ponedjeljak, 10. rujna 2012.

Cinema Poetry - video blog






Video blog s 20-ak (zasad) najpoetskijih prizora filmske povijesti.



Cinema Poetry is a video blog devoted to bringing you some of the most poetic scenes and sequences in the history of cinema. Where can I possibly start with Jean-Luc Godard? In art, he's a figure like Picasso or Stravinsky. His work redefined a medium and left hundreds of weaker imitators in his wake. His work also came in periods (from the French New Wave of the 60's to Maoist political films of the 70's to increasingly personal video projects from the mid-80's on), each one prolific, and each one harder to categorize than the one before it. His work is perennially enraging and bottomlessly complex. Histoire(s) du Cinema will never be seen as widely as his French New Wave work, and the reasons - its extended running time, its massive scope, its rejection of entertainment, its perplexing look, and its absolute difficulty - are precisely why it should be seen by those who think they love movies. Histoire(s) du Cinema [Histories/Stories/Lies of the Cinema] is nothing short of a treatise on history, on historiography, on war, on governments, on economics, on the culture of the 20th century, on mass entertainment, on art, on painting, on poetry, on philosophy, and on fictional, experimental, and documentary film. Few arenas of discourse escape the reach of Histoire(s) du Cinema, and few films build such a labyrinthine structure of poetic historical argument. This eight-part personal-essay behemoth of a film signifies with every frame but rejects interpretation in every edit, in every collage, in every title (though Godard has always loved words on the screen, never has he employed quite so many), and in every word uttered in Godard's quiet whisper. I can't call it a swansong; Godard's own history, the history of film, and the history of history - which are inseparably enmeshed in Histoire(s) - are too complex, too violent, too bitter, and too weary for that.
But Histoire(s) is a valediction. And for occasional brief moments, he allows himself hymns of beauty which nearly anyone could understand, with or without the thousands of secret passwords required to unlock each image. Such a florid visual song ends part 6, "La monnaie de l'absolu," when he elegizes the powerful poetry of postwar Italian cinema by masters like de Sica, Fellini, and Rossellini, with titles like Bicycle Thieves, Umberto D, and La Strada. Enjoy, and don't worry about understanding it all. The work of decoding history will never be accomplished either. Rather, rest on the images, and meditate on his parting titles




"I just discovered the video blog Cinema Poetry, which has collected twenty (so far) of the most remarkable scenes in the history of cinema.
The first of the two ride films below, the Lumiere brothers’ rickshaw film from an Indochinese village, is beautiful (watch it in full screen with the sound turned all the way up):

This makes good viewing alongside Sean Cubitt’s description of cinematic firstness, which he calls “the pixel” in The Cinema Effect.
Kvond’s “great scenes” suggestion of a wonderful clip from “Andrei Rublev” (starting at 3’24″) reminded me of Yuri Illienko’s brilliant camerawork in one of my favorite films, Sergei Paradjanov’s “Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors.” Cinema Poetry includes a scene from that...
There are moments like this in the film where the camera swirls around as if it were the eye of a tornado, or alternatively as if it were the tornado circling around the eye. What would Deleuze call this? The spiral-image? It’s not quite Michael Snow’s La région centrale”, but it’s heading in that direction. (Snow’s specially constructed camera swings, swirls, twists, and circles around for a couple of hours, like Emerson’s transparent eyeball gone wild in the subarctic tundra of northern Quebec…)
Illienko’s “A Forest Song” (Lisova Pisnia: Mavka) is full of that kind of delirious camerawork (unlike Snow, integrated into the narrative). Unfortunately all I can find of it online is a poor copy of what appears to be the whole thing chopped into segments, dubbed into Russian with no subtitles. See also his Eve of Ivan Kupalo, perhaps the peak of Ukrainian magic realism. - Adrian J Ivakhiv

Nema komentara:

Objavi komentar