Sublime Cinema

15/11/2023

• "A film is, or should be, more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what's behind the emotion, the meaning - all that comes later. The feel of the experience is the important thing, not the ability to verbalize or analyze it."
• "Anyone who has ever been privileged to direct a film also knows that, although it can be like trying to write 'War and Peace' in a bumper car in an amusement park, when you finally get it right, there are not many joys in life that can equal the feeling. The screen is a magic medium. It has such power that it can retain interest as it conveys emotions and moods that no other art form can hope to tackle."
― Stanley Kubrick

25/10/2023

Liv Ullmann's excellent interview for Yugoslav TV (April 1980) - you can rarely see such deeply insightful and intelligent conversation between a famous movie star and perceptive journalist, especially nowadays. Liv is simply stunning here, with her radiant grace, warmth, spirituality, profoundness, brightness, soulfulness, vulnerability, tenderness and loveliness.

Лив Улман из серије То сам ја - Разговор Драгана Бабића са шведском глумицом, норвешког порекла, која је почела каријеру као позоришна глумица, а дебитовала ...

24/10/2023

Scorsese on major movie franchises

''The danger with major movie franchises is what it’s doing to our culture. Because there are going to be generations now that think movies are only those – that’s what movies are. They already think that. Which means that we have to then fight back stronger. And it’s got to come from the grassroots level. It’s gotta come from the filmmakers themselves. And you’ll have, you know, the Safdie brothers, and you’ll have Chris Nolan, you know what I mean? And hit ’em from all sides. Hit ’em from all sides, and don’t give up. Let’s see what you got. Go out there and do it. Go reinvent. Don’t complain about it. But it’s true, because we’ve got to save cinema.
Cinema could be anything, it didn’t just have to be serious. Some Like It Hot – that was cinema, for instance. But, I do think that the manufactured content isn’t really cinema. No, I don’t want to say it. But what I mean is that, it’s manufactured content. It’s almost like AI making a film. And that doesn’t mean that you don’t have incredible directors and special effects people doing beautiful artwork. But what does it mean? What do these films – what will it give you? Aside from a kind of consummation of something and then eliminating it from your mind, your whole body, you know? So what is it giving you?”

08/10/2022

Woody Allen on cancel culture :
"Well, you know, the human race has consistently behaved stupidly throughout history. Cancel culture is the stupidity of our generation. Time will pass, we will look back and it will happen to us as with the McCarthy era. We will be ashamed of it. And we'll say to ourselves, 'My God, did people really do that and accept it? That teachers and university professors be fired, that scientists be discredited, that actors be put on blacklists ?' People will take time to see it. Again, the example of McCarthyism serves, which was horrible in the US. Everyone was called a communist. 'If you listened to folk music - communist.' It turned into something laughable. And then people started seeing it. There are already many people who see cancel culture for what it is : an embarrassment."
("ABC Spain")

13/09/2022

Sad news from France ... Jean-Luc Godard was one of the greatest directors in the history of modern cinema - a brave and trailblazing artist who created a new paths and new dimension of cinematic expression with his seminal works like "Breathless", "Contempt", "Alphaville", "Pierot le Fou", "Masculin Feminin", "My Life To Live", "A Woman Is A Woman", "Week End", "Band of Outsiders", "Every Man For Himself", and many others. A true artistic giant has departed to Eternity, but his groundbreaking works will always be a huge inspiration for generations to come.
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/obituaries/article/2022/09/13/jean-luc-godard-legendary-french-film-director-dies-aged-91_5996746_15.html

From the 1960s, Jean-Luc Godard was among those who pushed cinema's aesthetic and narrative limits while embodying the New Wave. The French-Swiss filmmaker died on September 13.

11/08/2022

"Man is not a noble savage – he's an ignoble savage. He is irrational, brutal, weak, silly, unable to be objective about anything where his own interests are involved. That about sums it up. I'm interested in the brutal and violent nature of man because it's a true picture of him. And any attempt to create social institutions on a false view of the nature of man is probably doomed to failure."
— Stanley Kubrick

18/06/2022

IN MEMORIAM : Jean-Louis Trintignant
(11 Dec 1930 – 17 Jun 2022)

Sad news from France ... Trintignant was one of the greatest actors of his generation and main protagonist in many famous films. His work with legendary directors like Krzysztof Kieślowski, Bernardo Bertolucci, Claude Lelouch, Francois Truffaut, Costa-Gavras, Claude Chabrol, Roger Vadim, Eric Rohmer or Michael Haneke, left an indelible mark in the history of modern cinema. He had a special gift for darker, complex characters with unique depth and strength of emotions, which certainly contributed to the great artistic success of many movies in which he acted. Trintignant once said : "The best actors in the world are those who feel the most and show the least." And he certainly was an epitome of such mastery.

https://www.thewrap.com/jean-louis-trintignant-dies-91-conformist-z-amour/

The actor, filmmaker and race car driver worked with auteurs such as Costa-Gavras, Éric Rohmer, Francois Truffaut and many more

13/04/2022

"This guy goes to psychiatrist and says : 'Doc, uh, my brother is crazy, he thinks he's a chicken.' And the doctor says : 'Well, why don't you turn him in ?' The guy says 'I would, but I need the eggs !' I guess that's pretty much how I feel about relationships. They are totally irrational, and crazy, and absurd … but, I guess we keep going through it because, uh, most of us … need the eggs."
― from "Annie Hall" (Woody Allen, 1977.)

15/03/2022

• "That’s essentially how I feel about life ... Full of loneliness and misery and suffering and unhappiness. And it’s all over much too quickly."
• "I feel that life is divided into the horrible and the miserable. That's the two categories. The horrible are like, I don't know, terminal cases, and blind people, crippled. I don't know how they get through life. It's amazing to me. And the miserable is everyone else. So you should be thankful that you're miserable. Because that's very lucky to be miserable."
― from "Annie Hall" (Woody Allen, 1977.)

10/02/2022

"Don't wait for things to get easier, simpler, better. Life will always be complicated. Learn to be happy right now. Otherwise, you'll run out of time."
― from "The Intouchables" (Olivier Nakache & Éric Toledano, 2011)

'Don't wait for things to get easier, simpler, better. Life will always be complicated.' Learn to be happy right now. Otherwise, you'll run out of time.'

- The Intouchables, 2011. ✨

08/02/2022

Concise and inspiring insight by Francis Ford Coppola.

31/01/2022

"Any biography that has to do with human relationships is a melodrama, and it is precisely for this reason that I think it is fair to make melodramatic films. The way in which Americans approach this genre of films conveys to the viewer only feelings, nothing more. I want to convey those feelings to the viewer, but giving them the possibility to reflect on them and analyze what they feel."
― Rainer Werner Fassbinder

30/12/2021

"I've often noticed that we are not able to look at what we have in front of us, unless it's inside a frame."
― Abbas Kiarostami

29/12/2021

"I think people talk too much ; that's the truth of the matter. I don't believe in words. People use too many words and usually wrongly. I am sure that in the distant future people will talk much less and in a more essential way. If people talked a lot less, they would be happier. Don't ask me why."
― Michelangelo Antonioni

12/11/2021

Sadly, true.

28/10/2021

• "I despise stories, as they mislead people into believing that something has happened. In fact, nothing really happens as we flee from one condition to another ... All that remains is time. This is probably the only thing that's still genuine - time itself ; the years, days, hours, minutes and seconds."
• "I like the continuity, because you have a special tension. Everybody is much more concentrated than when you have these short takes. And I like very much to build things, to conceive the scenes, how we can turn around somebody, all the movements implied in these shots. It's like a play, and how we can tell something, tell something about life... Because it's very important to make the film a real psychological process."
― Béla Tarr

28/09/2021

Given Von Trier's deep admiration for Tarkovsky, it's somewhat strange that only one film by Russian master is on this list ...

https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/lars-von-trier-favourite-films-of-all-time/?fbclid=IwAR3B_p6w05OQ86WDYUKZ6pBgqbhtrh-WXzvzLVTSpjlVBsL0T2v9GDLdToU

Essential viewing.

16/09/2021

"What do I want to happen ? I simply want our life here to become more human. We need to return to those places to find much of what is still important and authentic to our lives."
— Theo Angelopoulos

02/09/2021

• "Why, mother, nothing happens as we wish ? Why ? Why does one have to rot in silence torn between pain and desire ? Why did I live my life in exile ? Tell me mother, why can't one learn to love ?"
• "This suspect pain … The silence around me … My stubborness to want to learn, to want to know ... Then darkness."
― from "Eternity and a day" (Theodoros Angelopoulos,1998.)

03/08/2021

"Human existence is a brutal experience to me… an agonizing, meaningless experience with some oases, delight, some charm and peace, but these are just small oases. Overall, it is a brutal, brutal, terrible experience, and so what can you do to alleviate the agony of the human condition, the human predicament ? That is what interests me the most. I continue to make the films because the problem obsesses me all the time and it’s consistently on my mind and I’m consistently trying to alleviate the problem. And I think by making films as frequently as I do I get a chance to vent the problems. There is some relief."
― Woody Allen

06/07/2021

"Society invents a spurious convoluted logic to absorb and change people whose behaviour is outside its mainstream. Suppose that I can all the pros and cons, know that I'm gonna have a short life, etcetera and etcetera, but still want to use smack ? They won't let you do it, because it's seen as a sign of their failure - the fact that you just simply choose to reject what they have to offer. So … Choose Life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose your friends. Choose a fu***ng big television, choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol and dental insurance. Choose fixed interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose leisurewear and matching luggage. Choose a three-piece suit on hire purchase in a range of fu***ng fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the f**k you are on Sunday morning. Choose sitting on a couch watching mind-numbing and spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fu***ng junk food into your mooth. Choose rotting away, pi***ng and sh****ng yourself in a home, a total fu***ng embarrassment to the selfish, f**ked-up brats you've produced. Choose Life."
― from "Trainspotting" (Danny Boyle, 1996.)

31/05/2021

Andrey Tarkovsky on "Solaris" (pt.3)

"Lem's novel, in my own specific understanding of it, expresses precisely man's inability to concentrate on himself, and points to the conflict between man's spiritual life and the objective acquisition of knowledge. It's a conflict that will never give a man any peace until he has achieved complete outward freedom. We might call this freedom social, the freedom of the social individual who is not concerned with bread, food, a roof, or his children's future. Mankind does not move forward synchronously, it stops and starts and goes off in different directions. And only when scientific discoveries occur in the course of technological development, there is a corresponding leap in man's moral development. There is an extraordinary cohesion between the two. That was the problem which exercised me all the time I was working on the film. In simple terms, the story of Hari's relationship with Kelvin is the story of the relationship between man and his own conscience. It's about man's concern with his own spirit, when he has no possibility of doing anything about it, when he is constantly drawn into the exploration and development of technology."

04/05/2021

• "Film is a very, very powerful medium. It can either confirm the idea that things are wonderful the way they are, or it can reinforce the conception that things can be changed. Entertainment today constantly emphasises the message that things are wonderful the way they are. But there is another kind of cinema, which says that change is possible and necessary and it's up to you. Any film that supports the idea that things can be changed is a great film in my eyes ... A film can promote the idea of change without any political message whatsoever but in its form and language can tell people that they can change their lives and contribute to progressive changes in the world. Any movie that has that spirit and says things can be changed is worth making."
― Wim Wenders

27/04/2021

"Now it's serious. At last it's becoming serious. So I've grown older. Was I the only one who wasn't serious ? Is it our times that are not serious ? I was never lonely neither when I was alone, nor with others. But I would have liked to be alone at last. Loneliness means I'm finally whole. Now I can say it as tonight, I'm at last alone. I must put an end to coincidence. The new moon of decision. I don't know if there's destiny but there's a decision. Decide ! We are now the times. Not only the whole town - the whole world is taking part in our decision. We two are now more than us two. We incarnate something. We're representing the people now. And the whole place is full of those who are dreaming the same dream. We are deciding everyone's game. I am ready. Now it's your turn. You hold the game in your hand. Now or never. You need me. You will need me. There's no greater story than ours, that of man and woman. It will be a story of giants... invisible... transposable... a story of new ancestors."
— from "Der Himmel über Berlin" (W.Wenders / P. Handke, 1987)

29/03/2021

“You are wrong if you think that Joy emanates only or principally from human relationships. God has placed it all around us. It is in everything and anything we might experience. People just need to change the way they look at things. We just have to have the courage to turn against our habitual lifestyle and engage in unconventional living.”
― from "Into The Wild" (S. Penn / J. Krakauer, 2007)

23/03/2021

• "I didn't want to accept my wretched role. But now it's too damn lonely. We try out attitudes and find them all worthless. The forces are all too strong. I mean the forces... the horrible forces. You need to watch your step among all the ghosts and memories."
• "All this talk... There's no need to discuss loneliness. It's a waste of time."

― from "Silence" (Ingmar Bergman, 1963)

15/03/2021

“I'll tell you something banal. We're emotional illiterates. And not only you and I - practically everybody, that's the depressing thing. We're taught everything about the body and about agriculture in Madagascar and about the square root of pi, or whatever the hell it's called, but not a word about the soul. We're abysmally ignorant about both ourselves and others.There's a lot of loose talk nowadays to the effect that children should be brought up to know all about brotherhood and understanding and coexistence and equality and everything else - that's all the rage just now. But it doesn't dawn on anyone that we must first learn something about ourselves and our own feelings. Our own fear and loneliness and anger. We're left without a chance, ignorant and remorseful among the ruins of our ambitions. To make a child aware of it's soul is something almost indecent.You're regarded as a dirty old man. How can you understand other people if you don't know anything about yourself ?"
— Ingmar Bergman

28/01/2021

"There is something about yourself that you don't know. Something that you will deny even exists, until it's too late to do anything about it. It's the only reason you get up in the morning. The only reason you suffer the blood, the sweat and the tears. This is because you want people to know how good, attractive, generous, funny, wild and clever you really are. Fear or 'Revere me, but please, think I'm special'. We share an addiction. We are approval junkies. We're all in it for the slap on the back and the gold watch. The hip-hip-hoo-f**kin'-rah. Look at the clever boy with the badge, polishing his trophy. Shine on you crazy diamond … because we're just monkeys wrapped in suits, begging for the approval of others."

― from "Revolver" (Guy Ritchie, 2005)

14/01/2021

"But the cinephile is ... a neurotic! And that’s not a pejorative term. The Bronte sisters were neurotic, and it’s because they were neurotic that they read all those books and became writers. There's a famous French advertising slogan that says 'When you love life, you go to the movies'. It’s false ! It’s exactly the opposite - when you don’t love life, or when life doesn’t give you satisfaction, you go to the movies."
― François Truffaut

29/12/2020

"They tell you that if you're honest and if you say what you feel, then you'll get what you want. The truth is : no one wants the real you. So you stop telling the truth. You lie to your friends. You lie to your family. You lie to everyone who says they love you for being you. Because guess what ? They are lying too. They only want pieces and parts. They want to pick and choose."

― from "Assassination Nation" (Sam Levinson, 2018)