Bridges-Go-Around (1958), made by
one of the forerunner Jazz Film artists of all time, Shirley Clarke, is a
short film, or more precisely two shorts in one. Composed of a series
of shots from New York bridges, the film, in its first half, is edited
and synced with the music of Teo Macero.
For the second half, the very same images, as the first half, are
repeated, but this time they are accompanied by the electronic music of Louis and Bebe Barron. So Bridges-Go-Around
is a film which is played twice, but each projection, thanks to
specific effects created by each musical genre, gives a distinctive
impression and even the meaning of the images change and assiduously
contrast/complete/comment on the other half.
Showing posts with label Women and Film. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Women and Film. Show all posts
Monday 28 October 2013
Monday 10 June 2013
Survival of the Unfit
CINEPHILIA & REVOLUTION
A familiar practice in Persian film literature is that of the “cinematic memoir”—personal reminiscences of the film culture of pre-Revolutionary Iran.
Bolstered by a nostalgic tone, these autobiographical texts deal with the themes of childhood, adolescence and encounters with cinema in a Westernized Iran. The authors of such memoirs frequently depict Iran as a haven for cinephiles. Considering the number of films that were shown in pre-Revolutionary Iran and the diversity of their origins, this may be taken as an accurate characterization.
Saturday 8 June 2013
Women Cinema and the Problem of Representation
فیلمسازی زنان و
مسأله بازنمایی
يك بررسي تاريخي
از جنبش سينماي زنان
گردآوري شده توسط
كتايون يوسفي
یکی از اولین نمونههای
توجه جنبش زنان به رسانه سینما کتابی بود که در 1970 منتشر شد با نام «پیوندِ
خواهری محکم است». این کتاب 600 صفحهای
که مجموعهای از اسناد تاریخی و مهمترین مقالات فعالان جنبش آزادیخواهی زنان را گرد آورده بود
لیستی به انتهای خود ضمیمه داشت از فیلمهایی که به خاطر توجه به مشکلات زنان یا
جامعۀ مشکلساز برای زنان تماشایشان توصیه میشد. اين مجلد بهانهاي شد تا در طول پنج-شش
سال بعد از انتشارش انواع فستیوالها، کتابها و مجلات با موضوع سینما و زنان در
بریتانیا و آمریکا یکی پس از دیگری ظاهر شوند: 1971، تاسیس گروه فیلم زنان لندن؛
1972 برگزاری جشنواره فیلم زنان در نیویورک و دو ماه بعد بخشی مختص زنان در
جشنواره فیلم ادینبُرو؛ همچنین تأسیس مجله آمریکاییِ «فیلم و زنان»، 1973 فستیوال
فیلم زنان در تورنتو و واشنگتن و دورۀ «فیلم زنان» در انستیتوی فیلم بریتانیا. اولین
کتاب در این حوزه در 1973 توسط مارجوری روزن با نام «ونوس پاپکورنی» منتشر شدکه
تصویر ارائه شده از زنان در هالیوود را با آنچه در واقعیتِ جامعه میگذشت مقایسه
کرد. به دنبال آن در 1974«از تکریم تا تجاوز» (مالی هسکل) و «زنان و مسئلۀ جنسیت
آنها در فیلمِ امروز» (جون ملن) آمدند. هر سه این کتابها در آمریکا و توسط
نویسندگان آمریکایی نوشته شدند و رویکردی جامعهشناختی به این مسأله داشتند؛ به
این معنی که سینما را آینهای از یک جامعه در حال تغییر میدانستند؛ البته آینهای
پر از تحریف که به بهانه «واقعگریزی» تصویری دروغ از شرایط اجتماعی نشان میداد و
زنان را تشویق میکرد که با تصاویری غلط همذاتپنداری کنند.
Thursday 21 February 2013
Phallic Domination in the 70s Hollywood
سلطه در هالیوودِ دهه
هفتاد: در جستجوی آقای گودبار (1977)
زنانگي و مكافات
ان کاپلان
ترجمۀ كتايون يوسفي
همانطور که مالی
هسکل و دیگران به درستی به آن اشاره کردهاند، از اواسط دهۀ 1960 و همزمان با
آغاز جنبش زنان دو دسته فیلم در سینمای تجاری آمریکا ظهور کرده و غالب شد. گروه اول
برای طفره رفتن از مسائل مرتبط با تفاوت جنسیتی، زنان را کاملاً از فیلم حذف کرد
(فیلمهایی که به buddy-buddy
يا رفيقِ [مرد] جونجوني شناخته میشوند) و گروه دوم، وقتی که دیگر
اجتناب از این مشکلات ممکن نبود، خشونت و تجاوز به زنان را نشان داد. زمینه ظهور
این دسته دوم را فیلمی چید که با آنکه در زمان نمايشش، در 1960، متهم به نمایش غیر
ضروریِ سادیسم شد، اکنون بسیار جلوتر از زمان خود تلقی میشود: تامِ چشمچران
اثر مایکل پاول. این فیلم شاید بیشتر از هر فیلم دیگری تلاش نیروی مردسالاری برای
خنثی کردن تهدیدِ وارد از جانب زن را مینمایاند؛ تلاشی که یا به شکل کنترل او
توسط نیروی gaze
بود (نمونه: كاميل اثر جرج کیوکر)؛ یا بت ساختن از او (نمونه: ونوس
موطلايي اثر جوزف فون اشترنبرگ) و یا قتل او (نمونه: بانويي از شانگهاي
اثر اورسن ولز).
Wednesday 28 March 2012
A Chat With Laura Groves
I met Laura Groves in the last year's London International Women Film Festival, known as Bird's Eye View. There, Laura and her band, Blue Roses, accompanied the silent Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde with their electronic sound.
At the time, I wrote for Iranian Film Monthly about her imaginative work which was loaded with care for the meaning of every single image, and delivered a feminine sensibility throughout the film. Despite a personal dislike for electronic music for the silent cinema, and various forms of experimentation with the silent films, I was stunned by the brilliance of the Groves’s music and the way it contributed to the film. Her instrumentation was a combination of keyboards, synthesizers, guitar, piano, violin and innovative use of percussions. She even sang for two scenes.
What Laura Groves had achieved in Dr. Jekyll was interesting enough to persuade me to learn more about her work, so two weeks after the screening, I met her again, this time in the bar of the NFT.
Friday 18 March 2011
Against the Silence
The Birds Eye View Film Festival in London, which opened on International Women's Day (March 8th), and significantly on 100th anniversary of this auspicious day, is one of the most internationally acclaimed women’s film festivals. It is a collection of tastefully selected new films, short films, documentaries, classics, exhibitions, as well as live music performance. Their motto is “From Lois Weber to Lucy Walker”, thus acknowledging Weber (1881-1939), the first female director of feature length films and Walker, the documentary maker whose work Countdown to Zero, on the subject of nuclear race, has recently been screened.
Lillian Gish in The Wind |
John Barrymore in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde |
Laura Groves |
Lola Perrin |
Ladies performing for a silent film |
Many thanks to Linda Saxod.
Saturday 12 March 2011
Remembering Lois Weber
Lois Weber, the first woman director of feature films in American cinema, had an active social agenda that she sought to promote through the medium of screen melodrama. During the first world war years, she achieved tremendous success by combining a canny commercial sense with a rare vision of cinema as a moral tool. For a time, Weber made a fortune trying to improve the human race through movies. For birth control and against abortion, against capital punishment and for child labor laws. This is a tribute to her, and also a celebration of the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day.
Lois Weber was a unique silent film director. She was the first woman to direct a full-length feature film with The Merchant of Venice in 1914. Not only was she a woman who was certainly the most important female director the American film industry had known in its early days, but unlike many of her colleagues up to the present, her work was regarded in its day as equal to, if not a little better than that of most male directors. Her films were making money for Universal in 1910s ("studio's most important director during the war years," Richard Koszarski said), though she was not afraid to make features with risqué subject matter such as Christian Science (Jewel and A Chapter in Her Life), birth control (Where Are My Children), and capital punishment (The People vs. John Doe). Among her films, according to Anthony Slide, Hypocrites (1915, clip below) was another indictment of hypocrisy and corruption in big business, politics, and religion. The Weber films, however, did run into censorship problems and the director was the subject of a vicious attack in a 1918 issue of Theatre Magazine over the "indecent and suggestive" nature of her titles.
She was an innovative director in many aspects. For instance, in Suspense (1913) she found a new solution for depicting a phone conversation by dividing the screen into three triangles, with a woman speaking on the telephone at the top right, a tramp at the top left who is outside the woman's house and trying to break in, and the husband at his office, at the other end of the phone, in the center. Of course, now all these incredible efforts seem insignificant, but from a historical point of view, they are more important that Avatar, and as far as narrative is concerned, it's more beneficial than many 1940s classic women pictures, paradoxically all made by men. In 1915, the camera movements she used for Sunshine Mollie, were much ahead of its time. Film starts with a very high-angle view of oil fields, full of countless derricks pushing upward as far as the eye can see, and a very slow, circular panorama that ends up with the small figure of Lois Weber standing in the road with her
suitcase.
She was an imaginative filmmaker, with a poetic touch, much quite close to masters of her age like Maurice Tourneur. It's more challenging if we consider that a woman contemporary of Griffith, and when everybody was mad about Griffith's discoveries, takes a slightly different route. Her cinema, again an argument based on accessible fragments of her oeuvre, had a European touch. It is full of attention to detail, and gestures that are crossing the theatrical presentation and getting close to a more cinematic experience. Yet she wasn't completely detached of the literary tradition, especially in her way of using titles as a direct narrative device. She was juxtaposing the text and image in some of her film, or even sometimes she quoted poets in them.
In the early 1920s she released a series of personal, intimate dramas like Too Wise Wives and The Blot (watch a clip here), dealing with married life and the types of problems which beset ordinary people. None of these films were particularly well received by the critics, who unanimously declared them dull, while the public displayed an equal lack of enthusiasm. Nonetheless, these features demonstrate Weber at her directorial best.
on the set of her last film, White Heat (1934) |
- Richard Koszarski, An Evening's Entertainment: The Age of The Silent Feature Picture 1915 - 1928, Macmillan, pp. 223-225.
- Anthony Slide, International dictionary of films and filmmakers, Macmillan, pp. 1055-1057
- Wikipedia
Wednesday 16 June 2010
When Women Ascend the Stairs
Two shots from Mikio Naruse's When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960). Director of photography: Masao Tamai.
Mikio Naruse, the George Cukor of Japanese cinema, eventually made eighty-nine films (forty-four of which have survived), though he was not discovered by Western audiences until years after his death in 1969, today he is recognized as one of the greatest Japanese filmmakers. He regularly chose to depict strong, working-class female characters. Naruse’s cinematic style, like Ozu's, is deceptively simple, clear and intelligent, informed by a sharp sense of logic. He occasionally allows himself small, poetic touches, such as the brief segments featuring the streets, traffic and bright, flickering signs of Tokyo, and unheard in Eastern cinema he has used a jazz score (playing mostly with Vibes) for his brilliant melodrama, When a Woman Ascends the Stairs. Mark Saint-Cyr calls this film "a mini-masterpiece of composition and a poignant encapsulation of Naruse’s melancholic vision. When a Woman Ascends the Stairs is a moving, assuredly-told tale of making ends meet and portrays a realistic, resolute breed of femininity."
I think two shots from When a Woman... explain the situation of most eastern women in postwar world. Where you must live and pay heavy dues for that.
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