New Movie Books – Weekend
[ad_1]
Subjunctive mood
Armen Medvedev
Film Studies Artel 1895.io
Armen Medvedev has been an important participant in the Soviet and then Russian film process since the 1960s. Editor-in-chief of the Art of Cinema magazine, in the 1980s he was deputy chairman of the USSR Goskino, and in the 1990s he was chairman of the Goskino of Russia, organizer of festivals, advocate, ally and friend of many brilliant directors, he was also an excellent teacher. In the late 2000s, film critic Sultan Usuvaliev began recording Medvedev’s lectures at VGIK. Six months after the death of the teacher, he collected some of them into a book. This volume covers the period from the 1920s to the early 1960s, from Eisenstein and Kuleshov to Gerasimov and Tarkovsky – that is, in fact, until the moment when Medvedev himself enters the cinema. This is oral speech – not quite slender, winding, often a little naughty, as if optional and endlessly charming. And this is one of the best books ever published on the history of Soviet cinema. Medvedev had a remarkably open, lively look. The film process of the 1920s and 1930s, in his presentation, seems to be an action that unfolded quite recently. This is by no means about annoying familiarity with the greats. It’s just that the history of cinema appears in his stories not as a list of main lines and trends, achievements and mistakes of the masters, but as a space with an infinite number of potentials (hence the title of the book, the subjunctive mood, which history allegedly does not know). Medvedev urged his students to be skeptical about the clichés that had been adopted and the established images, and even at the age of 80 he himself was a master of such a renewed look.
Martin Scorsese: A Retrospective
Roger Ebert
AST
Translation Alexandra Moroz
Roger Ebert, who died in 2013, was the most famous American film critic of the 20th century. The author is not that particularly deep or subtle, Ebert is an absolute master. His lyrics are manifestoes of a healthy average taste, a golden mean. Martin Scorsese is his ideal hero, the same master, the embodiment of a worthy mainstream. They have a lot in common. Ebert and Scorsese are peers, both were born in 1942, both grew up in working-class Catholic families (although Scorsese was Italian, and Ebert was Irish), both fell in love with cinema as children and entered the profession almost simultaneously. In 1967, aspiring film critic Ebert wrote one of the first reviews of Scorsese’s debut film, Who’s Knocking on My Door? A few years after Mean Streets, he will proclaim Scorsese the main hope of American cinema and will compare him with Fellini (this is not an arbitrary comparison: both Catholic directors were occupied with the intertwining of guilt and sexuality, which also resonated in the soul of critics – as he himself writes in the preface). In 2008, Ebert compiled everything he had written about his friend in 40 years into a book: brief reviews, careful analyzes, eulogies, interviews. So the creative biography of the artist is intertwined with the biography of an attentive, biased viewer.
For now, the sea belongs to us. Films and time of Mikhail Kalik
Natalia Balandina
Word Order – Film Research Artel 1895.io
Books about interesting Soviet directors, let’s say, are not the first row – a rarity, and the monograph by Natalia Balandina is a notable exception. Its hero is Mikhail Kalik, the author of the films “A Man Follows the Sun”, “Goodbye, Boys” and “To Love”, one of the artists who were broken by the Soviet cinema system at the dawn of stagnation. In the 1960s, Kalik was listed in the hopes of cinema along with his friends – Tarkovsky, Konchalovsky, Khutsiev. In 1971, after censorship battles around “Love”, he emigrated to Israel and was essentially deleted from official history. In perestroika, fame returned to him, but it was no longer comparable to its former glory. Balandina began studying Kalik as a student in the 1990s, collected a lot of archival material, talked with the director himself (he died six years ago), his colleagues and relatives. Her book is a completely traditional biography that unfolds from infancy to old age, through ups and downs and dramas (in addition to the struggle with film officials, there were more serious repressions in the director’s life: in 1951, he, at that time a student at VGIK, was arrested under Article 58 and spent three years in the camps). The story of life is interspersed with an analysis of the work of Kalik – at the same time a subtle lyricist, an expert on children’s and youthful souls and a formal innovator, one of the main followers of the French New Wave in Soviet cinema.
About slowness
Lutz Koepnik
New Literary Review
Translation Nina Stavrogina
Lutz Koepnick is an American film critic, media theorist and intellectual historian with extremely diverse interests, author of books on Werner Herzog, Michael Bay, Nazi cinema, Benjamin, Wagner, and an expert on understanding climate change in contemporary art. In his 2014 book On Slowness, he also drifts between the history of technology, philosophy, photography, installations, and cinema itself. Her theme is slow art. There is a common belief: the world is accelerating more and more, technology is distracting our attention, and art, including cinema, adapts to them – it becomes fragmented, jerky, designed for instantaneous reactions. But there is also a reverse trend in the cinema of the last decades: an accentuated slowdown. This new slowness, according to Koepnik, is not at all an attempt to reverse progress, to cling to outgoing forms. On the contrary, her task is to really see the present, to feel it, instead of plunging into a cascade of special effects. Only slowness allows you to really realize the speed. There can be many examples here (Pedro Costa, Lav Diaz, etc.), but Koepnik knows the German context best of all. Its heroes are Werner Herzog, Christian Petzold, and, oddly enough, the author of Run Lola Run, Tom Tykwer.
About ice walking
Werner Herzog
individual
Translation Marina Koreneva
A good match for Koepnik’s research is the book of one of his main characters. In 1974, Werner Herzog, who had recently completed Every Man for Himself, and God Against All, learned of Lotta Eisner’s illness. The matriarch of German film studies, the author of classic books on expressionist cinema, the head of the archive of the Paris Cinematheque, Eisner, accused of left-wing sympathies, lived in France from the beginning of the Hitler era, but after the war she again became an active participant in the film process at home. For the generation of “new German cinema” to which Herzog belonged, her blessing played a crucial role: Eisner was the bridge connecting young innovators with the great era of Lang, Murnau, young Brecht. Herzog decided he could save Eisner from death. To do this, it was necessary to make a vow, to make something like a pilgrimage – to walk from Munich to Paris, if possible not using the conveniences of civilization: spending the night under bridges and in the hayloft, not changing shoes, dining on whatever God sends. It is worth saying: the operation was successful – Eisner lived for another nine years. On the road, Herzog kept a travel diary, and two years later he decided to publish it as a book. In fact, this is the same slow movie – only in prose: a series of long shots, meditative traveling, filled – absolutely in the spirit of Herzog’s films – with a maniacally focused effort of will, the desire to implement the chosen plan, no matter how crazy it may seem.
Subscribe to Weekend channel in Telegram
[ad_2]
Source link
