PRE-PROD

From the working script:

1. VIGNETTES
A closer look at ANGEL's life, wind back to the beginning in escalating rhythmical operatic beats.
ANGEL ( V.O. )
'Pag may naririnig tayong violent incidents o kaya abusive treatments na isinasagawa ng mga magulang sa kanilang mga anak,ang madalas nating itanong "Anong klaseng magulang 'yan? Anong klaseng magulang kaya meron sila?" Minsan, iniisip ko rin,
" Ano kayang klaseng magulang meron si Hitler? Si Mother Theresa? Bakit kaya sila nagkaganon?"

Whatever role she was playing, no matter how small and stereotyped it was, Anita played it well.

Clips from the various films of screen legend Anita Linda - from her landmark portrayal of "Sisa" to her sensitive performance as "Adela." The video was for her Lino Brocka Lifetime Achievement Award during the Golden Screen Awards by the Enpress this 2009.

At the peak of her career, an actress more often than not acts like a primadonna, expecting everyone to commiserate with all her problems, from simple toothaches to crises of the heart and the pocketbook. She imagines that the world is indebted to her and she can afford to ignore everyone around her. As she ages and falls from fame, she either sulks like a child or hates the world or buries herself in self-pity. This was not the case with Anita Linda (Alice Lake in real life), an actress who rose to fame and was admired from 1947 to 1958. When she came back to the movies in the 1970's, her acting prowess had not tarnished, she projected no star complex, but instead had become even more professional in her attitudes towards the industry. For her, people in film should be absolutely dedicated both to the industry and to each other. She does not like stars who disrupt shooting schedules. She hates it when crewmen and extras are treated like menials, or when fellow workers in the industry are not justly compensated for their work. And she does not care if these views affect her own career, negatively or positively.

In 1952, she had just received the Maria Clara best actress award for her performance in Sisa and was reigning as top actress of Premiere Productions, when the company's crewmen went on strike. Luha sa Langit was being filmed then. Anita believed in the cause of the workers, so she and Patria Plata agreed to mediate for the workers who were led by Casimiro Padilla, a sound man. They presented the workers' complaints to Mrs. Santiago. The latter did not welcome the complaints. The two actresses were reprimanded, and the problem was solved when the company was closed down. Anita Linda's contract was dissolved as well.

Free-lancing was not permitted then. It was difficult for an actress to survive outside a mother company. People began to surmise that the actress' career was doomed. Anita prepared herself for the crash. If it should come, she was going to open a livestock farm in her lot in Pugad Baboy, Bulacan. Nevertheless, she approached Dr. Perez of Sampaguita Pictures. The latter had previously offered her a role in Tres Musketeras, which she could not accept because Mrs. Santiago did not allow her to. "I'll let you know soon, if there is a good role for you," was Dr. Perez's promise. Because of that answer, Anita gave up on LVN as well. She then went from one unstable company to the other, until she decided to rest awhile.

Time passed, Bomba pictures became popular. New names came up. Actresses of the 1950's and 60's were upstaged by the "bomberas." But an actress remains an actress, even if it seems that there is no more place for her in the industry. For she was at a very "awkward" stage in life. She was no longer young, but she couldn't play mother to Susan Roces or Amalia Fuentes either. Bomba pictures were out of the question.

So to television she went. It was in Lupita Concio's Balintataw that she first got to know young budding directors, like Lino Brocka, Mario O'Hara, Elwood Perez and Joey Gosiengfiao (these are only some of the directors who respected Anita). With the new generation of "young stars" of the 1970's, Anita came back to the movies as mother to Nora Aunor or Vilma Santos.

More time passed. The musicals of these young stars competed with the love-triangles of Eddie Rodriguez, the action movies of Fernando Poe, Jr., the comedies of Dolphy and other mixed film genres, until the young stars themselves turned into serious actors. Modes changed, but Anita stayed on. She played all kinds of mothers - the martyr, the bitch, the nagger, the swinger. But whatever role she was playing, no matter how small and stereotyped it was, she played it well.

But then giving life to these characters came easy for her, for she could draw from a wealth of personal experiences to understand these characters. She had known love and the hurts that came with it; joy and disappointment, like success and failure, were no strangers to her. She knew the pain of losing a first-born during the Japanese Occupation years, of being neglected by a husband, of seeing her confidante-sister killed before her eyes, and of being alone. All these happened when she reigned as movie queen. Whatever problem she had in life, she learned to resolve by pouring herself into her many roles. "Perhaps this is all I can do. I love my profession." Because of her versatility, her acting prowess is constantly put to the test, and often adjudged excellent. Aside from winning the Maria Clara Award, she has received the FAMAS Best Supporting Actress trophy in 1974, for her performance in Hello Soldier, one of three episodes in Brocka's Tatlo, Dalawa, Isa. She has been recognized as an outstanding actress by the PATAS as well, and has received a string of nominations from groups interested in quality performances.

For her contributions to the development of the Filipino film industry, for her professionalism, versatility, patience and perseverance, which have earned for her the respect of her colleagues in that industry, the Manunuri ng Pelikulang Pilipino awards her its sixth Natatanging Gawad Urian.

(The above is the citation of the Manunuri for Ms. Linda's Natatanging Gawad URIAN in 1982.)

The House of the Dead

Life in prison was so dreary, a convict is a creature by nature so eager for freedom, and from his social position so careless and reckless, that "to have his fling for all he is worth," to spend all his fortune carousing with noise and music and so to forget his depression, if only for the moment, naturally attracts him. -from Fyodor Dostoevsky's "The House of the Dead"

Soon.

PRESA

CIRCA

They were the stars of the golden era of Philippine cinema – discovered by the film studios, adored by their leading men, and idolized by their legions of fans.

Today, hardly anyone remembers the names. They are but fragments of a colorful past – a past filled with faded memories of youth, fame, and glory.

Their past will be remembered...

SOON.

FILMOSOPHY OF THE DARDENNES

The Belgian filmmaking brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have bled their documentary foundations into a mesmerically pure fiction style. Their films absorb us in a recognisable world, that nevertheless shows us ordinary things in a new way, makes us look again at what we thought we understood. Their four most recent films — The Promise (1996), Rosetta (1999), The Son (2002), and The Child (2005) — almost entirely reject some key conventions of fiction filmmaking (shot-reverse-shot, point-of-view shots, establishing shots, etc.) in favour of a close and empathetic form of film-thinking. These films use images to think about (and for) theircharacters — thinkings which steer the emotions of the filmgoer.

Perhaps most significant about these four films is their movement away from ‘classical’ filmmaking forms, especially as regards point-of-view images and the traditional shot-reverse-shot. In 'The Son' the father tries to see into an office where details important to him are being discussed — the film aligns itself with him, squeezes a look at what he sees (half a desk, a hand, a pen), but without shifting to a point-of-view shot that denotes his actual seeing point, his ‘actual’ thinking. What we get is a thinking of his half-knowledge, through an obscured, fractured, half information image. What this means is that the four films do not break into their stories to try to replace their characters; they do not remove them from the film (by replacing them with a ‘view-point’). Importantly, we might say that the films do not presume to become their characters.

At the very beginning of 'The Son' the film, the moving sound-image, emerges from behind the father (moving up from darkness to reveal the back and then the neck and head of the father). We feel that the film derives itself from him, has lived with him, will live with him. The film thinks this close affinity, thinks (through framing and movement) this empathetic emotion. The film clings close to the father, tracing his neck and back and profile more than his face or locale. There is almost no space, no measurable distance between filmgoer/film and father. The film thinks an intense bond, creating a pure relationship between character and filmgoer. We begin to feel what he feels: tension, half-knowledge, anticipation. The film’s thinking doesn’t create an identification so much as an allegiance, a being-with. Through this closeness the films also enact a questioning thinking. The films watch Igor and Rosetta and Olivier and Bruno think, watch them make decisions, almost hears them decide. All of the films at some point ‘hold’ on each of them, studying their faces, questioning them, asking them ‘what are you going to do?’. The responsibility and conscience in both 'The Promise' and 'The Child'; the betrayal and enduring affection of the boy in Rosetta; the closing of distance between man and boy in The Son — each is unexpected for the protagonist. These are people who are unprepared for the humanity that won’t let them go.

In the cinema of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne the characters are accompanied, are followed and watched, by another consciousness, a new-consciousness, a filmind. This thinking is at one and the same time subjective and objective (it acts like another character, yet can occupy multiple spaces and shift from one time to another), in films that absorb the physical through (and into) the metaphysical. The ‘filmosophical’ thinking of these films is distinguished by their refusal to even attempt to ‘become’ the characters. The Dardennes resist these conventions of classical fiction filmmaking, and in doing so the films think with humbleness and respect. One person’s actions are never completely understandable; we can never become them to understand them, we must learn from what they do. Ethics resolves into a question of action: what do we do?

Each of the four films presents us with a filmind that is asking that for us, of a person, from a point of view we can never have: an omniscient, invisible, free mode of thinking.

Daniel Frampton is a London-based writer and filmmaker, and the founding editor of the salon-journal Film-Philosophy. This text is an extract taken from his recent book, Filmosophy (Wallflower Press, 2006).

They say it's the last song. They don't know us, you see. It's only the last song if we let it be.

Lars Von Trier's films have always provoked discussions. Critics call his work either pretentious or a masterpiece.

I manage to see Dancer in the Dark again. I still think of it as groundbreaking.

A. O. Scott of The New York Times: Lars von Trier's musical, shot in raw, jumpy digital video, is a fascinating exercise in brutality, mitigated by the otherworldy charisma (and the music) of the Icelandic pop star Bjork. As Selma, a Czech immigrant factory worker going blind in the early 1960's in Washington State (the film was shot in Sweden), Bjork seems to be inventing a whole new style of film acting, and her performance is miraculous. von Trier, continuing his campaign to rescue the art of film from complacency and convention, follows Selma's utter annihilation with sadistic relish. "Dancer in the Dark" is both stupefyingly bad and utterly overpowering; it can elicit, sometimes within a single scene, a gasp of rapture and a spasm of revulsion. Come to the theater prepared, with a handkerchief in one hand and a rotten tomato in the other.

A Resilient Octogenarian

Adela wants nothing more than a meal with her children and family. But as the widow goes about her day preparing and shopping—often stopping to help out her fellow slum-dwellers—the interminable wait for the celebration starts to seem futile. In a stylistic break from today’s characteristically energetic, fast-moving Filipino cinema, Alix trains his camera on veteran Filipino actress Linda in long takes, with profound and moving results. The film is a tribute both to the quiet dignity and indomitable spirit of its titular character, and to the actress whose compelling, poignant performance inflects every scene.

In the monthly exhibition ContemporAsian, MoMA showcases films that get little exposure outside of their home countries or on the international festival circuit, but which engage the various styles, histories, and changes in Asian cinema. The films in the series include recent independent films and little-seen classics. From September’s opening feature, a stylistically flamboyant series of surreal urban vignettes of social and racial strife offset by characters who break into song Stevie Wonder—style (Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly, 2008, Indonesia), to October’s intimate portrait of a resilient octogenarian, featuring venerated actress Anita Linda in a tour de force performance (Adela, 2008, Philippines), the films showcased encompass a variety of styles and themes.

Adela - Screening Schedules:

Wednesday, October 14, 2009, 7:00 p.m., Theater 2, T2
Thursday, October 15, 2009, 4:00 p.m., Theater 2, T2
Friday, October 16, 2009, 7:00 p.m., Theater 2, T2
Saturday, October 17, 2009, 7:30 p.m., Theater 2, T2
Sunday, October 18, 2009, 5:00 p.m., Theater 2, T2
Monday, October 19, 2009, 4:30 p.m., Theater 1, T1

A Lake of talents

A salute to one of the best thespians in Philippine Cinema.

I always treasure my working experience with the great Anita Linda. I did Tambolista, Manila and Adela with this screen legend. Her stories in between takes with her working relationship with some of Philippine cinema's masters - Gerry de Leon, Lamberto Avellana, Lino Brocka, Ishmael Bernal makes me want to stop shooting and just listen to her anecdotes.

I'm happy that now she's in her best fighting form and still sharing her craft. That's what she loves best.

Hope to work with you again soon with Circa.

UFO

More than 10 UFOs were sighted in Las Piñas at around 7pm Saturday night of August 28, 2000. Three children first spotted two unusual reddish-metallic-glares traversing across and above the partly cloudy skies, from their Mabolo St. residence, Verdant Acres, Pamplona, Las Piñas City. As the objects were racing towards the east where the moon was setting, another two came, followed by three more – appearing from above the western horizon. This unusual sight could not be mere airoplanes, according to 11 year old Nica Canarias, as two of them were seen heading towards the moon. Nica, the eldest of the siblings, and among the early witnesses, immediately summoned the 9-year old Adrian Israel, a close neighbor whom the kids knew well as a UFO experiencer, whose father Antonio (Tony), incidentally had taken video footage of UFOs in Las Piñas on September 3, 2000.

Adrian confirmed that these objects were similar to those of 4 years ago, and rushed back to his house to prompt his elder brothers, who then told their father, Tony, who took his video camera after observing the unique sight. He was joined by other neighbors observing the objects as they moved erratically, jerking, floating and jumping in several directions. From 7:30 to 8:15pm, Tony was taking video footage of 5 UFOs as each traversed the horizon at time intervals of c. 8 min per object, one following the other. Israel, thanks to his 2000 sighting, was now more composed in aiming his Sharp digital video camera with 200x magnification through the partly-cloudy skies of Las Piñas, which were indeed enhancing the points of reference and approximate heights of the objects. PAGASA, the Philippine observatory agency, would be unable to denounce these as festival balloons, being visible at c. 30,000 to 40,000 feet in Israel's estimation. Alas! After four years, they’re back... said Israel.

No headless woman

I saw Lucrecia Martel's La Mujer Sin Cabeza and was blown away by its simple power. Martel's story borders on the mysterious yet its power lies in its simplicity and her skillful attention to imagery and sound.

She is one of the few filmmakers who values the aural experience to complement the tensions of the narrative.

Here is an excerpt of her interview from theauteurs:

DANIEL KASMAN: Perhaps more than any other film in recent memory, it is hard to separate your movie into what was written in a script and what was visualized and created aurally in the final product. Did this film exist more as a written story about this woman, or did you envision it cinematically and formally? When you come to a scene in the movie, are you envisioning what you have written down or conceptualizing an audio/visual expression first and foremost?

MARTEL: What happens to me is that before I start out to write, I already know how the film is going to sound. To me, what really matters is sound. In a way, images are what I strictly need to frame the sound.

PHELPS: [Portuguese director] Pedro Costa says something similar to that, as well as of course Robert Bresson. I kept thinking of Bresson—despite obviously some differences—in his concentration on faces, and holding faces, and letting the whole world exist outside of the frame—on the outskirts of the frame sometimes—and almost swirl around the main character. There’s a stable anchor, a head or a face in the foreground, in the middle of the frame, but there are whole scenes that happen, and they are happening in the background! Could you talk about why you hold onto the back of people’s heads in a way; it’s almost like the audience is kept from the people’s thoughts…

MARTEL: What I find really fascinating about cinema is how it allows you to get very close to people but not actually know anything that’s going on inside of them. I find this very sexy, in a way—being so close but not know what’s going on.

A lot people think that shooting this style of film turns out to be cheaper, because you are just following one person around. Actually it’s not at all, because you still have to pay all kinds of actors off the camera; it’s not cheaper at all! Actors who are not at the center of attention want to be paid more, so in the end you are paying a fortune!

PHELPS: Would it be alright if we talked about a specific scene that occurs mostly in the background?

MARTEL: For example, the scene where Vero [played by María Onetto] walks into the [hospital] bathroom and hides, it is an example of a scene where everything that’s going around is around her, it is not on her. Actually, in that scene, I had to film some people in the action, but the voices are other people’s voices, so I had to pay double! This is because sound is so important to me; and for the voices in that scene I needed a different texture than the ones the actual actresses had, I wanted for the overall sound I wanted to convey what I had in mind, so that’s why I had to use other people.

KASMAN: How do you work with your sound designer? How hands-on are you in finding the sounds, creating the sounds, and placing the sounds in your film?

MARTEL: I’m very hands-on. I used the same mixer I used with my earlier film, La Ciénaga (2001); the sound director is the same guy for all my films, and he also records the direct sound. We work very well together, but having said that it is not like we understand each other immediately. We actually talk a lot, do a lot of tests, and experiment on a lot of things. He is very open to trying new things. We actually go out inside the city and record a huge amount of material that we can use as archival records.

Actually, it [the focus on sound] must run in the family, as one of my brothers who works in this area [in which the movie was filmed] and knows a lot about it went to see The Headless Woman, said “actually I liked the sound of the film, but when the actress is close to a window, there’s a bird and that’s not a bird from the area.” And what was amazing was that I knew that too! I was really excited to put a bird sound that was not from the actual location in the film.

For Alexis by Apichatpong Weerasethakul

For Alexis from Kick the Machine on Vimeo.

To whom nothing ever happens.

In photo: Director Vittorio De Sica (fist raised) and screenwriter Cesare Zavattini (left), on the set of The Bicycle Thief (1948).

Andre Bazin on Cesare Zavatinni profounding the purest form of neorealism: "The dream of Zavatinni is just to make a ninety-minute film of the life of a man to whom nothing ever happens."

Cesare Zavatinni (1902-89) was a journalist and novelist before becoming a screenwriter and the central theoretician of neorealism. Andre Bazin is a respected French critic.

Rizal and Luna

A rare photo of Jose Rizal and Juan Luna.

I've been thinking of doing a film about Juan Luna.

After 14 years

So it's the laughter

We will remember,

Whenever we remember

The way we were.
- from The Way We Were by Barbara Streisand

Nothing much has really changed except we were older. It was just like going back to your school after a LONG summer vacation. Seeing your friends is a trip down the past but it was good to catch up.

It was also good to see our teachers Ms. Bautista and Mr. Silverio.

High school is really something.

See you my batch mates on December 27 for our grand reunion.

Here's a short video for all of us guys...

You can't do better than ''Umberto D.''

When Neo-Realism Collided With Reality
By PETER BRUNETTE, New York Times

WHEN Vittorio De Sica's relentless dissection of postwar Italian society, ''Umberto D.,'' appeared in 1952, he was accused by the government's minister of entertainment of ''washing Italy's dirty linen in public.'' The open letter, published in a newspaper, hinted strongly that Italian filmmakers should henceforth be more upbeat -- especially if they wanted to continue receiving government subsidies.

The letter effectively put an end to the glorious movement known as Italian neo-realism, with its emphasis on the use of real locations and nonprofessional actors and its rejection of any hint of cinematic glamour. And it was delivered at the very moment the movement had achieved perhaps its purest expression, with ''Umberto.''

Less well-known than Roberto Rossellini's ''Open City'' (1945), which began the movement, or De Sica's 1948 masterpiece, ''Bicycle Thief,'' ''Umberto D.'' was overdue for revival. And now, expertly restored, it is playing at the Film Forum in Manhattan, exemplifying a movement that has had an immeasurable impact on the last 50 years of filmmaking around the world.

As in most neo-realist films, the plot of ''Umberto D.'' is resolutely unadorned. Umberto D. Ferrari, a retired bureaucrat who can't survive on his meager pension, battles with an unfeeling landlady to keep his rented room. One by one, former colleagues and insensitive social institutions fail him, until his only emotional connections in the world are with his dog and with the landlady's uneducated and unmarried maid, who is pregnant and herself desperately in need of assistance. Unfortunately, Umberto, obsessed with keeping up appearances, is not always able to provide it. He ultimately considers suicide, but the film ends on a hopeful note that may be little more than wish-fulfillment on the part of filmmaker and audience.

Cesare Zavattini, De Sica's scriptwriter and the major theorist of neo-realism, wrote both ''Bicycle Thief'' and ''Umberto D.'' and was intent on carrying out his theories more fully in the second film. For this hyper-realist, the truest cinematic expression was one fully congruent with lived time -- a 90-minute movie would portray 90 minutes of a person's life -- and, it goes without saying, would focus solely on the small details of everyday reality. De Sica was in fact able to achieve five full minutes of this hopelessly idealistic but hardly ignoble goal during a famous and powerful scene, about 30 minutes into the movie, in which the camera follows the maid around the kitchen as she prepares breakfast. In the midst of her wordless preparations, she pats her pregnant belly and tears stream down her face. It is one of cinema's most sublime sequences.

Beginning with a demonstration by pensioners against the government, ''Umberto D.'' leads the viewer to expect a political analysis of its protagonist's desperate situation, but it quickly becomes clear that De Sica isn't really interested in pursuing that idea. Though the bourgeois landlady and the fatuous friends in her music circle come in for some well-deserved drubbing -- the landlady hypocritically rents out Umberto's room by the hour to illicit lovers -- De Sica is quoted in Roy Armes's book ''Patterns of Realism'' insisting that politics are not the point: ''It is not Umberto's economic condition that interests us, it is his moral and human relationships with society. What concerns us is the solitude of an old man.'' To the continual consternation of the Communist party, which was then highly influential in artistic circles, most neo-realist films tended to see their characters' problems as a result of failings in human nature rather than as a function of capitalism. ''Umberto D.'' was no exception.

The film is composed primarily of vignettes and tiny, telling scenes filled with expressive human gestures that have little in common with the grand sweep of Hollywood narrative. Though common enough now, this procedure was, at the time, rather unorthodox, even in neo-realism. In fact, the most fascinating thing about ''Umberto D.'' today is that so much of it is so wonderfully silent, relying, for once, on the pictures to tell the story. Many of the film's most memorable moments owe an obvious debt to the visual dexterity of Charlie Chaplin's best scenes, as when Umberto, who has been practicing begging, suddenly turns his hand over, as though checking for rain, when a passerby makes a move to give him some money.

Much of the film's business is taken up with Umberto's adorable dog, and, like Chaplin's films, ''Umberto D.'' constantly flirts with sentimentality. To counter this, De Sica makes Umberto more than a little irascible and selfish, and any ''cute'' moments with the dog are always revelations of Umberto's inner psychological state rather than simply indulged for their own sake. The strategy seems to have worked. In his recent magisterial documentary on Italian cinema, ''My Voyage to Italy'' (''Il Mio Viaggio in Italia''), no less an authority than Martin Scorsese, who admits to preferring ''Umberto D.'' to ''Bicycle Thief,'' says: ''There's nothing easy about 'Umberto D.' The emotions are never forced, and the pathos is always genuine.''

The film's visual style also contributes to the storytelling. Virtually all of ''Umberto D.'' is shot in elaborate deep-focus, a technique popularized by Orson Welles some 10 years earlier in ''Citizen Kane.'' By emphasizing the physical space in the foreground, the camera reveals the vastness of Umberto's social isolation. Furthermore, the characters move among the Roman statuary and monuments, always in focus, giving us a sense that what is happening to Umberto has its roots in the human condition that stretches back centuries.

Umberto is played by a nonprofessional actor, a professor from Florence named Carlo Battisti whom, legend has it, De Sica stopped one day on the street. It's no accident that his character, Umberto D., has the same name as the director's father, an impoverished bank clerk and insurance company employee. The film is dedicated to De Sica's father because, as De Sica said later, ''He himself was an old bourgeois who fought against poverty and to maintain his dignity.''

While the subtitles are occasionally inexact or anachronistic, and seem, unfortunately, not to have been retranslated for the restoration, the visual and sound tracks are superb. The restoration was undertaken under the guidance of Giuseppe Rotunno, the famous cinematographer of Fellini and Visconti, and by the nonagenarian film stock expert Vincenzo Verzini, who has worked on many of the classics of Italian cinema, including Antonioni's ''Notte'' and Fellini's ''Dolce Vita'' and who has in recent years restored a great many of the films he helped to make years ago. Damaged or missing frames in the original negative of ''Umberto D.'' were replaced, the splicing between reels upgraded and the lighting improved. The soundtrack was also restored by transferring it to digital audio tape and filtering it with modern equipment.

Zavattini's hope of making a feature-length commercial film that would constitute a real and raw ''slice of life'' was never to be realized, of course, and perhaps that's as it should be. For a sense of what this impossible dream might have looked like, though, you can't do better than ''Umberto D.''

from: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/17/movies/film-when-neo-realism-collided-with-reality.html?pagewanted=1

Vittorio De Sica

He is one of the film makers whose films I really thought were powerful and still thought provoking. I even named my production company after my favorite film of his - "The Bicycle Thief."

I remembered him while I was watching Pixar's "Up", an adventure about a 78-year old man who ties balloons to his house and flies away, with an 8-year old stowaway.

Sobbing, struggling as my 3D glasses were starting to fog, I loved the opening montage showing the love story of Mr. Fredericksen and his love, Ellie. Later, the struggles and pathos of the old man, reminded me of De Sica's "Umberto D." Both dealt with the themes of flamboyant youth and the reclusive old age.

Here's a salute to De Sica and his films:

The Poetry of Everyday Life

Picture Virgil and Horace spooling their lyrical dramas and tales a millennium later on the streets of Rome. Once telling of mortals sacrificing their children to the gods and carrying their fathers on their shoulders across the seas surrounding Italy or feuding with jealousies and infidelities of their own, the eloquent verses take to city traffic and crank themselves out in mid-20th-century images. The betrayals and crimes, loyalties and desires, are still there, and so are the ashes of war; but the gods are fascists and the mortals are men on bicycles riding to work, shoeshine boys prancing high upon a horse, mothers protecting their daughters from soldiers, until…. Imagine that the tragedy of war has come home. The drama has entered everyday life. The poetry is now a dance of shadows on a screen, and the dreams are seen like the veins of leaves. “The wonder must be in us, expressing itself without wonder.” At least this is how Cesare Zavattini put it, the writing partner and co-conspirator of Vittorio De Sica in the unique moment of film history that would be known far and wide as “neorealism.” The ritual is cinema, and while the art is one of dire necessity, achieved bare-handed with minimal means, its aim is the same — social solidarity, catharsis, the healing and transformative power of poetry-in-the-making.

And the Winner Is…

In 1971, three years before his death, Vittorio de Sica’s work was honored with an Oscar for the fifth time, after thirteen nominations for films he’d directed and one for his acting in Charles Vidor’s A Fairwell to Arms (1958). That last award was for the Best Foreign Language Film, The Garden of the Finzi Continis, and it was presented by Tennessee Williams (the film was also nominated for a Best Writing award). Before that, in 1964 Rex Harrison had handed the same Oscar to producer Joseph E. Levine for De Sica’s Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow. Its leading actress, Sophia Loren, was nominated that year for De Sica’s Marriage Italian Style and had won the Best Actress Award for his Two Women three years earlier (the first time it was given for a foreign language role). A few years prior to that, De Sica’s long-time collaborator Ceasare Zavattini had finally been nominated for Best Writing for their homage to De Sica’s father, Umberto D. Almost a decade earlier the Academy’s Board of Governors had presented the team with a Special Foreign Language Film Award for perhaps their most famous work, Bicycle Thieves. But it had all started two years before that, in 1947, before any Academy Award had ever been given for a film made in a language other than English. A groundbreaking work turned the heads of the Academy once and for all, De Sica’s and Zavattini’s stunning Shoeshine. Recognizing Italy for its promising ventures in cinema amidst the rubble of World War II, the Academy created a “Special Award” just to be able to salute the film, declaring, “The high quality of this motion picture, brought to eloquent life in a country scarred by war, is proof to the world that the creative spirit can triumph over adversity.”

Places and Faces

De Sica came to cinema with two special gifts, and it was his father, Umberto, who noted them and insisted that the boy use them. First, the son possessed an innate charm as an entertainer. Even as a teen, Vittorio commanded quite an audience for his singing, but he was bent on becoming a bank clerk like his father who, luckily, had also been a journalist. So Vittorio studied accounting at a technical institute and then graduated from Rome’s University School of Political and Commercial Science. Little did he know that financial skills and a political sensibility would serve him well, but precisely for the film career that lay ahead, since his father tapped the entertainment celebrities he knew and launched the boy in a silent film that soon led to acting in Tatiana Pavlova’s theatre troupe and to forming his own company, producing plays and co-starring with his first wife, Giuditta Rissone. A handsome figure of a man with a winning smile, Vittorio De Sica wore his suave manner like a birthright. Tall, dark, and debonair, he became a matinee idol (both comedian and crooner) in his early twenties. He mastered the art of acting by virtue of his own experience: in a span of 26 years he appeared on the stage in over 125 productions — this in addition to over 150 performances as a screen actor that continued through his entire life. Once he began directing films of his own (31 features, all told), De Sica preferred not to use professional actors, but the professional that he was, according to one Assistant Director, “he could lure even a sack of potatoes into acting.” Then he patiently guided both pros and amateurs of all ages by acting out every nuance and inflection of their roles according to his own interpretation and calling upon them to imitate him. A second gift from his family also served De Sica well. While he was born in 1902 in Sora, a small market town in the Ciociara countryside between Naples and Rome, De Sica moved to Naples just a few years later when the Banca d’Italia transferred his father there.

Like Umberto, Vittorio felt a special affinity for Napoli for the rest of his life, but the family also moved to Florence a few years later, and to Rome five years after that. So in his formative years the boy grew up with three distinct “Italy’s” — the passion and humor of Naples, the aristocratic charm of Rome, and the cultural refinement of Florence. All would figure vividly in the dialects, dispositions, and temperaments of the characters in his films. And the director would come to discover and make special use of every nook and cranny of Rome, the “open city” of neorealism.

A Life of Paradox

Vittorio De Sica was known even in his lifetime as a man of contradictions. It was precisely the fare that came to repel him — the telephone bianco films of the 1930’s (trite pot-boilers and fluffy romances made artificially in studios, symbolized by the ever-present white telephone) — that brought him lucre as an actor that he would then turn around and use to direct the serious works that drew his commitment, films he could approach in a natural and organic way. Celebrity governed his own acting and theatrical style, precisely the stardom and style he shunned for the films he directed with “unfamiliar” faces according to the credo of neorealism.

He made a film for the Vatican during World War II (which they rejected and destroyed), stretching out production until Rome was liberated by the Americans so that he could avoid being sent by Goebbels to direct a German film school in Prague or be forced to run one in Venice for the Fascists. From 1942 to 1968 he led a double life as a husband of Giuditta Rissone (and father of their daughter) and as a lover of Maria Mercader (and father of their two sons). He was also a gambler in more ways than one: not only did he finance his best films himself when begging failed, but he was also known to bet several thousand dollars away one night after another at the tables of actual gambling establishments. He deplored Hollywood and yet he acted in studio films there and sought deals with some of the industry town’s biggest producers (Howard Hughes, for one, and David O. Selznick, who would have given him money for Bicycle Thieves if he’d been willing to cast Cary Grant in the lead). Oddly enough, De Sica’s most serious films were more successful in his day in the U.S. than they were in Italy at his home box office.

Neorealism Today

In 2002 Bert Cardullo’s Vittorio De Sica: Director, Actor, Screenwriter was published, the first and only authored book on De Sica in English to come out in the United States. (There is also a remarkable anthology edited by Howard Curle and Stephen Snyder in 2000, and an invaluable double-disc DVD set by The Criterion Collection including three filmed documentaries on De Sica, Zavattini, and neorealism and a booklet of ten essays.) Cardullo offers a reprint of an interview with De Sica by Charles Thomas Samuels, in which the filmmaker explains why neorealism is not simply shooting films in authentic locales: “It is not reality. It is reality filtered through poetry, reality transfigured. It is not Zola, not naturalism, verism, things which are ugly…. (It) was born after a total loss of liberty, not only personal, but artistic and political. It was a means of rebelling against the stifling dictatorship that had humiliated Italy. When we lost the war, we discovered our ruined morality. The first film that placed a very tiny stone in the reconstruction of our former dignity was Shoeshine.”

Along with Bicycle Thieves and his earlier The Children Are Watching Us, De Sica and Zavattini set down the prototype for films upholding the point of view of children. Buñuel would follow with Los Olvidados, Truffaut with 400 Blows, Satyajit Ray with his Pather Panchali series, Gianni Amelio with Stolen Children (a clear homage to Bicycle Thieves), and Kiarostami with his own trilogy including Where Is the Friend’s House?. They’ve all become classics, and their authors and countless others have spoken of their debt to that melancholy poetry of Italian neorealism, a clarion to the moral investment in new generations.

(from: http://www.cinemawithoutborders.com/news/139/ARTICLE/1414/2007-12-09.html)

Choices

The Young vs The Establishment

Crossroads: To Mold the Higher Tastes or Pander to the Lowest

Norman Corwin, Author, Dramatist


It is clear from both sides in Hollywood that new blood is needed, but not wanted. The desire is there, but the consummation is only devoutly to be wished, and nothing more.

Now this situation is enough to pique the curiosity of anyone. How does it happen? Are the young men without portfolio so different from the Ins who man the Establishment? Is each exotic to the other? On both sides there is acknowledged talent; both want to make good and profitable products. Yet there are obviously deep differences. A big one is in the degree of artistic security. The entrenched industry, having access to banks and millions, is nevertheless too often artistically insecure, whereas the young film maker, often hard put to raise the cost of raw stock and camera, is at least free to shoot what is on his mind and in his heart, and thus, in a lonely and melancholy way, he is relatively secure in his art.

One might think the Establishment would be confident, even arrogant, in its own powers, but even in its heyday it was timid about material. Hollywood has mostly preferred that some other medium initiate, test, and prove out its artistic resources; that somebody else take the risks and pains of conception and trial, be it the stage with the hit play, the publisher with the best-selling novel, the magazine serial with the giant circulation to build up titles, or the celebrity marinated in publicity (whether Sinatra up from radio, or the Beatles up from England, or an ex-queen from Iran).

The caution was, and is, understandable. Nobody wants to lose his shirt, least of all a shirt with corporate studs. But the fear of failure can be more crippling than failure itself. There is at least one incumbent major studio executive head of a rich and powerful film company, whose terror of failure is so crippling that only the safe, routine, pretested, undistinguished, competent, journeyman picture may be made in his plant.

To get back to the young film maker: as against the company, he has no qualms about trying something new. As a rule he couldn't dream of buying a hit play or a best seller; he couldn't afford Audrey Hepburn's stand-in. He is unencumbered by stockholders, a board of directors, or any of the disorders of corporate metabolism. His wife may object to his cashing in an insurance policy to cover lab costs but he is saddled with no idle sound stages that add to his overhead; he has no backlog of unproduced screenplays in which he has invested a fortune; and he is beyond the purview of the Legion of Decency. If his leading actress catches pneumonia or his male star is caught in a dope raid, it is no irrecoverable disaster. He will never need to peddle his old pictures to the late late show, or sell off his back lot to Zeckendorf.

Small wonder, then, that he creates new, different, arresting films. He had better, if he is to assert himself at all. Nor is every young film maker an unsung genius. Some of them are genuine hacks, and the fact that they are young and not profitably employed does not necessarily make them splendid and wise. If a man is to be an artist worthy of the name, it behooves him to sail on a fresh tack. He can afford to.

The Establishment admits that it will have little to do with the young men. On the other hand, the industry should not forget that its senior craftsmen, even though they may not admit young men to their ranks, do admit their ideas and influence. Orson Welles was just such a young man when he made "Citizen Kane"; no one can deny its effect on subsequent films. Eisenstein was twenty-five when he made "Potemkin", Chaplin was twenty-four when he captivated his first audience; Griffith was in his twenties when he first hit.

Pictures like "The Hustler," "Hud," "Tom Jones," and "A Hard Day's Night" represent a cross-fertilization of ideas and styles and philosophies of film—in them are glimmerings of all the young forebears, the experiments with hand-held cameras and bold cutting and diffused focus and piercing depth and overcranking and undercranking and whole new domains of story-telling. There is interaction between the young Outs and the old Ins, whether acknowledged or not.
But while the young film maker looks up to the seat of the mighty with envy and often with admiration, he no doubt regards its economy with amazement. For there the Establishment seems slowest of all to learn. To this day it clings, almost poignantly, to legends and traditions of the past. The star system is slavishly honored and employed, in spite of some of the most titanic disasters since the sinking of the ship of the same name.

The young film maker surely is aware that the day in which a star was a guarantee of box office returns is over. He is aware that if a film has no story or lacks a formidable premise, the producer is in trouble. He is aware that Yul Brynner will not, by the magic of his name and talent alone, make a hit of "Flight to Ashiya"; that even John Wayne, for so long a box office champion, and John Houseman, master director, could not combine to make a winner when the story was not there. The young film maker knows all this, but I'm not sure the Establishment quite believes it.

Finally, any consideration of the young film maker and his contemporaries must take into account the audience, which is, after all, the ultimate arbiter of what succeeds commercially. One may well ask whether the American audience would support the young film men, if they exposed their work. If the young Outs, instead of being denied even rudimentary distribution as of now, were to have their work broadly exposed, would many of the public show up? Or come back for more?

The answer to this, as to any imponderable of our culture, lies in the broadest configurations of society. If the instruments of artistic communication, the movie studios, theatres, transmitters are in the hands of timid or venal men, if mediocrity and a low mean are deliberate because they also are profitable and a way of life; if "Beverly Hillbillies" is eternal while "East Side, West Side" dies like a pedigreed dog; if monster and nudie movies are to be seen every night of the week in all of our key cities, while the "Spirit of America,'' and "Robert Frost," and a hundred other serious and wellmade films can't get a play date; if telephone and disk jockeys flourish while good music and drama are exiled to the remotest wave lengths of FM and the ghettos of educational radio, if one and the same mammoth corporation is to own a network, a recording company, "My Fair Lady," and the New York Yankees, while no young film maker can get past one of its secretaries to sell it a film like "Dream of Wild Horses," or Carson Davidson's "Variations on an Italian Theme"; if the Beatles take ten million dollars out of the United States while the symphony orchestras of the land scrabble for support, then something is wrong at the base of the pyramid, and not alone at the top. And there is very small hope that the young film maker will ever climb higher on the totem pole, unless our culture is strengthened to the point where he is looked upon as an honorable and useful artist, instead of an oddball.
The late, great Walter Paepcke, founder of the Institute under whose roof we meet, was partial to this sentence of Plato: "What is honored in a country will be cultivated there." The task is progressive—to cultivate that which is worthy of honor, and then to honor it.

Education can help, of course, but we can't wait for Summerhill and Harvard and the Aspen Institute and the Federation of Film Societies to do it all. It is the option, if not the duty, of mass communications to lead more than to follow to mold higher tastes rather than pander to the lowest.

YOUNGEST OF THE ARTS, and alone of the arts pervaded by big-business motivations, the film industry reflects the inherent conflicts between the eternal ideal of the creative individual to self-expression and the mundane scrutinization of balance sheets. Deployed between the two camps, the cinema audience freely hands out advice to both. Here, in excerpts from the Aspen Film Conference, all sides present their cases.
From:http://www.ubu.com/aspen/aspen2/youngOuts.html

Gattaca

It's really rare to see a good SFX film. With such massive money put on those jaw-dropping effects is it too much to match it with a decent, intelligent story? Yes, people love to see something different but a sensible narrative would be great too.

When I saw G.I. Joe, I felt it was like a telenovela. I stayed on just to see the visual effects, period.

This makes me think of GATTACA more.

Strawberry Swing

I always loved Coldplay's videos.

Now this one is really cool.

A great song with an awesome video.

Magic in 1982

I still remember when I saw E.T. in 1982. It was a very unique experience. I was five but while watching it, I felt I was transported to that world. I never knew what that was then. I kept on repeating E.T.'s lines in my mind...

"E.T. phone home..."

Now, looking back, I knew what it was.

It's the magic of cinema.