A post to point you towards an important discussion: The idiosyncratic film blogger/indie distributor Filmbrain raised a legitimate worry this past Friday, in the post “Brains Not Required (Or: Whither Subtlety?)“, leded by an Antonioni-quote:

“I want the audience to work. I ask them to see the film from the beginning and devote their full attention to it, treating it with the same respect they would give a painting, a symphony or any other work of art. I treat them with the same respect by inviting them to search for their own meanings instead of insulting their intelligence with obvious explanations.”
– Michelangelo Antonioni

Are today’s filmmakers spoon-feeding their audiences? Mainstream Hollywood fare most certainly is, but are independent films and foreign specialty fare also more and more letting their audience off the hook too easily? Filmbrain reflects on the negative response from critics in 1961 to Antonioni’s masterpiece L’Avventura, and uses two recently released feature films in US theatres to illustrate his point:

Today all but the shabbiest of critics are unafraid to confront the “obscure”, and you’re more likely to find passionate defenses of a challenging work rather than flippant dismissals such as Crowther’s. Yet how often are today’s critics (and filmgoers for that matter) given the opportunity to use their noggins once the lights go down? Are filmmakers living up to their half of the bargain, treating us with respect as expressed in the second half of Antonioni’s statement?

I recommend you to read all of Filmbrain’s musings, and do not quit reading until you’re through the comments. That is where the discussion is to be found.

Dear reader,

My previous post here dates back to October 19th 2007; in a time when the world looked much more different than now. A bomb went off in Karachi, but Benazir Bhutto was still breathing. Somewhere a small child put their first foot forward, and an old man went blind. I can’t remember anything from that day. Except! I wrote here on Subtitles that Jim Emerson had created a montage that expressed his love for cinema. Since then, I’ve not been writing, as I wanted to write. Yet now, I have returned. Why?

This is my tree. My return to writing in this space began after reading a piece titled “On Blogging“, in which Mr. Girish Shambu poses a simple, difficult question with more explanation than this: “Why do you blog?”. I remember answering, without answering: “I don’t - anymore. So lets move on to the next item in my feed reader.” Yet, just minutes later, a comment in the thread, by Mr. Michael Guillen of The Evening Class, played to me like a grandfather’s wise words to his grandchild.

He tells a great story, a personal one, as an answer to Girish’s question. I’ll just quote the conclusion: “I blog to retain creative integrity and to keep pace and to make friends with others in the blogosphere. And to dance against death.” It wasn’t a particular familiar element in this that set me off, pondering my return to writing here at Subtitles. It was simply the sheer value of a good story, well told - combined with the obvious relation Girish’s question had to my own reluctancy.

This, in turn, reminded me that my distance to writing was a hoax. Damn sure I’ve got the time to think, to write. I’ve got the words. The fingers. The pixellated ink. And now… the spark:

So, I’m back in this space. And I plan to both write the long, and the short of it.

This is easily the best original web video montage I’ve ever seen. Click on over to the amazing Jim Emerson’s post “Close Up: The movie/essay/dream” to view his film and read his thoughts on the close-up and why he decided to create an essay of moving images to visualize his thoughts. The result is… I don’t know what to say. It’s akin to the fantastic scene in Day for Night, when Truffaut’s director character opens a package that contains books on all his cinema idols and friends. It’s quite simply about being in love with cinema. And I salute it!

I love Criterion, as I’m sure every modern cineaste do. And I dig those montly newsletters, with their quote-clues to future releases. The most recent one made me very happy:

It has to be an indication that Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm is being given the Criterion treatment in the near future. And nothing makes me happier. The Ice Storm is everything American Beauty isn’t, and personally I rank it among Lee’s finest. I read somewhere that Rick Moody, author of the novel the film is adapted from, even said the film improved upon his own book. So, much kudos also to producer/screenwriter James Schamus. I expect the supplemental material on Criterion’s edition to be exquisite!

(Related bonus link: A touching anecdote about Ang Lee’s spiritual meeting with Ingmar Bergman, on Criterion’s blog.)

UPDATE: Now it is confirmed; Criterion is even writing about Ang Lee and the color correction process at their blog.

Today, I continue my presentation of short films here on Subtitles to Cinema. This time, it is an animated Norwegian short film with the long, yet precise, title: There’s a man in the habit of hitting me on the head with an umbrella (2005). The film is directed by Cathinka Tandberg, and tells a story that is… well, quite evident in its title. A man finds himself in the situation of being hit in the head with an umbrella (by another man). The absurdist and simple plot is derived from a short story by Argentinian writer Fernando Sorrentino, and has become a charming and melancholic animated short. Watch the 4 minute film - embedded below or in higher quality (I’ll share more of my thoughts after you’ve seen it):

What I really appreciate in this well-composed film, is that the comical essence of the situation is not exploited into cheap laughs and slapstick [sic]. Instead, Tandberg gives room for a subtle tristesse and creates two vulnerable, slightly tragic characters. I love how the simply cut drawings tells us so much about who these men are. Also, the film is a great example of how dialogue can be replaced by clear actions, and also in this case; very expressive music and sound. I felt every tap of the umbrella against the man’s head. Having seen this wonderful short many times now, both in festivals and online, I can also assure you that it holds very well upon repeat viewings.

A side note; I discovered on YouTube that quite a few individuals have used the same Sorrentino short story as basis for their short films (not animated). They’re without the same success as Ms. Tandberg, but for the curious ones it makes for an interesting comparison. You can find them here, here and here. (Btw, it’s a shame that some of them fails to credit the author.)

A film poster might be a tiny subject for a blog post, but this is so cool, I could not not put it up here. Since seeing Inland Empire in Lisbon (of all places) last april, I’ve been championing for a theatrical release of this Lynch film here in Norway. Sadly, the market for a surreal 3 hour Lynch film is not that big here, but after a long, hard distribution juggle, it finally opened in two cinemas a few weeks ago.

It is released by Norway’s most cherished art cinema distributor, Arthaus, a non-profit organization owned by the Norwegian Association of Cinematheques. Arthaus has a long-running collaboration for their film posters with celebrated graphic designer Egil Haraldsen of Exil design, and eventhough he’s been doing this for over 10 years, his Inland Empire poster is one of his finest.

I present the Norwegian theatrical poster for Inland Empire here with a certain pride; I find it to be the most striking poster for this film anywhere. To me, it captures all the intensity of the film, the lynchness in the tone, the horror of Laura Dern’s character’s journey and the pixellated visuals (that I really loved). Kudos to Mr. Haraldsen and Arthaus for this one.

(Check out this Inland Empire poster collection. The German one is most alike the Norwegian)

Every now and then, I’m going to present some short films here at Subtitles to Cinema. It can either be random discoveries, well-known classics or even some of my own stories. Today, I’d like to share the brilliant French short film J’Attendrai Le Suivant (2002), directed by Philippe Orreindy. It is a perfectly told story, and I would ruin it by writing too much about it beforehand. So, enjoy - and please do leave any thoughts in the comments.

Autumn is the season for new, local films in Norwegian cinemas. The most anticipated release this fall is Gone with th Woman (Tatt av kvinnen), directed by Petter Næss (Elling) from a celebrated cult-novel by Erlend Loe. The story is about an unnamed man (He), and his encounter with a woman who decides to enter his life. Or as described by The Norwegian Film Institute: “…about a young man’s first tentative steps into the potential disaster area of love, about the female monologues that pass for dialogues, and the right of a modern man to decide who wears the pants in the family.”. The opening paragraph of Loe’s book explains a lot (and has become a much-quoted line in Norway):

That was when she started coming around more often. In the evenings, right before I turned in for the night. She would sit down and talk. Talk about how much she loved silence, and how great it was to spend time alone. Talk and talk and never stop.

The book was published in 1993, and within few years it had become a phenomenon, and its author Erlend Loe was catapulted into fame. Loe is educated as a screenwriter from The Danish Film School, and as a result of that his stories tend to carry with them a certain cinematic flare. So, when a film version of Gone with the Woman went into production last year, it came as no surprise - though Loe himself was not involved with the adaptation. A few years back, the story was adapted into a play - also directed by Petter Næss - and the same main actor, Trond Fausa Aurvåg (The Bothersome Man), now brings the persona of ‘He’ from theater to the silver screen.

Now, I have yet to see the film myself - it opens here friday 7th of September, but has already garnered rave reviews from local critics. The film is also a part of Toronto International Film Festival, and I really hope it finds an audience there. The programmers seem really fond of it, describing the main character like this: “[He] is a preternaturally lethargic bachelor leading what he considers a harmonious existence: cycles of work followed by staring blankly into space in his apartment,” and continuing; “The visual scheme is, at times, as hyper-stylized as a Jacques Demy movie, and as coolly unwelcoming as a Tarkovsky landscape”.

I know the filmmakers are really psyched about presenting the film in Toronto, and wish them the best of luck. Anyone going to Toronto will find the charming Norwegians through this information sheet. (And make sure to congratulate them on being Norway’s submission for Best Foreign film Oscar this year.)

When I’ve seen the film, I’ll be back with a review. Apart from being a huge fan of the source material and loving what I’ve seen of the film so far, I’m especially looking forward to seeing what famous Swedish actor Peter Stormare (Fargo) can make of the most fun supporting character from the book; Glenn. So to conclude here, I give you two still images from scenes involving Stormare’s character’s encounters with He in the local sauna (and then, the un-subtitled trailer):

(click to enlarge)

So, on with the first interview published on Subtitles to Cinema. It is a conversation I had with the great Iranian film director Abbas Kiarostami a while ago. Hope you enjoy it!

* * *

Abbas Kiarostami makes only one half of his films. The rest is up to the audience to create themselves.

“I prefer to work alone,” he says.

Photo: Hanne Hvattum (contact)

The Iranian film director, photographer and poet is sitting across from me on a soft bench in the middle of Oslo’s Stenersen Museum, surrounded by walls with his own huge, black/white photos. The precise, short-worded and patient man in his sixties have got his sunglasses so firmly joined to his nose that they seem to have been with him since birth. And what is he talking about in this moment? To be alone. Working in solitude, without anyone interfering with him.

“The video camera has liberated the cinema artist,” says Kiarostami. “Now, we’re no longer trapped by big budgets and large crews when we are about to make film. An artist should be mostly alone with his tools: The camera and the actors, or objects.”

In Kiarostami’s video work Five dedicated to Ozu (2003) you can find a characteristic scene: A piece of wood, sized like a fist is washed onto the shore. The waves pushes it gently up and down in the sand for a few minutes, until a smaller piece of the wood comes off from the large one. The smallest wooden piece remains on the beach, but he larger one floats out to sea.

There’s similar scenes in many of Kiarostami’s photographies; motives from nature that allude to what he wants to say about us humans. A treet that stands alone, separated from a group of trees that stands together like soldiers.

“To me, nature represents an escape from daily life, the political life, society and city life.”

He was invited to Norway by Films from the South festival. At the same time a collection of his poetry was published in Norwegian translation, and his photos exhibited at this museum where I talk with him.

I ask him if he has any fears when he’s making films. Is he ever scared of something?

“The collective is what is dangerous. It is good to be in a group with people, but at the same time it is dangerous. It is not good if a group has the same idea, the same way of thinking,” the director answers.

“When you are in a group, a leader can transport you away. This is why individualism is very important. Especially for the artist. If there is a hundred people around me when I make a film, it won’t work. Everyone should get paid, and then it won’t be my idea, but he producer’s. A painter can say: ”This is my work.” The same goes for a photographer. But if a filmmaker makes an expensive film, he won’t be able to say that it is his.”

Alienation. This film philosophy and work method is connected to his original education as a painter, according to Kiarostami. Because that is where he started off, before a job with a producer of commercials in the 1960s led him into cinema. His first short films from the 1970s is small, interesting stories, mainly with children as leading characters. His playful and simple style, already evident in these first films, was going to color his whole filmography. For instance in his most famous film, Taste of Cherry, which in 1997 was awarded the Palme d’Or in Cannes (and was given the Criterion treatment two years later).

You mix both fiction and documentary filmmaking techniques, and you work a lot with amateurs in front of the camera. Are you capturing reality better like that?

“What is reality? I think the origins of any fiction film has to be something real. Documentary film does not exist. The moment a director makes one simple move with the camera, or joins to different clips together, he has made a choice – whether its label is ’fiction’ or ’documentary’.”

Kiarostami himself is more concerned with reminding the audience that they are watching a film, than making them think that what is unspooling on the screen is real.

“A filmmaker has to be conscious about his responsibility. I always wish to remind the audience that they are watching a film. You see, it is very dangerous to make the audience more emotionally engaged than they need to be. In the darkness of the cinema, people are so innocent. It makes them feel that everything is closer and stronger. That is why we should not make them even more emotional: People need to think when they watch films, not to be robbed of their reason.”

How do you achieve this?

“I make half movies. They are only made complete in the meeting with every single viewer.”

Fire. In the Iranian film Portrait of a Lady Far Far Away (2005), directed by Ali Mosaffa, there is a scene that burned itself onto my retina, and stayed there months after seeing the film. In the scene, we’re at a secret art show in a backyard in Tehran. During a performance, someone sets fire to a large photo. While the picture is burning to ashes, the artist proclaims that what was pictured, had now been set free.

The connection between images and flames has a painful and complex back story in Iran. When the Islamic revolution was set in motion at the end of the 1970s, fires in cinemas was given a symbolic meaning. It started when Rex Cinema in Abadan was set on fire on August 20th 1978, and approximately 430 people died. During the next year 180 cinemas in Iran was burned to the ground.

“The revolution affected our lives on all areas,” he tells me. “When the cinema in Abadan burned, I was not thinking about movies. I was concerned with the whole nation burning. I did not care about cinemas that day, but the people of Iran and what was happening with them.”

Censorship. The cinema fires, though, have had a paradoxical consequence: In fact, it was only after the fires that the nation’s own film scene began to flourish. The shah who had governed the country before the revolution, had let foreign (mostly western) films dominate the cinemas. But after the revolution, it was only legal to screen Iranian films. It resulted in enormous tasks, and huge growth, for the Iranian film community.

But at the same time, they’ve obviously had very strict censorship laws to struggle with. The so-called “Red line” – a constantly fluctuating border created by the authorities that controls what an artwork is allowed to express – has given Iranian cinema a unique aesthetics; they are often inferring, discreet films rich with allegory.

In the middle of all this is Abbas Kiarostami, who has been one of the foremost representatives of Iranian cinema. But sadly, his films have been prohibited in his homeland since 1997, when Taste of Cherry – which was about suicide – put him on the black list of the authorities.

Respiration. “This kind of complete exhibition of my work, would never happen in Tehran – they way things are now,” he laments. “I’m very sorry for the fact that the Iranian people can’t watch my films in public.”

My thoughts return to the burning photo from Ali Mosaffa’s film – and the figure that was captured within it – and I ask Kiarostami if he feels powerful when he’s making film.

“Why do you ask about this? I feel very happy when I capture a moment with my camera, but it does not give me any power other than a good feeling.”

He’s suddenly silent for a long while.

“It is like breathing. When you breath, you don’t expect anything special, you just need [to breath]. I believe the artist needs to create something just like he needs to breathe air.”

My time is up. The translator shakes hands, and says “Thank you very much”. But suddenly Kiarostami speaks up again:

“Have you seen the film, “The Rose”, that I’m screening here in the museum?”

“No,” I say.

“Lets watch the last five minutes of it together,” says Kiarostami.

We enter the video projection room, which during our interview has let out a surreal, hypnotic soundscape in the background. The film that Kiarostami wanted to show me, is a looped video montage of the photographs that is being exhibited in the museum. We’re watching it, and waiting. The final image is staying on screen longer than the others. Suddenly, it catches fire in the bottom right corner and burns completely to ashes in front of our eyes - inside his film.

Dear reader,

Welcome to a new film blog; Subtitles to Cinema. This is the place in which I, Norwegian writer/filmmaker Karsten Meinich, will share my thougths on cinema from all corners of the world, and also my own work.

So, who am I, and why do I write about cinema?

I’m a half-Turkish Norwegian with moustache and beard. I’m 25 years old, and I’m madly in love with film. I dig both American and European cinema and films from other parts of the world alike, but my goal, and passion, is to find and delve into films that transcend in some way, - that carry me over into another place (examples at the end of this post).

I’m going to write more about these subjects, but for now… I’ll say we’re on a need to know basis. I’ve been writing about film in Norwegian for many years - starting out in ‘99 at long-running, though now defunct, web magazine FilmListen. Five years ago I decided to shift into focusing mainly on making my own films, but I’ve also been writing freelance for Norwegian film journal Rushprint and its blog Rushblogg.

Personal and passionate writing about cinema have always been a dear thing to me; both as a reader and as a writer. For the last few years I’ve been slowly falling in love with some exceptional writing being laid out on a variety of English language film blogs - so much that I’ve almost completely ceased writing myself.

But then I thought I should give it another shot; I would like to try writing in English - try to take part in the ongoing discussion (or rather; Lovemaking with cinema art) that is going on in all these wonderful film blogs around (you can find links to some of these in my blogroll). That idea of creating “Subtitles to Cinema” is at least two years old. So it has been long in the making. Finally, I now have a space for this kind of writing. Content-wise, the focus here will be on writing about films that engage me, doing interviews with people that inspire me and commenting on issues that I care about. And I’ll make sure to spark a discussion or two.

So, I hope you will find something worth reading here in the weeks and months and years to come. Again: Welcome to “Subtitles to Cinema”, and please subscribe to the feed.

Best regards,

Karsten

PS: I’m adding four stills from my two most favorite films from recent years. Norwegian film Reprise (2006) and German-Turkish film Gegen die Wand (2004). Both films are recent masterpieces of European cinema worth checking out (I’ll write more on them further on).