Manhattan 1979

A great romantic comedy. The script was co-written by Marshall Brickman and Woody Allen. Critics often say that it is a cinematic love letter to New York. Issac, a 40-year-old neurotic writer, is romantically involved with Tracy, a 17-year-old student. His love life is a complicated and slippery terrain: he is tormented by his second ex-wife Jill, a lesbian who has written a memoir where she tells all the intimate details of their marriage. He leaves his job to work on a memoir about living in New York. However, everything gets complicated when he starts dating Mary, his best friend's former lover. The reaction of the critics was very favorable and the film raised more than $ 485 thousand dollars in its first week. And, in all time, the amount reached $ 39.9 million. Adjusted for inflation, it grossed more than $ 127 million, making it the second largest movie at Allen's box office, after Annie Hall. The musical score is fantastic and homage to George Gershwin.

Allen would repeat with Manhattan, almost mimetically, the formula that gave him success a couple before, a work that goes back to addressing the meaning of relationships in New York in the 70s, from the perspective of the economic and intellectual high class. On this occasion, instead of showing an unfolded character, as he did in Annie Hall, he introduces his work by means of an omniscient narrator who not only narrates but also tells his own story, since he is a writer in the creative process of a novel. Thus, in the very opening of the film, this voiceover describes New York as a city in constant black and white, a rhetorical resource that justifies the romantic monochromatic treatment of the film itself. Since then, the film / novel could be understood as the soundtrack of a relationship, since Allen is responsible for alternating significant scenes of iconic moments in his private life with songs that evoke the actions we see on screen. Rhapsody in Blue is the theme selected for the opening and closing of the story. The chords composed by George Gershwin allow us to emphasize the emotional charge that Allen intends to infer in the presentation of the city, while the literal definition of rhapsody as musical work composed of fragments of other works, leads us to identify the director's tribute to cinema, music and literature. He loves and she loves could be cataloged as "the song" of Isaac and Tracy, his 17-year-old girlfriend, and will be played while they ride in a carriage, in love with Central Park. The title and the images reveal a love that, in some way, is intuited as a passenger, unstable by the use of the undefined present that does not allow knowing the recipient of such love, but the presence of a momentary passion. Later, when Isaac, after having abandoned Tracy, decides to return to find her repentant, the same song will sound again with a very different meaning, which comes to affect the resurgence -present- of a past love that was thought forgotten. . It is a pure and naive love of the innocent youth of Tracy.

I've got a crush on you will be the melody with which we identify the relationship between Isaac and Mary, the woman for whom he abandoned Tracy, who was the best friend’s lover, Yale. We see how the intricate web of sentimental relationships gets complicated, but Woody Allen succeeds in proposing an identifying sound support to make the assimilation process much simpler. The title, which would have another meaning like "being crazy about you", reinforces Mary's initiative to renounce her anti-artistic principles to accompany Isaac to the cinema. The song will also mention a love at first sight, arising not so much from the physical attraction as from the connection that you feel when you look at it, that will be just what happens with the protagonist when you see Mary for the first time, and decide to leave in an unreflective way to Tracy. Finally, we have selected the theme Do, do, do, from Gershwin, as well as the previous ones. This song is presented according to its composers as a furtive and playful kiss and would reinforce the idea of that second adolescence lived by Mary and Isaac. Two adults who are not expected to have such and ardent and childish behavior but the mature relationship they were not predestined to have. For this reason, the couple will not be able to have control and everything will be in a constant search for a Utopian and unattainable love for someone like Isaac, a passionate dreamer, and  above all and inveterate loner. 

Directed by Woody Allen

Produced by Charles H. Joffe

Written by Woody Allen and Marshall Brickman

Cast:

 Woody Allen

Diane Keaton

Michael Murphy

Mariel Hemingway

Meryl Streep

Anne Byrne

Music by George Gershwin played by the New York Philharmonic, Zubin Mehta and the Buffalo Philharmonic, Michael Tilson Thomas

Cinematography Gordon Willis

Last Year at Marienbad 1961

"... This story is over. A few seconds and it will be frozen forever, in a marble past, like this garden carved in the stone, this hotel, with its rooms now deserted, these people motionless and silent, perhaps dead some time ago. Guardians of the corridors through which I advance to meet you, between lines of immobile, vigilant, indifferent faces. While you doubt, perhaps, staring at the entrance of this garden "

The voiceover (narrator) which walks us through the labyrinthine corridors and rooms of the hotel where the (non) history of The Last Year in Marienbad takes place gives us some clues about possible interpretations of this fascinating cinematic dream hatched by the two hands by the script by Alain Robbe-Grillet and Alain Resnais' camera (although the screenwriter claimed that the text he gave to Resnais "was more than a script", as it contained "the breakdown describing the film plane to plane, almost image by image, with the planned assembly ", always according to Robbe-Grillet, Resnais shot the film" respecting very carefully "the written" and “without ever intervening to try to modify something ", words with which the writer seems to claim greater authorship of the final work - an idea that, seeing the later works of the filmography of Resnais, one would not dare to question - although later,  this idea clarifies that Resnais nevertheless "turned the film into a work by Alain Resnais, into something much more psychological, through almost imperceptible changes, in the direction of actors, in the sound effects, in things so imperceptible that if you read my book and see the movie you may think they are exactly the same ").

Well, this fascinating creation that some have wanted to describe as an allegory about death or as a clear immersion in the world of dreams, as the pure representation of desire, as the disturbing universe of poetic creation or the immense and therefore unbounded space of ideas, gives even for multiple interpretations more, and, surely, to possible and reasonable arguments of which only you can be the creator. For a story as simple as its plot might seem, I warn you, it is only a plausible idea of what the plot could be and nothing more. The real story is directed to the emotions of the spectator through its representation, and to the disconcerting conjunction of images and words.

Be that as it may, we are faced with a work that allows endless interpretations (and therefore the one that is exposed here is only one of the many possible), in which the plot is broken down as in an immense puzzle of infinite possibilities; a three-dimensional puzzle in which time and space unfold, overlap, repeat or stagnate, without submitting at any time to the logic of conventional narrative. A minimal plot line is the starting point on which the enigmatic universe of the film is structured: X (Giorgio Albertazzi) is in the rooms of a luxurious hotel with Y (Delphine Seyrig), to which he tries to convince that both had met a year earlier in the gardens of Frederiksbad ("or maybe it was in Marienbad"), citing for a new meeting a year later, and Y claims not to remember anything that X assures him happened. The encounters of X and Y follow one another repetitively and non-linearly (changing the scenarios and the costumes of the characters without any apparent logic) in a scenario inhabited by individuals that act as automatons devoid of any emotion, phantasmagorical shadows that repeat one and again the same banal conversations, the same gestures and movements. The film argues the complexity of metaphysics of presence in a game of absences.  (frame 1). In the midst of this authentic army of undead, among whom the disturbing M (Sacha Pitoëff) stands out, X manifests as the only character with initiative, rebelling against the absence of emotions of all the characters, including Y.

Frame 1

"You have not changed, it seems like yesterday we split up. But you seem not to remember, "laments X during his first encounter with Y (frame 2); and in the face of her refusal, she insists on every new occasion: "It was last year. So much have I changed? Or do you pretend not to recognize me? "Memory or its absence (forgetfulness), themes so present in the first films of Resnais (think of Night and Fog, All the Memory of the World or Hiroshima, mon amour), seem to categorically define the different essence of both characters: X, as a conscious being, tries desperately to provoke (or perhaps generate) the memory in Y, which persists in denying the facts that it describes ("It was not me, you get confused with another person"). Like the rest of the inanimate beings that roam around the hotel, and it seems to base their existence precisely on the lack of memories (and hence the automatic actions repeat stubbornly, as if each time it were the first to execute them).

Frame 2

X's struggle, therefore, is to rescue Y from the shadow world in which she is trapped. Like Orpheus in search of Eurydice in Hades, X goes again and again to the realm of "silent rooms where the noise of footsteps is absorbed by carpets so thick, so thick, that one does not hear one's own steps" in search of his beloved, to whom he gives as proof of his first encounter a photograph "taken one afternoon in the park" (frame 3). But Y negates the evidence and persists in not remembering, or perhaps simply is unable to do so, given its condition of being inanimate (icy human statue that we always see with the same gesture - the left hand on the right shoulder - at first of each new appearance - frame 4).

 Frame 3

Frame 4

"You did not expect anything. It was as if you were dead. But it's not like that. You are still alive. You are here. I see you, "X insists obstinately to break the spell that holds Y among" immobile and silent people, perhaps dead some time ago." And, after numerous and repeated attempts (as evidenced by the image of  opening a drawer in which he keeps countless copies of the same photograph that again and again gave him X - frame 5), finally the hex is broken and X finally gets move away with Y, taking a path "along straight paths, between the immutable statues, losing forever, in the quiet night. Alone with me "(frame 6).

 Frame 5

Frame 6

The movie starts with a fascinating aand disconcerting, labyrinthine and disproportionate at times and no less tricky. "Hallways, carpets, stuccos, mirrors and more corridors, carpets ...", narrates constantly the voice in off, true protagonist of the film. Enjoy architecture, light and gloom as characters; that garden of triangular hedges without shadows in front of the disproportions of the characters, object characters like sculptures inside a board, or the amazing shine of the looks and the lips, the delicacy of the gestures and the rigidity of the bodies and walls.If you penetrate, do it by rushing even in restlessness, letting yourself be hurt and shuddered by that recurrent organ music, which seems to come out of the fingers of a drunken Bach in a night of composition in leaks. Make it all yours, as if, bored in the subway, play to invent the history of the bodies and minds that surround them, mixing sounds and words, looks and conversations, taking them to the field they want. And, if not, do it, you might learn to like so much incoherence, but in any case, do not forget, if you see it, that perhaps without it there wouldn’t be films like The Exterminating Angel or The Shining, much of Scorsese's narrative , the world of Lynch and many others.

The eternal fascination with Last Year at Marienbad  is that every time the viewer thinks he has found the key to the riddle, a new aspect appears that ruins all his theories. For example, when the woman asks the man to leave her alone, he leans against a balustrade that collapses because of the pressure. It must be a fleeting fantasy, the viewer thinks, and when the balustrade is seen again, it will be intact. But it's still broken! Does this reflect the character's unwavering conviction that his fantasy has actually occurred? Is it not more likely that it is a metaphor for a woman's desire to be free of the stranger? Thinking carefully, the second explanation seems more plausible. But, with regard to this enigmatic film, the only thing that can be said is "I think", and never "I'm sure".

In a second reflection, last year at Marienbad, with its subtle clues, its complicated interrelation between past and present and its representation of a reality that can simply be a dream, it acquires the appearance of a detective story. The figures (they are more figures than characters) move in an exquisitely controlled manner by a director who shows the precision of a skilled chess player. The oneiric world in which the story takes place has the quality of a fairy tale and, like most of them, a certain touch of hidden threat that lurks at all times to its characters. The fascination that this film exerts is based on its form and structure, which makes it a key work for 20^th century cinema.

Cast:

Delphine Seyrig  A

Giorgio Albertazzi X

Sacha Pitoëff  M

Credits:

Director: Alain Resnais

Screenplay: Alain Robbe-Grillet

Producer: Pierre Courau

Producer: Raymond Froment

Music: Francis Seyrig

Cinematography: Sacha Vierny

Editing: Jasmine Chasney

Editing: Henri Colpi

Production design: Jacques Saulnier

Costumes: Coco Chanel

Costumes: Bernard Evein

Set decoration: Jean-Jacques Fabre

Set decoration: Georges Glon

Set decoration: André Piltant

La Dolce Vita 1960

This classic of cinema is an exhibition of the “beau monde” of spectacle, scandal, aristocracy and wealth. From the perspective of the journalist Marcello Rubini (Marcello Mastroianni), Fellini shows different episodes where the luxury of a privileged life leads to banal love relationships, ephemeral carnal pleasures and hypocritical friendships. The sweet life has some of the most significant scenes of the filmmaker's work. And it was the film from which the term paparazzi was taken to designate social photographers obsessed with portraying the superficiality of public life. A milestone in the film career of Fellini that greatly influenced filmmakers such as David Lynch or Paul Thomas Anderson.

Life has three great turbulent forces, which manifest as an attractive whirlpool that traps humans in chaotic spirals, something discredited by modernity in traditional Christian symbols these are; the devil, the world and the flesh, the three enemies of man: the malice of licentious reasoning; the attraction of riches and materiality and the sweet enchantment of overflowing sexual energies. When you live under the attraction of these forces you can enjoy the dolce vita, a space without compromises, in which the severe admonitions of normality are not applied, since you live according to the moment, with full disposition to take advantage of opportunities, without sticking too much in the consequences.

We all have those dolce vita instincts, although restrained by social norms and fears of acting in public, of making a fool of ourselves. Federico Fellini has shown in his famous film La dolce vita what is experienced during a series of frantic days and nights, in which everything that happens to a person who lets himself be dragged by the swirls of life. It is a story that focuses on three aspects: what an attractive man, a womanizer, who experiences life with no signs of maturity; what happens in a city like Rome, in a time when everything is changing, and what happens in the feminine worlds, reflected in the stories of the women who cross in the life of this singular man.

The great Marcelo Mastroianni is the protagonist, incarnating Marcelo, a journalist who knows everyone, who is covering everything that happens, who is envied by his colleagues and adored by his photographers and collaborators for his self-confidence and skill. His attractive face, his smile, his gestures, his witty phrases, fill the film and serve as the driving axis, so that the viewer identifies himself, becomes interested in this man so fortunate and so disturbed, that he has time for everything, less to sleep and to behave normally. In an impetuous week he relates to five or six beautiful women; he sentimentally approaches his father, whom he knew little or nothing about; he experiences for a moment mysticism when listening to a work of Bach interpreted by his admired mentor and friend; it is related to the superficial world of spectacle and fashion; participates in orgiastic parties of the upper class; presence death; He experiences machismo and approaches loneliness and tenderness. It gives the impression, and this can be the essence of the dolce vita, that nothing affects you, that nothing learns, that simply exists, lives and experiences, without really realizing it.

Rome is the protagonist city. At the beginning of the film, a figure of Christ is transported by helicopter through the air of the city, with outstretched hands, crossing symbolic places (the ruins of the Baths of Caracalla, the new neighborhoods, the ancient city and the Vatican). He is a Christ made of concrete, without real power, who moves according to the whims and the modern means of man; that does not settle in the hearts, hardly fits in the superficial news of a sensationalist journalist. The Virgin, the traditional Madonna of this Catholic city, is the false appearance of children trained to deceive the unwary, an object of show business, which is filmed as a mass spectacle. In the Roma de la dolce vita one lives in night parties, in the streets at fast paces, in gossip or in cabarets. It is not the life of family homes, nor that of commerce or work; neither of academia or of science. The apparently saner character of this crazy city and of this film, the intellectual Steiner, who looks relaxed, musical and familiar, unexpectedly chooses the madness of suicide and violence against his children. Perhaps if he had aligned himself with the principles of the unbridled dolce vita, he would not have fallen into the depressive networks of which he has everything and knows everything, but without real meaning in it. Marcelo's father, a village man, witty and without apparent complexes, who briefly passes by the Rome of his son, approaches it with relish and then suddenly walks away, almost with fear, when he realizes that he is not a man capable of living the Roman turbulence.

Fellini has managed to film a masterpiece in good part due to the performance of the women,  the scenes in which they dominate the collages of this plotless film. The figure of Anita Ekberg, with her blond, undulating hair, with her cheerful and expressive body, incredibly light and attractive, like a nocturnal goddess, in the fountain of Trevi, remains in the retina of the spectators forever. But the scenes in which this actress answers the disordered questions of journalists with cheerful sensuality and intelligence, or in which she does a picaresque dance with her black outfit, her sensual smile and her blond hair are no less spectacular. In the film, she plays the role of dreamy woman, unattainable for the protagonist, showing that in the dolce vita real satisfaction is not achieved, although it can be slightly touched. Another singular woman is Paola (Valeria Ciangottini), a young waitress from Perugia, who symbolizes the idealized and angelic woman, equally unattainable for a man of the world, by touching her, he corrupts her and makes her lose her innocence. The protagonist moves between two women: his girlfriend Emma (Yvonne Furneaux), jealous, suicidal, resigned to suffer the machismo of his beautiful and unfaithful boyfriend and his occasional lover Maddalena (Anouk Aimée), a rich heiress, so superficial as intelligent. These two women symbolize the forces of stability and turbulence that strike the protagonist, unable to focus and commit.

La dolce vita is a story without plot, admirably narrated. It is worth seeing it carefully, several times, in order to appreciate the expressive art in all its magnitude. Precisely because it is a succession of loose events, only connected by the life of the protagonist, it has been possible for the performance to be sweet, unrestrained, loose, full of other subtle protagonisms. Fellini really managed to make his cast feel drawn by the whirlwinds of his crazy story.

Credits:

Directed by Federico Fellini

Produced by Giuseppe Amato and Angelo Rizzoli

Screenplay by Federico Fellini, Ennio Flaiano, Tullio Pinelli, Brunello Rondi. Uncredited: Pier Paolo Pasolini

Story by Federico Fellini, Ennio Flaiano, Tullio Pinelli

Music by Nino Rota

Cinematography Otello Martelli

Edited by Leo Catozzo

Starring:              

Marcello Mastroianni

Anita Ekberg

Anouk Aimée

Yvonne Furneaux

Magali Noël

Alain Cuny

Nadia Gray

Pickpocket 1959

According to French film director Robert Bresson. "A film is not a show. It's, above all, a style." He liked to distinguish between cinema and cinematography. The cinema, for him, was nothing more than filmed theater, while the cinematograph was a new art, a combination of sounds and moving images that, properly harmonized by the montage, was capable of transferring feelings. He did not like professional actors either. “I preferred to work with people who did not have any experience in the world of interpretation and whom I called models.” In short, he sought the very essence of cinematographic language, its maximum purity. That is why his works seem to be surrounded by a kind of aura of spirituality and asceticism.

To understand Bresson, the critic Michel Estève turns to Sartre, who affirmed: "Every technique refers to metaphysics". Notes on the cinematograph is an example of this relationship, from the numerous aphorisms that run around the representation (the "form") and the support (the "matter"), and that hardly make any allusion to the story (the "Content"), and never to faith or religion.

Baes on his aphorisms, Bresson did not even look for the beauty of images-which he calls "cardpostism" -but "the ineffable that you will release". This is the difference between "CINEMA" and "cinematographY". The first is the one that swarms in the exhibition halls and is usually nothing more than "filmed theater". On the contrary, the cinematograph is a search: "CINEMA drinks from a common fund. The cinematographer makes a voyage of discovery on an unknown planet."

Bresson shuns "representation"; that is, to understand the cinematograph as a reproduction of reality. On the contrary, the cinematograph consists of founding a new reality, constituted by the "truth" characteristic of the artistic work: "A thing that can only be expressed by the new cinematographer; consequently, something new."

Many pages would be necessary to explain the Bressonian poetics. However, it can be said that Bresson is entrusted to the machine, from which he praises his "scrupulous indifference". In the machine the cinematographic specificity begins, which continues with the montage. This consists -according to the filmmaker- in stringing images and sounds from the "internal" energy that the paintings contain. A single image is nothing without the existence of others, before or after: the image, devoid of beauty, loses its individuality and is part of a becoming.

Bresson's cinema is consistent with the novelty sought in “notes” on the cinematographer: surprising breaks and links, even opposed to the spatial-temporal logic, unexpectedly and markedly black melted, or sequences that begin or end after or before the action occurs (events that would be so relevant in a film by any other filmmaker, such as a death, attempted rape or murder). Materiality is not only visual: sound is also a fundamental element in the assembly equation. "Noise must be turned into music," says Bresson.

The work of the spectator is an important part of those who have devoted some pages to examine the Bressonian cinematography, like André Bazin and Sontag to the aforementioned Estève and Provoyeur, they all agree that the "writing" of Bresson is not in the images, but in the spirit of the spectator. His films are a constant invitation to reconstruct the story, incomplete or enigmatic that is what’s offered on the screen.

The Bressonian poetics - the exploration of materiality and of the staging, of which Notes on the cinematography gives an account - is finally coherent with that vision of the world: the ascetic image, the actors and actresses of the Stoic mood, the montage "unraveling the narrative." The characters are thrown into a brutal world, in which they must choose between virtue and vice, and accept all kinds of humiliations - as does the ass Random Balthazar, considered by one of its owners as a "saint" - . The immobility, the silence and the strangeness of the characters and situations arouse what Bresson calls the “ineffable.”

It should be noted that the Bressonian stories evolved towards pessimism as the years passed: there is a great distance between the Christian hope of the Diary of a rural priest (the priest dies, but "saves" a soul) and A Man Escaped (the prisoner escapes, against all odds), and the inevitable pain of Au Hazard Balthazar or Lancelot of the Lake.

Pickpocket

It is the story of Michel, a lonely young man who is fascinated by thefts, raised to the level of art. One day he goes to a horse race and steals money from one of the attendees. Confident that no one has seen him, he is surprised when the police stop him. After this episode, a band of pickpockets will teach him the technique of the trade and to exercise the skill of your hands and steal in public areas with many goals.

Filmed with non-professional actors, in the purest Bresson style, and based loosely on the Crime and Punishment of Dostoevsky, this film is considered by many as an essential title in the history of cinema. He was a finalist for the Bear of the Berlin International Festival.

'Pickpocket' is a film of silences, of silent emotions, of hidden feelings. And Bresson hits right on something that a priori is risky: the choice of non-professional actors. It must be said that at certain moments you can see that inexperience, since some do not manage to be as expressive as they should be, and more so in a film of its dramatic intensity. However, Bresson knows very well what is done, and turns all that acting inexperience into one of the best assets of the film, always wanting to reflect the lake of communication of the characters. The apathy of some of them contribute positively to the director reflecting perfectly what he wants to reflect.

During a robbery, something goes wrong. Michel does not realize it, but when he guesses that everything that has happened to him is part of a police strategy to find his apartment, he must flee with the money he has. Michel then decides to earn an honest living, but he has to do it outside his home, to hide from those who persecute him.

"This is not a police-style film, the author tries to express through images and sounds, the nightmare of a young man pushed by his weakness, in an adventure of theft for which he was not made for. Strange ways, will reunite to two souls, that without it, perhaps never they would have known ". With this prologue Robert Bresson introduces us in one of the seventy-two most beautiful minutes that have existed in the seventh art.

Michel is a lonely young man, living in a small room full of books. The relationship with his mother is distant and is in charge of Jeanne, a young woman who has been abandoned in turn by her mother and who lives with an alcoholic father. Michel’s attraction to thefts, is more about fascination and experiencing different sensations, given by his intellectual superiority and personal satisfaction, than by real need. When his mother dies, Michel will dedicate himself professionally to what until now was a pastime that brought him some benefit.

Pickpocket is photographed in a splendid black and white by Léonce-Henry Burel, Bresson, the director draws us, in his fifth feature film and, using a linear voiceover, a sober and lyrical story where objects, hands and looks are much more eloquent and necessary than any high dialogue. Magisterial and millimetric is the assembly of the planes of the theft of purses or the very first planes of the protagonist's hands that hypnotize us for their perfection.

Michael is played by Martin Lasalle, a true stranger, and his first and last role with the director, since Bresson hardly used professional actors in his films, since he had the belief that their inexperience helped them to offer more spontaneity to their characters ; to achieve it he only worked only once with them.

The characters of Bresson's cinema are almost always marginalized beings and offenders of the rigid rules imposed by society. Beings that experience a deep loneliness, anguish and uneasiness with a tendency to isolation, but with a great spiritual wealth, although this and its redemption, through love, come from within the bars of the prison. Bresson does not encourage us to judge or prejudge the criminal behavior or lack of ethics of Michel, although this is contrary to law and outlaws, but it is his own moral: - "The fact that we know something is wrong fact, it does not prevent us from doing it ". A nihilist would not find anything reprehensible this behavior, if it is to feel satisfaction or pleasure in the execution of some act that moves us away from reality.

Bresson, with a brief but shocking filmography, places Pickpocket, in his own right, among the best films in history. We will not find in it action or a fast-paced rhythm, or eloquent dialogues, but mostly in contention, simplicity, silences and subtle glances, portrayed by the French through a fluid narrative and planes and with a montage of extreme beauty and delicacy. And since beauty cannot be described, but is made to be felt and contemplated, it is absolutely necessary to see it.

Director: Robert Bresson.

Cast: Martin LaSalle, Marika Green, Jean Pelegri, Dolly Scal, Pierre Leymarie, Kassagi, Pierre Étaix, César Gattegno.