Perhaps the discovery that wisdom has other tongues and ministers than we, that though we should hold our peace the truth would not the less be spoken, might check injuriously the flames of our zeal. A man can only speak so long as he does not feel his speech to be partial and inadequate. It is partial, but he does not see it to be so whilst he utters it. As soon as he is released from the instinctive and particular and sees its partiality, he shuts his mouth in disgust. For no man can write anything who does not think that what he writes is for the time the history of the world…
A headmaster of my acquaintance sent me an article commenting on the loss of heroes for today’s youth. The article concluded, as all such articles must, with a solution to the problem, in this case a strategy for presenting George Washington, of all people, in some way that was guaranteed to secure the admiration of students. I barely glanced at it. There is no such strategy. Just talking about “how to present” is already hopeless capitulation…
The central irony is that we don’t have heroes anymore because the are too real, representations of them are too rich and detailed. There is no space for our imaginations to occupy, no room for us to supply them with mythic life. The old-style heroes had an intimidating kind of greatness that could make you feel like not bothering to develop your own average greatness. We no longer approve of that demanding kind of greatness; what we want now is a supportive and inclusive kind of greatness.
Camera 7 is under new management.
With the indulgence of the Camera Cinemas brass, I hope to embellish and intensify South Bay film culture, but every gesture depends on community interest and support.
Here’s what we’re doing:
The Camera Cinemas Legacy Screening Series begins on Wednesday, August 4th, with a free screening of HAROLD & MAUDE at 7:00 p.m. The Legacy Series is a monthly program of select films that screened at Camera One during its inaugural year (1975). All films will be presented on 35mm, with vintage trailers attached. Screenings will feature introductions by local filmmakers, critics and professors. Our first Legacy screening takes place just one month before the 35th anniversary of the grand opening of Camera One on South First Street in San Jose. This initial event will feature brief reflections on the history and evolution of Camera Cinemas, followed by local filmmaker Jarrod Whaley’s remarks about the career of director Hal Ashby and his account of shooting a new film at Palo Alto locations featured in HAROLD & MAUDE. “Witness the Revival of the Original Camera Cinemas Spirit!” boasts our flier. Again, we will not be charging admission to this event, though we hope you’ll buy some snacks and drinks to help us offset the licensing and shipping fees associated with repertory screenings of this kind.
Special events will be more prevalent at Camera 7, but there’s also the matter of current release programming. I’ll be working to program small, personal films, not just Sundance hits or limited releases with a name cast. Granted, my selections will not always appear in the line-up, but when they do I’ll be making a lot of noise and asking for support. It’s incredibly difficult to book small films at Camera 7 — it would be painful to see them come and go without reaching their intended audience.
The first film on my personal programming slate is ALAMAR, which opens at Camera 7 on August 6th for a one-week run with limited showtimes. ALAMAR is possibly the most gentle film I’ve ever seen — it’s small and quiet, incidental and unobtrusive, but it’s also transporting, transcendent and deeply moving. ALAMAR perfectly embodies everything I envision for nook-and-cranny programming at Camera 7. It goes without saying that this film needs your support — my struggle to get it booked at Camera 7 amid blockbuster summer releases required a great deal of tenacity and, well, a refusal to take “no” for an answer. Please make an effort to see ALAMAR during its first few days at Camera 7 and tell others to see it before the end of its run (August 12th). If we can identify a market for films of this kind, we’ll be able to program more of them. In keeping with my intention to reach out to the community, I will personally introduce every screening of ALAMAR throughout its run, reproducing that film festival ambience which goes hand-in-hand with less commercially-minded filmgoing experiences.
Perhaps obviously, my goal is to make Camera 7 a hub — even a home — for those who care about film culture. I recently connected with South Bay Indie Film Meetup Group and will continue to reach out and sponsor such groups, facilitating membership drives and offering discounts and special treatment when possible. I’ve placed tables along the hallways in Camera 7 in order to encourage people to sit and peruse various printed matter distributed in our lobby, and in time we’ll have plenty of film-related magazines on hand. In short, we don’t want to facilitate an atmosphere that foregrounds a transaction — buy your ticket, see your movie, go home. We like having you around.
I was quoted telling newspaper reporters that digital projection, 3D screens and D-BOX motion seating at Camera 7 “don’t come at the expense of higher culture.” I’d like to see myself keep that promise, so mark your calendars, show up, and hold me accountable.
If you have any requests, concerns or other feedback, you can reach me at alejandro@cameracinemas.com.
Pauline Kael was particularly gifted at sensing differences among directors, often making brutal distinctions when appraising a given vision or stylistic predilection. The following excerpts, taken from reviews of Renoir’s Boudu Saved from Drowning and Huston’s The Bible, present a unified aesthetic front. I find these passages both instructive and inspiring, as I’m afflicted with the kind of cinematic wildness she meticulously congratulates here. (I also happen to like the phrases “screen artist,” “movie-making sixth sense,” “sinfully extravagant” and “Promethean temperament.”)
“Boudu is a more leisurely film than we are used to now, not that it is long, or slow, but that the camera isn’t in a rush, the action isn’t overemphatic, shots linger on the screen for an extra split second — we have time to look at them, to take them in. Renoir is an unobtrusive, unselfconscious storyteller: he doesn’t ‘make points,’ he doesn’t rub our noses in ‘meaning.’ He seems to find his story as he tells it; sometimes the improvisation falters, the movie gets a little untidy. He’s not a director to force things; he leaves a lot of open spaces. This isn’t a failure of dramatic technique: it’s an indication of that movie-making sixth sense that separates a director like Renoir from a buttoned-up-tight gentleman-hack…He lets a movie breathe…Renoir’s camera reveals the actors as if they were there naturally or inadvertently — not arranged for a shot but found by the camera on the streets, in the shop, on the banks of the Seine. The camera doesn’t overdramatize their presence, it just — rather reticently — picks them up, and occasionally lets them disappear from the frame, to be picked up again at a later point in their lives.”
“John Huston is an infinitely more complex screen artist than David Lean. He can be far worse than Lean because he’s careless and sloppy and doesn’t have all those safety nets of solid craftsmanship spread under him. What makes a David Lean spectacle uninteresting finally is that it’s in such goddamn good taste. It’s all so ploddingly intelligent and controlled, so ‘distinguished.’ Lean plays the game of spectacles like a sane man. Huston tests himself, plays the crazy game crazy — to beat it, to win…
Huston shoots arrows all over the place; he pushes himself too hard, he tries to do too many things. [The Bible] is episodic not merely because the original material is episodic but also because, like Griffith in Intolerance, he can find no way to rhythm together everything he’s trying to do. Yet the grandeur of this kind of crazy, sinfully extravagant movie-making is in trying to do too much. We tend, now, to think of the art of the film in terms of depth, but there has always been something about the eclectic medium of movies that, like opera, attracts artists of Promethean temperament…I don’t mean men like DeMille who made small-minded pictures on a big scale — they’re about as Promethean as a cash register. I mean men like Griffith and von Stroheim and Abel Gance and Eisenstein and Fritz Lang and Orson Welles who thought big, men who’s prodigious failures could make other people’s successes look puny.”
The following is a brief but not-lacking-in-depth discussion between Slant writer Joseph Jon Lanthier and DVD Talk writer Tyler Foster regarding the relationship between cinema and a technology like D-Box motion seats. This slightly edited exchange took place on Twitter, where these two cinephiles stir things up as @j_jon_lanthier and @droidguy1119.
Lanthier: I’m not talking about representation, tho, I’m talking about tactile sensation. I.e., buzzers in theater chairs that make you jump.
Lanthier: Imagine a movie that felt, tasted, sounded, looked and smelled exactly like real life. That’s NOT cinema. That’s Bazin’s point.
Foster: I guess I feel that if all of those sensations have been artificially created, that is something uniquely cinematic.
Lanthier: It might be a kind of art, but cinema, like most modes of art, is defined by its limitations.
Foster: What if someone created what you described using CG?
Lanthier: To me the product/stimuli is more crucial than the technology. So it wouldn’t matter.
Lanthier: It’s like this. When photos started moving they weren’t photos anymore. When “radio” got picture w/it it wasn’t radio anymore.
Lanthier: I’m not saying that a “full sensation” theater would be pointless. It just wouldn’t be cinema anymore, it’d be something else.
Foster: In that regard, I think D-BOX is still cinema because D-BOX is a removable frill, just like 3D.
Foster: When it’s all melded together and you can’t experience it any other way, that’d be different.
Lanthier: I agree, my point is just that D-box, unlike 3D, is tactile. That’s a BIG step away from the cinematic experience.
Lanthier: I’m a cranky 26 year old who knows nothing of contemporary culture and fears change. Get off my lawn!
Foster: I am your opposite, a 24-year-old who adopts new things like it’s going out of style. Eat hoverboard dust!
Lanthier: Well, I do love me my iPhone, and have even reviewed films after watching on a 3.5 inch screen. So maybe I’m not so crotchety.
Lanthier: The bottom line here is that to me, anything that distracts from the screen/speakers is uncinematic. Which doesn’t = bad.
Foster: So does the future tech that envelops all senses completely, to the point you forget about it, come back around to “cinema”?
Lanthier: No, because uncinematic senses are being stimulated. Cinema is to future tech as a novel is to its cinematic adaptation.
As a too-cerebral writer I found relief in a medium — film — that curtailed my ability to express ideas. I aspire to thought-as-organism.
Antonioni is mistaken for cerebral because of his formal rigidity — but his treatment of themes is inconclusive, childlike, “discoverist.”
The perfect cinematician knows what he wants to talk about but not what he wants to say. Thematic clarity and tendentiousness are not the same.
Antonioni and Bresson, for instance, arranged people and staged events in order to look at them, in order to reflect and discover.
The barbaric certitude of a Bergman or Godard offends — in them I see only SIGNS of that testable, quantifiable commodity we call intelligence.
There are dangers, too, in characterizing intelligence as dynamism and adaptability, using words like “organic” and “vital” and “intuitive.”
We might be more intimidated than inspired by the dynamism of some of our heralded broncos — Welles, Cassavetes, Coppola, Carax.
I’m particularly concerned about the limitations — even dangers — which beset this strain of filmmaker. Enfant terrible? Genius? Just labels.
The apotheosis of Cassavetes at the hands of Ray Carney is largely fraudulent and has tended to produce cultish behavior in acolytes.
[Thursday, June 24, 2010, from Twitter]
Bertolucci builds a structure that supports improvisation. Everything is prepared, but everything is subject to change, and the whole films is alive with a sense of discovery… And Brando knows how to improvise: it isn’t just Brando improvising, it’s Brando improvising as Paul… His performance is intuitive, rapt, princely… At a more complex level, he helps Bertolucci discover the movie in the process of shooting it, and that’s what makes moviemaking an art… Acting involves the joy of self-discovery, and to improvise, as actors mean it, is the most instinctive, creative part of acting–to bring out and give form to what you didn’t know you had in you… A director has to be supportive for an actor to feel both secure enough and free enough to reach into himself…
The camera is only a dumb machine; it makes no claims to authority. Indeed, the camera is capable of making no claims, no assertions about the world, at all. Everything revealed by the camera has been revealed to the camera, revealed by its subjects in the camera’s presence. And there is no such thing as a revelation that is not true…
Documentaries are not inherently more direct or truthful than other kinds of films. But from this fact it does not follow that documentaries are too naive to take seriously unless they repudiate the aspiration of revealing reality. What particular documentary films reveal about reality, how they achieve their revelations, are questions to be addressed by acts of criticism, not settled a priori by theoretical fiat.
I won’t make a speech, but I’ll be glad to answer any questions. If I make a speech I’ll be fifty percent wrong, and if I answer your questions I’ll only be a little wrong…
In the first place, improvisation is a silly word because when you have a scene to do, you don’t really know anything about it until you see the people that are going to act in the picture. I’m more interested in fitting the story around the actors. A script is an important basis, but it doesn’t have to be followed exactly…A good example was a week before starting a new picture with John Wayne. I was down in Mexico on location and found a Mexican boy who I thought was awfully good. I made a test for him for a small part and gave him the lead opposite Wayne…
Actors per se I don’t give too much a hoot about, but personalities I do. I can take a personality and make something out of him, though I’ve worked with a lot of personalities who were both personalities and good actors, like Gary Cooper.
The adolescent looks for a mentor in whose authority he can believe. He eats or reads what his mentor recommends and, inevitably, there are occasions when he has to deceive himself a little; he has to pretend that he enjoys olives or War and Peace more than he actually does. Between the ages of twenty and forty we are engaged in the process of discovering who we are, which involves learning the difference between accidental limitations which it is our duty to outgrow and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot trespass without impunity.
