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

The Last Laugh (1924) by F.W.Murnau.

“Emil Jannings is an incredible actor. It is the story of this man, doorman in a Grand Hotel, with this suit that means so much for him, this suit that makes him a respected man when he goes back home. Very early in the movie, as he falls with the suitcase, he is put to the surveillance of the toilets. He descends deep stairs, that don’t seem to end, in which he disappears, until he does not exist anymore. Since he is marrying his daughter, he wants to hide his fall. It is a film about appearances, about how this man, even if he knows it’s vain, hangs to this costume. How he wants to sacrifice for his daughter, because he doesn’t want her to be ashamed. It simply is human, and each shot is there to make the story progress and tell something. When we see him go down to the toilets, we really see him go down in darkness, in hell. This is not a dark movie, even if it is not a love story it’s full of love, because the character is generous. He doesn’t rebel, he accepts scary things because he has no other choice, it’s also a movie about social status linked to appearance, to all that this uniform stands for. It’s a really moving film I often recommend.”

More informations about The Last Laugh.

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.