Now at www.cinemaoverthewaters.blogspot.com!

3:13 pm  •  17 May 2012  •  1 note

(Source: mrhankey)

11:53 am  •  18 April 2012  •  94 notes

“The movie business has always been a business like any other, and even more so than most. Every dollar counted and every penny had to show up on the screen. To put it another, blunter way – it was very likely, as a cost-saving device, an economic imperative to utilise to the fullest every board, plank and canvas flat on the studio stages. Sets and parts of sets would get recycled, with lower-budgeted films probably benefiting the most from the cast-offs of the major productions, although even major productions cannibalised sets and parts of sets, architectural trim, chandeliers, wall sconces, sections of staircases, doorways, etc. from other films. Consider this example: George Sidney’s Scaramouche was released in the US in May 1952. Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful, which was shot between April and June 1952, was released in December 1952. A left-over section of one of Scaramouche’s most elaborate set pieces, the duel in the theatre, is used as a throwaway in Minnelli’s film. The partial set is not necessary for the short twenty-second, single-shot scene in The Bad and the Beautiful, in which Kirk Douglas rehearses with Lana Turner – but it certainly enhances it.

The set, clearly kept in mothballs for future use, resurfaces for a cameo appearance in Minnelli’s Two Weeks in Another Town, ten years later in 1962, with added-on opera box modules. This time, Kirk Douglas is rehearsing Rosanna Schiaffino. Is it the same ladder?”

- The Secret Life of Objects, Mark Rappaport in Rouge.

3:33 pm  •  17 April 2012  •  1 note

Diego Velázquez, The Lunch (1620; oil on canvas)

1:20 am  •  17 April 2012

“At one time I liked some of his personal films, like Voyage to Italy. But I find him, all in all, disgusting. I detest Rossellini. Even the so-called historical films, like The Rise Of Louis XIV and Socrates. Under the pretense of talking about history, he shows only the pomp and the machinery of the court. One comes out of these films empty handed. The Louis XIV film flees from its subject in the end. And so what he does is disgusting because it is only decorative. He teaches nothing. These films say something about Italian television and Italian Christian Democrats, and that’s all. Even if Rossellini denies that he’s a Christian Democrat, that is certainly the subject of the film.”

- Jean-Marie Straub.

This should NOT be seen as any form of endorsement, mere interest. And though I worship at the altar of both Huillet/Straub and Rossellini with almost equal devotion, I found this anecdote typical of the Rivette-style reactionary attitude that JM adopts/enacts in many an interview.

Plus: “It’s wrong to say Fassbinder is a fascist exactly. It’s better to say simply that he’s very, oh, unpolitical. Or better, he is very irresponsible […] Fassbinder is irresponsible. And at this point of time in Germany, when anti-communism is flourishing, he is completely irresponsible.”

11:11 pm  •  12 April 2012  •  5 notes