RNL
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Post by RNL on Oct 25, 2006 0:55:07 GMT
Before I respond properly to this thread, I have to ask: What exactly is with this caustic, pretentious attitude? I'm seriously asking. You don't behave like that here (except for earlier in this thread), so what is it? The relative anonymity of IMDb? A split personality? Oh, and "USA-ians"? Jesus Christ. Talk about impressionable.
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RNL
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Post by RNL on Oct 25, 2006 2:24:51 GMT
Amelie is very popular in the U.S. though, and it is the only foreign film a lot of people here see. I don't like that. That may be true. How pathetic. 2 + 2 = ? Your name and the content of the post.
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Post by Valenti on Oct 25, 2006 11:59:50 GMT
"Anyone who likes this movie must be retarded" is the stupidest thing I've heard in a while. I shouldn't have to say why.
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Capo
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Post by Capo on Oct 25, 2006 22:59:30 GMT
Secondly, I agree with your definition of cinema, but my problem with Amelie is that the world that is created isn't rational, believable, or fully credible. It's just a fantasy world, filled with epic amounts of irrelevance and naivity. Three adjectives which could easily apply to Stalker.
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Post by Michael on Oct 25, 2006 23:42:32 GMT
Secondly, I agree with your definition of cinema, but my problem with Amelie is that the world that is created isn't rational, believable, or fully credible. It's just a fantasy world, filled with epic amounts of irrelevance and naivity. Three adjectives which could easily apply to Stalker. So you don't think Stalker is rational, believable, or fully credible? I couldn't disagree more. The world created in Stalker is allegorical; it's so complex I can't even begin to describe it in words. The struggle the three main characters go through in finding themselves is a struggle that every human being in the world has experienced, whether they realize it or not. It's rational and believable because it explores how irrational and unbelievable life is; it seeks out to find ultimate truth and comes up empty. If I read another person compare Amelie to the likes of Stalker or Vivre sa Vie, I think my head will explode.
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Capo
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Post by Capo on Oct 26, 2006 0:08:07 GMT
Yes, I think Stalker is incredible.
But it's quite easily a "fantasy world, filled with epic amounts of irrelevance and naivity".
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Capo
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Post by Capo on Oct 26, 2006 0:24:51 GMT
If I read another person compare Amelie to the likes of Stalker or Vivre sa Vie, I think my head will explode. I thought you liked Videodrome. And, what do you mean by "the likes of Vivre sa vie"?
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Post by Michael on Oct 26, 2006 1:12:15 GMT
Yes, I think Stalker is incredible. But it's quite easily a "fantasy world, filled with epic amounts of irrelevance and naivity". Stalker is the polar opposite of irrelevance and naivity. It is extremely relevant, and very enlightening. How could you think otherwise?
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Post by Michael on Oct 26, 2006 1:13:58 GMT
If I read another person compare Amelie to the likes of Stalker or Vivre sa Vie, I think my head will explode. I thought you liked Videodrome. ;D I'm referring to my favorite films.
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Capo
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Post by Capo on Oct 26, 2006 1:40:36 GMT
I find Stalker significant in that it is cinematic. Its philosophies happen to be provoking, certainly, but they're secondary to the rhythm and tone of the film itself, conjured by images, sounds, and the way they're edited together...to create a fully credible world.
It is enlightening, I agree; in the sense that it enhances my love for the medium, for myself, and makes me want to make films. That is how I would define "enlightening". But "enlightening" isn't the polar opposite to "naivety", is it?
I can't think of anything more naive than evoking your own personal truth in your work, and especially putting it under questioning. You can't progress without being naive.
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RNL
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Post by RNL on Dec 18, 2006 2:20:17 GMT
I wrote this response a few months ago, but never bothered posting it after this discussion fizzled out. Since the FCM crickets are chirping again, and the choice is between posting it and deleting it, here's my belated 2c.
Who said you weren't allowed to develop your own opinions or make your own judgements? Who's stopping you? Isn't that what you're doing here?
And you don't like cartoons?
That's not subtlety, that's ambiguity. I don't think I've ever seen Godard do anything with subtlety. He's fond of characters dictating their thoughts to the camera, open literary name-dropping and declarative text interludes.
I haven't found any of his work particularly ambiguous in any way either.
That notion of "interaction" strikes me as another buzz-phrase, and I believe you've simply found Amelie aesthetically displeasing and therefore refused to "interact" with it. Surely all you mean by "interactive" is that the film resonates with you, bonds with you, stays with you. Films aren't literally interactive.
The Neo-Realist filmmaker Roberto Rosselini despised artists; he said they were all narcissists who cared more about their own imaginations than they did about the real world and its problems.
This applies to Tarkovsky as much as it does to Jeunet. Certainly from Solaris onward Tarkovsky's films are abstract voyages into dreams and personal memories. What's Amelie? Exactly that. The film is a compilation of visual and narrative ideas Jeunet had come up with over the previous couple of decades anchored around the titular character.
Rosselini saw cinema as a wonderful new medium that was intuitively understandable and therefore accessible to the uneducated. He felt it could change the world and his films are sometimes recreations of things that actually happened based on eyewitness accounts.
To paraphrase Greenaway's description of his own work: Jeunet's films are not 'slices of life', they are openly films.
Consider this fact: Filmmakers are not inherently qualified to talk authoritatively about anything other than filmmaking.
Getting an education in philosophy or psychology or politics from cinema is a bit silly. You should be getting an education in cinema.
You "escape" when the film ends. Then you have all the "room" (I still don't know what that means, if anything) in the world to think about the film in whatever way you want and impose or extract whatever meanings you choose to. Almost all films are exactly like this (the ones that aren't are the ones that are meant as conceptual art). You're supposed to get "swept away" in it. That's why we sit in the dark, in silence, and let the images and sounds wash over us, it's why the film isn't periodically paused and why we don't rewatch scenes in various alternate contexts again and again and take notes and discuss the film while it's playing*. This is as true of Tarkovsky as it is of Jeunet. Look at the stuff I wrote in the Ang Lee thread about Brokeback Mountain earlier this year to see what the alternative is - sitting in the dark and stroking your chin, thinking about something completely seperate from the succession of sounds and images you've paid to experience. I could've gone and sat in the foyer and had the exact same thoughts about the fluidity of gender. Cinema is a sensual artform. It's powerful, viscerally. A lot of people resent it, and that includes a lot of its so-called "lovers" and even a lot of its practitioners.
Also, could you clarify how you made the logical leap from claiming there's "a false sense of hope, fantasy, and blind optimism" to claiming that because of that "the viewer couldn't possibly apply [the] themes [of Chance and Destiny] to the film"? That doesn't make sense.
(*There was actually a school of thought during the silent era surrounding the notion of "interactivity" in cinema. Some theorists objected to the use of music, claiming that instead viewers should be engaging eachother in an open discourse about the film they were watching while they were watching it. The talkies put an end to that notion.)
Why? Can you support that assertion?
a) What makes you think we're always told more about characters in theatre than we are in cinema?
b) How does the amount of information we're given about characters have anything to do with how cinematic the film is?
The cornerstone of theatre is character, so, if anything, you prefer theatrical cinema to cinematic cinema. Cinematic cinema being the cinema in which the actual mechanics of the medium, of the sounds and images, the way they work with and against eachother, are utilised to desired effects (arguable, of course - that's just what I'm currently thinking), as opposed to the camera being a documentation device focused on preserving the performance arts of the theatre for mass dissemination. Consider, though, that something as commonplace and unremarkable as a close-up can't be achieved anywhere outside of cinema. Drawing arbitrary lines between artforms doesn't really make sense. I've abandoned my quest for "pure cinema". If making "cinematic" cinema means using the tools that the medium of cinema places at one's disposal, then almost all films are, if only by necessity, somewhat cinematic, and others are very cinematic. Amelie is very cinematic; in fact, it seems to me that almost every scene in the film originated from an idea about cinematic form.
Stalker isn't even close to complex, its depth is in its simplicity... and the characters are ciphers.
That's just the "message" or overall "meaning" of the film, and it amounts to nothing so much as a basic philosophical idea that's been around for centuries, it's nothing new. Tarkovsky's just taken what is, to be frank, nothing more than the dictionary definition of Existentialism and framed his film around it. Not to trivialise his philosophical intentions, but that's essentially all that's there, and it's embodied cinematically to miraculous effect. I wrote and partially filmed a script about two years ago in which I did the exact same thing with one of Descartes's central philosophies of the mind (it was called Cartesian Theatre). Big deal. It wasn't much good, Stalker is; and their "messages" and overall "meanings" are as complex and original as eachother (ie; not at all). Moreover, you have to realise that that meaning is 100% communicable without the film ever having existed. If I give you the dictionary definition of Existentialism (which I will: "A philosophical movement embracing the view that the suffering individual must create meaning in an unknowable, chaotic, and seemingly empty universe") then, philosophically, I've given you everything Stalker has and saved you two-and-a-half hours. "Cinema is not the art of scholars..." Herzog is dead-on. If you want academia, then read academia. You have to be careful about reducing cinema to the level of "mere" conceptual art. In conceptual art the concept itself is the artistic creation, and the object that's subsequently chosen or constructed and placed in a gallery is nothing more than a physical "body" to house that concept for the purposes of posterity. Like the unmade bed Tracey Emin had placed in the Tate a few years ago. The concept there is that something as mundane and chaotic and generally unattractive as a messy bed could be granted "hallowed" space in an art gallery. It's a provocation, that whole branch of art that's obsessed with how elastic that little word is. There's a whole culture built around that kind of stuff. In MY opinion, Emin's "conceptual art" differs in no way whatsoever from Duchamp's "Fountain", the public urinal he had placed in an art gallery around the turn of the century. The concept is still "mundane, ugly object in hallowed space". What the object is is almost totally irrelevent so long as it fits those criteria: mundane and ugly. Cinema can function as conceptual art, but it's not really admirable to demand an audience sit for two hours so they can walk away with nothing but a simple 'statement' about something or other. Andy Warhol gave a lot of his conceptual art cinematic shape.
Firstly, something can't just be unconditionally "relevent", even if it happens to be "extremely" so, it must be relevent to something else. To what it relates to, Amelie is every bit as relevent as Stalker is to what that relates to, and as every other film ever made has been to what they have related to.
Secondly, whose naiveté? Amelie Poulain's? That's part of her character. It could be easily argued, however, that since all of her instincts about life and love turn out to be accurate that she's actually very clued in and insightful. One could also easily argue that naiveté doesn't come any more epic than the endless search for meaning in a meaningless universe.
Enlightening? Well... about what? In terms of what cinema can be? Then yes, I agree with Capo, very much so. Philosophically? Not really...
I'm unsure what Capo means when he says "rational", I can't really place that in the context of film criticism. Perhaps a "rationalizable world" is a better way to put it, and that seems to me to indicate exactly the same thing that the popular term "believability" does. I think that the term "believability" is just euphemistic, and what we're really talking about is the presentation of a "coherent cosmology"; we never really believe what's happening onscreen. Let's say for the sake of example that we enter every film under the presumption that the prevailing cosmology of the world we're about to be presented with will be identical to the prevailing cosmology of our world as we understand it. We don't, but for now let's just say we do. The film then has a short amount of time to lay its cards on the table, to let us know precisely how this fictional world differs from our world. There's a really involved kind of shorthand for doing this, using genre tropes and clichés (eg; the characters talk about "vampires", and we immediately, instinctively alter our understanding of the fictional cosmology in accordance with our understanding of the generic use of vampires in fiction). The filmmakers can't arbitrarily insert things that don't "make sense" within the context of the world they've presented. Imagine, for example, the final shots of Xanadu in Citizen Kane, imagine the final tilt up into the curling smoke, imagine you also saw a giant dragon flying by in the background, unmentioned, just passing through the frame off in the distance. That's an incoherency, we wouldn't buy that at all. However, we don't think every film will be grounded in "real world" natural laws. Paratextual previews of every kind drop hints as to the nature of the film's cosmology, and genre is a hugely important factor in controlling those hints. Anyway, this is more than an aside, because Amelie is actually largely about the notion of cinematic cosmology: Amelie is the narrator, she's fate, she's karma, she's caprice, she's luck, she's chance, she's destiny, she's God, because the world is her own imagination. She takes it on herself to alter people's lives for the better like some romantic little cherub. The film's cosmology is completely coherent, with Amelie at the centre of it and the whole universe coloured by her (Jeunet's) imagination.
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Capo
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Post by Capo on Dec 19, 2006 12:52:19 GMT
I defined "good Cinema" recently (ie. the films that I like) as that "which creates rationality by means of editing together otherwise irrational images." That's too vague a description and I've since discarded it (there are all kinds of things that contribute to my appreciation, such as thematic exploration, etc.), but in order to lend definition...
Your presumptive elaboration on this defines it better, or further at least. What I mean by it is that an image is irrational, that is a given with which I agree with you, and have done since our discussions in the Videodrome thread. Watch a scene out of context, isolated from the narrative in which it is set, and you'd be confused. You might be intrigued or you might decide "that film isn't for me," but either way, you don't really have a clue what is going on. Cinema edits together "unconnected" images, and in doing so, evokes a coherence, a plausibility.
I like your Xanadu example, but think it would work even better if you used Lord of the Rings, and instead of seeing a dragon, we saw a plane in the sky. That's like shattering our illusions even more violently, because Jackson's films are grounded in a fictional world aside from ours, so we have to extend our disbelief even further (or do we?) in order to "get into" the movie.
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Post by Michael on Dec 20, 2006 3:55:45 GMT
I've recently given up on the notion that there are two parts to a film (style and substance). When you're watching a film, what you're seeing on the screen and the manner in which it's delivered become one in the same. There is no point in breaking it down, because style can't exist without substance and substance can't exist without style.
If Stalker were filmed in grainy black and white and a still camera, I wouldn't love it nearly as much. If it were filmed the same, but instead portrayed a man's journey to find his daughter's lost teddy bear, I wouldn't love it nearly as much.
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RNL
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Post by RNL on Dec 20, 2006 4:26:47 GMT
The "style and substance" thing is a complete crock.
The other popular binary is "form and content". I don't like that either, since "content" is, like "substance", metaphorical.
"Meaning" is the better word.
There is form and there is meaning. Arguably this is so in everything. It's certainly so in language, and arguably all human experience is filtered through language.
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Capo
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Post by Capo on Dec 20, 2006 23:09:14 GMT
Consider this fact: Filmmakers are not inherently qualified to talk authoritatively about anything other than filmmaking. Do you agree with me when I say filmmakers are the most qualified to talk about Cinema, as opposed to critics? Between a film review and an interview with the director, I'd always choose the latter.
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Post by Michael on Oct 24, 2008 8:48:12 GMT
1. Amélie (2001)
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Post by Anasazie on Oct 24, 2008 9:08:02 GMT
1. Amélie (2001) 4/10 2. Alien Resurrection (1997) 4/10
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Post by quentincompson on Oct 31, 2008 18:08:17 GMT
1.Amelie 4/10
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