At first, we wonder what’s got into 24 year old Antonio Campos, director (as well as scriptwriter and editor) of this brilliant first film with its images of video gags and trashy porn bathed in the darkness of Scope, quirky framing, still shots of feet, etc. This focus on the formal, that looks at first like youthful folly, soon gains in substance. These images that seem “badly made” paradoxically reveal the presence of a real filmmaker. The question is who is he and why is he filming.

Let’s start at the beginning. In an upper class American boarding school, Robert, a stubborn, sex obsessed, teen loner masturbates in front of porn videos in his room while his buddy Dave deals cocaine. Elsewhere, students line up in a long corridor where they are given medication. At the canteen, one says, “You know, I fucked your sister,” “That’s coke whores for you.” says another, the way you’d say, “Pass the salt.” Meanwhile the school principal regularly reminds everyone of the school’s gentle ethics in a setting that looks like a chapel with a flag.
Then suddenly death rears its ugly head. The Thalbert sisters, pretty young twins who are the school’s muses, overdose in front of Robert’s camera. He is there by accident, fascinated, shocked or stunned - it is hard to say.
Up until then, there’s nothing new under the sun in this teen chronicle of the unease of the wealthy. Except that what interests Antonio Campos are the images.
These are the film’s real heroes; enigmatic, omnipresent and disturbing. They are pumped out by YouTube, picked up by cell phones, recorded by Robert for his video workshop or forbidden by the institution to save its reputation and its wealthy clients.
The director uses many sources and presents banal or terrible images on the same level. He seeks out reality but is aware it always slips away from him. Yet the film that Robert makes at the school’s request about the Thalbert sisters, with its flaws, its silences and the parents who suddenly have nothing to say, seems more ”true” than the empty, reedited film that ends up being shown to the school assembly with its endless repetition of “I will miss you,” over grandiloquent music.
If there is trauma it is in this camouflage; the gentle, muffled hushing-up, that like the medication handed out to the students is supposed to prevent anyone getting upset.
The images, like urges, keep coming. And Antonio Campos, like his stubborn hero, keeps following them, like an attentive and disturbing entomologist.

Emmanuelle Mougne

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

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.

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.

Though often disregarded or ignored in movie history, Mitchell Leisen played a significant role in American film history before living in oblivion. First working successfully as a costume designer then on sets decoration for filmmakers such as Cecil B. DeMille, Allan Dwan or Raoul Walsh, Mitchell Leisen produced as a director a brilliant work -ethereal and sophisticated-, working with the most brilliant people of his times -whether writers and actors. From Hands Across the Table or Arise my Love to Easy Living or the exhilarating Midnight, Mitchell Leisen developed his talents as an actors director, an artistic supervisor, showing a precise way to direct his films and rewriting the scripts of the films he worked on, which caused him to be hated by people like Preston Sturges or Billy Wilder. But no doubt Mitchell Leisen‘s films would never have been the same without this rewriting work: they probably wouldn’t have been so light and elegant and even though he is now ignored, his films would never have been so influent in this golden age of the American film comedy. The upcoming release in France of two of his major movies (Midnight and Hands Across the Table), the tribute to his work this year at Deauville American Film Festival and the current retrospective that is showing now at the French Cinemathèque in Paris until November 2, are major opportunities to rediscover the brilliant work of a unique director.

See the programme of the Mitchell Leisen Retrospective at the French Cinemathèque in Paris.
See the programme of the Tribute to Mitchell Leisen at Deauville American Film Festival.

Scampia is a suburb to the north of Naples, and a crossroads for global drug trafficking. Gomorra follows the lives of a dozen characters involved in the activities of the Camorra at different levels, all bound by the economic system of the most important criminal organisation in Europe.

With their disappointed and broken hopes and destinies, the characters in Gomorra are subject to a law that, although it is not overt, governs the lives of the people who live in the suburbs of Naples. The Camorra takes charge of its members from an early age, after a rite of passage that is as brutal as it is symbolic, and accompanies them after retirement with a pension scheme. Trafficking in drugs of all kinds, control of the rag trade, both legal and otherwise, the “management” of waste – we are spared nothing of the organisation’s activities, and the film, adapted from the bestseller by Roberto Saviano describing the organisation’s activities in Naples which earned its author a death sentence from the underworld, relies on its documentary skill. The director’s desire to address the subject comprehensively is palpable, as he uses the experiences of the individual characters to relate the tangible reality of everyday life in this suburb to the north of Naples. What interests the director is the everyday lives of ordinary people and the direct effects of the Camorra’s activities on the population of Scampia. But –and this is really one of the strong points of this remarkable film– the functioning of the Camorra in Naples never takes precedence over the dramaturgical aspect or the awesomely effective directing.
Gomorra is not only a brilliant documentary study – it is also a truly great genre film. Indeed by concentrating too much on the informative aspect of the film there is a risk of overlooking what makes it a great film. The filming and the photography are brilliant, staying close to the characters, sometimes seeing the world through their eyes, sometimes merely following them, but always there, with dynamic, inspired directing. Breathing palpable life into the characters, the director avoids the pitfall of turning them into major representative stereotyped figures and, beyond the documentary aspect, he makes us experience and feel with them the pregnant presence of the Camorra and the influence it exerts on everyone’s lives, whether they like it or not. At no time does the director use the mythology and iconography typical of the Mafia film. There is no indulgence in describing the underworld, or in the way of handling the other aspect of this ordinary war –violence– which is dry and cold, harsh and summary. In a word – ordinary.

One of the films in the official selection at the last Cannes Festival, where it received the Grand Prix, Gomorra is an exciting lesson in the cinema and proof of the rediscovered vitality of European cinema which, in Italy, Spain and Germany, is once more producing films for the general public that are both intelligent and technically brilliant.

Olivier Gonord

Richard Avedon was one of the most influential American photographers of the 20th century, in the tradition of Walker Evans, Robert Mapplethorpe and Diane Arbus.

Born in 1923, this portrait artist joined, so to speak, the merchant marine when he was hired to shoot ID photos of crew members with his Rollei camera, a gift from his father Jacob.
Alexey Brodovitch, artistic director at Harper’s Bazaar, quickly became his mentor and close friend, sensing the talent of this young advertising photographer.
Avedon went on to create a legendary series of photos for Harper’s, and for Vogue as well, revolutionizing the world of fashion photography by shattering old norms and injecting irony, movement and glamor into a field where rigidness had once reigned.
In parallel with his work in fashion, Avedon developed little by little his extraordinary portrait style. Photographing actors, musicians and poets, he privileged a raw relationship with his subject, focusing on the emotional encounter between photographer and subject, and glorifying the accuracy of the instant (“All photos are accurate. None of them is the truth.”) by getting rid of all contextualizing elements and anything else that might draw attention away from the “geography of the face.”
He thus perfected his signature style, with the subject against a neutral background (white and sometimes gray in the 1950s, and then a stark, optical white as of the late 1960s) framed by the black border of the negative, expressing in an obvious, and radical, way his relationship with the photographic act. This relationship, according to Avedon, was not a means of approaching reality (although he found that could be “very interesting”), but of “taking and dealing with the surface of things,” and is currently spotlighted in the retrospective at the Jeu de Paume in Paris.
Avedon’s work was long-term, almost painstaking in its repetition, as can be seen in such series as In the American West, originally commissioned by the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. Dating from 1979 to 1984, the 752 portraits taken from some 17,000 rolls of film depict the photographer’s socially-neutral but aesthetically-intensive perspective, and are considered by some the highpoint of his career.
Large prints – harsh and (obviously) in black and white – are as surprisingly natural as they are delicately constructed; the viewer is entranced by the artist’s knack at capturing, in the blink of an eye, the entirety, and complexity, of his human subjects, revealing both what they wish to show of themselves and what they actually are.
Whether it be the melancholic depth of Marilyn Monroe captured in 1958, the disturbing symmetry between certain portraits from the In The American West series and that of Warhol’s Factory in 1967, or portraits of Christ-like miners, Avedon revealed ineffable, or even invisible, instants with an eternal brightness.
For more than 50 years, Richard Avedon was the photographer of disparity, flouting convention, and making him, along with his affection, intelligence and force, one of the leading-edge explorers of his time.

Tiphaine Kazi-Tani

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

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.

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.