Published by Dissidenz 2010-03-13 at 7:11

Takeshi Kitano, Japanese cinema maverick

Achille et la tortueWho would have guessed 25 years ago that Beat Takeshi, masochist comic of the Japanese TV network, eccentric costumes disciple, supporter of goofy humour and self-humiliation specialist in front of million of viewers in shows each more regressive than the last, would become recognized as an international master of the 7th art, and would be in 2010 the center of attention of prestigious French cultural institutions such as the Centre Pompidou and the Fondation Cartier ? Not him for sure, of whom the artistic path, in his early years of fame, looks more like a chain reaction than a real ambition. An unpredictability became the true determination of his films.

Before the chance he was given by Nagisa Oshima in 1983 with Furyo, the appearances of Kitano in movies can be summarized in a few extra parts here and there, his comic status keeping him from the possibility of blossoming anywhere else than in the craziness of his TV shows. With his role of an alcoholic and silly guard, and the support of Oshima, he begins to have a taste for characters going in the opposite direction of what people expects from him and starts a real acting career through some movies mostly unseen out of Japan. 6 years later, Kitano sneaks into Oshima’s skin and holds the camera in his own hands for the first time with Violent Cop, a nihilist thriller which already show through the will of the newborn filmmaker to break some cinematographic conventions. From yakuza film with Sonatine and Brother, chambara with his singular vision of Zatoichi, the famous blind swordsman, or comedy with Getting Any?, Kitano hasn’t ceased to mistreat not only the codified side of these genres but also the expectations viewers could put in him. As he says himself, the worst that could happen to him would be to make the same film again and again and stagnate in his art. In order to avoid it, director Kitano and actor Takeshi affords to go out on a limb, as Takeshi’s, Glory to the Filmmaker! and Achilles and the Tortoise demonstrate it, a self-reflexive trilogy about creation and the status of artist. Intenable autosatisfaction for a few (apparently the majority being given their complete failure in Japan), incontestable genius for others, they mostly reveal the state of mind of a film director who constantly call himself into question. With Achilles and the Tortoise, Kitano seems to finally have found the answers and come back to a more classical and appeased cinema. After a short animated sequence giving his meaning to the title, the film draws the cruel and moving portrait of Machisu, failed artist searching for the perfect piece of art but only copying what others, from Matisse to Pollock, have created before him. More and more absurd sequences follow then one another where Machisu is ready for anything to achieve his purpose, and if it often implies black humour and bad taste, Achilles and the Tortoise is above all the most poetic film of Kitano since Dolls, imbued with a rather scarce optimism for him to be emphasized.
These three films must be seen as a transitional phase which have allowed the filmmaker to be at peace with himself, at peace with his art, and to be more free than ever as for his future wishes.

Thus, the protean work of Takeshi Kitano can be seen throughout two Siamese events : a retrospective of his career in cinema and television at the Centre Pompidou from march 11th to june 26th, with 40 films whose almost half of them stays unseen, and an installation entitled “Beat Takeshi Kitano, Gosse de peintre”, visible from march 11th to September 12th at the Fondation Cartier, where the artist unveils his child soul by means of sets, paintings, videos along with unusual objects. A windfall for fans and the ones who have always wanted to know more about Kitano the iconoclast.

Mathieu Col

Published by Dissidenz 2010-03-13 at 7:11

Takeshi Kitano’s exhibition

Gosse de peintreSince the mid 90s, we know well Takeshi Kitano as a successful director, acclaimed around the world. But his activities as a star television shows host and producer in Japan are still a mystery. How can the subtle director commit himself in these trash TV things ? Invited by the French Fondation Cartier to settle an exhibition, Kitano opens up the doors of his universe, not as schizophrenic as one could think.

Conceived as a playground for kids and families, the exhibition gathers all the activities of Kitano except cinema. First of all, it’s the very first real exhibition of Kitano’s paintings as he always refused all the invitations of museums. There are gathered the paintings he made after his accident in 1994, which can be seen in Hana-Bi, and 24 new pieces painted during the last two years. Under the apparent colorful naivety lies a real sense of composition and a strange universe mixing beasts and people. But the exhibition is also the opportunity for Kitano to play with ready-made ideas about Japan. He directed two videos about the way Japan is seen in foreign countries especially for this exhibition and he also plays with the clichés about his own carreer. In a closed room, almost presented as an atrocity exhibition, Kitano shows extracts of his infamous TV shows, involving many different type of vehicule explosing or people fighting with crocodiles. Upon the door to the room you can read “There is the real work of Takeshi Kitano”. A comical provocation which shows the real point of this surprizing and often hillarious exhibition: an invitation to enter and share Kitano’s universe, his taste for science and childhood magic, and a will to show him as he really is. There is no such thing as Kitano earning his life with stupid TV shows to be able to make his films. His work is a whole and this exhibition is the best way to embrace it fully for the first time.

Francis Chérasse

Published by Dissidenz 2010-03-13 at 7:11

JACQUES MAILLOT - Director

Monkey on My Back (1957) by André de Toth.
Quand la bête hurle“The film is the testimony of a boxer addicted to morphine shot by Holywood veteran André de Toth. It is, of course, a boxing film, but we really follow him in his life. At one point, he is a soldier in the pacific and there are fantastic war scenes with Japanese snipers up in trees, shooting American soldiers without ever being seen. The soldiers fall one after the other, shot by these invisible killers, a great scene, under the rain. It’s an excellent film. The character heals his wounds and he is treated with morphine which makes him addicted. It messes up his life even if it ends happily. It’s really modern, it’s never moralizing and with a real empathy for the character. It’s an extraordinary film, very sharp, and the actor, Cameron Mitchell, is amazing.”

More information about Monkey on My Back

Jacques Maillot
Jacques Maillot is the director and writer of Our Happy Lives, Inflammable Material, A Bottle of Wishes ou Cold as Summer amongst others. He also directed in 2008 Les liens du sang with François Cluzet and Guillaume Canet. His latest film, directed for television, A Monkey on My Back with Gilles Lellouche will be available on DVD on April 7.

More information about Nos vies heureuses
More information about the DVD of his short films

Published by Dissidenz 2010-02-26 at 7:32

All about Women

Femmes femmesTwo ageing actresses share a Parisian flat. On their walls, pictures of actresses of movie stars of the Thirties. One still play small parts, the other does small works to live. They act. They re-act their faded glory, they re-act their parts, they act their lives, makingfrom each small event a source of games.

The opening credits instantly places Women Women on the scale of the myths with all these portraits of stars from the golden age of the studios. Written and directed by Paul Vecchiali and co-written by Noel Simsolo (both writers for prestigious French magazine Les Cahiers du cinema), who also plays in it, Women Women is one of the most beautiful and unique child of a generation, the one of the New Wave, nourished with American and French classical films myth. Imaginative transitions, characters starting suddenly to sing (wonderful songs by Roland Vincent), unexpected sudden talkings to the camera, Women Women is constantly inventing. Such are the scenes and dialogues, precisely written and magnified by the two outstanding actresses Hélène Surgère and Sonia Saviange. Passing through violently contrasted emotions, they are moving or seducing, funny or irritating, classy or vulgar, as complex as women can be, incarnating a certain idea of femininity.

To help her friend rehearsing the part of Andromaque, Helene brings up the memory of a dead child and make her express a powerful emotion and we can not tell at this point how sincere it is for the character or even for the actress. Life and acting are mixed and hard to separate. Walking in such uncertain territory, the spectator can only frontally receive the emotion. “What must I believe? What is true in all this?” asks Hélène to her friend who just gave her a great story about money bills found is the streets. All and nothing could be our answer. Everyting is staged and everything is true. The world is a stage, the stage is a world.

The film presentation at the Venice Film Festival made such a strong impression on Pier Paolo Pasolini that he had the two actresses re-acting one scene of the film in Salo the year after. Now available for the very first time in France, the DVD has unfortunately no subtitles. While waiting for an hypothetical English-friendly DVD, keep in mind Women Women is one of the most beautiful films of seventies French cinema and try not to miss it if it ever screens near your home.

Francis Chérasse

More information about Women Women

Published by Dissidenz 2010-02-26 at 7:32

ANNE BENHAIEM - Director

Vampyr (1932) by Carl Th. Dreyer.
Vampyr
“It’s one of the films that moved me the most, it also makes me laugh a lot. If I wasn’t so lazy I would write my big paper about the comic in Dreyer and Bresson’s work! Plastically, the film is marvellous, there is something special in the transparency of the images, in the greys, the transparent greys. Each shot is an invention in that film. And it’s never affected, it’s always necessary. He dissociates the camera from what he is shooting, it’s something I really like about his work, something that makes my heart beat. He follows somebody walking and suddenly the camera does something else, it moves for itself. It marked me deeply.”

More information about Vampyr

Anne BenhaiemAnne Benhaïem studied cinema at French cinema school Fémis, in the directors section. She wrote, directed and edited a dozen of short films (Solo tù, co-directed with Arnaud Dommerc, Families Theater starring Helene Lapiower, Humphrey Bogart and the Invisible Woman) and co-wrote with Sophie Fillières (Ouch, Pardon My French) or Marc Cholodenko (writer for Philippe Garrel). We invite you to visit the Facebook page (in French) where she launches a subscription to finance her Film to Come…

Published by Dissidenz 2010-02-11 at 6:54

The Enlightened Room

La Chambre obscure
In the 16th century, Aliénor, who inherited the medical secrets of her father, visits the King of France to heal him from a mysterious disease. As she succeeds in curing him, he offers her in return to marry the man she wants. She chooses Bertrand de Roussillon who marries her against his will. As soon as they are married, he leaves their home. Alienor finds out soon that he joined the Republic of Sienna and is in love with another woman: Lisotta.


Adapted from one of the hundred novels of Boccace’s Decameron, The Dark Room follows the French cinematographic tradition of a revisited middle age. The filiation acknowledged by director Marie-Christine Questerbert with Robert Bresson’s Lancelot and Eric Rohmer’s Perceval is obvious as The Dark Room seems to be a kind of son of these two films, with a DNA sharing both its parents genes. A Bressonian minimalism and a Rohmerian taste for language meets there, with a common stylized representation of the times. The original text is rather modern too with its heroin chasing the man she wants and using tricks to put him in her bed, making a woman’s desire in the centre of the intrigue. She is also the one who holds the medicine secrets. Influenced by her research about the paintings of the era, the director made strong aesthetic choices. Quite abstract sets, strong dominant colours highlighted by the cinematographer’s fabulous work (Emmanuel Machuel who worked also on Van Gogh by Maurice Pialat or Money by… Robert Bresson), the production design is amazing. Discreet anachronisms contribute to blur the film’s time references and give it a fantasy taste. In this revisited middle-age, with the fascinating way the director has to represent it, the actors are still the centre of the attention. The cold virility of Melvil Poupaud echoes the boiling determination of Caroline Ducey whose sharp acting gives the character all its complexity. Led by this brilliant couple surrounded by a very well chosen cast, The Dark Room is an enchanting sensual tale.

The DVD is available as of February 23, 2010 with optional English subtitles and includes a preface by Hervé Joubert-Laurencin.

Francis Chérasse

More information about The Dark Room

Published by Dissidenz 2010-02-11 at 6:50

The Shock of the Worlds

Petits Morceaux Choisis“The body is comparable to a sentence which demands to be disarticulated so that its true contents can be recomposed through an endless series of signs.”It’s with this quote from Hans Bellmer, a major artist of the surrealistic movement, that the movie opens. As a true treatment, in both substance and form, of a unique documentary of which the narrative progression based on ideas and images is not the least of its qualities.

After taking interest in the ravages of the Serbo-Croatian conflict (Les vivants et les morts de Sarajevo, 1993) and having investigated the implications of the September 11 events (New York Ground Zero, 2002), Radovan Tadic confronts East and West with a structuralist approach, which Roland Barthes wouldn’t have disapproved. By using apparently unrelated facts, the director progressively spins a web of leads, intersecting, overlapping and taking root in fields so diversified that they’re incongruous. From post-Cold War soviet espionage to the creation of the Shinkansen -the Japanese equivalent of the French TGV- and his aerodynamic platypus-based profile, each one is processed with several points of view -psychoanalytical, theological or metaphysical- in order to define all their possible facets. But rather than giving in to the most complete abstraction, it’s with an avalanche of practical examples, often comical, always fascinating, that the reflection takes shape. Mentioned repeatedly as necessary to the balance of the world, the duality that governs it (love and hate, reality and fantasy, light and darkness) is made explicit on the screen by a journey to Greenwich, at the exact place where the meridian originates.

If these “small chosen pieces” are more than delightful, it’s also thanks to the unconventional people that compose them. Over and above the incontrovertible experts, physicians and psychoanalysts, we are introduced in particular to a dominatrix and her relationship with the male sex or to the evocation of cannibalism by one of his most famous fans: Issei Sagawa, the ‘Japanese cannibal’ who hit the headlines in the early 80’s after having cut, cooked and eaten a Dutch student at his home in Paris. The ‘ultimate proof of love’ as he likes to repeat. Thus, from a contributor to another, from facts to images, from extravagant analogies to voluntarily far-fetched demonstrations, the topics intertwine each other in a strangely consistent way, following a logical absurdity specific to Surrealism. And if Radovan Tadic doesn’t really answer the questions he brings up, it’s foremost because he values the journey over the destination -a truly stimulating intellectual process for whoever will accept to play his riddles.

Mathieu Col

More information about Ten Easy Pieces

Published by Dissidenz 2010-02-11 at 6:00

CECILE BABIOLE - Multimedia Artist

Impaled (2006) by Larry Clark.
Impaled“Larry Clark has this very special talent to make those young men so comfortable that they show themselves with all their kindness and naivety. He manages to get things many documentary makers can’t get. I don’t know how he does that, he must put them in condition, i don’t know if he cheats, but he manages to reach a complicity which makes them forget everything and open up. It’s a sociological document about nowadays sexuality which is quite unique and which says a lot about the standardization of young Americans sexual lives -totally biased by what they see on the internet. What they say about the way the girls must be is crazy. And they -the girls- comply with that. It’s not a male chauvinist problem, they all play the game!”

More information about Destricted

Cecile BabioleFrom industrial music in the 1980s (with the band Nox) to an exploration of electronic and digital cultures in our day, Cécile Babioleʼs artistic trajectory has evolved laterally, cutting across the realms of music and the visual arts. Far from de rigueur interdisciplinarianism, her works move back and forth between one language and another, bleeding each code into the other in an ongoing reinterpretation of the relationship between image and sound.
Whether staged in the public realm (streets, busses) or in private venues (galleries, concert halls), her latest installations and performances (RPM, Shining Field, Doom, Iʼll be your Mirror, Circulez yʼa rien à voir, Reality Dub, Crumple Zone…) question our prevailing systems of representation –from an original and ironic angle.

View Cécile Babiole’s website

More information about The Good Old Naughty Days [Deconstructed]

Published by Dissidenz 2010-02-05 at 12:17

Berlin Film Festival 2010

février 11, 2010àfévrier 21, 2010

Berlinale 2010

Official Competition :

Caterpillar by Koji Wakamatsu
En Familie by Pernille Fischer Christensen
En ganske snill mann by Hans Petter Moland
If I Want To Whistle, I Whistle by Florin Serban
Greenberg by Noah Baumbach
Howl by Rob Epstein, Jeffrey Friedman
Jud Suesse by Oskar Roehler
How I Ended This Summer by Alexei Popogrebsky
Mammuth by Benoit Delepine, Gustave de Kervern
Please Give by Nicole Holofcener
Puzzle by Natalia Smirnoff
A Woman, A Gun And A Noodle Shop by Zhang Yimou
Shahada by Burhan Qurbani
Submarino by Thomas Vinterberg
The Kids are All Right by Lisa Cholodenko
The Killer Inside Me by Michael Winterbottom
Tuan Yuan by Wang Quan’an
Bal by Semih Kaplanoglu
Der Räuber by Benjamin Heisenberg
Na Putu by Jasmila Žbanić
Sherkarchi by Rafi Pitts
The Ghost Writer by Roman Polanski

Published by Dissidenz 2010-02-02 at 7:20

The films in the shadow

Petits morceaux choisis2010! Dissidenz is back from its maternity leave (just in time for the Year of the Tiger)! The end of the year was the occasion to fill up the site with new DTR (Download-To-Rent) films (or films you can watch on video on demand) and we had to organize the life of all of them: fictions or documentaries, we couldn’t just make them available in the worldwide web vast ocean without guiding you to each one of them and highlight them all. From the iconoclastic Ten Easy Pieces to the frightening reality of The Camorra School by Nico Di Biase, through the hilarious Death’s Glamour by Luc Moullet or the exquisite Dark Room by Marie-Christine Questerbert (which will be available on DVD on February 16), we are happy to introduce little gems of a different cinema to be discovered since December 23.
If you’re a French speaker, do not hesitate to discover the series The Craft in the Shadow and Profession Producer by Emmanuel Chouraqui, which highlight less known cinema jobs but which are as important for the creation of films. Through interviews of professionals, discover the craft of a cinematographer, a sound engineer, a film distributor and many more. On the producer side, meet with established personalities in French cinema (Martine Marignac, Paulo Branco, Robert Guediguian…), who share their vision of their work. Captivating!

View the new releases available on video on demand

View the full list of films available on video on demand

Fontaine Le Glou

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