Cannes 2010

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

Trailers for Aurora, Poetry and Ha Ha Ha are also out (the last two have no subtitles).

[Amy Racecar]

Excited to see Jia Zhangke rolling out his new film, though I'll join the chorus lamenting Tarr's absence.

[jsteffe]

The "Cannes Classics" lineup is great.

It's heartening to see that the World Cinema Foundation is presenting a Central Asian film: Ermek Shinarbaev's MEST'/REVENGE. I saw a 35mm print of that years ago; it was distributed by an interesting fellow named Forrest Ciesol. I hope eventually they get around to preserving some films by the Kyrgyz directors Tolomush Okeev and Bolotbek Shamshiev--some great works that are largely forgotten to the world.

[John Cope]

I'm not sure what the point of this piece is supposed to be. That there should be more films at Cannes accommodating prevailing sensibilities? That there should be less auteur driven cinema represented? That Cannes does not capitulate to commerce enough?

[Nothing]

All they're really latching onto is the fact that there's no Big American Auteur in competition this year - no Tarantino, no Coen, no Eastwood, no Van Sant. The hole left by Tree of Life, essentially.

[colinr0380]

And at the same time they're trying to latch it onto the new and profitable mass audience entertainments versus old, esoteric (intellectual?) and therefore of limited appeal and worthless dichotomy, much as the Greenaway article was doing a few months ago.

In other news Burnt By The Sun 2(: Sunburnt With A Vengeance) has apparently had a lukewarm reception in Russia. More from the Guardian blogs here (with an interesting debate in the comments section), as well as from this blog, which also says that the film has been cut down from three to two hours for Cannes.

[jsteffe]

Thanks for these links, colinr0380. I thought all three pieces were fairly thoughtful.

So Mikhalkov filmed a topless scene of his daughter Nadia...

[rs98762001]

A sequel to Burnt By The Sun makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. It's been a long time since I've seen the film (which I remember as being wonderful) but didn't pretty much all the major characters get killed at the end?!

[colinr0380]

Curiouser and curiouser: Twitch is saying that the film has been split into two parts, Burnt By The Sun 2: Exodus and Burnt By The Sun 3: The Citadel. So it looks like this second film, despite losing an hour for Cannes, is still not going to be the end of the story. They also have a bombastic trailer on their page too. Not knowing any Russian I was amused to imagine that the first section seems to involve Stalin being told about this grizzled veteran in the style of one of those contrived setups to 80s action hero plots ("only Arnold Schwarzenegger can sort this mess out. Bring him out of retirement/resurrect him and give him the biggest guns you can find...now!")

Twitch also have the trailers up for Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Xavier Dolan's Les amours imaginaires and Hideo Nakata's Chatroom.

I was quietly looking forward to Chatroom but the trailer suggests a worryingly literal take on the internet (with bright blocks of online colours compared to dreary, washed out real life), and looks reminiscent of that episode of Futurama where they investigate the internet. If someone's head briefly turns into a flirty winking emoticon from across the room at some point, we'll know where the influence came from!

[Michael Kerpan]

A sequel to Burnt By The Sun makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. It's been a long time since I've seen the film (which I remember as being wonderful) but didn't pretty much all the major characters get killed at the end?!

IMDB has a capsule summary:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0403645/plotsummary" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

This sounds astonishingly like the most propagandistic films actually made in the USSR during WW2.

[Camera Obscura]

In other news Burnt By The Sun 2(: Sunburnt With A Vengeance) has apparently had a lukewarm reception in Russia. More from the Guardian blogs here (with an interesting debate in the comments section), as well as from this blog, which also says that the film has been cut down from three to two hours for Cannes.

Thanks for the links. Very interesting.

From Giuviv Russian Film Blog:

The film fails on many levels: it fails as myth, it fails as historical reconstruction, it fails as sequel, it fails as war film and as some commentators have pointed out it almost only succeeds as a loose string of comic-like episodes but the element of 'lubochnost' is only really there as a sum of the negative connotations of the word in Russian: after all, Mikhalkov is no Medvedkin.

What is 'lubochnost'?

[jsteffe]

Michael Kerpan: you're right, its sounds an awful lot like the Stalinist war epics The Fall of Berlin (dir. Mikhail Chiaureli) and The Third Blow (dir. Igor Savchenko). The difference is that whereas in those films Stalin lookalikes played the Heroic Leader (Mikhail Gelovani and Alexei Dikii, respectively), Nikita Mikhalkov has cast himself rather less modestly as the hero.

Camera Obscura: Regarding "lubochnost"--"lubki" (singular: "lubok") are inexpensive Russian woodcut prints that were intended for a popular audience. They often had religious, historical or satirical themes. You can find a good description of them in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lubok. I would guess that Giuliano Vivaldi is referring to some kind of deliberately naive, folksy, even comic-book element in Mikhalkov's film, not unlike the grotesque comic imagery in Alexander Medvedkin's Happiness. (Lubki were sometimes printed up as a kind of comic book with simple narratives and little text, if that helps.)

Edit: the suffix "-nost'" in Russian (as in Glasnost) refers to a quality or state of being. "Being like a "lubok" = "lubochnost." It's close to the suffix "-ness" in English and may even be related linguistically.

By the way, I heartily recommend the Giuviv Russian Film Blog! It's full of perceptive commentary, and Giuliano Vivaldi clearly has a deep knowledge of Russian culture.

[Michael Kerpan]

At least Fall of Berlin had an interesting musical score by Shostakovich.

[Camera Obscura]

Thank you for enlightening me on 'lubotchnost' and 'lubki', jsteffe. Much obliged. From what I see, most of these 18th century 'lubki' seem much more interesting than Mikhalkov's Burnt By The Sun: The Sequel.

Russian cinema is a blind spot for me, but Giuliano Vivaldi's Russian Film Blog seems like a valuable and highly readable source of information.

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

Twitch also have the trailers up for Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Xavier Dolan's Les amours imaginaires and Hideo Nakata's Chatroom.

These are also available at the festival website, along with numerous other clips and trailers (Certified Copy, Another Year, Outrage, Kaboom, etc.).

[Nothing]

And at the same time they're trying to latch it onto the new and profitable mass audience entertainments versus old, esoteric (intellectual?) and therefore of limited appeal and worthless dichotomy, much as the Greenaway article was doing a few months ago.

Actually, I think it's true that a certain contingent of international programmers, critics, academics and institutes are helping to paint art cinema into a corner. A situation where, gazing into the next decade, we may find ourselves with 'slow cinema' (dreadful term) on the one hand - films that are low-fi, inaccessible and virtually undistributable (Costa, Jia, Tsai, Alonso, Serra, etc.) - and an increasingly profligate and inane popular commercial cinema on the other, with very little in-between.

Now I have great admiration for the work of Costa and Alonso, but no-one can pretend that they will ever be relevant to more than 0.1% of the cinemagoing public; nor that this situation would have been substantially different even in art cinema's heyday - their approach is simply too slowly paced, too lacking in event, too theoretical, too detached, to have even a smidgen of crossover appeal. Of course, this obscurity is part of the allure to a certain coterie - especially the aforementioned taste-makers who relish their ability to lord over this little world unchallenged. Not to say there isn't a place for Costa and Alonso - just as there has been a place for Snow, Brakhage and the Dziga Vertov Collective in the past - but to drop the mantle of popular auteur cinema altogether is surely a terrible error that will lead only to increasing obscurity, to the gradual disappearance of art cinema, art cinemas, and art cinema funding mechanisms, leaving only non-professionals with their video cameras playing to an audience of ten.

I don't believe, however, that this is a charge you can lay at the feet of Thierry and his team. If anything, the Official Selection sits at the forefront of the fight to support popular auteur cinema in the traditional sense (unlike, say, the combination of willful obscurity and genre frivolity found in Directors' Fortnight). Last year's strong selection was a case in point - Trier, Campion, Tarantino, Suleiman, Audiard, Haneke and Noe are all directors who manage to retain their integrity whilst puling in the punters. Nevertheless, the committee can only program from what's available - as this year's rather less exciting selection (at least on paper) makes clear. One or two films would have made all the difference - once again, we find ourselves staring into the hole left by an uprooted Tree.

[Peacock]

But you can't blame directors for making films with no cross-over appeal, I mean it's like poetry - imagine if you had to dumb it down a little bit to make it sell better? Would that make it great poetry?

There are still artistic directors who don't fall into the 'inaccessible to wide audience' category - Lynch, Malick, Kitano for example. I think putting the blame on the recent trend towards 'slow cinema' on the programmers and critics is unfair - surely it would be impossible to ignore a Fellini.

[Michael Kerpan]

There are plenty of fine "artistic" directors whose work is not inherently inaccessible to wider audiences -- yet get almost no attention from such audiences. If those wider audiences are mainly interested in glitzy, hyperactive junk -- even "accessible" films (of higher artistic caliber) will be largely ignored (in the West, at least).

A few examples -- Hirokazu Kore'eda, HUR Jin-ho, Yoji Yamada, Ann Hui, Zhang Yibai

[tenia]

There are plenty of fine "artistic" directors whose work is not inherently inaccessible to wider audiences -- yet get almost no attention from such audiences. If those wider audiences are mainly interested in glitzy, hyperactive junk -- even "accessible" films (of higher artistic caliber) will be largely ignored (in the West, at least).

Question is : do, at least, these "audiences" want their attention to be caught by all these movies / filmmakers ?

Peacock speaks about Lynch, Malick and Kitano as "accessible to wide audience". I assume he means "technically accessible", on screens and on DVD / BR, because they are typically filmmakers that a lot of people will claim they make "obscure and non-understandable auteurish pieces of boring shit".
Lynch is too complicated. Malick is too contemplative (ie. boring, aka "watching leaves moving for 2h"). Kitano too slow-paced (plus it's japanese).

I mean, you could release any of their movies on 1 000 screens in the USA or in France, they would still do very low at the BO. Even worse with Kore-Eda or Yamada.

The problem is that this "wider audience" (I still think it's funny to make a whole different bunch of people a single "audience") might not even want these movies to be accessible to them.

You know, kind like throwing foie gras to pigs, and everything. I know it's a simplistic argument, but sometimes, I'm really wondering if some people are just meant to stick with blockbusters, and if increasing the accessibility of these movies would change anything for these people.

[Michael Kerpan]

I think Peacock meant "accessible" in the terms of comprehensible rather than "available" -- in any event, I intended the first defintition when making up my list of "accessible" directors. These are film makers whose work is not (generally) too complex for ordinary film watchers (with reasonably adult tastes). Still, I don't expect them to make any inroads in the US. People are allergic to sub-titled flms -- and are generally reluctant to see movies with unfamiliar faces (thus the re-makes of mass market or genre films from Aisa -- with local talent). The fact that films are comprehensible -- and might likely be enjoyed if seen (with good will and a little patience) -- does nothing to convince a wider audience that they might _want_ to see such films. You can lead a horse to water ...

(Sadly the Japanese animation craze did little or nothing to lead young people to actual Japanese movies).

[Finch]

House Next Door covering Cannes daily:

http://www.slantmagazine.com/house/2010 ... 0-day-one/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Fremaux and co made a miscalculation with opening the festival with Robin Hood, I think: many critics have already seen it at local screenings so there's no novelty factor and while the opening films have often been terrible in the past (Hollywood Ending and DaVinci etc), it feels more and more like a cheap deal with every year: the studios get extra marketing opportunities (Ridley Scott said as much) and the festival some star glamour in exchange but does Cannes really need to diminish itself by giving Hollywood dullards a platform? Aren't Binoche, Kitano and Amalric glamorous enough?

Early reviews of On Tour seem to agree that Amalric has avoided a Brown Bunny/The Brave fiasco but that the film is no great shakes either although it seems to pass the time quite nicely.

[Michael Kerpan]

The Guardian's blog mentions Wang's Chonqqing Blues in a favorable fashion -- but doesn't seem to review it.

[Nothing]

I mean it's like poetry - imagine if you had to dumb it down a little bit to make it sell better? Would that make it great poetry? There are still artistic directors who don't fall into the 'inaccessible to wide audience' category - Lynch, Malick, Kitano for example.

As Lynch himself said a short time ago: George Lucas is an auteur, he makes the films that he wants to make. It's just that those films happen to make a lot of money... When it comes to work that isn't so mind-bogglingly commercial, the impact of the tastemakers comes into play. By the way, I would agree that Malick, Lynch and Kitano embody the kind of cinema I refer to (less so the second-rate Naruse that is Kore'eda, or the fuddled, indulgent experimentalism that is Inland Empire) - ambitious, personal and uncompromising, yet engaging, sentimental, even kinetic. However, these three are very much a part of the old guard, for whom different rules apply. Theirs is a cinema under attack from both sides; the argument that tenia highlights, that such films still aren't commercial enough to justify themselves, and then, on the other hand, the argument that their work is too commercial, too beholden to 'outdated' crutches such as screenplays, trained actors and narrative structures... In this polarised landscape, Cannes continues to make a solid and valuable argument for the middle-ground.

Early reviews of On Tour seem to agree that Amalric has avoided a Brown Bunny/The Brave fiasco

If only Vince were here this year to liven things up!

The Im Sangsoo would appear to be the first must-see film of the festival.

p.s. Screen appear to be providing free access to their reviews for the duration of Cannes, but Variety has gone pay-to-view - Tsk! No sign of Todd McCarthy on IndieWire as yet.

[Finch]

Re Zombie nuns etc:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/video/20 ... val-marche" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

and a somewhat favourable capsule of Wall Street 2:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/may ... all-street" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Michael Kerpan]

the second-rate Naruse that is Kore'eda

You have SUCH a way with words,