Richard Brody remembers filmmaker Chris Marker, who died yesterday at age ninety-one: http://nyr.kr/Q72HeE
For Marker, memory isn’t passive; it’s an act of resistance—the edge that cuts a path into the future—and the effective work of memory is the very definition of art. Marker was a master of film editing—the part of the filmmaking process that Jean-Luc Godard, another master editor and memory-artist, defined as holding past, present, and future in one’s own hands—and the very possibility of remembering Marker demands a little editing, a splicing-in of excerpts from a surprising and crucial document.
(Image is a still from “La Jetée.”)
(via wnyc)
April
c86:
Michael Haneke, one of my favourite film directors, turns 70 tomorrow
In the UK, Film4 are screening Benny’s Video tonight at 11PM
Here’s a little tribute that I wrote about him on my BLOG
On the set of Dau. Kharkov, Ukraine, June 2010.
All photos by Sergei Maximishin. I’ll leave them up here unless/until anyone involved objects to it. The story itself is here.
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“Are you going to augment the city with CGI later?” I ask, just to ask something. Khrzhanovsky jumps in place and winces. “See, if one of the guards heard you, he would fine me a thousand hryvnias [about $125],” he says. “Because you’re my guest. It doesn’t matter that I am the boss. I get frisked like everyone else. You can’t use words that have no meaning in this world.” “Like CGI?” “Now he would fine me twice.” The fine system is the Institute’s latest innovation. Khrzhanovsky decreed it a few months ago, fed up with staffers smuggling cell phones and talking about Facebook. Other finable offenses include tardiness, which costs a whole day’s pay, and failure to renew the fake Institute pass. The program has been a hit. Not only has morale improved, a whole new euphemistic vocabulary has sprouted up. (“Google” is now “Pravda,” as in “Pravda it.”) The fine system has also fostered a robust culture of snitching. “In a totalitarian regime, mechanisms of suppression trigger mechanisms of betrayal,” the director explains. “I am very interested in that.”
Read More http://www.gq.com/entertainment/movies-and-tv/201111/movie-set-that-ate-itself-dau-ilya-khrzhanovsky#ixzz1cHnjYUt2
