Wednesday, October 18, 2006

Witness to Reds: The March


Witness to Reds: The March

"The picture (Reds) was never ready to be none. You're never ready. It's like a poem. A poem is never finished. It's abandoned. And certainly, the preparation of a movie is never done. It's abandoned. Because if you have some sort of aspiration to art, there are an infinite number of ways to work on it and change it, and this is not very compatible with commerical filmmaking."

~Warren Beatty, Reds extras tract

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Friday, October 13, 2006

Edvard Munch by Peter Watkins

Edvard Munch by Peter Watkins

This is the only way to know Edvard Munch: from the inside out. We are present in all the key moments of his life as the artist is slowly forced to the surface & learns to break from its hypocritical Christian Victorianism to find more, to seek a greater truth. All his answers do exist on canvas & later lithographs. All it takes is the right peers & one's final belief in himself. Peter Watkins is the only director who could have literally pulled it off. His framing, its repetition, the understanding of minor themes playing out in Munch's life had greater significance than one might imagine & his making the camera alive (an unfortunate visitor, always watching, always catching the characters eye when no one should be looking), is utter genius. To express oneself is the role of an artist, to find oneself in all the mess of our mind is a most difficult task, but to measure one's feelings as visual is what makes artists different, especially in expressionism. A brilliant film, far beyond the schemes of Hollywood's possibilities. Thank you, Mr. Watkins.

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