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.