bądź czujny... bo jam częścią tej siły, która wiecznie dobra pragnąc, wiecznie czyni zło, historia pozawolitywnej i pozarozumowej pracy nad rozwojem zła, aktualne portrety niemickie, aktualny w kwestii niemieckiej... Criterion...

Berlin, lata dwudzieste. Franz Biberkopf (Günter Lamprecht) jest niezwykłym człowiekiem. Potrafi być łagodny i uczuciowy, ma wielkie serce i szlachetną naturę, ale bywa porywczy i brutalny, a jego emocje potrafią zmieniać się w przemoc. Włóczy się po Berlinie bez perspektyw, wytyczonych celów i pracy. Właśnie - po czterech latach odsiadki - opuścił więzienie, do którego trafił za nieumyślne spowodowanie śmierci. Teraz chce zacząć nowe życie, choć to niełatwe, kiedy nie ma się przyjaciół. Franz wierzy jednak, że ich ma: wśród nich jest jego była dziewczyna Eva (Hanna Schygulla), dziś luksusowa prostytutka. Niestety nikt nie umie albo nie chce mu pomóc. Bez pracy i współczucia, boleśnie samotny Franz odchodzi donikąd, gdzie pociechą jest tylko alkohol. Po kilku tygodniach postanawia, że nie podda się tak łatwo. Znów jest pełen nadziei. Spotyka Reinholda (Gottfried John) tajemniczego i fascynującego kryminalistę i sutenera. Może nawet demona. Pod wpływem niezrozumiałego magnetyzmu Franz całkowicie składa swoje życie w jego rękach. Znów łamie prawo i znów przegrywa, zdobywa jednak coś wyjątkowo cennego: czystą i piękną miłość słodkiej Mieze (Barbara Sukowa). Reinhold nie zamierza jednak zrezygnować z zemsty na dawnym przyjacielu... fw

In late-1920s Berlin, Franz Biberkopf is released from prison and vows to go straight. However, he soon finds himself embroiled in the city's criminal underworld. IMDb

TV Series (1980). 14 episodes. This film is a 15-1/2 hour episodic exploration of the character of Franz Biberkopf, "hero" of Alfred Döblin's acclaimed novel, as well as the Alexanderplatz area of Berlin that he inhabits. Franz is an ex-convict that when released into the day's cruel and indifferent society slowly loses his mind. Set in Berlin in the 1920's.

www.filmaffinity.com/en/film341343.html

Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s controversial, fifteen-hour Berlin Alexanderplatz, based on Alfred Döblin’s great modernist novel, was the crowning achievement of a prolific director who, at age thirty-four, had already made over thirty films. Fassbinder’s immersive epic follows the hulking, childlike ex-convict Franz Biberkopf (Günter Lamprecht) as he attempts to “become an honest soul” amid the corrosive urban landscape of Weimar-era . With equal parts cynicism and humanity, Fassbinder details a mammoth portrait of a common man struggling to survive in a viciously uncommon time.

www.criterion.com/films/839-berlin-alexanderplatz

epizody

www.imdb.com/title/tt0080196/episodes

Berlin Alexanderplatz (German: [bɛʁˈliːn ʔalɛkˈsandɐˌplats]), originally broadcast in 1980, is a 14-part West German crime television miniseries, set in 1920s Berlin and adapted and directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder from Alfred Döblin's 1929 novel of the same name. It stars Günter Lamprecht, Hanna Schygulla, Barbara Sukowa, Elisabeth Trissenaar and Gottfried John. The complete series is 15 hours (NTSC and home media releases expand the runtime by half an hour).

In 1983, it was released theatrically in the United States by TeleCulture, where a theater would show two or three parts per night. It garnered a cult following there and was eventually released on VHS and broadcast on PBS and then Bravo. In 1985, it was transmitted in the United Kingdom on Channel 4.

epizody

"The Punishment Begins"

Berlin, 1928. Franz Biberkopf is released after serving four years in Tegel prison for killing his girlfriend Ida. After settling into his old apartment he visits Minna, Ida's sister, and rapes her. In a flashback we see Franz kill Ida with a cream whip after correctly suspecting she was about to leave him. Franz later runs into his old friend Meck and has a drink with him in Max's bar, a local place. There he meets Lina Przybilla, a young Polish woman, who moves in with him. He receives notification from the Berlin police that he is barred from living in certain Berlin districts and surrounding municipalities, under the threat of a fine or imprisonment. Biberkopf places himself under the supervision of a charity called Prisoners' Aid, to which he must report once a month while remaining in employment. By doing this, he is able to remain in Berlin.
"How Is One to Live if One Doesn’t Want to Die?"

Franz is self-employed hawking necktie holders on the street, but has trouble making enough money and does not consider himself an orator. After turning down the opportunity to sell sex education manuals, he is talked into selling the Nazi newspaper Völkischer Beobachter and wearing a swastika armband. In the subway, Franz is confronted by a Jewish man selling hot sausages, but denies being antisemitic, and Dreske with two other men also known to him. Dreske ires Lenin and the Soviet Union, but Franz responds by decrying revolution and 'their' Weimar Republic. At Max's bar, Dreske and his friends sing "The Internationale” to provoke Franz, to which he responds by singing the 19th-century patriotic songs "The Watch on the Rhine and "Ich hatt' einen Kameraden". At the top of his voice, Franz accuses them of being loudmouths and crooks, before almost collapsing. The other men return to their table. Outside, Franz meets Lina. He rambles about what has just happened; the men he has just met cannot understand life and do not know what it is like to be in prison.
"A Hammer Blow to the Head Can Injure the Soul"

Lina is now troubled by the dubious nature of the job Franz is fulfilling. She introduces him to a family friend, Otto Lüders, who turns out to be an ex-con he knows from prison, but Franz thinks Otto is a good man. With him, Franz begins selling shoelaces door-to-door. In the first apartment, Franz spends time with a widow whose deceased husband he closely resembles. Later, to Otto, he reports having sex with the widow. The next day, Otto goes to the widow's home and expects the same, but she feels threatened and rejects him. Otto demands money and steals from her. When Franz goes back to the widow, happily expecting another tryst, she slams the door on him. Franz vanishes. Lina distraught, searches for him with Meck. They wake Otto in the early morning, but Meck recognises that his is full of lies and hits him. Franz is found in a flophouse by Otto, who is immediately threatened with a chair. Otto offers him a share of the money Franz realises has been extorted from the widow, but wanting to go straight, he pours the contents of a chamber pot over Otto. Meck gets Franz's location out of Otto, but Franz had left soon after the earlier incident. Meck persuades Lina that Franz wishes to be left alone, and suggests she live with him.
"A Handful of People in the Depths of Silence"

Franz goes on an alcohol binge as a former medical orderly, Baumann, looks after him in rooms in a building opposite the one occupied by the prisoners' charity on which he depends for his liberty in Berlin. Franz wanders the streets in a delirious state; outside a church he takes a coal delivery man for a pastor. When he comes round after another binge, Baumann tells him he has been lying in a stupor for three days. Franz now feels that neither God, Satan, angels or other people can help him. After various thefts in the building become known, Baumann tells Franz he will not be with him for much longer, though the occupants of the neighbouring rooms are soon arrested. Franz strikes up a conversation with the vendor who offered him the sex education manuals, and discovers Meck is now selling clothes on the street and apparently doing well. Meck its to Franz that he had been living with Lina until she left him.
"A Reaper with the Power of Our Lord"

Franz, after several fleeting encounters, has finally become reacquainted with Eva. Eva, for whom he used to pimp, feels a deep affection for him, and has paid the rent for his old rooms in his absence. At Max's, Meck introduces Franz to Pums, the ringleader of an illegal enterprise. He also meets Reinhold, one of Pums's men. Reinhold is tired of his woman, Fränze, and wants Franz to take her off his hands. Franz has her come over and has sex with her. She returns to him after she cannot find Reinhold. Reinhold then employs the same plan with his current woman, Cilly, whom Franz accommodates after provoking a row with Fränze. Reinhold, after with the Salvation Army, has had enough of "broads" and is desperate to end his involvement with his current woman, Trude, but Cilly is angry when this is explained to her by Franz, and she briefly considers Franz worse in his treatment of women than Reinhold, possibly unaware of Ida's murder, but she persuades Franz to tell Trude about Reinhold's nature. They are reconciled.
"Love Has Its Price"

Franz explains to Reinhold that he wants Cilly to remain with him. Franz gets sucked into Pums's gang when he is drafted for a job as a last-minute replacement for Bruno, who gets beaten in the street. Franz ends up as a lookout as Pums, Reinhold, and Meck pull a robbery. In the getaway truck, Reinhold becomes suspicious of Franz because of a car that seems to be following them. Reinhold throws Franz out of the back of the truck.
" — An Oath Can Be Amputated"

Franz has survived the car accident, but his right arm has been amputated. He recuperates for a time with Eva and Eva's lover Herbert. Herbert agitates against Pums's syndicate, so the boss decides to take up a collection to help with Franz's medical costs. Franz goes to a red light district and encounters a pimp who offers him a woman he calls the whore of Babylon.
"The Sun Warms the Skin, but Burns It Sometimes Too"

Franz gets involved in an illegal enterprise with Willy, whom he met at a cabaret. Eva and Herbert drop by to see Franz and bring a young woman, Emilie Karsunke, whom they offer as a new lover. Franz and the tender-hearted woman, whom he nicknames Mieze, fall for each other. However, their spell of love is broken when Franz finds a love letter from another man.
"About the Eternities Between the Many and the Few"

Eva explains to Franz that Mieze just wants to work to him as Franz cannot do so due to his missing arm. He reconciles with Mieze. Franz goes to Reinhold's and tells him how he has become a pimp. Reinhold is disgusted by Franz's stump of an arm. Franz is inspired by a communist rally, during which Franz daydreams. After the meeting, Franz and Willy playfully debate a militant worker about the merits of their "dishonest" work. The two then meet Eva and Herbert, wherein Franz mockingly recounts the lessons he's learned about power and the state at the meeting, before more seriously soliliquizing about the role of order and authority versus a more limitless power.
"Loneliness Tears Cracks of Madness Even in Walls"

As Mieze cannot have children, Eva tells her she will have a child with Franz that Mieze can then raise. Mieze is delighted, to the point that Eva asks if she is a lesbian. Eva also tells Mieze she's concerned that Franz is getting into trouble with "rogue" Willy, when he should be attending to those who took his arm. At Max's bar, Franz listens as Willy espouses Nietzschean ideas while Max pleads with a Marxist to keep politics out of the bar. Franz drunkenly wanders the streets at night repeating snippets of the conversation before declaring he has no use for politics. Franz takes a taxi to the Tegel prison, where he falls asleep on a park bench before being accosted by a police officer and, now very drunk, making his way back home. The next day, Mieze asks Franz to stay out of politics, and he again declares he has no interest. Mieze its she has taken a rich client and; Franz is horrified as he thinks Mieze wants to be rid of him, until Mieze describes the agreement made with Eva for Franz's baby. After Mieze leaves, Eva arrives and asks if Franz wants to have the baby, and the two have sex. Responding negatively to a lecture from Herbert on his increasing drunkenness, Franz returns home and Mieze and he agree to get drunk. Mieze's rich client arrives. Franz finds out that she is going away with him for three days and weeps in despair.
"Knowledge Is Power and the Early Bird Catches the Worm"

Franz goes to Reinhold and tells him he wants to get involved with Pums again. Reinhold still has his suspicions but Franz is allowed to assist the gang with a job. Mieze is upset that Franz is earning money because she thinks Franz wants to be independent of her, but Franz reassures her. Franz brags to Reinhold about Mieze's devotion and decides to show him what a fine woman she is. In the apartment, Franz has Reinhold hide in the bed when Mieze arrives. She reveals she is in love with another man. Franz is angered and beats her cruelly, but Reinhold saves her and Franz throws Reinhold out. Mieze goes out to Franz and the two reconcile, though she has been bloodied by him. Franz and Mieze take a trip outside Berlin, where he explains to her he simply wanted Reinhold to see a true woman.
"The Serpent in the Soul of the Serpent"

Franz introduces Mieze to Meck. Reinhold blackmails Meck to set up a meeting for him with Mieze. Meck takes Mieze on a drive to Bad Freienwalde and delivers her to Reinhold. Reinhold takes her for a walk in the woods, where she resists his advances. Mieze wants to know more about Franz, and Reinhold reveals it is because of him that Franz lost his arm. Mieze is horrified at this revelation. Reinhold strangles her and leaves her in the woods.
"The Outside and the Inside and the Secret of Fear of the Secret"

Franz tells Eva that Mieze has left him. Eva reassures him, though she is a bit concerned herself. A robbery pulled off by Pums's gang goes wrong and Meck burns himself with a welding torch. Franz takes Meck to his apartment to bandage his wound. Meck tells Franz that Reinhold is a bad guy, but Franz claims he has a good heart. Meck takes the police out into the woods and helps them find Mieze's strangled body, telling them he helped to bury her. Eva brings Franz a newspaper that relates Mieze's murder. Franz lapses into demented laughter, claiming he is pleased that at least Mieze did not leave him as he had thought. Once he stops laughing, he vows to kill Reinhold.
"My Dream of the Dream of Franz Biberkopf by Alfred Döblin, an Epilogue"

In a fantasy sequence, Franz walks along a street of the dead with two angels. He finds Mieze, but she disappears from his arms. Reinhold is in prison for the crimes committed by a man whose identity he has acquired. He is anguished that his cellmate and lover is being released. Franz is taken to an asylum. Much of the rest of the episode takes place in his imagination. Franz's being run over by the car is re-enacted with different characters taking on the roles of victim and driver. In a striking sequence, Franz and Mieze are treated like animals being slaughtered in an abattoir. On a nativity set, Franz is raised on a cross as the other characters watch. An atom bomb goes off in the background and the angels clear the dead. The surreal imagery ceases suddenly and Franz is at Reinhold's trial testifying to his good character. Reinhold is sentenced to 10 years for manslaughter. Eva tells Franz she has lost the baby. The film concludes with Franz as an assistant gatekeeper at a factory. He is alert to his job but not to war on the horizon.

www.wikiwand.com/en/articles/Berlin_Alexanderplatz_(miniseries)

Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s controversial, fifteen-hour BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ, based on Alfred Döblin’s great modernist novel, was the crowning achievement of a prolific director who, at age thirty-four, had already made over thirty films. Fassbinder’s immersive epic follows the hulking, childlike ex-convict Franz Biberkopf (Günter Lamprecht) as he attempts to “become an honest soul” amid the corrosive urban landscape of Weimar-era . With equal parts cynicism and humanity, Fassbinder details a mammoth portrait of a common man struggling to survive in a viciously uncommon time.

www.criterionchannel.com/berlin-alexanderplatz

archive.org/details/berlin-alexanderplatz-s-01-e-14-my-dream-of-the-dream-of-franz-biberkopf-by-alfr

www.moma.org/calendar/events/2321

Berlin-Alexanderplatz: The Story of Franz Biberkopf (1931)
letterboxd.conexionsite.com/orinow/film/berlin-alexanderplatz-the-story-of-franz-biberkopf/

film o filmie, Ameryka o Ameryce, parodystyczna satyra na stosunki społeczno-branżowo-kinematograficzne, zabawnie przerysowane maniery adekwatnych protagonistów... Criterion

Gangster Caspar planuje zabić bukmachera Berniego. Nie zgadza się na to lokalny boss Leo, co doprowadza do wojny. fw

Rok 1929. Tom Reagan (Gabriel Byrne) jest prawą ręką irlandzkiego bossa, Leo (Albert Finney), jednego z najbardziej wpływowych ludzi w mieście. Przypadek sprawia, że obaj mężczyźni zakochują się w tej samej kobiecie, siostrze Berniego Bernbauma (John Turturro). Tymczasem konkurencyjny gang wydaje na niego wyrok śmierci. W ramach wcześniejszych rozliczeń zadanie to musi wykonać Leo. Zakochany gangster zdaje sobie sprawę, że odmowa doprowadzi do wojny. W rozgrywce chce posłużyć się Tomem, jednak nie wie, czy może mu jeszcze zaufać. fw

Miller's Crossing is a 1990 American neo-noir gangster film written, directed and produced by Joel and Ethan Coen, and starring Gabriel Byrne, Marcia Gay Harden, John Turturro, Jon Polito, J. E. Freeman, and Albert Finney. The plot concerns a power struggle between two rival gangs and how the protagonist, Tom Reagan (Byrne), plays both sides against each other.

In 2005, Time chose Miller's Crossing as one of the 100 greatest films made since the inception of the periodical. Time critic Richard Corliss called it a "noir with a touch so light, the film seems to float on the breeze like the frisbee of a fedora sailing through the forest".

www.wikiwand.com/en/articles/Miller%27s_Crossing

- In the script, the film takes place in 1929. trivia

--1st--
- This was the Coen Brothers' first collaboration with Steve Buscemi and John Turturro.

www.imdb.com/title/tt0100150/trivia

Tom Reagan, an advisor to a Prohibition-era crime boss, tries to keep the peace between warring mobs but gets caught in divided loyalties. IMDb

Tom Reagan (played by Gabriel Byrne) is the right-hand man, and chief adviser, to a mob boss, Leo (Albert Finney). Trouble is brewing between Leo and another mob boss, Johnny Caspar (Jon Polito), over the activities of a bookie, Bernie Bernbaum (John Turturro) and Leo and Tom are at odds on how to deal with it. Meanwhile, Tom is in a secret relationship with Leo's girlfriend, Verna (Marcia Gay Harden), who happens to be the sister of Bernie. In trying to resolve the issue, Tom is cast out from Leo's camp and ultimately finds himself stuck in the middle between several deadly, unforgiving parties. IMDb

Coen brothers gangster masterpiece
It's the Prohibition era. Leo O'Bannon (Albert Finney) is an Irish mob boss who controls the city. Tom Reagan (Gabriel Byrne) is his right hand man. Verna (Marcia Gay Harden) has the boss wrapped around her little finger. Only Leo doesn't know that Verna is also sleeping with Tom. Italian rival Johnny Caspar (Jon Polito) wants to kill bookie Bernie Bernbaum (John Turturro) who's been taking advantage of him. Tom tries to get Leo to give up Bernie but he's Verna's brother and Leo refuses. Leo and Johnny go to war. Leo kicks Tom out when he reveals his affair with Verna. Tom goes to work for Caspar and he's commanded to execute Bernie in the woods at Miller's Crossing.

It's the third big great movie from the Coen brothers and they show a real mastery of the cinematic arts. It is beautifully shot, ultra violent, and the actors are some of the best around. It is hard-boiled gangster noir and one of the best for fans of the genre. The mannerisms and dense dialog can put off some people and may lose some who don't pay enough attention. There are no good guys in this story. It is strictly anti-hero stuff. That may also put off some people. The audience is asked to pull for Gabriel Byrne even though he's still a gangster, just a more reasonable one. IMDb

A Roaring Twenties gangster saga that only the Coen brothers could concoct, Miller’s Crossing marries the hard-boiled sensibility of classic noir fiction with the filmmakers’ trademark savory dialogue, colorful characters, and finely calibrated set pieces. Gabriel Byrne brings a wry gravitas to the role of Tom Reagan, the quick-thinking right-hand man to a powerful crime boss (Albert Finney). Tom’s unflappable cool is tested when he begins offering his services to a rival outfit—setting off a cascade of betrayals, reprisals, and increasingly berserk violence. The Hopperesque visuals of cinematographer Barry Sonnenfeld, majestically elegiac score by Carter Burwell, and vivid ing performances from John Turturro and Marcia Gay Harden come together in a slice of pulp perfection that crackles with sardonic wit while plumbing existential questions about free will and our own terrifying capacity for evil.

www.criterion.com/films/29604-miller-s-crossing

www.criterionforum.org/Review/millers-crossing-the-criterion-collection-blu-ray

Miller’s Crossing: Marvelous Americans

Cahiers du cinéma: Do you [Dashiell Hammett’s] The Glass Key? The end?

Jean-Luc Godard: Not very clearly. I’d like to reread it.

Cahiers: At the end, a woman who has hardly featured in the story suddenly recounts a dream.

Godard: The Americans are marvelous like that.
“Let’s Talk About Pierrot,” October 1965

September 1990 saw the U.S. releases of three noteworthy American gangster movies: Martin Scorsese’s concussive, definitive, multidecade mob story Goodfellas; Abel Ferrara’s simultaneously white-hot and icy-cold contemporary drug-lord parable King of 
New York; and Joel and Ethan Coen’s Prohibition-era corkscrew Miller’s Crossing. Of the three, the Coens’ film—a terse and lyrical fable of violence, loyalty, and existential unease that draws on the hard-boiled fiction of Dashiell Hammett—is the most enigmatic and the most haunting.

These qualities are due to the character at the center of Miller’s Crossing. Goodfellas’ carousing, wildly irresponsible Henry Hill is a simple man; the aspiring philanthropist and vicious killer Frank White, in King of New York, is a man with a dream; in Miller’s Crossing, Tom Reagan is a . . . what?

In a sense, he’s a prototype of the Coens’ variation on a familiar literary and cinematic trope, the Man Alone. In what many have called “Coen country,” this figure is sometimes one who is slowly made to realize that the world he once considered his home is either ing him by or just flat-out ending: see the title character of Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), or Larry Gopnik in A Serious Man (2009), or Eddie Mannix in Hail, Caesar! (2016). The Dude of The Big Lebowski (1998) doesn’t seem to mind much that the world ed him by a long time ago. Ed Tom Bell in No Country for Old Men (2007) understands that the ending of worlds is just in the nature of things: “You can’t stop what’s coming.” As far as Rooster Cogburn in True Grit (2010) is concerned, he is the world. (These latter two characters were originated by two redoubtable American writers—Cormac McCarthy and Charles Portis, respectively—whose worldviews are unusually suited to that of the Coens.) In each of these films, the audience can easily understand where these men are, as they say, coming from. That’s not at all the case with Tom Reagan.

Played with a desolate quietude by Gabriel Byrne, Tom Reagan, confidant to city fixer Leo O’Bannon (Albert Finney), always seems to have something eating at him. The movie’s opening scene is a typically blunt and funny depiction of the business these American gangsters have chosen. It is, as many great Coen scenes are, simultaneously dry and broad. A couple of ice cubes drop into a whiskey glass, depicting a familiar mode of social lubrication; a raspy offscreen voice says, “I’m talking about friendship, I’m talking about character, I’m talking about—hell, Leo, I’m not embarrassed to use the word—I’m talking about ethics.” About two-thirds of the way into this proclamation, the Coens cut to a medium close-up of the speaker, Johnny Caspar, played by Jon Polito, one of cinema’s greatest portrayers of double-talking sleazebags and a Coen rep player throughout the 1990s. The unctuousness he oozes from his pores and through every strand of his pencil mustache is the joke’s immaculate punch line.

But the cloud over Tom Reagan’s head, as he endorses Caspar’s notion to rub out a parasitical fixer known in this section only as Bernie, grounds the movie’s solemn mien to an extent that nothing, not Caspar’s ridiculousness or anything else, can fully displace it. Leo is a tough guy who knows how things work, but he’s not particularly sophisticated—Tom corrects his mispronunciation of joie de vivre—and he’s a little naive. We eventually learn that he’s blinded by love, or something like it. He’s smitten, dazzled, by a bombshell named Verna (Marcia Gay Harden, tough and tender in equally potent measure)—who’s also Bernie’s sister. It’s with this Verna that Tom himself is conducting a desultory, booze-mediated, self-loathing affair. This does not make Tom sentimental. Just the opposite. He’s all for getting rid of Bernie. “Think about what protecting Bernie gets us,” he counsels Leo. But Leo doesn’t think. He feels.

Tom feels too. But mostly what he feels, it seems, is a lip-biting disgust. With himself, with Verna, with the money he owes to an ever-unseen bookie (this movie’s God figure), with the entire world around him. Except Leo. One senses that it’s not so much that he likes Leo as that he envies him—for his ability to feel things other than, well, disgust.

Bernie Bernbaum, played with terrifying intensity by John Turturro, is an object—not even a subject, in the final analysis—to inspire disgust. He shows up twenty-five minutes into the movie and is immediately repellent. That Bernie is Jewish is not unremarked upon by the characters around him. He is referred to as a “sheenie” and a “Hebrew” again and again. But he’s no victim. Between his lightning-speed, improvisatory venality and his equally brisk line of patter—he’s one of those characters you know is lying because his mouth is moving (and if he’s not lying, he’s making awful threats)—Bernie doesn’t just seem irredeemable; he is irredeemable. This shudder-inducing character is not an anti-Semitic depiction as such—but his conception is definitely what one might call impious, and the discomfort it arouses is entirely deliberate. The liberal use of epithets describing Jewish and Irish characters tamps down the viewer’s inclination to romanticize or sentimentalize these characters—something they are prone to doing themselves, what with all the “Danny Boy” singing and such.

As it happens, Tom’s act of mercy with respect to Bernie is almost his ruin. At one point in the movie, Tom is said to be “straight as a corkscrew.” That also applies to the story the Coens craft here. The initial dynamic between Tom and Leo is derived from the relationship between Ned Beaumont and Paul Madvig in Hammett’s 1931 novel The Glass Key. After the break with Leo, precipitated by Tom’s bitter confession to him about the affair with Verna, the story comes to resemble that of Red Harvest, the 1929 Hammett book that pits an unnamed detective—“the Continental Op”—against two warring gangs in a town known as Poisonville. He manipulates them into wiping each other out.

But Tom’s not as cool a player as the Op. At every turn, just as the viewer thinks Tom has wised up and is handling things, a new wrinkle, or just a literal fist to the face, bollixes things up. The fact that he vomits on his way to the site where he didn’t shoot Bernie shows he didn’t count on the corpse that lies there in Bernie’s place, shot in the face to make him unidentifiable. The way lousy luck seems to follow Tom around every corner is something experienced by several Coen protagonists, including unlucky barber Ed Crane in The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001) and A Serious Man’s Larry Gopnik. But the specificity of the misfortunes Tom faces, and the frustration they cause him, is a tie that practically binds Miller’s Crossing to Inside Llewyn Davis.

When all s and scores are settled, Leo expresses his gratitude to Tom. It was Tom’s “play,” his ostensible betrayal of Leo, that set the stage for the purge that ends at one very lonely funeral, where Tom is told to drop dead by the other mourner there with Leo.

Miller’s Crossing was the third feature film cooked up by Joel and Ethan Coen, and while it was largely very positively received by critics, one could say it kicked off the ponderous pondering concerning whether or not these guys were putting us on.
Their first movie, Blood Simple (1984), is a tight and nasty neonoir with an especially mordant sting in its tail. But their second, Raising Arizona (1987), is something like an ultrafrantic Looney Tunes cartoon with biker movie and spaghetti western DNA spliced in. Miller’s Crossing is for sure an engrossing motion picture, but what else is it? A pastiche of Dashiell Hammett plotlines? An homage to classic thirties American gangster pictures? A send-up of said pictures? The morsels of absurdity and absurdism that fleck the film (the scene in which Caspar demands that the mayor make his non-English-speaking cousins from the old country aldermen, for instance) could conceivably throw one off-balance.

But if the Coens’ subsequent career has taught us anything, it’s that we would be mistaken in thinking that they’re trying to trip us up. Their ethos has a kinship to Puck’s exclamation, “Lord, what fools these mortals be!” They depict that condition in all the modulations that can make good movies. The tones and tropes we encounter in their films are components of a genuine sensibility—one they don’t feel compelled to explain to journalists. As collaborators, perhaps they do not even need to explain it to each other—their being brothers means their senses of humor and of what works in narrative are things they formed side by side.

Looking at Miller’s Crossing today, one is most impressed by its sheer density. The way the script adores idioms of the thirties criminal world: phrases and words like “let it drift,” “dangle,” “What’s the rumpus?,” “I’ll see where the twist flops,” “don’t smart me,” “take it on the heel and toe,” “jungled up,” and of course the immortal “I’m sick of getting the high hat.” At an angle off that idiom, there’s wisdom in the adages. The dry way that Johnny Caspar’s malevolent henchman the Dane (J. E. Freeman) says to Tom, “You ever notice how the snappy dialogue dries up once a guy starts soiling his union suit?” (A funereal variation on the great line “The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter,” from The Maltese Falcon, both Hammett’s book and the movie.)

In an interview, cinematographer Barry Sonnenfeld recalled that he and the Coens agreed that the movie should look “handsome.” That meant using long lenses and shallow focus. It meant magisterial New Orleans locations, streets and alleyways in which both gangsters and ghosts of gangsters walked. It meant the burnished feel of the interiors, down to the floorboards through which Leo sees telltale wisps of smoke in his bedroom. Such visual details enrich the movie’s great set pieces, which mix dread and slapstick with remarkable brio. Leo’s bravura response to his attempted assassination—not just the way he dispatches his would-be killers from underneath his bed, but his “just try me” rage as he runs into the street, tommy gun blazing. The slow, steady walk into the forest where Bernie will deal with a fate he’s not entirely sure he can wheedle his way out of. Tom’s exasperated invasion of a crowded ladies’ room to confront Verna. (The startled attendant is played by none other than Albert Finney in drag.) The movie’s sound, too, is handsome, imposing. Carter Burwell’s score, drawing on Irish themes, or Irish-sounding themes, evoking the old country of Tom and Leo, is orchestrated Aaron Copland–size. The movie’s silences are deep. The noise of a trolley car ing behind Tom as he is about to enter another building where he’s due for another date with destiny bears down like the chug of a 
mammoth locomotive.

As in The Glass Key, there is a dream recounted in Miller’s Crossing. But it’s not at the end, it’s smack-dab in the middle of the picture. And the dream isn’t recounted by a minor character but by Tom himself. It’s after a conversation with Verna in which Tom asks the burning question “What did I want?” The couple are in bed, Tom sitting at its edge, Verna still under covers. Both are as unguarded as they’ll get in this movie. Tom broods and smokes. “What are you chewin’ over?” Verna asks.
“A dream I had once. I was walking in the woods, I don’t know why. Wind came up and blew me hat off.”

Verna somehow feels she can finally make some kind of meaningful connection with Tom here. So she riffs: “And you chased it, right? You ran and ran, finally caught up to it. And you picked it up. But it wasn’t a hat anymore. It had changed into somethin’ else, somethin’ wonderful.” This only has the effect of closing a door. “Nah,” Tom says, wearily. “It stayed a hat. And no—I didn’t chase it.” Tom draws from his cigarette. “Nothin’ more foolish than a man chasing his hat.”

Is Miller’s Crossing, finally, the story of a man chasing his own hat? The movie opens with the image of a hat on a forest floor; its final shot is of Tom Reagan, his hat as firmly on his head as it will ever be, with nowhere to go, nowhere to be. Maybe as much of a riddle to himself as he is to us.

www.criterion.com/current/posts/7686-miller-s-crossing-marvelous-americans

The Coen Brothers’ Miller’s Crossing (1990):
Criterion Blu-ray review

I wrote a review of the Coen Brothers’ third feature, Miller’s Crossing (1990), soon after it was first released. I loved this dense, richly textured homage to the classic gangster movie at the centre of which is an enigma. The plot is complex and endlessly twisty as it revolves around a character who expresses almost nothing – he keeps his feelings so tamped down that we can never be sure why he does what he does, or even at times just what it is that he’s doing. For me, everything abruptly came into focus with the film’s final shot; it suddenly all made sense. I sent that review to Film Quarterly and in due time received a polite and thoughtful rejection, the gist of which was that finding such a “key” is a dubious critical step, that it’s unreliable and reductive.

And yet, thirty-odd years later – and almost two decades since I last watched Miller’s Crossing (on DVD) – I find it happening all over again. I can follow the story’s events more easily because I’ve been here before, but that final shot still tells me something which clarifies (and in a sense “explains”) what has happened. This is the opposite of that final shot in Citizen Kane (1941) which purports to “explain” the life and personality of Charles Foster Kane, but explains nothing and makes a joke of the quest to understand the man. Should I distrust my own intuition? I haven’t come across other reviews which offer the same interpretation, so perhaps my own mind, emerging from the Coens’ feverish tragicomedy, has invented this apparent insight out of thin air. But then composer Carter Burwell, in an interview on Criterion’s new Blu-ray, makes a comment about his approach to the score which suggests he saw exactly what I see…

There’s no way to dig into this without talking about specifics of the film’s plot and themes which might be considered spoilers, so reader beware.

Miller’s Crossing marked a major development in the Coen Brothers’ filmmaking. Their first feature, Blood Simple (1984), was a tight, ferocious, low-budget neo-noir which channelled Jim Thompson better than any actual adaptation of his novels. Their follow-up, Raising Arizona (1987), was a broadly comic mash-up of genres barely held together by a screwball plot. But Miller’s Crossing is bigger, evoking golden age studio movies rather than the independent fringe. Although it is still playing with genre, it has formal qualities which give it an elegance absent from the earlier, scrappier movies. In a way, this makes it harder to read, because beneath the elegance there is still a feeling of comic irreverence. Are the Coens’ mocking the classic gangster genre, or embracing it and repurposing its tropes, deconstructing something familiar to reveal or create something new?

The brothers say that their script owes a lot to the stories of Dashiel Hammett, both in of the narrative itself and in the manner of its telling; they avoid providing interior information. We only know the characters through their words and actions, neither of which give the audience a reliable idea of what is happening. In this tale of gangsters and gang war, of political corruption and the intersection of individual self-interest and social conflict, as viewers we react to seemingly familiar incidents without necessarily knowing what the actual motives behind them are.

The characters talk about, and are perpetually concerned with, loyalty. These gangsters have a code which supposedly defines their behaviour, but being flawed people their reality fails to live up to their ideals. In the opening scene (which echoes the beginning of The Godfather [1972]), Italian boss Johnny Caspar (Jon Polito) petitions the more powerful Irish boss Leo O’Bannon (Albert Finney) for redress of a perceived wrong. Caspar keeps returning to the issue of ethics as he explains that Bernie Bernbaum (John Turturro) has been interfering with Caspar’s betting on fixed fights, cutting into his take. But Bernie is under Leo’s protection because the latter is romantically involved with Bernie’s sister Verna (Marcia Gay Harden). He refuses to sanction Bernie’s death, thus initiating fractures in the uneasy balance of power between the gangs.

Leo’s adviser and fixer Tom Reagan (Gabriel Byrne) tells him he should give Bernie up in order to maintain the peace, but Leo puts his personal loyalty before the code. The path to a war between the Italians and the Irish is set. Things are further complicated by the fact that Tom is also having an affair with Verna, a betrayal of the boss to whom he otherwise shows unwavering loyalty. Once someone ends up dead – Leo’s man Rug Daniels (Salvatore H. Tornabene) bumped off in an alley – the violence escalates, with Tom caught in the middle. It all gets very complicated before Leo’s enemies are defeated and we see that Tom has played the gangs against one another like Toshiro Mifune in Yojimbo (1961).

Underlying the mechanics of the gang war is a depiction of male fragility, all the rules, the code, the “ethics” existing in order to protect the egos of these gangsters. Visually, one of the symbols used to increasingly comic effect is hats – they come off, they’re pulled down low over the eyes, they’re grabbed by the wind. Caspar, perpetually concerned with his own status, is always suspicious that everyone else is “giving him the high hat”, asserting their dominance, putting him down. These suspicions provoke him to violence, striking out to reassert his masculine authority. These hats act as both shields and containers, protecting their wearers from insult while simultaneously holding in volatile, destabilizing emotions. (The Coens, however, insist that “a hat is just a hat”.)

Issues of masculinity shape the characters’ personal as well as “professional” lives – Tom’s betrayal of Leo with Verna causes a seemingly irrevocable rift, although it eventually leads to the destruction of Caspar’s gang and the restoration of Leo’s position as the man who runs the town. Their emotional triangle is reflected in a second triangle, one involving three men which is key to unravelling the web of conflicts tearing the town apart: Caspar’s lieutenant, the Dane (J.E. Freeman), is involved with Mink (Steve Buscemi), who in turn has something going with Bernie. This triad needs to be destroyed before stability is regained, but it points towards that revelation which I see in the film’s final moments.

At the funeral for Bernie (whose death at the start might have spared everyone all the subsequent conflict and violence), Leo tells Tom that he’s going to marry Verna and as they walk away from him, Tom watches them go, pushes his hat down hard over his forehead as if clamping a lid on his own feelings – and the camera dollies in as he tilts his head and his eyes stare out from under the brim, weighted with what appears to be a deep sense of loss and melancholy. But it’s not Verna he’s lost; it’s Leo. It seems that all he’s done, all the plotting and manoeuvring to save Leo from his own poor decisions, has been done out of an unexpressed, unrequited love.

Everything Tom has done to manipulate and guide the action makes sense and takes on a sense of agency when seen in this light. That final look in Tom’s eyes carries the weight of the film, the cost to himself of all he’s done for the object of his desire which has nonetheless been irrevocably lost to him as a consequence of his actions. And yet … if you search “Miller’s Crossing gay subtext” you get a lot of hits referring to the Dane-Mink-Bernie triad, but little or nothing mentioning Tom. The Coens have mentioned in interviews the mirroring of the gay triangle and the heterosexual triangle (Tom-Verna-Leo), but the question of why Tom would risk so much to have a relationship with his boss’s mistress, a woman he actually doesn’t seem to have any particular feelings for, isn’t addressed. Could it simply be that Verna is the closest he can come to having a physical relationship with Leo? Not to mention her unfaithfulness with him seems likely to provoke rejection from Leo, thus removing Tom’s “rival”.

Although nowhere in the disk extras is any of this acknowledged by the Coens or the actors, Carter Burwell mentions that as he was trying to find the musical tone he needed for the score, he settled on the idea that this was a romance between Tom and Leo, an idea which unsettled the Coens until they actually heard the score. Woven through the Irish airs, which could so easily have seemed parodic, is a thread of romantic melancholy which works perfectly with the sombre visuals and the generally understated performances (Polito and Turturro are the big exceptions, the former going large to compensate for suspicions of inadequacy, the latter as an expression of absolute self-confidence which is toxic) to give the film its distinctive tone – neither parody nor pastiche, but rather a romantic tragicomedy which uses the tropes of the gangster movie to explore a particular type of masculinity.

www.cageyfilms.com/2022/02/the-coen-brothers-millers-crossing-1990-criterion-blu-ray-review/

pionowe struktury zakonu władzy i poziome połacie zdegenerowanej antropologii, pęd ku iluzji materialnemej wieczności i kult funkcjonariatu instytucjonalnego bóstwa, eksperymentalne zdjęcia, Criterion...

Skromny urzędnik państwowy zostaje niespodziewanie aresztowany, a następnie powiadomiony, iż wytoczono przeciwko niemu proces. fw

An unassuming office worker is arrested and stands trial, but he is never made aware of his charges. IMDb

Josef K wakes up in the morning and finds the police in his room. They tell him that he is on trial but nobody tells him what he is accused of. In order to find out about the reason of this accusation and to protest his innocence, he tries to look behind the facade of the judicial system. But since this remains fruitless, there seems to be no chance for him to escape from this Kafkaesque nightmare. IMDb

- It has been reported that Orson Welles dubbed 11 voices in the movie. trivia

The Trial (French: Le Procès) is a 1962 drama film written and directed by Orson Welles, based on the 1925 posthumously published novel of the same name by Franz Kafka. Welles stated immediately after completing the film: "The Trial is the best film I have ever made". The film begins with Welles narrating Kafka's parable "Before the Law" to pinscreen scenes created by the artists Alexandre Alexeieff and Claire Parker.

Anthony Perkins stars as Josef K., a bureaucrat who is accused of a never-specified crime, and Jeanne Moreau, Romy Schneider and Elsa Martinelli play women who become involved in various ways in Josef's trial and life. Welles plays the Advocate, Josef's lawyer and the film's principal antagonist.

The Trial has grown in reputation over the years, and some critics, including Roger Ebert, have called it a masterpiece. It is often praised for its scenic design and cinematography, the latter of which includes disorienting camera angles and unconventional use of focus.

www.wikiwand.com/en/articles/The_Trial_(1962_film)

A feverishly inspired take on Franz Kafka’s novel, Orson Welles’s The Trial casts Anthony Perkins as the bewildered office drone Josef K., whose arrest for an unspecified crime plunges him into a menacing bureaucratic labyrinth of guilt, corruption, and paranoia. Exiled from Hollywood and creatively unchained, Welles poured his ire at the studio system, the blacklist, and all forms of totalitarian oppression into this cinematic statement—a bold, personal film that he himself considered one of his greatest. Dizzying camera angles, expressionistic lighting, increasingly surreal locations—Welles unleashed the full force of his visual brilliance to convey the nightmarish disorientation of a world gone mad.

www.criterion.com/films/28115-the-trial

The Trial: Crime of the Century

Franz Kafka’s The Trial, the unfinished tale of a man living under arrest and prosecution for an unspecified offense, is perhaps the iconic author’s most paradigmatic text. Following its posthumous publication in 1925, and its translation into English by Willa and Edwin Muir in 1937, The Trial became, in turn, one of the paradigmatic texts of the twentieth century, an emblem of the “nightmare of history” from which none of us, dreaming or awake, has ever managed to escape. That it was successfully filmed by the exiled Hollywood wunderkind Orson Welles should be legendary in its own right.

Yet, almost as if the movie itself were guilty of some indefinable crime, the reputation of Welles’s The Trial (1962) has been regularly overshadowed, in critical appraisals, by the monuments that precede and follow it. I mean, of course, Touch of Evil (1958) and Chimes at Midnight (1966), the two films that best demonstrate how Welles’s mastery had survived, even expanded, following the humbling destruction of The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) and It’s All True (partially shot in 1941 and 1942 and never finished). In the 1970s, when—hard as it is now to imagine—Welles’s later career needed rehabilitation, advocates as influential as François Truffaut and James Naremore took pains to set The Trial aside as a misstep, while biographer Charles Higham called it “an agonizing experience.” Peter Bogdanovich, wrangling with the director in one of their taped conversations, its that it “simply isn’t a picture I really like to see . . . All the others I could see joyously over and over.” As recently as 2012, Jonathan Rosenbaum—one of the handful of critics sympathetic to the film, alongside Peter Cowie, Roger Ebert, and David Thomson—extended the view that “it has never found a very secure and comfortable place within [Welles’s] oeuvre.”

What was The Trial’s crime? Had it fallen into an abyss between Welles’s and Kafka’s divergent sensibilities? Was Anthony Perkins miscast as Kafka’s persecuted everyman? Was Welles antagonistic to the material? He didn’t do himself any favors by suggesting he’d chosen the book flippantly, from a list of literary works to adapt handed him by producer Alexander Salkind. Yet Welles also regularly called the film his happiest experience. “You know why I defend it,” he told Bogdanovich. “I suppose because it’s my own picture, unspoiled in the cutting or anything else . . . The producers were heroic and got it made, and there isn’t anything I had to compromise.” A doubter might chalk this up to petulance, yet Welles never relented on his regard for the movie. “Say what you like, but The Trial is the best film I ever made,” he told Cahiers du cinéma in 1965.

The situation is intricately ironic. Kafka left The Trial, like his other novels—The Castle and Amerika (known also as The Man Who Disappeared)—unfinished. Welles, notorious for uncompleted projects, brought this one to the finish line. Yet his absolute commitment to Kafka’s disjunctive and oblique novel induces a vertiginous experience for which many critics, let alone audiences, were hardly prepared. The two artists may seem to be polar opposites—Kafka the earnest, self-abnegating martyr, the starvation artist, barely known in his lifetime; Welles the Falstaffian raconteur, bluffing magician, and eater of worlds, his artworks obscured by an aura of rumor and charisma. These outward differences cloaked the deeper resonance that animated the project. They also dictated the awkward first impression that has tended to restrict The Trial from the shortlist of Welles’s masterpieces, completed, wrecked, or otherwise.

If Welles’s artworks were inevitably distorted by their creator’s aura, so, too, were Kafka’s, in the decades following his death in 1924. With the ascent of technocratic bureaucracy, Kafka’s reputation as an advocate for humanity against monolithic forces of conformity and repression made him a secular saint—an emblem of individual feeling in the face of the machine. Following the Holocaust, Kafka seemed a kind of archetypal Jewish victim and seer (never mind, in this viewpoint, that he wasn’t killed by Nazis; he would have been). Like Anne Frank, the author conveniently wasn’t around to complicate this sanctification, or to add further writings that might disappoint his celebrants. Kafka the poster child for artistic sensitivity is easier to embrace than the deeply ambivalent, vain, wry, self-pitying, neurotic, jealous, and elitist Josef K. who is the protagonist of the novel (or the similar K. of The Castle).

A distracting amount of attention was given to Welles’s alterations to the book’s chapter order, and its ending—an order and an ending that were, by definition, provisional, since the manuscript Kafka left behind existed only in fragments, frozen into a false authority by his literary executor Max Brod. Another distraction concerned the film’s concluding imagery: the smoke of the final explosion resembled a mushroom cloud, an unavoidable impression that Welles hadn’t intended and a form of “symbolism” he detested. Yet by the time the atom-bomb echo was drawn to his attention on set, logistical circumstances made it impossible to substitute anything better.

If Welles didn’t also regret his declaration (offered in interviews to Cahiers and the BBC) that he’d altered Kafka’s ending to make it less ive in light of the death camps, he ought to have. The suggestion—defensive yet pompous—combined with his insertion of an all-seeing supercomputer, which gives a slightly Rod Serling feel to one scene (Welles had the instinct to cut most of the computer material out just before the Paris premiere), gave an impression that the director had appropriated Kafka as a vehicle for his own topical themes. Yet the opposite is true. Welles lent his powers to Kafka’s text with a responsiveness bordering on the devotional. “A challenge I was very happy to accept,” he booms in a 1981 dialogue with students in an auditorium at the University of Southern California, filmed by Gary Graver for the documentary project Filming “The Trial.”

Welles was a better reader of Kafka than most of the director’s critics, especially those who rejected Anthony Perkins’s performance. In the USC talk, the director seems rueful at the possibility that he’d hung his star out to dry: “Perkins got very bad press, all over the world, and the entire blame for that is mine . . . He played the character that I saw as K., and paid the price, because nobody else sees it my way. I find in the book repeated indications that K. is a pusher, on his way up the bureaucracy. Not Mr. Zero in the adding machine, not little Mr. Nobody, not the poor little faceless ant, but a young man very anxious to get ahead in this awful world, and doing his best to do that, and therefore in a state of real neurosis, because he is both terrified of, and anxious to conquer, the same thing.” Here, Welles’s breathtaking eloquence is equaled by his insight. Having instructed Perkins to play it as “dark comedy,” Welles said, “we roared when we made it—you can’t imagine the hysterical laughter.” This corresponds to Kafka, who giggled as he read The Trial to his delighted friends.

The resonance between these two artists hides in plain sight. Welles’s films obsessively rework a two-character system, where a powerful and worldly mentor, sponsor, or villain ensnares and beguiles a more innocent, more gullible man; the arc of this universe bends toward betrayal. From Charles Foster Kane/Jedediah Leland in Citizen Kane (1941) through the two policemen in Touch of Evil and the two directors in The Other Side of the Wind (which Welles began work on in the 1970s and which was completed by others in 2018), Welles scarcely broke with this design. Instead, he found in it variations as splendid as Chimes at Midnight’s fallible, saintly Falstaff and the chilly, opaque title character of Mr. Arkadin (1955). (This is why The Third Man works as an emblem of Wellesianism, though Carol Reed directed it.)

Anyone knowing Kafka, from the story “The Judgment” to the relationship between the land surveyor and the sleepily monstrous Klamm in The Castle, will see the resemblance. There’s father-son energy in this mix, yet the more that relation is displaced into other frameworks, the better it illuminates the ballet between power and enthrallment. Welles lived longer than Kafka and felt more complicit with the father’s position; in his films, he plays the callow, impressionable son just once, in The Lady from Shanghai (1947). In The Trial, the role he took for himself, as the Law’s tyrannical, bedridden representative, enjoys only a scattering of scenes—yet by dubbing so many other characters’ voices, Welles manages to perfectly “embody” the everywhere-but-invisible quality of the advocate’s insinuating influence.

Welles also accentuated Kafka’s subterranean perversity. The sexual puns in the initial scene of arrest in K.’s rooms—the substitution of pornograph for phonograph, the strange dispute over the word ovular—originate with Welles, as does the development of the languorous, teasing encounter with his fellow boardinghouse occupant, Miss Bürstner, played by Jeanne Moreau. She’s just the first of the temptresses Welles hurls at Josef K. Presented with the specter of female desire, the character whiplashes between diffident preening and nerve-racked indifference. As reported by Welles’s late-life confidant Henry Jaglom, Welles and Perkins never needed to directly communicate the homosexual subtext of which both were aware. The insertion of a centerfold into the courtroom’s law books, on the other hand, comes from Kafka: “I got all the dirty eroticism of the rest of the movie out of that one thing,” Welles told Bogdanovich.

This atmosphere of polymorphous-perverse unease may have added to a sense, in 1962, that Welles had mishandled Kafka’s book. But again, Welles was ahead of a wave of twenty-first-century scholarship and retranslation, which freed Kafka’s texts from Max Brod’s revisions, as well as the religious tone played up by his first English translators, to better reveal the blunt, searching strangeness of his texts—and a few suppressed sexual allusions. Here, Welles anticipates writers like Michel Foucault, Slavoj Žižek, and Roberto Calasso, who employ Kafka as a lens on how unsatisfiable appetite binds humans to systems of disciplinary power.

Welles’s interrogation of Kafka’s subtext wouldn’t mean much if the director hadn’t found a cinematic language equal to the novelist’s distinctive effects: those careening yet gnomic set pieces; the tonal vertigo that seems to excavate the underside of ordinary existence; and, above all, the serene, dreamlike juxtapositions and jumps, so incontrovertibly lucid, that give Kafka’s writing its crazy power. Who better than Welles, really, to depict the discontinuous spatiality that caused Jorge Luis Borges to compare Kafka to the Greek philosopher Zeno of Elea? Preparing to shoot, Welles drew up designs for elaborate sets he wasn’t allowed to create—some of the sketches survive, possessing an expressionistic power perhaps most closely approximated in the final film by the slatted cage that houses the sinister court painter Titorelli (William Chappell). 
Yet Welles’s employment of found locations, including the vacated Gare d’Orsay train station in Paris, worked better than any sets could have done. The movie shatters multiple European cities into fragments, crushing together antiquity and modernity, and claustrophobia and barren enormity, to form a labyrinth that grips K. as tightly as the teeth of a vise. The Trial, one of the few films where Welles controlled every editorial decision, shows that among his many talents he was one of the greatest editors in cinema.

The musical score, too, crushes eras together. This temporal insight Welles also drew from his study of Kafka: “In my reading of the book . . . I see the monstrous bureaucracy which is the villain of the piece as not only Kafka’s clairvoyant view of the future, but his racial and cultural background of being occupied by the Austro-Hungarian Empire.” Like George Minafer in The Magnificent Ambersons, another occupant of a decaying castle he can exit but never leave, K. is a bug smashed, as if in the pages of a book, between historical eras.

In hindsight, we can now place The Trial less outside the continuum of Welles’s interests than as the middle film in a loose trilogy, with Mr. Arkadin and The Other Side of the Wind: all three present labyrinthine, fractured, phantasmagorically subjective worlds, and conclude that, despite the plethora of doors and ages one may through—quite easily, despite the onition of the doorkeepers—no exit is possible, since the inside and the outside, the prisoner and the warden, are one and the same. (The Lady from Shanghai is The Hobbit to this Lord of the Rings.) Of the three, only The Trial is whole and intact, and, though the two others originate with Welles and The Trial with a book plucked from a list, it is the least archly baroque, the most fulfilled, in authentically Wellesian . When Bogdanovich mutters, “I told you I liked it better the second time I saw it,” Welles, sensing victory at hand, commands, “See it a third time!”

www.criterion.com/current/posts/8256-the-trial-crime-of-the-century

The Trial (1948)
letterboxd.conexionsite.com/orinow/film/the-trial-1948/

The Castle (1994)
letterboxd.conexionsite.com/orinow/film/the-castle-1994/

The Castle (1997)
letterboxd.conexionsite.com/orinow/film/the-castle/

chcącemu dzieje się krzywda, odyseja człowieka którego każdych ciał spotkać przez ciemną noc zła które przynosił a pracy swej nienawidził, nieoczekiwane meandry życia, film osobisty, [unofficial] Lonely Man trilogy II...

John LeTour jest dilerem narkotykowym z Manhattanu doświadczającym kryzysu wieku średniego. Kiedy jego szefowa decyduje o zawieszeniu działalności, pojawia się dla niego szansa na zmianę. fw

John LeTour (Willem Dafoe), dealer narkotyków z bogatej dzielnicy Nowego Jorku, zaczyna odczuwać wyrzuty sumienia, widząc rezultaty wykonywanej "profesji". Przełomem staje się przypadkowe spotkanie wielkiej miłości sprzed lat, którą wciąż mocno kocha. Ona jednak ma do niego wielki żal, że przez niego zaczęła zażywać narkotyki. fw

A drug dealer reconsiders his profession when his boss plans to go straight and an old flame reappears. IMDb

A drug dealer with upscale clientele is having moral problems going about his daily deliveries. A reformed addict, he has never gotten over the wife that left him, and the couple that use him for deliveries worry about his mental well-being and his effectiveness at his job. Meanwhile someone is killing women in apparently drug-related incidents. IMDb

Writer/director Paul Schrader has said that this is the final film in his trilogy of loners who hate their jobs. Taksówkarz (1976) and Amerykański żigolak (1980) were the other two films. trivia

Light Sleeper is a 1992 American crime drama film written and directed by Paul Schrader and starring Willem Dafoe, Susan Sarandon, and Dana Delany. Set in New York City during a sanitation strike, the gritty neo-noir film stars Dafoe as a high-class drug dealer battling a midlife crisis before becoming embroiled in tragic events following the chance encounter with a former girlfriend. While under-performing at the box office, the film was regarded favorably by critics.

Background

Schrader has described the film as a "man and his room" story like American Gigolo and his most famous screenplay which became the basis for Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver. In this film his character is dealing with anxiety over his life and the external forces that threaten it. Light Sleeper also shares with American Gigolo an ending reminiscent of Robert Bresson's Pickpocket, in which the imprisoned hero is shown contemplating a new and hopefully better existence.

The movie was still in the process of fundraising when production began, so Schrader financed the first three weeks of pre-production using his own money. Light Sleeper was the first artistic collaboration of Willem Dafoe and Paul Schrader, who met during filming of Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ. Dafoe and Schrader later collaborated in Affliction (1997), Auto Focus (2002), The Walker (2007), Adam Resurrected (2008), Dog Eat Dog (2016) and The Card Counter (2021).

Schrader had originally intended to use songs from Bob Dylan's album Empire Burlesque, but Schrader and Dylan could not agree on which songs to use and Schrader decided to use songs by Michael Been instead.

Light Sleeper premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival in February 1992 and was released in the US on August 21 that same year, earning $1 million at the box office. It gained mostly positive reviews and received various nominations, including the Independent Spirit Award. Willem Dafoe was awarded the Sant Jordi Award as best actor. In a telegram, German filmmaker Wim Wenders congratulated Schrader, stating that his direction was in a league with that of Japanese director Yasujirō Ozu, who both Wenders and Schrader ire. In a 2005 interview, Schrader called Light Sleeper his most personal film.

Reception

Light Sleeper received positive reviews from critics. It holds an 87% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 45 reviews, with a rating average of 7.50/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Light Sleeper requires patience, but delivers commensurate rewards -- and boasts an absorbing performance from Willem Dafoe." Metacritic assigned the film a weighted average score of 70 out of 100, based on 22 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".

Film critic Roger Ebert wrote, "Schrader knows this world of insomnia, craving and addiction. And he knows all about people living in a cocoon of themselves. […] In film after film, for year after year, Paul Schrader has been telling this story in one way or another, but never with more humanity than this time”.

Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly wrote Light Sleeper is "[…] a small but absorbing mood piece […] even when the film doesn't gel, one is held by Willem Dafoe's grimly compelling performance”.

Writing for Time Out Film Guide, Geoff Andrew said the film is a "stylish film…But the story meanders, and it echoes Taxi Driver and American Gigolo so closely that Schrader is working less than fresh variations on over-familiar themes”.

www.wikiwand.com/en/articles/Light_Sleeper

historia kina drogami innowacji i nowatorstwa - "a story of innovation, because innovation fuels cinema", film w dictum rewolucyjnym...

900 minut najprawdziwszej filmowej magii - to efekt wieloletniej pracy Marka Cousinsa, reżysera, krytyka filmowego i człowieka, którego serce najmocniej bije w kinie. "The Story of Film - odyseja filmowa" to, jak nazwa wskazuje, projekt przyglądający się rozwojowi kinematografii. Jego niezwykłość polega na tym, że stworzył go ktoś, kto język kina ma w małym palcu i doskonale go rozumie, a właściwie - mówi nim. Opowiadając o pełnej przypadków, intrygujących faktów i wiekopomnych epizodów historii filmu, reżyser nie stoi na pozycji patrzącego chłodnym okiem dokumentalisty, ale inkorporuje kinowe style i chwyty. Dlatego film Cousinsa nie jest przezroczystym, estetycznie "szkolnym" referatem, ale najprawdziwszą przygodą, podróżą przez czas i przestrzeń. Ten projekt to efekt ogromnej pracy. Podzielony na 15 części materiał prowadzi przez 120 lat pogmatwanych dziejów taśmy filmowej (a potem - karty pamięci). Kompetencja i rozmach tego projektu zachwyca, ale zaczarowanym kluczem do serc widzów nie jest tu szkiełko i oko, a wrażliwość twórcy. Podczas seansu łatwo zrozumieć, że dla Cousinsa kino jest wszystkim. A jego pasja i miłość są zaraźliwe. fw

A comprehensive history of the medium and art of motion pictures. IMDb

www.imdb.com/title/tt2044056/episodes

Covers six continents and 12 decades of film. trivia

The Story of Film: An Odyssey is a 2011 British documentary film about the history of film, presented on television in 15 one-hour chapters with a total length of over 900 minutes. It was directed and narrated by Mark Cousins, a film critic from Northern Ireland, based on his 2004 book The Story of Film.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Film:_An_Odyssey

- 1895-1918. The world discovers a new art form
- 1918-1928. The triumph of American film and the first of its rebels
- 1918-1932. The great rebel filmmakers around the world
- The 1930s. The great American movie genres and the brilliance of European film
- 1939-1952. The devastation of war and a new movie language
- 1953-1957. The swollen story : world cinema bursting at the seams
- 1957-1964. The shock of the new, modern filmmaking in Western Europe
- 1965-1969. New waves sweep around the world
- 1967-1979. New American cinema
- 1969-1979. Radical directors in the 70s make state of the nation movies
- The 1970s and onwards. Innovation in popular culture around the world
- The 1980s. Moviemaking and protest around the world
- 1990-1998. The last days of celluloid, before the coming of digital
- The 1990s. The first days of digital : reality losing its realness in America and Australia
- 2000 onwards. Film moves full circle and the future of the movies

www.librarything.com/work/691975

The Story of Film: An Odyssey (2011)

www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3foyEVX3ztw3GutiJvOwyRs-eacSdPtj

Hollywood (1980)
letterboxd.conexionsite.com/orinow/film/hollywood-1980/

Cinema Europe: The Other Hollywood (1995)
letterboxd.conexionsite.com/orinow/film/cinema-europe-the-other-hollywood/

od natury do kultury, od przemysłu do obyczaju, od człowieka do człowiek, Ontario miejsce do życia dla wszystkich i o każdej porze, impresja, poliwizja...

A multi-image large-format film showcasing life in Ontario without narration and dialogue. IMDb

A Place to Stand is a 1967 film produced and edited by the Canadian artist and filmmaker Christopher Chapman for the Ontario pavilion at Expo 67 in Montréal, Québec, Canada. For the film, he pioneered the concept of moving panes, of moving images, within the single context of the screen. At times there are 15 separate images moving at once. This technique, which he dubbed "multi-dynamic image technique" has since been employed in many films, notably Norman Jewison's 1968 film The Thomas Crown Affair. Jewison has credited Chapman as the creator of the edit style. The technique can also be seen more recently on television in the series 24.

It is said that most of the editing decisions were worked out in an ant's spreadsheet book and the pencil edit plan resembled flow charts.[citation needed] Chapman has remarked that at one point in the editing process he stood there in the room, bits of footage hanging from clips all around him. He felt crushed by the force of his vision and was a breath away from quitting. Even at the first screening, Chapman was exhausted and unsure but as he left the room, Steve McQueen watching at the back, grabbed Chapman and told him that he was blown away by the film.

The 18-minute film used 70mm stock and was projected onto a 66 by 30 foot screen. It contains no dialogue, but only music by a 45-member orchestra and a 15-member choir. Its theme song, "A Place to Stand, a Place to Grow", written by Dolores Claman and Richard Morris, and orchestrated by Jerry Toth, enjoyed great popularity on its own. Commissioned by the Ontario Department of Economics and Development from the Toronto commercial design studio TDF and premiered at the Expo 67 Ontario Pavilion on April 28, 1967, it was seen by some two million at Expo 67 itself and later by a further estimated 100 million in North America and Europe in cinema release. It was nominated for an Academy Award in two categories: Best Documentary Short Subject and Best Live Action Short Subject. It won the latter prize, which Chapman accepted on April 10, 1968.

The film won the Canadian Film Award for Film of the Year at the 20th Canadian Film Awards in 1968. In the same year it was screened at the 18th Berlin Film Festival as part of Young Canadian Film, a lineup of films by emerging Canadian filmmakers.

www.wikiwand.com/en/articles/A_Place_to_Stand_(film)

This short was originally screened at the Ontario Pavilion at Expo '67 in Montreal, Canada. trivia

Commissioned by the Ontario Government for the Ontario Pavilion at Expo 67, the film shows (without a storyline or narration) life in Ontario; the places, the industry, the culture and the people. Approximately 90 minutes of footage is shown in it's 18 minute running-time by using the groundbreaking and innovative "multi-dynamic image technique". The technique allows up to 15 s of images of various sizes and formats simultaneously projected onto a single large screen. IMDb

Multi Image Expo'67 Oscar Winner Holds Up Solidly
A Place To Stand stands the test of time due to its intelligent use of split screen images, some stunning photography and an unforgettable theme song....the only element that needs primping is the narrative, which has the antiseptic feel of a bureaucratic rubber stamp (in this case, the Ontario Tourist Board). This oscar winner delighted Expo '67 and the sequel in '68 "Man And His World" in Montreal and is totally obscure today. Picked up a vhs wide-screen copy for personal use from a friend in the business and was thrilled as any World's Fair film completist must be. As the closing theme lyrics cheerlead "Give us a place to stand, and a place to grow, and we will build Ontario!!!!" IMDb

poliwizja

In the Labyrinth (1967)
letterboxd.conexionsite.com/orinow/film/in-the-labyrinth/

nowatorska poliwizja zastosowana w filmie

The Thomas Crown Affair (1968)
letterboxd.conexionsite.com/orinow/film/the-thomas-crown-affair/

atrakcyjna multi-poliwizja...

Milioner przygotowuje napad na bank w celu manifestacji swojej pogardy wobec społecznych norm. fw

Thomas Crown (Steve McQueen) to jeden z najbogatszych obywateli Bostonu. Jego wielką pasją są przestępstwa. Przygotowuje duży skok na bank, nie dlatego, że potrzebuje pieniędzy, lecz tylko po to, by zburzyć istniejący układ społeczny. Dla Thomasa jest to tylko gra, a pieniądze to namacalny dowód jego zwycięstwa. Agencja ubezpieczeniowa wysyła swoją najlepszą agentkę, Vicky Anderson (Faye Dunaway), by zajęła się tą sprawą. Vicky postanawia spotkać się z Crownem i przyłączyć do gry, którą prowadzi. fw

The Thomas Crown Affair is a 1968 American heist film directed by Norman Jewison and written by Alan Trustman. It stars Steve McQueen, Faye Dunaway, Paul Burke and Jack Weston. In the film, Vicki Anderson (Dunaway) is hired to investigate the culprits of a multi-million dollar bank heist, orchestrated by Thomas Crown (McQueen).

The film was nominated for two Academy Awards, winning Best Original Song for Michel Legrand's "The Windmills of Your Mind". A remake was released in 1999.

Production

A pioneering split screen photography technique used to show simultaneous actions was inspired by the breakthrough Expo 67 films In the Labyrinth and A Place to Stand. The latter debuted the use of Christopher Chapman's "multi-dynamic image technique" of images shifting on moving panes. Steve McQueen was on hand for an advance screening of A Place to Stand in Hollywood, and personally told Chapman he was highly impressed; the following year, Norman Jewison incorporated the technique into the film by inserting split screen scenes into the already finished product.

The film also features a chess scene, with McQueen and Dunaway playing a game of chess, silently flirting with each other. The game depicted is based on a game played in Vienna in 1898 between Gustav Zeissl and Walter von Walthoffen.

McQueen performed his own stunts, which include playing polo and driving a dune buggy at high speed along the Massachusetts coastline.

Vicki Anderson's car, referred to as "one of those red Italian things", is the first of only ten Ferrari 275 GTB/4S NART Spiders built. Today, this model is one of the most valuable Ferrari road cars made. McQueen liked the car very much, and eventually managed to acquire one for himself. The dune buggy was a Meyers Manx.[citation needed] McQueen owned one.[citation needed] Crown's two-door Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow carried the Massachusetts vanity license plate "TC 100" for the film.

Sean Connery had been the original choice for the title role, but turned it down — a decision he later regretted. Johnny Carson also turned down the role.

www.wikiwand.com/en/articles/The_Thomas_Crown_Affair_(1968_film)

A debonair, adventuresome bank executive believes he has pulled off the perfect multi-million dollar heist, only to match wits with an insurance investigator who will do anything to get her man. IMDb

Four men pull off a daring daytime robbery at a bank, dump the money in a trash can and go their separate ways. Thomas Crown, a successful, wealthy businessman pulls up in his Rolls and collects it. Vickie Anderson, an independent insurance investigator is called in to recover the huge haul. She begins to examine the people who knew enough about the bank to have pulled the robbery and discovers Crown. She begins a tight watch on his every move and begins seeing him socially. How does the planner of the perfect crime react to pressure? IMDb

remake

The Thomas Crown Affair (1999)
letterboxd.conexionsite.com/orinow/film/the-thomas-crown-affair-1999/

poliwizja wzorowana na filmach

A Place to Stand (1967)
letterboxd.conexionsite.com/orinow/film/a-place-to-stand/

In the Labyrinth (1967)
letterboxd.conexionsite.com/orinow/film/in-the-labyrinth/

gestaltowanie i spiskowanie w poszukiwaniu minionego czasu...
metafora rozdyskutowanego chaosu po '68...

Kronika prób prowadzonych przez dwie trupy teatralne, przygotowujące się do wystawienia tragedii greckich Ajschylosa, "Prometeusza w okowach" i "Siedmiu przeciw Tebom". Perypetie bohaterów, zarówno postaci scenicznych, jak i zaprzątnietnych codziennością aktorów, stanowią odbicie zagadkowej historii tajnego bractwa w Paryżu. fw

Following the May 1968 civil unrest in , a deaf-mute and a con artist simultaneously stumble upon the remnants of a secret society. IMDb

Out 1, also referred to as Out 1: Noli Me Tangere, is a 1971 French mystery film written and directed by Jacques Rivette and Suzanne Schiffman. It is indebted to Honoré de Balzac's La Comédie humaine, particularly the History of the Thirteen collection (1833–35). Known for its length of nearly 13 hours, the film is divided into eight parts of approximately 90–100 minutes each.

The vast length of Out 1 allows Rivette and Schiffman, like Balzac, to construct multiple loosely connected characters with independent stories whose subplots weave amongst each other and continually uncover new characters with their own subplots. A truncated 4½-hour version exists, and its Spectre subtitle was chosen for the name's ambiguous and various indistinct meanings, while the Noli me tangere ("touch me not") subtitle for the original cut is clearly a reference to it being the full-length film as intended by Rivette.

The film's experimentation with parallel subplots was influenced by André Cayatte's two-part Anatomy of a Marriage (1964), while the use of expansive screen time was first toyed with by Rivette in L'amour fou (1969). The parallel narrative structure has since been used in many other notable films, including Krzysztof Kieślowski's Dekalog and Lucas Belvaux's Trilogie, which includes Un couple épatant, Cavale and Après la vie, to name a few. Each part begins with a title in the form of "from person to person" (usually indicating the first and last characters seen in each episode), followed by a handful of black and white still photos recapitulating the scenes of the prior episode, then concluded by showing the final minute or so (in black and white) of the last episode before cutting into the new episode itself (which is entirely in color).

Out 1 has won consistent critical acclaim since its release, and further received 13 votes in the 2012 Sight & Sound critics' poll of the greatest films ever made, resulting in a final ranking of 127th, and 17 votes in the 2022 critics' poll, resulting in a final ranking of 169th.

www.wikiwand.com/en/articles/Out_1

"Out 1" is a very precise picture of post May 1968 malaise - when Utopian dreams of a new society had crashed and burned, radical terrorism was starting to emerge in unlikely places and a great many other things. Two marginals who don't know one another stumble into the remnants of a "secret society": Colin, a seemingly deaf-mute who all of a sudden begins to talk and Frederique, a con artist working the "short con" (stealing drinks and tricking men who think she's a hooker out of their money). Meanwhile, there are two theater groups rehearsing classic Greek dramas: "Seven Against Thebes" and "Prometheus Bound". A member of the Moretti group es a note to Leaud about "The 13" which sends Leaud on a search for "The 13". His search brings him eventually to Bulle Ogier's shop in Les Halles "L'Angle du Hasard." Berto follows much the same path when she steals a cachet of letters from Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and tries to get money from their owners for their return. These twin activities reactivate "The 13", which had been dormant for years, revealing, among other things, that the two theater groups were once one. IMDb

3 dekady niemego kina Europy, cytatami ważnych filmów i wspomnieniami kluczowych twórców, kontynuacja "Hollywood (1980)"...

Spojrzenie na epokę kina niemego w Europie, od narodzin filmu do połowy lat 30. XX wieku, gdy dźwięk zaczyna święcić pierwsze triumfy. fw

Kolejna edukacyjna seria twórców "Hollywood: A Celebration of the American Silent Film" - tym razem przybliżająca największe dokonania kina europejskiego. 6-godzinna lekcja tylko dotyka najważniejszych dokonań potężnej europejskiej kinematografii. A wędrówka rozpoczyna się już od historycznych dokonań braci Lumiere, by później skupić się głównie na kinie skandynawskim, niemieckim, francuskim, brytyjskim, włoskim i rosyjskim. Narratorem cyklu jest słynący głównie z filmowych adaptacji dramatów Szekspira, Anglik Kenneth Branagh. fw

Documentary mini-series about the rise and fall of the European silent film industry.IMDb

Cinema Europe: The Other Hollywood (1995) is a documentary film series produced by David Gill and silent film historian Kevin Brownlow.

It is a follow-up to their 1980 documentary film series, Hollywood.

The six-part mini-series focuses on the origin of European cinema, from its infancy as a novelty created by French inventors Auguste and Louis Lumière to its flourishing as the pinnacle of film-making in the silent era and as a serious commercial contender against America (that is, until the surge of the Nazis).

The important series contains much rare footage and offers an even-handed analysis of the specific strengths and weaknesses of the various national film industries during this first flourishing of film as art.

Episodes

I - "Where It All Began" (Introductory Episode)

October 1, 1995
Highlighting the world's first public presentation of films in Paris, the silent film industries in Denmark and Italy, the comedies by Max Linder and Ernst Lubitsch, Abel Gance's J'accuse and the onset of World War I.

II - "Art's Promised Land" (Sweden)

October 8, 1995
Including Ingeborg Holm, Terje Vigen and The Phantom Carriage by Victor Sjöström and Greta Garbo's star-making performance opposite Lars Hanson in Mauritz Stiller's Gosta Berling's Saga. Directed by Michael Winterbottom.

III - "The Unchained Camera" ()

October 15, 1995
Featuring The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Battleship Potemkin by Sergei Eisenstein, Metropolis, Die Nibelungen by Fritz Lang, Joyless Street starring Greta Garbo, F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu, Emil Jannings, The White Hell of Pitz Palu featuring Leni Riefenstahl and Louise Brooks becomes a star in G. W. Pabst's Pandora's Box and Diary of a Lost Girl.

IV - "The Music of Light" ()

October 22, 1995
Highlighting Abel Gance's masterpieces, Napoleon and La Roue.

V - "Opportunity Lost" (Britain)

October 29, 1995
Exploring the early career of Alfred Hitchcock.

VI - "End of an Era" (Finale)

November 5, 1995
Focusing on the arrival of sound films, The Jazz Singer, The Blue Angel, and the onslaught of World War II.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinema_Europe:_The_Other_Hollywood

www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLuLciUkp6WHFzPYMrgCJQw2zBWAHy1_MY

Cinema Europe: The Other Hollywood (1995) is a documentary series produced by David Gill and silent film historian Kevin Brownlow. Chronicles the birth of European cinema, from the Lumiere brothers to World War I, and then the first golden age of Swedish cinema, from the formation of Svenska Bio to the departure for Hollywood of Stiller and Sjöström. The French build the first studio, invent the traveling shot, and experiment in sound. Max Linder becomes the first comedic star. The Italians do spectacle and early realism. Germans invent film propaganda and have Lubitsch. The Danish cinema is rich before the war. An affectionate portrait of Swedish cinema appreciates its cinematography, led by Jaenzon, its conversion of novels into film, and the emergence of a production company that owned its own theaters. This is a marvelous documentary series and required viewing for film buffs.

Where It All Began (introductory episode). Highlighting the world’s first public presentation of films in Paris, the silent film industries in Denmark and Italy, the comedies by Max Linder and Ernst Lubitsch, Abel Gance’s J’accuse and the onset of World War I.

cinephiliabeyond.org/cinema-europe-hollywood/

www.silentera.com/video/docCinemaEuropeHV.html

Chronicles the birth of European cinema, from the Lumiere brothers to World War I, and then the first golden age of Swedish cinema, from the formation of Svenska Bio to the departure for Hollywood of Stiller and Sjöström. The French build the first studio, invent the traveling shot, and experiment in sound. Max Linder becomes the first comedic star. The Italians do spectacle and early realism. Germans invent film propaganda and have Lubitsch. The Danish cinema is rich before the war. An affectionate portrait of Swedish cinema appreciates its cinematography, led by Jaenzon, its conversion of novels into film, and the emergence of a production company that owned its own theaters. IMDb

Hollywood (1980)
letterboxd.conexionsite.com/orinow/film/hollywood-1980/

The Story of Film: An Odyssey (2011)
letterboxd.conexionsite.com/orinow/film/the-story-of-film-an-odyssey-2011/

... jednak następnego dnia... satyrowanie na rozczarowanie, czyli rozpęd byka - lot indyka, przedrzeźnianie rzeczywistości w sposób podobno śmieszny, nowofalowy surrealizm improwizowany na wszystko co ma związek ze stosunkami społęcznymi oraz kino nieadekwatnej ekspresji, Criterion...

Magiczna i niezwykle ciepła opowieść o przyjaźni dwóch kobiet: bibliotekarki Julie (Dominique Labourier) i tajemniczej Celine (Juliet Berto). Poznały się pewnego dnia w parku. Celine gubi po drodze różne rzeczy, a Julie podąża za nią, by jej oddać zguby. Gdy ją wreszcie dogania, Celine zaczyna opowiadać barwne historie pełne przygód i pięknych miejsc. Wszystko jest jak we śnie i żadnej z nich nie przeszkadza, że te historie są tylko wytworem wyobraźni. Kobiety szybko połączyła więź przyjaźni. Postanawiają wspólnie rozwikłać tajemnicę pewnego nawiedzonego domu. fw

A mysteriously linked pair of young women find their daily lives preempted by a strange boudoir melodrama that plays itself out in a hallucinatory parallel reality. IMDb

- It is a misconception that most of the film was improvised by the actors. Jacques Rivette provided structure but did not let his actors "go wild", instead he let them write. A single scene was improvised, where Celine, played by Julie Berto, brags to her associates about her rich American friend. The rest of the scenes where shot from scripted material, mostly thanks to participating actors. The film is collaboration by several authors, including actors Berto, Labourier, Ogier and Pisier. Rivette's involvement in the writing was to give structure to all the contributions, tightening things up. trivia

Céline and Julie Go Boating (French: Céline et Julie vont en bateau: Phantom Ladies Over Paris) is a 1974 French film directed by Jacques Rivette. The film stars Dominique Labourier as Julie and Juliet Berto as Céline.

Themes

Magic is one of the themes of the film. Céline, the stage magician, does her magic tricks in a nightclub performance. Magic seems to come too from Julie's Tarot card readings. Finally, "real" magic comes from the design of a potion, which enables both women to enter the house and take charge of the narrative.

At the start, the two women are leading relatively conventional lives, each having jobs (Julie, a librarian, is more conservative and sensible than Céline, a stage magician, with her bohemian lifestyle). As the film develops, Céline and Julie separate from the world by leaving their jobs, moving in together, and gradually becoming obsessed with the mysterious and magical events in the old house.

In one scene, according to critic Irina Janakievska, Julie is playing Tarot cards, with one of the cards interpreted as signifying that Julie's future is behind her—exactly when we see Céline, wearing a disguise, observing Julie from one of the library desks. As Céline draws an outline of her hand in one of the books, Julie echoes that as she plays with a red ink pad.

Another noticeable aspect of the film is its use of puns. For instance, the title Céline et Julie vont en bateau has other meanings from that of taking a boat ride: "aller en bateau" also means "to get caught up in a story that someone is telling you" or, in English, getting taken up in a "shaggy dog story".

www.wikiwand.com/en/articles/Celine_and_Julie_Go_Boating

Film skupia się na losach dwóch dziewczyn – Céline (Juliet Berto) i Julie (Dominique Labourier) – przeplatając fragmenty z ich codziennego życia z halucynogennymi scenami wodewilowymi.

Obraz otrzymał Nagrodę Specjalną Jury na MFF w Locarno, głównie ze względu na poetykę przywodzącą na myśl Alicję w Krainie Czarów Lewisa Carrolla, był też porównywany z czasem do znacznie późniejszego filmu Davida Lyncha Mulholland Drive (2001).

www.wikiwand.com/pl/articles/Celine_i_Julie_odp%C5%82ywaj%C4%85

Whiling away a summer in Paris, director Jacques Rivette, working in close collaboration with his stars and coconspirators Juliet Berto and Dominique Labourier, set out to rewrite the rules of cinema in the spirit of pure play—moviemaking as an anything-goes romp through the labyrinths of imagination. The result is one of the most exuberantly inventive and utterly enchanting films of the French New Wave, in which Julie (Labourier), a daydreaming librarian, meets Céline (Berto), an enigmatic magician, and together they become the heroines of a time-warping adventure involving a haunted house, psychotropic candy, and a murder-mystery melodrama. Incorporating allusions to everything from Lewis Carroll to Louis Feuillade, Céline and Julie Go Boating is both one of the all-time-great hangout comedies and a totally unique, enveloping cinematic dream space that delights in the endless pleasures and possibilities of stories.

www.criterion.com/films/29639-celine-and-julie-go-boating

Synopsis

Whiling away a summer in Paris, director Jacques Rivette, working in close collaboration with his stars and coconspirators Juliet Berto and Dominique Labourier, set out to rewrite the rules of cinema in the spirit of pure play—moviemaking as an anything-goes romp through the labyrinths of imagination. The result is one of the most exuberantly inventive and utterly enchanting films of the French New Wave, in which Julie (Labourier), a daydreaming librarian, meets Céline (Berto), an enigmatic magician, and together they become the heroines of a time-warping adventure involving a haunted house, psychotropic candy, and a murder-mystery melodrama. Incorporating allusions to everything from Lewis Carroll to Louis Feuillade, Céline and Julie Go Boating is both one of the all-time-great hangout comedies and a totally unique, enveloping cinematic dream space that delights in the endless pleasures and possibilities of stories.

www.criterionforum.org/Review/celine-and-julie-go-boating-the-criterion-collection-blu-ray

www.criterionchannel.com/celine-and-julie-go-boating

Céline and Julie Go Boating: State of Play

n Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974), play is a life force, pleasure a form of liberation. Drawing inspiration from cartoons, Hollywood musicals, and the vaudeville shenanigans of early screen comedy in the vein of Buster Keaton and the Marx Brothers, Jacques Rivette’s fifth feature film, a masterpiece of modern cinema, wields laughter—women’s laughter—like a weapon for shattering conventions.

We first see Julie (Dominique Labourier) perched on a park bench, consulting a book on magic as she draws runic symbols in the sand with the heel of her shoe. She is iring her surroundings—billowing trees, a cat on the prowl, squealing kiddies—when the waifish Céline (Juliet Berto) appears, wrapped in a green feather boa, shuffling along like the muttering White Rabbit running late for his appointment in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Julie jumps to the rescue when this strange, flighty woman drops her sunglasses. She whistles and yoo-hoos to no avail before Céline launches into a full sprint and Julie follows after her, initiating an extended, wordless chase down the rabbit hole and through the streets of Montmartre. Theirs is a connection felt rather than rationally understood.

The plot resists easy summarization, unfolding as a series of playful vignettes that forge a mystical connection between the two women, soul sisters in nearly literal . Věra Chytilová’s Daisies (1966), another frolicking fantasia of merged female identities and a great favorite of Rivette’s, is a clear touchstone. As is Howard Hawks’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), a film that explores the performance and consumption of gender roles to determine what it means to be a woman. In Céline and Julie, we’re plunged into a girlish, colorful world of cats and tarot cards, dolls and candy. Reality here is dictated by dream logic, spiked with fantastic, supernatural forces—it is the elaboration of an alternative existence, the possibility of an otherwise. Over the course of three and a quarter hours, we spectators are folded into the narrative, but Rivette keeps us on our toes, asking questions, searching for meaning.

A tragic love triangle in the style of a classic Hollywood melodrama plays on eternal loop in a mansion on 7 bis, rue du Nadir-aux-Pommes. As Céline and Julie grow closer, they experience flashbacks of scenes from this house of fiction and, like sleuths—or curious moviegoers—embark on a quest to fill in the missing pieces. Hard candies, like Marcel Proust’s madeleine, allow the women to watch the story in fragments, and to enter it as well, each by turn in the guise of the child’s nurse. A coherent narrative is achieved over repeated “viewings,” revealing the murder of an innocent child, Madlyn, with a jarring, traumatic image: a bloody handprint on a white pillow.

Unlike his French New Wave contemporaries—Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, and Eric Rohmer—Rivette did not shoot to counterculture fame right out of the gate, and his work never attained mainstream popularity. He was an immensely private figure, elusive even to his close collaborators, and a reluctant interview subject. In Claire Denis and Serge Daney’s documentary profile of the director, Jacques Rivette: Le veilleur (1994), Rivette is reserved and pensive, a hesitant speaker who is prone to bursts of enthusiasm when asked the right question. He casts his eyes down often, unsure not because of a lack of knowledge but out of caution, perhaps, that he may not say what he really means. He was something of an autodidact. An obsessive cinephile, he was known to attend the Cinémathèque française with regularity, always nestled in the same seat. During his tenure as editor in chief of Cahiers du cinéma, from 1963 to ’65, he looked to thinkers outside the realm of cinema—philosophers, composers, anthropologists—to diversify the magazine’s content. His film oeuvre is a reflection of these qualities. Behind a seemingly impenetrable, hermetic facade of extreme duration and slippery formal conceits lies a powerful, promiscuous fascination with film history, literature, and the theater. In their disregard for the boundaries of mainstream cinema, his films embody a spirit of unmoored creation. His greatest commercial success, Céline and Julie carries a reputation as the “lightest,” most accessible entry in Rivette’s muscular body of work. Indeed, there’s no denying the pleasures of its gleeful chaos and rambunctious heroines, who feel true and recognizable despite their ambiguity. Filled with pranks and high jinks, tall tales and pointless diversions, the film might easily be labeled “frivolous,” a word that brings to mind both the days of five-cent nickelodeons, when moving pictures were considered cheap spectacles, and the kind of insults commonly reserved for women and their women things. Yet Céline and Julie recasts these very precepts.

“A magician and a librarian, respectively, Céline and Julie are no strangers to the pleasures of fiction and make-believe.”

Rivette’s singular approach to filmmaking would seem to complicate the notion of auteurism—the idea that the director is the true author of a film—which his fellow Cahiers critics helped bring to the fore of modern film culture and criticism. “I detest the formulation ‘a film by.’ A film is always [by] at least fifteen people,” Rivette said in a 2007 interview with Les inrockuptibles. “Mise-en-scène is a rapport with the actors, and the communal work is set with the first shot . . . It’s a collective work, but one wherein there’s a secret too. For that matter, the actor has his secrets as well—of which the director is the spectator.” In the opening romp through Paris, the manner in which Rivette’s handheld 16 mm camera captures Berto and Labourier’s antics comes across as free and spontaneous, as though the two of them were simply unleashed onto the city and told to play cat and mouse.

Rivette had recently kicked off the richest and most radical phase of his career with L’amour fou (1969) and Out 1 (1971), two works that flout convention in both their long run times and their reliance on actorly improvisation to generate complex modes of performance. The palpable chemistry between Berto and Labourier in Céline and Julie was no fluke—the two women were friends in real life, and after Rivette and Berto’s previous project, a Phantom of the Opera–inspired period piece set to star Jeanne Moreau, fell through for lack of funding, the filmmaker had decided on something “on the contrary very cheap, as easy to make as possible, and fun to do.” Intrigued by Berto and Labourier’s friendship, Rivette used that existing rapport as a sort of raw material in which to anchor the film’s more puzzling qualities.

There’s a gravity to Céline and Julie’s friendship. The way the duo stumble their way into a taxi after Céline is expelled from the house of fiction brings to mind the breathless, dazed exhaustion that comes after a night at the discotheque—that same tender backseat slump onto the shoulder of a comrade. Their connection casts female love and camaraderie as both universal and particular; to women viewers especially, their friendship will seem intuitively familiar, yet it remains mysterious and sealed off to intruders, who will never quite understand how they communicate and what exactly they mean to each other. The most intimate friendships both jump off the page, so to speak, and remain private affairs. Rivette uses the forms of magic and telepathy to demonstrate this elusive bond. Céline invents a story about her new friend for a group of coworkers, claiming that Julie is an American heiress with a heart-shaped pool. Without having heard this conversation, Julie talks about the same pool in a later chat. On another occasion, Julie emerges from the kitchen holding Bloody Marys, just as Céline is yawning about her craving for the drink.

Rivette dialed back the nearly unmitigated improvisation of Out 1 for this film, opting for a more structured but still intensely collaborative method. He worked closely with Berto and Labourier, as well as actors Marie- Pisier and Bulle Ogier and writer Eduardo de Gregorio, to develop the characters and map out the story’s twists and turns. The nature of the experience encouraged a rare kind of commitment from the main players—Berto and Labourier moved in together during this period: “We got up early in the morning and told each other our dreams, which the film depended on,” Berto explained in an interview. “We wrote our lines each morning and evening . . . [and we always] knew what stance we had and why.” Despite Rivette’s meticulous orchestration, it is the authentic, living, breathing expression of their friendship that Berto and Labourier constructed that keeps the film from crumbling into mere conceptual play.

A magician and a librarian, respectively, Céline and Julie are no strangers to the pleasures of fiction and make-believe. “Life is full of happy endings when you pretend,” sings Jerry Lewis’s goofball aspiring children’s author in Frank Tashlin’s Artists and Models (1955), a film that Rivette and de Gregorio saw together in the summer of 1973. Céline appears at Julie’s library and bangs around in the kids’ section. “The children are very noisy today,” a colleague of Julie’s observes. We see Céline tracing her hand in the pages of a large picture book, and Julie at her desk, mindlessly making thumbprints with an ink pad. There’s a humorous eccentricity to this behavior, but Rivette exalts these childlike tendencies as virtues, and as implicit disavowals of the strictures of masculine fantasy.

Céline and Julie Go Boating is a film of binaries, doubles, and parallel worlds. Actors have multiple interiorities in Rivette’s work. He uses the complexities embodied by his performers to create characters with inner worlds that clash and coexist in the open. Céline and Julie are interchangeable, and they flaunt this ability in a way that, again, knowingly subverts the male gaze. After answering a phone call from Julie’s childhood beau Guilou (Philippe Clévenot), Céline shows up at the park to meet him wearing a curly brown wig; a floppy, wide-brimmed hat; and a virginal white dress. Even in a film with countless bellyache-inducing gags, this moment stands out as a delectable mockery of starry-eyed, painfully straight, old-fashioned romantics. Guilou has returned with the intent of marrying Julie, yet he falls for Céline’s disguise. As he whispers sweet nothings and muses about the couple’s soon-to-be-realized marital bliss, Céline spouts random nonsense through a toothy grin—and still Guilou fails to recognize the trick. Ultimately, the prankstress pulls down her suitor’s pants midwaltz, leading him to rescind his proposal. “You’ve become an absolute monster of vulgarity!” Guilou seethes.

Later, in a scene that recalls the climax of Dorothy Arzner’s Dance, Girl, Dance (1940), Julie takes Céline’s place at the nightclub, and intentionally blows an audition that might have catapulted Céline into globe-trotting fame as her seductive alter ego, Mandragora. Julie performs a musical number in an affectedly girlish voice before launching into a tirade against the audience of “cosmic twilight pimps” and their objectifying gazes, blowing a raspberry, and cackling with glee as she dashes offstage. Performance need no longer work in the service of men. Liberated and strengthened by each other, Céline and Julie are free to create their own adventures.

“For Rivette, the creative, generative impulse is the stuff of liberation.”

The world of play elaborated by Céline and Julie contrasts sharply with the drama unfolding inside the house of fiction, which sees another pair of women, Camille (Ogier) and Sophie (Pisier), duking it out in a game of subterfuge and manipulation over the affection of a widower named Olivier (Barbet Schroeder, also the film’s producer). These characters wear stuffy formal attire and speak in a stale, sophisticated manner that is dated and rigid in comparison with Céline and Julie’s tank tops, denim, and freewheeling drawls. Per de Gregorio’s suggestion, the melodrama was loosely based on two works by Henry James, The Other House and “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes.” The result is another mocking satire of old-school heterosexual mores, this time laced with simmering dread.

After ingesting the candies, Céline and Julie face the camera, eyes wide and munching on popcorn, as the interior story plays out like a movie being projected, or like a mind-screen made manifest. “Always the same thing,” Julie sighs, recognizing the conventions and overstated flourishes of the penny-dreadful women’s picture, with its stagy theatrics and desperate feminine infighting. Yet the drama, predictable or not, remains engrossing—a testament to the seductive powers of storytelling that relies on formula. There are still gaps in the action, though, and without any candies left, the ladies suit up in roller skates and skintight black costumes (inspired by the character of Irma Vep from Louis Feuillade’s 1915–16 film serial Les vampires) to infiltrate the library by moonlight in search of potion books with recipes for memory retrieval. It’s sort of an inexplicable diversion, considering Julie’s access to the place, yet we relish their escapades and puckish detective work. For Rivette, the appeal of a detective narrative lies not in its eventual resolution but in the very principle of investigation.

The Jamesian melodrama plays like a stumbled-upon theatrical performance, yet clues throughout the film hint at Céline and Julie’s subconscious involvement in the proceedings. There’s a picture of the mansion in a chest Julie owns that also contains dolls and trinkets from her adolescence. Images from both realms mirror each other in uncanny ways: Julie mends Céline’s injured leg at her apartment, and both women, in the role of Nurse Angèle, wash the wound on Camille’s hand; at the burlesque club, Céline wears a thick layer of face cream that resembles the zombiesque face paint that the mansion players put on in the final act. Waiting for Céline to emerge from the house, Julie knocks on a neighbor’s door and has an unexpected reunion with an old woman whom she seems to know intimately—her grandmother, perhaps, or a former nanny. “Do you the little girl next door?” asks Julie, possibly referring to Madlyn. “She was my age.” The woman reveals that the family moved away long ago, and that the house has been closed ever since. “Their nurse scared you,” she recalls.

“We must save the kid at all costs,” Julie declares. When she and Céline finally decide to enter the house of fiction together, their unity renders them immune to the mansion’s memory-washing powers. Their plan? Stick to the script, and while one of them plays the predetermined scene, the other will investigate. Naturally, the women fumble their lines, miss their cues, and giggle through the solemn drama. Try as they might, they can’t help but project their games onto the increasingly ghoulish events, transforming the story—and, in the process, themselves, from mere side characters into tangoing, troublemaking detectives.

By means of play, laughter, and friendship, Céline and Julie insert themselves into the text by their own movement, upending a sexist tragedy otherwise seemingly consigned to infinite repetition. In rescuing Madlyn, they actively confront buried traumas, saving themselves from the complacency of ive spectatorship and rejecting the rote performance of femininity that caters to patriarchal desire. Finally, with Madlyn in tow, Céline and Julie go boating. The film’s French title is Céline et Julie vont en bateau—a phrase that carries multiple meanings. They may be taking a trip, in either sense of the word. They may be caught up in telling or listening to a fantastic story. Rivette once called Scheherazade, the storyteller of The Thousand and One Nights, the “patron saint of everyone who tries to play with fiction.” Sentenced to a beheading at dawn, that fabled heroine staves off disaster by captivating the vengeful sultan with stories so incredibly compelling that he eventually, one thousand and one of them later, decides to spare her life. For Rivette, this creative, generative impulse is the stuff of liberation. And so we begin back where we started: the same park, the same bench. Only this time, Céline will chase Julie. The materials do not change, yet the possibilities are infinite, unpredictable, freeing.

www.criterion.com/current/posts/7316-celine-and-julie-go-boating-state-of-play

Super-Duch dokonuje zemsty na zabójcach hollywoodzkiego producenta, ożywają zombie-lalki, samochód naprawia się jak Christine, dolary mielą córkę zabitego...

Kiedy znany producent filmowy zostaje zamordowany we własnym domu, detektyw Jim Corrigan rozpoczyna emocjonujące śledztwo. fw

Słynny producent filmowy, Foster Brenner, ginie w zamachu bombowym zorganizowanym w jego posiadłości. Policja niezwłocznie wszczyna śledztwo, które prowadzi detektyw Jim Corrigan mający romans z córką ofiary, Aimee Brenner. Początkowo nie trafia on na obiecujące tropy, ale po przesłuchaniu lokaja dowiaduje się, że Foster Brenner miał paru wrogów. fw

DC Showcase: The Spectre is a 2010 short animated film, directed by Joaquim Dos Santos and written by Steve Niles. Gary Cole played Detective Jim Corrigan, whose suspects are brought to justice by his alter-ego, the Spectre. The film, released on February 23, 2010 as a bonus feature on the Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths DVD, was the first of the DC Showcase series and was included on the compilation DVD DC Showcase Original Shorts Collection in an extended version.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DC_Showcase:_The_Spectre

As Detective Jim Corrigan investigates a murder, The Spectre delivers horrific justice to the perpetrators. IMDb

kiedy Hex z odstrzelonym policzkiem wymusza ujawnienie miejsca zwłok kochanków zmordowanych przez soloonową burdelmamę, zostawia ją samą pośród znajomych twarzy...

Madame Lorraine zabija przestępcę poszukiwanego przez Jonaha Hexa. Łowca głów postanawia wymierzyć jej karę. fw

Wyjęty spod prawa przestępca Red Doc odwiedza położone na uboczu miasteczko. Mężczyzna wydaje dużo pieniędzy, czym zwraca na siebie uwagę madame Lorraine. Kobieta kusi Red Doca swoimi wdziękami, po czym go morduje. Tropem bandyty podąża Jonah Hex, który zamierza zdobyć nagrodę za jego głowę. fw

When a ruthless brothel madame murders Jonah Hex's current quarry, the disfigured bounty hunter plans to make her pay. IMDb

DC Showcase: Jonah Hex is a 2010 short animated Western superhero direct-to-video short film directed by Joaquim Dos Santos and written by noted western comics writer Joe R. Lansdale, featuring the voice of Thomas Jane as disfigured bounty hunter Jonah Hex on the trail of a ruthless brothel madame who has murdered his latest quarry. The film, which was released on July 27, 2010 as a bonus feature on the Batman: Under the Red Hood 2-Disc Special Edition DVD, was the second of the DC Showcase series and was included on the compilation DVD DC Showcase Original Shorts Collection in an extended version.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DC_Showcase:_Jonah_Hex

1. Hebrew Melody
2. Aktion K
3. Wild Grass
4. Starlit Minute
5. Miracles in the Sieve
6. Elu maitse
7. Człowiek ze studni
8. Po całym ciele
9. A potem nazwali go bandytą
10. Bardzo krótki strajk. 14-15 grudnia 1981 roku

...plus 476 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

12 filmów Keystone Cops [ustalić kolejność]

The Keystone Cops (often spelled "Keystone Kops") are fictional, humorously incompetent policemen featured in silent film slapstick comedies produced by Mack Sennett for his Keystone Film Company between 1912 and 1917.

www.imdb.com/name/nm0465957/

www.wikiwand.com/en/Keystone_Cops

1. Bangville Police

   The Keystone Cops #1

2. Hoffmeyer's Legacy
3. Mabel's New Hero
4. In the Clutches of the Gang
5. Making a Living
6. A Thief Catcher
7. Tillie's Punctured Romance
8. Wished on Mabel

   The Keystone Cops #11

9. Love, Loot and Crash
10. Miss Fatty's Seaside Lovers

...plus 3 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

References for research.
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Kino Moralnego Niepokoju - Tadeusz Lubelski

akademiapolskiegofilmu.pl/pl/historia-polskiego-filmu/artykuly/kino-moralnego-niepokoju/321

1. Wahadełko
2. Top Dog
3. Provincial Actors
4. A Woman Alone
5. Personnel
6. The Scar
7. The Calm
8. Camera Buff
9. Blind Chance
10. Kung-fu

...plus 44 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Andrzej Dębski
Obraz Polski i Polaków w filmie niemieckim oraz Niemiec i Niemców w filmie polskim po 1945 r.
www.polska-niemcy-interakcje.pl/articles/show/36

seriale
- Czterej pancerni i pies w reżyserii Konrada Nałęckiego (21 odcinków: 1965-1969, odcinek 20 wyreżyserował Andrzej Czekalski),

+ Stawka większa niż życie w reżyserii Janusza Morgensterna i Andrzeja Konica (18 odcinków: 1967-1968),

+ 11-odcinkowy serial Buddenbrookoowie (Buddenbrooks, RFN-Polska-Austria 1979), będący ekranizacją powieści Thomasa Manna

- [Z THE OGRE] Podróż do śmierci - Die Reise in den Tod - Wolfgang Panzer - 1996
www.imdb.com/title/tt0806910/

1. Knights of the Teutonic Order

   --- Kino polskie ---

2. Forbidden Songs
3. More Than Life At Stake

   serial

4. The Promised Land
5. Bumerang
6. Dziś w nocy umrze miasto
7. When Love Was a Crime
8. enger
9. The First Day of Freedom
10. Possession

...plus 92 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Polskie filmy poświęcone problematyce lat wojny, okupacji 1939-1945, Powstania Warszawskiego 1944 i losom powojennym żołnierzy i konspiratorów.

www.sppw1944.org/index.html?http://www.sppw1944.org/books/films_spis.html

1. Kanal

www.filmportal.de/search?search_api_fulltext=polnische+Wirtschaft

- Hart - strona
- drugi set z filmami = strona 73

1. The Diary of Dr. Hart

   www.filmportal.de/video/das-tagebuch-des-dr-hart

   www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2XakiGiUqw

   www.google.com/search?q=Das+Tagebuch+des+Dr.+Hart&client=firefox-b-d&sca_esv=92641c2b9d8087ab&sca_upv=1&sxsrf=ACQVn09VUpSrrS_z-jWEZ3-Ziy6sg197IA%3A1708371984036&ei=ELDTZaboAfy7wPAPtMq-2A0&ved=0ahUKEwimsILKlbiEAxX8HRAIHTSlD9sQ4dUDCA8&uact=5&oq=Das+Tagebuch+des+Dr.+Hart&gs_lp=Egxnd3Mtd2l6LXNlcnAiGURhcyBUYWdlYnVjaCBkZXMgRHIuIEhhcnQyBhAAGBYYHki0B1CuAliuAnABeACQAQCYAaEBoAGhAaoBAzAuMbgBA8gBAPgBAvgBAcICBxAAGB4YsAOIBgGQBgE&sclient=gws-wiz-serp

www.sfp.org.pl/_vault/_files/sfp_2017/100_na_100.pdf

11.
www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Pomnik+Grunwaldzki+1910

www.youtube.com/watch?v=gE9Dx0eTCzU

1. The Musicians

   Kazimierz Karabasz

2. Hear My Cry

   Maciej Drygas

3. ABC Book

   Wojciech Wiszniewski

4. A Few Stories About a Man

   Bogdan Dziworski

5. Anything Can Happen

   Marcel Łoziński

6. Such a Nice Boy I Gave Birth To

   Marcin Koszałka

7. Storm in Poland

   Jerzy Bossak, Wacław Kaźmierczak

8. Seven Women of Different Ages

   Krzysztof Kieślowski

9. Family of Man

   Władysław Ślesicki

10. Talking Heads

    Krzysztof Kieślowski

...plus 1 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1989 - 1997

Motto
„Gdybyście mi dali nawet najlepszy w Europie fortepian, lecz kazali mi grać na nim przed audytorium, które tego, co gram, nie rozumie, zrozumieć nie chce i wspólnie ze mną przeżywać nie umie – straciłbym chęć i radość muzykowania.” – Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

61 autorskich filmów animowanych do muzyki klasycznej (55 filmów zrealizowanych na zamówienie Programu 1 Telewizji Polskiej S.A., 6 filmów niezależnych). Cykl adresowany jest przede wszystkim do widowni dziecięcej i młodzieżowej i ma na celu popularyzację muzyki poważnej w najlepszych polskich wykonaniach.

tvsfa.com/5185-miniatury-filmowe-do-muzyki-klasycznej-2/
tvsfa.com/kategoria/muzyka-klasyczna/

Miniatury filmowe, inspirowane muzyką klasyczną, obrazują najbardziej znane utwory Mozarta, Bacha, Chopina, Beethovena, Straussa czy Vivaldiego zabierając widza w niezwykłą podróż po świecie muzyki poważnej. Malownicze animacje oddające tempo i rytm muzyki, przedstawiają charakter największych dzieł światowej sławy kompozytorów. Różnorodność ich twórczości ukazują obrazy ilustrujące różne historie, miłość, radość czy nieznany baśniowy świat fantazji. Ciekawa propozycja nie tylko dla wielbicieli muzyki klasycznej.

pwm.com.pl/pl/sklep/publikacja/miniatury-filmowe-do-muzyki-klasycznej-4-dvd,,26198,ksiegarnia.htm

www.gandalf.com.pl/f/miniatury-filmowe-do-muzyki-klasycznej/

swiatmuzyki-sklep.pl/pl/p/Miniatury-filmowe-do-muzyki-klasycznej-4-DVD/121

swiatmuzyki-sklep.pl/pl/p/Miniatury-filmowe-do-muzyki-klasycznej-4-DVD/121

pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_Studio_Film%C3%B3w_Animowanych#Miniatury_Filmowe_do_Muzyki_Klasycznej

1. Exsultate Jubilate Alleluja

   Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

2. Kukułka

   Louis Claude Daquin

3. Symfonia dziecięca

   Leopold Mozart

4. Aria Królowej Nocy

   Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

5. Kuplety Torreadora z II Aktu Opery Carmen

   Georges Bizet

6. Rondo alla Turca z Sonaty A-dur KV 33

   Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

7. Czarodziejski flet. Uwertura. Fragment

   Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

8. Sonata F-dur KV 280. Adagio

   Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

9. Badinerie z II Suity orkiestrowej h-moll BWV 1067

   Johann Sebastian Bach

10. Flight of the Bumblebee

    Nikołaj Rimski-Korsakov

...plus 42 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

35mm.online/
www.polishanimations.pl/pl/
www.polishshorts.pl/pl/
www.polishdocs.pl/

Dokument autotematyczny

To coś więcej niż jedna z wielu odmian gatunkowych filmu dokumentalnego.

Dokument autotematyczny w kinie polskim nie jest zjawiskiem incydentalnym ani czymś ostatnio modnym, lecz od dawna stanowi specialité de la maison uprawiania u nas tej dziedziny twórczości. Dokument refleksywny pojawiał się w zaawansowanej, dojrzałej formie artystycznej jeszcze w czasach PRL-u. Już wówczas był uprawiany z zastosowaniem zarówno obrazów nieruchomych (malarstwo, grafika, fotografia w roli tworzywa), jak i ruchomych.

Studia nad morfologią znaczeń przekazów wizualnych, ze szczególnym podkreśleniem użycia techniki repollero, poetyki dekompozycji oraz wideoartu, uczyniły nasze dokumenty autotematyczne (refleksywne), zjawiskiem prekursorskim w świecie. Lista „zasług” wypada po latach naprawdę okazale. Do szczególnie interesujących realizacji rodzimych dokumentów autotematycznych z tamtego okresu należy zaliczyć: „Polską Kronikę Filmową” wydanie (anty)jubileuszowe 1959 nr 52 A-B, Andrzeja Munka, „Album Fleischera” Janusza Majewskiego, „Zdjęcie” Krzysztofa Kieślowskiego, „Wizytę” Marcela Łozińskiego, analityczne filmy Warsztatu Formy Filmowej,
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letterboxd.conexionsite.com/orinow/list/warsztat-formy-filmowej/edit/
***
cd.
„Oj, nie mogę się zatrzymać!” Zbigniewa Rybczyńskiego, „Copyright Film Polski MCMLXXVI” Piotra Szulkina, „Videokasetę” Filipa Bajona, „Klaps” Krzysztofa Kieślowskiego, „Na planie” Jerzego Ziarnika, „Przerwane śniadanie braci Montgolfier” – dyplomowa etiuda Michała Tarkowskiego, „Pierwszy film” Józefa Piwkowskiego, „Ścinki” Zygmunta Dusia oraz fenomenalne, unikatowe w skali światowej „Ćwiczenia warsztatowe” Marcela Łozińskiego. Warto dodać, iż niemal w tym samym czasie, w którym powstały „Ćwiczenia warsztatowe”, Zbigniew Rybczyński nakręcił w Stanach Zjednoczonych poczęte z ducha najlepszych tradycji polskiej szkoły dokumentu autotematycznego mistrzowskie „Schody”.

Współczesność po roku 1989 przydała temu gatunkowi szereg nowych znaczeń, o czym świadczą między innymi: „Tren na śmierć cenzora” Krzysztofa Magowskiego, „Usłyszcie mój krzyk” Macieja Drygasa, „Ostatnie zdjęcia. Brulion” Andrzeja Brzozowskiego, „Żywe obrazy” Stanisława Różewicza, „Żeby nie bolało” Marcela Łozińskiego, „Film znaleziony w Katyniu”.

Józefa Gębskiego, „Historia pewnej kamery” Marii Zmarz-Koczanowicz, „Dokument…” Małgorzaty Szumowskiej, „Po-lin. Okruchy pamięci” Jolanty Dylewskiej, „Takiego pięknego syna urodziłam”, „Jakoś to będzie” i „Ucieknijmy od niej” Marcina Koszałki, „Portrecista” Ireneusza Dobrowolskiego, „Spotkania” Kazimierza Karabasza oraz „Ojciec i syn” i „Ojciec i syn w podróży” Marcela i Pawła Łozińskich.

www.sfp.org.pl/_vault/_files/sfp_2017/100_na_100.pdf

1. Polish Film Chronicle 59/52AB
2. Fleischer's Album
3. The Photograph
4. The Visit
5. Oh! I Can't Stop!
6. Copyright Film Polski MCMLXXVI
7. Videokaseta
8. Slate
9. Na planie
10. So it Doesn’t Hurt

...plus 20 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

filmpolski.pl/fp/index.php?osoba=11116472

analityczne filmy WFF, należą do:
letterboxd.conexionsite.com/orinow/list/dokument-autotematyczny/

• The Market

Antologia polskiej animacji eksperymentalnej

Antologia przedstawiająca tytuły nie mieszczących się w głównym nurcie kina animacyjnego. Animacja eksperymentalna to szerokie pojęcie, którym określa się różne formy filmu animowanego, przełamujące konwencje formalne i narracyjne. Niniejsza antologia jest zbiorem kilkudziesięciu pozycji nie mieszczących się w głównym nurcie kina animacyjnego. Ważnym nurtem kina eksperymentalnego jest film abstrakcyjny, któremu poświęcona jest pierwsza płyta niniejszej antologii.

[...]

prospero.e-teatr.pl/film-animowany/3471-antologia-polskiej-animacji-eksperymentalnej.html

"Animacja eksperymentalna to szerokie pojęcie, którym określa się różne formy filmu animowanego, przełamujące konwencje formalne i narracyjne. Niniejsza antologia jest zbiorem kilkudziesięciu pozycji nie mieszczących się w głównym nurcie kina animacyjnego. Na trzech płytach znalazły się filmy abstrakcyjne i takie, w których manipulacjom poddane zostały obrazy fotograficzne, a także niekonwencjonalnie rysowane kreskówki. Niektóre realizacje są dziełem znanych twórców spoza środowiska filmowego, na przykład pisarza Stefana Themersona i jego żony Franciszki - malarki, projektanta form przemysłowych Andrzeja Pawłowskiego, czy fotografa Tomka Sikory. Są tu też utwory artystów należących do czołówki polskiej sztuki współczesnej: Józefa Robakowskiego i Jerzego Kaliny. Nie zabrakło też dzieł animatorów światowej sławy: Jana Lenicy, Waleriana Borowczyka, Zbigniewa Rybczyńskiego czy Jerzego Kuci. Zestaw filmów zawarty w Antologii Polskiej Animacji Eksperymentalnej jest na tyle różnorodny, że z pewnością każdy znajdzie w nim coś dla siebie." (Marcin Giżycki)

[...]

culture.pl/pl/dzielo/antologia-polskiej-animacji-eksperymentalnej

1. The Eye & the Ear
2. Once Upon a Time
3. Cineforms
4. Here and There
5. Banner of Youth
6. Somnambulists
7. Dynamic Rectangle
8. Test I
9. Demons
10. Stomp

...plus 30 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Album inauguruje monograficzną serię wydawniczą Narodowego Instytutu Audiowizualnego, prezentującą twórczość najwybitniejszych polskich animatorów. Na dwóch płytach znajduje się kilkanaście animacji oraz wyjątkowy dokument o Henryku Tomaszewskim – zrealizowany przez Daniela Szczechurę.

[...]

prospero.e-teatr.pl/katalog-tematyczny/1768-daniel-szczechura-polska-animacja.html

ANIMOWANE MYŚLI DANIELA SZCZECHURY

Daniel Szczechura to bez wątpienia jeden z największych mistrzów w dziejach nie tylko polskiej, ale i światowej animacji. Przed ćwierćwieczem – w 1990 roku – Międzynarodowe Stowarzyszenie Filmu Animowanego (Association Internationale du Film d'Animation – ASIFA) uhonorowało go Nagrodą Specjalną za nieoceniony wkład w sztukę i rozwój filmu animowanego.

[...]

www.polishdocs.pl/pl/czytelnia/2783/animowane_mysli_daniela_szczechury

1. Hobby. Daniel Szczechura. Kilka filmów animowanych jednego autora
2. Conflicts
3. The Chair
4. Graph
5. Hobby
6. Journey
7. Gorejące palce
8. Skok
9. Fatamorgana 1
10. Fatamorgana 2

...plus 8 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

www.filmweb.pl/film/Stanis%C5%82aw+Ignacy+Witkiewicz.+Witkacy-1968-549474/relateds

fina.gov.pl/event/zniewolona-wyobraznia-witkacy-na-ninatece-17-24-wrzesnia/

www.mnw.art.pl/aktualnosci/filmy-zwiazane-z-witkacym-dostepne-w-ramach-przegladu-on-line-na-platformie-ninateka-pl,806.html

1. Witkacy pod namiotem, czyli Szalona Lokomotywa w Teatrze Stu w inscenizacji Krzysztofa Jasińskiego

   www.filmweb.pl/film/Witkacy+pod+namiotem%2C+czyli+Szalona+Lokomotywa+w+Teatrze+Stu+w+inscenizacji+Krzysztofa+Jasi%C5%84skiego-1977-607954
   www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpqSkX-R4qU
   cyfrowa.tvp.pl/video/muzyka,witkacy-pod-namiotem,60772280

2. Witkacy ID

   www.filmweb.pl/film/Witkacy+ID-2009-743387
   www.filmweb.pl/film/Witkacy+ID-2009-743387/discussion/OPIS+FILMU,2686066
   www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9ailCGvnVc

3. Hamadria

   Hamadria 1981 - Jacek Schmidt
   www.filmweb.pl/film/Hamadria-1981-6016
   www.dailymotion.com/video/x82bcwg

4. Farewell to Autumn
5. Tumor Witkacego
6. Blaga

   film dyplomowy
   filmpolski.pl/fp/index.php?film=1260090

7. Witkacy
8. Epilog

   www.filmweb.pl/film/Epilog-1988-406027
   vod.tvp.pl/filmy-dokumentalne,163/epilog,398888
   filmpolski.pl/fp/index.php?film=423332

9. "Demoniczne" kobiety Witkacego

Ekranizacja "13 bajek z Królestwa Lailonii dla dużych i małych" Leszka Kołakowskiego, wydanych po raz pierwszy w Czytelniku w 1963. Pierwotnie zbiór składał się z 14 bajek, z których jedna - "Wielki głód" - została zatrzymana przez cenzurę i wydrukowana została dopiero w 1995.

filmpolski.pl/fp/index.php?film=429234

Pomysłodawcą adaptacji oraz autorem scenariuszy i opracowania dialogów był Jan Zamojski.

www.wikiwand.com/pl/Czterna%C5%9Bcie_bajek_z_Kr%C3%B3lestwa_Lailonii_Leszka_Ko%C5%82akowskiego

tvsfa.com/3767-14-bajek-z-krolestwa-lailonii-leszka-kolakowskiego/

KRÓTKI METRAŻ #14. O NAJWIĘKSZEJ KŁÓTNI. Kiedy baśń przenika się z filozofią

film.org.pl/r/krotki-metraz-14-o-najwiekszej-klotni-kiedy-basn-przenika-sie-z-filozofia-225851

„14 bajek z królestwa Lailonii Leszka Kołakowskiego” w praktyce edukacyjnej

pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/kse/article/view/9458/9145

1. Piękna twarz

   filmpolski.pl/fp/index.php?film=429234
   tvsfa.com/782-piekna-twarz/
   pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/kse/article/view/9458

2. Czerwona łata
3. O sławnym człowieku
4. Wojna z rzeczami
5. Garby

   filmpolski.pl/fp/index.php?film=4212569
   tvsfa.com/792-garby/
   pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/kse/article/view/9458

6. O wielkim wstydzie

   filmpolski.pl/fp/index.php?film=4212570
   tvsfa.com/794-o-wielkim-wstydzie/
   pressto.amu.edu.pl/index.php/kse/article/view/9458

7. O zabawkach dla dzieci
8. Jak bóg Maior utracił tron
9. Jak Gyom został starszym panem
10. The Biggest Quarrel

...plus 2 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Lista filmów z największą liczbą widzów w Polsce

1 --- 66 - filmy polskie i zagraniczne

www.wikiwand.com/pl/Lista_film%C3%B3w_z_najwi%C4%99ksz%C4%85_liczb%C4%85_widz%C3%B3w_w_Polsce

1. With Fire and Sword
2. Pan Tadeusz
3. Clergy
4. Quo Vadis

   Aktualnie najdroższym polskim filmem wyprodukowanym po 1989 roku jest "Quo Vadis" Jerzego Kawalerowicza (z budżetem 76 140 000 zł).

   www.filmweb.pl/news/Film+o+Villas+najdro%C5%BCsz%C4%85+polsk%C4%85+produkcj%C4%85+po+1989+roku+Mo%C5%BCe+kosztowa%C4%87+100+milion%C3%B3w-151792

5. Avatar
6. Titanic
7. The ion of the Christ
8. Shrek 2
9. Shrek the Third
10. Letters to Santa 3

...plus 56 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

POLSKIE WESTERNY. Szlakiem bezprawia – od Bieszczadów po Teksas

film.org.pl/a/polskie-westerny-szlakiem-bezprawia-od-bieszczadow-po-teksas-152402

***

dodać
Szlakiem bezprawia. Człowiek znikąd (1983), reż. Józef Kłyk
www.filmweb.pl/film/Szlakiem+bezprawia%3A+Cz%C5%82owiek+znik%C4%85d-1983-822186

1. Rancho Texas
2. The Law and the Fist
3. The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg
4. Komedia z pomyłek
5. Kwestia sumienia
6. Wolves' Echoes
7. Południk zero
8. Dark River
9. All and Nobody
10. Dłużnicy śmierci

...plus 3 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Lista filmów animowanych z największą liczbą widzów w Polsce.

1 --- 32 - filmy polskie i zagraniczne

www.wikiwand.com/pl/Lista_film%C3%B3w_z_najwi%C4%99ksz%C4%85_liczb%C4%85_widz%C3%B3w_w_Polsce

1. Shrek 2
2. Shrek the Third
3. The Lion King
4. Shrek Forever After
5. Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa
6. Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs
7. Despicable Me 3
8. Ice Age: The Meltdown
9. Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted
10. Minions

...plus 22 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Lista filmów z największą liczbą widzów w Polsce:

1 --- 20 - filmy polskie
21 --- 26 - filmy zagraniczne

www.wikiwand.com/pl/Lista_film%C3%B3w_z_najwi%C4%99ksz%C4%85_liczb%C4%85_widz%C3%B3w_w_Polsce

1. Knights of the Teutonic Order

   32 315 695 widzów

2. In Desert and Wilderness

   30 989 874

3. The Deluge

   27 615 921

4. Nights and Days

   22 350 921

5. Forbidden Songs

   15 235 445

6. Mister Blot's Academy

   14 094 014

7. Sexmission

   11 164 329

8. Colonel Wolodyjowski

   10 934 145

9. The Leper

   9 834 145

10. Pharaoh

    9 453 934

...plus 16 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.