Link Round-Up: Post Cannes, Pre-Apocalypse

I gotta get a better system of making sure I update this...

My first book, Approaching the End: Imagining Apocalypse in American Film, is still due out in October. Here is the list of films I'll be tackling in it: Kiss Me Deadly, The Lady from Shanghai, The Big Heat, The Rapture, God Told Me To, Days of Heaven, Strange Days, The Terminator, They Live, and Southland Tales. There is also extended talk of Out of the Past, In A Lonely Place, In The Mouth of Madness, and The World's End.

I went to the Cannes Film Festival for the first time, and it was a truly spectacular experience. You can see my Top films of the festival here (and a complete ranking on Letterboxd), and a special Cinephiliacs episode recorded at the Palais. There were a few films I never got around to writing about (Techine, Lapid, and Ostlund in particular), but I did manage to write about the following films...
-Winter Sleep (Ceylan, Turkey) - Competition, Palm D'Or Winner
-Foxcatcher (Miller, USA) - Competition, Best Director
-Mr. Turner (Leigh, UK) - Competition, Best Actor Award (Timothy Spall)
-Maps To The Stars (Cronenberg, USA/Canada) - Competition, Best Actress Award (Julianne Moore)
-Goodbye To Language (Godard, Switzerland) - Competition, Jury Prize
-Mommy (Dolan, Canada) - Competition, Jury Prize
-Leviathan (Zvyagintsev, Russia) - Competition, Screenwriting Award
-Grace of Monaco (Dahan, France/USA) - Opening Night
-Timbuktu (Sissako, Mali) - Competition
-The Captive (Egoyan, Canada) - Competition
-The Homesman (Jones, USA) - Competition
-Welcome To New York (Ferrara, USA/France) - Marketplace
-National Gallery (Wiseman, UK) - Director's Fortnight
-Saint Laurent (Bonello, France) - Competition
-Amour Fou (Hausner, Austria) - Un Certain Regard
-Jauja (Alonso, Argentina) - Un Certain Regard
-Two Days, One Night (Dardennes, Belgium/France) - Competition
-Lost River (Gosling, USA) - Un Certain Regard
-The Search (Hazanavicius, USA/France) - Competition
-Hard To Be A God (German, Russia) - Marketplace
-The Tale of Princess Kayuga (Takahata, Japan) - Director's Fortnight
-Clouds of Sils Maria (Assayas, France) - Competition

Catching up with Cinephiliacs episodes, I've got two episodes from Philadelphia with Carrie Rickey on Clueless and Sam Adams on The Long Goodbye, and then Philip Loppate talking Charulata and Reverse Shot's Michael Koresky on The Seventh Victim.

And then there's my Criterion reviews! I've got looks at Riot In Cell Block 11, an investigation into the two different cuts of Red River, and a look at an essential bonus feature on the Blu of All That Heaven Allows - Mark Rappaport's Rock Hudson's Home Movies.

Two more Masters of Cinema Blus are on the way with booklets edited and compiled by yours truly: Elia Kazan's Boomerang! and John Cassavetes's Too Late Blues. More information on those at a later date.

Some stuff on Letterboxd: 
-New Stuff: Godzilla, The Amazing Spider-Man, Riddick
-Old Stuff: White Threads of the Waterfall, Utamaro and His Five Women, The Little Foxes, Melo, In Harm's Way

Images of the Day 4/12/2013

Unstoppable (Scott, USA, 2010)

Climates (Ceylan, Turkey, 2006)

"A painter working with tempera could modify and re-work the image, but the process was quite painstaking and slow. Medieval and early Renaissance masters would spend up to six months on a painting a few inches tall. The switch to oils greatly liberated painters by allowing them to quickly create much larger compositions (think, for instance, of the works by Veronese and Tician) as well as to modify them as long as necessary. This change in painting technology led the Renaissance painters to create new kinds of compositions, new pictorial space and even narratives. Similarly, by allowing a filmmaker to treat a film image as an oil painting, digital technology redefines what can be done with cinema."

—Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media, 2001

The Filmic Discoveries of 2012 (Part I)

            I saw over 300 films in the span of 2012, starting with a rewatch of Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Cercle Rouge and as of last night, my second viewing of Erich Von Stroheim’s Greed. Of those, less than a third were from the year of 2012. While there were certainly plenty of great works of cinematic art that are worth your time, I retreated from the multiplex and even the art house to the hollowed grounds of repertory cinema instead.

No one has a perfect knowledge of the history of cinema, and any film critic has his or her own “blind spots.” I don’t see that as a bad thing though. Why would anyone want to have seen every movie? I’d rather have new discoveries to be made every year that open up new terrain to be explored. The 100 (yes—100!) films I’ve highlighted in this list fascinated me in so many different ways. And even better, most I saw on 35mm, a practice I have argued for again and again (though really something you can do in a handful of cities).

While some of my choices for films I saw the first time in 2012 are damningly obvious, there’s a reason they are obvious, canonical works. If my 2013 year of cinematic viewing (get ready for the Kiarostami Koker trilogy on February 10^th at Film Society everyone!) can come even half as good as the year of film 2012 ended up for me, I’ll be a very happy camper indeed. Thus, I present the bottom 25 below, with the top 25 to come later this week. UPDATE: Follow here for the Top 25.

Screening Log: Clover Edition

            Two notes before this week’s screening log! Today begins the For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon. Run by Ferdy on Films, Rod Stewart, and the lovely Self-Styled Siren, this year’s goal is to raise $15,000 to donate to the National Film Preservation Foundation, who will use that money to restore the recently found Hitchcock film The White Shadow. Read more about it at Ferdy’s place, and donate here. Yours truly will have a couple of things to blog about later this week. Also, as I posted Friday, make sure to check out some of the great stuff at the Migrating Forms festival.

-Celine and Julie Go Boating, 1977. Directed by Jacques Rivette. 35mm projection at Film Forum.

-Climates, 2006. Directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 35mm projection at Film Society of Lincoln Center.*

-The Connection, 1961. Directed by Shirley Clarke. 35mm projection at IFC Center.

Nuri Bilge Ceylan on "Anatolia:" Filmmaker's Parable of Life

A staple on the art house and festival scene, the Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan has become an international sensation since the release of his 2006 film, Climates. His latest work, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (reviewed here), follows a group of policemen in a cold and distant land as they search for the body of a dead man, of which the two criminals cannot remember where he has been buried. Less procedural than meandering and existential, and certainly in no rush to subscribe to anything resembling a classical narrative structure, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia won the Grand Prix and has been chosen as the official submission by Turkey for the Foreign Language Film Oscar. When the film premiered at the New York Film Festival in October, Mr. Ceylan spoke about some of the influences and choices he makes in this philosophical epic. (One note: Mr. Ceylan spoke in English, and some of his sentences did not make complete sense. I eliminated some of his answers, and tried my best to interpret some of his words to the best of my understanding. I apologize for any inaccuracy).

On the genesis of the film

Actually, everything started from a real story. One of the scriptwriters followed this story in Anatolia in the 80s, when he was doing his social service, right in the same place; in this town. They searched for the body till the morning, and that interested me a lot. We decided we could make a film out of it. Of course, we changed a lot. We just kept the [premise] of the story. All the characters are created [by us].

The film’s title suggests a fairy tale like narrative…

I actually wanted it to be as realistic as possible, and as historic to today. But we wanted to make the present as the past of the picture. In this way, we tried to create a kind of pointless feeling. 

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia: Long Turkish Journey Into the Night

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

Directed By: Nuri Bilge Ceylan

Written By: Ebru Ceylan, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, and Ercan Kesal

Starring: Muhammet Uzuner, Yilmaz Erdogan, Taner Birsel, Firat Taris, and Ahmet Mumtaz Taylan

Director of Photography: Gokham Tiryaki, Editors: Bora Goksingol and Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Art Director: Dilek Yapkuoz Ayaztuna

Rated: Unrated, but only appropriate for audiences with open minds and strong bladders.

As the title might suggest, landscape may be the most crucial character in the dark and elliptical Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. As the men we follow trek the terrain through the night, the clear plains and trees seem to carry on into the distance without end. These men are lost in a world where not much exists beyond the hills and the slowly fading sun. Like the opening shots of Abbas Kiaraostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us, they are dwarfed among the plains in their small cars, which become their only source of light as their search continues into the utter darkness.

            Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is the latest work from Turkish director Nuri Bile Ceylan, best known for his 2006 film Climates. Mr. Ceylan’s latest feature is both an epic as well as an intimate and minimalist portrayal of daily life. Shot gorgeously along the Anatolian plains, this occasionally frustrating work attempts to explore a lot of different themes and ideas, as well as characters, but through a small prism of access in which we our limited by a type of realism in which narrative turns are small and unique. But as it slowly treks toward some sort of conclusion, this police procedural is an assuredly bold attempt to explore a number of notions about the existence of human life, even if Mr. Ceylan is not sure what exactly he is exploring.

New York Film Festival: Nuri Bile Ceylan's Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

A Film By Nuri Bile Ceylan

Turkey

            As the title might suggest, landscape may be the most crucial character in the dark and elliptical Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. As the men we follow progress through the night, the clear plains and trees seem to carry on into the distance without end. These men are lost in a world where not much exists beyond the trees and the slowly fading sun. Like the opening shots of Abbas Kiaraostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us, they are dwarfed among the plains in their small cars, which become their only source of light as their search continues into the long night.

            Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is the latest work from Turkish director Nuri Bile Ceylan, best known for his 2006 film Climates. Mr. Ceylan’s latest feature is both an epic  as well as an intimate and minimalist portrayal of daily life. Shot gorgeously along the Anatolian plains, this occasionally frustrating work attempts to explore a lot of different themes and ideas, as well as characters, but through a small prism of access in which we our limited by the realism of how people truly act. But as it slowly treks toward some sort of conclusion, this police procedural is a unique and assuredly bold attempt to explore a number of notions about the existence of human life, or at least something of that matter.