If you have never seen any Guy Maddin film and are a film addict looking for new cinematographic experiences, or else if you are just open-minded enough to pass over dominant schemes, take your chance! Prepare – or rather do not prepare –, rush to see Guy Maddin’s latest film: Brand Upon the Brain! The discovery will be even more striking, refreshing and, above all, dazing. Experimental in its form, yet not elitist, Brand Upon the Brain! is built as a “remembrance in 12 chapters” and drags you down to a fantastic tale where images in Super 8, expressionist black and white, colours strokes, falsely subliminal intertitles, aerophonic sounds, Jason Staczek’s music and Isabella Rossellini’s voice take you to the guts, quite literally. Because Brand Upon the Brain!, is also a genre movie (in the many senses of the term): myths and mythology melt in a maelstrom of secrets, obsessions, desires, primal fears and strange holes hidden deep into the memory of a character named Guy, first as a man then as a child. An hypnotic trip derived from psychoanalysis and poetry.
Financed by The Film Company, an independent American film studio, which supports authors and lets them free to run their projects, Brand Upon the Brain! proves, in a new context for Guy Maddin but in a quasi-synthetic way, the stupefying vitality of a work like no other.
If Maddin’s aficionados (Careful, Archangel, Tales of the Gimli Hospital, Cowards Bend the Knee, The Saddest Music in the World) will be satisfied to identify the organic and visual touch of the on the margins filmmaker, newcomers will enjoy this cinematographic food without any conservatives where senses are filled with wonder. An unforgettable mystical trip to a forever lost past: the one of an awakening childhood.

Read Guy Maddin’s interview and watch the trailer now!

Synopis: Whatever are young “Guy Maddin’s” parents really up to in their lighthouse home/orphanage on a chilly remote island? Overbearing Mother tracks her son’s every move, bellowing for him to come home over the “Aerophone” just as something interesting is about to happen! And poor Sis, his older sister (who is rapidly blossoming into a young woman)–Mother will never let her have any fun! The intrigue continues as deranged Mother, hellbent on restoring her youth and sinister Scientist-Father who is sequestered night and day in his basement laboratory, engage in diabolical, secret experimentation. When new parents of recently adopted children from the orphanage notice strange wounds on the youngsters’ necks, a pair of teen sleuths, Wendy and her brother Chance, known as “The Lightbulb Kids,” appear on the island to investigate–and in the process, inspire Guy’s first crush and Sis’ first love affair. The lurid family secrets that unfold are positively shocking.

Françoise Duru

More details about Guy Maddin’s films:
Archangel
Careful
Dracula
Cowards Bend the Knee
The Saddest Music in the World

Playtime (1967) by Jacques Tati.
“Playtime is a very complex film with very different patterns and a groundbreaking narrative, using the progressive disappearance of the character of Mr Hulot. This character, whom we have known since Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot, loses his central role a bit more with each new film. In Jacques Tati’s last films, ensemble structures replace the main part played by Mr Hulot. Tati’s work becomes more and more democratic and the character of Mr Hulot almost disappears. The work on the sound is groundbreaking, and so is the work on the picture. I think Playtime is the only real film that fully uses the 70mm format. In principle, 70mm is used as a spectacular “gimmick”, because in the 70mm picture there is space to add many more elements than in 35mm. The work on space that we can see in Playtime offers a brand new syntax of the screen. The problem is that Playtime is a film which is hard to understand on the small screen. There is no place today for 70mm. If you have the chance to see Playtime on its original format you can find many surprises for the eye. In one single frame you can choose between 4 or 5 visual patterns spread out across the large surface of the screen. You can find a sequence with lots of visual effects and metaphors in the upper left corner of the screen, and another one in the lower right corner… Lots of surprises indeed! It’s a use of space completely different, which goes much further than Orson Welles’ work on depth of field, according to me. Because Tati not only uses depth of field, but also a real work on screen surface. It is a bit complicated to explain with words: it is a poetic experience of space totally new and very modern, where spectators have a great role to play as co-directors, since they have to choose between all the visual elements offered to them. This is why Playtime is a film that you can see many times: you rediscover it during each screening.”

More informations about Playtime.

José Luis Guerin was born in Barcelona. He started his career directing experimental films from 1975 to 1983, then directed his first feature film in 1983, Los Motivos de Berta. His film received a special price at the Berlin Forum. In 1988, José Luis Guerin directed the Spanish episode of City Life – the other episodes being directed by Reichenbach, Kieslowski, Agresti, Tarr, Sen et Rijneke. City Life was awarded in Berlin, Rotterdam and Montreal Film Festivals. In 1990, José Luis Guerin directed Innisfree, presented in competition at Cannes International Film Festival. In 1997, Tren de Sombras - presented during the Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes - obtained the Golden and Silver Melies awarded by the European Federation of Fantasy Film Festivals. Then, in 2001, José Luis Guerin directed En construccion, awarded in San Sebastian Festival and, in 2007, En la ciudad de Sylvia, selected by the 2007 Venice Film Festival.

In a stroke of well-orchestrated timing, given that September happens to be when school goes back, this month sees the DVD and theater release of La loi du collège (School Law), by Mariana Otero (in stores on the 16th) and the Golden Palm at the last Cannes Film Festival, Entre les murs (The Class), by Laurent Cantet (released on the 24th in France).

The first pioneered a new genre, the documentary series, in relating in six episodes the 1993 school year at the Garcia Lorca Junior High School in St Denis, in the suburbs of Paris.
The second is fiction that takes a school as its setting. For his fourth feature film (after Human Resources, Time Out and Heading South), Laurent Cantet has adapted the book of the same name by François Bégaudeau, which described a French teacher’s year at a junior high in the north east of Paris.

Two “classroom movies”
“Classroom movies” are practically a genre in their own right. Among those that spring to mind, there are comedies (Les Sous Doués (The Under-gifted) by Zidi, Kindergarten Cop by Reitman: the classroom as a backdrop for fooling around), and tragedies (school as the first of oppressive institutions – Young Torless by Schlondorff, If by Lindsay Anderson, etc.). In the second case, sometimes a teacher who is “not like the others” lets in a breeze of freedom (a romantic version as in Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Society, or libertarian style as in Seeking Asylum by Marco Ferreri). Sometimes, too, things are reversed and the violence of the outside world bursts in (Blackboard Jungle by Richard Brooks back in 1955, Class 84 by Mark Lester, It All Starts Today by Tavernier or in a completely different style, Elephant by Gus Van Sant…).
Logically, this fertile playground most often attracts filmmakers interested in political and social issues or groups (Ferreri, Kiarostami, Philibert, Tavernier, Wiseman…).
Mariana Otero and Laurent Cantet undeniably belong here. But School Law and The Class do not fit into these categories. Heirs of a complex world in which “big causes” have disappeared, these two films make do with presenting characters grappling with the complexity of their situation. Both of them see school as a watching ground for “human chaos”. Mariana Otero says she did not want to make a film about learning, but about the law: how it is laid down, negotiated and practiced. Cantet’s film is in the same style. What matters here is language. He looks at how speech circulates and the relationship to power and authority, rather than a depiction of learning in the strict sense. For both filmmakers, school is where people confront one another, size each other up, show respect and try to get along. These films are “team players” (The Class ends with a game of soccer between teachers and students), which doesn’t stand in the way of a few close-ups on certain characters. It’s not easy for a film to give equal airtime all the way.

A similar structure: the issue of time and space
To render this confrontation, the two of them chose to be both radical and modest. Both opted for the same “time and space”: a school year and the closed environment of a junior high school.
Classroom, staff room, corridors, yard and school principal’s office: it all happens here, in a life governed by bells (which sound strangely like an alarm at Garcia Lorca Junior High). Inside this space, there is a lot of noise and cameras are on full alert – 3 cameras for Laurent Cantet’s film and the flexibility of a small crew for Mariana Otero. They share an objective: revealing classroom drama by taking their time. One was filmed over a period of a whole year. The other was constructed around (separate) workshops for students and teachers.
By keeping off-screen the private lives of both teachers and students, psychology and overly obvious determinism is avoided. This was particularly risky for the fiction because the film gives little opportunity to identify with the characters, preferring to explore situations of interaction rather than inner worlds.

Fiction / Documentary
In Laurent Cantet’s film, we leave the school grounds only once: at the start of the film, François Marin has a coffee at the bar of a café, then enters the school with two colleagues. The same is true in Mariana Otero’s documentary: a group of teachers, tired of strikes that don’t get anywhere, decide, as a last resort, to visit the School Inspectorate.
The out-of-school scene in The Class is individual. In School Law it is collective. This difference indicates contrasting approaches. For the sake of efficiency, Cantet focuses on the individual, structuring the film around attentive close-ups on faces. During the film, a story emerges. The teacher veers onto slippery ground. Drama slowly builds. The film ends with the expulsion of a student. For Otero, the camera is hand-held. She films the yard and the meetings. There are more people per shot. She takes in the “whole” school.
Paradoxically, the strength of each film lies in its ability to take on the characteristics of the “other” genre. In School Law characters disappear or reappear depending on events. Stories follow on from one another, which makes relevant the use of the series. On the contrary, in The Class, the actor-students and Bégaudeau, who plays the role of the teacher himself, contribute extra reality to the fiction.

Similar intentions
It is no accident that the classrooms chosen were in junior highs with a reputation for being difficult. In junior highs, the whole process of social sorting has not yet taken place. And in so-called tough neighborhoods, the issue of “getting along” is even more urgent.
These films use school to reflect their era, assuming that the outside will invite itself in – starting with the issue of identity and origins. As Khoumba and Esmeralda say to their teacher François Marin, why use the name Bill in an example, rather than Aïssata?
Furthermore, both of them incidentally raise the fundamental (and unresolved) question of what school can pass down today and reveal a world grappling with a possible breakdown in meaning.
We hear over and over, “You move, you run, you shout, you fly, why do you come to school?” looping a teacher’s sentence like a nursery rhyme in the credits of School Law. Fifteen years later, Henriette echoes her in The Class by saying to her teacher at the end of the year, “I didn’t learn anything this year. I don’t get what we’re doing.”
Through François Marin and the staff at Garcia Lorca Junior High neither of these two films gives an answer but they both give the question a real workout.

Emmanuelle Mougne.

More details about School Law available now on DVD and VOD.
Also check out the film blog including free videos.

The Ice Storm (1997) by Ang Lee.

“It’s a film by Ang Lee, by far his best film I think. It’s about how parents behave like children. It’s fantastic, it’’s just so true and it doesn’t shy away from anything. They remade the movie after that, American Beauty -to me a cheap version of it.” Synopsis: It is Thanksgiving 1973, and the Carvers and the Hoods are two prototypical suburban families seemingly living the good life in New Canaan, Connecticut. Behind their New Age philosophies and polyester fashions, however, lies deep discontent. One husband carries on an unsatisfying affair with the other family’s wife, while his teenage daughter experiments sexually with both of the neighbor’s boys. When a winter storm descends upon their upper middle class neighborhood, buried resentments bubble over, leading to a tragedy neither family will ever forget… Based on the novel by Rick Moody, The Ice Storm stars Sigourney Weaver, Kevin Kline, Joan Allen, Christina Ricci, Tobey Maguire and Elijah Wood.

Baltasar Kormákur is an Icelandic actor and a stage and film director. Nowadays he is best known for his work as a director of films like multi-awarded 101 Reykjavik. Also a producer through his production company, BlueEyes, (he co-produced Stormy Weather by Solveig Anspach for instance), Baltasar Kormakur has just finished his fifth feature-length film, White Night Wedding, while Jar City has just been released in French theaters.

Read our interview with Baltasar Kormakur on the occasion of the French theatrical release of Jar City.

You started as an actor, you directed theatre productions, how did you start to direct films and how did those prior experiences nourish your work as a director?
I felt all the time that I was going to make a film, I played in a lot of them and I felt more and more the need to do it myself. When I did my first film I thought “This is who I wanted to become”. You are asked this question all your life “what do you want to be ?” I never really knew but I found it and that’s why I’ve stayed there. I occasionally play as an actor and I do theatre once in a while as well ; this background gives me a different perspective on the storytelling. I’m mostly interested in characters and telling stories through characters rather than using the plot as a way to hang the characters on them. I don’t mind doing action or little effects if it’s needed -I’ve done stunts or stuff like that but it’s not what gives me a great close-up on characters or human behaviour, this is what gets me excited. I’ve been offered to do big Hollywood movies, it’s not because I’m against them, it’s just that they don’t get me going, I couldn’t do it well, I would need viagra to be able to direct these movies, my interest has to come from the inside.

Why did you choose to turn this bestseller into a movie?
First of all, when I bought it it was not a bestseller, it was the first book in line, he [Arnaldur Indridason] had made a couple of books that were not successful, this one was the first to become successful but I bought it before that. I read it and I thought it had very strong premises: it takes place in Iceland, it’s about characters, it talks about the old times in Iceland in a certain way -without going backwards but it’s connected to that- and how our modern society is going in another direction, maybe too fast, and the science of being able to find out your grandmother’s secrets when she was a young woman -probably playful like most of the young women like we want to have them but then you don’t want to know about that when it’s your grandmother! This is a fantastic story to work with but it took me a lot of time because it didn’t work straight from the page. It’s only when I found this new way of structuring it that it could work as a film. It took me six years to do that starting from when I bought the title -by that time the book had done really well. But it has no importance, the film has to work on its own.

How did you work on the screenplay? What was the adaptation work like?
I didn’t work linearly from the novel because the story is told from the point of view of the investigator finding a corpse until he finds the man he is looking for. Then you have the flashback of his story and then it continues. This didn’t work for me, it was just not interesting. Not until I kind of figured out it was the drama of two fathers losing a child and then I decided to tell their two stories in parallel, then I got really excited about this idea ; I tried to find other movies that were made the same way but I couldn’t find any. My co-producers thought it would be too difficult, that the people who had read the novel would not like it, that this would kill the movie, so I said “then I won’t do the movie”! It ended up my way and I think it was the right think to do. For some people it’s too complicated but you can never please everyone. I’m more worried about having people ahead of me in the cinema instead of a little bit behind, that’s ok, then they will have to go again to definitely figure it out! (laughter)

Did you want to make it easier for the audience by deciding with your cinematographer to use strong dominants to mark the different time periods?
This was always in our mind but I probably pushed that a little bit more in the post production. That came naturally from the story but I also wanted to hold people a little bit backwards, it’s a little different but people don’t realize it right away, it’s a part of how things come together and you understand it. I have been making films in studio, bigger budgets, but I wanted to do this one on location: no studios, no tricks, make it also for as little money as possible, the bigger the movies become, the more conventional they have to be. I wanted also to put a test on myself. So I used Fuji film, which is the cheapest. Not only for money but also for the colours: I really like its green tones and it’s more true to Iceland than Kodak. Kodak is more Hollywood -more yellow-, Fuji is greener, that’s why it wanted it. Then we decided to use old lenses and shoot it on 16mm but the wider shots are shot on 35mm -we used an old camera and it’s fantastic because we decided to use no tricks, it’s the best school I had as a director.

What were your influences while shooting this kind of genre movie? Were there clichés you wanted to avoid?
First of all I wanted to avoid as much as possible the clichés and pitfalls of thrillers, all the fake surprises. What I wanted to do is to build the tension inside, from the inside of your brain, not from sound effects. In my films, especially while working on this one, I want people to be able to watch it again and that everything makes sense too. It’s very easy to make the tricks ; there are movies that trick you and when you watch them again, you see the trick is not believable because the character wouldn’t be doing that at that time. I wanted to make the story slowly built up to raise tension, I’m not tensed in cinema with somebody running and shooting guns, there must be something else, something about relationships, about the things possibly happening more than when it happens. This is the kind of energy I was thinking about. There are also two ways that have become very overused in cinema today, like in old horror films: you use things to shock people for no reason, just to make it disgusting. On smaller films, more arty films, they have to create the cliché of only the reaction, you don’t see what you see, this has been done endlessly, it was original when it started but now “ok, you’re using that trick”. Like you do in theatre -it happens off-stage. But I really wanted to show when there was a reason to show. And then show it all. Not like hide for the old ladies because they can’t take a dead body, I really wanted people to smell the film, feel the film, almost taste the film, that’s why I never shy away.

The most disturbing thing in your film may be the scene when Erlendur eats his sheep’s head.
It’s exenstialistic -the death, the meat, the rotenning, this is life. When you go into a hotel like the one we are in now [Murano hotel], they try to hide the life, you sleep in a bed and feel like nobody has ever slept in it but of course people slept and had sex in it. But they’re hiding it, which is culture. It’s interesting in a film to embrace it. This is the thing these people eat and the actor loves it, it’s no faking there, it’s his favourite food. It’s like the old style of food and when the movie came out, it was on the cover of the biggest paper in Iceland that sheep heads sales had gone three hundred per cent up!

You said once in an interview that you were “sick of these Icelandic films with endless beautiful landscapes”. In your movie the landscapes are used to mark a frontier between a modern urban Iceland and a more archaic one?
The thing about landscape is that it’s almost like sex for me, if it’s not used for a purpose to tell you something it’s useless. In Jar City, it’s the memory of the cold wastelands, the endless distances between people and little villages, and sitting in your car on the road to visit your grandmother, sitting in your car forever and there’s nothing to see, it’s a different beauty, it’s also a way for me to show Erlendur’s emotions without having to give them verbally. You get his emotions through those pictures. It’s lonely, it’s almost biblical, he’s almost like a missionary, trying to correct things on his own.

Family relationships are at the heart of the movie, like it was in 101 Reykjavik and The Sea, is this something particularly important for you?
Relationships between parents and a child is something that you are one side of in the beginning of your life and then you go to the other side of it -or actually in the middle of it when you have your parents and children-, it’s something that is one of the biggest part of the journey through life, and when your child becomes your friend and stop being your child but is still your child, you have to learn as a parent not to interfere with your child’s life at a certain point -this thing nobody taught you, nobody taught you to be a parent. This is a journey you’re going through and part of that, in my case, is to tell stories about that. I think the brightest happy end I ever made is in Jar City, which is about him opening up to his daughter and sharing his thoughts with her instead of opposing and she actually caresses him. She really feels she needs to help her father, this is a turn in relationships, and for me an opportunity of growing from there. It’s not the end of the book, we decided in the editing room it should be the end.

Why did you choose the Police Choir for the film soundtrack?
This came for the fact that in a lot of films policemen are portrayed in a very negative way. But when you check the basis of the job, it’s actually very beautiful, it’s to help human beings walking through life without bumping too hard into each other, and when it happens: to find a solution. The basis of the job is very beautiful and I also started to talk to them, to investigate things and they were really close: “How does this affect you?”, “Oh we have no problem to deal with that” and then they start opening up and you realize they actually carry it up. All those family dramas they walk into ; they didn’ tell me but this is a unique thing in Iceland that the police sing, this is a big choir, they travel into the world to sing, and my understanding of that is that it’s a way to do something beautiful together. They’re always arresting people, fighting, and twice a week they sing together, in harmony. It’s not in the book but it’s something I really wanted, they’re like singing for all of us, trying to help us. It shows the police in a different perspective.

Interviewed by Olivier Gonord in Paris on September 5, 2008.

Read Baltasar Kormakur’s Pick of the Week.

A man’s corpse is found in his apartment. “A typically Icelandic, messy and uninteresting crime where the evidence is not even concealed” observes one of the investigators. A yellowed photo of a tomb found under a desk drawer leads the investigation to events that took place 40 years before. Jar City is adapted from the Arnaldur Indriason best seller by the same name and is the 5th feature film from Baltasar Kormakur who directed 101 Reykjavik, The Sea and Crime City.

As the story unfolds we follow a policeman from forgotten rural Iceland to the very heart of modern technology’s greatest symbol, where detective Erlendur must stir up memories and reveal buried secrets. Memory is at the centre of a story which tells Erlendur’s investigation at the same time as; in an earlier time space continuum, we discover the life of a man who has been destroyed by the loss of a child. The relationship with the father is also one of the main elements of a story that explores the issue of transmission in a full frontal and metaphorical way. Continuing the mistakes of elders, transmitting an evil that should no longer be spread, parent-child relationships are the main subject of the film. At the same time as he carries out his investigation, detective Erlendur renews his relationship with his wayward teenage daughter who finds her way home after an unfortunate pregnancy. Genetic heritage plays a key role in this theme and in the investigation leading Erlendur to the heart of the DeCode Genetics Corporation that was created in 2002 and was a major event in Iceland. 95% of all Icelandic residents were genetically “registered” in that year and the consequences thereof are cleverly exploited by the novel and film as they focus a variety of fascinating reflections on the subject.

The opening sequence sets the formal tone of the film: from the little girl’s hospital room to preparing her body for burial, the bluish light bathes images in a gritty grain and provides a specific and carefully defined focus. The images, especially those clearly delineated shots that are sometimes yellow or blue depending on the timing of depicted events are the remarkable work of director of photography Bergsteinn Björgúlfsson whose work we recently admired in the refreshing Back Soon by Solveig Anspach. In order to film his characters closely and best use the Icelandic landscapes without falling into an easy “postcard” aesthetic, the director depicts a country that is drawn between its archaic moments and its modernity and offers a great alternative to formatted American thrillers while avoiding their equally formulaic stumbling blocks.

Read the interview with Baltasar Kormakur about Jar City.

Tales of Ugetsu (1953) by Kenji Mizoguchi.


“I like universality, and a movie like this one, anybody, from anywhere, can see it and through it feel extraordinary emotions by its stories, so simple and moving, stories that concerns our inner souls and our nightmares, this beautifull dream that transforms, and this the human kind story. This is why this film, for me who comes from Colobane, talks to me like if Mizoguchi was coming from Colobane too, like if all the men and women that played in this film were coming from Colobane too, my childhood neighborhood. If was deeply moved by that.”

More details about Ugetsu (1953) by Kenji Mizoguchi.
Read the full interview with Wasis Diop.

Younger brother of filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambéty, whom he worked with a lot on his movies, Wasis Diop, as a musician, gave birth to a sensitive and very diverse work, a true invitation to travel. Whether sampled by Dr Dre & Track-master for “The Firm”, or chosen for the soundtrack of “The Thomas Crown Affair” by John McTiernan with Pierce Brosnan and Nina Simone, or for the films of a master of French cinema like Techiné, Wasis Diop continues his route with integrity and musical talent that make him an artist impossible to circumvent in World Music.