Rumors had spread already for a few weeks giving a strong French presence and some new exciting names for the 61st Cannes film festival. Which one were true? The traditional press conference, held wednesday in Paris, announced a program in which everybody will find his pleasure ; and if it’s far from changing the festival identity, there are films and auteurs here that contribute to give it some fresh air.
Woody Allen’s Vicky Christina Barcelona, shot in Spain with Penelope Cruz, Scarlett Johansson and Javier Bardem, should open the party. Out of competition, there will also be Spielberg’s fourth episode of Indiana Jones, Emir Kusturica’s documentary about Maradona, another one on Mike Tyson and Kung-Fu Panda, latest Dreamworks animation by Mark Osborne and John Stevenson. Abel Ferrara will also present his documentary Chelsea Hotel in a special screening.
Twenty directors will compete from May 14 through May 25 and will be judged by a jury led by Sean Penn and gathering (for the moment) Sergio Castellito, Natalie Portman, Alfonso Cuaron, Rachid Bouchareb, Alexandra Laria and Apichatpong Weerasethakul: Clint Eastwood (Changeling), Jia Zhang-ke (24 City), Steven Soderbergh (Che, about Guevara), Wim Wenders (The Palermo Shooting), the Dardenne brothers (Lorna’s Silence), Atom Egoyan (Adoration), Nuri Bilge Ceylan (The Three Monkeys).
With Eric Khoo (My Magic) or Brillante Mendoza (Serbis), the festival has noted the Directors’ Fortnight importance in bringing the best new directors to the front of the scene (the program will be announced today: one of its main events, beside the 40th anniversary and the tribute to Jim Jarmusch, will be the screening of a 5-hour long film by a 24-year-old director from the Philippines, Raya Martin, with Now Showing)
With Waltz With Bashir by the Israelian Ari Folman, an « animated documentary » about Sabra and Chatila massacre, the official selection tries, maybe, to reiterate the success of Persepolis in 2007. French cinema will be represented by Arnaud Desplechin’s Un Conte de Noël (A Christmas Tale), Philippe Garrel’s La Frontière de l’aube (The Dawn frontier) and a third director whose name will be announced soon, said Thierry Fremaux. Will also be in the competition: Charlie Kaufman, Lucrecia Martel, Walter Salles, Pablo Trapero, Paolo Sorrentino, and in the alternative section Un Certain Regard, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige, Raymond Depardon, Kelly Reichardt or Bong Joon-ho, Leos Carax and Michel Gondry for a three-headed film called Tokyo!
Besides, we already knew that Max Ophuls’ Lola Montès would open Cannes Classics selection ; and that Quentin Tarantino will be giving this year the traditionnal master class, after launching the rocket Death Proof in last year’s competition.

Bastien Hader

Viridiana (1961) by Luis Buñuel.

“It was the time when we were starting the Cineastes de notre temps series, and we started with Bunuel, just after Viridiana. We went to see him at his home, in Madrid and in Toledo. It has to do with personal things but not only. The film is filled with more and more surprising metaphors and it was Bunuel’s come back to Spain. I can’t think about any other film which it could be compared to about its blasphemous violence, and it was done with such subtelty that the film received a price in Cannes from the Catholic Office !”

Paris, March 14 2008

ANGER Cédric, Director
BIDOU Jacques, Producer (JBA Productions)
BRISSEAU Jean-Claude, Director
CAUSSE Jean-Max et François, Theater Manager and Owner (la Filmothèque du Quartier Latin, Paris, France)
CAVALIER Alain, Director
CHODOROV Pip, Director and distributor
DUMONT Bruno, Director
GONZALEZ Annie, Producer (C-P Productions)
GUIRAUDIE Alain, Director
HARLAN Jan, Producer
LIMOSIN Jean-Pierre, Director
LORENZ Juliane, Editor and Rainer Fassbinder Foundation President
MAILLOT Jacques, Director
MARIGNAC Martine, Producer (Pierre Grise Productions)
MARQUIS François, Producer (Les Productions Bagheera)
MORDILLAT Gérard, writer and director
OSSANG F.J., Director
PAUL-BONCOUR Vincent, Theatrical and Video Distributor
SENA Nuno, co-director of IndieLisboa Film Festival
SOLANAS Fernando, Director
TEMPLE Julian, Director
WAKAMATSU Koji, Director
ZONCA Erick, Director

Pen-Ek Ratanaruang is the other great name of contemporary Thai cinema along with Apichatpong Weeraseethakul. Both have studied in the USA and have found an international audience thanks to the festivals interests –in Cannes in 2004, one can remember the venenous beauty of award-winning Tropical Malady not far from Lynch’s Mullholland Drive or Murnau’s Sunrise.
But there aren’t many similarities between those two filmmakers. First working as a graphic designer, Ratanaruang has another idea of beauty, which his more for him a question of style: floating camera, beautiful slow motion and sidelong framings. A hazy style who hasn’t given up to take cinema as a fine art, with majesty and maybe a little bit of affectation. An apocalyptic wind blows over his simple yet obscure tales, rejecting all violence outside in order to keep only an unsettling oddness: after Last Life in the Universe in 2003, Invisible Waves for example followed a man from Macao to Hong-Kong passing through Phuket by representing the twists and turns of his guilt as a curious Mafia-like organization. Great influence of modern cinema: bergmanian stupor, antonionian silence and desolation.

His sixth feature, Ploy, should satisfy the aficionados of this kind of cinema but not only because this time everything is more simple and more attractive in a way. Thriller is still there, but as always, as if it was suffocated, pending ; this time it’s driven by erotic scenes. Ploy is the name of a young woman a married man meets in a bar, and whom he asks to spend the night on the couch of the hotel room where he stays with his wife, waiting for a funeral. Soon attached to her, he will put his marriage in danger while in another room (and maybe another time) a chambermaid and a barman are playing erotic games (which aroused Thai censorship cuts after having required more incomprehensible cuts on Weerasethakul’s Syndroms and a Century). Those are two stories that are only related by a common sensual approach, as well as Ratanaruang’s gift to create complex yet moving structures. Ploy has been released this week in France after it was screened in many festivals last year from Cannes to Toronto through St. Louis or London. Soon, Addithya Assarat’s first feature film Wonderful Town, winner of the latest Rotterdam competitive section, will confirm Thai cinema’s great health.

Bastien Hader

Come and See (1985) by Elem Klimov.
“A friend who works on the concept of war made me discover this film. It’s the last film by Elem Klimov. It exhausted him to sickness. I can see on the faces of the actors what they went through. It’s a film entirely shot with a steadycam, in 1984, with a heavy machinery ; a film in which the death of God is really convincing and has nothing to do with the proclivity of the Church or the Orthodox mysticism we can see in other russian directors.
It’s a really scary movie about the massacre of a Byellorussian village. You can see a cow shot with real bullets. Come and See shows refugees who need meat and milk ; it’s obvious they had to kill this cow. Klimov films the eye of the dying animal, I got dizzy in it. I saw the earth rotation in it, it brought me back to Un chien Andalou. It’s a film that make me want to write about it, I hadn’t adhere this way to a film for a long time. It’s a film about chaos, war, pain. They must have shoot it chronologically, it can’t have been done in any other way. On the face of this young paysant who went through these Dantesque circles, you see a real transformation. No tricks, no make-up : he really felt the tragical elements of the story. The sound, which contains many noise elements, pieces of Mozarts, is also astonishing.
A long time ago, I saw at the Cinematheque a documentary Klimov made about his wife. I wasn’t very enthusiastic. They also shown Farewell to Matyora, the film his wife couldn’t finish because of her death in a car accident and Klimov finished. I also kind of missed it, it must have been my fault, it’s impossible that a director who makes an extrordinary film like Come and See can make minor things. Seven or eight years of preparation, nine months of shooting, Come and See made him sick. In one of the extras of the very good French DVD, you can see him getting sick and suffering to have to talk about it. You can feel he can not go beyond this film, that he can not go further. He went to the end of the experience.”

By Antoine Thirion, 2008, February the 13th in Paris.

More informations about Come and See.

Jean-Pierre Limosin’s work is still in progress. Each new film seems to be a conscious continuation of some previous research: to do that he always needs to jump from fiction to documentary and from one subject to another. That’s how Limosin overcame a period of doubt following his first three films, Subterfuge (co-directed with Alain Bergala in 1983), Guardians of the Night (1986) and The Other Night (1988), working on documentary with portraits of Abbas Kiarostami and Alain Cavalier for the French TV serial Cinéma, de notre temps, in order to come back to fiction with Tokyo Eyes in 1996, shot in Japanese with young local stars and a special guest, Takeshi Kitano –who will also have his portrait filmed in the same French TV serial one year later. Those are two films it’s impossible not to think about when watching Young Yakuza, Limosin’s new Japanese documentary he shot in Shinagawa neighborhood within the clan of M. Kumagai, a yakuza boss whose face first may frighten without its anxious words.
Between Tokyo Eyes and Young Yakuza, Limosin made Novo -a fiction of desire and amnesia with Anna Mouglalis in 2002- among others projects. For the DVD special features, Limosin went back to Japan to film Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki: on this occasion M. Kumagai first met him with the idea of filming his clan. As a documentary is often the place for a power struggle, Limosin didn’t brought this Godfather fan the film he expected, but on the contrary a very sharp description of a circle. The “young yakuza” is not him but Naoki, a recruit who doesn’t support the implacable ceremonial for a very long time and end up disappearing without further notice: a charismatic boy, whom softness and adaptability is strong enough to oppose the ancestrals yet shiny rituals of the mob. Naoki is not less charismatic than Tokyo Eyes hero. Later, Kumagai fell off his position due to the internecines infightings Limosin told us in his interview: the film foreshadows this fall by depicting the outside pressure on the clan more than the inverted movement -traditional in mob films from Hawks’ Scarface to Scorsese’s Goodfellas. That’s what makes Young Yakuza a precious film about Japan’s relation to its “mob” -a documentary fascinated by its subject without the need for Limosin to assist one way or another to the crimes it continues to perpetrate.

Bastien Hader

The Pianist (2002) by Roman Polanski.
“I have a strong interest in the great directors’ latest -or last- films. Maybe it’s a little perverse: I may watch these movies with a different eye but if I name the films that moved me the most in the fifteen or twenty last years, there’s The Sacrifice by Tarkovski, The Dead by Huston and The Pianist by Polanski. I am often fascinated to see someone, who accomplished a great work, coming back on his past in his new films, with everything he learnt on or from his former films. Polanski does things he never did before in The Pianist, very strong things, very beautiful too. These are things that move me deeply, mainly in my relation with the director more in the film itself, in what it says about a person I spent time with, even from far away, for decades. It moves me more than a lone work, even a brilliant one.”

By Olivier Gonord on March 6, 2008.

Click here to read more details about The Pianist.
Click here to read our interview with François Marquis about the production of Erick Zonca’s film, Julia.

The retrospective at the Pompidou Center in Paris and the French release of his works on DVD have been long overdue. Although less famous than Mizoguchi, Ozu and Kurosawa, Kijû Yoshida is still a critical figure in Japanese film history.

Very active from 1960 to 1973, he was part of the Japanese New Wave, along with Nagisa Oshima, Shohei Imamura and Hiroshi Teshigahara. Employed in the late fifties by Shochiku Studios (where Ozu worked), he insisted on writing the screenplay for his first film, Good-for-Nothing, in line with the studio’s policy of producing films to which contemporary youth could relate. Albeit heavily influenced by Breathless, Good-for-Nothing already showed what was unique to this other “New Wave”: the movies were more oriented towards generational conflicts, opposing rebellious sons to their capitalist fathers. They were less playful but more sensual and explicitly political and were profoundly marked by the War, defeat and the atomic bomb.
Hence, his second film, Blood Is Dry (1961), is the story of an employee in an assurance company who threatens to commit suicide when management announces a massive layoff, and recounts how the company uses this threat to its own advantage by turning it into an advertising campaign. The character then crosses the city and comes face to face with his own image at every street corner, as in a hall of mirrors. With the success of the campaign, however, he is no longer a desperate man pointing a gun to his head, but a potential leader who wishes to take advantage of his failed suicide – unless he is simply an image of the People, manufactured by management to further their own cause. Yoshida never divorced narrative from a thoughtful reflection on the use of image. In Woman of the Lake, adapted from Kawabata, a young bride begs a blackmailer to give her back compromising photos of an adulterous affair: the film shows that the woman’s image is still not her own. Yoshida thus wanted to construct his films from the woman’s point of view, in contrast to a society structured by the male figure of the emperor, and chose his wife, Mariko Okada, a great actress who starred in Ozu’s An Autumn Afternoon and Naruse’s Sound of the Mountain, to play the heroine in most of his films.
The Bomb is another critical aspect in his movies. For Yoshida, the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki defy representation, akin perhaps to the Holocaust in the West. This missing image structures his directing; as opposed to the tracking shots for which Mizoguchi is famous, he shoots in such a way that the audience can never understand the exact architecture of a place and must mentally reconstruct the space themselves. Shots filmed from behind someone’s head, actors filmed from a distance through a frame or the sliding panels of a shoji (a wall divider with paper-covered doors), and sharp low-angle shots that flatten the space all contribute to disorienting one’s view and exteriorizing the drama. According to Yoshida, the break between classic and modern Japanese films was the movement from humanism to “anti-humanism”, in which the yardstick is no longer the ideal man, but rather man in a specific situation, such as a time of war.
Starting in 1969 with Eros Plus Massacre, followed by Heroic Purgatory and Coup D’Etat in 1973, Yoshida opted for a more radical perspective. Eros Plus Massacre sets the story of a nearly legendary anarchist in Japan, Takae Osugi, including his relationships with three women and his assassination by the police in 1963, against a contemporary tale of two students trying to make sense of Osugi’s politics. The fragmented viewpoints extend to the spoken word, and the multiplicity of expression puts History into perspective, and yet still gives it vivid immediacy. Yoshida sees the assassination of Osugi as the State’s way of defending itself against the imagination and freedom that reject it. Yoshida went so far politically and esthetically that, after Coup D’Etat in 1973, he stopped directing fiction, left Japan and only shot art documentaries (several episodes of “Beauté de la beauté” may be seen in the Pompidou Center’s retrospective) until he returned to fiction in 1986 with A Promise, followed by Onimaru in 1988, and Women in the Mirror in 2002, in which he dealt with Hiroshima head-on. He has recently published an impressive book on Ozu (the French translation, Ozu ou l’anti-cinéma, is published by Actes Sud), which combines both a filmmaker’s personal relationship to his a work and a precise yet elegant analysis, and is written with a rare and singular voice, as demonstrated in his “Pick of the Week” for There Was a Father.

Bastien Hader.

There Was a Father (1942) by Yasujiro Ozu.
“My relationship with Ozu is distinctly twofold. On the one hand, it is very private and personal, while on the other, it is that of a colleague in the film industry. True, I was thirty years younger than him, but I believe my interest in his work on an intimate level is equivalent the interest I’ve had as a filmmaker. You can see these two poles in my book on Ozu.
My personal relationship with Ozu dates very far back to my childhood during the war. When I was nine, my parents took me to the movie theater and introduced me to There Was a Father. Of course, I was too young at the time to understand the story, the structure and the plot elements of the film. But I clearly remember one scene in particular where a dazzling light shines upon a valley, and at the bottom of this valley, near a river, a father and son are fishing together. Repetition is used in this fishing scene, with the father and son tirelessly repeating the same movements. Of course, as a child I became bored watching the same movements continually repeated, and I ended up wondering what purpose this repetition served. What struck me the most was that this father and son repeated exactly the same movement, which consisted of casting a line and then re-casting it when the current took it back upstream. When I compared this father and son to my own father and myself, their difference became clear: the father was big and strong, and if he’d raced against me, he would have necessarily won. And yet in this film, the father and son performed the same synchronized movement despite their difference in size and stature. At the end of the scene, the father simply utters the following words: You and I are now going to be separated, you’re going away to school and although we’re father and son, we’re going to become strangers. Listening to his father’s words, the son, who’s kept on casting his line, eventually stops and lets his father fish alone. Thus in this scene, an identical, repetitive movement eventually ceases, marking their separation. I understood much later that this scene represented every person’s destiny.
At the end of the feature, my father explained to me that the movie had been shot by a filmmaker named Ozu. It was the first time I’d heard his name; it was also the first time I became aware that a film was manufactured by a director and that it was real work, a job like any other. As luck would have it, in my career, I eventually entered Shochiku, the film studio where Ozu worked. I was thirty years his junior, however, and Ozu was nearly as old as my father: that’s why I never considered becoming his assistant and shooting films the way he did. I ended up becoming a director several years later.”

By Antoine Thirion, in Paris, on March 27, 2008.

Mainly known for her musician career as one of the leaders of the New York seventies scene and unforgettable anthems such as Gloria, Because the Night co-written with Bruce Springsteen or People Have the Power, Patti Smith expressed herself in many different arts. The ongoing exhibition at the Fondation Cartier in Paris gives the opportunity to discover a work that goes beyond its mediums of expression and deserve to be discovered in its totality.

Born in Chicago, Patti Smith moved to New York where she met and lived with Robert Mapplethorpe. Together they linked with major writers such as Allen Ginsberg or William Burroughs. Fascinated by poetry since her childhood, and particularly by Arthur Rimbaud, Patti Smith first appeared on stage reading poems put in music. She started very early to take pictures and she initiated Robert Mapplethorpe to this art. In 1975, the cover of her debut album Horses -a picture of her in an androgynous style taken by Mapplethorpe- struck a whole generation. In 1978, a year after a tragic stage accident, her drawings were shown for the first time in the Robert Miller Gallery in New York.

The exhibition which just opened at the Fondation Cartier in Paris (until June 22) relates forty years of the artistic journey of an artist who always considered singing as only one of her ways to express a creativity largely fed on European culture. The hundreds of photos sum up her encounters and emotions, her trips, and open the doors to the influences that marked her work. A few portraits, a not so technical work, the photos of Patti Smith are essentially a work of impressions, a way to capture the moment, a saving of memories, memories of the places she went to, the people she met, and most of all the memory of people she admires : a picture of Virginia Woolf’s bed, Hermann Hesse’s typewriter, the tomb of Arthur Rimbaud. This idea is also in the exhibition of objects as relics of the authors that nourished her : original manuscripts, a stone Patti Smith took on the bank of the river where Virginia Woolf drown, Pope Benoit XV’s slippers. We can see on different places this attraction to Catholic religion : an installation about La Cène, a Christ and a crown of thorns, and many photos of religious statues. This impressionist art of photography is also in her work as a painter, an art close to calligraphy, an art of sketches which goes with words that often surround the drawings. The films shown there are based on a similar approach, a capture of impressions and poetry to go with it. That is the real nerve of Patti Smith’s art: poetry. Patti Smith could be thought about as a singer who loves photography, drawings or films, she is in fact a poet and the mediums she chooses to express herself are only different entrances to her striking art of poetry, which is beautifully illustrated in this exhibition.

Francis Chérasse.