Telluride Film Watch 2016

A Publication of the telluride film festival & telluride Newspapers

2016

TELLURIDE HAS THE

BEST FALL

COLORS PLEASE STAY ON THE GRASS

RECREATIONAL & MEDICAL CANNABIS CENTER

250 SOUTH FIR STREET 728-7999

OPEN 11 AM – 7 PM

ONE BLOCK EAST OF THE TELLURIDE GONDOLA STATION

July July 20 20 -- 23, 23, 2017 2017

How much much are are they they How asking for for that that house? house? asking How many many bedrooms bedrooms does does How it have? have? What What does does the the it interior look look like? like? interior Find your your answers answers at at Find

SearchTellurideRealEstate.com SearchTellurideRealEstate.com

Tel d e Yo g a F eest s t ival.com Te llu l urriide YogaF iv al.com

tellurideyogacenter tellurideyogacenter Be Be sure sure to to visit visit the the

BINDU BINDU • BOUTIQUE

located located in in the the studio studio

201 201 W. W. Colorado Colorado Ave. Ste. 200 Upstairs Upstairs in in the the Nugget Nugget Bldg., Bldg., Corner Corner of Main St. & Fir View Viewschedule schedule online online at: at: tellurideyoga.com, tellurideyoga.com, (970) 729-1673 DROP-INS DROP-INSWELCOME WELCOME •• WE WE OFFER OFFER MANY MANY STYLES STYLES AND LEVELS

WEEKEND OF WELLNESS WEEKEND JUNE 88 -- 11, 11, 2017 JUNE

D EE W WO OW . C O M TTEELLLLUURR II D

970.728.0808 970.728.0808 237 237 South South Oak Oak Street Street @ @ the the Telluride Telluride Gondola Gondola

contents

Editor Jason Silverman creative director Casey Nay Associate Editor Jonathan Silverman

Contributors

026

Laure Adler, Sean Axmaker, Sheerly Avni, Ramin Bahrani Michael Barker, Cate Blanchett, Meredith Brody, Justin Chang Michel Ciment, Mark Danner, Manohla Dargis, Don DeLillo Laurent Durieux, Geoff Dyer, David Fear, Mara Fortes Scott Foundas, Gregory Freidin, Amir Ganjavie, Gary Giddins Larry Gross, Gary Indiana, Eric Kohn, Fabien Lemercier Geoffrey Macnab, Leonard Maltin, Angus Macqueen 028

Gail Mazur, Davia Nelson, Nicholas O’Neill Miguel Pendás, Stephen Saito, Peter Sellars, Volker Schlöndorff Krista Smith, Milos Stehlik, John Tagliabue, Bertrand Tavernier François Truffaut, Ginette Vincendeau Christopher Wallenberg, John Wranovics

036

Copy Editors

Seth Cagin, Marta Tarbell, Fiona Armour, Mara Fortes, Katie Klingsporn Transcriptions Andromachi Papangeli Marketing Director Maureen Pelisson Marketing Coordinator Lea St. Amand

054

Advertising

Dusty Atherton, Maureen Pelisson, Jennifer Sulze, David Nunn Production Manager Hanah Ausencio Graphic Designers Connor O’Neill, Nola Svoboda Office Manager Shelly Bolus 064 Cover Design Yann Legendre

Published by Telluride Newspapers Publisher Andrew Mirrington

080

Associate Publisher Dusty Atherton Editor Andre Salvail Associate Editor Stephen Elliott

307 East Colorado Avenue, Telluride, CO 81435 970.728.9788 www.telluridenewspapers.com

Co-published by The Telluride Film Festival

800 Jones Street, Berkeley, CA 94710 510.665.9494 www.telluridefilmfestival.org

089

GUEST DIRECTOR 007 Volker Schlöndorff 008 Voyager’s complexity 008 Volker: coming of age TRIBUTES 010 A Tribute to Casey Affleck 012 Manchester: a family adrift 014 A Tribute to Amy Adams 016 Arrival: otherworldly challenge 018 A Tribute to Pablo Larraín 019 Neruda art and ideology R E V I VA L S 020 Variety: Circus tale 022 France, food, film: The Pagnol Trilogy: Marius, Fanny, Cesar 024 It Was the Month of May: post-war horror 026 Lang’s thrilling Spies 028 The Fire Within: Malle’s gem 030 The Barefoot Contessa: Hollywood satire 032 Cocteau + Melville = Les Enfants Terribles 034 Soviet fear and reprisal: Gulag 035 East German classic: I Was Nineteen NEW FILMS 036 Keys to the past: California Typewriter 037 DeLillo on typewriters 038 Toni Erdmann: Kaufman-esque comedy 040 Jerry Lewis: The Man Behind the Clown 042 Graduation: the seep of corruption 044 Wakefield’s suburban adventure 046 La La Land: L.A.’s musical moment 048 First contact: The End of Eden 050 Amazing Grace: Aretha like never before 052 A Journey to the Heart of French Cinema 053 Cinephile: Pierre Rissient 054 Boxing comeback: Bleed for This 056 Painful memories: Una 060 Maudie: art lovers 062 Lost in Paris: clowning around 062 Hero of the Hudson: Sully 064 Chasing Trane finds jazz great’s essence 066 Moonlight gets personal 068 Elsa Dorfman: Polaroid art 070 Gere’s scheming: Norman 072 Frantz: The mysteries of war 073 Through The Wall 074 Men: A Love Story: What is love?

076 Herzog’s volcanoes: Into the Inferno 078 Justice for Guatemala: Finding Oscar 080 Beauties of the Night in Mexico 081 I Called Him Morgan: A Jazz tragedy 082 Eagle Huntress: Mongolian trailblazer 084 Fire at Sea: the refugee crisis 085 The Coppolas: The Family Whistle 086 Reynolds and Fisher: Bright Lights 088 Cool Cats: jazz greats in Denmark 089 The greatest action hero: Mifune 090 Bernadette Lafont: New Wave’s forgotten icon 092 Isabelle Huppert in Things to Come 093 Rescue story: The Ivory Game 093 A Fanatic Heart: Bob Geldof on W.B. Yeats SPECIAL PROGRAMS 094 Filmmakers of Tomorrow:

Great Expectations, Calling Cards, Student Prints 096 Snapshots 097 COVER ARTIST Yann Legendre 098 IN MEMORIAM

FOR SHOWTIMES, VENUES AND TICKET INFO, SEE THE OFFICIAL TELLURIDE FILM FESTIVAL 2016 PROGRAM GUIDE OR VISIT telluridefilmfestival.org

FILMWATCH • N

5

Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group.

Worldwide Hospitality Partner of the Telluride Film Festival.

THE AMERICAS Atlanta • Boston • Las Vegas • Miami • New York • Washington DC EUROPE, MIDDLE EAST & AFRICA Barcelona • Bodrum • Geneva • London • Madrid • Marrakech • Milan • Munich • Paris • Prague ASIA-PACIFIC Bangkok • Guangzhou • Hong Kong • Jakarta • Kuala Lumpur • Macau • Sanya • Shanghai • Singapore • Taipei • Tokyo For more information, visit mandarinoriental.com

BARKER

SC H L ö N D O R F F

Going the Distance Volke r S chl öndorff’s e xtraordinary career

By Michael Barker Volker Schlöndorff is one of cinema’s great treasures: a writer, director, cinephile, marathon runner, studio chief and great friend to the Telluride Film Festival. He was an assistant to Jean-Pierre Melville, Alain Resnais and Louis Malle at the height of the Nouvelle Vague and was a key figure, with Werner Herzog, Werner Rainer Fassbinder and Margarethe von Trotta, of the groundbreaking New German Cinema. His 1979 film The Tin Drum won both the Palme d’Or and an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. Other notable works include Swann in Love (1984), Coup de grâce (1976), The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1975), The Handmaid’s Tale (1990) and Diplomacy (2014). He spoke with Michael Barker about his distinguished career.

MICHAEL BARKER: You and I met each other at our first Telluride in 1981. I was at United Artists Classics, and you had directed Circle of Deceit. I believe it was the world premiere.

VOLKER SCHOLONDORFF: Oh yes, it was almost like a rough cut. I brought it in a suitcase to hide it from customs and somehow managed to get it through the Boston airport. It’s set in the war in Lebanon, and in the middle of the screening at the Sheridan Opera House everything went dark, a power failure. I came onstage with a torch lamp, and I told the rest of the story live.

I’m sure my intervention improved the picture enormously for the audience!

Sam Fuller was in the audience, and he criticized you. He thought the movie was perfect except for the ending.

And you and your colleagues came up with the title. The original translation was Forgery and when I told Sam the title, he said, “Well, nowadays you could almost call any movie Circle of Deceit.” (Laughs)

Volker Schlöndorff 2016 Telluride Film Festival Guest Director Curated program includes: I WAS NINETEEN (East Germany, 1968) IT HAPPENED IN MAY (U.S.S.R., 1970) THE FIRE WITHIN (France, 1963) THE BAREFOOT CONTESSA (U.S., 1954) LES ENFANTS TERRIBLES (France, 1950) SPIES (Germany, 1928)

Your first film was Young Törless, and then you were part of a new German generation, the New German Cinema. Tell us about that.

I was in France, where I had fled from my father for two years, to learn French at a boarding school. I liked it so much I didn’t return home for ten years. I studied and became an assistant director in France and that was the moment before the Nouvelle Vague, before Truffaut and Godard made their first films.

I wanted to make French films, but Louis Malle and my other close friends told me, “Go back to Germany and make films there.” I was sent back home, into exile. During the first week, I met both Werner Herzog, who had just made his third short film, and Alexander Kluge, whom I sublet a studio from. Munich was a small town then. There were barely a dozen people in the country that 9 wanted to make movies. It’s not like today.

FILMWATCH • N

7

Coming of Age

By Volker Schlöndorff

Life Is a Curve

BY JOHN TAGLIABUE Volker Schlöndorff already had an Oscarwinning movie, The Tin Drum (1979), to his credit when he moved to New York, following the trail of many young German directors to the United States. But by 1987 his career had stalled, his marriage to the filmmaker Margarethe von Trotta was breaking up, and at the age of 47 he could perhaps identify with a man like Walter Faber. At this point the idea came to him of filming the tale of Faber, the antihero created in 1959 by the Swiss novelist Max Frisch in his novel Homo Faber. In Schlöndorff’s Voyager, the character is a Swiss engineer who inadvertently falls into a tryst with his own daughter, conceived two decades before, during a love affair with a young Jewish woman in Zurich.

Frisch wrote the novel as a kind of reflection on his country’s complex but little-analyzed role in World War II. The story is laced with the thoughtlessness and casual neglect of the Swiss engineer toward the young Jewish woman, who bears the child on the eve of World War II. The character shows some resemblance to Frisch, a frustrated architect turned author. But for Schlöndorff, who ultimately obtained the movie rights once held

by Anthony Quinn, the story was less a political morality tale than a haunting chronicle of personal destruction. As a result, he felt comfortable changing the nationality of the protagonist, although most of the settings and other characters have remained European.

Sam Shepard plays Faber, and the character is transformed into an American engineer.

As with many of Schlöndorff’s adaptations (among them Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1990), the highly acclaimed television production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1985), starring Dustin Hoffman, and, of course, Günter Grass’ Tin Drum), the book’s author played an intense role. Tragi-

VOYAGER Germany, 1991, 117m Director: Volker Schlöndorff Stars: Sam Shepard, Julie Delpy

N

8

• FILMWATCH

•

cally, Frisch was diagnosed with terminal cancer during production. He died in 1991 at the age of 79, before the film was completed but not before approving significant changes and the principal actors and actresses, as Schlöndorff, chatting in his Munich apartment, remembers.

One casting decision made a particular impact. Frisch seemed almost overwhelmed by the choice of the young French actress Julie Delpy to play the unwitting daughter Sabeth. “You could feel there was some emotional link” between the two, “not just that she was a fine actress. Some chord was touched.”

Frisch had a very different reaction to Sam Shepard. He was initially shocked by Shepard’s portrayal of Faber, says Schlöndorff. “He found this man was so closed within himself. He perceived him as laconic, feeling-less, like a killer. Frisch was afraid that people would hate the character.

It showed enormous grandeur to accept this tall, lean American as his alter ego.”

For Schlöndorff, the choice of an actor to play Faber was crucial; he considered a number of actors, including William Hurt, but settled on Shepard, partly because of his unorthodox acting habits.

“Sam contributed a great deal to the film, not so much by writing as by his reactions,” says Schlöndorff. “Some actors can give you any line you write down.

Others, like Sam, can only read a line when they feel it’s right. And when he felt it was wrong, I didn’t question his capacity as an actor. I said something must be wrong with the line; something may even be wrong with this situation.”

While some may see the film as a story of a man who entraps himself unknowingly with his daughter, Schlöndorff says the film is really “a very private story, telling you that you cannot, say, at 50, pick up your emotional life where you left it at 25. … You may say it’s too bad she happens to be his daughter, otherwise they’d be a happy couple forever after.

But the story would not work even if it were not incest. The point is that he is denying his age, denying his experience.

He is denying the fact, as Max Frisch put it, that life is a curve. It’s not a vector that goes on and on in a straight line.”

John Tagliabue is former New York Times correspondent. Copyright The New York Times.

Reprinted with permission.

Guest Director

•

I am not sure I was somebody when I was born, but in the words of Raymond Queneau’s Zazie: “la vie m’a fait ce que je suis”: “life has made me what I am.”

I have no memories of night air raids spent in underground shelters, even though there must have been many such nights. I remember that around my fifth birthday, in March 1944, we moved out of the city, into the countryside. We were “bombed out” as the expression went, meaning that our house in the industrial suburb of Wiesbaden had been hit by a bomb and was gone.

But the real event had happened a few weeks earlier. As my father saw his patients on the ground floor, my mother was warming up floor wax polish on the kitchen stove.

My younger brother and I were playing on the second floor. Suddenly there was a huge howling. We raced down the corridor; our father stormed out of his office, up the stairs.

Too late. Thick smoke was coming from the kitchen. A spark had ignited the liquid wax, which exploded in a big flame. Mother stood in the kitchen, her body a torch.

I know it sounds like a picture from a horror tale, from Struwwelpeter to be precise—for that is how I imagined it. Gerda, our kitchen help, immediately locked us in the bedroom. I only remember how, with my tiny fists, I pounded on the door behind which something terrible was happening.

Decades later I had little Oskar pounding just as desperately on the lavatory door, behind which his mother, poor Agnes Matzerath, was in agony after swallowing too much fish: sardines, tuna, herring, eels.

I allowed myself no feelings, no pain, no mourning for the loss. The next image in my pathetic recollection shows me six weeks later with a Pickelhaube, the Prussian helmet, and a wooden sword on the uppermost step of the same stairs leading to the kitchen. The charred furniture was still there. It was my fifth birthday. The same day we moved to the country, into the woods. It was the beginning of something new. Mutti, as we called her, was now in heaven; we moved on. For me, moving, packing, going elsewhere was to be associated forever with loss and mourning.

“Jetzt ist alles, alles aus … ,”, so father told us, were her last words.

A few days after my sixth birthday, my older brother had to climb up the big birch tree to hang a white bed sheet from the top, as a sign of our capitulation. “They’re coming”: through the woods they came, on big trucks and shiny jeeps. Young, friendly GIs, so different from the bitter, haggard Weh-

tributes

•

revivals

•

rmacht, who hours before had thrown their guns into the rain-filled bomb craters in the woods, giving up all hope of the “Endsieg.”

Soon every one of us kids had his American friend. Nineteen- and twenty-year-old guys from such exotic places as Idaho and Nebraska became our natural allies, for they had defeated our parents. “Off limits,” “no fraternization” were the first words we learned to ignore. We were interested in their trucks and guns, they in our bikes and sisters. We went to the boys’ club, learned baseball and soapbox racing, we traded brand new copies of Mein Kampf for Camels and Pall Malls. Soon officers’ families followed, and we lived in American suburbia, while receiving at home an education according to the rules of my father’s world, the world of Kaiser Wilhelm.

During dinner, father would seize every opportunity to advance “our education,” whatever the topic of conversation. Time and again we had to fetch the Brockhaus Encyclopedia, Wasserzieher’s thesaurus or a Duden dictionary to determine the meaning, origin and spelling of a word. Father added the ideological “deeper meaning.”

Amazingly we must have been listening, because I still remember a lot of this quite schizophrenic upbringing.

As I grew older, books became my refuge. I skipped the boyish reading of Karl May adventure novels and went straight to the American Mark Twain. Later on I discovered Balzac, Dostoevsky and Hemingway. I only lived when reading. My emotions and adventures were literary: I trusted the paper more than my personal experience. I discovered myself in the characters of those novels. Life in books seemed to me more intense, more real than so-called real life. I was seriously infected with literature.

I earned money to buy a first box camera working as a caddy for Americans on a golf course. Photography became my hobby.

Early in the morning I went out to catch the rising sun in the mist—or else willows over a pond in the moonlight—to illustrate some haikus, and I felt very creative.

Based on a chapter of Volker Schöndorff’s Licht, Schatten und Bewegung: Mein Leben und meine Filme (Munich: Hanser, 2008). Reprinted with permission of the author.

new films

•

Special

•

7

It seemed like all of you had something important you really wanted to say.

We were obsessed. And we were appalled by the fact that German history and German reality didn’t exist in German films. Now that we had cameras, we could shoot outdoors and in the streets, and have direct sound. The trials on the concentration camps started, so that was our subject. We had suffered from the silence of 15 years, and we were happy now to finally speak up, to say all the things our parents didn’t tell us.

One thing that has been distinctive about you as a filmmaker is that you always gravitate towards adapting great works of literature: Young Törless, Swann in Love, Death of a Salesman, The Tin Drum.

Fortunately, nobody else is sharing this vice. Early on I loved reading.

People in books seemed more real to me than so-called true stories. In most of my adaptations, it was the quality of the literary work and some affinity I felt with my own experience.

It came to me naturally that when I wanted to make a film about my experience in a boarding school, I used Robert Musil [author of The Confessions of Young Törless]. … I’m a great Proust reader. Arthur Miller was the American literature I grew up with from 1945 onwards.

There were more American men, soldiers, officers and their families around the Frankfurt area than Germans. Actually your father, Michael, was one of them. I could speak for hours about Death of a Salesman. Willy Loman is very close to me.

I wanted to make French films, but Louis Malle and my other close friends told me, “Go back to Germany and make films there.”

For years, people said, “Tin Drum could never be a movie.”

You seem never to be afraid of these challenges.

This is another deep American influence on me. I am personally very often hesitant, but to overcome my own fears, the best thing for me is to just do it.

You are very American, Volker.

(Laughs) When it comes to Louisiana [where Schlöndorff shot A Gathering of Old Men], I can tell you I sometimes had the feeling that I knew more about the place than most Americans. By the way, I’m an honorary citizen of Thibodaux, and I have the key to the city. I just can’t find the door.

You have lived up to the fantasies of a lot of people like me. You were assistant to all these great directors—Melville, Malle, Rappeneau, then you became friends with Arthur Miller and Billy Wilder and made movies with Richard Widmark, Dustin Hoffman, Alain Delon and Robert Duvall. You became the head of the major motion picture studio in Germany history. I remember you gave me a tour of this massive studio with miles of costumes and sets. Then you came back to making movies.

I finally wrote my memoir, but unfortunately it is not translated into English.

But I could bring you a very nice Chinese edition.

I would love it.

It feels embarrassing to hear the names of the people I’ve worked with and the things I’ve done. But it all just seemed natural to me at the time.

Michael Barker is, with Tom Bernard, the co-president and co-founder of Sony Pictures Classics, which celebrates its 25th anniversary in 2017. Barker and Bernard’s films have received more than 150 Oscar nominations.

FILMWATCH • N

9

KOHN

A F F L EC K

ERIC KOHN: When did you know you wanted to be an actor?

CASEY AFFLECK: There was no one moment when I decided I would spend my life acting. I am not certain that I will. Acting has never been a consistent passion. I have done it since I was young—so I have been acting for 30 years—but intermittently. I always had other jobs, joys and creative outlets.

Your first prominent film role in Gus Van Sant’s To Die For, not the most conventional of projects. What impression did that experience leave on you?

I was 18 and the process was new to me. I was trying to give the director what he wanted and not embarrass myself. Now, 20 years later, I see how lucky I was to have had that experience early in my career.

Many of my jobs have resulted in a series of mortifying revelations spread over years and years following the shoot. Walking down the street, thousands of miles and a decade removed from the set, I might suddenly understand some note a director gave me and cringe at how I misinterpreted it or argued about it. To Die For, being my first movie of a certain kind, is rife with examples of this. But on the set, Gus tolerated me patiently. Gus let me say stupid things and make mistakes and never corrected me or contained me. All the learning happened with distance and on my own, without any shame. Joaquin [Phoenix] and I felt like we could do anything in those scenes. Gus allowed for that sense of inclusion and freedom. And when it was all done he would cull Cas ey A ff l e c k avoi ds t he hy p e through the footage and pluck the a n d d o es t he wor k one or two decent moments and use them expertly and artistically.

Having that experience right out of the gate left me with the CASEY AFFLECK is a film-lover’s actor, an artist who avoids the idea that people who make movies limelight, revels in smaller parts, and brings depth, intelligence are artistic and smart and fun and and soul to any role he inhabits. Though a critics’ favorite, he has kind, and that I could make lastyet to become a household name (despite his Oscar nomination ing friends in this business. I could for The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert have easily had the opposite expeFord). That may change with the forthcoming release of Kenneth rience on my first adult job, but I Lonergan’s MANCHESTER BY THE SEA, screening at the had this one, with these people. festival. He spoke with ERIC KOHN about his career.

And I am eternally grateful.

Deep Learning

The Assassination of Jesse James By the Coward Robert Ford was considered a major breakout moment for you, but it wasn’t a huge success.

What did you get out of the experience?

The experience of shooting a film is really the experience of whatever relationship you form with the director. Even in films in which I have played someone who falls in love with an actress or raises a child or something, the most profound relationship at work is always with the director. You idolize them or hate them or fall in love with them or they become a parent figure. Or all of it. The best experiences I have had were the ones with the most charged and intimate relationship with the director.

Andrew Dominik is a uniquely talented film director. Making that movie was in part learning to give over entirely to a director. That doesn’t mean becoming a puppet, it means bringing as much as you possibly can to the role, preparing as well as you can, having as many ideas as you can for every scene and line, feeling as connected emotionally as you can to every moment … And then letting it all go and trusting everything the director says.

I have been very lucky to work with people who inspire me, who I admire and respect and who have made films (before working with me) that I continually return to over the years because they are so good.

A TRIBUTE TO CASEY AFFLECK The program includes a selection of clips followed by the presentation of the Silver Medallion, an onstage interview led by John Horn (Friday) and Eric Kohn (Saturday), followed by Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea (see page 12).

N

10 • FILMWATCH

•

Guest Director

•

tributes

•

revivals

•

Many of these people are great directors and something else—a painter, a playwright, a musician. Andrew is a pure film director. He is just a film director. Without a lot of experience he seems to know more than anyone. He pushed everyone. He made everyone better. He had brilliant ideas for actors and for costumers and set designers and on and on—and especially for me. He was hard to please and I knew that if he didn’t think something was working he was probably right.

The film was released without a lot of enthusiasm and was met with even less.

That isn’t very important to me. It is almost nothing to do with my experience on the film.

In Manchester By the Sea, you play a man reeling from a terrible tragedy that changed his life years earlier.

What were some of the challenges of getting inside this man’s head?

Just the obvious one of coming to work and making yourself feel really terrible everyday.

Much of writer-director Kenneth Lonergan’s experience comes from theater. How did he guide your performance? And even though the film contains dark, dramatic material, it’s quite funny. How did you relate to these shifts in tone?

He guided my performance with patience and sensitivity. Nobody could have helped me as much as he did.

I had faith in Kenny and the material.

There isn’t a word in the script he hadn’t chosen very carefully. And Kenny never writes without some humor. He is funny. He sees the humor in situations. It doesn’t undermine the drama. It might make the tragedy felt even more. I consider Kenny a family member whom I love and feel very close to.

I acted in one of his plays. He was there quite a bit, doing most of the directing. I was familiar enough with his writing to know that I would never improve on it. Whatever suggestions I made had better be about the acting only. The words were perfect. Nobody understands the intricate complexities of his writing as well as he does. He trusts his actors, but is firm in where the scene should go and how the dialogue should work. He is brilliant. And our relationship was deepened and widened and filled with love over the course of making this movie.

I am astonished and humbled by how lucky I am to work with Kenny on material this good. Sincerely.

Eric Kohn is the chief film critic and a senior editor for Indiewire and manager of the Criticwire network. His work has appeared in The New York Times, New York magazine, Variety and Filmmaker.

new films

•

Special

•

filmography

Casey Affleck

b. August 12, 1975 Falmouth, Massachusetts

Actor Manchester by the Sea (2016)

1 4

Triple 9 (2016)

3

The Finest Hours (2016) Interstellar (2014) Out of the Furnace (2013) Ain’t Them Bodies Saints (2013) ParaNorman (2012) Tower Heist (2011) WWII in HD: The Air War (TV) (2010) I’m Still Here (2010) The Killer Inside Me (2010) Gone Baby Gone (2007)

1

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) Ocean’s Thirteen (2007) The Last Kiss (2006)

2

Lonesome Jim (2005) Ocean’s Twelve (2004) Gerry (2002) 2

Ocean’s Eleven (2001) Soul Survivors (2001) American Pie 2 (2001) Attention Shoppers (2000) Hamlet (2000) Committed (2000) Drowning Mona (2000) 200 Cigarettes (1999) Desert Blue (1998) Good Will Hunting (1997) Floating (1997)

3

Chasing Amy (1997) Race the Sun (1996) To Die For (1995) The Kennedys of Massachusetts (TV mini-series) (1990) Lemon Sky (1988)

Director I’m Still Here (2010) The Book of Charles (1999)

Writer I’m Still Here (2010) Gerry (2002) 4

Producer I Am Dying (TV) (executive producer) (2015) I’m Still Here (producer) (2010) All Grown Up (TV Movie) (executive producer) (2003) Information compiled from IMDB.com and Film Reference.

FILMWATCH • N

11

Jacks of All Trades By daVid Fear Kenneth Lonergan knows how to use the medium of cinema to communicate the human condition in all its ragged glory; he’s the closest thing we have to an American Yasujiro Ozu. If you’ve seen his work—the handful of films he’s directed and half-dozen one-acts and plays he’s penned—you understand why he’s racked up numerous theater awards, Oscar nods and a Pulitzer nomination.

And if you’re lucky enough to meet Lonergan, you’ll understand where that singular voice comes from. The shaggy, bespectacled 53-year-old director of You Can Count on Me (2000) and Margaret (2011) acts like a Kenneth Lonergan character. Within seconds of meeting an interviewer, he’ll jokingly call him an asshole and then affectionately pat him on the arm. He stumbles through answers only to suddenly, passionately verve into eloquence and righteousness. He comes off as simultaneously happy, Eeyorish-ly sad and constantly radiating a deep sense of empathy.

Most of all, he seems genuinely surprised to hear that he’s just made a masterpiece.

Manchester by the Sea follows a Bostonbased handyman named Lee (Casey Affleck) who goes about his daily chores with a sense of quiet desperation. A phone call summons him back to the seaside town of his youth that gives the movie its name, with unexpected news: His brother (Friday Night Lights’ Kyle Chandler) has passed away. When he gets there, he discovers that his sibling’s will names him as the guardian of his surly teen

maNChesTer By The sea United States, 2016, 135m Writer/director: Kenneth Lonergan Starring: Kyle Chandler, Michelle Williams, Casey Affleck

N

12 • FILMWATCH

•

nephew (Lucas Hedges, in a star-making role). A series of flashbacks reveal their tight bond—and that Lee’s old-wounds history makes returning to the old neighborhood impossible to contemplate.

‘I don’t like the fact that, nowadays, it feels like it’s not permissible to leave something unresolved,” Lonergan said. “I mean, what the fuck is closure? Some people never get that. Some people live with their trauma for years. … Some people can’t get over something major that’s happened to them at all. Why can’t they have a movie too? Why can’t there be one film about somebody who doesn’t magically bounce back?”

The genesis for Manchester came from actor John Krasinski (The Office) and Boston native Matt Damon, who had starred in a production of a Lonergan play over a decade ago and had appeared in the director’s sophomore feature, Margaret (2011). The duo had been kicking around an idea about an emotionally crippled jack-of-all-trades and approached Lonergan to help them flesh it out.

“Once I read a very, very rough draft—it was about 4,000 pages—I just begged Kenny ... ‘You have to direct it,’” Damon said. “It’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever come across. I was going to be in it, he was going to direct, and then ... I had a full slate.

I couldn’t do it for a year. And in a bizarre kind of fit of generosity, I gave it to Casey.

I wouldn’t give this role up to anybody but Casey Affleck.”

Thank god he did. Though the entire cast performs well—from Gretchen Mol, who plays a recovering alcoholic, to Michelle Williams as Lee’s bitter, brittle ex-wife—Affleck is the revelation here; this is his movie from the beginning. Whether quietly rebuffing people who want to get closer to him or trash talking with his spiky ward, the actor gives what is easily his most layered, nuanced performance to date. He’s given impressive turns

Guest Director

•

before—see Gone Baby Gone or The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford—but the way Affleck gradually shows you the man’s bone-deep grief and emotional damage makes you believe that one of this generation’s finest actors has simply been waiting to be coaxed out.

“Casey just threw himself into this, pressing me on every detail and wanting to know the thought process behind every decision,” Lonergan said. “There were a lot of discussions about how we’d show what’s going on in the head of someone who’s closed off to the world. We eventually came up with the idea that Lee is obsessed with performing tasks: If something is broken, he fixes it. He keeps moving because if he stops, he has to think about this great past tragedy that’s scarred him for life.”

Affleck’s battened-down character and Hedges’ boundary-pushing angry young man bicker like longtime ball-busting family members—a dynamic that apparently describes the relationship between Lonergan and his leading actor on set. “Yeah, Casey is also an immense pain in my ass,” the director said, laughing. “He didn’t want to do any sort of Boston accent! I spent weeks up in Manchester researching the area, because I’m not from there, and I wanted to get the region right. And while it’s not like a Southie accent, you can still hear it. But he just said, ‘No one talks like that under the age of 40, Kenny, I’m not fucking doing it.’”

“Not two hours later,” Lonergan said, “some 12-year-old local boy wanders by the set, and I hear him say”—he adopts a caricaturish Northern Massachusetts voice—“‘Oh my gawd, is that Casey Affleck?!? I just gotta meet him!’ I just yelled, ‘Hey, Casey, I think this kid is under the age of 40, can you please do the fucking accent!’ … Our editor would get footage back and ask the crew, ‘Have they killed each other yet? Is everything OK on set?’ Because we’d just lay into each other.

But that’s how I talk to people I love.”

David Fear is senior editor and writer of film/TV/ culture at Rolling Stone, and he has also written for The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Spin and Time Out New York. Copyright Rolling Stone.

Reprinted with permission.

TRIbUTES

•

REVIVALS

•

NEW FILMS

•

SPECIAL

•

STEVE CATSMAN REAL ESTATE The Gray Head homeowners are honored to once again host the annual Telluride Film Festival Patrons Brunch.

All Gray Head homeowners enjoy exclusive ownership in the Owners’ Cabin. Host private dinners, play tennis, fly fish in the private stocked pond, or just sit on the porch and soak in the best views of Wilson and Lizard Head that the area offers.

Gray Head also hosts some of the Telluride’ areas most spectacular views, “Sound Of Music”-like meadows, and the area’s best and most exclusive ownership opportunities.

If you haven’t been up to Gray Head lately, take the quick drive up Last Dollar Road and come see for yourself one of Telluride’s most beautiful and unique neighborhoods, and hike it’s extensive 16 mile trail network just minutes from town.

S T E V E C AT S M A N 970.729.0100 S T E V E @ C AT S M A N . C O M

www.catsman.com

FR ANK STR ACHAN 504.616.8410 FGARDEN7@GMAIL.COM

smitH

ADAms

DEEp COMMItMENt a my a da mS g iVe S all in eV ery role By krisTa smiTh aMY adaMS is a national treasure, an actor who has brought her spirit, intelligence, passion and emotional depth to dozens of roles. Plus she can sing and dance! After five Oscar nominations, two Golden Globes, and endless accolades, in roles as diverse as Enchanted (2007) and American Hustle (2013), The Muppets (2011) and The Fighter (2010), she brings an intensity and wisdom to her role as Dr. Louise Banks, a linguist tasked with connecting two universes. She spoke to Vanity Fair’s kriSTa SMiTh about work, emotional resonances and the gift of continual learning.

KRIStA SMItH: First of all, if it were to stop today, you have had one of the greatest careers of anybody ever. It’s true.

AMy ADAMS: I know, I’m very lucky. I’m coming to a place where I can really see the scope of my good fortune. I feel very lucky.

Let’s start at the beginning. You were a dancer. Was that your artistic expression?

My family was competitive and focused on sports. I never liked the competition aspect.

It always felt empty to me. Dance was athletic, but without the competitive aspect. It fit into my family’s idea of athletics without actually competing. Dance kept me out of trouble.

You didn’t go to university or a drama school like Juilliard or Yale. You translated your dance into theater and then into your career.

I was always really interested in storytelling, and I did that through dance. I was a much better dramatic dancer than a technical dancer. Maybe somewhere in my head I wanted to act in films or be an actress on stage. What happened was that a friend from high school died—I haven’t talked about it a lot—and that was the impetus for me to just go for it. I said to myself, “Life is short. Even if I’m scared, or I don’t believe in myself.”… At that point, I didn’t have dreams of being nominated for an Oscar. It was a dream of making a living as an actor.

8

Can you tell me about those early days?

There was no social media. It was very tame. What was then considered suggestively pornographic, we now see on Carl’s Jr.’s commercials … I was focused on survival. I moved out here thinking I’d get jobs in a commercial or a soap opera. Getting a television show far exceeded what I expected. I never had big, lofty goals. It wasn’t until after I started auditioning for television that I started studying acting. Before that, I was acting on instinct, and I was pretty limited, if I’m being honest. I really started studying. I always worked out for auditions. I came in and knew my lines, dressed in costume. I always cared a lot. I cared so much.

There are always those people who said, “You’ve just got to act like you don’t care.” I still don’t know how to do that. It’s just not in me. I care about everything too much!

I transitioned from survival to an actual artistic endeavor when I moved out here. Getting jobs was no longer my goal. I wanted to actually go for something.

a TriBuTe To amy adams The program includes a selection of clips followed by the presentation of the Silver Medallion, an onstage interview led by Krista Smith (Saturday) and John Horn (Sunday), followed by Denis Villeneuve’s science-fiction film arriVal, shown in its entirety.

N

14 • FILMWATCH

•

Guest Director

REVIVALS

•

NEW FILMS

•

SPECIAL

•

FILMOGRAPhy

amy adams

b. August 20, 1974 Vicenza, Italy

Was there a certain technique that you responded to more than others?

I started working with a coach. Acting classes made me uncomfortable. The ones I had taken wanted you to expose your own life in order to find emotion. That was a dead end for me, because it turned me into a crazy person.

I’m not going to go through all my personal pain in order to act. I can’t, because when I get upset I actually shut down and isolate. That’s not going to work unless I just play characters that are shut down. I had to figure out a way to access these emotions that we all have without pulling my junk out of the closet.

I worked with Warner Loughlin. It was all character-based, creating an entire life for your character. I worked one-on-one with her for Arrival for an entire week, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., for seven days.

Watching you in Arrival and knowing you for a number of years, it’s the closest role to your own persona that you’ve ever done.

This one was tricky, because of the nonlinear way that the story is told. I have to indicate to the audience that I’m carrying weight. We are introduced to her pain before we understand when and how the pain took place. I have to carry that through the movie without having experienced it. That was really a total mind-fuck.

It’s impressive to me at this point in your career that you still go back to work with a coach.

Yeah, I did it for Big Eyes; I did it for Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals. I haven’t done it on a couple of films, and I’ve regretted it.

I’m so easily distracted by my life—by my daughter, by my dogs, by the needs of my husband, by my friends. It’s hard for me to focus on anything that isn’t immediately in front of me, which I’m sure you can attest to.

Anybody who ever wants to get ahold of me knows that you have to catch me when I’m right by by the phone. It’s not going to happen otherwise. I think women all feel that way.

When you were working on Junebug in 2005, did you feel like something bigger was happening? Or was it just kind of another day telling a story?

I felt like something bigger was happening in the sense that it was happening inside of me. A lot of the performances that resonate with me happen while I’m going through a personal transition. As much as I like to keep my personal life out of my work, it comes through. I just can’t help it.

During Junebug, I was getting fired from a television show—again. My part was reduced and I was given a choice to stay on as a recurring character or to leave the show. I decided to leave the show. It was very empowering. Unintentionally, I put all that feeling of worthlessness and self-doubt into the character. Wanting to be liked, wanting to be seen and having it not happen.

1

aCTor

2

Arrival (2016) Nocturnal Animals (2016) Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016) 8

Big Eyes (2014) Lullaby (2014)

3 3

American Hustle (2013)

1

Her (2013) Man of Steel (2013) Trouble with the Curve (2012) The Master (2012) On the Road (2012) The Muppets (2011) The Fighter (2010)

4

6

Leap Year (2010)

4

Julie & Julia (2009) Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian (2009) Amelia Earhart

2

Doubt (2008) Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day (2008)

5

Sunshine Cleaning (2008)

6

Charlie Wilson’s War (2007) 7

Enchanted (2007) Underdog (2007) The Ex (2007)

7

Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny (2007) Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (2007) The Offi ce (TV series) (2005-2006) Standing Still (2005) The Wedding Date (2005) 5

Junebug (2005) The Last Run (2004) Dr. Vegas (TV series) (2004) King of the Hill (TV series) (2004) Catch Me If You Can (2002) The West Wing (TV series) (2002)

You were fired from the TV show and nominated for Oscar within the same six months. Then Enchanted was such a departure from anything that anybody had ever seen on film. You were born to pay that part.

I feel like Giselle existed as my alter ego my entire life. Never before, and never since, have I looked at a part and thought, “I really don’t know who else they’re going to get to do this.” Now, with a huge dose of humility and knowing other people’s talents, I can think of a handful of people who would have been really good at it.

What speaks to you about supporting parts in Doubt, The Master or The Fighter?

The lead characters have the responsibility of the plot. You don’t always get a chance to try out new things because you really have to be a certain type of actor. I really do my best work in supporting roles.

With American Hustle you credited director David O. Russell for taking a princess and turning her upside down.

I’m really grateful for the fact that David took people’s perception of me and turned it on its head. He sees what he wants to see in actors and makes sure that he brings it out of them. He enjoys doing that, and that’s why he gets such immediate per16 formances. It doesn’t feel like a

Serving Sara (2002) Pumpkin (2002) The Slaughter Rule (2002) Smallville (TV series) (2001) Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV series) (2000) Providence (TV series) (2000) Charmed (TV series) (2000) That ‘70s Show (TV series) (2000) Psycho Beach Party (2000) The Peter Principle (TV) (2000) Drop Dead Gorgeous (1999) Information compiled from IMDB.com and Film Reference.

FILMWATCH • N

15

15

performance. It feels like it’s happening, and that’s because it is. He gives direction while you’re acting, while the camera is rolling, over the lines.

At this point in your career, how do you pick your parts and, specifically, why did Arrival speak to you?

Arrival spoke to me because I am at another transition period of my life.

How do I make choices that aren’t completely self-serving? A lot of what Arrival deals with, a lot of what Nocturnal Animals deals with, are the choices that we make.

You’ve gotten to work with Clint Eastwood, Tom Hanks, Meryl Streep and Phillip Seymour Hoffman. Is there something that you take away, or you learn from the experience of working with those kinds of icons?

They’re all so different, and the way they work is so different. What I’ve learned from them is invaluable: they’re all so present in the moment that they take me with them. And another thing they all have in common: they all have a really good attitude about work. None of them pretend like they don’t care.

Into the Void FILM WATCH: If you could, give me a brief summary of the film.

DENIS VILLENEUVE: Arrival begins on a bad Tuesday morning when 12 spaceships land in a strange place—not above the White House or beside the Eiffel Tower—but in the most boring places on Earth. We have no idea why they are here. When they stay silent, everyone freaks out. The U.S. government brings Louise Banks, a linguist, to go inside one of the spaceships, make contact with the aliens, and try and translate and understand the purpose of their visit. It’s a film about making a relationship with another civilization.

Denis Villeneuve (Inciendies, Prisoners) returns to Telluride with his latest adventure in storytelling: an altogether unexpected and boundarystretching science fiction story starring festival tributee Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner and Forest Whitaker. Villeneuve answered questions for The Film Watch.

Is science fiction a new genre to you?

I’ve been dreaming of doing science fiction since I was 10 years old. It is a genre that I feel has a lot of power and tools to explore our reality in a very dynamic way.

Can you discuss working with Amy Adams?

Amy Adams was the actress I dreamed of for this part. I knew the audience would believe in this movie if the actress believed in it. Everything is happening in her eyes. We will meet this civilization—we will meet those beings coming out from outer space— through her eyes. I needed an actress strong

ARRIVAL United States, 2016, 116m Director: Denis Villeneuve Starring: Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, Forest Whitaker

N

16 • FILMWATCH

•

Guest Director

•

enough to make us believe, an actress with vulnerability, sensitivity, strong intelligence, range. At the end of the day, she goes through a strong, strange process, with different, subtle layers that I wanted expressed.

Amy fell in love with the screenplay. I was so, so excited. She is not only one of the best actresses alive, if not the best, she’s also the most lovely of human beings and a trouper.

It was like sunshine on set all of the time with Amy, even if you were shooting in the rain.

She just wanted to give everything. She’s very generous.

Can you tell us about the visuals of the film? It has far fewer visual effects than the typical science-fiction film.

We were shooting near the St. Lawrence River, which gave us insane cloud formations that I could never have dreamed of. When we were doing the aerials, the pilot said, “We cannot shoot there because of those strange clouds.”

I said, “No, no, no, no, no, it’s the opposite. Let’s embrace it; it’s so beautiful.” I was very lucky. We tried to shoot everything on camera. It’s tough to shoot a spaceship on camera, so we were not able to do it, [laughs] but the rest all is.

And that is a gift from life.

Text provided by Paramount Pictures.

tributes

•

revivals

•

You’ve consciously chosen not to partake in social media. You are what I would call a Luddite. Why? It’s not natural for me, for my personality. I’m what they call an extroverted introvert. I really like people, but then when I’m done I really need to be alone, in my room.

You have fan pages devoted to you, so you are out there in a different way.

There are people taking pictures of me with my lime-a-rita from my weekend, so we’re good.

What kind of trajectory would you like your career to take in the next decade or so?

I’m trusting myself more, taking a breath, and making good choices. I don’t want to go back into survival mode.

You’re beginning to produce films?

I’m dipping my toe into it. It’s been great to be involved in the creative side of things. Sometimes as an actor I feel completely out of the loop. I’m not given any information. There’s so much surrendering, and that’s not my strong suit. Surrendering is not my strong suit.

Krista Smith is Vanity Fair’s West Coast editor, a position she’s held since 1993.

new films

•

Special

•

Poetry and Politics

T h e i n t e n s e ly cre ativ e worl ds of Pa blo La rra ín

BY JUSTIN CHANG For audiences familiar with the awardwinning work of Chile’s Pablo Larraín, the protean writer-director of films such as Tony Manero, No and The Club, it will come as little surprise that even one of his more conventional-sounding pictures should turn out to be anything but.

So it is with Larraín’s sixth feature, Neruda, a captivatingly original literary chase thriller that refuses to behave in any traditional sense like a biopic of the poet, politician and diplomat Pablo Neruda (played

by Luis Gnecco). It’s a film so dramatically and structurally free-form that even Larraín was at a loss to summarize it when filling out his Cannes submission form.

“We left that section blank,” he said. “Is it a thriller, a drama, a comedy? We didn’t know. What I do know is that, more than a movie about Neruda himself, it is about the Nerudian—his world, his imaginary space.”

A Tribute to Pablo Larraín The program includes a selection of clips followed by the presentation of the Silver Medallion, an onstage interview led by Mark Danner (Sunday) and Davia Nelson (Monday), followed by NERUDA (see opposite page), shown in its entirety.

N

18 • FILMWATCH

•

Guest Director

•

tributes

•

revivals

•

Larraín described Neruda as the boldest and, at five years in the making, most timeconsuming project he has undertaken. When his brother and regular producer, Juan de Dios Larraín, first suggested a movie about the life of one of the artistic giants of the 20th century, Larraín initially demurred, fearing the result would be “so dangerous and so boring.”

But the project gradually came together as Larraín, working with screenwriter Guillermo Calderón (The Club), decided to avoid the broad brushstrokes and cradle-to-grave narrative framework beloved by so many biographical filmmakers. Instead, they focused on a narrow period in 1948, when mounting Cold War pressures forced Neruda, already a popular artist as well as a senator for the Chilean Communist Party, to go into hiding.

Armed with the knowledge that Neruda loved reading crime fiction, the filmmakers concocted a fictional character—Oscar Peluchonneau (Gael García Bernal, who also starred in No), a police inspector assigned to hunt down the fugitive poet—to serve as his nemesis and the film’s co-lead.

It is perhaps the most brazenly Nerudian of the film’s conceits, especially when Peluchonneau, who delivers the film’s nearcontinual voice-over narration, attempts to assert himself as the hero of his own story.

“We decided at some point that Neruda would create everything in the movie,” Larraín said. “Everything was just coming out of his head.” The cat-and-mouse game that

new films

•

Special

•

filmography

Pablo Larraín b. August 19, 1976 Santiago, Chile

Neruda

Director Jackie (2016)

We see and feel Pablo Neruda as a creator

Neruda (2016)

who is so complex and extensive, practically

The Club (2015)

infinite, that it’s impossible to put him into a single category, to make a single film purporting

Venice 70: Future Reloaded (2013)

to establish or define his personality or his work

No (2012)

in a hard and fast way. That’s why we chose the story of the escape, the investigation and

Prófugos (TV Series) (2011)

the literary legend.

Episode #1.1

For us, Neruda is a false biopic. It’s a biopic that isn’t really a biopic, because we

Post Mortem (2010)

don’t really take the task of making a portrait of

Tony Manero (2008)

the poet that seriously, simply because that’s impossible. So we decided to put together a

Fuga (2006)

film from elements of invention and playfulness.

In that manner, the audience can soar alongside him in his poetry, his memory and his

Writer

Cold War communist ideology.

We invented a world, just as Neruda

The Club (2015)

invented his. The film we made is more a ‘Nerudian’ film than it is a film about Neruda, or

Chile, 2016, 107m Director: Pablo Larraín Starring: Luis Gnecco, Gael García Bernal, Alfredo Castro, Antonia Zegers

perhaps it’s both.

We created a novel that we would have liked Neruda to read.

–Pablo Larraín

Post Mortem (2010) Tony Manero (written by) (2008) Fuga (2006)

Producer

ensues dovetails intuitively with the movie’s inquiry into the very nature of Neruda’s art, and its rich understanding that history is written not only by the victors but also by the artists who endure.

“Every real artist is always doing something dangerous, at some point,” he said.

“And if you talk about art and creation, and see that as key to the revolution of the characters … if you really want to use that, then you have to expose yourself. You cannot protect yourself.”

Over the past decade, Larraín has steadily risen to become one of the foremost figures in Latin American cinema. After making his directing debut in 2006 with Fuga, a drama about a tortured musical prodigy, he bounded onto the international stage with a trilogy of distinctive and widely acclaimed films— Tony Manero (2008), Post Mortem (2010) and No (2012), which collectively amounted to a corrosive critique of life under the Gen. Augusto Pinochet regime.

In 2015, he continued his attack on institutional abuse with The Club, a grimly accomplished portrait of a group of Catholic priests living in Church-imposed exile following accusations of child molestation. The film won a raft of international prizes, including the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize at the Berlin Film Festival.

What perhaps distinguishes Neruda most is the non-hagiographic way it regards its title subject, whom Gnecco (known for his work

on the Netflix series Narcos) plays less as an impassioned man of the people than as a great sensualist with a decidedly vain, manipulative streak. Larraín may share a first name with his subject, but the film is content to keep the real Neruda at a playful distance: It shrewdly keeps its focus on the poetry rather than the man, well aware that we would care little about the latter, if not for the former.

“Who was he, really? It’s impossible [to say],” Larraín said. “And after investigating a lot, after I’ve made the movie, I’m still not really sure.”

Admitting that he can be something of a “control freak,” Larraín said he had to adopt a looser, more experimental touch than he typically favors. In one particularly daring move, he decided to shoot almost every scene in the script at least three times in different locations, and then cut freely among them—a surreal technique that exhausted the cast and crew over the course of the film’s roughly nine-week shoot in Chilean and Argentinian locations.

Although the movie was shot digitally, Larraín and his director of photography, Sergio Armstrong, worked to achieve a richly cinematic, retro-styled look using a single 35mm anamorphic lens. The two also integrated other visual techniques—old-fashioned lens flares, deliberately phony-looking rear projection in the driving scenes—to

further evoke the mood of the past. And mood, more than anything else, is what Larraín was aiming for.

“The script is essential, [as are] the characters, the locations, the director of photography,” he said. “But what really, really matters in the end is the atmosphere. That’s when the movie gets into your guts.”

Justin Chang is a film critic for the Los Angeles Times, a regular contributor to NPR’s Fresh Air Weekend and FilmWeek, former chief film critic at Variety and author of FilmCraft: Editing. ©Los Angeles Times. Reprinted with permission.

The Club (producer) (2015) Nasty Baby (producer) (2015) Barrio Universitario (producer) (2013) Gloria (producer) (2013) Crystal Fairy & the Magical Cactus (producer) (2013) Paseo de Oficina (producer) (2012) No (producer) (2012) Young and Wild (producer) (2012) Prófugos (TV Series) (executive producer) (2011) 4:44 Last Day on Earth (producer) (2011) El año del tigre (producer) (2011) Ulysses (producer) (2011) Grado 3 (producer) (2009) Life Kills Me (producer) (2007) Information compiled from IMDB.com and Film Reference.

FILMWATCH • N

19

Highwire Act

A silent circus film rises above the clich é s

BY MIGUEL PENDÁS One of the outstanding examples of the mid20s golden age of German cinema, Ewald André Dupont’s Variety has a plot that would work nicely for a late-40s film noir, complete with an alluring femme fatale, betrayal and death. In a bleak prison, Boss Huller (Emil Jannings), finishing a ten-year sentence for murder, confides to the warden the true story behind his crime. Before his arrest, Boss had destroyed everything that ever meant anything to him, and he has little to look forward to on the outside.

Once a celebrated trapeze artist, Boss has been reduced to running a low-grade peep show and carnival with his devoted wife and their small child. One day an exoticlooking young woman, Berta-Marie (Lya de Putti), “just arrived from Frisco,” hopes that they will hire her as a dancer. Frau Huller is threatened, but Boss said, “she stays.” BertaMarie’s hoochie-coochie dance drives men wild, Boss included. Before long he has fall-

VARIETY Germany, 1925, 112m Director: Ewald André Dupont Starring: Emil Jannings, Lya de Putti, Warwick Ward Presented By: Pordenone Festival

N

20 • FILMWATCH

•

en madly in love, and they run off together.

Boss forms his own trapeze act with Berta-Marie and, in the limelight and in love, draws the attention of a famous trapeze artist, the suave, elegant Artinelli (Warwick Ward) who hires them to be his new partners. It doesn’t take long for Artinelli to use his charm and a little sparkling bling to seduce Berta-Marie. Boss’ jealousy shatters the bond among the trapeze artists, whose very lives depend on their complete trust in each other as they fly through the air.

Variety was one of the signature productions of the German film studio Ufa, which in 1925 was at the peak of its legendary reputation. The German military launched the studio in 1917 to produce propaganda films. But after World War I, Ufa, during the all-too-short days of flourishing German art and culture under the Weimar Republic, became known as a producer of the utmost professionalism and innovation. Ernst Lubitsch, F.W. Murnau, Fritz Lang, Dupont, Pola Negri, Emil Jannings and Marlene Dietrich emerged to become world-famous stars, along with a young Englishman by the name of Alfred Hitchcock, who found himself directing his first feature for Ufa. Dupont began as a screenwriter and directed programmers, mostly detective stories from his own scripts. His breakthrough came with two films featuring Henny Porten: The Green Manuela (1923), about a young

Guest Director

•

dancer who falls in love with a smuggler whose brother gives his life to ensure their happiness, and Das alte Gesetz (1923), the story of a young Jew’s flight from his Orthodox home to seek fame in the theater.

In Variety, which the director adapted himself from the 1921 novel by Felix Holländer, Dupont demonstrated his thorough grasp of the medium. In her influential 1952 book The Haunted Screen, Lotte Eisner describes “the secret of Dupont’s talent”: “He has the gift of capturing and fixing fluctuating forms which vary incessantly under the effect of light and movement. His objective is always and everywhere the ebb and flow of light.”

In his 1947 book From Caligari to Hitler, Siegfried Kracauer points to Dupont’s talent for revealing the hidden motivations of his characters. “Unusual camera angles, multiple exposures, and sagacious transitions help transport the spectator to the heart of the events,” Kracauer wrote, describing how Dupont deftly opened a window onto “the psychological processes below their surface.”

For Variety, Dupont gathered the most gifted German talent. Jannings’ virtuoso performance as the lowly doorman in F.W. Murnau’s The Last Laugh (1924) cemented his reputation as the country’s greatest actor. Jannings came to Hollywood in 1926 on a contract with Paramount and garnered the first ever Best Actor Academy Award for his appearances in Victor

tributes

•

revivals

•

Fleming’s The Way of All Flesh and von Sternberg’s The Last Command.

Lya de Putti, a sultry, Hungarian-born former dancer, was perfectly suited for the part of the young temptress Berta-Marie, making a credible transition from cowering, orphaned teenager to adept seducer. The fan magazine Picture-Play gushed about her performance in Variety. “Lya de Putti is a seductress the like of which the screen has never yielded from the long line of native sirens. She is baleful, unbridled—as naïvely physical as a quadruped of the jungle.” The attention earned her a Hollywood contract, where she was mostly cast as a vamp, and she also worked on the New York stage and in Europe, but died at 31 after a so-so stateside career.

The behind-the-scenes talent who contributed most to the visual artistry of Variety was cinematographer Karl Freund, that mad scientist of the camera. As Kracauer points out, the camerawork for Variety had its dress rehearsal in The Last Laugh, shot the year before. Freund tried everything possible to give his films a distinctive look, especially with the use of movement, and his characteristic unleashed camera was uniquely suited to the high-flying action in Variety. The camera moved everywhere, on vehicles and in the streets. He even attached a camera to the swinging trapezes of Boss, Berta-Marie and Artinelli, for a vertigo-inducing point of view.

After Variety, Freund shot Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, another unparalleled achievement, and was one of the photographers of Walter Ruttmann’s avant-garde Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927), for which he developed a high-speed film stock that made shooting outside at night without artificial lighting as feasible as shooting during the daytime.

The film achieved considerable critical and popular success in America. “However the public may have received the Ufa picture Variety, it had a tremendous effect on Hollywood,” wrote an excited columnist in Picture-Play. “Directors, scenario writers, producers, and actors have seen the picture as many as half a dozen times and one may expect to see many varieties of Variety on the screen shortly.”

The principal creative artists of Variety took advantage of the opportunities this success offered. Dupont directed the Viennese period piece at Universal, Love Me and the World Is Mine, which was shelved (until 1928), when it fell flat with audiences and critics. He had better luck in Britain, where he made two other films set in a show-biz demimonde, Piccadilly (1929) and Moulin Rouge (1928). Despite his monumental talent, his was a sadly underappreciated career.

For nearly 20 years, Miguel Pendás was the creative director of the San Francisco Film Society and historian of the San Francisco International Film Festival. He is a current member of the San Francisco Museum and Historical Society.

Originally published at silentfilm.org, reprinted with permission.

new films

•

Special

•

sgniwohS eludehcS I setadpU ytreporP tnatsnI I airetirC hcraeS evisnetxE ,motsuC

m o c .e t a t s E l a e R e d i r u l l eT h c r a e S

ta snoitseuq etatse laer ruoy ot srewsna dniF

woH ?esuoh taht rof gniksa yeht era hcum woH ?ekil skool roiretni eht tahW ?sah ti smoordeb ynam

?SUOIRUC UOY ERA

The Spirit of Pagnol

A F r e n c h w ri t er l iv e s on throug h food a nd f i l m

BY MEREDITH BRODY Past Telluride Film Festivals have featured special marathon screenings, which have included made-for-TV movies unseen in the U.S. (the BBC’s Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky trilogy in 2006 and Channel 4’s Red Riding trilogy in 2009), epics in complete versions (Olivier Assayas’ Carlos trilogy in 2010) and masterful restorations.

And at least one has been served with food. In 2015, the five-and-a-half hour screening of Fritz Lang’s beautifully restored Die Nibelungen (1924) included the added fillip of free bratwursts (with or without sauerkraut) and beer, served al fresco, during intermission. I described it, in Indiewire, as my “peak cultural experience of 2015.”

This year, the festival marries food and film again in a marathon screening (with casse-croûte and drinks inspired by the movies) of the newly restored Marius, Fanny and César, the famed Marseilles trilogy of the great writer/director Marcel Pagnol, the first filmmaker to be elected to the Académie Française. The restoration was undertaken

by Nicolas Pagnol, the grandson of the writer, who presented Pagnol’s Harvest and Merlusse in Telluride in 2011, introduced by Alice Waters, owner of the famed Chez Panisse.

It’s more than just the name of her restaurant that Waters took from the work of Pagnol. In her forthcoming memoirs, she writes about her friend, festival co-founder Tom Luddy, and the relationship they each had with their loves: “Tom loved to turn people onto films—he still does. It’s like me with food.”

Luddy often drove Waters out to the Surf Theater in San Francisco, run by Mel Novikoff: “We went there for many films, but the most important ones were Marcel Pagnol’s trilogy: Marius, Fanny and César,” Waters said. “Tom kept saying to me, ‘You will love these, you must see them on the big screen.’”

“The trilogy is a love story; at the heart of it is a love affair between Marius, the bartender’s son, and Fanny, the girl who sells oysters in front of the bar. Initially it didn’t make me want to cook so much as it made me want to marry a Frenchman. Just not one who would then abandon me and go off to sea, as Marius does!”

“But the story is always circling around food: they’re sitting at a bar, drinking a pastis, steaming up a bowl of mussels. And it shows a certain way of life: cards in the afternoon, a game of pétanque. I wanted to live in those films.”

In other words, Waters suggested, the Marseilles trilogy bespoke a lifestyle: “I con-

MARIUS France, 1931, 130m Director: Alexander Korda Writer: Marcel Pagnol

N

22 • FILMWATCH

FANNY France, 1931, 125m Director: Marc Allégret Writer: Marcel Pagnol

•

CÉSAR France, 1936, 168m Writer/Director: Marcel Pagnol

Guest Director

•

nected to Pagnol too because our lives were a little like that,” Waters said. “We sat around playing cards, drinking pastis, talking, philosophizing, having love affairs. And in the end, it fed into the idea of having a restaurant, having a bar where people would gather, connect to each other, and live their lives. There was a spirit of camaraderie around the table, and I wanted to be in that world … more earthy than Parisian life and very sentimental.”

In the trilogy, Panisse is not a restaurateur, but an older, wealthy ship’s chandler and sail-maker who steps in to save Fanny’s honor when she learns she’s pregnant after Marius runs off to sea. In fact, Waters was initially taken with other characters in the trilogy. She thought about calling her place Chez Marius or Chez César. “Tom was the one who said it should be Chez Panisse,” she said, “because Panisse is the only character in the whole story that made any money!”

(Luddy, however, doesn’t remember saying that.) “And then I found out that panisse is also the name of a little chickpea pancake from Provence,” and the decision was made, Waters said.

Waters founded Chez Panisse in 1971; its Craftsman-inspired wooden paneled walls to this day are hung with vintage Pagnol film posters. (Waters also named her daughter Fanny, and ran a little breakfast-and-lunch place across town called Café Fanny from 1984 to 2012.)

The Telluride Film Festival was founded in 1974; if Pagnol had not died in April that year at the age of 79, he surely would have been one of Telluride’s honored invited guests.

tributes

•

revivals

•

The prolific Pagnol, born near Marseilles, is one of France’s greatest and most revered writers, noted for having triumphed in almost every medium: drama, film, novel and memoir. Marius (1931) and Fanny (1932) were first successful plays, written for Pagnol’s mistress Orane Demazis, the French actor Raimu, whom Orson Welles called “the greatest actor who ever lived” and Pierre Fresnay (La Grande Illusion).

Pagnol entrusted the direction of Marius, the first film to be made from his works, to Alexander Korda, the Hungarian-born British director. Fanny was directed by French director Marc Allégret: the sharp-eyed can perhaps glimpse André Gide, en passant, and, as a tramway passenger, Pierre Prévert, also credited onscreen as an assistant, along with Allégret’s son Yves, eventually a director in his own right and first husband of Simone Signoret.

In 1932, Pagnol formed his own film company, and he wrote and directed the original screenplay for César in 1936. (In a case of life imitating art, in 1933 Demazis gave birth to an out-of-wedlock son, Jean-Pierre Burgart, with Pagnol, who was still married to his first wife.)

Even those who know the trilogy are likely to find the restored version holds some surprises. Last year I told Luddy and Pierre Rissient that I had already seen Die Nibelungen, and their response was, “No, you haven’t.”

The Marseilles restoration turns faded grey into lushly contrasted, velvety black-and-white, and the soundtrack is perhaps even more of a revelation—as

new films

•

Special

•

are the new subtitles, which finally do honor to Pagnol’s expressive and often salty dialogue.

Nicolas Pagnol is overseeing not only the restorations of Marcel Pagnol’s movies—the long-unseen The Baker’s Wife will be ready by the end of 2016— but also a series of books, including the heavily illustrated Marcel Pagnol, l’album d’un vie, J’ai écrit le rôle de ta vie, which gathers the correspondence between Marcel Pagnol and Raimu, Fernandel, Cocteau among others and a forthcoming volume of correspondence with his great friend Georges Simenon.

One hopes that the forthcoming theatrical release by Janus and the box-set release by Criterion will encourage English translations of these movies.

Even without the addition of actual food, the appeal of the Marseilles trilogy really does make you hungry—but not just for Fanny’s coquillages, or the restaurant meal César plans to share with his (unseen) mistress (soupe de poissons and steak frites), or the midnight casse-croûte César has laid out for himself (charcuterie, bread, a massive hunk of cheese, artichokes, tomatoes, wine), more than enough to share when Marius

“I CONNECtED tO pAGNOL tOO BECAuSE OuR LIVES wERE A LIttLE LIKE tHAt.” turns up unexpectedly. The real hunger is for friendship, the daily, enduring, deep friendship experienced by César and his fellow Marseillaises, who share joy, sorrow, and floods of aperitifs.

The specialty of bar César is the picon curaçao, as he instructs his inept son Marius: “You can’t make a vermouth cassis. Or a mandarine citron [Fanny’s mother Honorine’s drink of choice]. And as for a picon curaçao, forget it. And yet it’s easy. Look. You put a third of curaçao. A very small third. A third of lemon.

A good third of Picon. And then a large third of water. Voilà!”

When Marius objects that that makes four thirds, César replies, “That depends on the size of the thirds.”

The sum of the Marseilles trilogy, especially consumed in one voluptuous day, is even more than its parts. Let’s drink to that.

Meredith Brody has been the restaurant critic for, among others, the Village Voice, LA Weekly and SF Weekly, and written about film for everything from Cahiers du Cinema to The New York Times.

She now writes about film festivals for Indiewire and food and film for EatDrinkFilms.

above all else

300ELKSPARK.COM

ROSIE CUSACK, Broker 970.728.0461

220 east colorado ave. telluride. colorado 81435

LUXURY VACATION RENTALS & LODGING

story

hi de ri llu Te d ne bi m co of s ar ye 0 10 er ov ith w s al Loc , www.VACATIONTELLURIDE.com

| 866-754-8772 INFO@VACATIONTELLURIDE.com

Eyes Wide Open A Sov i et c la ssi c rev i s i ts the e nd of a wa r

BY GREGORY FREIDIN Old films are like a message in a bottle, mysterious and enchanting, even more so if written in a hidden code to elude the censor. Great Soviet filmmakers from Eisenstein to Muratova have made such coding part of their cinematic aesthetic.

Marlen Khutsiev is among them.

Khutsiev (his given name is a contraction of MARxLENin) was born in 1925 in Tbilisi, Georgia, to an actress mother and a Bolshevik revolutionary father who perished, like many, in the Stalinist purges.

A graduate of the venerable Russian film school VGIK (1952), he became famous in 1956 with his third film, Spring on Zarechnaya Street (with Feliks Mironer).

Khutsiev is now working on his 13th film—about an encounter between Anton Chekhov and Leo Tolstoy. He is, perhaps, best known for his 1961 film, I Am Twenty, with its echoes of La Nouvelle Vague and Francois Truffaut, and July Rain (1966), with its cinematic vibe resembling classic Antonioni. In Russia, these two films became iconic for the 1960s generation.

Like them, It Happened in May (1970) is intensely contemporary. Released to mark the 25th anniversary of the end of World War II, it falls within the range of governmentsponsored topics: the Great Patriotic War, victory over evil and vigilance in the face of the uneasy coexistence with the former foe.

By 1969, it was the World War II victory, not the revolution of 1917, that the regime mined for legitimacy. Accordingly, the theme monopolized movie houses, TV screens and other media. But not all war stories were equal: the Jewish Holocaust, for one, was passed over with silence—in line with with Soviet “anti-Zionist” foreign policy, while Stalin’s role in the war was amplified in line with the regime’s effort to whitewash him and his record of mass terror. Khutsiev was among the prominent artists and scientists who petitioned against creeping Stalinism. No wonder, then, that he would inject his own—coded and subtly discordant—note into the official chorus of commemorative hosannas.

Paradoxically, It Happened in May is set on a bucolic German pig farm, untouched by war, a few days after the Nazi surrender. But Khutsiev opens with a five-minute montage of war footage, replete with a deafening battlefield soundtrack overlaid

IT HAPPENED IN MAY U.S.S.R., 1970, 115m Director: Marlen Khutsiev Presented By: Volker Schlöndorff

N

24 • FILMWATCH

•

with Tchaikovsky’s Manfred (the theme of tormenting memories) and culminating in the hoisting of the Red flag over the Reichstag. Then comes deafening silence—as the protagonist, a young Lieutenant (Alexander Arzhilovsky), wakes up on a sunny morning in a clean and puffy farmer’s bed. There were more surprises to come.

Made for television, which explains its generous use of close-ups and a spare setting, the film is based on “The Wages of Horror” (1962), a short story by Georgy Baklanov (1923-2009), a chronicler of World War II who was much admired for his authenticity and honesty. In the story, an old veteran recalls how he was stunned when, as a young officer, he came face to face with the Nazi extermination camps concealed behind Germany’s civilized veneer. Khutsiev appropriated Baklanov’s straightforward narrative, ostensibly about a Polish victim, and infused it with an extraordinary resonance and depth.

A small detachment of Red Army scouts, led by a 21-year-old lieutenant, is quartered on an idyllic German farmstead visibly untouched by the war. The soldiers make friends with the farm’s German owners, who are eager to put the war behind them. The camera focuses on the simple pleasures of peace: sleeping late, a hearty meal, sharing a carafe of cider, the soldiers making simple conversation, their clumsy courtship of the farmer’s pretty wife.

The farm raises pigs, and the soldiers are eager to help the farmer’s wife in her chores around the well-tended pigsty. But come evening, the farmer, mindful of the soldiers’ gallantry, takes his family overnight to his relatives in a nearby village. All is peaceful but the camera’s in-your-face gaze, awkward silences, strained exchanges and the scene’s flat lighting lend an uncanny air to the opening episode. Are we in a Gothic fairytale castle, its ghosts too shy for the light of day?

Guest Director

•

Early in the evening, the young lieutenant is summoned by his superior to a nearby estate to celebrate the end of the long war. He mounts a trophy motorbike and speeds to the party along a beautiful wooded alley. Within sight of his destination, an opulent German country house, he fumbles and crashes. For a moment he looks dead. After he gets up, dazed but uninjured (Khutsiev needs this shock to ready him for his eventual descent into hell), he joins other partying officers in raising melancholic toasts in honor of fallen comrades and singing tearful Russian songs. They have seen too much grief and lost too many friends and family to abandon themselves to a victory celebration.

As the party comes to an end, the host, a senior lieutenant (the filmmaker Pytor Todorovsky, wearing his own wartime uniform), invites officers to go for a ride in a captured German convertible. They run into a strange gate, not quite realizing they have arrived at the portals of hell. Inside, still clueless, they enter the dark camp buildings, their flashlights illuminating mysterious empty cans (the gas Zyklon-B), mounds of abandoned footwear, spoons, and finally, heavy oven doors of the crematorium that the visitors take for the camp’s heating system.

Only later that night, when the camp’s former inmates wander onto the pig farm, does the lieutenant learn the truth about the death camp: the gassing and burning of the victims, the use of human ashes to fertilize the nearby fields. Now aware of the farmer’s complicity in the gassing of a Polish laborer, they go searching for him in the nearby village. But the family is gone. In one of the final shots, the lieutenant stands, dazed and bewildered by the horror of the revelation, while all around him are the farm’s well-tended pigs—a fairytale substitute for the disappeared German family.

tributes

•

revivals

•

The film’s final segment holds the key to the hidden code. Like the introduction, it consists of a montage of documentary footage, but this time, the clips show street life of modern European cities—Berlin, London, Paris, Moscow—replete with well-dressed men, women and children hurrying on their way along avenues pulsating with traffic.

Wearied by the story’s horror, the eye feasts on these ordinary scenes until, without warning, the human traffic begins to flow onto the grounds of a concentration camp museum. Now the moving images get interspersed with some of the most famous stills of the Jewish Holocaust. The camera lingers, moves on, and then returns to one of the iconic Holocaust images—a 7-year-old Jewish boy from the Warsaw ghetto, his arms raised in a gesture of surrender. As the present-day footage resumes, the camera picks out a charming boy of the same age and fixes on his wideeyed gaze before fading into the credits.

This silent acknowledgement of the Jewish Holocaust escaped the censor but not the Soviet viewers. For them, it would have also resonated with another enforced silence— the unmourned millions of victims of Stalin’s Great Terror. Baklanov must have felt ecstatic for the way Khutsiev “unpacked” the impulse behind his “The Wages of Horror.” In a rare tribute, he renamed the story “It Happened in May.” A native of Moscow, Gregory Freidin is Professor Emeritus of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Stanford University and author of a critical biography of Osip Mandelstam, A Coat of Many Colors (University of California Press, 1987, 2010) and, forthcoming A Jew on Horseback: Isaac Babel in Life and Art. His writings on Russian literature, culture, and politics have appeared in The New Republic, The New Criterion, The Los Angeles Times and the Times Literary Supplement. ©Gregory Freidin, 2016.

new films

•

Special

•

Spies R Us

L ang thrills with innovative caper

BY SEAN AXMAKER In the late 1920s, Fritz Lang was the star director of Germany’s Ufa Studios, the biggest film studio outside of Hollywood, and one of the most celebrated filmmakers in the world for such ambitious epic visions as Destiny (1921), Die Nibelungen (1924) and especially Metropolis (1927), his allegorical science fiction classic that is still considered one of the great films of the silent era.

His 1928 thriller Spies (Spione) belongs to a different tradition, one that came out of the rapid-paced adventure and crime serials of the 1920s that were inspired primarily by the hugely successful (and at

SPIES Germany, 1928, 143m Director: Fritz Lang Presented By: Volker Schlöndorff

N

26 • FILMWATCH

•

times surreal) pulp crime serials of Louis Feuillade in France, such as Fantomas and Les Vampires.

Early in his career, Lang (with Thea von Harbou) developed the exotic cliffhanger thriller The Indian Tomb (1921), which was directed by Joe May; Lang also wrote and directed Spiders (1919) and the popular twopart Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922), both of which focused on a criminal empire headed by a mysterious, diabolical mastermind.

After the grandiose sweep and imagery of Metropolis, Spies was a return to such pulp entertainment, but with the technical virtuosity and exacting perfectionism he had developed in the intervening years. It was also his first production as an independent producer through his short-lived company Fritz-Lang-Film GmbH. Metropolis was a critical success but a financial failure, and it precipitated Lang’s split with Ufa, though he didn’t go far. Ufa continued to distribute and promote his independent productions.

Guest Director

•

The inspiration for Spies came from a real-life event: Scotland Yard uncovered a Soviet espionage ring working in London under the cover of a trade delegation, a case that caused a scandal in 1926.

Little of that true story remains in Lang’s treatment as scripted by von Harbou, his wife and creative partner, which springboards the concept into a pulp fantasy.

In their tale, super spy and financial mastermind Haghi runs an international espionage network literally under the cover of a bank: his secret headquarters is located under the foundation of his public bank. Like Feuillade’s Fantomas, Haghi is a master of disguise, and like Dr. Mabuse, he controls a vast surveillance and communications network, which he uses to steal state secrets.

The Mabuse connection is made even stronger with the casting of Rudolph Klein-Rogge as the master criminal; the actor played both Mabuse and mad scientist Rotwang in Metropolis. For Haghi’s top operative, the beautiful super-spy So-

tributes

•

revivals

•

nia, Lang cast Austrian stage star Gerda Maurus in her film debut.

Another Lang favorite, Fritz Rasp, co-stars as another of Haghi’s agents and director-actor Lupu Pick is rival agent Doctor Masimoto, seduced by cold-blooded femme fatale Kitty (Lien Deyers, also making her film debut). Willy Fritsch, a veteran leading man in his first role for Lang, completes the featured cast as the heroic Agent 326, the “good” spy who falls in love with Sonia on his mission to stop Haghi.

Working on a much smaller budget and scale than was in the case his previous features, Lang creates a fluid, fast-paced, visually inventive film that weaves enough intrigue, double dealing, secret identities and criminal conspiracies for an entire serial into one compact movie. There are buttonhole cameras, invisible ink messages, periscopes, peepholes, assassinations, seductions, drugged victims and a spectacular train wreck woven through the machinations of the competing spies.

But Lang remained a perfectionist, at times shooting dozens of takes until he got the performance he demanded. According to journalist Curt Riess, he even used a real gun to shatter a glass plate that was placed next to his leading lady in one scene, personally firing real bullets from a variety of weapons until he got the desired effect. According to Riess, terrifying film rookie Gerda Maurus was all part of the effect: “Lang needed danger, so the actors could act out the danger of the situation.” He completed Spies in 15 weeks, generous by most standards but quick for a painstaking perfectionist like Lang.

After Metropolis, Lang needed a success and Spies was just that, a popular hit in Germany that was exported to the U.S. in an edited version. Though derided by some critics for its convoluted plotting and pulp fantasy milieu, the film found admirers for the exacting editing, rapid pacing, expressionist images and fluid style of Lang’s design and direction.

In many ways it’s his most exciting silent movie, and arguably his most purely entertaining. Like Metropolis, surviving prints of Spies were severely edited and the original cut was unavailable for decades until, in 2004, the Murnau Institute restored the film with over 50 minutes of missing footage. Lang’s cinematic spy fantasy is available once again in its full glory.

Sean Axmaker is contributing writer for Turner Classic Movies Online and the Today Show website, the managing editor of Parallax View and former columnist for MSN Entertainment and film critic for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Originally published by Turner Classic Movies. Reprinted with permission of the author.

new films

•

Special

•

M alle ’ s masterpiece comes to T elluride

BY MICHEL CIMENT When he shot The Fire Within in the spring of 1963, Louis Malle had already established a strong reputation. Incredibly precocious, he won a Palme d’Or at the age of 24 at the 1956 Cannes Film Festival for the underwater documentary The Silent World, photographed and codirected with oceanographer Jacques Cousteau.

One year later he anticipated the French New Wave with Elevator to the Gallows, scored by Miles Davis and starring a young Jeanne Moreau, who also starred in his next film, The Lovers, which won a Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1958 and created a scandal with its explicit eroticism.

His follow-up, an audacious 1960 adaptation of Raymond Queneau’s farcical novel Zazie dans le métro, further proved his fondness for literary sources, and 1962’s Vie privée created a stir by featuring Brigitte Bardot in one of her more complex roles.

Yet despite his commercial and critical success, Malle felt dissatisfied with his career when he made The Fire Within. His apprenticeship with Robert Bresson, for whom he was assistant director on A Man Escaped (1956), probably had instilled in him a high exigency for the practice of his art. He was also aware of the eclecticism of his style, as well as of his themes, while newcomers like Godard and Truffaut had imposed a stronger personality.

Now 30, Malle seemed to be hiding behind literary adaptations, which looked like aesthetic variations with no real focus.

The son of a wealthy family of industrialists from the north of France, Malle felt ill at ease with his bourgeois upbringing, and unlike some of the directors coming from

THE FIRE WITHIN France, 1963, 108m Director: Louis Malle Starring: Maurice Ronet

N

28 • FILMWATCH

•

Cahiers du cinéma (Truffaut, Rohmer, et al.), with their right-wing inclinations, he was decidedly opposed to the war in Algeria and the Gaullist regime, even producing the overtly political first feature of his friend Alain Cavalier, Le combat dans l’île (1962).

After taking a break from fiction, shooting some documentary footage both in Algeria (for a film that never came to fruition) and back home, following the Tour de France (which became the 1962 short Vive le Tour), he began an original script, inspired by the tragic end of a journalist friend, about a man who commits suicide. The project, alternately called “Assez de champagne” and “Trente ans ce soir,” had come to a standstill when a friend handed Malle a copy of Pierre Drieu La Rochelle’s 1931 novel Le feu follet, which he had read in his youth. His shock at rediscovering it gave him the impetus to write a script adaptation in the first weeks of 1963. He then immediately shot the film in the spring and edited it in time for a September showing at Venice (where it won a Special Jury Prize) and an October release in France. The year was thus literally devoted to The Fire Within, made in a state of grace and at full speed. And this intensely personal work would help alleviate Malle’s doubts about his career.

In many ways one of Malle’s most idiosyncratic films, The Fire Within reveals three layers of inspiration. The origin of the novel and the model for protagonist Alain Leroy was a real-life personality: Jacques Rigaut, an arrogant, lonely and nihilistic dandy, close to the surrealist group in the 1920s, who exerted a strong fascination on André Breton and his friends; a ladies’ man who had affairs mostly with rich foreign women, particularly Americans; a mundane society man who hardly published (just 200 pages worth of sarcastic short texts and aphorisms). Rigaut killed himself in 1929 at the age of 30, and two years later Drieu, one of his best friends, dedicated to him the roman à clef Le feu follet. During the occupation, Drieu turned Fascist, and committed suicide in 1945 after the liberation of France, when he was threatened with a trial

Guest Director

•

for his German collaboration. Malle was far from Drieu politically (an episode in the film, set in a café, satirizes two members of the OAS, an extreme right-wing movement), but the two did share several preoccupations— self-doubt, love of women, nightlife.

Many images in the film (the date “23rd of July” written on the mirror, Alain playing with the gun) lend it a sense of doom, which is reiterated by the words superimposed on the last shot: “I’m killing myself because you didn’t love me, because I didn’t love you. Because our ties were loose, I’m killing myself to tighten them. I leave you with an indelible stain.”

With such a serious central theme, the director chose a spare and austere style. At first he thought of using nonprofessional actors, as his mentor, Bresson, did. He also abandoned color after two days of shooting and decided on black and white, working with a new TriX Kodak film that allowed him to shoot in the streets and in real interiors with very little light. Likewise the budget was lower and the crew less numerous than on his prior films.

But his major decision, of course, was to cast Maurice Ronet as Alain Leroy.

Ronet, born in 1927, was five years older than Malle but looked like his alter ego. An actor for more than ten years, he had already appeared in Elevator to the Gallows and was considered one of the hopes of French cinema, as evidenced by his recent role in 1960’s Plein soleil, alongside Alain Delon, but he had never been given a true leading part.

His performance in The Fire Within is his most remarkable. Accentuating the director’s osmosis with Ronet, the actor was asked to wear Malle’s own clothes; he also lost 40 pounds to play Alain, his emaciated face emphasizing the exhaustion of detoxification. To enhance the realism, Malle surrounded Ronet with little-known actors (except Jeanne Moreau), including, in the role of Solange, the hostess at Alain’s final meal, Alexandra Stewart, who was to become the director’s companion.

Malle and cinematographer Ghislain Cloquet’s fluid camera movements, recall-

tributes

•

revivals

•

ing, more than Bresson, early Antonioni (Le amiche) and Preminger’s Bonjour tristesse, closely follow Ronet as he rambles through Paris, expressing Alain’s instability and the rush to his final decision. Indeed, the film’s other protagonist is Paris, as in so many features of the New Wave, from The 400 Blows to Breathless.

Agnès Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7, shot a year earlier, structurally most resembles The Fire Within in its recounting of 90 minutes in the life of a woman who meets several people on her way to the hospital to get cancer test results. Malle offers a striking parallel to Varda’s film, as Alain leaves his clinic in Versailles to wander mostly through the Latin Quarter, from the Brasserie Lipp to the arcades of the Odéon Theater, from the Café de Flore to the rue du Dragon, the Luxembourg Garden and the quai Voltaire, and ending up at place des Vosges. Meeting the challenge of confronting the City of Lights, Alain strolls through the streets, which look, under Malle’s camera eye, as sad, dull and gloomy as his forlorn soul. In fact, Alain is saying farewell to a world of idle people—intellectuals, businessmen, parasites whose lives provoke in him rejection, disgust, and weariness.

Malle repeatedly said that The Fire Within was the first of his films to totally satisfy him. It’s also probably the one that worked as an exorcism and liberated him from his former persona, that of a young man living at night, having brief encounters and blessed with an easy existence and (at least to his eyes) undeserved professional successes. At the age of 30, and facing the same existential issues as Alain, Malle was giving an opposite answer, throwing away what he hated in himself and clearing the way for a quest of perfection and his love of life.

Michel Ciment is a member of the editorial board of the French film monthly Positif and the author of 15 books on cinema, including Kubrick, Kazan on Kazan, Conversations with Losey and Le dossier Rosi. Copyright Criterion Collection. Reprinted with permission.

new films

•

Special

•

Vicious Love M ankiewic z’ s H ollywood satire

BY FRANÇOIS TRUFFAUT I recently saw A Letter to Three Wives for the second time, and I realize that I can never ignore Joseph Mankiewicz again. Its story is brilliant, intelligent and elegant, tasteful and refined, packaged with an almost eerie precision, style and professionalism. The actors are directed with an extravagant theatricalism. Mankiewicz has a sure instinct for extending his shots and using special effects in a way we don’t expect anymore except with Cukor. This is Mankiewicz’s art. He’s in control of his genre—dramatic comedy—and we shall leave aside its limitations for now, especially since its good qualities are too often ignored.

The Barefoot Contessa is perplexing. We leave it uncertain that we have understood everything, but unsure that there was, in fact, more to understand. We don’t know what the author was up to. But what is beyond doubt

THE BAREFOOT CONTESSA United States, 1954, 128m Writer/Director: Joseph Mankiewicz Starring: Humphrey Bogart, Ava Gardner, Edmond O’Brien Presented By: Volker Schlöndorff

N

30 • FILMWATCH

•

is its total sincerity, novelty, daring and fascination. Mankiewicz has been reproached as the favorite director of the snobs, but … the one sure thing about Mankiewicz’s film is that he is cursing the cliques of Hollywood, of the idle, of the Riviera. It’s not an indulgent satire like his earlier films. This time he portrays a furious hatred of vulgarity.

Three American movie executives discover an extraordinary and marvelous Spanish dancer, Maria Vargas (Ava Gardner).

They bring her to Hollywood and launch her as a star. The producer, Kirk (Warren Stevens), a dictator, a sexist and a bigot, courts her futilely. She despises him and finds her lovers among truck drivers, gypsies, guitarists and handsome young men.

At a certain point, to humiliate Kirk, Maria agrees to go for a cruise along the Riviera with Bravano, a South American multimillionaire. Bravano (Marius Goering) won’t have any more luck than Kirk, but he comforts himself with the thought that everybody will think he’s Maria’s lover. Bravano turns out to be a weird imbecile and Maria leaves him for Count Vincenzo Torlato-Favrini (Rossano Brazzi), whom she falls in love with and who is in love with her. They marry.

Then the Count tells his bride that he cannot love her with all his heart, since he has been mutilated in the war. Maria makes a daring resolution: the most beautiful gift she can of-

Guest Director

•

fer her husband is a child. She is about to accomplish her purpose when her husband surprises her and kills her, along with her dupe.

The pivotal scene occurs in the cemetery in the rain, as the great star is buried. The storyline is related by a number of the characters, among them the director Harry Dawn (Humphrey Bogart), who was Maria’s sole friend and confidant. He has arrived on the scene too late to make things right though he had anticipated how it would all end. It would be off the mark to reproach Mankiewicz for opening up a number of themes without grappling with any of them since his idea was not so much to make a satire about Hollywood (although it is the most vicious one ever made), or a film about impotence (which is, of course, symbolic), or a guide to the Riviera and its denizens as to paint one of the most beautiful portraits of woman ever filmed, in the person of Ava Gardner, Hollywood’s most exquisitely beautiful actress.

Mankiewicz places his heroine—wild, natural, enigmatic—in four spots, in different life situations, faced with contradictory personalities, in order to watch her reactions and to visualize the separate moralities a famous star creates around her.

Maria Vargas is not, as some reviews have said, a nymphomaniac. It’s not perversion that pushes her into the arms of lower-class men, but profound disgust, really a physical repul-

tributes

•

revivals

•

sion, for the princes of her world, the producers, the millionaires, the displaced and idle kings. In her eyes they are the “sick” ones.

Their infirmity is made concrete in the impotence of Vincenzo, the last count of an illustrious line. (It is no accident that his sister, Valentina Cortese, is also sterile.) Since it is his fate to find first love with this “child of nature,” it is reasonable that Vargas, to assure Vincenzo’s happiness, will react with an extravagance that matches his extravagant personality. This is not a film to be picked apart; either one rejects it or accepts it whole. I myself accept and value it for its freshness, intelligence and beauty. It is a daring, novel and most satisfying venture, and Mankiewicz uses it to settle scores with the Hollywood that condemned him to polishing furniture when he had dreamed of breaking down walls. Thanks to the success of his psychological comedies, Mankiewicz had assured himself a privileged place in Hollywood, which makes it all the more praiseworthy to have risked such originality. (1955) François Truffaut (1932-1984) wrote and directed 28 films including 400 Blows, Jules et Jim and the Oscarwinning Day for Night. He is author of Hitchcock/ Truffaut and The Films in My Life. Originally published in Cahiers du cinema, 1955; reprinted in The Films in My Life (De Capo, 1975). Reprinted with permission from De Capo Press.

new films

•

Special

•

43rd

IS PROUD TO RECOGNIZE THE GENEROUS SUPPORT OF

MAJOR SUPPORTERS The Burns Family Tribute

Richard Meyer & Susan Harmon General Support

George & Pam Hamel Education

The Myerson Family Travel Support

The Haney Family General Support

Bill & Michelle Pohlad General Support

Jeffery Keil & Danielle Pinet The Backlot

Elizabeth Redleaf Film Sponsorship & General Support

Ralph & Ricky Lauren Abel Gance Open Air Cinema

Holly & Brad Reeves General Support

Leucadia National Corporation General Support

Bobby & Polly Stein General Support

B E N E FA C T O R S Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

Kevin & Patricia Kiernan

Matthew & Natalie Bernstein

Terri E. Miller & Andrew W. Marlowe

Peter Becker

Peter & Linda Bynoe

Alan McConnell & Caroline Schafer Hank Dorochovich

Jennifer Eplett & Sean Reilly Warren & Becky Gottsegen Daniel & Mary James

Linda Lichter & Nick Marck Nicholas Palevsky

Prospect Creek Foundation

The Alexander Schoch Family

Virginia Wellington Cabot Foundation Cris Wasiak

CONTRIBUTORS

DONORS

Lucas Family Foundation

Nina & McKay Belk

John Steel & Bunny Freidus Maxine Rosston

Fred & Claudia Schwab Katherine Sugg

In the Bedroom

T he bi z arre M elville - C octeau m énage a tro I s

BY GARY INDIANA This legendary collaboration between résistant Jean-Pierre Melville and collabo Jean Cocteau seems neither to have been a grudge match nor a picnic. Cocteau admired Melville’s first film, Le silence de la mer (1949), and approached Melville about filming his own wildly popular 1929 novel, the existentialist avant la lettre, Les enfants terribles.

Cocteau’s choice of Melville may have been influenced by the writer’s desire to turn his latest flame, Edouard Dermithe, into a movie star (an endeavor he felt more likely to succeed if Dermithe worked with a director besides Cocteau himself). And Melville genuinely liked the story, and it was a project that was sure to draw money (which was desperately scarce at the time).

Melville later said he had been “flattered” to be chosen by Cocteau, adding that he “quickly got sucked into it.” Cocteau wanted far more control than Melville would give him. When the author tried to change his own script, Melville told him that if he planned to write a new Les enfants terribles, he wasn’t interested in filming it.

Melville gave way on two points that he regretted: the casting of Dermithe as Paul and the “updating” of the action from 1929 to 1950. When Cocteau “inadvertently” called “cut” in the middle of a scene, Melville had him thrown off the set. In Melville on Melville, the director acerbically speculates that Cocteau hoped Melville would die during shooting so Cocteau could simply take over the film. In the end, Cocteau’s screenplay turned out to be an almost literal transcription of his book.

Melville’s transposition is architectural, musical (and to some extent a matter of casting)—a masterful, poetic rendering of words into images. As Melville probably anticipated, critics endlessly parsed the finished film to decide what belonged to Cocteau and what came from him.

Compared to the Dreyeresque camera setups of Melville’s Le silence de la mer, Les enfants terribles moves with the restless pace of a Marx Brothers movie. Siblings Paul and Elisabeth, who share a bedroom in a Paris flat, deflect anomie with a repertoire of incestuously entangling games. Les enfants terribles, like many of Melville’s works, depicts the baroque

LES ENFANTS TERRIBLES France, 1950, 105m Director: Jean-Pierre Melville Writer: Jean Cocteau Starring: Edouard Dermithe, Nicole Stéphane Presented By: Volker Schlöndorff

N

32 • FILMWATCH

•

events leading up to an abrupt, lethal end.

The film, like the novel, opens with a schoolyard snowball fight at the Lycée Condorcet—where both Cocteau and Melville, at different times, went to school—in which darting camera movements and intricate crosscutting catch the rough and tumble of young boys. Paul, who as played by the hulking Dermithe looks a little mature for a schoolboy, is hit with a rock-spiked snowball thrown

by Dargelos, his lycée crush. Once Paul has been helped home by his chum Gérard, he endures, or enjoys, the demanding torpor of an invalid, teased and nursed by Elisabeth, who’s a few years his senior and has to look after the house and their ailing mum.

Paul’s incapacity is another slightly offkilter detail. He manifests no dramatically alarming evidence of illness, but lying prone in bed—an indolent and self-satisfied young bundle of petulance and unpredictable mood changes rather than the delicate rejected lover of the novel—he heightens suggestions of sexual availability. His habitual lassitude, his habitation of an oneiric playpen of an unbelievably cluttered room—it all suggests that Paul’s “recovery” may never conclude, because he was always this way. His immobility compounds his passivity, making him more malleable to his sister’s capricious inspirations and the physical play that, certain commentators to the contrary, signals incest in unambiguous terms.

Cocteau’s was a sensational book, not merely “daring” but one that tapped the antagonism between French institutions— school, family, police, military—and the generation not quite adult but already more clear-headed about what they wanted, and especially what they didn’t want, than their parents had ever been.

In book and film, we’re presented with the superannuated, spiritually mildewed figures of the school prefect, the family doctor,

Guest Director

•

the family lawyer, the spectral French professional class, unchanged since the time of Balzac, that does things a certain way because things have always been done that way. Les enfants terribles deals with these figures in a manner suggesting that what all such people actually do is keep the wheels of social boredom in stabilizing slow motion and the joy of living in a state of rot.

The core characters—Paul, Elisabeth, Gérard and the clothing model Agathe, whom Elisabeth invites to live with them after Elisabeth takes a job in a fashion house—become a tribe of indoor campers, all clustered in the magic bedroom, a commune with all the thinly repressed power struggles and inegalitarian subtexts of hippie communes of the 1960s. Paul and Elisabeth’s magnetic field of pranks, games and playful sadisms takes precedence over everything, including the possibility that one or the other sibling might form an attachment to someone else. They are a band of nomads who rarely go anywhere, build tents from blankets and collect dysfunctional, arresting objects for their “treasure,” a chest of drawers reminiscent of the surrealists’ discoveries at flea markets.

Of course, Melville’s film is patently unreal, a surprisingly sure-handed appropriation of the dream realm Cocteau’s work specialized in. To keep its unreality within limits, Melville vetoed most of Cocteau’s suggestions and brought an edgier kind of unreality into play. Instead of Cocteau’s desired jazz motif, for instance, Melville chose the baroque, Bach and Vivaldi, which is woven into the film to optimal effect, heightening the disorienting interior spaces and the characters’ movements inside them.

This choreography of sound and image, which owes its quality of unfolding surprises in large part to cinematographer Henri Decaë and his idiosyncratic framing, switches

tributes

•

revivals

•

from high to low angles, and unusually mobile camera work, which anticipates the handheld camera of the new wave. Indeed, Decaë would go on to be an icon of the New Wave, shooting François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows and continuing to work for Melville (Bob le flambeur [1956], Léon Morin, prêtre [1961], Le samouraï [1967]) as well as for such directors as Chabrol, Malle, Franju, Duvivier, Joseph Losey and George Stevens.

But it is Nicole Stéphane, as Elisabeth, who thoroughly dominates this film: magnetic, fascinating, shrewish, repulsive and sympathetic by turns; once she also owns the house they’re all living in she becomes the duplicitous, devouring monster that has been incipient in her character all along.

That the others have never taken their glimpses of this monstrosity seriously can almost serve as her justification for it. Elisabeth has the predator’s gift of dissembling motive and intent. Stéphane’s Elisabeth methodically takes inventory of the strings she has to pull on each of her victims, and displays an almost wistfully meditative pleasure at the moment she’s about to give one of them a tug.

Cocteau is a poet of myth and the rounded completion of the imaginary; Melville is a poet of intricate schemes running to quick ruin upon contact with reality. In Les enfants terribles, these two modes of poetry merge into a hybrid something else, unrepeatable and unforgettable.

Gary Indiana is a novelist, playwright, critic, essayist, filmmaker and artist, hailed by The Guardian as “one of the most important chroniclers of the modern psyche,” and by The Observer as “one of the most woefully underappreciated writers of the last 30 years.” His latest book is Resentment: A Memoir.

Originally published by Criterion Collection.

Reprinted with permission.

new films

•

Special

•

S t e hl i k

macqueen

At war with itself

Gulag e xp o s e s S ov i et s yste m of Fe a r a nd Re p risa l

BY MILOS STEHLIK For four years, during the period of martial law and Solidarity, Angus Macqueen taught English in Poland. Macqueen knew the Soviet Union was hated by most Poles. That, for Macqueen, was an incentive to investigate. He applied for and received a new teaching job in Siberia, “the most boring and the most interesting year in my life.”

Nearly 15 years later, Macqueen, by then an acclaimed photographer, documentary filmmaker and producer, convinced the BBC that a documentary on the Russian Gulag—the Soviet system of forced labor camps—had to be made now. The survivors were dying, and the open political climate in Russia was likely to change.

It took him three years to finish Gulag.

MILOS STEHLIK: What happened when you arrived in Siberia?

Angus Macqueen: I learned how the Soviet system operated. I was one of the first foreigners to teach at the university in Siberia. For the KGB, I was potentially extremely dangerous, particularly because I came from Poland. I began to learn to read the Soviet Union and to read the way in which people survived within the Soviet system.

By the end of the 80s, because of Glasnost, I was able to make some of the first films about Stalinism. I met one of the central figures in Gulag, the warden of one of the camps, a KGB agent, who also turned out to be a cartoon artist. He had created an absolutely unique record of the gulag in cartoons.

Did any Soviets otherwise document the gulag?

A group called Memorial collected oral history. In the opening film, three of their members dug for bodies in a huge expanse outside of St. Petersburg. In the 1990s, Russia was trying to understand its past, to make sense of it and to seek how it affected its future.

Can you give more context on the camps?

Gulags were unique and different from the Holocaust. Hitler declared war on his own citizens in the form of its Jewish minority—an attack on the outsider. Through the gulag, and the famine in the Ukraine and with industrialization, Stalin declared war on his own society. This was a civil war. These are your neighbors. The person who denounces you at work could end up in prison next to you or might be recruited to be the guard. The gulag—the fear at the heart of it—became a defining item of the Soviet Union, a part of the genetic makeup of those living there.

Was it difficult to get those who worked in the system to talk?

It was incredibly difficult. Some were very aggressive. The most interesting figures would shrug their shoulders at the methods used and were very proud of the achievements. One of the most remarkable figures is the camp commandant of the northern mining town of Norilsk. He was already in his 80s and genuinely proud of the achievements that they built this great mining town that helped the Soviet Union build and become strong. It helped them win the war.

GULAG United Kingdom, 2000, 50m Director: Angus Macqueen

N

34 • FILMWATCH

•

Guest Director

•

tributes

•

revivals

•

new films

•

Special

•

His mythology of the gulag rests on his argument, “How else were we supposed to industrialize?” And, “The capitalist world will do everything to undermine the revolution.” There is an element of truth in this. But it was twisted into a war against your own people. You can get sent off for making a joke about Stalin, or by someone in power wanting your job and denouncing you.

What other discoveries did you make?

The most interesting characters were not the ideologues; they were the normal people, who got drawn into the system. There is a wonderful interview with two railway workers, a husband and wife, who admitted to being informers and to denouncing people.

Stalin learned from the failure of the French Revolution. We found archive films in uncensored versions that were approved by Stalin. They openly show that you have to use violence in order to maintain the revolution.

Can you tell me about what happened in the camps?

The gulag was a hugely complex organization. It was a parallel state. Andrei Tupolev and Sergei Korolev, who became key parts of the aerospace industry, were both in camps.

There were scientific camps, there were engineering camps, there were children’s camps, there were mining camps, there was rail building. The camps were fundamentally important to building the Soviet infrastructure.

We begin the film with the building of the canals, which are extraordinary.

What lesson do the gulags hold for the state of the world today?

The fear of the gulag was drilled into people.

By the 60s and 70s, the Soviet government didn’t need to arrest tens of thousands of people—it could arrest five or ten dissidents and everybody would be scared. The lessons of the gulag are at the heart of what we need to understand Putin’s Russia. Modern Russia forgets its history at great cost to itself.

Milos Stehlik is the director of Chicago’s Facets Multi-Media, which he co-founded in 1975 and which presents film premieres, retrospectives and festivals.

He is a contributor to WBEZ and the recipient of the 1997 Telluride Film Festival Special Medallion.

I was 19 “I think this film by Konrad Wolf is the best East German film, and probably the best of his. It’s a very personal film for Wolf, because it is his own story. He emigrated to Russia with his father Friedrich and his brother Markus, who later became the head of the Stasi. He grew up in Moscow beginning from 7 years old, and at age 19, during World War II, came back to Germany as a lieutenant in the Red Army. His film picture is based on his diary—a Russian-German coming back home. Wolfe deserves to be remembered for many films, but especially this one.”

–Volker Schlöndorff

East Germany, 1968, 115m Director: Konrad Wolf

FILMWATCH • N

35

WRAnovics

nicHoL

REquIEM FOR ANALOG

t h e e n du r i n g m y t hology of a n e n da n g e re d machine it, and I tried to be totally pure in my intent. I stopped making commercials about two years ago to focus solely on it. I’d always wanted to get back to where I started, making films, and I was only able to do it by directing, shooting and editing it all myself.

By JohN wraNoViCs The digital juggernaut is plowing under the finest artifacts of our analog past. What do we hold on to in order to stay human? If robots are the future, will bluecollar workers share the fate of the discarded typewriter? doug nichol’S debut feature length documentary explores the meaning and value of “obsolete” typewriters in today’s culture of disposable electronic gadgets. He spoke with John WranoVicS about those still connected with their beautiful old machines, including musician John Mayer, historian David McCullough and playwright Sam Shepard.

CaliForNia TyPewriTer United States, 2016, 103m director: Doug Nichol featuring: Tom Hanks, Sam Shepard, John Mayer, David McCullough

N

36 • FILMWATCH

•

JOHN wRANOVICS: How did the project get started?

DOuG NICHOL: I read an article in The New York Times about somebody who found an Underwood typewriter on the street, and it became his prize possession. For some reason, it stuck in my head. I found an Underwood on Ebay for $6 and bought it. It didn’t work, but I set it on my desk. I’d look over at it, and it was almost like it was calling to me to fix it up.

I Googled typewriter shops and found California Typewriter in Berkeley—one of the last shops left in the Bay Area. They were only open for a few hours a day. I met the Permillion family that runs the shop and loved their passion for typewriters.

I decided to make a five-minute short about people trying to keep old technology alive during the digital age.

After I finished the short, I heard that Tom Hanks was into typewriters and, through a friend, sent a Vimeo link to Tom’s wife. Tom saw the short and said he’d love to be in it. After his interview, I started to think this could be more than a short.

Guest Director

•

How did you find the other typewriter people profiled in the film?

Normally, when you come up with an idea you kind of sketch out how you can make it into a film. I decided instead to do a little experiment and just see if the film could tell me what it wanted to be. After Tom Hanks, I started filming Jeremy Mayer, a struggling artist making sculptures out of typewriter parts in Oakland. Jeremy told me about the Toronto collector Martin Howard. Each piece led to something else.

You’ve got such an impressive range of people talking about what typewriters mean to them, poets, playwrights, historians, musicians.

I’d film one person and a door would open leading me somewhere else. Jeremy turned me on to Ed Ruscha and Mason Williams’ 1967 Royal Road Test picture-book art piece where they threw a typewriter out the window of a car doing 90 mph. We decided to recreate it.

For a long time, I’d made music videos and commercials. This is the first time I just made something that I wanted to make. Nobody hired me to do

tributes

•

revivals

•

What do you want this film to make people think about typewriters?

The center of this film is the Permillion family and their efforts to keep their shop alive. Herb Permillion’s business was one of the first casualties of the digital revolution. What’s happened to them is going to continue happening to many people in different walks of life as machines displace human workers.

Typewriters are not wasted objects.

They do still serve a purpose. I hope that this film helps people rediscover the typewriter and that it helps the Permillions survive and even thrive continuing to do what they’re doing. Even though this film is about typewriters, it’s also really about something else.

It’s about where we’re heading in the future, and the effect that the digital revolution will have, especially on blue-collar workers.

There are those who embrace the future and those who fear it. Guys like Jeremy are excited about the future.

Others, like Martin Howard, are comfortable with the past. John Mayer, whose been on stage with Steve Jobs introducing Apple products, is super connected with the high-tech world, but he likes typewriters because they let him get his thoughts out without being disrupted by a word processor’s editing and spell-check functions. David McCullough is concerned with how digital composition might prevent future historians from really understanding the past since they won’t be able to see the mistakes and edits that reveal an historic figure’s thinking process. The film is an homage to a time when machines were serving people, instead of people serving the machines.

John Wranovics is the author of Chaplin and Agee: The Untold Story of the Tramp, the Writer, and the Lost Screenplay. His writing has appeared in The New York Times Sunday Book Review, Positif, Capricci 2011 and Noir City, in which he wrote on U.S. psychological warfare and the birth of Italian neo-realist film.

NEW FILMS

•

SPECIAL

•

Tough Love

M ar e n A de’s pa i n f u l ly f u nny fa mi l i a l ta le

By Manohla Dargis Filmmakers find inspiration in love, nature, faith, trauma, other people, other movies.

The German director Maren Ade discovered a muse for her latest, the sensational Toni Erdmann—a critical favorite at the 69th Cannes Film Festival—in an American comic who died in 1984, of whom she said: “I fell in love with Andy Kaufman.”

Maren Ade (pronounced MAR-in AHday) also fell for Kaufman’s most outrageous creation, the belligerent insult comic Tony Clifton, whose first name she borrowed for the title character of her new movie. Toni is the fabrication of Winfried (Peter Simonischek), a music teacher who uses this outsize persona to infiltrate the life of his only child, Ines (Sandra Hüller), a corporate strategist on assignment in Bucharest. Toni emerges after Winfried pays a brief, awkward visit to Ines, who barely makes time for her father. Exit Winfried, enter Toni, a lout with a wolfish leer, a fright wig and false teeth who claims to be a “consultant and coach” for the chief executive of Ines’ company.

Toni Erdmann quickly lifted the festival mood and Ade’s international profile, though it was shut out on awards night. “It’s nice and weird at the same time,” she said of the attention the day after her movie’s first press screening. While here, she racked up 30 hours of interviews with 60 journalists from more than 15 countries. Seated on a terrace in the festival headquarters overlooking a yacht-choked marina, she seemed remarkably at ease, especially given that she had been working on the movie days before the festival opened. “It was very, very crazy to just get it here.”

We met again a few days later in a small Italian restaurant. She was at once alert and relaxed, although also hoarse, either from all the interviews or, she thought, tending to her 4-year-old. She had brought both her sons—the other is six months old—along with her partner and assorted grandparents.

That afternoon, she and her family planned to take a boat to a nearby island for a break before heading to a friend’s house. Sipping warm milk with honey to soothe her throat, and speaking in English, she seemed pleased by the praise, if somewhat exasperated that the movie had been described as arriving out of the blue.

TONI ERDMANN Germany, 2016, 162m Director/Writer: Maren Ade Starring: Sandra Hüller, Peter Simonischek

N

38 • FILMWATCH

•

“In your own life,” Ade said, “nothing is out of the blue.” Some of this surprise doubtless stems from the movie’s comedy, a quality not always associated with German cinema, especially in a temple of seriousness like Cannes. In addition, until now, Ade, 39, has been largely known only inside rarefied cinephile circles and it has been seven years since her last feature, Everyone Else. Since then, she has produced movies and had her children; she was pregnant with one son while writing Toni Erdmann and pregnant with the second while working on it in post-production. As she once put it, “I became a mother, which is also like making one film at least.”

The textured realism in Toni Erdmann also needed time. “It took long to develop the characters and to really find that story,” Ade said. “It came step by step, going deeper and deeper into the game they’re playing.” As a character, Toni enables Winfried to insinuate himself into Ines’ hyper-rationalized life. He barges into her workplace and social events, becoming a classic trickster, that mischievous, subversive figure who upends the status quo. Lewis Hyde, a scholar of tricksters, argues that they emerge from need: “There are large, devouring forces in this world, and that trickster’s intelligence arose not just to feed himself but to outwit these other eaters.”

With a demented smile and oversize teeth, Toni the trickster sets out to sabotage the forces devouring his daughter.

Guest Director

•

Most obviously, Toni Erdmann is a father-daughter story, if one thankfully without the familiar therapeutic platitudes and psychological tidiness. Ade had been interested in the father-daughter dynamic “for a long time,” she said. “I found out that during writing it’s difficult to escape your own family.”

The inspiration for Toni’s teeth came from a gag set she was given at a premiere of Austin Powers when she was 20 and working for a production house. She gave the teeth to her father, who she knew would make good use of them, and together they, with Andy Kaufman and Tony Clifton, became part of her exploration of role playing.

Toni Erdmann is only Ade’s third feature, after The Forest for the Trees (2003) and Everyone Else, which shared the Silver Bear (second place) at the 2009 Berlin Film Festival. Ade began making amateur movies with a camcorder when she was a teenager and attended the University of Television and Film Munich. There, she and another student, Janine Jackowski, founded Komplizen Film, which produces Ade’s work along with those of other artfilm names like Miguel Gomes. (A third partner, Jonas Dornbach, joined Komplizen in 2010.) Having her own company, Ade said, gives her the freedom she wants—and the control she seems to like—including the luxury to rehearse on location.

“Everything had to come out of the characters,” Ade said. “Maybe that’s also

tributes

•

revivals

•

why the film needs time.” The movie runs a comfortable, perfectly calibrated two hours and 42 minutes, although she did try to shorten it. “I went back into the editing room three weeks after giving birth, because I wanted to be sure that it’s the right length.” But when she tried to cut it, she felt the movie lost its complexity. It makes sense. Ade is a pointillist, and over the span of Toni Erdmann, you don’t only watch Ines and Winfried, you also learn to read their looks, to inhabit their silences and to recognize the weight of their seemingly meaningless moments.

Last November, after her second son was born, Ade sat down with her co-workers and asked them to be honest about whether the film had a shot at being selected for Cannes.

It’s an index of this event’s significance to a filmmaker like Ade, whose importance isn’t measured in box office numbers, that she powered ahead to finish the movie by the festival’s deadline. Her persistence and work paid off, because long after this year’s juries have disbanded and the world has forgotten who won this year’s awards, the 2016 edition will best be remembered as the year Ade gave us Toni Erdmann, a work of great beauty, great feeling and great cinema.

Manohla Dargis is chief film critic for The New York Times, and three-time nominee for the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. Copyright The New York Times.

Reprinted with permission.

new films

•

Special

•

43rd

THANK YOU TO OUR SHOW RING MEMBERS: Anonymous

Vincent & Anne Mai

Anonymous

Yvonne & Michael Marsh

Ron & Joyce Allred

Donna & Steve Mawer

Kelly & Carrie Barlow

Adam & Diane Max

Sheldon & Jill Bonovitz

Jay Morton & Mike Phillips

Harmon & Joanne Brown

The Myerson Family

Kevin & Mary Grace Burke

Mark & Alison Pincus

Ken & Julie Burns

Charles & Jessie Price

Keller Doss

Debra & Andrew Rachleff

Barry & Paula Downing

Elizabeth Redleaf

Carla Emil & Rich Silverstein

Dick & Susan Saint James Ebersol

Bruce & Bridgitt Evans

Guy & Jeanine Saperstein

The Fairholme Foundation

Mark Scher

Patrick & Elana Ferrall

Prabha & Anita Sinha

Andy & Barb Fremder in honor of the East Bay College Fund

Joseph & Diane Steinberg

Charles Goodman Chad Graff & Joann Falkenburg

Tammy Estrada Strome Patricia Sullivan Richard & Ann Teerlink

George & Pam Hamel

Ward Veale

Janine & Tom Hill

JoAnn & John Weisel

Peter & Heidi Knez

Jeff Yabuki

BE A PART OF FILM HISTORY

Dedicated to the past, present and future of motion pictures and inspiring new generations of filmmakers Share your legacy and donate to the Academy ACADEM Y MUSEUM @OSCARS.ORG

Behind the Mask

H o n o r i n g on e of c i n e m a’s g re atest come di a n s

BY LEONARD MALTIN Jerry Lewis wears many faces—sometimes literally, in the films where he plays multiple characters—but French filmmaker Gregory Monro has set out to profile the one we know the least about in his welcome documentary Jerry Lewis: The Man Behind the Clown.

His clear-eyed view of Jerry is enhanced by well-chosen (and edited) film clips showing vintage interviews and press conferences, scenes of Jerry directing, live performances, kinescopes of television shows, interviews with Lewis scholars and colleagues, and of course, scenes from Jerry Lewis movies. He also benefits from the fact that Jerry has saved every scrap of film ever taken of himself, including priceless footage of him with his partner Dean Martin at the Copacabana nightclub in New York City, when they were at their peak.

Movies actually diluted the impact of Dean and Jerry. I fell in love with Jerry on film but was too young to have seen him at work on TV’s Colgate Comedy Hour, which captured the manic energy he and his partner brought to their work in nightclubs and stage appearances.

“You couldn’t sit down and design that kind of energy output,” Lewis told me in 1992. “You could sit down and design the sketch, the meter, the rhythm, the logistics, but you needed two people who couldn’t

JERRY LEWIS: THE MAN BEHIND THE CLOWN France, 2016, 61m Writer/Director: Gregory Monro Featuring: Jerry Lewis, Martin Scorsese, Sean Hayes, Pierre Étaix

N

40 • FILMWATCH

•

wait to become Katzenjammer Kids in that frame of reference. That’s what we had going for us. We were absolutely having the best times of our lives watching hundreds and thousands of people laughing at that nonsense. Audiences enjoyed our victory— they enjoyed that we pulled it off.”

What did come across on screen was Lewis’ inspired comedy persona in such early films as At War with the Army (1950), Sailor Beware (1950), Living It Up (1954) and Artists and Models (1955). His comedy was, and remains, gut-funny. He is the perpetual child, which appeals to the kid in all of us.

When Martin and Lewis arrived in Hollywood, Jerry became intrigued with the mechanics of moviemaking. He later recalled, “They never could find me the first year. Because I was in editing, I was in the camera department. I was in makeup, wardrobe, miniatures, main titles. I was everywhere but on the set. ...

“I learned about the F-stops and the light.

I even learned to load the camera. And I did it on my own production because producers that I worked for weren’t crazy about the idea. But I learned to do it. It was a great joy to be able to talk to these 185 [crew] guys on a level you would never have an opportunity to talk about. I learned from what they said, I learned from what they showed me. And they loved that I wanted to learn.”

But in the wake of his earth-shattering split with Dean Martin and his evolution into an auteur, or what he called “The Total Filmmaker” in the 1960s, critics began to sound some sour notes. While audiences flocked to The Bellboy (1960), The Ladies Man (1961) and The Nutty Professor (1963), Andrew Sarris said Lewis “has never put one brilliant comedy together from fade-in to fade-out.”

The French, who became Jerry’s biggest

Guest Director

•

supporters, apparently didn’t care about sloppy construction, arid stretches between funny scenes, or the banal, sentimental, self-indulgent moments Lewis included in many of his movies. But as Sarris pointed out, “The argument about laughs is irrelevant because laughter in this case is less decisive than love. The French critics love Jerry Lewis. Many Americans do not.”

The French response to Jerry is a key element of Monro’s documentary, which manages to cover a lot of ground in spite of its subject’s daunting resumé. After all, there is no facet of show business he hasn’t conquered, from nightclubs, movies and television to the Broadway stage. He had hit records and even “starred” in his own long-running series of comic books! He taught filmmaking at the University of Southern California (to students like George Lucas) and once showed off his modest paycheck for an Esquire magazine photo essay about what gave famous people their greatest reward.

He even managed to impress critics with his performance as mordant talkshow host Jerry Langford in Martin Scorsese’s King of Comedy (1982).

At the age of 90, he is still going strong and, as I can personally attest, remains as funny as ever. He has a new movie (Max Rose) about to be released theatrically and a string of personal appearances on deck.

Ironically, Jerry Lewis had to turn down invitations to this festival for decades because he spent Labor Day Weekend hosting his famous telethon for Muscular Dystrophy. This filmed tribute to his remarkable career is long overdue in Telluride.

Leonard Maltin fell in love with Jerry Lewis at the age of 6. He is been attending the Telluride Film Festival since 1979.

tributes

•

revivals

•

Director Gregory Monro with Jerry Lewis

new films

•

Special

•

T R U N K S H OW S E P T E M B E R 1 - 4

|

DESIGNER IN HOUSE

2 0 9 E A S T C O L O R A D O AV E N U E | T E L L U R I D E 970.728.3777 | slategraygallery.com

300 Elks Park

Perched over the center of the charming, historic Town of Telluride, Colorado, this peerless 4-bedroom penthouse boasts sweeping 360-degree views of arguably the world’s most magnificent box canyon. Conceived by renowned New York architect and designer Alan Wanzenberg, and built by legendary Fortenberry and Ricks Construction, this 6,235 square foot property encompasses the building’s entire top floor. The quality, design, and location are second to none — humbled only, if at all, by the majesty of the mountain peaks that fill its vistas. There’s simply no other place like it.

Price available upon request. Call to make an appointment for a private tour.

MIKE WENTWORTH

Telluride & Mountain Village Properties

ROSIE CUSACK

Telluride Luxury Rentals & Real Estate 220 E. COLORADO AVE. | TELLURIDE, CO 81435

WEB: 300ELKSPARK.COM | PHONE: (970) 316-3557

E M A I L: C O N TAC T@300E L K S PA R K.C O M

L EME R CIE R

MUN G IU

Hard Lessons

T he generational seep of Romanian corruption and a lot of parents think they can redeem themselves through their children.

Is the film specific to Romania, or is it universal?

I try to make films about human nature, about the moral dilemmas that people are faced with. I’m speaking to my generation about one of the biggest problems you can have as a parent: the morals you pass onto your child. In Romania, you must decide, and it’s a decisive choice you make for your children, whether to advise them to stay or leave the country. My generation decided to stay as we had the energy to fight to change society. But nowadays, you could ask yourself how many generations should be sacrificed for a country.

The film broaches very serious subjects with a lot of tension, but there is no anger at all.

There’s a lot of aggression in today’s society. When you live in a place where things aren’t regulated, you feel like emotions are running high. A lot of people feel let down. But I didn’t want the characters to appear that way. I wanted them to show above all that they love each other. Everything had to be very calm, very gentle.

Cristian Mungiu, one of the central figures of the Romanian New Wave, follows his Cannes-winning films 4 Months, 3 Weeks And 2 Days (2007) and Beyond The Hills (2012) with Graduation, a brilliant exploration of immorality, parental love and institutional corruption. Mungiu, who won the best director prize at Cannes, tells us how the movie was born.

FABIEN LEMERCIER: Where did the idea for Graduation come from?

CRISTIAN MUNGIU: As a parent, I think a lot about what I should say to my children. And as my films always reflect what’s most important to me personally at any given time, I wanted to do some-

GRADUATION Romania, 2016, 128m Writer/Director: Cristian Mungiu

N

42 • FILMWATCH

•

thing on children, parents and the truth.

We often think that a convenient truth is enough for children: we live in our adult world and fashion a whole other truth for children. But if we really want to bring our children up well, we have to have the courage to look in the mirror, tell ourselves that we’ve made some bad choices in life, live with it and talk about it with our children.

Also, I read and collect a lot of different articles and had two files: one with little stories about corruption in Romania and

Guest Director

•

another on education. Some articles were difficult to sort into one or the other. So there’s a link between corruption, compromising your principles and education. To put a stop to that, we have to think about it.

It was also important to portray someone who feels a bit let down at this stage of his life in which he realizes that it’s too late to make new plans and that his accomplishments in life are all in the past. At this stage in his life, any energy he has left is focused on his children,

tributes

•

revivals

•

Do you distinguish between hard and soft corruption?

In the film, you see that if you put up with serious corruption, you don’t even notice when you resort to small-scale corruption in your life, as you’re never publicly judged for it. I wanted above all to explore the potential link between social corruption and the moral compromises we make in life without even noticing. So I portray parents who have only been able to survive in this country by making such compromises.

The main character is idealistic and rather naive compared to his children.

He thinks he can save his daughter from corruption and imagines sending her to another country that is allegedly free from corruption. But it’s not really possible.

Somewhere along the line, we have to be very strong; we have to have the courage to tell the truth, to look at how we act, to weigh the reasons for making our decisions.

Fabien Lemercier is a Paris-based correspondent for Cineuropa.org.

Reprinted with permission from Cineuropa.org, a website specializing in European film and audiovisual production.

new films

•

Special

•

Providing the technology to do what you love.

We’re proud to support the 43rd Telluride Film Festival.

Gross

S W ICO R D

The Solitary Man

B rya n C ra n st on s ta rs i n a n u ncommon s u bu rban dram a

Best known for her literary adaptions, including Little Women (1994), Practical Magic (1998), Matilda (1996), The Perez Family (1995), Shag (1989) and the Oscar-nominated The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008), Robin Swicord also directed the acclaimed Jane Austen Book Club (2007).

In 2009, she was drawn to the E.L. Doctorow short story “Wakefield,” the story of a man who drops out and takes on a secret life. Swicord spoke with Larry Gross about the challenges of converting one man’s inner turmoil into on-screen drama.

LARRY GROSS: If I was going to categorize this film to a friend, I’d describe it as the discontented suburban husband genre … except it’s totally and completely different from anything in that genre that I’ve seen.

ROBIN SWICORD: Yes, I would say that places this film.

I felt that the other movies about discontent somehow were indicting suburbia or marriage. But Wakefield could have been happily married in suburbia. That isn’t necessarily the core cause of his unhappiness. The core cause is much deeper. It’s about how to be present in his life.

WAKEFIELD United States, 2016, 109m Writer/Director: Robin Swicord Starring: Bryan Cranston, Jennifer Garner

N

44 • FILMWATCH

•

So it’s more of a metaphysical problem than a social problem, like Fellini’s 8½. It’s not about the problem of being a movie director. It’s a question of what does it mean to be a person? And both films are told in first person.

In film, you have no other way to communicate your interior life than first person. It’s a lonely journey. So you confide in the audience.

There’s something compulsive and excessive about the voiceover, and it produces an utterly dramatic effect. Did you ever say to yourself, “Boy, I’m out in left field here!”

Oh my God, so many times! As I was writing, I’m thinking, “This is the strangest movie I’ve ever seen.” But we all have these monologues and dialogues going on with ourselves all the time. We are talking to ourselves. I decided that Wakefield was someone who walks around the house speaking his thoughts. He needs to tell us a story.

Guest Director

•

tributes

•

revivals

When did you first encounter this material?

I read E.L. Doctorow’s short story in The New Yorker in 2009, and it crossed my mind that it would be interesting to adapt it as a film. I wrote a few emails to Doctorow to introduce myself and then met him. He agreed. He was a fantastic guy, and his wife Helen is also fantastic. They stuck with us for the more than four years it took to get it financed and cast and up on its feet.

Did Doctorow see the script?

Yes, he did. We had an agreement: there would be no money exchanged until we had the financing. In return for that, I offered him the opportunity to give his complete input. His notes were small and helpful and supportive. He did have one note that I initially resisted.

But when I was in the editing room, at a certain place 20 minutes into the film, I changed the order of a couple

•

new films

•

Special

•

WELCOME TO TELLURIDE FILM FESTIVAL & HAPPY MOVIE WATCHING! of scenes. I realized that that had been Doctorow’s note.

And that note had come years before!

Yes, exactly. You have to be ready to hear the note. We were both trying to solve the same problem, but in two different ways. I realized, oh my God, Doctorow actually told me to put that line there instead of here.

So, it was a four-year process from finishing the script to getting the movie made. Can you describe that, without the full splendors and miseries?

They weren’t miserable. They were just long. As you know, money follows cast.

So we had to get it cast. And the actors who can get you your money are people who are being offered everything else in the world. Maybe they don’t want to read, or they aren’t really right for the role.

[The casting director] Deb Aquila drew up a list and the first name on the list was Bryan Cranston. And I said, “We don’t even need to keep going.

Bryan is perfect. That’s who I want.”

And she said, “Your producers are not going to like the name, because he hasn’t made feature films, except in small parts. He has made his career in television. And I don’t know that you’re going to be able to get your financing.”

So we went through the list together of the usual, wonderful male actors who can get your movie made. You have to approach one at a time, and wait a long time for an answer about whether they would even read.

After about a year, I began to say, Why don’t we just go back to Bryan and make it for whatever we can? … Bryan and I hit it off, he liked the script, he wanted to play the role. We were done, except that we had to wait a little over a year for him to be finished with all the other commitments. And during all of this time his value as a movie star began to increase. Which meant that our budget could increase.

How does that work?

I wanted to work with the most money possible obviously, up to a certain amount.

Could we make it in 12 days? Well, it wouldn’t look as good as 20 days, which is where we ended up. To get the days, you have to raise the money.

What was it about Bryan Cranston?

The idea of casting the Wakefield character on the basis of a short story was challenging. You don’t know what he looks like. You have some sense of him

through his behavior, but there is a quality of the man that we can’t know.

The truth is, he doesn’t even know himself. Bryan is a character actor.

There is an ordinariness to his look.

He is handsome and ordinary at the same time.

Please talk a bit about the decision to cast Jennifer Garner.

That was the role I was most worried about casting. How do I get a beautifully transparent actor to play the role of the wife, someone whose expressions and thoughts you can read from a distance, whose thoughts you could feel from their expressions?

Someone you can see right through.

It was a short list of people that could do that. And we went to Jen. …

Were you worried that the audience wouldn’t like Wakefield?

[Laughs] You know I don’t shy away from unsympathetic characters! I have a number of movies that I have written where the characters are initially unsympathetic. And there are movies never made because of the years of studio filmmaking, in which everything was determined by corporations. Their question is always, “Is this character likeable?”

God forbid you make a movie with somebody who is not likeable! Some of my favorite movies, like Groundhog Day, the whole point is that, at the beginning, a person is one way.

Over the course of the movie, they evolve into something different. They do things that we don’t expect, we are fascinated, we stay with them. We may not want to invite them to dinner, but we are compelled to watch.

What I think about is, “Do we connect with this character?”At what point in the film do we feel ourselves becoming aligned with them? Alignment is the moment where the audience agrees to be that character. It is this beautiful transference; it’s part of the joy of watching movies: leaving yourself and joining that person and becoming them.

Larry Gross, a visiting professor at New York University Abu Dhabi, wrote the screenplays for 48 Hours and Streets of Fire. He won the 2004 Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award for We Don’t Live Here Anymore. His criticism has appeared in Film Comment and Sight & Sound.

Join us at

For an exclusive trunk show featuring

Celebrating 150 years of Scottish cashmere production, Begg & CO is a master of their craft.

This fall’s collection offers a beautiful range of weights and colors, pairing contemporary design with timeless luxury.

Opening Reception, September 1, 3-7 p.m.

Trunk Show, September 1-5, 10-6 p.m. daily

Transcription by Andromachi Papangeli.

221 East Colorado Avenue, Telluride, CO

|

www.CashmereRed.com

|

970-728-8088

SE L L A R S

CHAZELLE

Musical Review

D amien C ha z elle supercharges a beloved genre

BY PETER SELLARS Damien Chazelle breathed new life into the jazz film with his first two features, the charming low-budget Guy and Madeleine on a Park Bench (2009) and the Oscar-nominated Whiplash (2014).

He also gained significant moviemaking capital, enough to emerge on one of the most ambitious musicals in years.

La La Land, starring Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone and John Legend, tells the story of an actress-waitress and a struggling jazz pianist who meet, fall for each other and then are pulled apart by the currents of Hollywood fame.

Peter Sellars spoke with Chazelle about the film.

PETER SELLARS: La La Land is an insane checklist of every movie musical that’s ever been made. You nail every image, and you transmute it into your own dream universe. To watch you do your historical homework, and the sheer density of film intelligence, is just beyond belief.

DAMIEN CHAZELLE: Thank you; it’s definitely borne out of many years of lots of obsessive watching of those musicals.

I love lots of the old Hollywood musicals. I also really love the French musicals. Once I finally was able to make this movie, there was a lot to explore.

I would love for you to just talk about your design process—there is a level of voluptuous visuality that we are not used to.

Movies are weird art form in the sense that they combine a ton of different art forms and musicals even more so. You’ve got dance and songs and literature and design and costume and architecture and photography and painting. All of these things mix together and sometimes compete in almost any movie and particularly in a musical. But the musicals that really work for me feel like a single piece of music. The colors and sounds and melodies are one continuous piece.

This was a movie that was made in prep, and we tried to make it so every department

LA LA LAND United States, 2016,126m Writer/Director: Damien Chazelle Starring: Emma Stone, Ryan Gosling, J.K. Simmons

N

46 • FILMWATCH

•

felt like it was in constant dialogue with every other department. We rented out a couple of warehouses. In one room there would be a dance rehearsal and dancing going on right next to the costumes, next to the camera department. My office was right there. Everyone got to see every stage of the process.

We’d screen movies for inspiration, the The Band Wagon or Top Hat or A Star Is Born, and talk about them. Ryan and Emma were rehearsing and training and learning the dances, and became part of the process in a way that actors wouldn’t normally be. It was not the easiest thing that I’ve done, but once we got on set it felt like we were all speaking the same language.

It’s clear that everybody was drinking the same Kool-Aid and having the same insane Technicolor hallucinations!

Color is a character in the film. We take color for granted now. When color was a new, a novelty, before it was a default, movies in color had to justify being in color. And so you had this incredible richness and incredible expressivity in the Technicolor movies of the 40s and 50s. We were always talking about that color palette and did a lot of tests, shooting certain costumes and wallpaper designs. Emma wears this deep green dress in

Guest Director

•

the middle of the movie that is her emotional hot point, the one perfect moment that she and Ryan never quite get to recapture.

It’s incredible to see how much hard work your two stars did, mastering those dance routines, while still holding on to their tentativeness. You find a fragile place on edge of that confidence and Ryan and Emma place their performances so beautifully. Normally, the American musical comes with a brashness, which doesn’t feel like the correct temperature for America right now.

What is so special about the old Hollywood musicals that’s hard to find nowadays is the simplicity and the humanity that’s underneath the technique.

There is a real reason why we fall so in love with Fred and Ginger. Part of it is the artistry, but I always find myself looking at Ginger Rogers’ face in their dances and tracing how her face changes during the course of any number that she does with Fred. It’s just so sublimely understated, underplayed, subtle, tentative, fragile acting.

I think she’s one of the great actresses in history and underrated.

That’s why the conception of the movie started with really good actors who could then

tributes

•

revivals

•

act the dancing, act the singing, in a way that feels like real life, to have it feel completely human, to be the expression of a feeling as opposed to an expression of a routine.

Could you say a word about black presence in the film? About black presence in musical history and jazz? It’s an important issue that weaves through the movie.

To me one of key parts of the movie is the conversation between Keith, John Legend’s character, and Ryan’s character, where they put arguments on the table about preserving the tradition of jazz, about purity, about being a student of the history of jazz.

It was important to me that someone like John Legend could speak with authority on these subjects, on questions he himself has had to deal with as a black musician, questions of authenticity. At what point does opening doors becoming selling out? These are eternal questions for all popular music in America, and basically all popular music in America is black music.

Opera, theater and festival director Peter Sellars, Telluride’s Guest Director in 1999, is a professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures at UCLA and a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, the Erasmus Prize and the Gish Prize.

new films

•

Special

•

AMÉRICAS

FILM CONSERVANCY Proud Sponsors – Telluride Film Festival

FILMMAKERS OF TOMORROW

Producing and preserving cinematic excellence in the Americas and around the globe Los Angeles | Rio de Janeiro – San Paulo | Miami

AFC supports FILMMAKERS OF TOMORROW WORLDWIDE and encourages NEW PRODUCTIONS film in the Sate of Colorado

Facebook.com/AmericasFilmConservancy

www.afcla.org

Uncontacted

T he final arrivals to the modern world

By Angus Macqueen Footage of a man handing bananas to two naked men in the middle of an Amazonian river went viral in late June 2014. At the time, the Brazilians claimed it was a once in a generation event—that the moment of “first contact” was caught on camera. These were some of the last so-called “uncontacted” peoples left on the planet—men and women who live with no direct contact with the outside world. Experts suggest there are perhaps 70 such groupings left, numbering anything from 2,000 to 3,000 people in total, nearly all of whom live in the headwaters of the Amazon.

The emergence of this group of 35 of the Sapanahua tribe in 2014 has raised serious questions about how we should approach these people. In making our film The End of Eden, we not only got the first access to the 35 to find out why they made contact and what their lives were like, but we went over the border to reserves in Peru, where we discovered a much bigger crisis. For some reason, different uncontacted tribes and groupings are coming out on all sides of the reserves. The conventional, often correct, explanation is that they are being driven out by confrontations with illegal loggers and drug traffickers. But there is evidence that something more fundamental is happening. What is certain is that the authorities are struggling to cope.

In Brazil the 35 people—14 men, nine women and 12 children—are flourishing under the protection of Funai, the Brazilian department of indigenous peoples, at a camp they are creating four hours upriver from where they emerged. They seem to have overcome the most immediate danger: lack of immunity to our common diseases. It is now thought that simple influenza and the common cold, brought by outsiders from the Spanish conquistadors onwards, wiped out the vast majority of the indigenous peoples in the Amazon over the centuries.

So Funai flew in an expert doctor who vaccinated all 35, after gaining enough trust to

THE END OF EDEN U.K., 2016, 83m Director: Angus Macqueen

N

48 • FILMWATCH

•

Guest Director

•

persuade them that the injections were not designed to kill them. That trust is difficult.

Misunderstandings abound. More than 100 Funai agents have been killed by tribes in the past decade. Funai proudly claims that this is the only time no one on either side has died after first contact, although some anthropologists and NGOs worry that members of the 35, when they disappear off hunting, could meet other members of the tribe and pass on deadly germs.

In their new home, where they continue to hunt and live much as they did before, the 35 have quickly adapted to the advantages of clothing, machetes and pots and pans. One of the women loves her flipflops, while a 9-year-old boy, Curi Curi, happily seized our stills camera and within 10 minutes was producing photographs.

They may well be what we once were, but they quickly can become like us. For good or bad.

In the desire to protect, it is amazing what we invest in these men and women. When the team first travelled down the rivers for more than a week to meet them, we felt as if we were crossing a time barrier. Here were people untouched by our rapacious civilization. Here were people who might tell us something profound about ourselves. Do they hold some profound ancient wisdoms we have lost? Some understanding of what we are as human beings? Or is such an idea simply an expression of our guilt?

While with them we discovered that it was a confrontation with armed men deep in the rainforest that finally drove them out. There had been a massacre in which fathers and mothers had been killed. The ones who first emerged were young and incredibly brave to seek peaceful contact with “the whites” who have always brought them death. Their leader, Xina (pronounced Sheena), told us that his parents always talked about how “the whites had always wanted to kill us.” Indeed, a few days with the Funai anthropologists made clear that these rivers are not quite so untouched as they seem; nor were these tribes quite so isolated. They were almost certainly refugees from the horror that was the rubber boom of the early 20th century, when tribes that did not agree to work as slaves were hunted down and exterminated. These were the ones who ran away.

And have stayed away until now.

What we also discovered from them, and also from others when we travelled south into Peru, was that they are not living in some prelapsarian Eden, innocent and untouched by the burdens of modern life. They continue to live in an almost constant state of terror, with fear of both their own world and fear of the outside.

tributes

•

revivals

•

It is a toxic mix: it turns out they are scared of snakes and jaguars, don’t like sleeping naked in the storms and think thunderstorms are the work of the gods. And they do know about the outside world. They watch it, often silently. They see the clothes, the axes and the houses. And they want them, so it emerges they are regularly stealing and raiding. And that creates the next stage level of fear—because often when they put on the clothes they fall ill and sometimes die. And of course they cannot understand why.

For the past generation, the established policy has been to create vast reserves for the tribes, into which outsiders are not permitted, and not to contact them when they are seen or they approach. This policy provides some element of protection against the multinational oil, gas and mining companies that, like the first Spaniards, see the rainforests as the new frontier.

Indeed as recently as 10 years ago, the Peruvian government and its commercial friends ridiculed environmentalists and groups such as Survival International, which attempt to protect the interests of indigenous peoples in the Amazon. The government said there were no uncontacted peoples in Peru, so there was no need to protect them or close off their lands.

In the past couple of years the uncontacted have been unconsciously taking advantage of the policy. Local indigenous tribes, long part of the Peruvian and Brazilian state, have been lectured on how they should run away and escape if ever approached. They are told they will be prosecuted if they attack or even retaliate. As a result the uncontacted feel able to walk into villages, particularly when the men are away. There is a genuine sense of crisis in some regions on the edge of the reserve.

The Peruvian ministry of culture is struggling to cope and is for the first time breaking its no-contact code. It and has created a post along the river, which not only prevents tourist boats stopping to gawp, but also has a doctor. We witnessed the first time the doctor went over to treat a woman, who had been attacked by an anteater. The government hopes that such contact will build some trust, though it fears the possible passing on of germs at the same time, which might undermine that trust.

The mantra must clearly remain that these men and women should only come out if they choose to. But if it is true that fear is the dominant reality of these people’s lives, is our overwhelming desire to protect them as they are the right way to continue?

Angus Macqueen has been making documentaries for 20 years and is former head of documentaries at Channel 4 Television in London. His film Gulag also screens in the festival. Originally printed in The Guardian. Reprinted with permission of the author.

new films

•

Special

•

THE CROWN JEWEL OF TELLURIDE

SPA & SALON LIVE THE SWEET LIFE!

A RESTORATIVE ESCAPE

OPEN DAILY

OPEN DAILY

MODERN MOUNTAIN CUISINE

SIP . SAVOR . SMILE

11:30 AM - 10:00 PM DAILY

6:30 AM - 6:30 PM DAILY

madelinetelluride.com | 866.736.0108 | 568 Mountain Village Blvd., Telluride

Saving Grace

T he r e ma r k a b l e r e sc u e of a long lo s t A r et ha F r a n k l i n con ce rt f ilm It was the biggest album from one of the biggest stars of the 1960s and 70s, recorded live in church in front of a rapturous audience. And as Aretha Franklin’s performed the songs that were to become the double-platinum Amazing Grace, the Oscar-winning director Sydney Pollack shot it all with four 35mm cameras, with help from the legendary music producer Jerry Wexler (who also worked with Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan and Ray Charles). Warner Brothers initially intended to release it as part of a double feature with Super Fly, but due to technical problems, the film was never completed. More than 40 years later, the producer Alan Elliott, a close friend of both Pollack’s and Wexler’s, has brought Amazing Grace to life. He spoke with Geoff Dyer about the process.

At what point did the technology for fixing this problem become available?

I first had the conversation about finishing the film with Sydney Pollack in 1991, and, the technology just didn’t exist then. In 2008, a woman named Beverly Wood from Technicolor, she’s African American and of that certain age where she knew the movie’s historical significance, said, “I’ll take care of it; I’ll make sure that it gets done.”

It took her two weeks to sync the film, and when it was done, we had the makings of a magical document. This was of course just after Sydney had passed away.

When Jerry died, his son called me and said, “I think you kept him alive an extra year by giving him something to work on.” That was a really great compliment.

other things that are going on in society at large, outside the church.

Absolutely! It’s fascinating from so many different perspectives. It takes place in post-riot, post-Black Panther Los Angeles.

At the same time, it’s also the dawning of real corporations owning the music business. And what always gets me when I see the film is Jerry Wexler, who after signing Aretha Franklin, producing all the Ray Charles records, sold his company to Warner Brothers for a lot of money. Not a lot of money today, but a lot of money back then, in 1968. It’s 1972, and he’s older and he is wearing a sailing jacket. He is literally sailing away from the music business. And he would tell me, after 1973 or 1974, the entire recording business was just gas fumes.

Has Aretha Franklin seen it?

I don’t know. She is very hard to reach. I met her once for maybe about 17 seconds, and she has never engaged with it. I understand that she likes to move forward. She’s never been one to do something that she has already done. But the film is a love letter to her, an absolute love letter. I’ve done it as respectfully as I can, and I really hope at a certain point she will put her arms around it.

GEOFF DYER: At the beginning of the film, you give us a brief and enigmatic note: the film didn’t see the light of day because of technical reasons.

What were they?

ALAN ELLIOTT: The crew failed to bring a clapperboard. There were four cameras covering the concert from top to bottom, but without a clapper and with the cameras being turned on and off repeatedly, there were no reference points to sync the picture with

the sound. There was a further problem in that one Nagra tape recorder, for whatever reason, ran a few milliseconds slow. So the editors had to cut out a frame here and there, which made everything look herky-jerky.

They hired Alexander Hamilton, the choir director, and some lip readers to try to figure out which songs matched which takes.

It was 1972, in the predigital age, and they were dealing with 16mm film and tape. After a couple of months, they just gave up.

Did you decide not to include people looking back on what it was like in 1972, to keep to this raw document of the experience?

There was never a minute, ever, that I considered using talking heads. The movie is the last work done by Sydney Pollack and Jerry Wexler. I wanted to be in that hall. I don’t need anybody to tell me what I’m feeling.

David Ritz, who wrote Aretha’s biography, said it’s like watching the Sistine Chapel as it is painted. I wanted it to feel like we found this movie from 1972. We made the best movie that we could have made in 1972.

AMAZING GRACE United States, 1972, 87m Director: Sydney Pollack Producer: Alan Elliott

I don’t know how much a clapperboard costs. Let’s say you could have bought one with $25 back then. It would have been $25 well spent.

I would have imagined $25 might have been high. …

Though it’s primarily a documentary about the making of an album, it’s got great historical value about this particular period in American history. Even though we don’t stray beyond the walls of the church, we can feel a lot of the

N

50 • FILMWATCH

•

Guest Director

•

tributes

•

revivals

•

Geoffrey Dyer, the 2012 Telluride Guest Director, is author of four novels: Paris Trance, The Search, The Colour of Memory and Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi; two collections of essays; and six genredefying titles: But Beautiful, The Missing of the Somme, Out of Sheer Rage, Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It, The Ongoing Moment and Zona. His collection Otherwise Known as the Human Condition won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.

new films

•

Special

•

F o u n da s

Ta v e r n i e r

Far Beyond the New Wave A hero of F rench cinema replays his favorites

longer include. It wasn’t that I admired them any less, but they could not find their place, the same way that in a fiction film you may have to cut a certain character or monologue because it doesn’t fit what you’re trying to do. Jean Gabin led to Marcel Carné, which led to Maurice Jaubert; there was a kind of emotional construction in that.

BY SCOTT FOUNDAS It seems only fitting that BERTRAND TAVERNIER was born in Lyon, France, a stone’s throw from where the brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière had, a half-century earlier, turned their camera upon the workers exiting their family’s photographic factory and, by doing so, invented the art of cinema. For in his own half-century as critic, publicist and Oscar-nominated filmmaker, Tavernier has himself seemed the very embodiment of the spirit of cinema, with an encyclopedic knowledge of film history and an insatiable appetite for new discoveries, whether they stem from the deepest recesses of B-movie ephemera or the forefront of today’s maverick auteurs.

And Tavernier’s mammoth new documentary, MY JOURNEY THROUGH FRENCH CINEMA, is no ordinary hit parade of the silver screen’s most iconic moments.

Rather, for three glorious hours, Tavernier takes us on a deeply personal stroll down memory lane, from his earliest movie memories to his industry apprenticeship under the brilliant but cantankerous director Jean-Pierre Melville.

Call it Tavernier’s Remembrance of Movies Past—a cinephilic autobiography and remarkably comprehensive and fair-minded assessment of French moviemaking from the 1930s through to the early 1970s (when Tavernier’s own career as a director began). Along the way, Tavernier pays due homage to master actors, writers and directors both widely celebrated (Jean Renoir, Jean Gabin, Jean-Paul Belmondo) and unjustly overlooked (Jacques Becker, Edmond T. Gréville, Claude Sautet), while doing a great deal to rehabilitate the reputation of the pre-New Wave French movies (in) famously dismissed by Francois Truffaut as “le cinema du papa.”

Somewhere, one suspects, the Lumière brothers are smiling. He spoke with SCOTT FOUNDAS.

MY JOURNEY THROUGH FRENCH CINEMA France, 2016, 190m Director: Bertrand Tavernier

N

52 • FILMWATCH

•

Sim o ne Signoret in Casque d’or, direct ed by Jacques Becker ( 1952)

Eddie Constant ine in Jean-Luc Godard’s Alp h aville (1965)

SCOTT FOUNDAS: The title of the film alludes to Martin Scorsese and Michael Henry Wilson’s epic 1995 documentary, A Personal Journey Through American Movies. What were some of your other sources of inspiration?

BERTRAND TAVERNIER: There were many sources. One was the regret to have not met certain directors; I was less than 20 years old when Maurice Tourneur died. And I found it shocking that a lot of those directors ended their lives without having any kind of tribute, any kind of interview. Anatole Litvak is another example. I had that in mind. Also, I wanted to do a film of admiration. I felt a need to express my admiration and gratitude for so many people. Of course, Martin Scorsese has something to do with it.

But even before his film, I wanted to do a film that would come not from the point

Guest Director

•

of view of a historian, a critic, or a scholar, but from the point of view of a director who is passionate about the work of some of his older colleagues. I didn’t want to do a historical approach; that idea bored me to death.

I wanted to be passionate, to be grateful, and to seek out the flesh and the blood that existed in those films.

Even at three hours, there are only so many films and film personalities you can include from the vast history of French cinema. How did you make those choices?

That was so difficult. But slowly, like in a fictional screenplay, the film imposed its own logic. There was a moment where, after Jacques Becker, I needed something lighter; Becker was leading organically towards Jean Renoir. Then there were some people who, because of this progression, I could no

tributes

•

revivals

•

For the last 50 years, any discussion of the history of French cinema has seemingly been dominated by the “New Wave” directors who burst on to the scene in the 1960s: Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol, Rohmer, Rivette. Was it one of your goals to reintroduce other, largely overlooked chapters of French film history to this conversation?

I admire many films of the New Wave.

I worked very strongly to defend them, sometimes against the critics. But I’m a bit exasperated to have the French cinema reduced to a seven- or eight-year period. It’s as if you were speaking about the American cinema and saying that, outside of Scorsese, Altman and Cassavetes, there is nobody else. You forget Lubitsch, Hawks, Ford, La Cava, Minnelli, Donen, the people of the silent cinema. I did not want to approach cinema like that, with labels.

“New Wave” is a label like “poetic realism,” where you put in the same bag Carné, Julien Duvivier, Jean Grémillon and people like that. You group together people who have nothing to do with each other; they don’t have the same sensibility. What does New Wave even mean? That they had lighter equipment—that’s all. What do Rohmer and Godard share in terms of values, in terms of politics, in terms of narrative construction?

What is the relationship between Resnais and Truffaut? Chabrol and Godard have nothing in common. It’s an accident that they started together. Each of them made films that were important; they were innovators, and they changed cinema. But you have to take Godard for what he is and Chabrol for what he is.

But mostly I didn’t want to speak of these fights between clans. I hate religious war; I have done a film on that subject, and I know that it’s stupid. You kill a lot of people for absurd reasons, for a discussion of dogma that could be solved peacefully, without the burning of cities and hangings by the thousands.

I wanted to talk not about labels, but about the work itself, the real work. Some films are good in spite of what some people of the New Wave have said about them; some are good because of what the New Wave has said. But my film is not a declaration of war; it’s more a declaration of peace.

Scott Foundas, former chief critic at Variety, is senior manager of acquisitions/production at Amazon Studios Original Movies.

new films

•

Special

•

Cinema Champion of the World

A great film lover holds court

BY BERTRAND TAVERNIER The great cinephile Pierre Rissient, namesake of the festival’s Le Pierre theater, is given tribute by his former business partner Bertrand Tavernier.

Pierre is for me synonymous with friendship, a friendship that extends for more than 55 years. A friendship without turmoil, without misunderstanding, without any kind of bitterness. I worked with Pierre for ten years, and I got to know well the Pierre Rissient who was ten—sometimes 15—years ahead of critics around the world, who by principle refused catch phrases and dogma of any kind.

I witnessed the way in which the discovery of The Molly Maguires (1970) completely transformed his perception of Martin Ritt— a filmmaker he didn’t really consider before the screening. Subsequently, he defended Conrack (1974) and Sounder (1972). I shared his enthusiasm for Anatole Litvak’s Coeur de Lilas (1930), which forced us to dive into the fascinating work of this filmmaker, shunned

by French critics. We both shared the same regret of never having met him.

Pierre, an indefatigable viewer with insatiable curiosity, was never a passive spectator. He spotted the driving force of a work (which sometimes had nothing to do with its theme) and his vision was never removed from the real, from the secret, interior life of

GENTLEMAN RISSIENT France, 2015, 110m Directors: Benoît Jacquot , Guy Seligman, Pascal Merigeau

a film. He could sense an emerging talent just from looking at rushes; and after seeing only a first cut, he knew exactly which shots or dialogues had to be cut or modified, how scenes could be tweaked and how the main argument could be polished. He did not refrain from judging a film on an aesthetic level, but instead, readily intervened and got his hands dirty.

And whenever he offered his advice or opinion, there was no underlying preaching or lectures, no concessions to current trends, or to the drift of the times.

And in face of the rigor he has always upheld, intellectuals and politicians who capitulate or bow to public opinion have always incited in him a certain disgust.

I’ve known the Pierre who was so enthusiastic for so many first films, who attempted to impose Lino Brocka’s Insiang (1976) at Cannes, who managed to get Abraham Polonsky’s Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here (1969) released by showing it to the Siritzky brothers, those passionate movie exhibitors. The same passion has always emanated from Pierre.

“Passion is the heart’s distraction,” wrote Vladimir Jankelevitch, to which Emile Zola responded: “Passion is what best helps us to live.”

Betrand Tavernier is a four-time Palme d’Or nominee and Venice Career Golden Lion recipient whose films include A Sunday in the Country, Round Midnight, The Clockmaker, Coup de Torchon, Life and Nothing But and The Judge and the Assassin. His film My Journey Through French Cinema screens at the festival.

Gross

Younger

Going for Greatness

W h y B e n You n g e r i d e n t i f ies w ith b oxe r Vinny Pa zi e nza say you can’t do. And then it’s done.”

Once I locked on to that, I thought, “I’ve got to tell the story. This is personal now.”

How did you steep yourself so thoroughly in Rhode Island? You are an Orthodox Jew, not Italian, not from New England.

My mother is a shrink. She taught me to listen and to observe and to be a caring and sensitive human being. And I think that’s the number-one quality for a filmmaker, just being able to listen.

Certainly for a writer, more than for a director. I really like telling true stories.

Boiler Room was a true story. I feel like I’ll never get this close on my own.

There’s a lot that’s incredibly specific in this movie.

I had access to family photos; I had access to videos. I just ate it up. I watched everything I could; I just did a lot of research. I was never a journalist. My writing has always been about researching, diving into worlds.

I was always a reader of nonfiction. I like the discovery period. It’s really fun. You probably will never see me write a science fiction movie. As a writer, it’s not who I am.

the majority of them have absolutely no chance of reaching an audience.

This one has a chance.

BEN YOUNGER: Those were the movies I grew up on. Chinatown was a success, but it was also a masterpiece. Nobody made distinctions between art house and commercial. They started doing that when they started making shitty movies.

After the critically acclaimed Boiler Room (2000) and Prime (2005), Ben Younger’s career as a director slowed to a stop. When he heard the story for Bleed for This, about a phenomenal comeback, he was reenergized. Bleed for This tells the inspirational true story of Vinny Pazienza, a boxing champion who makes an unprecedented return to the sport. Younger spoke with Larry Gross about the film.

LARRY GROSS: First of all I just want to congratulate you. This film is the rare combination—obscenely rare these days—of totally compelling entertainment on the one hand and intelligent on the other. There are a lot of good films made in the world, but

BLEED FOR THIS United States, 2016, 134m Director: Ben Younger Starring: Miles Teller, Aaron Eckhart, Katey Sagal

N

54 • FILMWATCH

•

What Michael Bay is today, Sidney Lumet was in 1974. That was a different world. So that brings us to Bleed for This. What was your history as boxing fan, if any?

I am not a fan of boxing; I’ve never been a fan. It’s just not my thing.

Scorsese had never been to a boxing match before he made the Raging Bull!

He knew nothing about the sport. So, how did the story land on you and how did you come to it?

The truth is I took the job because I was in a bad place. You know, I didn’t make a movie for eleven years. I realized how much my life reflected this story, of coming back from the brink. Chad Verdi approached me and pitched me the story.

I thought it was incredible. Even though I was not a fighting fan, I always loved

Guest Director

•

the boxing film genre and I thought, “Yeah, I can make some money.” But as I wrote it, I fell in love with it. That has never happened before.

Taking a job for money is not an obscenely terrible thing. I’ll give you an example of a film I know that the director took for money, when his career had hit a wall: The French Connection.

It was a job and then Bill Friedkin fell in love with it. How did you fall in love with this story?

It was a two-step process. The first was meeting Vinny. I went to Rhode Island and met him, and he’s very pure of heart.

He’s not an intellectual, he isn’t self-reflective, but he did have a strong sense of what had happened to him. He was aware of the journey he had been on.

The other part was this: Vinny was told he wasn’t going to box again. I wasn’t told I was never going to make a film again. When you take ten years off between movies, it’s not so simple coming back to make another one. And when I finally decided I was ready to come back, there were obstacles. That element of the story, people saying, “You’re not going to be able to do this,” and his reaction: “Don’t listen to them. Do the thing they

tributes

•

revivals

•

At what point did you see Miles Teller as Vinny?

Straight away. His agent, Tracey Brandon, sent me to go see Whiplash before it came out. It’s funny—he walked into our meeting and said, “I’ve never seen Boiler Room; I am sorry, dude.”

Arrogant kid, in the greatest way possible. At that moment, I was a little put off. “Way to do your homework, pal.”

But that’s who Vinny is. That’s exactly what Vinny would do. He’d come in; he’d tell the truth.

Aaron Eckhart is awesome in the film—it was 15 minutes before I knew it was him. The idea of Aaron Eckhart in this part is so counterintuitive.

How did it happen?

Miles’ first movie was Rabbit Hole, which was a starring vehicle for Aaron.

And now Miles is the main guy, and Aaron is playing a supporting role. Maybe the freedom of it, not having to carry the film on his shoulders, gave him a chance to just act, which God knows, he can do it. We had been on the same road a bit, you know? We were both like, “OK, it’s time to be great.”

“Do you want to be great?”

“Yeah, I want to be great; I’m ready.”

I said, “Let’s stop fucking around; let’s go for it.” That was the argument for our working relationship.

new films

•

Special

•

Proud Sponsor of The Telluride Film Festival.

VISIT US AT TMVOA.ORG

B la n c h e t t

A n dr e w s

Dark Reunion

Roo n ey M a ra a n d B e n M e n de lsohn e xp lore a trag ic a f fair

BY CATE BLANCHETT In Una, acclaimed theater director Benedict Andrews turns a couple’s reunion into a deep exploration of pain, betrayal and healing. He spoke with actor Cate Blanchett about working with (David Harrower’s play Blackbird) and the actors Rooney Mara and Ben Mendelsohn about extracting maximum meaning and emotion.

UNA United Kingdom, 2016, 94m Director: Benedict Andrews Based on the play Blackbird by David Harrower Starring: Rooney Mara, Ben Mendelsohn, Riz Ahmed

N

56 • FILMWATCH

•

CATE BLANCHETT: Firstly, a disclaimer: I have been haunted by David Harrower’s savage and painful story of two star-crossed lovers since I first read the stage play Blackbird back in 2005.

I am an ardent admirer of the theatrical work of Benedict Andrews, having worked with him on three productions as an actor, as well as having consumed, as an audience member, countless of his indelible productions.

I have borne witness to his prowess as a writer, his unique visual flair and his deep love of actors. Speaking of starcrossed, it seems this screen collaboration between you and David Harrower was somehow predestined. Can you explain how this project crossed your path?

BENEDICT ANDREWS: The idea of making a film of Blackbird obsessed me ever since I directed the play at the Schaubühne (the famed Berlin theater) in 2005. I loved the way the play drew the audience into a knot of desire and guilt, without ever judging the characters or offering easy consolation. I was attracted to the complex moral

Guest Director

•

ambiguities of Una and Ray’s relationship, to David’s razor-sharp writing and to the fundamental question of how the past lives on in the present. This seemed to me a deeply cinematic idea, and something I was interested to explore in my first film.

(Producer) Jean Doumanian had been developing a film version of the play. In 2013, I heard whisper that Jean was looking for a director and put myself forward.

At our first meeting, I told Jean that I wanted to show the young Una’s relationship with Ray in the past. I mentioned the Alain Resnais-Marguerite Duras’ masterpiece Hiroshima Mon Amour, the way that film portrays memory and trauma.

In Hiroshima Mon Amour, the two characters are stranded in the present— emotionally shipwrecked. Buried memories resurface and weave through their meeting like insistent melodies. I wasn’t interested in flashback merely as a narrative device; it had to be essential to the fabric of the film. The characters sift through the wreckage of the past and face what was left unfinished. I wanted

tributes

•

revivals

•

the film—like Una herself—to exist on a fault-line between past and present.

Jean was a fan of my work in the theater and liked my ideas for the film. David Harrower visited me in Reykjavik, and we began to flesh out the script. Actually, it was a combination of fleshing out—opening up pockets of the story in the present and past—and stripping the play to what was essential. And yes, the work with David definitely felt like it was meant to be. From the get-go, we were able to tap into a really dynamic, creative way of working, feeding off each other and the raw material of his extraordinary play.

Having directed Blackbird at the Schaubühne in Berlin, were there any echoes or discoveries that felt essential to preserve when embarking on this filmic retelling? What did you feel was integral to preserve or what if anything was vital to shake off? Or did it feel like a creative page one rewrite?

It really helped knowing the play inside out. I knew how it was hard-wired. That knowledge was invaluable when it came

new films

•

Special

•

to taking it apart and reworking it for the screen. Blackbird is a masterpiece of economy and tension—one of the most thrilling and audacious plays so far this century.

The first word is “shock,” and it never lets go from there. The audience is trapped in the room with Una and Ray as they tear strips off each other and fight for everything they hold dear. It’s nervewracking and intense—a kind of verbal boxing match—by turns shocking, forensic, funny, disturbing and deeply intimate, a white-knuckle story of damaged love, a taut, relentless examination of character, desire and fate.

In the theater, all Una and Ray have is words—words as weapons and testimony, secrets and lies. David writes tough, muscular language in a fragmented syntax. We needed to discover a cinematic equivalent for that.

We didn’t want the speech to sound stagey.

The accusations, evasions, lies, manipulations and confessions of the play are highly rhetorical. That’s beautiful in the theater, but not necessarily cinematic. We needed to find what we could leave out, to leave space for the audience to search between the lines. The play is deeply claustrophobic. We’re trapped in that room with the two characters. There’s really nothing else. The past exists purely in words, on the screens of our imaginations.

In the film, we have an opportunity to show what can’t be said and to immerse the audience in memories. Cinema offers a special way to study the emotional experience of time, and I was interested in how to portray the fragile membrane between past and present. As well as opening up flashes of the past, we chose to expand the play beyond the lunchroom and to develop Una and Ray’s reunion in the context of their new lives.

We decided to give hints of their life beyond this room—how Una still lives with her mother, for example, or her addiction to anonymous sex ... also to show Ray’s new life, everything he’s fighting to protect. The outside world bursts into the hermetic room of the play, and we follow the characters into the world. I envisaged Una’s journey through the film as a passage through a labyrinth. Ray’s workplace is a kind of purgatory where he and Una are trapped. The bland rooms of the warehouse contrast the turbulent emotions and painfully intimate drama.

Una and Ray pursue each other along stark maze-like corridors, through boxlike rooms and towering storage stacks. She wants to stare down the enigma of her desire and confront the Minotaur of her past. This concept of the labyrinth was a key idea for me in transforming the play into a film. The idea of the girl lost in the maze also informs the memories of their past. The tense, claustrophobic present is interrupted by fleeting, fragmented memories. This creates an elegiac, dreamlike feeling, and a highly emotional experience of the mechanisms of memory.

I knew from directing the play how Blackbird continually messes with the audience’s expectations. They must work like detectives to decipher what’s real, what’s true, whom to

believe. The play twists you and turns you, flips your sympathies, troubles your moral understanding of victim and perpetrator. David and I aimed to preserve this sensibility in the filmmaking. The whole thing had to be balanced on a knife edge.

There is so much backstory: misunderstood, previously unexplored history between the two characters—so beautifully structured and balanced in the play. How did you and David hit upon the powerful central focus of Una? Ray and Una share a secret bond that separates them from others, yet which they can never follow. Theirs is an impossible, nihilistic form of love. Una feels like a kind of stranger in her own life. She needs to answer the questions that plague her.

Only by confronting Ray and facing what happened between them can she begin to heal. Una and Ray’s memories lay buried for 15 years; their tense reunion unlocks the past. The highly charged memories that interrupt the present are clues—fragments of a shattered history.

The creation of the Scott character—Ray’s co-worker who develops a nascent and tender relationship with Una—was a stroke of story telling genius …

Una and Ray’s relationship is intensely exclusive, a kind of bubble. We needed a kind of circuit breaker—someone on the outside looking in. Una is a puzzle to Scott, a beautiful mystery. He senses that something is going on, that everything is not as Una and Ray claim. He’s protective of his mate “Pete” and at the same time attracted to this strange woman. His tenderness to Una— when she is most lost—suggests the possibility of another kind of adult relationship for her.

“I’m always looking for unexpected flickers of thought or emotion—things none of us had planned that come up in the moment, under pressure, through the cracks … They make up the secret fabric of the film.”

This is raw and emotionally tangled territory for actors to wade into. The casting of a fearless, charismatic, inventive pairing must have been paramount. You’ve worked with Ben Mendelsohn before on stage, on your stunning production of Julius Caesar, but this is the first time with Rooney.

As is so often the case in your work, you seem to facilitate the performers colliding with the material. In this case, watching Una career toward Ray has the terror and thrill of a car crash—when I say thrill I mean as in “thank God this is not happening to me.” Tell me about the rehearsal process. How did that run? Rooney and Ben are so in sync with the rhythm and tone of the piece and with each other. I’m sure you didn’t have the luxury of time to embed this.

How did the three of you work?

Actually, I didn’t want to rehearse much before the shoot. I wanted to save the charge between the actors for their meeting in front of the cameras. In the theater, as you know, I’m used to really unpacking the play around a table and on the floor. There’s time for that because in the theater, the actors have to train so they can be real, night after night. Rehearsals are a kind of shredding of text, character, and impulse … getting completely lost, then— hopefully—putting it all back together in front of an audience. But in film, it only needs to happen once in front of the camera. So it was a question of finding out how to condense that process into the shoot.

Initially, Ben and Rooney and I spent a few days together in a rehearsal room. Riz [Ahmed] and Ruby Stokes (who plays the young Una) joined us for some of that. David was there, too, and we used the opportunity to rework dialogue. Ben and Rooney had strong input into the shooting script—for example, the idea of Una’s anonymous sex in the nightclub toilet grew from a conversation with Rooney. She felt a glimpse into Una’s double life was important. This collaboration with Rooney and Ben about the script continued throughout the shoot—we’d rework and improvise dialogue as necessary.

My work in front of the camera with the actors was extremely intimate. I

–B enedict Andrews

FILMWATCH • N

57

B la n c h e t t

was asking them to go further, to surprise each other, to keep it fresh. Una and Ray’s meeting is an emotional high-wire act. The atmosphere on set needed to allow them to be emotionally naked and completely honest. I made sure the atmosphere around the camera could mirror the exclusive, raw intimacy of their encounter. This meant keeping noise, prying eyes and distraction at bay. In my theater rehearsal rooms, I’m used to—and demand—a special kind of sheltered, exploratory space. An incubator.

I wanted to make sure that the actors had this same intimacy in front of the cameras.

Close to the action, we worked with a bare minimum, skeletal crew who maintained an atmosphere of great concentration and support. I was blessed to be surrounded by a completely generous, switched-on crew. They were in touch with the actors and deeply respectful of the process.

This helped elicit such brave, true performances. Ben and Rooney are both fearless actors, both incredibly truthful. It was a great pleasure to watch them dig into this tough material together every day. They developed a deep and binding trust that was invaluable when approaching such confronting scenes. Our director of photography, Thimios Bakatakis, has a great eye and helped chase down special moments of vulnerability between the actors.

You are working with actors who speak volumes with a look, but also your framing made dispensing with many a monologue possible. I’m curious—how predetermined in your screenplay was the flip-flopping between memory and the present? How much did you want to keep alive to play with this in post?

The film contrasts the relentlessly linear events of a single day in the present with a mosaic of non-linear memories from the past. David and I had fleshed out an extremely precise structure in the screenplay, but all the pieces got thrown in the air again in the edit. Editor Nick Fenton and I looked on the whole film as a puzzle to be reassembled in the cut. I think this was necessary in order for the memories to feel organic. Nick and I felt our way through the film together. It was an extremely creative, exploratory process.

Speaking of rhythm—music is in your creative bones—the soundscape and soundtrack of Una is inextricably linked to the atmospheric core of the film. How did this evolve? Had you worked with Jed Kurzel before?

Jed and I have been mates for years. We were at drama school together, and he performed as an actor and contributed music in several plays with me back in the 1990s, in our hometown, Adelaide. We were both the best men at his brother Justin’s wedding, too.

I’m a huge fan of Jed’s film scores— his work on Justin’s Snowtown in particular. A knockout. His scores are deeply

N

58 • FILMWATCH

•

A n dr e w s

Cat e Bl anch et t & Benedic t Andr e w s Ph o to b y Ma r c o D e l Gr a nde

evocative and extremely sensitive. He works from the inside out and is always probing the film’s nervous system. He helps the audience hear it—without ever being clichéd, obvious or banal.

In our first conversation about Una, Jed used the word shimmering to describe the music he had in mind. I thought this sounded just right. His score for Una keeps the audience on edge. It draws them ever deeper into the whirlpool of Una and Ray’s relationship. You call them “star-crossed lovers”—Jed’s music somehow encourages this sense of a damaged, doomed romance. His soundtrack is delicate, deeply felt, and somehow manages to resist telling us what to think about the character’s. It won’t let us take sides.

One of the things I admire about your process is that it’s singular AND organic.

You are so alive to the random surprises that get thrown up in a rehearsal room, in operating them without losing the meta-thread of the production. What surprised you working on Una? Every day was an adventure, but I think ultimately the biggest surprises were in the performances. I’m always looking for unexpected flickers of thought or emotion—things none of us had planned that come up in the moment, under pressure, through the cracks. I loved the extreme intimacy of the camera. It brought me very close to a feeling I pursue in the theater rehearsal room—and always hope to see onstage—a kind of emotional nakedness, the actor laid bare. These moments surprised me most. They were precious and hard won. They make up the secret fabric of the film.

Guest Director

•

It was just a matter of time before you cleared your slate long enough to make a film—it’s too banal to point to the use of video in many of your theatrical productions, long before it was fashionable, but not as the main game, as an augmenting device.

Witnessing you in the technical and dress rehearsals of a theatrical production and indeed the previews is really exciting—the thrill of you harnessing the technical possibilities of the work to the narrative. It’s there that I witnessed your love of audience. How conscious were you of an audience in post? How did you find this layer of the process?

Well, I really loved the editing process. I loved being able to play with time, and how the whole emotional impact of a moment or scene shifts depending on where the cut comes. Working with Nick was a continual process of experimentation and distillation— making sure the film was tense, taut, knifeedge, making sure we earned every frame. We showed the film to friends, colleagues and our financiers for feedback—and the responses of these first audiences helped shape the film. I learned to listen to them the way I might feel out an audience during previews for a play.

Ultimately, however, we were striving for a special, often uneasy atmosphere— the subject demands that—and really the only way to do that was to feel our way through the film. I wanted the audience to feel an uncomfortable complicity with Ray and Una, to be drawn into their encounter as a kind of free-floating witness.

Una’s reunion with Ray involves the audience in a knot of sexual obsession. The film asks the audience to consider their relationship from multiple angles. It’s con-

tributes

•

revivals

•

stantly shifting. The ground is not steady.

Often when a truth appears to have been established, it collapses under us.

My goal in making Una was to look unflinchingly into the heart of a damaged relationship and to examine the scar tissue. I wanted to get uncomfortably close to the characters, to investigate the knot of desire, abuse, guilt and longing that binds them. I wanted to evoke the claustrophobic intensity of a nightmare mixed with the tender intimacy of an affair.

I wanted to dig deep into the characters, into the memories that haunt them, into the contradictions that tear them apart and into places which hurt. In the final frames of the film, sitting on a hotel room bed, the young Una turns to face the camera. She looks straight back at us. Her look is defiant yet wounded. It demands that we don’t forget her; that we don’t judge her or label her too easily. She makes us complicit in her story and her possible redemption.

Una is a tender yet forensic portrayal of damaged love and emotional violence.

The film refuses to condemn or condone Una or Ray. I’m not interested in a cinema as emotional placebo. I prefer cinema as a kind of raw wound. I want the audience to be left asking questions. What happened between Ray and Una should never have happened, yet those events shattered their lives. We are left to piece together the broken lives, and to reflect on how they might be repaired. There are no easy answers.

Cate Blanchett is an actor and theater director.

She has been nominated for Academy Awards for Carol, Elizabeth: The Golden Age, I’m Not There and Elizabeth, and won Academy Awards for Blue Jasmine and The Aviator.

new films

•

Special

•

Welcome 43 R D A N N UA L

TELLURIDE FILM FESTIVAL ATTENDEES

Join us on the deck of Altezza at The Peaks for breathtaking views and an Italian-inspired menu.

970.728.2525

|

T H E P E A K S R ES O RT.CO M

|

136 COUNTRY CLUB DRIVE

|

MOUNTAIN VILLAGE

O ’ NEI L L

WALSH

Painting a New Life

S ally H awkins and E than Hawke in an unlikely love story

BY NICHOLAS O’NEILL Dubliner Aisling Walsh’s ambitious debut, Joyriders (1988), set in a pre-Celtic Tiger Ireland, emerged when there was relatively little happening on the Irish filmmaking landscape. Her Song for a Raggy Boy (2003), starring Aiden Quinn and Iain Glenn, tackled the vile history of institutional clerical child abuse in Ireland. It debuted at Sundance in won prizes festivals around the world, as well as at Ireland’s IFTAs. A prolific director in television with innumerable BAFTA-winning or nominated highlights, including the mini-series Wallander (2010), Room at the Top (2012) and An Inspector Calls (2015), as well as the dramas Fingersmith (2005) and A Poet in New York (2014), Walsh has a knack for working with first-rate actors such as Kenneth Branagh, Tom Hollander, David Thewlis, Samantha Morton, Alfred Molina and Miranda Richardson.

In Maudie, she pairs Sally Hawkins and Ethan Hawke in a deeply moving portrait of the Canadian folk artist Maud Lewis, who lived a tough but seemingly joyous, simple life in a tiny shack with her taciturn fish-peddler husband Everett in Nova Scotia until her death in 1970.

NICHOLAS O’NEILL: Why did you choose to tell this story?

AISLING WALSH: I trained as a painter, so there’s that, but I was drawn to the love story part of it in particular, how two outsiders find each other and find love. Adult love stories are so rare, and I found this one to be beautiful and sweet. They are both simple people living on the edge of society, each cast out for different reasons. It’s amazing what they did for each other; she brought him love and a life that he never knew existed while he enabled her to paint, to live a life she always dreamed of.

MAUDIE Canada/Ireland, 2016, 115m Director: Aisling Walsh Starring: Sally Hawkins and Ethan Hawke

N

60 • FILMWATCH

•

How did these two actors come aboard the project?

Sally Hawkins was the first name I wrote down after I read the script. We had worked together before, and I thought it might be an amazing role for her, one that she might want to do. I’ve always loved Ethan. He’s a real artist, a writer and playwright as well as an actor. I thought that Ethan and Sally would be an amazing couple. They are both real artists. It felt so right.

The depiction of the landscape is vital to the success of your film.

A sense of place is always really important to me in film as it helps me tell the story, which is set in Nova Scotia but shot in Newfoundland, which further complicated things. The landscape is in all of her paintings, this pastureland on the edge of civilization. Life is difficult there. It is not a comfortable place. In all, we used four different locations that we stitched together.

Guest Director

•

The tiny house where they live, really no more than a shack, is both the film’s central location and Maude’s main “canvas” for her art. How did you approach the challenge of making that work?

If I’d been told 15 years ago that I was going to be working with two actors in a 12-by-12-foot shack, it would have terrified the life out of me. When you first see the house at the beginning and then see what it looks like at the end, you see the beauty and color she brought into Everett’s life. Initially there was talk of filming the house in a studio but I felt that we needed to build it on location. I remember saying to my production designer John Hand that we needed to be able to see 360.

“For real” is always best; for the actors, they could open a window or walk in and out the door. We shot pretty much in continuity. The design and construc-

tributes

•

revivals

•

tion guys prepared four versions of all the walls and when we were ready to change eras, we changed the walls around.

The film closes with some lovely and very moving archival footage of the real Maude and Everett in their home, footage that is referenced within the film itself. Why did you choose to use this footage and place it where you did?

When I first saw the footage, I knew we absolutely had to use it. I found it to be very touching. I didn’t want it at any point that would have taken us out of the film, but using it at the end reminds us that these are real people, living simple lives in that tiny little shack. I think it’s very affecting for audiences.

Nicholas O’Neill is an Irish producer and critic based in San Francisco. His credits include Micha, Crushproof, I Could Read the Sky, Lost Zweig and Peaches.

new films

•

Special

•

Time Warner Cable is now Spectrum.

We’re proud to make movies more accessible — in person or on-screen.

2016 Telluride Film Festival Sponsor

M LD GA

OUN T

A IN

GO

HOME FURNISHINGS • ART • PHOTOGRAPHY

LLERY

TIME WARP by Kane Scheidegger 970.728.3460 • TELLURIDE • 135 W. COLORADO AVE.

Serious Fun

D o m i n i qu e A b el a n d F i ona G ordon re i n v ig orate the a rt of t he c lown You work is bright and optimistic, which is rare given the general dark mood of our time.

FIONA GORDON: It’s funny that you mention that because we are in the process of putting together our press kit and we wrote, “The spirit of our times is pessimism, violence, cynicism, darkness.”

And in a way, though we don’t do it deliberately, we resist this spirit of the times.

We’re not more optimistic than any other person, but there is another way of looking at humanity in all its idiosyncrasies, and in all its hideousness as well. A more carefree perspective. Lightness for us is not synonymous with triviality or thoughtlessness but a synonym of joy, liberty, vitality.

That’s what we want to uphold and defend.

BY MARA FORTES Dominique Abel and Fiona Gordon met in Paris in the 1980s as students at the École Jacques Lecoq, the famed school of physical theater.

They have since collaborated onstage and in film to develop a modern burlesque sensibility. Lost in Paris, their fourth feature, follows the misadventures of a homeless man, a lost Canadian tourist and her missing elderly aunt (Emmanuelle Riva, like you’ve never seen before, in a Paris like you’ve never seen before). They spoke with Mara Fortes about their process.

LOST IN PARIS France, 2016, 85m Directors: Dominique Abel and Fiona Gordon

MARA FORTES: Your characters are always named after yourselves. Is there an autobiographical element in your work?

FIONA GORDON: Yes, it’s intended so that people feel that it’s coming from us, that our humor is very much based on our own vulnerabilities, and on our own strengths as well.

DOMINIQUE ABEL: We try to bring our colors, our material, our vision and the small things that move us in life. There’s always a personal core to our shows and films. There is an “us” within.

There is also a social consciousness in your films—your characters tend to be people who exist on the margins of society.

ABEL: Unconventional beauty, non-conformism attracts us. The beauty of difference, of aging too. When we were young actors, we thought to ourselves—we aren’t old enough, we don’t have the marks of age, of time, the signs that make us fragile and human. Now we’re getting there and it’s a source of inspiration. We also think that a story about rich happy people wouldn’t be that interesting.

GORDON: And it wouldn’t be funny. We are funny in our weaknesses.

You collaborate with two great icons of French cinema, Emmanuelle Riva and Pierre Richard. How did this come about?

ABEL: (Producer) Régine Vial told us to look at Emmanuelle Riva, and showed us a video she made for The New York Times where Emmanuelle dances, imitates Chaplin, very inno-

Hudson Heroics

N

62 • FILMWATCH

•

Guest Director

•

tributes

•

revivals

•

new films

•

Special

•

cently, very joyfully. And we thought, “Well, it’s not the Emmanuelle Riva we know, but she is definitely open to physical comedy.”

When we met her we were blown away.

She is very curious about life, constantly observing and has this beautiful childish laughter. She would tell us, “Inside, I am 14 years old. I discover life every day, even though my body is 88.”

And the film speaks to that, to someone who will never let go of her desires. For her character, freedom is non-negotiable. And that really inspired her as an actress. After we met her, she was acting in the theater and broke seven vertebrae. And she continued to play on stage, with her broken vertebrae! That is Emmanuelle Riva for you— her life is the theater and the cinema.

For the other role, we had Pierre Étaix in mind. But he was frail and couldn’t do it. So we met Pierre Richard. Pierre read six sentences about the film and right away said yes. For me it was a moment of great emotion, because he was my hero when I was little.

We had Pierre and Emmanuelle improvise the “foot dance” scene on the bench, and they took great pleasure in doing it. All of a sudden, he turned to her and said, “They had told me that you were such a pain in the ass, but in fact, you’re not at all.” And Emmanuelle Riva just laughed. She burst out laughing in her 14-year-old’s laugh.

I sense a spontaneity in your films. Do you improvise?

ABEL: There isn’t much improvisation during the shoot, because we prepare a lot beforehand. But our style is very much nourished by improvisation. And we built our universe originally onstage, as clowns, with very little dialogue, so naturally, our ideas tend to be very physical.

GORDON: But we do write by improvisation. The body has a logic that the mind or cannot fathom, and we try to tap into that.

Do you identify with the classic tradition of cinema clowns (Tati, Keaton, Chaplin)?

ABEL: They have all inspired us, because they are true clowns. They make us laugh. But there isn’t a preconceived idea or form in our work. It’s a constant search, so there’s no nostalgia.

GORDON: We recognize that we belong to the same family, but we don’t consciously seek to be part of this tradition.

In the beginning, we referenced it more, so that people could anticipate the types of movies we made.

Your style embraces a very strong aesthetic: fixed shots, long takes, artisanal special effects.

GORDON: That’s how we import our experience in theater into cinema. There is always a reminder to the spectator that this isn’t real life. This is our vision of life as artists, and we want to maintain, in a Brechtian fashion, this relationship with the audience.

This idea that to represent a tree you hold a branch, this branch is a tree: to represent the sea, we have a few glasses of water that we splash around, and that practically becomes the sea. This reminder that it’s our imagination that is at play and not real life that we are in the midst of observing.

Mara Fortes is a curator for the Telluride Film Festival, programmer for the Ambulante Documentary Film Festival and head curator at the Center for Digital Culture (Mexico).

43rd

GRATEFULLY RECOGNIZES THE SUPPORT OF OUR 2016 TELLURIDE BUSINESS FRIENDS

Gold Mountain Gallery Lumiere Fletcher & Liz McCusker What began as a routine assignment for Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger soon became a day that will long be remembered. On January 15, 2009, US Airways Flight 1549 departed from LaGuardia Airport to Charlotte. Soon after takeoff, the engines failed. And Sullenberger, in the midst of a bustling city, found a way to save his passengers. Based on Sullenberger’s memoir Highest Duty: My Search For What Really Matters, and produced by Frank Marshall, Clint Eastwood’s film stars Tom Hanks as Sully, Aaron Eckhart as his copilot and Laura Linney as his wife.

Sully United States, 2016, 96m Director: Clint Eastwood Starring: Tom Hanks, Anna Gunn, Aaron Eckhart, Laura Linney

Gray Head Market at Mountain Village Ridgway Mountain Market The Market at Telluride Timberline Ace Hardware Two Skirts

CashmereRED Franz Klammer Lodge Mountain Tails

SE L L A R S

SC H EIN F E L D

Soul Trane

A n appr e c i at i on of on e of con te mp ora ry mu s ic’s de e p e st t hinkers

BY PETER SELLARS In just under 40 years of living, the master saxophonist John Coltrane experienced many lives: as a sideman to Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk during the heady early days of bebop; as a composer who created some of jazz’s most memorable tracks; as a heroin addict who heroically kicked the habit; as the leading figure in the “free jazz” movement; and as a seeker who deeply explored multiple realms of spirituality.

John Scheinfeld (The U.S. vs. John Lennon) tells Coltrane’s story in the first authorized documentary about his life. He spoke with Peter Sellars.

PETER SELLARS: What made telling this story about John Coltrane a priority for you?

JOHN SCHEINFELD: I am attracted to stories of artists who go their own way, who find success on their own terms and take a fascinating and not always obvious journey. Coltrane absolutely fits that mold. In a short period of time, he accomplished an extraordinary level of achievement and that inspires me.

I am a fan but not an obsessed fan.

In many ways, that makes me a better author of his story, in that I am not into the minutia of it all. It gives me the ability to step back and perhaps take a more objective view of his journey.

Coltrane became such a legend. Everybody goes crazy when you mention his name. But people who actually follow the music are much more rare. Your film digs deep and brings us to unexpected places.

I try to take viewers someplace they don’t expect to go. Most of the material that’s available on Coltrane analyzes the music. I was much more interested in looking at the man and where the art came from, trying to come to some sort of understanding of the influences that acted upon him and propelled him. That to me is the fascinating journey.

Chasing Trane United States, 2016, 99m Director: John Scheinfeld Featuring: Denzel Washington, Carlos Santana, Common, Cornell West, Bill Clinton

N

64 • FILMWATCH

•

One of so many things that I admire about Coltrane is that he was constantly pushing the envelope. He was not content to stay where he was. He was always trying to expand, to find new journeys. He was not concerned with what it would mean for record sales or concert appearances. One has to admire Coltrane’s courage to go where his art took him and not worry about the consequences.

I asked everybody one question: “Where do you think Coltrane would have gone had he lived?”

Sonny Rollins looked at me and said, “Oh, you can’t expect me to answer a question like that! ” I laughed, he laughed. It’s impossible to say with an artist like Coltrane. What we saw was an artist that was constantly moving forward. His courage in following his muse wherever it took him is to be admired.

A lot of the most progressive figures don’t use the word jazz. They are making music that no longer fits the label. The jazz DNA is there but recombined in ways that we could have only dreamed of. That late Coltrane music is like a dream, a message from the future. He left the jazz aficionados and even the label of jazz behind.

What he did 50 years ago is beginning to

Guest Director

•

resonate only now, in this generation.

Coltrane himself says, “I don’t recognize the word jazz. I just play John Coltrane.”

That says it all. He was an artist who painted emotions with his instrument. He went to emotional places that spoke to him. It was irrespective of any label.

I set out to do a portrait of an artist, not a portrait of a jazz artist. That may seem like a small distinction, but to me it was critical. As I wanted to introduce this genius to a much more broad audience that perhaps had heard the name, maybe knew A Love Supreme, but not much else. An artist is an artist. They may work in one idiom or another, but they have an approach to art that is to be respected and admired.

The film starts with that amazing burst of psychedelics. It’s appropriate for the internal and external universes Coltrane’s music moves through.

For me, the most challenging aspects of a film are the opening and the closing. And they either come to me early on, or not until the last possible moment, which drives me crazy and keeps me up at night. That opening came quite early.

Here is a man who was out in the universe, exploring, much like Einstein.

tributes

•

revivals

•

He was cosmic. Where we are coming from? Where are we going? What’s important?

Superimposing Coltrane and Albert Einstein is such a shattering and beautiful thought, because we rarely recognize how profoundly rooted African American culture and African cultures are in a cosmic worldview. People are starting to realize that the African skies that so many African tribal traditions celebrate actually examine the nature of the universe. Curved space came into physics in the last century but has been a given for the Dogon tribe.

I have interviewed quite a few rock ‘n’ rollers for documentaries, and they talk about what they really wanted to do with their music was get girls. Here in Coltrane we have somebody that was searching for universal truth, who was, like Einstein, a deep thinker who would think about space and time and energy and why are we here and where we are supposed to take ourselves. It wasn’t just about how best he could play the horn.

It wasn’t at all about how to get girls. It was about something deeper and more meaningful. I love that about him and I love that about the art that he created.

new films

•

Special

•

We are thrilled to be celebrating our 6th anniversary with the TELLURIDE FILM FESTIVAL and are proud partners of the signature FilmLab program designed for 10 UCLA TFT graduate film students.

September 2nd through September 5th

224 E. Colorado Ave, Telluride, CO 81435 970.728.6866 dolcejewels.com

SE L L A R S

J EN K INS

Guided by Light

B arry J enkins reveals the beauty in inner -city Miami

In Moonlight, the award-winning writer-director Barry Jenkins (Medicine for Melancholy) taps into his own personal history as a boy and young man growing up in a Miami plagued by drugs and violence and yet blessed with rich beauty. Jenkins, who first came to Telluride as part of the festival’s educational programs, and now serves as a curator and emcee for the festival, adapted the play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue by MacArthur Fellow Tarell Alvin McCraney. Jenkins spoke with Peter Sellars about the emotional resonances of the film, and the role the Telluride Film Festival has played in his life.

PETER SELLARS: Barry, thank you. This film has needed to exist for so many generations, and finally it arrived. Thank you for the courage, for the depth, for the insight, for the urgency, for the power, and for the ability to blast through every cliché. Can you tell me how you started it?

BARRY JENKINS: I never expected to make this film, Peter. I went to Europe a few weeks before Telluride to write something else. And I brought Tarell’s play—it was 40 pages, non-linear, jumping back and forth in time. I said, “I’m going start writing a script from this, just to get me back into writing.”

I hadn’t written anything in three years. Ten days later, it was done. Tarell was born and raised in Miami—he grew up a few blocks from me. What he wrote was so rich and authentic, and it reminded me of where I’m from. I just had to go into this place, to get into these characters and to find a way to put it up on screen in a way that would push past clichés, that would defy expectations, that would get past the surface.

MOONLIGHT United States, 2016, 110m Writer/Director: Barry Jenkins Adapted from the play by Tarell McCraney Starring: Naomie Harris, Mahershala Ali, André Holland

N

66 • FILMWATCH

•

You exploded that surface!

I have memories of watching my mother go through the experiences that [the film’s character] Paula went through. But Naomie Harris, who plays Paula, couldn’t be further removed from who Paula is. I couldn’t tell a story that is so personal to me, about things that have happened to me, about the place that I’m actually from, and have it not go all the way. And Naomie said, “You know what? We’re going to go all the way.”

I have never seen the unbearable photographed with such beauty, such insight, such deep life-giving. You are giving life. There is a huge collective strength and transformation that moves through this movie and so many acts of kindness for every single appalling or ghastly gesture.

When you’re living that life, you don’t really understand how dark it is or how heavy it is. You just adjust to it. It becomes what’s normal. And so my childhood memories are not of a dark, cloudy, oppressive time.

My childhood was surrounded by beautiful colors and bright lights. This movie is filtered through that feeling. Even though things were very hard, there is always somewhere in the periphery this little glimmer of hope And so many people are serving 25 to life, for holding face in court—that whole idea that your face is not going to betray anything. The court-appointed psychologist is unable to determine and find your remorse; therefore you’re given the maximum sentence.

Guest Director

•

tributes

•

revivals

And it’s such a constant phenomenon. It becomes a performance. And the character Chiron in the film starts to put that face on. He puts it on and it fits so well that he starts to believe, “This is my face.”

It takes an act of love to smash that thing down. The most personal moment in the film for me is Chiron’s reconciliation with his mother. I’ve always felt there is a part of me that wouldn’t allow myself to become whomever I’m meant to become: an artist, someone capable of expressing my feelings in personal interactions and in my work. It took my mother telling me that she loved me, and apologizing for whatever the hell we had to go through, for me to be able to actually open myself up to myself.

One of my favorite moments is when the characters reunite at a diner. Chiron comes around the counter, and Kevin gives him dap, this ritualistic joining of hands between black men, but then brings him in for the hug. His hand lingers on his back, just for a second. You can almost feel him exhale.

People aren’t used to seeing black men be delicate with anyone but especially not with each other. If there’s anything I’m really proud of, it’s the way the film frames exchanges of masculinity between black men. There are moments when they are extremely caring and extremely affectionate. When one man in a scene needs someone to be affectionate and be delicate. Because those moments are absolutely OK. What you are doing is Rembrandt’s thing: looking at what’s ugly and finding what’s beautiful. He paints

•

new films

•

Special

•

CHOP HO

U

some old guy upstairs in a slum, and then names the painting “The Prophet Abraham.” You let these people shine with this kind of blaze, with glory, with light pouring from them. You see the divine presence, of forgiveness. And at the same time you use silence as a way to say everything that no one can say. And that is just so rare. It is so rare that a film induces that depth of listening in the audience.

Clearly the actors trusted me to not be filling every space when they were performing. I can’t not embrace the fact that this is a black story, it’s a black film, with black characters, black actors from my black-ass life and Tarrell’s black-ass life.

We’re not used to that level of silence when we’re dealing with characters from those backgrounds, and there’s something about it that’s a bit unsettling. But that’s only because there’s been such a lack of it. The actors did a great job of emoting without speaking. Because there’s just so much going on behind the lids, with all of us, all the time.

HISTORIC SE, BA & PARLOR R

NEW AMERICAN

CUISINE with

INTERNATIONAL

FLAVORS UNPARALLELED CUISINE ♦ NOTABLE LIBATIONS BREAKFAST LUNCH DINNER 231 W. COLORADO, TELLURIDE 970.728.4351

43rd

b A rry J e n k i n s , b r Ad Pitt, s tev e m cq u een At t h e 2 0 1 3 t e l l ur i de f ilm f es tivA l

Today, talking about race, everyone gets trapped in all kinds of rhetoric, and trips over themselves, and trips over each other. And what’s needed are powerful, visceral images that aren’t just taken on somebody’s cellphone, images that take us deep into the quality of life and take us deep into black bodies and black minds and black hearts, and this zone of blackness.

I’m grateful to Telluride for paying attention to you and to you for paying attention to Telluride. But what I’m really grateful for is that America gets to pay attention to this movie. There’s nothing more important for America to be hearing to right now.

When we first met, I was sitting in a classroom in Telluride! The fact that people are going to see this in Telluride where I’ve ushered screenings and popped popcorn and always felt welcome.

The way I make movies has been directly influenced by the movies that I’ve seen at the festival, going back to 2002.

I’ve just been so obsessed with cinema, going back to when I first stumbled into it at the age of 21 or 22. It has made me feel whole. I never thought when I first came to Telluride that I would ever show a film at this festival. And showing a film that is about a part of me that has been completely separate from my life at the festival … it just feels right.

FOR SALE

Beginning Wednesday, August 31st at 12pm

Will call for pass pick-up at the FESTIVAL BOX OFFICE

(at the Ticket Windows at the Brigadoon Plaza, base of the Gondola, where Oak & San Juan Streets meet)

Beginning Thursday, September 1st at 10am

Will call for pass pick-up at the FESTIVAL BOX OFFICE

(at the Ticket Windows at the Brigadoon Plaza, base of the Gondola, where Oak & San Juan Streets meet)

Beginning Friday, September 2nd at 8am

Will call for pass pick-up at the FESTIVAL BOX OFFICE and LATE SHOW PASSES - $75 each, grant access to the last film of the day at

the Palm Theatre or Chuck Jones’ Cinema, Friday though Monday. LATE SHOW PASSES can be purchased at the Nugget Theater, Palm Theatre, Chuck Jones’ Cinema.

Payment can be made by credit card.

Before each screening

SINGLE ADMISSION TICKETS - $30 each, go on sale at all theaters, for each Screening, once passholders have been seated.

Payment can be made by credit card.

Beginning Tuesday, September 6th

AFTTER THE TELLURIDE FILM FESTIVAL (ATFF) PASSES

$45 each for Locals, $60 for Non-Locals, grant access to all six screenings of the ATFF Program shown at the Palm Theatre and the Nugget Theater, Tuesday September 6th through Thursday, September 8th. ATFF Passes can be purchased at the Palm Theatre Box Office and Nugget Theater Box Office half an hour before each screening.

Payment can be made by credit card.

AFTER THE TELLURIDE FILM FESTIVAL (ATFF) SINGLE ADMISSION TICKETS - $15 each, go on sale at the Palm Theatre Box Office or

Nugget Theater Box Office, for each screening, once ATFF passholders have been seated.

Payment can be made by credit card.

Art of the Portrait

C ambridge ’ s legendary photographer goes big

BY GAIL MAZUR I’m sure I’m not alone in saying there is NO ONE like my friend Ellie. (Am I the only one left now, besides her sisters, to call her Ellie, not the intimidating, oddly to me formal Elsa?) I’ve known her since we were 9. You’d think there was little we didn’t know about each other or about our families. But there’s always more to know about someone you love, and I’m still learning.

When we were 28, both living in Cambridge, Ellie introduced me to the Grolier Book Shop, the poetry bookstore. Neither of us was sure what we wanted “to do.”

I’d say she changed my life, but since she was always there I should say, well, my life’s unimaginable without her. We often agreed that 28 is the turning point in life, as it was for us. That’s when a colleague handed over his Hasselblad to her and she began her irresistible, extraordinary, absolutely idiosyncratic life as a photographer.

In Errol Morris’ film, B-Side, she says it was “unthinkable” in those days for a nice Jewish girl who wasn’t married not to live with her parents. “So, I hadda have a ‘thing,’” she says. How brilliantly counterintuitive for that nice Jewish girl to find her thing, as she did, in the shabby venerable poetry bookshop she calls “a beacon of sanity,” and to find its poet-denizens, outsiders all, perfect subjects.

From the Grolier and out into the street thanks to that camera-lending colleague, she negotiated the loan of a Stop & Shop shopping cart (when she was growing up, her father worked for Stop & Shop) and filled it with her amazing black and white photos of charming street people in Harvard Square and denizens of the Grolier, and oh, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, Bob Dylan etc. etc. etc.

And she wheeled it onto the plaza in front of Harvard’s Holyoke Center on Mass Ave in her “fun fur” in all weather and peddled her pictures. She had a legal writ, via her husband, Harvey Silverglate, telling the cops she was entitled to set up in the Square (her First Amendment right!) and sell photographs.

Professors and kids and passersby snatched them up for less than the price of today’s machiatos and lattes. I hope most of them realize what treasures they have, I hope they took care of them. Before the construction of the amazing Polaroid

B-SIDE: ELSA DORFMAN United States, 2016, 76m Director: Errol Morris

N

68 • FILMWATCH

•

20x24 camera, she was documenting the bohemian life of the Square in all its beautiful messy transient un-Ivy vitality.

I love what fiction writer Mark Mirsky calls the “warm glow of her courage.” Her courage has imagination, wit and inimitable style—it’s the courage of an original.

It cuts through the wishy-washy and the affected and goes about its work.

She was ready for that huge camera, and it didn’t just come to her. Her intuition told her she’d love making pictures on that scale.

That’s how she works, the generous girl who’d left college and the low expectations of our youth, got a secretarial job in New York, and met and was loved by Ginsberg, Levertov, Creeley and other great poets now gone, alive still in their works and in Ellie’s images.

Then she came back to a life she could

Guest Director

•

invent for herself in Cambridge, not far from the suburb we’d fled. Who else would have thought to rent the gigantic camera all to herself, to rent a spanking new studio, all without funding, and for decades to make an incandescent portrait of our time, and our places in it?

Those portraits of Allen, the big camera’s saturated colors so rich, are completely alive, animated with his love for the camera, and for its operator. (In the Polaroid 40x80 camera she used a few times, Ginsberg gets to pose standing naked, in front of the life-sized suit-and-tied Allen. Trusting himself, trusting the photographer. It’s a Dorfman masterpiece.)

All of her projects—and right today they seem countless and huge—are gaily, naturally informed by her love of

tributes

•

revivals

•

people, her compassion and respect for suffering, for men and women struggling with AIDS or cancer, by her pleasure in the giddy pleasure of her subjects, for families and loners. All those shoots, radiant occasions of celebration.

(And Elsa’s Housebook, pre-Polaroid photos, published in the late 70s and about to be published in a new edition, is a treasure box of Ellie’s gift for friendship, for narrative, for plowing ahead and her idiosyncratic loving eye.)

“My work is about affection,” she says today. And, “the camera is like a fork or spoon (what? what?), it’s an instrument you eat your soup with; it’s not the soup.”

Ohhh. … An artistic force of nature, she’s not falsely modest, nor arrogant, but I say her portraits are works of genius.

“There’ll never be film like this again, never, never,” she says. Rueful, philosophical, upbeat in pink polka-dot leggings or holding a dozen black birthday balloons, she’s an inspiration. And the camera—as they say—loves her!

Gail Mazur is a poet whose has published seven collections, most recently Forbidden City (University of Chicago Press, 2016). They Can’t Take That Away from Me (University of Chicago Press, 2001) was a finalist for the National Book Award.

new films

•

Special

•

Avni

C e dar

The Party Crasher

J oseph C edar celebrates a classic outsider

BY SHEERLY AVNI You already know Norman Oppenheimer. He’s the guy no one can remember inviting to the party, and yet here he is, handing out business cards and offering to put you in touch with one of his many well-heeled connections.

Or he’s pressed against the velvet rope on a rainy night, insisting he’s with the band.

Norman is the producer without a website, investor without a portfolio; he’s the guy who looks like he never belongs here—because he doesn’t. Part groupie, part swindler, part self-appointed guardian angel, he promises you that he just wants to help, but you’re not sure that the kind of help is offering is safe, moral, or even legal.

Yes, you know Norman, and maybe you even know enough to steer clear of him, but until now, you’ve never heard Norman tell his side of the story. Israeli-American Joseph Cedar (Beaufort, Footnote) offers his take on the maligned stereotype within an irresistible specificity: the relationship between a shady New York fixer (Richard Gere, in one of the most nuanced and moving performances of his career) and Heschel, an Israeli politician (an electric Lyor Ashkenazi).

Cedar spoke with Sheerly Avni from his home in Tel Aviv about the joys of working with Gere and the real-life inspiration for Norman Oppenheimer, perhaps the unlikeliest cinema hero of 2016.

NORMAN: THE MODERATE RISE AND TRAGIC FALL OF A NEW YORK FIXER United States, 2016, 118m Director: Joseph Cedar Starring: Richard Gere, Lior Ashkenazi, Michael Sheen, Charlotte Gainsbourg

N

70 • FILMWATCH

•

R i c ha r d Ge r e , Li o r Ash k e n a zi

SHEERLY AVNI: Whom did you originally base this character on?

JOSEPH CEDAR: Joseph Süß Oppenheimer, a court Jew in Germany in the 18th century. He achieved that position by buying a man a coat. That man, Kurt Alexander, eventually became a duke, and when he did, he invited Oppenheimer to be his financial consultant.

It’s the classic court Jew narrative: A Jew finds a way into the close circle of someone in power, helping that person in power achieve the things he wants to do, while creating antagonism among all the people he’s just bypassed. He was eventually executed.

Leon Feuchtwanger turned his story into an amazing novel in 1925. Then it became a British film in 1936, and then finally remade into the 1940 Nazi propaganda film Jud Süß. It is the anti-Semitic stereotype of the Jewish operator. I shifted it to a contemporary modern setting, and with a little bit of a wink toward the whole thing, made the man in power an Israeli.

Why an Israeli?

The relationship between an Israeli politician and a New York Jewish fixer is good for everyone. It works because of the flaws of both men. The politician is seduced by what this Jewish New York businessman is offering him. And

Guest Director

•

the businessman is seduced because he thinks, “Through you, I can feel good about myself, because you are so important. You have this historical role and if I can play the smallest part in your historic role, I feel that I’ve done something good in my life.”

Heschel is the opposite of Norman.

He’s a charismatic, charming man who, even when he is seems down and out, is clearly one of the winners.

Those of us who feel welcome anywhere usually take it for granted. It’s a good feeling to walk into a place and know that you are wanted. Norman doesn’t feel that anywhere. I encounter people like Norman, especially in the film business.

Sometimes I’m even on the bad side of that power—not giving a person a sense of welcome. Norman’s not welcome.

He’s trying to get involved in something he’s not invited to get involved in. He’s someone who always seems to have an ulterior motive, and it’s natural to want to push people like this away.

It makes Richard Gere’s performance even more incredible, since one would expect to see him in Heschel’s role.

Richard is a fantastic actor. It’s not the obvious character for him. He is extremely comfortable with himself and

tributes

•

revivals

•

feels like he belongs and has the power to influence his environment, whereas Norman is the opposite. Once we started working, it became this beautiful artistic challenge for him. It was one of the best processes I’ve had with an actor.

Did you start out the project thinking you were going to show us a more likeable Norman?

The movie became a movie only when I found out that not only do I love this character, I also respect him. It didn’t start out that way. There was a point in the writing where I realized that that’s how I feel about him—and that’s how the story became something that had a beginning, a middle and an end. Before that it was just another negative portrait.

This story is a statement of defense for this character. He’s been treated badly in literature and in film, and hopefully I’m giving another point of view on what makes this man tick, how he functions and why we should have some sympathy toward him, even when he’s so aggravating.

To me it boils down to the moment, toward the end of the film, when Dan Stevens’ character says, “Why isn’t anything ever simple with you?”

And Norman answers: “Who says simple is good?”

new films

•

Special

•

DANIEL E. DOCKRAY 97 0 -7 0 8 - 0 6 6 6 D A N . D O C K R AY @ S O T H E B Y S R E A LT Y. C O M O F F E R E D F R O M $2,495,0 0 0 – $ 5,495,0 0 0

ELKSTONE21.COM

fortes

ozon

Love and War

F r an co i s Oz on ’s very m o de rn hi storica l dra ma and white and color.

Douglas Sirk is one of my favorite filmmakers! I decided to shoot the film in black and white, but struggled because I really love color, especially the Technicolor films of the 50s. So I thought it would be so beautiful if, during moments when a kind of vitality reemerges in this story—a story about loss—the color would return.

So I use color and black and white very much as elements of the mise en scène, as integral components of the narrative.

BY MARA FORTES Set amidst post-World War I tensions between France and German, the latest film by François Ozon (Swimming Pool) follows a young German woman (Paula Beer), who, mourning the death of her fiancé Frantz, killed in the war, meets Adrian, a mysterious Frenchman (Pierre Niney), who shows up to place flowers on Frantz’s grave. Mara Fortes talked to Ozon about his masterfully crafted film, which combines Sirkian melodrama with the gritty, morally messy tensions of contemporary life.

MARA FORTES: Your film is partially based on an original play by Maurice Rostand, which Ernst Lubitsch adapted for Broken Lullaby. Did either of these represent a starting point for your film?

FRANÇOIS OZON: I first discovered the play, and then learnt that Lubitsch had adapted it. But both were very differ-

72 • FILMWATCH

Did you have Pierre Niney and Paula Beer in mind from the beginning?

I did have Pierre Niney in mind. He’s an actor who is incredibly perceptive. I love him because he’s not afraid to show his femininity, his sensitive side. Often male actors want to be virile, macho. He has a genuine fragility that was essential for this role. I didn’t know Paula Beer. I did a casting call and met with many young German actresses. But from the moment I saw Paula I knew she had to play Anna.

She was 20 when we shot the film—she is very young, but you feel that she has already lived through a lot. The character of Anna required someone who endures a range of emotions, who could emanate this power onscreen.

And you see that duality: two characters traumatized by war who maintain an innocence, a naiveté.

FRANTZ France, 2016, 113m Director: François Ozon

N

ent from what I wanted to do. In both the play and the Lubitsch film, it’s the young Frenchman’s point of view that dominates.

I wanted the main character to be the young woman and the story to be anchored in her point of view, the point of view of a young German woman, of someone on the side of the people who lost the war. And the second half of the film, which takes place in France, I completely invented. I tried to keep the pitch and the essence of the original, but I completely transformed the story.

•

Guest Director

•

Anna is forced to grow up very quickly.

She lived the drama of the war, but also dreams, like all young women, of meeting a Prince Charming. She has a romantic, naïve side. That’s what I find so beautiful. Even if there is war, even if one is in a stage of mourning, even if her fiancé is dead, she wants to believe in love, she wants to live still. This is a film about life.

Your work also has a dimension that addresses the phantasmatic, or imaginary, that suggests more nuanced kinds of love—the relationship between the two young men, for instance.

Absolutely. Adrian is in shock—he was shocked by the war, taken out of his senses.

And maybe there’s a latent desire in him, something he hasn’t quite understood.

Why did you decide to make a film that deals strongly with the toxic effects of nationalism?

Even though it’s set in 1919, the story feels very modern in what it evokes about nationalism. Nowadays, in Europe, we sense a lot of danger related to zealous nationalism, and I feel it’s the same in the U.S., with inflammatory rhetoric and demagogic policies that constantly bring up national identity.

I believe nationalism is always dangerous. And this is why I particularly love the figure of the father in the film.

In the beginning, he despises the French for murdering his son, but little by little he wants to believe in the possibility of a Franco-German friendship.

Is there a common thread in your work, despite the different stories and stylistic choices?

That is for you to discover! It’s a task for critics and journalists, not for me. I try not to analyze my films in relation to each other. I try to make a film every year, and try to tell a different story, and hope that each time it represents a new adventure. I have my own obsessions: mourning and loss, impossible love. But it’s not something I’m particularly keen on analyzing.

The main characters of your films tend to be women. What does inhabiting a female subjectivity bring to your work?

Often, when the hero is a man, you end up with an action film. When the heroine is a woman, the result is a film that deals with more complex emotions and sensations. I find that women are able to transmit emotion and sensation more easily than men. That’s why I love working with actresses, and why I tend to create lead roles for women.

I also thought a lot about Douglas Sirk when I saw your film, with the mise en scène and the interesting play of black

tributes

•

revivals

•

new films

•

Special

•

Avni

B U R S H TEIN

If She Builds It, Will He Come?

T he I sraeli fairytale of a single O rthodox girl

Rama Burshtein’s Through the Wall is only the second film made by a Haredi female filmmaker for the general public.

As for the first? That was Burshtein’s own award-winning 2012 debut feature coming-of-age love story, Fill the Void.

The Israeli-American writer/director again sets the action in the misunderstood Haredi Orthodox Jewish community in Tel Aviv, focusing this time on Michal, a single woman of a certain age who plans her wedding despite being jilted by her fiancé. Michal, angry, desperate, but blazing with faith and a kind of desperate optimism, believes that if she prepares to be a bride, God will send her a groom. Sure enough, Michal’s faith begins to change her world in unexpected ways, bringing new opportunities, new tests and even the attentions of a dreamy secular rock star.

While the structure may initially recall a Hollywood rom-com, Burstein is less interested in a one-note happy endings than in the troubled and often troubling nature of belief itself. The film’s complexity is rendered even more poignant by strong casting all around and a star-making, marvelously layered performance by Noa Koller as Michal in her first lead role. Burshtein spoke with Sheerly Avni from her office in Tel Aviv about the sophomore jitters, the nature of belief and how she explains the frequent comparisons to Jane Austen.

SHEERLY AVNI: Fill the Void was based on a real-life anecdote that you heard from friends. Is this one also based on a true story?

RAMA BURSHTEIN: This time I was inspired by seeing the way many of my friends, both secular and religious, had lost their faith, not just in finding love but in the idea of hope itself. I made the film hoping that it will offer them some hope and strength. Michal is a woman who believes—not only in the idea that God will send her a husband but in the idea of belief itself.

Some people might also say that by planning a wedding without a groom in mind, she might also be crazy. Are you are saying Michal she’s not?

What do you think? Is she crazy?

As an audience member, I went back and forth.

THROUGH THE WALL Israel, 2016, 110m Director: Rama Burshtein

And that’s what faith is. It’s not something that is just there all the time and you rest your head on it like a pillow. Faith is something you fight for. Sometimes faith is extreme. It begins where rationality ends.

How did you find Noa Koller?

It was clear right from the start that she had this unique ability to play all the complexities in the character. And there were people who were worried. “Is she movie-star pretty? Can you expect to have all these men fall in love with her?” But she is pure genius. We all ended up falling in love with Michal, including the cinematographer.

Fell in love with her in what sense?

You know, the camera is an expression of the heart of the cinematographer. I felt that he needed to fall in love with Michal, as she is. He needs to love her enough that all her sides are interesting to him, instead, for example, of only trying to film her from a flattering angle.

We rehearsed for three-and-a-half months, and shot all the rehearsals. We needed the rehearsal time because of the emotional shifts and movements within the

scenes. I knew if I was looking for those in the shooting, it wouldn’t have come out right. We had to find and feel and understand the emotional range of each scene. During rehearsals, I could see in the footage that he found that love for Michal.

Perhaps because you use marriage and love as the structural frames in your films, you are frequently compared with Jane Austen. Is she an influence?

Not directly, I don’t have 19th-century England in mind when I’m writing (laughs), but I do think the fact that the characters are not rebels—they don’t want to leave their world or break its rules—may be similar. Also, because of the characters are religious, there is no touching. Courtship is always verbal. Perhaps that throws audiences back to England somehow.

True. Contemporary love stories almost always include a lot of sex.

I believe in tension much more than I believe in sex. Isn’t that the magic of film? When the imagination takes over?

Sheerly Avni is a writer based in Mexico City.

FILMWATCH • N

73

Nelson

C H A K A R OV A

Open Hearts

L e a r n i n g h ow t o ta l k a b ou t lov e

BY DAVIA NELSON Mimi Chakarova is a photographer and filmmaker whose 2011 documentary, The Price of Sex, an exposé on sex trafficking in Eastern Europe and beyond, was recognized with the Nestor Almendros Award for courage in filmmaking and the Daniel Pearl Award for Outstanding International Investigative Reporting. Her other films include In the Red (2015), The Hour (2005)and Frontline/World (2002). She teaches photography at the University of California Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism and Stanford University. She spoke with Davia Nelson about her latest film.

DAVIA NELSON: What drew you into photography?

MIMI CHAKAROVA: I was born in Bulgaria. I grew up poor. How come some of us were born in one place and other people born in another? It’s such a crapshoot, a toss of a coin, you know. I grew up around animals—chickens, sheep, donkeys—very rural. I grew up barefoot, running around. We had an outhouse. It was raw and beautiful. One thing I can say about my childhood, I felt free. I had no concept of “we don’t have much” because we always had food. We ate what my grandmother grew.

My mom and I moved to Baltimore from Bulgaria when I was 13. We lived on top of a pizza place in a studio apartment. The cockroaches came up from below every night. We were very, very, very poor. I didn’t speak any English. I could not communicate.

A lot of the kids and teachers thought I had a mental disability because I couldn’t speak. For the first year in America, I was treated like a disabled person.

We would receive letters from Bulgaria from our friends and family asking for stuff. Communism had collapsed; people were desperate. There were lines for bread, milk … I tried to describe in my letters to my friends that we were poorer here than we were in Bulgaria. They thought I was lying, that I wasn’t sending stuff because I didn’t want to.

We always talk about camera as a witness. I wanted to show people back home that I was not bullshitting, that what I was describing in our letters was real. Our existence was pathetic. We would get three-month visa extensions … always on the verge of packing up and leaving. That was the life we had and that was the purpose of the camera. It was evidence, proof of our existence here.

The camera was the way I communicated with my friends initially, and later on, the world. It was my way of bridging these two very different realities. It

What motivated Men: A Love Story? What’s the fire behind that?

I had spent seven years posing as a prostitute, interviewing girls who had been sold as slaves, building

MEN: A LOVE STORY United States, 2016, 80m Director: Mimi Chakarova

N

74 • FILMWATCH

could be trafficking, a war zone; it could be anything I was experiencing, I felt I could convey much better through the image than through language.

Later on I felt I had exhausted the medium of photography, so I needed something more. That became film. With film you’re adding audio, gestures, someone’s breathing, the way they sit.

•

Guest Director

•

tributes

•

revivals

relationships with these women over a long period of time. It was a very dark place. It changed me. Then we did [the documentary] The Price of Sex, and then we had two years on the road with that work, so that’s nine years of my life talking about rape, talking about how to break a person, how to break a woman.

In the beginning, Men: A Love Story was a disaster because I couldn’t separate myself from what I knew so well, which was misogyny—men abusing women, men taking advantage of women, men lying to women.

The first few months of filming Men: A Love Story, I was finding men, I don’t know how, found men with

•

new films

•

Special

•

OPEN DAILY8-4PM QUEUE FRIENDLY FOOD!

CALL US AT 728-5556 & WE’LL HAVE IT WAITING the most twisted stories about what they were doing to women. These stories were just a continuation of The Price of Sex. Then I made this decision. In order for me to do right by this film, I needed to have a clean page. When I interview people I cannot have all this shit from the past with me. I needed to pretend that I was an alien, and I didn’t know anything about men or human nature and could ask questions with that kind of innocence and naiveté.

At every screening during those two years of being on the road with The Price of Sex there was always the same question from the audience: “After everything you have seen, you must really hate men.” I thought that’s interesting; this is what they’re getting out of watching the film. I started answering with a joke because I wasn’t ready to go into it back then. My answer was, “No I don’t hate them, but the next film that I make will be a comedy, and it will be about men.” Everyone would laugh. Over time I thought, “why not?”

Men: A Love Story, was supposed to be a comedy.

It’s not quite that. You know how you get bitten by a snake, and you have to take the anti-venom? Men: A Love Story is the anti-venom for The Price of Sex. Watching it, you feel most of the men had not sat with somebody, especially a stranger, especially a woman, and talked about their heart and their feelings about women and love.

And don’t you think that’s sad? I found it really sad that no one had asked them that question. That, I think, is probably the most human question. What is love for you? What is love for me? It speaks to the core of who you are, because what else is there?

Not a single guy who walked out of the interview, no one said, you know what, I don’t want to be in your film, why are you asking me all these personal questions about my love life, my sex life, whether I cheated? It was a film about listening and being open.

Each one of these portraits is just a little window into their lives.

And what is love for you?

I want to say it’s everything. But that sounds kind of lame. But it is everything. Only two things truly make me happy—love and art. In a way, they are intertwined. If we are artists, it has to come from a place of love. It has to come from a place of wanting to understand another person.

That’s the same with interviewing a person, or photography. You have to capture the person’s essence.

And that is love, taking the time to truly understand.

Not only understand but to get rid of all the layers and the barriers and walls we put up because we’re too scared to let someone know who we truly are.

There are different kinds of love—romantic or erotic or with the child or with a stranger, a person you’ve just met and are interviewing—but nevertheless it is love. That reveal is love.

Davia Nelson is, with Nikki Silva, a producer of the duPontColumbia Award-winning NPR series Hidden Kitchens, the Peabody Award-winning NPR series Lost & Found Sound and The Sonic Memorial Project and most recently, NPR’s The Hidden World of Girls.

Real Food, Re a l Good breakfast sandwiches house made cookies and pastries specialty sandwiches and salads house made veggie burgers & salmon burgers all kinds of drinks sunny patio

Made Fresh, Fr om Scr a tch ON MAIN ST. BETWEEN SHIRTWORKS AND T-SPORTS FACEBOOK.COM/BROWNBAGTELLURIDE

B ahra n i

H e rz o g

Trembling Beneath Our Feet W e r n e r H e r z og s t ep s t o the e dg e of the volca n o thing moving and profound. Do you think humanity needs John Frums? Or would we be better off just accepting that there’s no grand design?

Well, we have to accept that we live in an aimless universe. And of course, humans have a tendency to insert structure and hope and eschatology. And so, yes, the film shows that with all earnestness.

It’s not funny at all. It’s something deeply fascinating, and Clive Oppenheimer, in his conversations with the tribal chief, treats him with the utmost respect and curiosity.

Can you discuss the French couple in the film?

Looking into archival footage, you inevitably would stumble across footage that they shot in the 1970s and 80s, 16mm celluloid footage of extraordinary quality and intensity. I’ve never seen anything like this. It cost them their lives to do this.

They got too close to the volcano. Too unprotected. Too much like daredevils.

They both perished in a pyroclastic flow, a super-heated cloud of glowing ashes coming 100 miles an hour at them.

BY RAMIN BAHRANI Volcanoes seem an ideal subject for Werner Herzog, who throughout his career has made mystery and wildness central themes of his films. He spoke with filmmaker Ramin Bahrani about his latest.

RAMIN BAHRANI: I know you’ve always had a love of science and scientists. Can you describe meeting Clive Oppenheimer, the co-creator of the film?

WERNER HERZOG: We met ten years ago on Mount Erebus in Antarctica, during the filming of Encounters at the End of the World (2007). Mount Erebus is a very big volcano, active, one of three where you can look straight into the magma, the boiling rock of the inner Earth. Clive and I were talking together about my previous engagement with a volcano exactly 40 years ago, La Soufrière in the Caribbean, on the island of Guadeloupe, which was just about to explode.

You made a great documentary at La Soufrière—everyone was fleeing the island, but you went to find the one man who refused to leave. You found him sleeping. He didn’t seem scared at all. Is there anything at this point in your life that scares you?

No. I wasn’t scared when we were at La Soufrière, even though it was predicted that it would explode any moment. It could’ve been two minutes, or two hours, or two days.

And everybody had fled, including the scientists. But when you are working with a camera, you do your job. You do your work, and you are prudent. And once you are done, you immediately take a big distance from the volcano that’s rumbling under your feet.

INTO THE INFERNO United Kingdom/Austria, 2016, 104m Directors: Werner Herzog and Clive Oppenheimer

N

76 • FILMWATCH

•

Guest Director

The footage of the magma at night in Ethiopia is so beautiful and mysterious. You can imagine continents being formed and destroyed.

Ramin, I know you liked the footage of Erta Ale in Ethiopia so much, this beautiful and strange magma, so I made it twice as long: your input in the film.

Good! As anyone who knows your work will know, this is not a nature documentary. You’re chasing something else, something more mysterious. That includes deities, demons and magic.

Yes, you can see it very clearly in the Vanuatu footage. It’s an archipelago in the Southwestern Pacific, and local people there started a cult there—the so-called John Frum cult—and created a new deity.

Frum was a mysterious, obscure American G.I. who became their god. They hope he will return through the volcano, as a portal, and bring all the consumer goods from America—chewing gum, jukeboxes, fridges, maybe even a Cadillac. Apparently, different denominations have sprung up in small communities.

As usual, you manage to take these strange things and turn them into some-

•

tributes

•

revivals

•

You were in Sumatra at Mount Sinabung and filmed an eruption happening. What was that like?

It felt reasonably safe. Farmers were plowing the field in a zone that was completely restricted. We entered and filmed and then moved out very quickly. Three or four days later, the same volcano exploded and killed seven farmers right where we had our camera. What we saw in Indonesian television was stunning. In a way, we were lucky.

You and Clive discuss volcanoes with an Ethiopian scientist, Dr. Yonatan Sahle, who was so passionate about what he does that he even kisses the ground. Clive asks him, “Is there at time period you would want to go back to?” He said that he wanted to be in the moment before languages became different, or skin colors changed.

Well, that’s our very origins: our direct ancestors, the first Homo sapiens who emerged in this area 100,000 years ago.

Is there a time period you would want to go back to? If you could take your camera back to some time, some place?

Yes, I would say the fourth, fifth, sixth century, in Europe, when the Roman Empire collapsed and all knowledge of antiquity was literally wiped out, with only a few pockets of survival. That’s a very fascinating transition time. Everything was in movement. It took about 1,000 years to regain most of the knowledge that we had almost completely lost.

new films

•

Special

•

Do you mean the beginnings of the Dark Ages?

Yes, the so-called Dark Ages. We also asked Dr. Sahle, “You are fascinated by our origins 100,000 years ago. Do we have another 100,000 years?”

And he gives a very interesting answer.

“We are a very interesting species, collaborating and doing extraordinary things, but also responsible for the extinction of many other species, and jeopardizing our environment and our survival. And 1,000 years from now, the human race will face a very critical phase, where it will be decided whether we will survive or not.”

Do you think we have 1,000 years?

Yes, I think he’s probably right, and then we’ll enter into a very critical phase.

by fo r ! up Stop n Films up of So n the go e o C e , r B e t w t y S a l a d g B u rg e Your n r i a a H e r d Wi n n Quickest, wa or A Most

Affordable Choice

Serving

Like mass starvation, and lack of water and floods?

Whatever it is. Pollution and overpopulation and wasting too many of our resources and on and on.

If all the volcanoes in the world were to erupt and just wipe out humanity, is there something you would like to save? Something you wish could be saved for some future time?

No, not really. If it wiped out everything, leave the planet to the scurrying roaches and the retarded reptiles.

Ramin Bahrani’s films include 99 Homes (2014), Goodbye Solo (2008) and Man Push Cart (2005) and have been shown at retrospectives at Harvard University and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

for a

Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner

Great Bite in Town

Open Early to Late Family Friendly

TELLURIDEGAYSKI.COM FEBRUARY 25- MARCH 4, 2017

Thanks for Coming Out!

the place to BE...

Danner

S u ff e r n

The Survivor

A Guatemalan man ’ s heroic search for the truth

BY MARK DANNER In 1982, Guatemalan commandos raided Dos Erres, a tiny farming village, massacring 250 people.

Director Ryan Suffern worked with forensic anthropologists, activists and some heretofore undiscovered survivors to revisit the devastating day, to describe the ongoing quest for justice for those killed and to expose the larger geopolitical forces that helped lead to Guatemala’s devastating civil war. He spoke with Mark Danner, author of the seminal book The Massacre at El Mozote, an investigation of a similar event in El Salvador, about the making of the film.

78 • FILMWATCH

How did you begin work on this story?

A week after first hearing this story, I found myself, camera in hand, accompanying (Oscar’s attorney) Scott Greathead and (forensic anthropologist) Fredy Peccerelli and Oscar to attend the sentencing of one of the Guatemalan soldiers found living as a U.S. citizen here in Southern California. That night I went home to my wife and said, “I just filmed the end to the most fascinating story I’ve ever heard. I just have to get the rest of it,” which ended up taking two-and-a-half years.

This period of the 1980s is filled with stories of disappearance, murder and massacres, all of which—because they

FINDING OSCAR United States, 2016, 100m Director: Ryan Suffern

N

MARK DANNER: Congratulations on the film. I admired it very much. It is a story of massacre and killing, but it’s also a story of redemption and a detective story that, more than any other of this kind that I’ve seen, pulls the viewer in.

RYAN SUFFERN: The attraction of this story was the point of access to Oscar.

His story—the existential crisis of one day discovering your whole life is not what it seems—makes a horrific story into a fascinating and epic search. For us it was important to try to figure out a way to tell this story in such a way so as not to overwhelm the audience, to really hook them into the fascination of this mystery of finding the truth.

•

Guest Director

•

involve the United States—involve us.

It is, in one sense, the story of faraway people, in a distant land. But you make the connection with the United States visceral and dramatic.

Part of my personal attraction to this story was that there are so many larger issues that you can’t help but touch upon—genocide, U.S. foreign policy, immigration. These are very much at play, and yet if you set out to make a documentary about any one of those issues, a large percentage of the American audience, if not an international audience, would probably just tune out.

There are some stories that just exist in the world—it’s like they’re hewn out of rock. The narratives just seem to exist in some timeless fashion. And when you at last find Oscar in the film, he seems to somehow embody human happiness and resilience.

If you heard about somebody who has experienced first-hand the massacring of his entire family and then was raised by the family of one of the soldiers who helped lead that massacre, you can’t help but start to form an impression of how that would wreck a human being for life. And so to find Oscar—this charming, hardworking, loving father and husband—is the last thing you would expect.

Do you think this is a story about finding justice? We see soldiers who

tributes

•

revivals

•

are prosecuted, and we want to think that there is some justice. But then you realize that the people who made these decisions, from [Guatemalan President José Efraín] Ríos Montt to Ronald Reagan, would do exactly the same thing again if they faced what they saw as a similar “threat to national security” and were in a position to do it.

When you hear about atrocities like this, it is hard not to just get overwhelmed with the horrors. They happened in Latin America and Central America in the mid-1980s, and, all too often, are happening all over the world now.

In Guatemala, it’s very encouraging that some of the members of the [elite commandos known as the] Kaibiles that were involved in the Dos Erres massacre have been brought to justice. Yet it’s just a fraction of the people who were responsible for murdering and disappearing over 200,000 Guatemalans.

But I’m inspired by the fact that there are these amazing activists and forensic anthropologists and prosecutors who aren’t giving up that fight, even though it’s daunting. They’ve been doing this for decades and have only recently found any justice. So I would be careful not to paint broadly the idea that justice has been found. This is a story spotlighting those who continue to search for truth and justice and an example of them finding some of that.

new films

•

Special

•

TellurideLuxury.com

Predict the next Best Picture winner here at Columbia House.

Our newest luxury rental is ideally located next door to the Galaxy.

Reserve now for TFF 2017 | 866. 762. 6540

F O R TES

CUEV A S

Agents of Desire

M e xi co ’s showg i rl s com e of ag e

BY MARA FORTES Ten years ago, artist and graphic designer Maria José Cuevas embarked on her first feature documentary: a portrait of the Mexican showgirls who beamed on cabaret stages, TV and movie screens in the 1970s and 80s.

She discovered that they were still dancing and donning feather boas, but also had a wealth of wisdom to share about life’s tribulations and joys. She spoke with the Telluride Film Festival curator Mara Fortes about the film.

MARA FORTES: What do the women in your documentary represent for Mexico?

MARIA JOSÉ CUEVAS: The vedettes are cultural icons, and popular culture in each country very much defines the social climate.

They belong to an era known as the “época del destape” (era of uncovering)—when there began to be more consciousness about the body, when the movie industry thrived on the “cine de ficheras” (sex comedies and musicals). Their fame spanned all media and all classes of the population.

Can you describe your personal connection with them?

My father (famed artist José Luis Cuevas) was fascinated by popular culture and used to frequent cabarets and take me along. So the vedettes became these very familiar presences in my childhood. I wanted to find out what had become of them, to pay tribute to these women whom, in a sense, I grew up with.

I first met Princesa Yamal. One day she called me and said, “I have a surprise for you.”

She showed up fully decked out as a showgirl and performed a special dance for me! I recorded her on a little camera. When I played the tape, Beauties of the Night materialized: this woman who hadn’t put on her showgirl costume in over three decades puts it on again and is suddenly transformed.

There was this palpable nostalgia in the air, this need to show: “I am still this, even if it’s been more than 30 years that I haven’t done this.” And in the film you sense that. Even though they have spent the bulk of their lives

BEAUTIES OF THE NIGHT Mexico, 2016, 90m Writer/Director: Maria José Cuevas

N

80 • FILMWATCH

•

The one rule I made for myself was that I would never tell them what to do. I surrendered to their reality. I spent eight years following them with a camera and developed the trust that eventually rendered the camera invisible.

not “being in character,” they are still attached to their showgirl persona.

Why did you decide to focus the film on their present?

My starting point was witnessing how they interpreted their own past. If I had approached them through their past, as I knew it, the film would have become a conventional testimonial documentary about a particular period, and I was more drawn to the human aspect: to how these women lived, and lived through certain things.

What makes these characters so endearing, and interesting is the passage of time, the lessons they’ve acquired from life. The fact that they were all famous showgirls once was merely the common denominator. But their present—that broaches more universal themes, speaks to the experience of being women, of aging, of reinventing yourself. I also wanted to do away with the prejudices surrounding them. Prejudices about age, about how, as a society, we won’t allow our great goddesses of beauty to lose their youth.

I did revisit the past by diving into archives of photographs, film and TV footage. But this film is very much a creative complicity among women in the now. I want to stress that, because this would’ve been a completely different film if a man had made it. The best thing I did was invite my sister Ximena (Cuevas) to edit. She got to know the women only from what she saw on the screen—and I supplied the behind-the-camera experience.

Guest Director

•

You also witnessed some of their most difficult moments.

When I met them, each was going through a moment of crisis. I don’t know if the fact that I suddenly appeared in their lives, with a camera and a desire to tell their stories, prompted them to reexamine their lives and open up. But it was a turning point. Had I shot the film over a short amount of time, I would have never captured their transformation.

Did you encounter anything completely unexpected in the process?

Everything was unexpected! These women are thoroughly unpredictable! The best thing about this process was that it was like constantly being inside a musical. I grew up watching Fred Astaire, Busby Berkeley, movies where people start singing and dancing out of the blue.

And out of the blue, the vedettes would show up singing, decked out as rumberas dancing “Mambo No. 8” by Perez Prado.

tributes

•

revivals

•

These women have very specific relationships to their body and sexuality and are very aware of their status as sex symbols in this macho Mexican culture.

In the film, Lyn May says she hates the phrase “sex symbol” because that turns you into a sexist term: you become an object of, rather than an agent of, desire. They are all conscious of exposing their sensuality, but they are adamant about being “desiring women” rather than desired objects. They have no need for a man. They choose their independence. Everything they do is by choice—living with 49 dogs, refusing to wash a man’s socks, having surgery, embracing their freedom.

new films

•

Special

•

G i dd i n s

c o ll i n

The Ballad of Lee and Helen R evisiting a contemporary jazz tragedy

BY GARY GIDDINS On February 19, 1972, Helen Morgan walked into Slugs, an East Village club, with a pistol drawn, and shot her husband, Lee Morgan. Morgan, who had played with Dizzy Gillespie, John Coltrane, Art Blakey, Wayne Shorter and McCoy Tyner, died before an ambulance could arrive. Documentary filmmaker KaspeR Collin spent seven years assembling the materials, including a taped interview with Helen Morgan, and interviews with many others who were close to Lee and Helen. The result is a film that’s as much Greek tragedy as it is jazz biopic. He spoke to Gary Giddins, the world’s preeminent jazz critic, about the Morgans.

GARY GIDDINS: Can you tell me the genesis of the film? I assume it was the interview that Helen Morgan gave?

KASPER COLLIN: I previously spent seven years making a documentary about Albert Ayler, and the kind of music that Albert represents—this spiritual, soulsearching jazz music that really meant a lot to me for many years, and still does. I did not know much more about Lee Morgan than his Sidewinder album, but at that time it wasn’t really my music. Then, seven years ago, I saw a fantastic clip on YouTube of Lee Morgan from 1961 performing Bobby Timmons’ “Dat Dere” with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers in Japan, and it moved me deeply. Lee’s sound and the way he played that solo was amazing. I just kept watching it over and over. I realized then that there was another Lee beyond The Sidewinder. The remarkable music and the fact that Lee was this fascinating wonderkid character who got signed by Blue Note when he was only 18 years old made me want to see if there was a film there and I started to do research.

Of course I had heard about Lee’s bitter ending, and about Helen, but only like most jazz lovers do: that she was the woman that killed him.

Exactly! We really knew nothing about her except for that one interview.

I CALLED HIM MORGAN Sweden, 2016, 89m Writer/Director: Kasper Collin

When I met the musicians and friends around Lee, many of them started to talk very warmly about Helen. That was one of the first things they did. Of course, they talked about Lee and the music but almost immediately they wanted to talk about Lee’s last years and about Helen, and they did it with a lot of passion and love.

They weren’t angry with her?

When Helen shot Lee, their friends lost Lee— and that was horrible—but they also lost Helen. They lost two good friends at once.

There are a lot of double feelings around all this; she killed him but at the same time they knew what Helen had meant to Lee. I got hold of Larry Thomas’ interview with Helen directly from him early in the process and I found that to be such an incredible document and the idea of using it and Helen’s own voice in the film felt natural.

You’ve created a modern Greek tragedy. It seems almost miraculous that you have the tape of Helen, you have the tapes of Lee, and you found this other woman, Judith. How long did you spend assembling the materials?

Thank you very much. There are no shortcuts, really. The editing process has been spread out over three-and-ahalf years. And the full process of the

film including research, producing and shooting part is seven years.

It can take a long time to be able to find the right people and to do these kinds of interviews. It takes time to find a certain kind of material. Then you need time to develop the unfolding of the narrative, the visual style and the vibe, and to find a way to integrate the music in the film so you really have a chance to feel the beauty and power in it. The tricky thing is that all these parts are integrated and suddenly new material can be found that changes things rather completely, or a new person can appear. And to create the film you want you have to be open for that. The interview with Lee himself was material that was found rather late in the process.

station announced that Lee Morgan had been shot. We had to pull over to the side.

We were stunned.

Wow … you were there? That’s amazing.

Somebody in the film talks about the sawdust on the floor. That was sort of the first thing you noticed when you walked in.

It was a real old-fashioned New York bar, way on the East Side.

Are there places like that anymore?

All of your interviews are wonderfully candid. It’s wonderful to see these people really open up.

Oh, thank you. Well, the interviews are very important to me. And I guess I’m a curious person. I like to listen. I’ve talked a lot today.

Usually I don’t talk this much.

No, it’s very different now. I was a kid and it was just thrilling to walk into a club knowing you were going to be surrounded by these great musicians. That’s one of the things I always loved about jazz, how intimate it was. You could listen to classical music all your life and never meet the great conductors, but you walked into any of these clubs and they had to pass by your table to get on stage. There was a real sense of being right there in the middle of it.

You are really to the point. I can’t live without this music.

I remember the night he was killed very well. I was in Slug’s earlier that night, but went over to the Village Gate thinking we might come back later. We were driving back from New York City into Long Island at around 2 a.m. when the jazz

Gary Giddins, the long-time columnist for the Village Voice, has won an unparalleled six ASCAP–Deems Taylor Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Peabody Award in Broadcasting, as well as a lifetime achievement award from the Jazz Journalists Association. His most recent book is Celebrating Bird.

FILMWATCH • N

81

Sa i t o

B e ll

The Art of the Eagle A Mongolian teen becomes a folk hero

BY STEPHEN SAITO For 2,000 years, in northwestern Mongolia, Kazakh men trained their sons—and never daughters—in the practice of training eagles to help them in their hunts. Recently, Aisholpan Nurgaiv, a 13-year-old girl, hoped to change the two-millennia-long custom.

Otto Bell, a British-born, New York-based creative director for the ad firm Ogilvy, saw a picture of Aisholpan online, an eagle on her outstretched hand. Soon after, he headed to her home in the remote Altai Mountains. Bell spoke of the challenges involved in bringing Aisholpan’s journey to the screen and the evolution of the story.

Stephen Saito: This is your first time making a feature. How did you know you had enough material?

OTTO BELL: I didn’t know if it was going to be a 10-minute film or a 40-minute short for festivals. I certainly didn’t think when I stepped out that it was going to run to feature length, but things kept on happening. As a documentarian, you’re often forced to tell stories in retrospect. You have to fill in blanks because you got to the party a little late.

I got the rare privilege of stumbling in at the start of chain of events. The first day of filming was the perfect day for her to steal the eagle from the nest and start her journey to becoming a full eagle hunter.

The actual capture of the eagle is so expertly handled that it’s hard to

THE EAGLE HUNTRESS United Kingdom, 2016, 87m Director: Otto Bell

N

82 • FILMWATCH

•

believe it happened the first afternoon you were there.

Filming that sequence was a crazy experience. The whole sequence took about 30 minutes, and there aren’t any retakes, like, “Oh, could you just put that eaglet back?” When you’ve got an (eagle) mother circling overhead, we really had to just let them do their thing. (Aisholpan’s father) has been doing this for decades.

He’s a two-time world champion eagle hunter, and he’s got a pretty good sense of how things are going to go down.

I had a GoPro at the bottom of my rucksack, which I taped to [Aisholpan] so we could get point-of-view shots. Then Asher Svidensky, the still photographer who took the original photos of Aisholpan that I saw online, took his beat-up Canon 1D DSLR and we nearly killed ourselves actually climbing onto this little ledge so that we could get the lateral view on the nest. He had never shot video, so I was whispering to him, “Just keep it steady, you know how to hold focus,you can do this,” as this little girl in pigtails is climbing down this cliffside into the nest.

Guest Director

•

You have talked about how you build the film around three peaks—the capture of the eagle, the festival and the hunt.

As I was filming, I was learning more and more about the milestones of becoming a full-fledged eagle hunter. The first step is to steal a baby eagle from the nest, and the next is to build a bond with the eagle. Then you take that bird out into the mountains, in those vicious winters, and successfully hunt with it.

How much patience was required?

The winter sequences, when they’re out hunting, required enormous patience.

Everything takes four times as long when you film in those minus-50-degree conditions. Batteries give up the ghost in no time at all. All your equipment breaks.

Everything moves more slowly. The idea of trying to find wild foxes and have cameras in the right position, and mix that with a young girl and a young eagle … put it this way, we were supposed to film for five days, and we ended up staying for 22.

tributes

•

revivals

•

On the opposite end of the spectrum, one of my favorite scenes in the film also is the nail painting scene that reminds the viewer that Aisholpan is still a young girl. Was easy to find those moments and locate them in the larger story?

She is a bad ass, and she has this steely determination, but there is definitely a real femininity to her. I had to remind myself a lot that she is just a 13-year-old girl. ... When she’s in the dorm with all her girlfriends chatting away about her bird, and when she goes into a women’s store and tries hair bows while dressed in her full hunting gear: They’re all important reminders that we’re dealing with a very elegant young lady.

Stephen Saito is a Los Angeles-based writer whose work has been published in The Los Angeles Times and Premiere and on IFC.com. He founded The Moveable Fest in 2011, in which he writes about the festival circuit’s indie films and up-and-coming filmmakers.

Originally published in The Moveable Fest.

Reprinted with permission of the author.

new films

•

Special

•

790 GOTHIC ROAD MOUNT CRESTED BUTTE, CO

43rd

EXTENDS OUR SINCEREST GRATITUDE TO THE FOLLOWING DONORS FOR THEIR GENEROUS SUPPORT OF TELLURIDE’S HISTORIC NUGGET THEATRE

6 Bedroom 6 Bath Custom Built Log Home with 360 Degree Mountain Views.

3D Virtual Tour: http://bit.ly/2aV1V2s MLS #721563

Rita Payne

970.209.3683

ritaapayne@yahoo.com

Anonymous Anonymous Adam & Diane Max Jay Morton & Mike Phillips

Portrait and Landscape Gallery adamcarlos.com | adam@adamcarlos.com Reflection Plaza - Mountain Village Core 931-636-5023

Town of Telluride, Commission for Community Assistance, Arts, and Special Events

adam w. carlos F I N E A R T TELLURIDE | COLORADO

C O M M I S S I O N E D

P O R T R A I T S

|

L A N D S C A P E S

|

E Q U E S T R I A N

|

H A N D S

O F

M U S I C

G A N J A VIE

R OSI

Deadly Paradise R osi documents migrant tragedy

BY AMIR GANJAVIE Winner of the Golden Bear at the 2016 Berlin Film Festival, Gianfranco Rosi’s Fire at Sea documents the European refugee crisis, focusing on one of the major landing points, the Sicilian island of Lampedusa.

Rosi tells the story through the eyes of a 12-year-old local boy and the doctor who processes the refugees. The film caused a stir among critics and audiences with devastating footage of some of the mostly Libyan immigrants dying or dead in cramped boats, suffocated by diesel fumes.

Focusing on outsiders, renegades, and social issues, Rosi’s cinema is uncompromising in subject matter. El Sicario, Room 164 (2010) explores the world of a Mexican drug cartel hitman, who speaks directly to the camera in the hotel room where he tortured his kidnapped victims. For Sacro GRA (2013, winner, Golden Bear, Venice Film Festival), Rosi shot and edited over a nearly three-year period, documenting the lives of a gallery of vibrant oddball characters living on the famous road that encircles Rome. Rosi spoke about his filmmaking philosophy and the political possibilities of cinema.

AMIR GANJAVIE: How would you describe this kind of film? Can we still call it a documentary?

GIANFRANCO ROSI: I’m glad to call it a documentary.

But it also has some resemblance to neorealism.

You know, in neorealist cinema they take people from the street and make them interpret various characters. The people who work in my film are themselves, and they are re-enacting their own daily lives. We never tell them what to do. There are many formal documentaries that take the form of an investigation, like a BBC or National Geographic documentary. I like documentaries that give the space of poetry … Since my first film, I wanted to break this barrier between documentary and

FIRE AT SEA Italy, 2015, 114m Director: Gianfranco Rosi

N

84 • FILMWATCH

•

fiction. When I start to film, I never think that I’m going to make a documentary or a fiction film; I want to make a film.

How did the people of Lampedusa react to you?

Journalists are the enemies of Lampedusa because every time someone dies on or near the island they report this, sometimes exaggerating, so Lampedusa is always associated with death and disease. This summer a newspaper published a headline that ISIS terrorists are coming in with the migrant boats, and the next day 500 people canceled their planned trips to Lampedusa.

So the islanders depend on tourism?

In the summer they do. For example, in the summer, fishermen go out to fish and they rent their room to the tourists. So to be associated with the terrorists, the fear, with dead people floating around Lampedusa, is not good for them.

You were supposed to shoot this as a short film, but ended up staying more than one year and making a feature.

In some places, such as the desert, you need to stay for four years to make a film. In Lampedusa, it took me only one and a half years …

Guest Director

•

I tried to understand the reality of the place.

Can you discuss the editing?

When you start editing, you have to forget about your personal experience and bring everything into the present tense. I shoot 80 hours of film in one year, and then I close my eyes. It’s like how in life if you close your eyes right now you don’t have every single moment of your life happening. You have 10, 15, 20 episodes of your life that are very strong memories. For me, editing is the same; there are some moments that are very strong.

There are maybe 10 hours, but they emerge from these 80 hours. Then I start working with these 10 hours and start structuring the film. This becomes the second writing.

You got access to the rescue operations in a way that we have never seen before.

How did you convince both the people of Lampedusa and the people in the rescue operations to take you along?

When we went on the naval boat for the first 20 days, they put me in a boat that was not on the front line, which I didn’t know at the time, and nothing happened. However, that meant that I had an opportunity to get very close with the crew, including with the commander.

When I asked them to go back, they put me in

tributes

•

revivals

•

the front line, and then I was able to shoot a lot of things, including the moments of tragedy.

Were there ethical challenges in filming the dead?

They asked me to go inside the boat and film that. I didn’t want to film those scenes, but the captain of the ship told me that I had to show them. The world had to see these horrible things happening. The hard thing isn’t me filming it: the hard part is that these things should not fucking happen. People cannot die like that. It’s like asking someone to film the gas chambers in operation during the Holocaust. The hard thing isn’t me filming it: the hard part was that that image should never have existed..

This is one of the biggest tragedies since the Second World War. … Every single person in Europe, in the world, is responsible for this atrocity. All of us are responsible because we keep turning our faces away.

In Canada we said, “Yes, we’ll take five thousand Syrians.” Five thousand people arrived in Lampedusa yesterday alone.

Amir Ganjavie has published widely about cinema, architecture, and cultural studies, including editing Humanism of the Other (2005), an essay collection on the Dardenne brothers (in Persian).

new films

•

Special

•

The Road from Bernalda H ow the C oppola clan became a cultural force

BY GEOFFREY MACNAB Very near the start of my interview with Michele Russo, he lets off a high-pitched, three-note whistle. This whistle features prominently in his new documentary The Family Whistle, about his cousin, the celebrated filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola and the Coppola family’s origins in Bernalda, a small, impoverished town in southern Italy.

This particular whistle was used by the Coppola family to identify themselves to each other. In Bernalda, every family had a different whistle, passed down from generation to generation.

When you were lost in a crowd and you heard your family’s whistle, you would know where to go, Russo said.

Growing up in Bernalda, Russo said he remembers picking olives as a child so he could afford to buy a ticket to watch the first Godfather. He was a little startled when his parents told him, oh, by the way, the director of the film, Francis Ford Coppola, was his cousin, and that the Coppola family came from Bernalda, too.

Years later, as a young man, Russo wrote a letter to his cousin, having finally tracked down his address. By then, he was a young drama student, fresh out of theater school in Milan. This was in the late 1980s. Francis Ford Coppola replied in very friendly tones, inviting Russo to meet him when he was next in Rome.

The great film director and his young relative from Italy hit it off immediately.

“We weren’t just cousins. We became friends,” Russo said. Coppola realized that Russo was an actor and singer. Soon afterwards, he cast his young cousin in a small role as a Sicilian hitman in The Godfather Part III. Russo fully looked the part—sleek, darkhaired and with a brooding expression.

Russo grew increasingly intrigued by the Coppola family history. One evening while they were drinking wine by the fireplace, he told Francis he should make a film about his origins, who responded by telling Russo, no, he should make the film. Russo spent nearly 10 years completing the project.

The Family Whistle tells the remarkable story of Agostino Coppola, Francis’ grandfather, who, born in poverty in 1882, immigrated to America in the early 20th century, sired seven sons and

THE FAMILY WHISTLE Italy, 2016, 65m Writer/Director: Michele Russo

launched the Coppola dynasty. That includes Nicolas Cage, Talia Shire, Jason Schwartzman, Sofia Coppola and numerous academics, entrepreneurs and musicians.

Russo said it was a long way from the existence Francis’ great-grandfather Carmine, impoverished and uneducated, eked out in Bernalda’s olive fields. His great-grandmother Filomena, who sounds like a character out of a magical realist folk tale, was known as “No Nose.” When she was a young seamstress, she caught an infection and to stop it from spreading, a doctor cut off her nose. She sometimes wore a veil to hide the hole.

Agostino, the third of four children, scraped together the rudiments of an education, according to Russo. He was hired as the apprentice to Ciccio Panio, a legendary inventor and mechanic in the region, and was to play the guitar and mandolin by a blind musician. When he came back to Bernalda after doing national service in northern Italy, he discovered that his brothers had left to try to build new lives in New York. Agostino became part of the great southern Italian migration, through Ellis Island, to the U.S. in 1904. He never saw his mother again.

In New York, Agostino flourished, Russo said. His mechanical skills, quicksilver mind and entrepreneurialism were well-suited to American life. For several years, he worked in a factory producing

Mich ele R usso int er viewin g F ra n c i s Fo r d C opp o l a

springs. He pushed his children to study and inculcated them with his own deep love of music. He went to night school to study mechanical engineering and took to reading The New York Times.

He also began the family’s long and enduring relationship with the film business—Agostino built the Vitaphone sound system used by Warner Brothers during the transition to sound, according to Russo. Although he became successful, Agostino felt an intense yearning for the Italy he had left behind. He refused to Americanize his name. Like many other immigrants, he managed to

create his own little corner of southern Italy in lower Manhattan.

One of Russo’s first screenings was in Bernalda in 2011, on the day of Sofia Coppola’s wedding to Thomas Mars. “Francis said to me: ‘Do you have your documentary with you?’

“I said: ‘Of course.’ We projected the documentary before the cake,” Russo said.

To his relief, Coppola was moved and delighted by the film.

Geoffrey Macnab is a freelance writer based in London. He contributes to Screen International, The Guardian, Time Out and Sight and Sound.

FILMWATCH • N

85

Hollywood Royalty

G l i m p s e s i n t o the mos t fa mous mothe r-daught er t eam

By Leonard Maltin Debbie Reynolds, one of the biggest stars of the 50s and 60s, lives next door to her daughter, Carrie Fisher, aka Princess Leia, and later the author of the bestselling novel Postcards from the Edge. And the two, having survived decades in the spotlight, maintain an intense, tender but complex friendship.

In the documentary Bright Lights, filmmakers Alexis Bloom and Fisher Stevens bring poignancy, humor and deep respect to the relationship between Fisher and Reynolds, which is utterly unlike any other and yet strangely familiar.

The filmmakers spoke with Leonard Maltin about the film.

LEONARD MALTIN: What was the biggest surprise? What did you learn or discern?

FISHER STEVENS: There were surprises on a daily basis. We never knew what we were going to get when we showed up to film. Even though I knew Carrie, I didn’t know how incredibly fast and witty she is.

To be honest, I didn’t know much about Debbie Reynolds. I was really surprised by her incredible professional discipline and talent as a performing artist. I was in awe of what she did to get to where she was.

You can see where Carrie’s sense of humor comes from. Debbie’s hilarious.

BRIGHT LIGHTS United States, 2016, 95m Directors: Alexis Bloom and Fisher Stevens Featuring: Carrie Fisher, Debbie Reynolds and Eric Fisher

N

86 • FILMWATCH

•

ALEXIS BLOOM: I wish she’d shown more of that with us, because she is absolutely profane. In a professional sense, she’s also absolutely rigorous. When she showed up for us, she’d be dressed, with her false eyelashes and her wig on. It didn’t matter how shitty or weak she was feeling. She just pulled herself together and did it anyway. She just brings it. … I knew her as a cheerful, sunny gal. I didn’t realize that she’s got a spine of steel.

What do you do at moments when you’ve captured something overly intimate or potentially embarrassing? As filmmakers you want to keep it, but you’re friendly with your subjects. You don’t want to put them in an awkward position.

FISHER STEVENS: We are walking a tightrope there, obviously. Certainly Lex and I fell in love with our subjects. The last thing we would do is hurt them. Carrie and I bonded, and then she got to know Lex; she knew weren’t going to hurt or damage them in any way. But we want a truthful portrayal as well. As filmmakers, we want the truth.

Guest Director

•

ALEXIS BLOOM: There’s a moment towards the end when Carrie is having a manic episode. That must have been difficult for her to see on film. But she understands that is who she is. You can cut a scene in a way that’s unkind, in a way that makes her look completely untrammeled, or you can cut it in a way that reveals her vulnerabilities but doesn’t go for the cheap shots. When Fisher says that Carrie had trust in us, she did. She always knew that we were not going to take cheap shots.

There’s not an objective standard of the truth, and what is revealing may not be flattering.

It doesn’t hurt that she’s unusually selfaware.

ALEXIS BLOOM: She’s done her onewoman shows when she talks about her mental illness, and [written] her books.

But she’s the author of those. So even though it seems like she’s doing a tellall, she’s the one telling the story … But when we showed her our film for the first time, there definitely was an element of, “Wow, I didn’t expect that.”

tributes

•

revivals

•

What do you hope people will take away from this film?

FISHER STEVENS: Back in the day, being a movie star, you went to work every day, and you really worked your ass off.

Debbie’s a fantastic mime. She sings; she dances. If she can’t do something, she’ll learn how. There is discipline involved. I would like people to revel in the past, to get lost in what the world was like back then.

One other takeaway: even though they were a famous family, they’re a family. They have the same issues as everybody else.

ALEXIS BLOOM: Family is bittersweet, and fame is ephemeral.

Leonard Maltin is best known for his longrunning paperback reference Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide and his thirty-year run on TV’s Entertainment Tonight. He teaches at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, hosts the weekly podcast Maltin on Movies, appears on ReelzChannel and Turner Classic Movies and is on the board of directors of the National Film Preservation Foundation. He holds court at leonardmaltin.com.

new films

•

Special

•

American Jazzmen in Copenhagen

R emembering B en W ebster and De xter G ordon GEOFF DYER: Is it part of everyone’s collective memory that Ben Webster and Dexter Gordon were in Denmark?

JANUS KØSTER-RASMUSSEN: It’s part of our cultural identity in Copenhagen, the Golden Age of Jazz in the 1970s and 1960s—it’s something that a lot of people know. They played in the Montmartre jazz club, and every night was a treat, but no one had bothered to check the story and tell it in a coherent way. They have a cult following, and nobody had really told their story. Everybody was talking about something that nobody was sure about.

BY GEOFF DYER In the mid-1960s, jazz greats Ben Webster and Dexter Gordon joined the many major African American cultural icons— Paul Robeson, Josephine Baker, Miles Davis, Richard Wright, Nina Simone, James Baldwin—who fled the racism and violence of the U.S. in search of more accepting homes.

In an unlikely twist, both landed in Copenhagen, where they became integral members of Denmark’s emerging creative scene. Webster spent most of his final five years in Copenhagen, where his ashes are scattered; Gordon stayed for 15 years. The documentary filmmaker Janus KøsterRasmussen talked to Geoff Dyer about the two ex-pats who became heroes to a city.

COOL CATS Denmark, 2015, 83m Director: Janus Køster-Rasmussen

N

88 • FILMWATCH

•

I was completely unaware that Ben Webster shot so much footage. At what point did you come across that? How much more is kicking around on the editing floor?

The University of Southern Denmark has a jazz collection, and in the listing on the Internet of what they had in that collection, they had tapes and records and all kinds of stuff. One tiny line on the university’s web page listed 8mm films. That’s when I started to get curious. I borrowed those films, which I found on the bottom shelf in a basement.

I watched three-and-a-half hours of stuff. It was fantastic. People laughed me off. “Oh Ben, I remember he ran around all the time with his camera. He couldn’t film anything. You can’t use that for anything; there’s not even sound on it.’” But I could see immediately—I think any film-

Guest Director

•

maker would be able to see this—the great warmth and story in those clips.

And then I got in touch with Ben’s girlfriend, Birgit. I asked if I could speak to her. “No, that’s absolutely out of the question! That’s never going to happen.’”

I called again in a couple of months, and she said, “OK, I suppose you can come by.”

I went there with a very nice photographer, a guy called Claus. He’s very good with old ladies, and he helped her fix her VHS machine. Then we did the interview and it went really well. Just before we left she said, “Oh by the way, I have something that I think you would like to see.” She went to the attic, and she came back with another three-and-a-half hours of Ben’s 8mm photography. When I had this material, I absolutely knew that I had a film.

I put this facetiously, but I wonder if you got money from the Danish tourist board? Copenhagen comes out of it looking like one of the greatest cities in the world. And Webster and Gordon fall in love with it. It’s free of racial prejudice, everyone takes them into their hearts, they get girlfriends quickly.

Yeah, but you know, everywhere looks good in 8mm film … Back then, it probably was a fantastic place. Yes! Of course there has been some amount of racial prejudice, but we didn’t really have any experience with black people in the 1950s and 1960s.

We saw a few American soldiers dur-

tributes

•

revivals

•

ing the World War II, but we didn’t have a language for racial tension. So, for those guys, especially being really skilled and famous, they probably felt like it was the best country or the best city on earth. But I hope that’s also part of what the movie says: what you think is good for you maybe isn’t all that good for you in the long run.

And you know, we have a saying in Denmark: you can be a sheep in the king’s land or king in a shitty land. That’s what happened to those guys: they were so head and shoulders above everybody else when it came to music that they became ambassadors of jazz music. That wasn’t what made them great to begin with.

What made them great was coming from a country with a very fierce and competitive tradition when it came to jazz music.

I think that was what made Dexter leave.

Ben died here. The Danish alcohol culture was not good for Ben. On the one hand, Ben and Dexter are these mythic, almost godlike figures. But they’re not superstars in the way that, say, Mick Jagger is. They’re living quite ordinary lives and interact with ordinary people. My favorite section is that incredible footage where the caretaker has a drink with Ben Webster. They don’t have a language in common and are just sitting around drinking beer.

I love the footage that Ben took of him. It’s just completely unfiltered. It’s almost like an Andy Warhol sequence.

new films

•

Special

•

Kohn

Okazak i

A New Breed of Action Hero

C elebrating Toshiro Mifune

BY ERIC KOHN The modern movie hero owes a great debt to Toshiro Mifune, the longtime Akira Kurosawa star who imbued everything from Seven Samurai to Yojimbo with an intelligent ferocity. Steven Okazaki’s documentary Mifune chronicles the scope of the actor’s sprawling career and his lasting cultural impact. The filmmaker spoke to ERIC KOHN about his interest in the film and why more people should appreciate Mifune’s legacy.

ERIC KOHN: When did you first encounter Mifune’s performances?

STEVEN OKAZAKI: I was 10 years old when I saw my first Mifune movie. Seven Samurai was shown at the Japanese Community Center in Venice, Calif. We sat on rickety wooden seats, the noisy 16mm projector was propped up on a table, and the screen was two white bedsheets clipped together.

I remember walking behind the screen and watching the last battle scene—the bandits roaring into the village, the horses struggling in the mud, and Mifune falling and dying in the rain. I was hooked. Is there any action movie that tops Seven Samurai?

What surprised you over the course of your research of his life?

Japanese are very private people, and Mifune was very private. I wasn’t aware of how much he was affected by the war, watching young soldiers sent off to die on kamikaze missions.

But I guess what surprised me was that he was pretty much the samurai he played on screen—gallant, noble, sometimes volatile, sweet, funny—and he liked to get drunk.

The film contains both recollections of Mifune by his friends and family as well as expert insight from people like Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg.

How did you go about finding the balance between these two perspectives on his achievements?

I was initially worried about how the Japanese and American interviews would work together. But Spielberg and Scorsese were both enthusiastic about talking about Mifune,

MIFUNE: THE LAST SAMURAI United States, 2015, 70m Director: Steven Okazaki Featuring: Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg

so we did it. Japanese address things differently, revealing what they feel less directly, while Americans tend to say what they think.

Somehow both approaches work when you talk about Mifune. He’s very Japanese and very un-Japanese at the same time. He was shy and brash, funny and cool, silly and deadly serious. That’s what made him so dynamic. But it’s his integrity as an artist and a person that made people love and respect him.

You include a lot of footage from Mifune’s career, including both performances and glimpses of his off-screen life. What were some of the hardest materials to track down?

I’m shaking my head. Collecting the old photos and footage was really hard. Japan is a paper and wood culture—expendable, impermanent. So much has been lost and forgotten. It’s heartbreaking.

I know it’s a stereotype that Japanese revere the past, but they’re much more drawn to what’s new, what’s next. Most of the stuff from

the past has been thrown away. The long established movie studios don’t really document and preserve their histories and old movies.

Luckily, the Mifune family was very involved in the production from the beginning. His son Shiro, and Shiro’s wife Akemi and their son, Rikiya, gave us access to boxes and boxes of photos, old scripts, articles and letters, and helped us figure out what was what. Other materials came from Kurosawa’s production office and Toho Studios. The film also includes rare 8mm film shot by an assistant cameraperson who was on the Yojimbo crew.

With all of the access to various forms of media these days, relatively little attention has gone to preserving and sharing our movie heritage. In Japan, young people don’t know who Toshiro Mifune and Akira Kurosawa are, just as young people in the United States don’t know who John Wayne and John Ford are. Netflix only has four Cary Grant movies and not the great ones. That’s why we made this film, to remind people of

all the great movies they’re missing.

Why do you think Mifune is under-appreciated by Western audiences?

I think it is just exposure. Western audiences just haven’t seen the films in a long time. Young viewers don’t experience the incredible range of cinema history that’s available. They might see Citizen Kane, Metropolis and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, then skip over everything else until they get to the newer stuff.

They don’t realize what a huge influence the Kurosawa/Mifune films are on the movies they love—Star Wars and all the films influenced by that, Sergio Leone’s films and all the films influenced by him, The Magnificent Seven and all the films influenced by that.

Toshiro Mifune was the first movie hero who wasn’t a white guy. You look at him, and then you look at the way Asians are portrayed in most movies and television. He didn’t demean himself or belittle his culture. And he didn’t take shit from anyone.

FILMWATCH • N

89

Muse of the French New Wave R e m e mbe ri n g B e r na d et te La fon t

BY GINETTE VINCENDEAU Bernadette Lafont (1938-2013) was one of the most enduring female stars to emerge from the French New Wave. A feisty, dark-haired, sensual beauty, she emerged into cinematic consciousness in François Truffaut’s first (short) film Les mistons in 1957, when she was 19.

It was also her first film and proved momentous for both actress and director.

Against the summer heat in the South of France, she plays an erotic fantasy figure for a group of young boys as she rides her bicycle, skirt billowing. The voice over details how “Bernadette” enflames the boys’ nascent sexuality while her relationship with “Gérard” (Gérard Blain, Lafont’s husband at the time) provokes their jealousy.

In the wake of Les mistons and against Blain’s wishes, Lafont, with only a little training in ballet, embarked on a film career.

Although she would not work with Truffaut again until 1972, she remained close to New Wave circles, appearing memorably in Claude Chabrol’s Le beau Serge (1959) and Les bonnes femmes (1960).

In both films her pouting lips, curvaceous figure and impertinent wit estab-

BERNADETTE LAFONT: AND GOD CREATED THE FREE WOMAN France, 2016, 65m Director: Esther Hoffenberg

N

90 • FILMWATCH

•

lished her persona as that of a defiant, blatantly sexual woman, usually of modest origins. She thus occupied a specific niche in the New Wave female galaxy, against Jeanne Moreau and Emmanuelle Riva’s cerebral heroines on the one hand and Jean Seberg and Anna Karina’s Godardian gamines on the other.

Post New Wave, after a career eclipse (she married and had three children), she re-emerged triumphantly, her sensual image taking a simultaneously more burlesque and more feminist slant. La Fiancée du pirate (1969), Nelly Kaplan’s controversial, surrealist-influenced classic, is a milestone in French women’s cinema, a comic critique of masculinity in which Lafont’s Marie uses her sexuality as a weapon to take revenge on the men who humiliated her mother.

That film marked Lafont deeply to the point that she titled her 1978 autobiography La fiancée du cinéma. Convinced that she could now carry the weight of a film, Truffaut gave her the lead in Une belle fille comme moi (A Gorgeous Girl Like Me, 1975), another comedy in which a woman uses her sexuality against men, graced by Lafont’s ebullient performance. In a similar vein, also notable was Les stances à Sophie (Sophie’s Ways, 1970), Moshé Mizrahi’s adaptation of Christiane Rochefort’s feminist novel. More misogynist but better-known outside France

Guest Director

•

was Jean Eustache’s libertarian ménage à trois story The Mother and the Whore (1973), her other signature film.

Thereafter, if Lafont no longer starred in such prominent auteur movies, she enjoyed a prolific career in art and popular film (with more than 100 such credits), television and theatre.

Through the decades she appeared in important supporting roles, for instance in L’Effrontée in 1985, for which she got a César, in Chabrol’s late thrillers such as Masques (1987) and more recently in the successful rom-com Prêtemoi ta main (I Do, 2006).

Lafont suffered a personal tragedy when her daughter Pauline (also an actress) died in a hiking accident in 1988.

She bounced back, however. As she put

tributes

•

revivals

•

it, she “did not like being an object of pity.” While her career was appropriately crowned by an honorary César in 2003, her sunny screen presence, inimitable voice and warm personality always elicited huge sympathy.

By a nice twist of fate, one of her very last films, Paulette (2012), in which she stars as a granny growing old disgracefully, selling drugs on the side, was a major hit. Entering French cinema in some of its most revered films, she left it with a bang.

Ginette Vincendeau is a professor in film studies at King’s College, London. She is author or editor of books that include Brigitte Bardot, The Life, The Legend, The Movies (2014) and A Companion to Jean Renoir (2013).

new films

•

Special

•

ARGENTPICTURES.COM

ADLeR

HAnsen-LØve

Mid-Life Crisis

IS A BEL L E H UP P E RT E MB O DI E S TRANSITION the bookshelves is phony, it jumps right out at me. What’s more, in my films, people do read, and they do go the movies. They do engage with works that make them what they are. As is true of most people in real life.

I think that people accord a greater place in their lives to art than their social “peers” in movies. Nathalie reading Vladimir Jankélévitch’s La mort (Death) is an image drawn from a memory. Shortly after my parents separated, I remember my mother reading that same book, with a dedication from her old university professor, whom she adored.

It made me laugh that she should be engrossed in Death at that particular moment, and oblivious to the huge significance. At the same time, it shook me up. That could be the starting point of Things to Come. There is often an image that sums everything up.

By laure adler Mia hanSen-løVe first made an impression as actress, starring in Late August, Early September (1998) and Les destinées (2000) among other films. But she has thrived as a director of five films, including Father of My Children, which in 2009 won the Special Jury Prize at Cannes. She comes to Telluride with ThingS To coMe, for which she won best director at Berlin.

The story is about Nathalie, a philosophy teacher who faces several existential crises. HansenLøve spoke with laure adler about art generally and film specifically.

LAuRE ADLER: What’s the first shot in a movie that made an impression on you?

MIA HANSEN-LØVE: I’m not sure I could name the first shot, but a scene that obsesses me is the final scene in Eric Rohmer’s A Winter’s Tale. On a bus, the heroine bumping into the man she has rather absurdly carried a torch for. And that ending: “Don’t cry.” “They’re tears of happiness.” A character’s arc, all that perseverance eventually justified by the end of the movie, two people reunited, cinema working its spell.

Your films do not check the “psychological drama” box, in the sense that the meaning that emerges is multifaceted.

When I write, I’m concerned with rhythm, musicality and lots of other things but hardly at all with the characters’ “psychology.” What we need to know is generally expressed as we go along without needing to be explained. In fact I try, from writing through editing, to remove as much information as possible. If I feel a scene merely serves a purpose, I cut it out. What I keep has existential value and poetry.

It often feels as if Isabelle Huppert’s character has absolutely no idea what the very next moment will bring. Do you stick closely to the script or do you look for happy accidents?

My films aren’t intended to be rehearsed before we shoot simply because the truth of

ThiNGs To Come France, 2016, 100m Writer/director: Mia Hansen-Løve Starring: Isabelle Huppert, André Marcon, Roman Kolinka

N

92 • FILMWATCH

•

every scene relies heavily on the setting, its lighting, its atmosphere, and how that influences the actors. The script, structure and dialogue are very important but what is at stake on set is bringing it to life. That comes from an interaction between cast and director that can only occur at that precise moment.

You are a young filmmaker, but you look at stages of life that you have not physically experienced. Things to Come is the portrait of a woman of your mother’s age.

I have always felt out of sync with my age, to an almost pathological degree. It nurtured a melancholy, from which cinema released me. You write to free yourself of your demons while constantly going back to them.

The sustained tempo of writing and shooting over the last ten years comes from an addiction to this feeling of rediscovering the present. Whatever the age or gender of the characters, when I’m shooting, I feel totally at one with them, and with myself.

Where does Nathalie come from? How did she take shape in your imagination?

Partly, she comes from the couple my parents formed, their intellectual bond and my mother’s energy. Afterwards, there is the brutality of separation and the difficulty for many women over a certain age to escape a form of solitude. But I wrote the movie with Isabelle Huppert in mind, so Nathalie

Guest Director

•

emerged from the encounter between my memories and observations, and Isabelle.

Things To Come is the portrait of a woman who profoundly loves her job as teacher. You explore an underexploited theme in movies: the world of ideas.

Nathalie’s destiny, her strength in enduring the breakup, is inseparable from her relationship to ideas, teaching and transmission.

There are few films where you know which newspapers the characters read, which ideas they are attached to and which political issues agitate them. I always try to establish my characters in the real world, but Things to Come was a chance for me to embrace fully this relationship to books and ideas.

Your characters are defined by what’s on their bookshelves. Nathalie and her husband have a near-biological relationship with the books they own, as if those books were the backbone of their existence.

In the apartment where I grew up, the great luxury was the book collection. I don’t think I could live in a place devoid of books, and I have always paid particular attention to what’s on the bookshelves in my movies. It’s not simply about showing that the characters are educated, but also about taking pleasure from the choice of books and publishers.

A row of first editions or a row of paperbacks, a brown row or a multicolored row don’t say the same thing. When what’s on

tributes

•

revivals

•

Isabelle Huppert is in any number of films, yet she succeeds once more in surprising us, as the ultimate incarnation of a character—the way she moves, occupies the space, talks, sunbathes, thinks...

Beyond the fact that I rate her as the greatest French actress, I couldn’t imagine anyone else playing the part. Besides the wellknown facets of her talent—finesse, energy, humor, the hint of ferocity, etcetera)—I also had in mind the Isabelle Huppert that I had met away from the movies. There was something else that caught my attention, a particular fragility and sort of tranquility in total contrast to the tough cookies she often plays. I was keen to bring that out and take her toward something more gentle, tender or even innocent.

There is something absolutely spoton about the choice of actors, whether part of the family—husband, mother, children—or in the school or student environment. How do you manage to achieve such authenticity?

Like many filmmakers, I think that getting the choice of actors right is 95 percent of the job. On set, if I have a method, I’d have trouble defining it. It’s both intuitive and very grounded. Conversations deal with blocking, pacing and tiny details that say so much. I rarely touch on in-depth issues. I tend to think that the less you discuss those things with actors, the happier they are. There’s nothing worse than loading an actor up with all your psychological considerations. I’m skeptical about abstract intentions as a way of finding a character. I believe in the truth of scenes tackled head-on, in the now.

Laure Adler is a French journalist, producer and author whose many books include In the Footsteps of Hannah Arendt (2012). Reprinted with permission.

NEW FILMS

•

SPECIAL

•

T H E S E C O N D COMING Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

rescue Mission

THE R AC E TO S AV E A FRI CA’ S E L EPHANTS

In the past five years, 150,000 elephants have been killed for ivory. That’s one elephant every 15 minutes. At this rate, the African elephant will face extinction in 15 years. The Ivory Game offers an astonishing, searing investigative look at a species under serious duress. From the heated battleground of Southern Africa, where elephants are under constant assault from poachers, to the Chinese marketplace where the goods wind up, The Ivory Game reveals the full scope of a horrible assault on one of the world’s grandest creatures.

Directors Kief Davidson and Richard Ladkani have constructed a globe-spanning, pulse-pounding espionage thriller, following countless activists and officers engaged in a clandestine and often dangerous battle with an underground economy.

They use concealed cameras to capture backroom conversations between traders and undercover agents in China, tense scenes matched by similar showdowns in Africa, where officers seek poachers in the immediate aftermath of their malicious hunts. They visit scene after scene of mutilated elephant corpses, and in China—the biggest importer of illegal ivory—discover that a single kilogram of ivory sells for $3,000 on the black market.

The Ivory Game provides a keen overview of the geopolitical setbacks that keep

the ivory business in flux. “One person has the destiny of an entire species in his hands,” says one activist, placing the blame solely in the lap of China’s president—and the film’s revealing footage makes it easy to see why. Despite official regulations limiting the amount of ivory allowed into the country, many traders gleefully flaunt their illegal wares, with few locals willing to speak up. One exception: the brave Hongxiang Huang, a young man determined to uppend assumptions about his country’s ambivalence even as he risks being deemed a traitor.

The Ivory Game’s most potent moments trace the gun-wielding poachers who roam African parks slaughtering hordes of elephants without restraint. Flying high above the African plains, the filmmakers reveal scene after scene of dismembered animals—shriveled under the sun, their corpses signposts of indifference. But the film acknowledges some of the broader systemic issues allowing the killing to persevere: In villages where roaming elephants inadvertently destroy farmland, locals welcome hunters the way one might greet an exterminator.

In the tradition of Virunga and The Cove, The Ivory Game provides a bracing, immediate ecological call to action, celebrating those risking everything to bring illegal traders to justice, transforming an urgent message into an epic as sensational and suspenseful as any blockbuster but with far more consequence.

The iVory Game United States/Austria, 2016 directors: Kief Davidson and Richard Ladkani

Eric Kohn is the chief film critic and a senior editor for Indiewire and manager of the Criticwire network.

His work has appeared in The New York Times, New York magazine, Variety and Filmmaker.

By eriC kohN

The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming!

Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight:

somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

–William Butler Yeats, 1919

BoB GeldoF oN w.B. yeaTs: a FaNaTiC hearT England, 2016, 100m director: Gerry Hoban featuring: Bill Nighy, Van Morrison, Colin Farrell, Bono, Edna O’Brien, Noel Gallagher, Liam Neeson

FILMWATCH • N

93

f i l m m ak e r s o f t o m o rr o w

STUDENT PRINTS

T he best of student- created work selected from submissions from around the globe TAREK KASKA RÖHLINGER AGE: 28 Name of my film: A State of Emergency City: Ludwigsburg, Germany My film, eight words or less: Society in panic.

Favorite comedy: In China They Eat Dogs Favorite documentary: Darwin’s Nightmare Favorite drama: Fargo Key moment during the marking of your film: When we were sure that we are actually able to shoot the movie.

Dream mentor: The Coens

YUXI LI AGE: 25 Name of my film: Tear of the Peony City: New York City My film, eight words or less: A regretful love from a woman of Ming Dynasty.

Favorite comedy: Kung Fu Hustle Favorite documentary: The Cove Favorite drama: 2046 Key moment during the marking of your film: The moment when the world Olympic champion was teaching our actress how to do a sword fight.

Dream mentor: Tsui Hark

JIMMY KEYROUZ AGE: 29 Name of my film: Nocturne in Black City: New York City My film, eight words or less: A musician struggles to rebuild his piano.

Favorite comedy: The Dinner Game Favorite documentary: The Blue Planet Favorite drama: The Shawshank Redemption Key moment during the marking of your film: Out of time with a major scene left; I had planned six shots—we did it in two masters!

Dream mentor: Steven Spielberg.

Also playing: AND THE WHOLE SKY FIT IN THE DEAD COW’S EYE (d. Francisca Alegría, Chile); EDMOND (d. Nina Gantz, United Kingdom); ICEBOX (d. Daniel Sawka, United States)

FILMMAKERS OF TOMORROW Telluride’s annual sampling of fine new work from emerging filmmakers

N

94 • FILMWATCH

•

Guest Director

•

tributes

•

revivals

•

new films

•

Special

•

f i l m m ak e r s o f t o m o rr o w

CALLING CARDS

Ex ceptional new works from promising filmmakers C urated and presented by Barry Jenkins and followed by a Q&A DAINA O. PUSIĆ AGE: 30 Name of my film: Rhonna and Donna City: London My film in eight words or less: Conjoined twins learn to live with each other.

Favorite comedy: Best in Show Favorite documentary: Gray Gardens Favorite drama: Talk to Her Key moment during the making of your film, in 20 words or less: Working with children and teenagers; learning to notice and use of their sense of humor and grasp of the ridiculous Mentor of your dreams: Pedro Almodóvar and Bette Davis JACK O’SHEA AGE: 27 Name of my film: A Coat Made Dark City: Dublin My film, eight words or less: Offbeat and arresting animation exploring greed and submission.

Favorite comedy: Down by Law Favorite documentary: My Winnipeg Favorite drama: Au Hasard Balthazar Key moment during the marking of your film: Editing the structure into a linear narrative. Earlier cuts of the film featured extensive use of flashback.

Dream mentor: Nicolas de Crecy WILLIAM LABOURY AGE: 25 Name of my film: Fais le mort City: Paris My film, eight words or less: A very, very, very, long sleep in space.

Favorite comedy: The French Kissers Favorite documentary: Sans soleil Favorite drama: Kairo Key moment during the marking of your film: When I saw the footage of the actress who has been recorded while sleeping for four nights.

Dream mentor: David Robert Mitchell NATHALIE ÁLVAREZ MESÉN AGE: 28 Name of my film: Asunder City: New York City My film, eight words or less: Earthy. Close. Power. Adolescence.

Sexuality. Implosive. Memories. Family.

Favorite comedy: Eagle vs Shark Favorite documentary: The Act of Killing Favorite drama: Rosetta Key moment during the marking of your film: Calling the most difficult shoot day “the difficult day” from the beginning made the day seem easy when it arrived.

Dream mentors: Andrea Arnold, Jane Campion and Lucia Puenzo Also playing: LITTLE BULLETS (d. Alphan Eseli, Turkey); THE LAST LEATHERMAN OF THE VALE OF CASHMERE (d. Greg Loser, United States); 4.1 MILES (d. Daphne Matziaraki, United States-Greece)

FILMMAKERS OF TOMORROW Telluride’s annual sampling of fine new work from emerging filmmakers

FILMWATCH • N

95

f i l m m ak e r s o f t o m o rr o w

GREAT EXPECTATIONS VINCENT LE PORT AGE: 30 Name of my film: Le Gouffre (The Chasm) City: Paris My film, eight words or less: Fantastic tale in Britanny, about fear and disappearance.

Favorite comedy: Ma première brasse Favorite documentary: Sans soleil Favorite drama: Come and See Key moment during the marking of your film: Do not fear ridicule, for grace is often very close to grotesque.

Dream mentor: Stan Brakhage Also playing: DIRT (d. Darius Clark Monroe, U.S); THE GAMBLER (d. Karim Lakzadeh, Iran)

FILMMAKERS OF TOMORROW Telluride’s annual sampling of fine new work from emerging filmmakers

Snapshots E yes on the WorlD

When we think of documentaries, we picture filmmakers embedded in remote locales, compiling mountains of footage for an arduous editorial process that lasts years on end.

The results are often works illuminating incidents, issues and subjects from the past, a reflection of the world that was rather than the world that is. With Snapshots, the festival spotlights works of a more immediate nature, shorter-form narratives by documentarians addressing up-to-the-minute subjects in the here and now.

In Extremis, Dan Krauss (Kill Team) embeds himself on the ICU ward of a public hospital. Chronicling the work of Dr. Jessica Zitter, the film explores the knotty decision-making process in urgent end-of-life cases. Krauss crafts a sobering portrait of a doctor’s struggle to help co-workers, patients and families come to terms with the limits of medicine and the indifference of mortality. It’s a film about the inevitability of death that deepens our understanding of the meaning of life.

Directors Joyce Chen and Emily Moore’s Refugee follows the odyssey of Aicha Diop, a Mauritanian who sacrificed all when she fled her home country in 2003, leaving behind her five children. In this elegant portrait, directors Chen and Moore peel back the curtain on the refugee experience by framing Diop’s modest South Bronx life against the intricacies of the asylum seeking process. There is an irrepressible light in Diop’s spirit and this clear-eyed film presents it with grace.

With White Helmets, Orlando von Einsiedel reaffirms the impossible blend of humanism and brawny grit displayed in his Academy Award®–nominated Virunga. A tour-deforce set in Aleppo, Syria, the film follows the volunteer “White Helmet” team as it races into air-strike wreckage in search of survivors. Alternating between embedded footage of real-life missions and the personal testimonies of the volunteer force, White Helmets takes forces us to confront the hearts and souls of the people who still call the war-torn Syria home.

–Barry Jenkins

Snapshots: Eyes on the World Featuring Extremis (d. Dan Krauss, U.S., 2016, 24m); Refugee (d. Joyce Chen & Emily Moore, U.S., 2016, 28m); White Helmets (d. Orlando von Einsiedel, U.K., 2016, 40m)

N

96 • FILMWATCH

•

Guest Director

•

tributes

•

revivals

•

new films

•

Special

•

Durieux

L e g e n dr e

Battle of the Wits

T wo legendary illustrators talk shop

BY LAURENT DURIEUX Laurent Durieux’s 2015 poster—of the Telluride main street, in an intriguing retro future (or futuristic nostalgic past) was an instant classic.

The same can be said for the 2016 poster, created by Yann Legendre, whose innovative work has been seen in The New York Times and GQ, in books including Grimm’s Fairy Tales and Couture Conversations and in various movie posters (including several for Joe Swanberg) and DVD covers (Black Moon and Zazie dans le métro for Criterion).

The two discussed the finer points of creating enduring work for Telluride.

LAURENT DURIEUX: First of all, I must say that Yann is a friend, and so the poster he has created for this year’s festival is by far the best in a long time ... except maybe the one I designed last year. Friendship has its limits! (Laughs) All jokes aside, when I had to work on this, I understood the difficulties in addressing the theme of cinema, especially avoiding clichés. What was your starting

point in creating this poster, Yann?

YANN LEGENDRE: It was a little bit like developing a character for a film. I sought to find what it was that defined this festival: its characteristics, personality traits, what it is that makes the Telluride Film Festival a special place with a unique spirit. Then I found a metaphor that seemed to fit well with the spirit of the festival: “to move mountains,” which was my starting point for this poster. I still needed to find scenery—the mountains that surround Telluride—and an actor: the Yeti. (I wanted Bigfoot, but he was busy.)

When Julie (Huntsinger) had contacted me to design last year’s image, her instructions were very simple: “carte blanche.” I don’t know if you work the same way I do, Yann, but carte blanche can sometimes prove to be an impediment … too many possibilities can sometimes make it difficult to find the right one. What do you think?

Yes, you are right, and I’m the same!

The most difficult thing for me was that Julie gave me carte blanche, but also said that she really loved my poster for the film Zazie dans le métro, which I did for the Criterion Collection, and that she would love it—if possible—if I could capture the same gist for the festival poster. In the end, I only kept the same dash of humor. Graphically, they are very different.

I know that you are a great fan of American comics and Jack Kirby especially. I can safely say that he is an influence for you. I find similarities in your work: hyper bold lines, charts, a love for black and white, very graphic compositions.

What influences me most in Kirby’s work is this nuclear energy you find in his compositions. Each page in his comic strips works as a poster. He always manages to guide our eye exactly where he wants to and with very little graphic means. Legend has it that Picasso was a collector of Kirby’s work.

I find it very interesting when a graphic designer draws extensively from popular culture to define his writing or voice.

Do you have an opinion?

Just like French poster artist Raymond Savignac loved to say, “The poster is a streetwalker, popular and fragile.”

In fact, because of its origins, the poster is part of popular culture, just as much as comic strips, pulp fiction and satirical journals are. Our role as poster artists is above all to appeal to the public’s emotions. So I find that it makes a lot of sense to draw graphic inspiration from this shared and popular culture that ultimately defines us. I believe that more than any award or professional recognition, the highest achievement

for a poster is to become a popular icon.

Only the public can decide that.

In this regard, the Yeti (or Bigfoot) is a purely popular fiction character.

I imagine that your reference to the Yeti is linked in some unconscious way to Hergé [the noted author of the Tintin books].

Of course, Hergé is also part of my culture, without a doubt. When I was little, he was the first to make me travel in reading the adventures of Tintin. I followed those travels with more cosmic voyages, reading the comic strips of Druillet and Moebius. But there’s also Conrad, and Kipling, the films of Georges Méliès or Dario Argento.

As you name indicates, Yann, you are French even if you have lived in the U.S. for a long time (and even if you married a splendid woman from the U.S.). Can you tell me what are the major differences, if any, between the way in which we approach our craft as opposed to our American colleagues?

“Yes we can!” in my view, perfectly captures the difference between American culture and that of the old Europe.

Laurent Durieux is a Brussels-based illustrator and icon in the world of collectible posters, having created legendary versions of Hitchcock classics, Jaws, the Universal Studio classic monster movies and Criterion Collection releases, including Things to Come.

FILMWATCH • N

97

In memoriam

Paul Cox 19 4 0 -2 0 1 6

Abbas Kiarostami 1940-2016

In Telluride: Lonely Hearts (1982), Man of Flowers (1983), My First Wife (1984), Cactus (1986), A Woman’s Tale (1991), Innocence (2000) “The cinema has been given to us to explore our true potential. It is the greatest gift to our times. It’s also the most abused and misused form of self-expression.

I call on all young independent filmmakers to fight the good fight and express what’s in their hearts, to make their own films without making concessions and then conquer by perseverance and not bending to silly commercial demands. The true potential of the cinema can only be experienced when one has freedom of expression and finds an audience that’s not conditioned to constantly be entertained.”

–Paul Cox, 2015

N

98 • FILMWATCH

•

In Telluride: Taste of Cherry (1977)

Telluride Film Festival staff member, 1995-2016

“Film begins with D.W. Griffith and ends with Abbas Kiarostami.”

–Jean Luc Godard “We are living in the era of Kiarostami but don’t yet know it.”

–Werner Herzog “Kiarostami represents the highest level of artistry in the cinema.”

–Martin Scorsese

Guest Director

•

tributes

Felix Snow 19 66-2016

•

revivals

“Getting to know Telluride meant getting to know Felix Snow—an unofficial town mayor and larger-thanlife Main Street fixture with his boisterous trademark laugh. Always warm and welcoming, Felix offered instant friendship to locals and visitors alike. He embodied SHOW and lives on with us in spirit. Felix Snow, forever Telluride.”

–Andy Brodie, manager, Nugget Theatre

•

new films

•

Special

•

sgniwohS eludehcS I setadpU ytreporP tnatsnI I airetirC hcraeS evisnetxE ,motsuC

m o c .e t a t s E l a e R e d i r u l l eT h c r a e S

ta snoitseuq etatse laer ruoy ot srewsna dniF

woH ?esuoh taht rof gniksa yeht era hcum woH ?ekil skool roiretni eht tahW ?sah ti smoordeb ynam

?SUOIRUC UOY ERA

THE CRITERION CHANNEL COMING THIS FALL ON