Foster Child, renamed John John for its French release, was one of the major discoveries of the Director’s Fortnight at 2007 Cannes Film Festival. A discovery because the fifth movie of Brillante Mendoza is from a region -The Philippines- from where few films come to us even if they arouse more and more interest from festivals: Berlin Film Festival just showed the director’s sixth film, Tirador. A discovery that will remind us about another one, shown a few years earlier in Cannes, which describes in a very realistic way the journey of a father whose child was abducted. It’s the same anxiety of the loss that can be felt in the American Keane and the Philippine John John, the same way to follow a hero in long shots of pure strolling. But John John tells another story: Thelma’s one -a woman who raises orphans waiting for their adoption- and John John’s one -the child she is about to give to an American couple in a luxury Manilla hotel.

As often, the film is strengthened by his documentary precision. Through the adoption problem, we can see the human consequences of the unbalanced relationship between the North and the South. We can also admire the way Brillante Mendoza shoots the movements of her characters, from the shanty town where they live to the hotel where they split, leaving to us the discovery of a town and the way people inhabit it or how they are put away from the place where money and power are. We hope this very beautiful film will meet an audience and a larger distribution. France is the first country to show it after its release in The Philippines.

Bastien Hader

Hangmen Also Die (1943) by Fritz Lang.

“I am strongly pro-Lang. My bedside film is Hangmen Also Die. I was 15 the first time I saw it at the Cinémathèque, and I’m still watching it regularly. I may have a particular interest for the figure of Evil in cinema, and the film deals with it in the best possible way. It is a film that gathers everything I like in Lang’s cinema, maybe the height of his art as it shows the very calculating, perfectionnist, virulent aspects of his work. I’m a little bit like a son of the Cinémathèque, and if my work mainly consists in watching modern cinema, I remain attached to classics and Hollywood. ”

Read the interview

Hangmen Also Die on DVD

In five years, IndieLisboe has become one of the most important portuguese film festival thanks to a daring selection, the welcoming of imporant authors, and the missions to open the portuguese screens to different films and to promote the most important directors of the country, from Joao Pedro Rodrigues (O Fantasma, Odete) to Miguel Gomes (A cara que mereces). Miguel Valverde, co-creator of the festival with with Rui Pereira, explained us, in Berlin, the birth, the evolution, and the projects of IndieLisboa. This interview is the first of a serie about independent film festivals, the way they meet their audience and overcome the economic difficulties.

How did IndieLisboa come about?
The festival was created five years ago. At the time I was working for the Portuguese Cinematheque. I needed to begin a new project. The other two cofounders of IndieLisboa, Miguel Valverde and Rui Pereira, used to schedule thematic programs and retrospectives of certain filmmakers in a movie theater that was more or less the only independent movie house in Lisbon. It was an excellent project, but they didn’t have enough money to pursue it. That’s how we came up with the idea of a new film festival, an easier project to finance: we quickly found several partners, both public and private. From the outset, the goal was to continue the work of this independent movie theater, showing new films that weren’t being shown in Portugal because no one would distribute them, and because there was only one general festival in Lisbon. So we weren’t lucky enough to see films by Hsiao-hsien Hou or Sang-soo Hong. All the important directors in contemporary film were oddly absent from Portuguese distribution. None of Johnny To’s films had been distributed in theaters, not only in Lisbon, but in the whole country. We started the festival in a single theater and began expanding as of the second edition, and we’re now in three cinemas with seven screens. It’s doing quite well, there’s unquestionably an audience interested in it, who come to the festival due to the fact that movies by certain directors are so rarely seen because they don’t have a following – it’s not because they’re difficult films in an of themselves, but because they get blocked by the distribution system in Portugal. There are only four or five distribution companies and the only one these films interested, Paulo Branco’s company, was having enormous problems distributing them.
(Lire la suite…)

Cinémas hors circuits : DVD and independant labels exhibition
saturday march 1st : from 2pm to 10pm
sunday march 2nd : from 3pm to 8pm
Point Ephémère 200 quai de Valmy 75010 Paris

1st show dedicated to independant DVD label but also books and magazines, Cinémas hors circuits will welcome more than sixty labels on a week-end in Paris.

Discover and find rare films, classics… Meet those who release your favourite movies on DVD and defend the cinema you like… Listen to presentations, discussions, assist to screenings… Share your passion for cinema !

Entrance is free

The whole program is there (in French) : Cinemashorscircuits.com

Since 1978, the Cinéma du Réel international documentary film festival has been an outstanding international meeting point, where the public and professionals discover the films of experienced authors as well as new talents, the history of documentary cinema as well as contemporary works. The festival programs some hundred films for its various sections, screened at the Centre Pompidou, the Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles, the MK2 Beaubourg film theatre, the Paris City Hall and several other theatres in the Ile-de- France area.

International Competition
28 French and international premieres, as well as encounters and discussions with the filmmakers.
See the films in competition

French Selection
28 French and international premieres, as well as encounters and discussions with the filmmakers.
See the selection

Retrospectives and Special Programmes

Americana
A selection of films where commitment and the driving forces of socio-political movements (against the Vietnam war, for Black empowerment or… for a different way of life) are translated into cinematographic vitality, narrative inventiveness, reinventions of documentary and fiction The programme includes tributes to Shirley Clarke and Jim McBride.

In South-East Asia
From Kuala Lumpur to Manila, from Bangkok to Jakarta, documentary films lend images and sounds to long-buried stories, as witnessed by the works of filmmakers such as Garin Nugroho, Amir Muhammad, Raya Martin. The programme includes a tribute to Lav Diaz, the great Filipino poet of cinema, whose powerful films blend documentary and fiction into a lyrical experience.

Images / Prison: visions from inside
In several European countries, film—especially the documentary—has become a focus for workshops on filmmaking, projections and writing, organised within penal institutions. Here we attempt to understand what they mobilise within their makers and the spectators who watch them on the “outside”.

Figures of tourism : for a history of the “view”
It is well known that one part of the world makes a spectacle of the other part, and this does not date from the advent of digitalisation or miniaturisation of “picture-taking”. From the beginnings of cinema to the present day, what is being played out is a history of the “never seen” and the “already seen”. Modern tourism, with its desire for “authenticity” and “discovery, is the central theme of many films bearing the impossible dreams of the “first times”. Filmmakers take possession of tourist images, re-examine and re-compose them. The tourist as a character and tourist images as material for critical analysis guide a programme that mingles documentary and fiction, past and present, films and videos by plastic artists… to call into question the contemporary “view”.
In partnership with MNAM (Collections Cinéma et Nouveaux Medias), and in association with MK2 Beaubourg and ACRIF.

The Theatre of Reality
La Tentation du Paradis
by Vivianne Perelmuter and François Christophe, with Bruno Putzulu.
The staging of a semi-improvised piece of theatre; the play writes itself in the moment : a lost tourist, images of islands, the ghost of Christopher Columbus, tropical storms…

Special screenings and events Bernardo Bertolucci’s “La Via del petrolio”, Hartmut Bitomsky’s “Staub” etc

See the whole program on the Film Festival website

Young yakuza Koji Wakamatsu was sent to prison in his twenties; there, he learned that power leads to repression and brutality. After his release, he wrote a book about his experience, and found in filmmaking a way to expose the abuse of power. In 1959, he worked for television and, four years later, shot his first films. He was granted total artistic freedom, as long as sex and violence predominated. His “pinku-eiga” (erotic Japanese movies) attracted a lot of attention and, step by step, he realized that eroticism was necessary to the development of his political discourse; thus, the original constraint had become a necessity. In 1965, he created his own production company, Wakamatsu Productions, and directed Secret Act Inside Walls (aka Affairs Within Walls). The film was submitted to Berlin Film Festival that same year and was nominated for the Golden Bear. It caused general indignation; Wakamatsu’s camera had thus become an active political weapon exposing the faults of a hypocritical government and the mouthpiece of the identity crisis of young people. Wakamatsu’s films, shot frenetically (around ten films a year), with a simplistic touch in their bare staging that reminds Jean-Luc Godard, but with sexual excesses and brutality that are typical of exploitation films, are virulent anarchist manifestos that are still maddening Japanese authorities, while Wakamatsu is still forbidden on American grounds for his left-winged position.

Do you have particular memories here in Berlin?
I’ve had a film in 1966 in the Berlin Film Festival and it’s not so much with Berlin but at that time people said here, and in Japan as well, that I was a national disgrace.

You didn’t came here since 1966?
That’s right. And again I’m afraid of what can be told about my new film.

Can the reactions be the same that 40 years ago?
It’s completely different now, people seem to be really interested in my films.
(Lire la suite…)

Pierrot le fou (1965) by Jean-Luc Godard.

“The first time I’ve seen a film by Jean-Luc Godard I really learned a lot about filmmaking. But most of all, I’ve learned that you have to do the films as freely as you can. Pierrot le fou for example changed my way of filmmaking.”
Young yakuza Koji Wakamatsu was sent to prison in his twenties; there, he learned that power leads to repression and brutality. After his release, he wrote a book about his experience, and found in filmmaking a way to expose the abuse of power. In 1959, he worked for television and, four years later, shot his first films. He was granted total artistic freedom, as long as sex and violence predominated. His “pinku-eiga” (erotic Japanese movies) attracted a lot of attention and, step by step, he realized that eroticism was necessary to the development of his political discourse; thus, the original constraint had become a necessity. In 1965, he created his own production company, Wakamatsu Productions, and directed Secret Act Inside Walls (aka Affairs Within Walls). The film was submitted to Berlin Film Festival that same year and was nominated for the Golden Bear. It caused general indignation; Wakamatsu’s camera had thus become an active political weapon exposing the faults of a hypocritical government and the mouthpiece of the identity crisis of young people. Wakamatsu’s films, shot frenetically (around ten films a year), with a simplistic touch in their bare staging that reminds Jean-Luc Godard, but with sexual excesses and brutality that are typical of exploitation films, are virulent anarchist manifestos that are still maddening Japanese authorities, while Wakamatsu is still forbidden on American grounds for his left-winged position.
Read his interview.

About Pierrot le fou: After abandoning his wife and infant daughter for the new babysitter, a woman he’d loved and lost several years earlier, an errant husband embarks on a haphazard road to tragedy.
“I wanted to tell the story of the last romantic couple,” Jean-Luc Godard said of this brilliant, all-over-the-place adventure and meditation about two lovers on the run (Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina). Made in 1965, this film, with its ravishing colors and beautiful ‘Scope camerawork by Raoul Coutard, still looks as iconoclastic and fresh as it did when it belatedly opened in the U.S. Godard’s misogynistic view of women as the ultimate betrayers is integral to the romanticism in much of his 60s work–and perhaps never more so than here–but Karina’s charisma makes this pretty easy to ignore most of the time. The movie’s frequent shifts in style, emotion, and narrative are both challenging and intoxicating: American director Samuel Fuller turns up at a party scene to offer his definition of cinema, Karina performs two memorable songs in musical-comedy fashion, Belmondo’s character quotes copiously from his reading, and a fair number of red and blue cars are stolen and destroyed.” (Capsule by Jonathan Rosenbaum from the Chicago Reader)

Click here to learn more about the DVD

Presented last year at Cannes Director’s Fortnight, finally finding its U.S. premiere in San Francisco at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts a couple of weeks ago and released this week in France, The State Of The World (O Estado Do Mundo) is an initiative commissioned by the Gulbenkian Foundation, a Portuguese private institution of public utility whose statutory aims are in the fields of arts, charity, education and science. Calouste Sarkis Gulbenkian was a petrol magnate of Armenian origin and also a passionate and prolific art collector. For its 50th anniversary, the Gulbenkian Foundation asked six filmmakers to make a 15-minute film: Pedro Costa (Colossal Youth), Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Tropical Malady), Chantal Akerman, Wang Bing (West Of The Tracks), Vicente Ferraz (Soy Cuba, O Mamute Siberiano, which examines the creation and exhibition of Kalatozov’s Soy Cuba) and video artist Aysiha Abraham. In 15 minutes, none of the directors try to make a global diagnosis but to reopen, in present times, a door on the past. It’s for instance a bereavement in Weerasethakul’s quietful Luminous People, the specter of deportations in Costa’s sublime Tarrafal, the primitive memory of totems in the gigantic digital images that float in the air of China in Akerman’s Tombée de nuit sur Shanghaï, or the memory of tortures committed on the opponents to the regime in Wang Bing’s Brutally Factory.
In The State Of The World there are enough beauties to arouse the regular fans interest as well as the curiosity of those who haven’t took a glance yet at these auteurs. Each film works as an autonomous machine, with its proper tools (DV, HD, Super 8 or 35mm), its own speed, its own relation to genres. Costa’s Tarrafal may naturally evoke John Ford and Jacques Tourneur, but it’s mostly the occasion for Costa to carry on with the important yet lightful work that leads to Colossal Youth (read our chronicle from last week) in a story where speech is given back to Cap-verdian immigrants deported by Portuguese Minister of the Interior – we soon realize that these speeches may come from the grave. As always with Weerasethakul, Luminous People is the occasion for a shooting outside the city, an occasion to go on cruise on a river in which the ashes of a father are spread ; blissful moment shot in super 8, without sound, like a home movie directed too late, with no regrets but confidence in the coexistence of the living and the dead. Absolute contrast with Wang Bing’s Brutally Factory. His usual small camera penetrates a disused and monumental factory and in its dust, ghost of tortured and murdered students are being resurrected. Precious disparity: if most of the directors gathered here didn’t try to formalize social or economical situations, each one of has invented a particular rhythm, a particular form, so that the documentary would not get its strength from its subjects but from its images.

Bastien Hader

The Fondation Cartier is hosting a major solo exhibition of the visual work of American artist and performer Patti Smith. Drawn from pieces created between 1967 and 2007, it strives to provide an insight into her lyrical, spiritual and poetic universe. Her expressive voice serves to magnify the installations created specifically for the exhibition: a synthesis of photographs, drawings and films.

While the name Patti Smith evokes an image of a founder of the New York punk-rock scene, she has explored the visual arts and poetry since the late 1960s. The exhibition at the Fondation Cartier embraces the various facets of her creative process. Patti Smith began to take photographs in 1967 for use in collages. In 1995, she returned to photography using a vintage Polaroid Land 250: “The immediacy of the process was a relief from the long involved process of drawing, recording, or writing a poem.” Many of Smith’s photographs embody significant personal meaning: Robert Mapplethorpe’s slippers, Virginia Woolf’s bed, Hermann Hesse’s typewriter and Arthur Rimbaud’s utensils. Others serve as a visual record of her well-traveled life. The exhibition also features a selection of the artist’s drawings, several of which are borrowed from prestigious institutions such as the MoMA and the Centre Pompidou or from private collections.

The powerful yet subtle drawings have been executed with a calligraphic sense of line entwined with poetry and text. They represent her solitary side. Her collaborative side is represented in films directed by Robert Frank, Robert Mapplethorpe and Jem Cohen and the audio performance of The Coral Sea with Kevin Shields. She will shoot a short film, specially commissioned for the exhibition. The exhibit also includes cherished belongings taken from her personal archives. Among them original manuscripts, a photograph taken by Constantin Brancusi and a stone from the river in which Virginia Woolf committed suicide.

Inspirations

The source of much of her inspiration has been key figures of French culture, including Arthur Rimbaud, Nicole Stéphane, Jean Genet, Antonin Artaud and René Daumal. Paris echoes throughout, from drawings executed in the Montparnasse district, where she lived during her first Parisian sojourn in 1969, to recent photographs taken in the garden of the Fondation Cartier, situated nearby.

A Comprehensive Project

To reflect the multitude of fields explored by Patti Smith, the exhibition is intended to be a comprehensive project that expands beyond the exhibition space. The Fondation Cartier is giving free rein to Patti Smith to oversee the
programming for the Nomadic Nights as well as performing herself, offering solo and band performances as well as informal poetry readings. The Fondation Cartier’s bookshop will, for a time, become the artist’s personal library. Her choice of books, CDs, films and objects will enable visitors to further penetrate the rich universe
of this iconic artist.

BIOGRAPHY

Patti Smith was born in Chicago and grew up in New Jersey. A maverick teenager with a passion for Rimbaud, she moved to New York in 1967, where she met Robert Mapplethorpe. In 1969, the pair moved into the Chelsea Hotel and befriended such artists and writers as Sam Shepard, Brice Marden, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs. Absorbing herself in performance and poetry, she was inspired to create a fusion of improvisation, politics and rock’n’roll. She released her first single “Hey Joe/Piss Factory” in 1974, and along with the group Television helped create a strong protopunk movement at the legendary CBGB. In 1975, her first album Horses, graced with the iconic portrait by Robert Mapplethorpe, received international recognition, including the Grand Prix du disque Charles Cros (1975).

In 1977, a serious accident forced her into a long convalescence, during which she immersed herself in poetry and published Babel. The following year, her drawings were shown for the first time in New York at the Robert Miller Gallery. She also released the album Easter, which featured the single “Because the Night,” co-written with Bruce Springsteen.

In 1979, she left New York City and career behind, and moved to Detroit, Michigan to marry musician Fred Sonic Smith from the group MC5. They had two children and recorded Dream of Life, which included the anthem “People Have the Power.” In 1995, after the untimely death of her husband, she returned with her children to New York City and resumed her public life. In 2005, Patti Smith was awarded the Insignes de Commandeur dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Republic. In 2007, she was inducted into the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame, the highest accolade awarded to contemporary musicians.

FONDATION CARTIER pour l’art contemporain
261, boulevard Raspail 75014 Paris
Tél. 01 42 18 56 50 / Fax 01 42 18 56 52
fondation.cartier.com
Open from tuesdays to sundays, from 11am to 8pm.
Late nights on tuesdays to 10pm.

Whether viewed in its original Portuguese version (Juventude Em Marcha), in English (Colossal Youth) or in French (En avant jeunesse), the feeling is the same. Pedro Costa’s new film is a monument built on a new basis and the English title -referring to the pop summit first album of British Young Marble Giants- points out well what this young colossus aims: the determination of a manifesto as well as the precise manufacturing of a pop song.

Since Casa de Lava in 1994, Pedro Costa shoots his films in Lisboa shanty town Fontainhas with its inhabitants -mostly Cape Verdeans immigrants. Since In Vanda’s Room, he only shoots with the lightest equipment: a DV camcorder and a few reflectors, to sculpt natural light, to avoid big machines between him and his non-professional actors. The first character was a young female drug-addict, Vanda ; then his masters, Daniel Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub editing in Le Fresnoy –Contemporary art studios in Tourcoing- in the documentary Où gît votre sourir enfoui?. Same device for fiction or documentary –an obsolete difference totally abolished in Costa’s work.
What matters is the encounter with a man or a woman and the right angle to take. What makes Colossal Youth monumental –350-hour rushes and 2 hour and an half cut– is mostly the mythological stature of its character, Ventura, who came from Cape-Verde in 1972 and is settled in Fontainhas ever since -a king in exile from the very beginning of the film: his wife Clotilde sends him out and throws his stuff through the window. After this divorce, Colossal Youth becomes the fiction of the community: the relatives Ventura goes to see are all his sons, like Vanda who comes back here and who is his daughter.
During a scene, Ventura visits the luxury rooms of the Gulbekian Foundation and when his eyes stare on a corner of the room no one can tell if he is looking at the Rubens on the wall or at the wall itself he built when he was a workman. We have the same impression facing a Costa film: aiming as well the beautiful and the necessary, trying to create the right image to fit the greatness of this proletariat.

Bastien Hader