific in Stockton, and the School for Social Research in New York (1973-75) after graduating from high school.

Like Wenders, she was a student at the Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film in Munich. Her first feature Straight through the Heart in 1983 was followed by Im Innern des Wals 1984. Her biggest success and the kickstart of her career was Männer.../ Men..., released in 1985 - a national and international successs.
Some said that Rainer Werner Fassbinder's death in 1982 was the end of the New German Cinema, others say it was the release of Doris Dörrie's comedy.

In any case, the mid-80s marked a clear shift from the aims and goals of the New German Cinema towards a more entertaining and commercially succesful form of filmmaking. Men.. was filmed on tight budget of $400,000. The twenty initial prints were soon expanded to 230 and Men... became the first major box office success for a female director from Germany since the 60s. It actually became the most successful German film of 1986 with five million admissions in Germany and six million worldwide.

Margarethe von Trotta's Rosa Luxemburg, released in the same year, received the Best Film award in Cannes. It had a total audience of 519,000. Men... opened in New York and made $ 10 million.

Following her success with Men..., she released Paradies/Paradise in 1986 and Me and Him in 1989 (which went straight to video). Happy Birthday, Türke opened in 1992. It is based on a novel by Jakob Arjouni who since then has released a trilogy of novels focusing on a Turkish private eye working in Frankfurt/Main, encountering daily racism and xenophobia. The wonderful Nobody Loves Me (1994) won the Film Strip in Gold at the German Film Awards for Maria Schrader (who became more famous with Aimee and Jaguar) and was followed by the episodic Bin ich schön? / Am I Beautiful in 1998.

Doris Dörrie has filmed all her feature films with the same crew. Her husband and cameraman, Helge Weindler, died of cancer in 1996 while shooting Bin ich schön?.

Her latest North American release is Enlightenment Guaranteed, somewhat of a sequel to her biggest success, a Men II.... Uwe Ochsenknecht, Heiner Lauterbach, and Ulrike Kriener are back to face their (mid-life) crises in the new millenium.

Doris Dörrie is also well-known as a writer of short stories and novels. Some of her movies are based on her fiction.

source: Dept of Germanic and Russian Studies, University of Victoria, Canada

Trinh T. Minh-ha (b. 1953 in Vietnam)

2010-01-04T05:34:00.000-08:00

still from The Fourth Dimension, 2001

Trinh T. Minh-ha, the Vietnamese-American filmmaker and feminist theorist, is currently living in Tokyo, teaching as Visiting Professor at the Institute for Gender Studies at Ochanomizu University, Tokyo. Trinh T. Minh-ha's personal history as a filmmaker, writer and composer includes, films as Surname Viet Given Name Nam /1989/ and A Tale of Love /1995/, and books as Framer Framed /1992/ and When the Moon Waxes Red /1991/. She was born in Hanoi in 1953 and brought up in Saigon. At the age of 17 she went to the USA for her university education and majored in Music Composition and Comparative Literature. Trinh T. Minh-ha is Professor of Women's Studies and Film at the University of California, Berkeley.
I talked with her about an hour on June, 2, 1998 at her temporal office at Ochanomizu University, and I realised I could keep asking her questions and exchange thoughts and doubts for hours. Her precise process of selecting terms, expressions, of defining theoretical tools and clarifying words, statements, thoughts proves, again and again, her enormous intellectual, artistical and leftist background and working directions. from the interview: Inappropriate/d Artificiality with Marina Grzinic, available on Minh-ha official website www.trinhminh-ha.com

Agnes Varda (b. 1928 in Belgium)

2010-01-04T05:09:00.000-08:00

“I NEED IMAGES, I NEED REPRESENTATION WHICH DEALS IN OTHER MEANS THAN REALITY. WE HAVE TO USE REALITY BUT GET OUT OF IT. THAT’S WHAT I TRY TO DO ALL THE TIME.”
quote source: thebelievermag.com

a taste of Varda's masterpiece 'Cleo de 5 a 7'

(Interview with Varda from the British Film Institute can be accessed by the link that is this post's title.)

Le Pointe Courte, 1954

Kira Muratova (b. 1934 in Romenia, now Moldova. Currently living in the USA)

2010-01-04T04:41:00.000-08:00

Kira Muratova (b. 1934) graduated from the All-Union State Filmmaking Institute (Sergei Gerasimov's workshop) in 1962. Despite a career repeatedly stifled by censorship, Muratova has amassed a number of prestigious awards. Long Farewells (made in 1971 and shelved until 1987) received a FIPRESCI award at the Film Festival in Locarno. The Aesthenic Syndrom (1991) which is considered Muratova's masterpiece, received a Nika (Russian Film Academy) award and "The Silver Bear" Award at the Berlin International Film Festival. In 2000 Muratova was chosen as the first recipient of the Andzei Wajda/Philip Morris Freedom Prize.

Muratova's Brief Encounters (1967)

Kira Muratova's film, Brief Encounters, is structured as two interspliced narrative lines. Together, they tell the story of how two women-the urban, city council official Valentina and the rural cafe waitress Nadia-love the itinerant and restless geologist Maksim, played by the chansonier cult figure Vladimir Vysotsky, for many years an actor at Moscow's Taganka Theatre.
The lives of these two women intersect when Nadia comes to the city to find Maksim, whose address she had been given on a slip of paper. There she encounters Valentina, who assumes Nadia has come to be interviewed for a housekeeper position and hires her immediately. The subtly comic pairing of the two women and their unintentional love triangle with the missing man are infused with a lyric sensitivity, as the film's episodic flashbacks narrate each woman's emotional dependency on the absent Maksim.

Director Kira Muratova, who also plays the role of Valentina, the city bureaucrat, provides a psychological depth and complex richness to her character that contrasts starkly with the more traditional femininity of her foil, played by actress Nina Ruslanova, for whom this was the first film role. The relationship of the two female characters contrasts city and country, as well as differing class expectations, and normative gender roles.

The film's nontraditional structure, avoiding linear narration and a single, unambiguous perspective, proved ideologically problematic upon its completion in 1967.

The film was shelved until 1987, when it was released during the perestroika period, together with such delayed films as Aleksei German's Trial By Road and Aleksandr Askol'dov's Commissar.

Muratova's work, from her early Brief Encounters to the more recent Three Stories and Second-Class People, has challenged viewer expectations that Russian culture, and cinema in particular, has an ethical responsibility to present an unambiguous moral message. Unlike a number of her prominent colleagues, notably Aleksandr Sokurov and Nikita Mikhalkov, Muratova has resisted both spiritual and patriotic aspirations in her work, opting instead for a dark and brutal humor that does not readily lend itself to a redemptive reading. Although her work retains few traces of the "provincial melodramas" from the earlier period to which Brief Encounters belongs, she continues to prefer disrupting and disturbing the genteel norms of her audiences, rather than satisfying their love of a predictable, well-wrought story.

source: Russian Film Symposium (www.rusfilm.pitt.edu)

Muratova's Filmography:

On the Steep Cliff (1963) codirected with Aleksandr Muratov

Our Honest Bread (1964)

Brief Encounters (1967)

Long Goodbyes (1971, released in 1987)

Getting to Know Whole Wide World (1979)

Among Grey Stones (1983) as Ivan Sidorov

Change of Destiny (1987)

Asthenic Syndrome (1989)

Sentimental Policeman (1992)

Passions (1994)

Three Stories (1997)

Letter to America (1999) short

Second Class Citizens (2001)

Chekhov's Motives (2002)

The Tuner (2004)

Two In One (2007)

source: Russian Film Symposium (www.rusfilm.pitt.edu)

The Truth (if there's any...)

2009-12-22T14:59:00.000-08:00

"In DRAMA, as in LIFE, we are NOT what we SAY we are. We ARE what we DO."

(from "So You Want To be a Playwright?" by Tim Fountain, capitals mine.)

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

X LS

Her Name Was Gilda!

2009-12-21T16:46:00.000-08:00

In fact, her name was Gilda de Abreu. Born in Paris, France in 1904, during her parents' trip to Europe - her mother, Nicia da Silva was the most popular classical singer in Brazil at the time, and was often invited to perform in Europe.

Gilda's mother taught her lyrical singing. Gilda started performing to audiences, and eventually even writing her own operettas. During her singing career she met the love of her life, the singer Vicente Celestino, whom also was at the top of his filed, being known as 'The Voice of Brasil'.

It did not take long for Gilda, based on the very songs she wrote, to start writing scripts for films she would eventually act on (along with Celestino)and direct.

This woman seemed to be nothing less than a phenomenon, and how anyone in Brasil can grow up without knowing about her (as it was my case) is proof of how Brasil suffers of a very short cultural memory!

Gilda de Abreu films were the biggest box offices (as they call it these days) of her time; they were "Pinguinho de Gente", "Coracao Materno" (in which her husband starred), as well as "Chico Viola Nao Morreu", based on the life of legendary singer Francisco Alves, and "Cancao de Amor", film which was dedicated to her husband.

She died in 1979.

This remarkable woman must be remembered by us all.

I will be back, probably before NYE 2010, to bring in more women who ought to be remembered and celebrated for their creations!

Feliz Natal! (Merry Christmas) x LS

Kathryn Bigelow nominated for Best Film Director

2009-12-15T02:12:00.000-08:00

North American Film Director Kathryn Bigelow has been nominated for an Academy Award on the upcoming ceremonies to be presented in 2010 for her film "The Hurt Locker".

The director of films like "Point Break" (with Keanu Reeves as an FBI agent who infiltrates a gang of bank robbers lead by a surfer played by Patrick Swayze) and the futuristc, dystopian thriller "Strange Days" (with Ralph Fiennes, Angela Bassett and Juliette Lewis), started with the dreams of becoming a painter in San Francisco before dedicationg herself to the Cinema.

"The Hurt Locker" is her first film after a cinematic hiatus of seven-years, and has gathered raving reviews for chalenging a still persistently misconceived notion that a woman would be an unlikely choice to direct action/ war movies.

"The Hurt Locker" is set in Iraq, in its current war, and portrays a group of soldiers led by its "brash, reckless Sargent" with he mission of dismantle explosives in life-threatening situations.

For more info on the film and for an interview with Bigelow, click on the link that is this post's title, and fingers crossed for Bigelow next year.

source: avclub.com

Watch this Space!

2009-12-13T07:19:00.000-08:00

Watch "Mistresses of the Universe" for further additions on our very special Hall of Honours!

The next entries will continue to be dedicated to the Ladies of Cinema - and these addtions should undoubtly enrich us all!

Thanks for looking!

X LS

Sally Potter (from The Guardian today)

2009-12-04T06:36:00.000-08:00

Sally Potter: 'There was no such thing as an easy ride'More familiar with life on the fringes of British cinema, director Sally Potter finds herself the subject of a BFI retrospective. But she has no interest in looking back

By Ryan Gilbey

Thursday 3 December 2009 21.50 GMT Article history
'When it's time to let go of my films, I really let go' … Sally Potter.

Photograph: Felix Clay

In the late 1980s, Sally Potter was scratching around for funding to make Orlando, the Virginia Woolf adaptation widely considered her finest film, as well as a formative moment in the career of its star, Tilda Swinton. Potter's friend, the visionary director Michael Powell, had secured her a 10-minute meeting with Martin Scorsese, in which she hoped to convince him to extend a helping hand to a fellow maverick.

The Gold Diggers Production year: 1983 Country: UK Cert (UK): U Runtime: 89 mins Directors: Sally Potter Cast: Colette Laffont, Julie Christie, Thom Osborn More on this film "Tilda and I went with our producer to meet Scorsese in New York," says the 60-year-old Potter, seated at a table in her east London office. "We walked into his place and nearly fainted with admiration. He then proceeded to spend the entire 10 minutes talking about how incredibly difficult life was for him as an independent film-maker because the critics had just 'killed' him over The Last Temptation of Christ." The slender, softly spoken Potter grimaces at the memory before whooping loudly, throwing her head back in a gesture that disturbs her long, red mane.

Although she didn't come away from chez Scorsese with a fat cheque in her fist, she did leave with something of greater long-term value. "It was fascinating to observe that somebody who was the very definition of a loved and respected film-maker should himself be carrying real wounds from criticism he'd received, and could still be struggling. It was bizarrely reassuring. I realised I was part of a spectrum. There was no such thing as an easy ride – just different kinds of difficulties."

What has occasioned these reflections is a season of Potter's work at BFI Southbank, ranging from avant-garde shorts that were in the can before she was out of her teens, to Rage, the 2009 murder-mystery set in the fashion industry and comprised entirely of talking heads, including Jude Law, Judi Dench and Steve Buscemi. Potter is indisputably an arthouse film-maker, but if there's one thing she can do, it's reel in the stars: Johnny Depp, Christina Ricci, Joan Allen and Julie Christie are among past collaborators.

She is, she says, largely averse to revisiting the past. "I'm completely absorbed in my films until the moment of letting go. Then I really do let go. I barely even remember them." What's most striking about the retrospective is the continuity between films made over a 40-year-span. The split-screen short Play, filmed in 1971 from the window of Potter's bedsit using two cameras running at different speeds, is a perfect example, foreshadowing some of the same ideas about the untrust-worthy image that are explored in Rage.

Potter is essentially a product of late-60s London, when the capital was a hive of underground creativity: you could scarcely throw a dissertation on Derrida without hitting a leftist collective or an arts laboratory. Potter had already whiled away many long days at the Drury Lane Arts Lab, where audiences would lounge around on mattresses for screenings of, say, Andy Warhol's eight-hour Empire. Having harboured dreams of film-making since before she left school, and high on Eisenstein and Vertov, Potter pitched up at the London Film-Makers' Co-Op. "The deal was that you just walked in and lurked about," she explains, "and if you were lucky you got to use something. My memory is of standing in the background, blushing and feeling terribly shy, trying to get a foothold. When I did get to use the editing equipment, I remember unwinding the film all over the floor, and just crying."

Play brought the young director the recognition from her LFMC colleagues that she wanted, but she still felt like an outsider. "There simply weren't a lot of women making films. It was just on the cusp of the women's movement. I went on marches, but I always wondered if the real movement was somewhere else. When people ask me if I was part of the women's movement, I tend to think, 'I dunno.'"

Potter then enrolled at the London School of Contemporary Dance, and devoted much of the 1970s to choreographing and performing. Her return to film-making proper came in 1979 with Thriller, a playful short in which Mimi, the seamstress who expires at the end of Puccini's La Bohème, unpicks the manner of her own demise. "I was on my own with Thriller, not really having any reference points to guide me. But also in the physical sense of editing the film alone at night, with the lights off and a thermos of coffee, using borrowed equipment out of hours while the rest of the city slept." Told largely through still images in the manner of La Jetée, but bristling with erudite wit, the film was a labour of love that became a calling-card. It can only have raised expectations for her 1983 feature debut, The Gold Diggers.

Watching the picture now, it's extra–ordinary to think that this cheerfully adventurous piece analysing the role of women in cinema and society – starring Julie Christie – could have attracted the opprobrium it did. "It was supposed to be a comedy," she shrugs. "I couldn't understand why no one was laughing." Maybe Britain simply wasn't ready for a socio-political screwball-feminist discourse on gender, with added tap-dancing. Potter had employed an all-female crew, the better to reflect the film's feminist thrust – a clear instance of positive discrimination before that term was coined. "Many of the women weren't very experienced. And there were all the tensions and mutinies that come with that kind of idealistic project. But the idea was that the behind-the-scenes situation needed to reflect some of what was going on in the story itself. You couldn't believe what an issue it was then. The flak we got! We were called anti-male. We were derided and ridiculed."

With The Gold Diggers savaged by all but a handful of critics, Potter was back to being an outsider again. I had always pictured her, rather sentimentally, as an established part of that British arthouse scene funded by the BFI in the 1970s and early 1980s – Jarman, Peter Greenaway, Terence Davies, Bill Douglas. But she sets me straight on that. "I was on the margins," she says brightly, in the manner of someone putting a jolly spin on bad news. "The idea of us as any kind of group is a product of hindsight." So you weren't hanging out in Soho pubs, arm-wrestling Terence Davies? "Hugging Terence Davies, certainly," she says. "Though not very often. I love Terence, and Derek was a good friend too. But film-makers work very much in isolation. We only ever see each other every three or four years when we come out of the dark to attend festivals."

Being an outsider meant there was no kind of support network to cushion the blow of The Gold Diggers' commercial failure. "It was dreadful. I felt really cast out. I thought there was a very real chance that I'd blown my one opportunity. It was a long haul back." But while Orlando took Potter the best part of eight years to realise, it feels like the film she was born to make. The storytelling is breezy and dextrous, spanning 400 years in the life of a time-travelling nobleman (Swinton) who jumps genders. The casting alone is manna from gay heaven: Ned Sherrin, Jimmy Somerville, even Quentin Crisp as Queen Elizabeth I. It was also one of the first films to straddle the divide, rigid in those days, between arthouse and mainstream, looking back to the muscular conundrums of Greenaway's The Draughtsman's Contract or Rivette's Céline and Julie Go Boating, but also forward to the period-piece irreverence of Shakespeare in Love.

Potter isn't short of explanations for Orlando's popularity. It's snappy (she hired the editor of Delicatessen to give it some punch) and, she says, better made all-round than The Gold Diggers. But her precarious prospects at the time must have forced her to be all the more driven. "I can assure you I was very determined with The Gold Diggers," she points out. "But with Orlando it felt like life or death. If I didn't make a film that worked in the eyes of the world, rather than just a few diehard supporters, I knew I wasn't going to be able to do what I perceived as my life's work."

Tilda Swinton as Orlando

Did she ever feel like giving up? "Sure. I got close many times. Especially financially – you have to learn to live in debt constantly. But once you discover that you don't actually starve, every obstacle becomes an opportunity to redefine what you're doing, a vehicle for transformation. That's perfect for taking the fear out of things. It's like Gertrude Stein said: 'Considering how dangerous everything is, nothing is really very frightening.'"

Kelly Reichardt

2009-12-01T15:00:00.000-08:00

There seems to be almost no information at all about Kelly Reichardt on the web. I found some interesting interviews though, and I selected the following extract - the interview is made by maverick film director GUS VAN SANT (Drugstore Cowboy, My Own Private Idaho, Elephant amonsgt others). Enjoy!

Director Kelly Reichardt first gained widespread notice with her 2006 film Old Joy, a paean to post–9/11 political and personal miasma played out in the campfire conversations and road-trip recollections of two longtime friends in the Cascade Mountains of Oregon. Together they drive into the wilderness, get lost, find the hot spring they’ve been looking for, and return to Portland. What this threadbare narrative really underscores is the unspoken impossibility of their reconnection. Wendy and Lucy, Reichardt’s latest, debuts on December 10 at Film Forum in New York. Centered around the escalating hardships of Wendy (played by Michelle Williams; Lucy is her dog) whose car breaks down in a rural Oregon town en route to a well-paying summer job, the film shows how seemingly minor setbacks can lead to devastation. Reichardt’s other films include her 1994 debut River of Grass and several short films: Ode, Then a Year, and Travis. Currently a visiting assistant professor at Bard College, she lives in New York City. Revered auteur Gus Van Sant met with Reichardt this July in Portland to discuss the joys and hardships of filming on the cheap, local hot springs, and Wendy and Lucy.

Gus Van Sant So, your last two films have been in Oregon.

Kelly Reichardt My last three films. Before Old Joy there was a short called Then A Year. Mostly I’m shooting in Oregon because I’m working from Jon Raymond’s stories and they’re set here. Wendy and Lucy is not supposed to be Portland per se, but small-town Oregon. Old Joy was written specifically about the Bagby Hot Springs.

GVS I’ve never been there. I’ve always heard about it. I’ve been to hot springs in the Northwest but they’re not necessarily built. They’re natural hot springs.

KR I went to a built one last week in Fields, Oregon. It sits at the foot of the playa out in the middle of the desert.

GVS There’s something about the springs that have an enzyme, or something in them that can be bad for you.

KR I never heard that, but on Old Joy we had a ranger with us who told us about all the things he’d found in the tubs—including a dead body—which actually wasn’t the worst of it. He said the temperatures are just hot enough to keep all the bacteria alive.

GVS Those rangers see a lot.

KR A ll kinds of things, I’m sure.

GVS They have to be responsible for busting meth labs and such.

KR With Wendy and Lucy, I was thinking of not shooting in Portland again. I scouted all over. I went to like 20 states. Then I was sitting in this Safeway parking lot in the middle of February in Butte, Montana, thinking, What the hell am I doing? What are we going to spend bringing a Portland crew out to Butte to shoot in a parking lot that looks so much like the one in Portland that Jon wrote about? So Jon ended up getting his way. We shot at the Walgreen’s right down the street from his house.

GVS In the same place he was thinking of?

KR Yeah. Jon ends up getting his way every time with the locations. Like right now we’re working on this Western; the story takes place out near Fields—there’s nothing out there. At first glance it seems super impractical to shoot there. But I’m sure somehow that’s where we’ll end up. It’s cool though; scouting other places and driving around the country helps me figure out the movie, so even if I end up back in Portland it’s a worthwhile process.

_____________

GVS I’m usually not that concerned with literal hope. Although I have had really hopeful endings, to the point where it’s, like, ridiculous. I don’t know about your own history, but it seems to follow the presence of hope. Like, when times are good, you’re going to be making a certain kind of film. And when times are not good, you’re going to be making another kind of film. Without any sort of plan. It’s just your reaction to your environment.

KR During the “good years” I couldn’t get a film made to save my life. There were 12 years between my first film River of Grass and Old Joy. I made smaller films, like Ode. But even that has a downer ending.

GVS I’m into downers. As a storyteller, I feel that it’s a valid point of view.

KR This summer I’ve been watching all the Kitchen Sink films from the ’60s. The heroes of those films are all stuck in lower economic classes and resentful of their lack of options. Your films have some of that.

GVS Lack of options?

KR People who are aware that people are living another way but they can’t get to it—whatever the restraints are; it might not be class.

GVS Right. I think in my sense, it’s the audience that’s aware. Probably more than the characters. It depends on which film. In certain films that can be the theme. Or there’s indication that maybe the characters are aware but you’re not sure. I’m usually not committing to that.

KR I guess your characters aren’t so interested in being part of the majority or whatever the idea of the American dream is.

GVS In Wendy and Lucy there was a feeling that I don’t think I’ve ever actually had, and it did relate to certain situations, especially with Italian neorealist films, now that you mention that you actually were watching them.

KR In those films there’s the theme of certain people not being of any use to society—maybe they’re too old or poor so they’re a blight—they’re like stray dogs.

source: bombsite.com

Safi Faye (b.1943)

2009-12-01T09:31:00.000-08:00

This is part of the research I am doing for Film Directing 4 Women.

I have discovered many, many women filmmakers from various countries, with the most varied journeys. Women who have made sure their visions are materialized in celluloid, that their cinematic voices are heard.

It has been difficult to pick one of them to represent the many filmmakers I found, especially because I myself have never heard of them until now. So I am sharing this as I learn about them.

To start this research, I have chosen Safi Faye from Senegal. Faye is also an ethnologist, making the very interesting crossing from documentaries to fiction. I personally find the line in between both to be quite blurred. For me, the research of daily life and how people live (socially, culturally, and economically) is the base for all fiction. I can't, and I do not intend to, tear them apart.

Faye was born in 1943 in Dakar. She obtained her teaching certificate at the age of 19 and continuing teaching for the next six years. During the Dakar Festival of Negro Art in 1966, Faye met the renowned French ethnologist and filmmaker Jean Rouch. Rouch encouraged Faye’s interest in Cinema as well as its use as an ethnological tool.

Faye acted in Rouch’s film “Petit à petit ou Les Lettres Persanes 1968 (Little by Little or the 1968 Persian Letters)” which
allowed her to become acquainted with Rouch's technique of cinéma-vérité (an unobtrusive camera eye, spontaneous shooting, improvised nonprofessional acting, and mostly single takes), which was to influence her greatly in the course of her future career as a filmmaker. (Francoise Pfaff, 1988)

In 1969 Faye moved to Paris and enrolled at “the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes to study ethnology and at the Louis Lumière Film School in 1972”, and supported herself working as a model, actress and film dubbing.
Her first film, La Passante (The Passerby) derives from Faye’s experience of estrangement in Paris. After making a collective film with other students from the Ecole (Revanche, The Revenge), Faye went back home to Dakar to work on the research for her next film, “her first feature length docudrama, Kaddu beykat (Letter from My Village), with a crew of three, including a French cameraman and her uncle, who worked briefly as a soundman.”

The film was actually financed with a $20.000 grant given to Faye by the French Ministry of Cooperation and was released in 1975. It went to be shown at the Cannes Film Festival and “ won an award at the Festival International du Film de l'Ensemble Francophone (FIFEF) held in Geneva. ln 1975-1976 this film obtained the Georges Sadoul Prize in France and a special award at the Fifth Pan-African Film Festival of Ouagadougou (FESPACO) in Burkina Faso, and won the International Film Critics Award at the Berlin Film Festival (FIPRESCI).
Whilst pursuing her cinematic ambitions, Faye received her diploma in ethnology from Sorbonne, concluding her PhD in 1979 at the University of Paris.

to be continued.

scene from Mossane (1996) by Safi Faye

Source: Francoise Pfaff, "From twenty-Five African Filmmakers", Greenwood Press 1988