Richard Avedon was one of the most influential American photographers of the 20th century, in the tradition of Walker Evans, Robert Mapplethorpe and Diane Arbus.

Born in 1923, this portrait artist joined, so to speak, the merchant marine when he was hired to shoot ID photos of crew members with his Rollei camera, a gift from his father Jacob.
Alexey Brodovitch, artistic director at Harper’s Bazaar, quickly became his mentor and close friend, sensing the talent of this young advertising photographer.
Avedon went on to create a legendary series of photos for Harper’s, and for Vogue as well, revolutionizing the world of fashion photography by shattering old norms and injecting irony, movement and glamor into a field where rigidness had once reigned.
In parallel with his work in fashion, Avedon developed little by little his extraordinary portrait style. Photographing actors, musicians and poets, he privileged a raw relationship with his subject, focusing on the emotional encounter between photographer and subject, and glorifying the accuracy of the instant (“All photos are accurate. None of them is the truth.”) by getting rid of all contextualizing elements and anything else that might draw attention away from the “geography of the face.”
He thus perfected his signature style, with the subject against a neutral background (white and sometimes gray in the 1950s, and then a stark, optical white as of the late 1960s) framed by the black border of the negative, expressing in an obvious, and radical, way his relationship with the photographic act. This relationship, according to Avedon, was not a means of approaching reality (although he found that could be “very interesting”), but of “taking and dealing with the surface of things,” and is currently spotlighted in the retrospective at the Jeu de Paume in Paris.
Avedon’s work was long-term, almost painstaking in its repetition, as can be seen in such series as In the American West, originally commissioned by the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. Dating from 1979 to 1984, the 752 portraits taken from some 17,000 rolls of film depict the photographer’s socially-neutral but aesthetically-intensive perspective, and are considered by some the highpoint of his career.
Large prints – harsh and (obviously) in black and white – are as surprisingly natural as they are delicately constructed; the viewer is entranced by the artist’s knack at capturing, in the blink of an eye, the entirety, and complexity, of his human subjects, revealing both what they wish to show of themselves and what they actually are.
Whether it be the melancholic depth of Marilyn Monroe captured in 1958, the disturbing symmetry between certain portraits from the In The American West series and that of Warhol’s Factory in 1967, or portraits of Christ-like miners, Avedon revealed ineffable, or even invisible, instants with an eternal brightness.
For more than 50 years, Richard Avedon was the photographer of disparity, flouting convention, and making him, along with his affection, intelligence and force, one of the leading-edge explorers of his time.

Freaks (1932) by Tod Browning

“It could have been a commercial film, a sensationalist one, it is absolutely not, it is a very moving film. You can feel Tod Browning loves his characters, he has a kind of complicity and love for his “monsters”. You can feel it in the way he directs his film, in the way he films them, everywhere. And this last scene when the monsters crawl under the wagons, in the storm, is absolutely unforgettable. This really is great cinema.”

Synopsis : Hans is a suave midget who belongs to the sideshow of a seedy circus and who makes the mistake of falling in love with the beautiful Cleopatra, one of the “normal” circus performers. Learning that Hans is about to inherit a fortune, Cleopatra agrees to marry Hans even though she abhors him, planning to steal his money and get rid of him.

More informations about Freaks.

Jean Rollin is a cult French director of low budget B movies. For more than forty years he has managed to keep directing and he his now a cult figure for young filmmakers and cinema addicts who grew up watching his films on VHS.

Richard Avedon
Photographs 1946 - 2004
From 07 01 2008 until 09 28 2008

Organised by the Louisiana Museum in Humlebaek with the cooperation of the Richard Avedon Foundation, this exhibition surveys the whole of Richard Avedon’s career, starting with his first steps as a fashion photographer at the end of the Second World War.

Avedon continued to photograph the creations of the big Parisian couture houses up until 1984, working first for Harper’s Bazaar and then for Vogue. Finding fashion photography too static and stuffy, he transformed it by introducing movement and photographing his models in public spaces.
He also made many portraits of celebrities from the worlds of literature, art and show business, always taking care to shatter the icon in order to reveal the true personality behind the public image.

In the 1960s, Avedon also ventured into photojournalism, covering such hot subjects as Civil Rights campaigners in the American South (1963), the Ku Klux Klan, patients in a mental hospital and the Vietnam war — both in the country itself, where he photographed military officers and napalm victims, and back home, where, a pacifist himself, he covered the hippie protests against the war.

In 1974 Avedon exhibited a series of his father, then dying of cancer, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. During this decade he continued his fashion photography and reportage, and also produced a series of 73 portraits of America’s political elite for Rolling Stone.

The early 1980s saw Avedon produce a long series of 700 portraits of middle class and poor Americans from the 17 western states. As if to refute the myth of the American West, these portraits, all taken outdoors against a white ground, show closed, tense and introverted faces with an intense but subjacent emotional power. At the end of the decade, a commission from the French magazine Égoïste gave Avedon the chance to cover the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Jeu de Paume
1, place de la Concorde
75008 Paris
métro Concorde

information: 01 47 03 12 50

Hours:
Tuesday: 12:00 - 21:00
Wednesday - Friday: 12:00 - 19:00
Saturday and Sunday: 10:00 - 19:00
Closed Monday

In 2002, the Cannes Film Festival paid Aki Kaurismaki his due respect. The Man Without a Past received the Grand Prize of the Jury and his favorite actress, Kati Outinen, won for Best Actress. The award was well-deserved: the Finish filmmaker has become a leading cinematic figure in little over twenty years, with fifteen films to his credit, thanks to his disillusioned and affectionate style.

Above all, Aki Kaurismaki has proven his inimitable way of expressing the bleakness of the world and of the “little people” who inhabit it, antiheroes whose untiring equanimity render them both dignified and quirky. As the characters drag through the no man’s lands of urban and rural settings, they are somehow akin to Droopy, Tex Avery’s dog, and like him, seem to be saying, with a deadpanned expression, “You know what? I’m happy.”
With his sketchy minimalism and burlesque stylization, Aki Kaurismaki also depicts resistance against life in the fast lane and against a world that rejects anything that “doesn’t fit in.” With the mere image of a woman seated in a party waiting in vain to be approached, he manages to portray loneliness. A bouquet of flowers is enough to recount a nascent romance. His actors are not particularly good-looking, but through poetry and humor they incarnate the grandeur and the poverty of the human condition. His “loser trilogy” (Drifting Clouds, The Man Without a Past and Lights in the Dusk) and his previous “worker’s trilogy” (with the cinematic gems Shadows in Paradise, Ariel and The Match Factory Girl) are pathos-free portraits of “working stiffs,” losers of all sorts who try to survive in a hostile universe without ever forsaking their dignity.
That his films are so consistent, however, does not preclude them from being diverse. From the fold suddenly emerged Bohemian Life, in a reconstructed Paris, and Juha, in sumptuous black and white, “the last silent movie of the 20th century.” The DVD of his complete works especially offers viewers the occasion to treat themselves to several rarities, such as his musical short films, including the ineffable Those Were the Days, where a cowboy and his donkey seek refuge in a Paris café. And then there is Calamari Union, his second, but as yet unreleased, film, a sort of black and white, quick-paced sketch showing a group of dysfunctional, over-aged delinquents all named Frank who make their way across town (at their own risk!). The spirit of the “Leningrad Cowboys” – a very bad rock band with elaborate quiffs and extremely pointed boots, and a box-office success in 1989 – is already present.
Lastly, this complete set offers the chance to meet the “Kaurismaki family”. Indeed, the Finish director’s films are also a story of loyalty: the same director of photography from the very beginning, and several favorite actors, including Kati Outinen, with her chin pulled in, and her heart-rending and unsettling loneliness, and Matti Oulippää, an unflagging accomplice starting with his first appearance, hair parted on the side, in Crime and Punishment, and up to his early death. “I don’t understand why you’d need to replace the perfect actor by another one just for the sake of change,” he has said. “John Ford and Howard Hawks kept John Wayne in their Westerns because he was the best for that kind of role.”

Emmanuelle Mougne

Hardcore (1979) by Paul Schrader.
“In Hardcore, like in American Gigolo, Schrader ends his film - ike the Dardennes did in The Child- the same way Robert Bresson did in Pickpocket, “It took me a long time to reach you”. It is a great film, which always moved me, with this character facing his own demons, facing the choice he made, his faith being questioned by earthly pleasures, this character in quest for redemption, I think it’s a very powerful and beautiful film. Schrader is often compared to Scorsese, they are like brothers, and even if there’s not Scorsese’s brilliance in Schrader’s work, there is some kind of sickness that always moved me. And this complete obsession for redemption is fascinating, always fighting morale and taboos. The quest of this father in this 80s California is really a journey to hell, a search for himself in fact. The ending is often discussed but he really quotes Bresson and as far as I’m concerned I find that ending very consistent.”

More information about Hardcore

Fabrice Du Welz directed the very disturbing The Ordeal in 2004. His new film Vinyan, starring Emmanuelle Beart and Rufus Sewell will be released in France in October 2008.

British animator and filmmaker Barry Purves has directed numerous commercials and animated films for various media, earning him renown in the United Kingdom, but he has also directed many stand-alone films, veritable masterpieces of extreme ingenuity, which have now been brought together on a superb DVD.

With an academic background in theater and Greek civilization, followed by work as a stage manager, Barry Purves places gesture and artistic performance at the heart of his films. From Next, with William Shakespeare being auditioned by an inattentive, Peter Hall-like stage director, and Screen Play, with its Japanese puppetry, to Rigoletto and Gilbert & Sullivan, Barry Purves makes the theater stage the centerpiece of his cinematic universe, as fodder for the subject of the film to emerge or as a means to transform the frame’s inherently restrictive dimensions into a space for experimentation. Screen Play and Achilles, both wonderful works, are also the best examples of this approach. Using the confines of small theaters in miniature proportions, Purves creates expressive worlds through the precise movement of marionettes, combined with astounding lighting that sculpts the bodies and accompanies the protagonists’ forms. With little or no set, Purves imbues Achilles and Petrocles’s love with an unexpectedly physical and extremely touching quality.

But what is most surprising in Barry Purves’s work, beyond his gestural precision and incredible expressiveness, lies in fact outside the actual animation. What is most striking when one discovers his films is his mise en scène: his attention to the sets, the expert lighting, a sparkling palette for the costumes and sets, the extremely dynamic film editing, and especially his camera work. As it pans, pivots and zooms in and out with remarkable fluidity, Purves’s camera creates a thrilling energy, which is a rare surprise in the field of animation. Barry Purves’s art does not reside so much in his admirable skill as an animator, with the accurate and precise movements of his characters, as it does in his fantastic talent as a storyteller and in his skill at turning his small tales into large, emotional voyages thanks to his wonderfully inventive and dynamic directing and writing.

The DVD, which has just been released by French company Potemkine, includes short films Next (1989, 5 mins), Screen Play (1992, 11 mins), Rigoletto (1993, 30 mins), Achilles (1995, 11 mins), Gilbert and Sullivan, the Very Models (1998, 16 mins) and Hamilton Matress (2001, 30 mins). It comes with fascinating special features (film introductions by the director, interview with Purves and French animator Michel Ocelot) and a beautiful and rich booklet. A sumptuous boxset for an animation master, who really deserves to be discovered by those who don’t know his wonderful art.

Since Otar left (2003) by Julie Bertuccelli.
“It is about the destinies of three women, described in a very sensitive way by Julie Bertuccelli, who was directing her first film. This is a film that also made me discover, in a certain way, Georgia -its history, its past, its present. It’s about three generations of women -a woman, her mother and her niece. They live in Georgia and the only son of the family went to work in Paris, France. Their lives are paced by the letters of this son. One day the woman and her niece discover the accidental death of the man. They decide to hide the terrible news from the grandmother. Through this lie, feelings will emerge, desires too, the dream of the young girl to travel, to go to Paris, her dreams of literature. The director treats her characters with a great sensitivity, through looks and silences. This is a very beautiful film”.

Sandrine Pillon is a French short films producer, she founded Les Fees Productions, her own company. Her first short film, Les Volets by Lyèce Boukhitine, was nominated for the Best Short Film Cesar (French “Academy Award”).

Ferrare, Italy, 1938. The vast Finzi-Continis domain opens its doors to the middle-class youth when sports clubs access is suddenly denied to Jews. The rich Jewish noble family welcomes here their children’s friends. In this closed preserved space, Giorgio and Micol, only daughter of the family, live their lives, which grows from friendship to love for Giorgio.

As Italy is going deeper into fascism and Europe is on the edge of war, the Finzi-Continis are shown as living in a protected closed world, keepers of an art of living on the way of its destruction. The story runs through four years that will cover the evolutions of the relationship between Giorgio, the educated middle class boy, and Micol, when, all around them, the mentalities are changing, due to the rise of fascism. Ignored, underestimated, the new order that overcomes Europe will finally break through the domain and definitively destroy it.

Like beautiful Micol (marvellous Dominique Sanda), the family seems desperately passive to face the changes that occurs in Italy, caused by mussolinian racial laws and the rise of the brown shirts. Shot in a stunning way, as the photography evolves in time with the periods, Vittorio de Sica’s film is a wonder like -in a different way- neo-realism classics were (The Bicycle Thieve, Umberto D.). Adapting the novel by Giorgio Bassani, De Sica, through the Finzi-Continis, evokes a certain idea of Europe, its culture and its values, through its aristocracy facing the rise of fascism. “When I show this people so little anxious of the threats upon them, when the father says “Mussolini is better than Hitler”, when the son blames his father’s lack of reaction against persecutions, I think I reflected well theses times”. De Sica’s will is not to tell about Micol’s love affairs but to make her a living image of European aristocracy’s position in fascist Italy and in whole Europe. The Finzi-Continis will be blown away by History, and, with them, a certain idea of European aristocracy which definetly ended with world war two.

The DVD is now available. More information about The Garden of the Finzi-Continis.

Army of Shadows (1969) by Jean Pierre Melville
“I saw again the film recently and it surprised me a lot. I had in mind a much more official film about the “resistance”, released in 1969, that praised and even worshipped the heroes but it was a false memory. The truth of the film, which plays a lot with false impressions, like Hitchcock films, is a very dark look upon the Resistance, not in the soothing way we often see, which makes every French a resistant. Melville’s film shows very well that all these guys were really few, threatened, outlaws -and being an outlaw was to be ready to do everything, even the worst. We often remember the scene of the killing of the “traitor” -traitor seems to be a far too strong word considering what the guy did- in an apartment, which requires to do it in the most silent way, without any noise, any cries, even if the situation is absolutely terrible. But there is this other scene: when Lino Ventura is captured and is waiting to be questioned. Hours pass by, he is with another prisoner, he finally waves at him -they don’t communicate verbally at all- saying this way to him it’s time to try something if they both want to escape this. The young men understand it and goes through what he believes to be an opening and he is killed immediately. But this is how it is brilliant, this was the very way the film’s positive hero Ventura was planning his own escaping. I find this scene, so violent, so realistic, absolutely astonishing.”

More information about Army of Shadows.

Also a writer, Jerome Prieur co-directed with Gerard Mordillat Corpus Christi and The Origins of Christianity. They are finishing The Apocalypse.

In Johnnie To’s extensive filmography, the majority of works are clearly mob films – in fact, he’ll soon be shooting a remake of Le Cercle Rouge (The Red Circle) starring Orlando Bloom and Alain Delon. But the Hong Kong filmmaker has proven over and over his talent for romance, science fiction, martial arts and even cartoons. Sparrow belongs to this broader tendency, which has included the charming Yesterday Once More and the lighthearted Running on Karma.
The plotline is simple: a young Taiwanese woman is married to a powerful man who keeps her hostage by stealing her passport. She hires four pickpockets who steal it back in an extremely beautiful final sequence that is a throwback to Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg). The cinematic references do not stop there. Johnnie To’s increasing passion for French cinema radiates throughout the entire film and gives it a nostalgic feel. Kei, the main character, played by the Clooney-like Simon Yam, wanders the streets of the old town center on an antiquated bicycle armed with a vintage camera. Sparrow thus offers us pure documents of the city, a striking change of pace for To, who is usually known for his aerial shots that bring everything, including still objects, into majestic movement. This documentary slant is a new approach for Johnnie To, who is likewise working on a project for an historic film with Jia Zhang-ke, a filmmaker who would ordinarily appear to be an unlikely choice for collaboration.
The levity of the film is hence called into question – or rather, one cannot speak of levity here precisely because the film itself plays with the concept. Since “sparrow” is local slang for pickpocket, the viewer may see metaphors throughout: photos snapped on the fly from a bicycle, a beautiful woman kept in a cage with a passport symbolizing a key, … But only one metaphor is truly important: Johnny To offers a bird’s eye view of the town. While action has been shown horizontally for the last decade (e.g., the bullet-time shots of Matrix or the lateral tracking shots of Old Boy), To returns to verticality, filming streets from the rooftop and vice versa, as his characters scramble up buildings, heels are broken and bicycles navigate the steepest routes.
In fact, more than To’s previous works and probably more than his future movies, Sparrow affirms the filmmaker’s attachment to his city and his desire to define its final image. The city has been in transition since 1997, when it was granted a fifty-year reprieve before total retrocession to China. Until 2046, Hong Kong will be free to do as it likes. Screenplays may very well become simpler: what matters is to inhabit the city, to film it before it disappears. From now to 2046 represents a long grace period, and To’s light approach to filmmaking may provide the best image of this suspended time.

Bastien Hader