Books

  • Raoul Ruiz – Poetics of Cinema 1 (1996)

    1991-2000BooksRaoul Ruiz

    From the article linked to above:

    Quote:
    Ruiz’s Poetics of Cinema must be one of the strangest and most interesting works on the cinema ever to be written. While addressing many contemporary issues around the politics of the entertainment industry, globalisation and the powers of audiovisual images, this work also draws on discourses as untimely as ancient treatises on Chinese painting and the 16th century occult theories of Ramon Lull. But perhaps what is most striking about Poetics of Cinema is its composition in which not only diverse theories and reflections are combined but that they are done so frequently in the form of theoretical fictions as delirious as Ruiz’s cinema itself, that completely blur the boundaries between the real and the imaginary, the true and the false. This has led several critics, notably, Christine Buci-Glucksman to make direct links between Ruiz’s aesthetics and the Baroque, rather than more contemporary aesthetic movements such as Surrealism (Buci-Glucksmann, 9-41). As Laleen Jayamanne has pointed out, Ruiz may use the “decorative and stereotypical aspects of Surrealism” but he rejects its underlying metaphysics in favour of a Baroque “allegorical system” (224). The crucial difference between the Baroque, as Ruiz understands and employs it and the ethos of cinematic Surrealism, is the replacement of the motto “everything is fundamentally simple” with its opposite “everything is fundamentally complex”. Jayamanne emphasises that cinema, for Ruiz, is an allegorical system inhabited by ghosts, zombies and the dead, which operates by a “perverse logic” (224) or a “baroque […] multiplication of points of view, of an object, of a space, [of] a body” (225). Already this affinity between the complexity of the Baroque and perversion is apparent: for Ruiz, Surrealism is inferior to the Baroque because it remains too French, or in other words, fails to be complex or perverse enough.Read More »

  • Akira Kurosawa – Something Like An Autobiography (1983)

    1981-1990Akira KurosawaBooksJapan

    Something Like an Autobiography
    by Akira Kurosawa

    Published by Vintage | 1983 | 205 pages

    Description:

    Quote:
    Among Japanese film makers, no one is perhaps as universally known as Akira Kurosawa.

    “Something like an Autobiography” is an account of the legendary director’s early life. It is only a partial account, encompassing his childhood, adolescenct years, the early years of his film career, up to the point of Rashomon. Nonetheless, the book benefits anyone keen for understanding the man behind such remarkable films as Seven Samurai, Ikiru, Rashomon, and Dersu Uzala among others. Kurosawa’s films were – Stuart Galbraith IV writes in the introduction to his book “The Emperor and the Wolf” – first and foremost, deeply humanist pictures, films which effortlessly transcend cultures and centuries. Something like an Autobiography helps one understand the evolution of the artist Kurosawa, the influences that shaped his vision.Read More »

  • Jean-Luc Godard – A Conversation with Jean-Luc Godard (1968)

    1961-1970BooksFranceJean-Luc Godard

    Here`s a long Godard interview from 1968 where he not only gives interesting insides into his La Chinoise but also talks about Foucault, Roland Barthes, Bergman`s Persona,
    Pasolini and much more.

    Here are some quotes:

    Quote:

    That’s precisely why we’re
    trying to make movies so that future Foucaults
    won’t be able to make such assertions with quite
    such assurance. Sartre can’t escape this reproach,
    either.Read More »

  • Jean-Luc Godard and Youssef Ishaghpour – Cinema: The Archaeology of Film and the Memory of a Century (2005)

    2001-2010BooksFranceJean-Luc GodardJean-Luc Godard and Youssef Ishaghpour

    Reviews
    ‘ . . .the greatest living cinematic artist, the wisest, most transformative, most original agent provocateur at work in the fields of cinema? The short answer: sans doute. Godard is to his medium what Joyce, Stravinsky, Eliot, and Picasso were to theirs: rule-rewriting colossi after whom human expression would never be quite the same.’
    The Village Voice

    ‘It’s possible to hate half or two-thirds of what Godard does – or find it incomprehensible – and still be shattered by his brilliance.’ Pauline Kael
    Read More »

Back to top button