What he said

Jonathan McCalmont on this year's Cannes shortlist and eventual award (which went to Haneke's Amour and though of course I'm happy about that...):

Clearly, this shit is intolerable.

Aside from the obvious moral arguments about inclusivity and discrimination, there is also an important aesthetic argument to be made about the importance of unfamiliarity to the art house cinematic experience. Indeed, chief among the many pleasures of art house film is its ability to introduce us to whole new ways of seeing the world. For example, when Apichatpong Weerasethakul won in 2010 for Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, he was not only being rewarded for his cinematography and storytelling but also for his great skill at articulating what it must be like to see the world through his eyes, the eyes of a forty year-old gay man from Thailand. Similarly, when Cristian Mungiu won the Plame d’Or for 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days he was not only being rewarded for the skill with which he explored the issue of abortion, but also for his capacity to speak for an entire generation of Romanians who grew up under the rule of Nicolae Ceauşescu. Central to the appeal of art house cinema is its peerless ability to show us the world from an entirely different perspective. Indeed, it is telling that the success of both Weerasthakul and Mungiu lead directly to explosions of critical interest in films from their respective countries.  Art house cinema is all about new perspectives and art house cinema audiences are forever crying out for new ways of seeing the world.

By choosing only established male directors for competition, 2012 Cannes festival organisers ensured that their Palme d’Or would introduce no new conceptual blood into the cinematic bloodstream.

By choosing a shortlist dominated by elderly men, Cannes festival organisers denied art house cinema audiences the chance to discover something genuinely new.

I've long felt that Cannes has become less interesting as the years go by and vaguely remember mentioning this phenomenon of Old White Men dominating the competition section. So basically, what Jonathan said.

Haneke's Love

Somehow, I thought I was over suffering and the slow decline into death. Really. Thought that was all so 2009, the obssessive examination of all things decaying and dying.

Turns out old obssessions can still take. And when it's Haneke, it must be watched.

And it has Trintignant! And Emannuelle Riva! (And, incidentally, Isabelle Huppert).

Haneke cast French screen icon Jean-Louis Trintignant, 81, and Emmanuelle Riva, 85, in the story of George and Anne, a couple of retired music teachers, whose rich and adoring relationship is cruelly tested when she suffers a stroke.
Set in the hushed rooms of the couple's parquet-floored Parisian flat, the film charts Anne's physical and mental decline, and the increasingly unbearable strain it puts on George, who pledges to care for her at home until the end.
Utterly believable in the role, Riva told a press conference after the screening that she threw herself heart and soul into the part, sleeping in her dressing room at the studio where it was shot to remain immersed in her character.

[...]

"Once you reach a certain age, you necessarily have to face the suffering of the people you love," he told the press conference. "It's part of nature." "It raises the issue of how to manage the suffering of the people you love." Wheelchair-bound, half-paralysed, the intelligent, vivacious Anne early on tells her husband she does not wish to live such an impaired life. But carry on they do, as far as George can take her.

Now doesn't that sound just like something I'd like to watch?

Weerasethakul and an interview with JLG

So glad Uncle Boonmee won the Palme d'Or.

Here's:

A general interview.

An older one from Reverse Shot.

And some links.

**

Oh, and a fantastic interview with JLG here:

LALANNE: You don't claim any rights over the images that any artists might be lifting from your films?

GODARD: Of course not. Besides, people are doing it, putting them up on the Internet, and for the most part they don't look very good... But I don't have the feeling that they're taking something away from me. I don't have the Internet. Anne-Marie [Miéville, his partner, and a filmmaker —JML] uses it. But in my film, there are images that come from the Internet, like those images of the two cats together.

LALANNE: For you, there's no difference in status between those anonymous images of cats that circulate on the Internet, and the shot from John Ford's Cheyenne Autumn that you're also making use of in Film Socialisme?

GODARD: Statutorily, I don't see why I'd be differentiating between the two. If I had to plead in a court of law against charges of filching images for my films, I'd hire two lawyers, with two different systems. The one would defend the right of quotation, which barely exists for the cinema. In literature, you can quote extensively. In the Miller [Genius and Lust: A Journey Through the Major Writings of Henry Miller, 1976 —JML] by Norman Mailer, there's 80% Henry Miller, and 20% Norman Mailer. In the sciences, no scientist pays a fee to use a formula established by a conference. That's quotation, and cinema doesn't allow it. I read Marie Darrieussecq's book, Rapport de police [Rapport de police, accusations de plagiat et autres modes de surveillance de la fiction / Police Report: Accusations of Plagiarism and Other Modes of Surveillance in Fiction, 2010], and I thought it was very good, because she went into a historical inquiry of this issue. The right of the author — it's really not possible. An author has no right. I have no right. I have only duties. And then in my film, there's another type of "loan" — not quotations, but just excerpts. Like a shot, when a blood-sample gets taken for analysis. That would be the defense of my second lawyer. He'd defend, for example, my use of the shots of the trapeze artists that come from Les Plages d'Agnès. This shot isn't a quotation — I'm not quoting Agnès Varda's film: I'm benefiting from her work. I'm taking an excerpt, which I'm incorporating somewhere else, where it takes on another meaning: in this case, symbolizing peace between Israel and Palestine. I didn't pay for that shot. But if Agnès asked me for money, I figure it would be for a reasonable price. Which is to say, a price in proportion with the economy of the film, the number of spectators that it reaches...

[...]

LALANNE: Is the idea of accomplishing a body of work, one which life granted you the time to complete, a matter that weighs upon you?

GODARD: No. I don't believe in the body of work. There are works, they might be produced in individual installments, but the body of work as a collection, the great oeuvre, I have no interest in it. I prefer to speak in terms of pathways. Along my course, there are highs and there are lows, there are attempts... I've towed the line a lot. You know, the most difficult thing is to tell a friend that what he's done isn't very good. I can't do it. Rohmer was brave enough to tell me at the time of the Cahiers that my critique of Strangers on a Train was bad. Rivette could say it too. And we paid a lot of attention to what Rivette thought. As for François Truffaut, he didn't forgive me for thinking his films were worthless. He also suffered from not ending up finding my films as worthless as I thought his own were.

Thin Cannes

There has to be something seriously wrong with a festival whose best work appears to be from directors over 60.

Cannes has increasing blipped off my radar; among the few things I'd like to see from this year is:

Manoel de Oliveira's The Strange Case of Angelica (aren't you in awe of a filmmaker who still makes films at a 101?)

Abbas Kiarostami's The Certified Copy (I've been hungering for a Kiarostami. He's not just palate-cleansing, he's pristine and joy-giving.)

Takeshi Kitano's Outrage (more yakuza = more, better gorgeousness).

and finally, finally (though it breaks my heart to see some think it will be his last), Godard's Film Socialisme.

In Cannes next week, Godard, now 79, will be presenting what many believe will be his final feature: Film Socialisme. In advance of the premiere, the arch-provocateur has made a subversive trailer, which lasts under two minutes and shows not just highlights but the entire film speeded up. In the frenetic digital age, Godard is telling us, audiences don't have the time or the patience to go to festivals to watch 35mm prints of art-house movies in cinemas. They want instant 90-second gratification on YouTube. 

I don't know that Godard is 'telling us' anything as straighforward as 'In the frenetic digital age, [...] audiences don't have the time or the patience to go to festivals to watch 35mm prints of art-house movies in cinemas',  but we'll let that pass. The whole trailer here.

God knows what horrors the Woody Allen holds, so I'm not even going there.