Water Drops on Burning Rocks (2000) by François Ozon
“I’m a true cinema maniac. My favourite director is Renoir. All films by Renoir: I can hardly pick just one. I have a real affection for French cinema in general, from New Wave, from before and after. Today, I especially like François Ozon, and not only because he reveres Fassbinder. With Water Drops on Burning Rocks, he dared to do something new. He reinvented Fassbinder his own way. Rainer always said that it is impossible to remake or copy. It’s only possible to do personal things. Ozon told me he discovered Fassbinder with a play which paid tribute to him and that he had so many difficulties then to discover Rainer’s films because only a few were available. So he discovered them as the successive restorations went by, discovering Fassbinder the same way Fassbinder discovered Douglas Sirk.”

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How did you meet Fassbinder ?
I was 19. I was a political sciences student. In order to earn money, I was also working as an assistant in one of Studio Bavaria’s editing rooms in Munich. Somebody recommended I should work with Fassbinder, whom I met by chance. I was his assistant in 1976 on Chinese Roulette, his sound editor on The Stationmaster’s Wife, his editor on Despair’s etc. At that time, new German cinema was well-established and Fassbinder was famous and powerful -he had already made 27 films. He hired me, loved me and gave me a lot of strength. He believed in youth’s energy. Together, we made The Marriage of Maria Braun, The Third Generation, and then Berlin Alexanderplatz…

Ten days before the shooting, while we were on holidays, he told me he would not see the editing before it’s finished. That he would only make one or two shots for each scene and that the editing had to be ready the day after. We proceeded that way for two hundred and fifty four days. At the end of the shooting, the film was almost completely edited. Rainer’s screenplay was very precise, he had been writing it for two years. The atmosphere was very professional and the members of the crew knew each other very well -only the cinematographer, Xaver Schwartzenberger, was new. As for me, I was only 21 or 22 years old but I had already made seven films before. Fassbinder did not take many shots because he wanted to rely on the actors provided the latter were ready. At that time we didn’t had any cell phones or laptops and we couldn’t be disturbed. And there were only a few interviews on the set.

Berlin Alexanderplatz’ DVD edition nevertheless shows a German documentary made on the set.
It was at the very beginning and at the very end. It was a Bavaria initiative. They wanted to make a very simple and nude documentary about Fassbinder’s work. In Germany, a book was released at the same time the film was broadcast. It was published in close collaboration with Rainer and his assistant Harry Baer. It was the first time a book about a TV show was published. Another book, published by Schirmer Mosel, shows Berlin Alexanderplatz’ screenplay: very written, perfectly prepared. I had to follow it scrupulously. Rainer’s screenplays were written in a rather poetic way although people could understand it and use it without any problem. Then I was able to create the rhythm and the sound, because at that time editing and mixing weren’t as dissociated as they are nowadays. Fassbinder was so understanding with someone like me who was learning cinema’s vocabulary. We’ve made fourteen films together. The other directors I’ve worked with, like Werner Schroeter for Two in 2002, were more difficult. Rainer shared his experience with me, recommended books. I found someone who was really at the top of his art. He was very proud of what he had done at only 29 years old.

Fassbinder made as many films as it is humanly possible ; was he also concerned by the question of inheritance?
No. He used to say to me and to his family: after I die, take care of everything. He only wished his papers would not be thrown away, so his mother and I kept everything. The Fassbinder Foundation was created in 1989. His mother financed it with a part of her inheritance. She’s taken care of it for two years, and I’m dealing with it since 1991. One of the Foundation curators is in charge of all the writings, which are exhibited in one room. Rainer was also a writer. Since he was 16, he wrote poems, short stories and plays…

How long did Berlin Alexanderplatz restoration last?
Ten years. It was way more difficult and longer than the shooting. We had to contact Döblin’s inheriters, Stefan and Claude. Then I had to contact the Bavaria studio and talk about the restoration. They asked if I was crazy. I said yes, of course! New York’s MOMA also offered its contribution to us. In 2004, the Foundation for German Art –founded in 1998 when Gerhard Schroeder invented the Ministry of Culture (which was only before a department of the Ministry of the Interior)– also supported the restoration. The Minister of the time had already offered to finance Eisenstein’s Potemkin restoration, but Berlin Alexanderplatz wasn’t a priority because it wasn’t old enough for him. We had to wait for the creation of a special department devoted to restorations. It started on July 15, 2006 and ended on December 21 the same year. The German DVD edition had to be released at the beginning of 2007 for Berlinale’s opening. Then we presented the boxset in New York in April and today in France thanks to Carlotta. A specific extra of the French edition is the presentation of the restoration through the comparison of a number of restored and non-restored images.

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From the 27th of november to the 4th of december 2007
Theaters Reflet Médicis and L’Arlequin in Paris

The Forum des images hors les murs hosts the 13th Internation Cinema Meetings in Paris, from the 27th of november to the 4th of december, in the theaters Reflet Médicis and l’Arlequin.

This year, for focuses :
- Tribute to Todd Haynes
- Lech Kowalski
- Romanian Cinema
- International movie competition.

The Competition :

* Art of negative thinking (the), Bǻrd BREIEN, Norway
* Battle For Haditha, Nick BROOMFIELD, Great-Britain, Jordania
* Buddha collapsed out of shame, Hana MAKHMALBAF, Iran, France
* Capitaine Achab, Philippe RAMOS, France, Sweden
* Cochochi, Laura Amelia GUZMÁN, Israel CÁRDENAS, Mexico
* Homme qui marche (l’), Aurélia GEORGES, France
* Mère (la), Antoine CATTIN, Pavel KOSTOMAROV, Swizzerland, France, Russia
* Nos vies privées, Denis CÔTÉ, Canada
* Useless, Jia ZHANG-KE, China
* Visite de la fanfare (la), Eran KOLIRIN, Israël, France
* With the girl of black soil, Soo-il JEON, South Korea, France
* Wolfsbergen, Nanouk LEOPOLD, Neederlands, Belgium

More informations here.

Straub & Huillet’s complete works should be available within two years in four boxsets thanks to French DVD publisher Editions Montparnasse. For now, let’s pay tribute to the release of the first boxset that gathers five of the couple’s German films: their first two films that derived from Heinrich Boll’s stories -Machorka Muff in 1962 and Not Reconciled or Only Violence Helps Where Violence Rules in 1964-65- and three films in relation with composer Arnold Schoenberg -Introduction to Arnold Schoenberg’s Accompaniment to a Cinematic Scene (1972), Moses and Aaron (1974) and From Today Until Tomorrow (1996). It’s natural to begin with these films: i) in Germany, which was the couple’s first country of adoption, with the couple who straightaway permit the dialectique to take place in life, ii) with the horror of Nazism, which formed the core of their cinema from the beginning, iii) with the music that has always had a crucial importance in their work. To be continued with the release of an “Italian period” coming soon in about a year…

Bastien Hader

Police blotters and news in brief have always fascinated the general population. From the recent increase in the number of TV shows in France about criminal cases, sparked by the success of Faites Entrer l’Accusé on France Télévision, to the rise in circulation of newspapers like France’s Le Petit Détective, and despite (or perhaps thanks to?) scandalous headlines and baseless extrapolations, interest in these snapshots of ordinary horror has not waned. Fiction writers have always sought inspiration in real-life events and banner headlines, from which they could, more or less accurately, approach their audience’s day-to-day experiences and evoke their daily lives.

Based on a True Story

When we try to figure out what lies behind these news items, what specifically defines them, we see that it is their compact headlines and the range of possibilities they open up. What makes them interesting, beyond the fateful moment they recount or what happens afterwards (e.g., the investigation, the trial), is the disturbance in everyday life (or how fundamentally disturbed everyday life actually is): what comes before, what causes the event. In this regard, the case of Jean-Claude Romand (who murdered his wife, children and parents after living a life of lies for years) and the way it is handled is rather symptomatic of what authors must face when tackling an adaptation of a police blotter for cinema. How can you reconstruct the circumstances of such a tragedy? If the ending is known from the outset, all that is left is the approach. From Nicole Garcia’s L’Adversaire (The Adversary) to Laurent Cantet’s L’Emploi du Temps (Time Out), and including numerous documentaries about the case, the different ways it is depicted are as diverse as they are divergent. The end is known and the characters are still an enigma: the news item becomes the only concrete element of an entirely malleable reality. It is therefore an ideal basis for fiction writers. It is a single moment, a single act, too huge to have been made up, onto which they can project whatever they like. From a few lines in a newspaper, Claude Chabrol made La Cérémonie and addressed one of his favorite topics, the petite bourgeoisie provinciale, better than he ever had before, and directed one his most relevant films on everyday class struggle. René Allio understood it all when he adapted Moi Pierre Rivière ayant égorgé ma mère, ma sœur et mon frère based on the murderer’s writings and on research by Michel Foucault. By casting inhabitants of the region with no prior acting experience in the main roles, he gave the characters additional depth. And by deciding to cast professional actors in the roles of gendarmes and magistrates, he affirmed in a single move an obvious truth: news in brief is by nature a frozen instant, it knows no temporality other than that of the criminal act, and stops at the point when the judicial system takes over.

“A young screenwriter is found dead in the swimming pool of a former silent-film star.”

But crime news in fictional cinema is not merely the adaptation of real-life events by writers; it is also a distinct way of approaching detective movies. Thus, Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, which was originally intended to open with a scene of corpses in a morgue recounting their deaths, was changed after test previews to begin with journalists and police officers gathered to observe the death of William Holden, whose corpse is floating in a swimming pool. The fantastical aspect was removed and the movie took the more relevant form of an utterly trivial news item, and was hence more accessible and had a stronger impact. Cinema has also managed to comprehend the importance of crime news in a more indirect way. From Clouzot’s La Vérité (The Truth) to Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder, the courtroom has often been the setting where the murderer’s history is written retroactively, including his motives and the circumstances of the tragedy the trial is meant to clear up. What defines news in brief is the fact that it is both the starting point and the ending of the story. Otto Preminger’s movie is thus a perfect illustration of the problems stemming from handling a criminal investigation as a news item. A soldier is accused of murdering the man who raped his wife. During the entire film, which encompasses to time of the trial, Preminger’s movie, adapted from a bestselling novel, demonstrates the inability of the judicial system to get to the truth about the precise causes and circumstances of the murder. The verdict is returned, and its absurdity is highlighted by a final ironic twist. All that remains is the objective element, the starting and ending point, i.e. the news item itself: one man killed another.

As we have seen, news in brief feeds authors’ creativity because they proceed from an inherently fascinating mechanism: the reconstruction of the event. And these news items will, without a doubt, hold the public’s interest for years to come, since it is the extreme projection of their everyday life and the object of infinite speculation. Movies will thus continue to use the mechanisms of spectacular information, whose very form influences its contents, and will undoubtedly give rise to even more cinematic masterpieces.

By Olivier Gonord

To read more : Gus Van Sant and the News in Brief

With Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park hitting the French screens on October 17, here’s a look back at the importance of news in brief and police blotters for this great American filmmaker.

In New Hampshire, an ambitious newscaster charms a high school student so that he will murder her husband, who she feels is holding back her career. A janitor in a Boston university is a mathematical genius. A basketball player in the Bronx is working towards a Pulitzer Prize. A young woman on the run is murdered in a shower in her motel room. Two boys get lost in a California desert and kill each other; two others, who are armed, open fire on their classmates at a Columbine high school. A famous singer with the allure of a lumberjack commits suicide in his backyard shed in a Seattle suburb. A teenager is involved in the accidental death of a security guard whose body is found in two pieces, severed by a train traveling along Paranoid Park, Portland’s skateboard park.
These morbid or bizarre plot summaries taken from Gus Van Sant’s filmography could just as easily pass for police blotters in a newspaper. The American filmmaker has always depended on news items in varying degrees, even if the examples mentioned above come from very different sources: from screenplays written by Buck Henry (To Die For), Matt Damon and Ben Affleck (Good Will Hunting) or Casey Affleck (Gerry), a novel (Blake Nelson’s Paranoid Park), a film (Hitchcock’s Psycho) or real life (the Columbine massacre in Elephant and the death of Kurt Cobain in Last Days).

A manufactured event

A police blotter, in and of itself, does not prejudge the authenticity of an event. It can be corrected, refuted or elucidated; newspapers can relate a lie or completely manufacture a story. Whether it comes from a novel or a newspaper is secondary. News in brief is a category of information, a short story that makes ordinary people captive of an insignificant fate. This little narrative form has sometimes been elevated to a literary level (as in Les Nouvelles en trois lignes, published by the journalist and art critic Félix Fénéon at the turn of the 20th century).

With Van Sant, news in brief is more than a mere source of inspiration; it is a form with which his films share a deep affinity. To Die For, for example, linked the all-consuming ambition of a weather forecaster (Nicole Kidman) and a rumor that first spread among her friends and acquaintances, then to the newspapers, and that eventually led to her conviction, claiming that she had caused the death of her overly possessive, stay-home husband (Matt Dillon). Within the Hollywood system, Gus Van Sant, like Fritz Lang, is interested in the mechanics of media and uses news items to depict a growing rumor, taking shape, and the power of the information that manufactures the event.

An Inexplicable Death

The case of Elephant is different: Gus Van Sant stays away from the media, like Blake’s friends in Last Days, who run from the house before the journalists arrive in order to spread news of the death of the renowned singer Kurt Cobain. Van Sant recounts the Columbine news story from the inside. But by slowing down the movement of the high school students, by showing how impervious they were to the various signs, especially audible ones, that alert us to the massacre, he incorporates the end of the tragedy from the outset: in just two or three sentences, we understand that a guy is racing towards his death. But this calamity has no precise significance and immediately thwarts any search for meaning. Van Sant never tries to explain the causes of the tragedy, but rather dangles them before us to show their inherent absurdity. When he shows the killers playing videos before executing their plan, he is not trying to say that they were subject to a negative influence; he is putting the hallways of the game and those of the high school on the same level, like unreal spaces where the same emotions circulate. Van Sant does not avoid the media per se, but rather the causality that they want to find at all costs to explain the event.

Although it is based on a novel, Paranoid Park follows a similar path. A teenager accidentally commits a crime. In his high school, he speaks to detectives, but with the same mask of incomprehension he dons everywhere else – perhaps he has not yet realized his responsibility in the case. Is it still a misdeed when the death is absurd and involuntary? In any case, for Gus Van Sant, the problem lies elsewhere: instead, it concerns opening up the bubble where most American youth live and exposing them to the outside world. The death is not so much a trigger for guilt feelings as it is an opening to the outside, or rather to all sorts of outsides: the death of the police officer as well as the war in Iraq. It is a way to go beyond the mere news item, and beyond the movies of the 90’s which often made television a vicious machine that propelled people to stardom while also ensnaring anyone who set foot in their spotlight. Away from television, the world created by Gus Van Sant is all the more disturbing because it no longer has any boundaries.

Antoine Thirion

In order to adapt La Duchesse de Langeais, Jacques Rivette and his co-writers Pascal Bonitzer and Christine Laurent have been looking for one of the first titles of Balzac’s novel : “Don’t touch the axe“. These words, which had been pronounced by a guardian in Westminster in order to warn a visitor who was curious of the weapon which served to behead King Charles the First, were used by Balzac for rising a political statement. At the time of French Restoration, aristocracy flew from the popular neighborhoods of Paris, concentrated power in fancy Faubourg Saint-Germain and used it for itself. Then, separated from the people, aristocracy was less powerful than it thought and could be chopped more easily than if it was in good terms with the nation.
Something remains from this statement in Rivette’s movie: the choice of a an actress of character, Jeanne Balibar, and of a more physical actor, Guillaume Depardieu. One is diaphanous and ethereal whereas the other is fiery and rough. Both are astonishing in the parts of an aristocratic femme fatale and a bonapartist general, torn by a passion which will never turn concrete. In fact, the novel has been chosen according to the actors.
In the bonus materials, Depardieu says he was surprised that Rivette didn’t submit him to his usual method, improvisation, and that he had to follow a very precise script. The fidelity to Balzac’s literature was equal to the respect of the actors’ identities. We have rarely seen such an embodiment of literature and History.

Bastien Hader

On the occasion of the DVD release of DESTRICTED, we are pleased to invite you to the Destricted Xtended Special Event in Paris at Maison Européenne de la Photographie (5-7, rue de Fourcy, Paris 4) on Thursday the 8th of November.

Reservation required in the limit of available seats. Free entrance as of 19:00.
Warning: the event is not for audience under 18.

Schedule of the evening:
As of 19:00 until 20:00 (admission until 19:30 only):
visit of the Larry Clark photo exhibit Tulsa, 1963-1971
20:00: Impaled by Larry Clark
20:45: Haruki Yukimura & Nana-Chan by Xavier Brillat
The screening will be followed by a cocktail party.

Destricted (er), v,
1. To unlimit restriction
2. To bring objectivity by putting out of restriction
3. To deconstruct within bounds, to unconfine
‘Destricted’ is the first short film collection of its kind, bringing together sex and art in a series of short films created by some of the world’s most visual and provocative artists and directors: Larry Clark, Matthew Barney, Richard Prince, Gaspar Noé, Marina Abramovic, Sam Taylor-Wood, Marco Brambilla.
Explicit, stimulating, challenging, provocative, strange or humorous, YOU decide!

Please note the film is not for audience under 18 and not recommended to sensitive viewers.

The 2-disc set includes the 7 films as well as exclusive special features: the making of Matthew Barney’s film, a deleted scene from Gaspar Noé’s film, an interview with Sam Taylor-Wood, the movie and video trailers, and a special hidden extra: ‘Haruki Yukimura & Nana-Chan’ by Xavier Brillat, followed by an interview with Xavier Brillat and Agnès Giard.
Optional English subtitles are available.
On DVD the 13th of November.

Reservation: Blaq Out at 01 42 77 88 20.

The Invisible Man (1933) by James Whale
The important film in my life is the first one I saw, The Invisible Man, that I saw when I was 7 or 8. It made a big impression on me because it connected to a recurring dream I was having regularly in which I was invisible. I saw without being seen, and took great delight in it. And suddenly, I watched, and I thought it could really happen! And decades later, I made an autobiographical film called Ce répondeur ne prend pas de message (This Answering Service Takes No Messages) and I was in the shot. I said to myself, it’s impossible for me to be seen, and without thinking of The Invisible Man, I went to the drugstore and bought a bandage and wrapped up my head. I didn’t become invisible – you could see my arms, my body, hear my voice –, it was already very compromising, but you couldn’t make out the features of my face. I was pleased. Afterwards, I developed a strong feeling: I think that if I were invisible, I could make absolutely sumptuous films, slip inside, and I think that what you see in theaters, compared to what I could have filmed if I were invisible, is extremely poor. I mean, it’s one billionth of human activity. Slipping into environments, among people, I did that afterwards, but I knew the limits. I talk to someone who’s talking to me; I don’t catch things off-guard. Also, I’ve always wanted to be invisible. I would’ve loved not to sign my films, to live very anonymously, in a corner. Not that I’m famous, but I’m marked by my profession; I’m marked by the films I’ve made. This film encompasses a great deal of things in my life and in my filmmaking. It’s a sort of matrix for me, a melting pot of inspiration. And I’ve never seen it again. I didn’t want to see it again. Because one day I went to see my grandfather’s house, which was a wonderful part of my childhood, and it was inhabited by someone else, it had been transformed, and that obscured my previous memory. I want to dream The Invisible Man until the end of my life.

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