Bigger Than Life

This is a still from Nicholas Ray's "Bigger Than Life" (1956). I just love this film. First of all, the reason why I love it because it has a subversive way of using the new format of that time, CinemaScope. It wasn't a western nor a musical but a domestic thriller. By using the format CinemaScope, it has a feeling of commenting and criticizing on Hollywood mainstream productions...
In this particular scene, as the child, Richie is interrogated by his father, James Manson, on a series of mathematical questions, the shadows in the room are looming, oppressive. We can see there is a red lampshade nearby. And Ed bends over Richie from behind, his shadow on the wall is immense. Usually, Ray's use of mise en scene is subtle but even the average audience could not fail to notice this effect. It is hardly surprising that the poor boy can't think straight.
Jim Jarmusch who was Ray's teaching assistant during his time in New York University argues that whenever James Mason's character becomes delusional or psychotic, the light level are low. They are lit from beneath because of this light source. The shadows are projected unusually high. When he gets the miracle drug and is feeling good again, the light sources go back up, and everything's seems okay. These technical aspects of filmmaking affects the film emotionally. I am very much interested in the narration hidden in the narrative. The light source that Jarmusch discusses is on the left side of the frame and the shot is lit from a practical light. Therefore the source and the motivation of lighting is in the frame and has a place in the story. They are not non diegetic.


Lou, the mother comes in to make a triptych, hierarchically arranged, Ed the tallest, Lou to his side, Richie seated.
In that sense, Ray is considered to be the most progressive filmmaker in his use of wide screen in the 50's. His compositions are controlled and powerful. Charles Barr admired Ray's technique within the wide frame, calling it "completely natural and unforced". He argues the fact that Ray was able to achieve a "greater physical involvement" by revealing a "more vivid sense of space" within the CinemaScope frame.
Ray's films and use of CinemaScope also influenced Cahiers du Cinéma writers and filmmakers.
Jean Luc Godard said: "There was theatre (Griffith), poetry (Murnau), painting (Rossellini), dance (Eisenstein), music (Renoir). Henceforth there is cinema. And the cinema is Nicholas Ray." In Godard's film, Contempt, the character played by Michel Piccoli claims to have written Ray's Bigger Than Life.

Housemaid

I was able to see Housemaid (1960) online by Kim Ki-Young last night through the wonderful website The Auteur. The film is from the era of Golden Age of Korean Cinema of the 60's and is considered to be as a "consensus pick as one of the top three Korean films of all the time."
The director is actually known for his melodramas and horror films and has a mainstream style in case of storytelling and filmmaking.
He said: "I'm a scientist specializing in medicine. That makes me close to a technician... In some ways, human beings are more accurate than machines... As an independent producer, I have to be a type of skilled laborer. There were many times that I had to make a film quickly. At those times, I kept entertainment-value in mind. Not once have I made a film for the sake of making the film itself. My taste is in looking through the camera. Filming happens to correspond with that taste. Art films are what Hyun Mok Yoo makes. That's because director Yu wants to make art films. I just make films by following my heart, so the analysis I leave to all of you."


The film is a domestic thriller about a family's destruction by the introduction of a sexually predatory femme fatale, into the household. A composer, his pregnant wife and their two children move to a new, two story house where they hire a housemaid to help the wife for the work around the house. The housemaid is strange, stalks the composer and tries to seduce him, catches a rat, and she eventually gets pregnant by the husband. The baby is not welcomed by the father or the mother, therefore the composer's wife convinces the housemaid to induce a miscarriage by falling down a flight of stairs. After the accident, she becomes more erratic and kills one of the child with rat poison and and then persuades the composer to commit suicide with her by swallowing rat poison. It is a very disturbing story and not an easy film to watch.
Moreover, the director's presence is felt almost in every scene, he seems to be very careful about the staging, the depth, and the compositions, making the film a must see for film students. The way he uses conventional narration and turning it into something completely different makes him unique in case of storytelling.
In 2003, Jean-Michel Frodon, editor-in-chief of Cahiers du Cinéma, wrote that the discovery of The Housemaid by the West, over forty years after the film's debut, was a "marvelous feeling– marvelous not just because one finds in writer-director Kim Ki-Young a truly extraordinary image maker, but in his film such an utterly unpredictable work."
Actually what also attracted me about the period, the film and the director was the design of the posters. This is the poster designed for the film Housemaid.


And this is the poster design for the VHS release of his film "Woman of Fire" (1971).



I haven't seen Woman of Fire, but the way the director often focuses on the psychology of their female characters is very well visualized within the design of the posters. The icon of femme fatale belong to western cinema of the film noir of the 40's and 50's but the director was able to apply it to his own cinema creating an unique work of storytelling.

The Garden of Earthly Delights

Hieronymus Bosch was an Early Netherlandish painter of the fifteen and sixteen century. He is well known for his use of artistic imagery to illustrate moral and religious concepts and narratives. One of his most important work is "The Garden of Earthy Delights" which is housed in Museo del Predo in Madrid since 1939 because in the late sixteenth-century, Philip II of Spain purchased most of Bosch's paintings is a triptych made with vivid colors and it was probably intended to illustrate the history of mankind according to medieval Christian doctrine.
Little is known about him and his training since he didn't leave any notebooks or diaries. Because of this reason, it was never easy for academicians to make interpretations about his work and they have often arrived at contradictory interpretations.
Art historian Walter Gibson argues the fact that Bosch's paintings is a world of dreams and nightmares in which form seem to flicker and change before our eyes.
The reason why I am writing about Bosch is that I recently found out an animation film based on Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights painting from a Spanish director. According to Juan Ibanez, the director, the experimental short film hopes to delve into the timelessness of the metaphor as an element of sensitive communication; in how the stories and the data of human experience are interpreted and shown in the artistic act.
The film's pedagogic interest lies in the possibility of offering a new vision of the work of art that is closer to the current visual education which highlights the movement and action over the static-ness of traditional painting. On the other hand, it allows for a deeper comprehension of the symbols which infer and draw closer artistic perceptions from different eras and artistic manifestations.
The teaser of the short animation film can be found at this link:
http://www.elboscomovie.com

Barry Lyndon

Barry Lyndon directed by Stanley Kubrick in 1975 is a film based on the novel "The Luck of Barry Lyndon" by William Makepeace Thackeray. It is about an Irish adventurer on the eighteenth century, his rise and fall in the English society.
The way Kubrick photographed it fascinates me. He wanted to contradict with the conventional way of lighting which is used in dominant cinema and he wanted to get a different feeling for this particular piece. He wanted to achieve photography without electric lighting which meant to be shot with candle lights.
In order to do that, they worked specifically with faster lenses developed by Zeiss for NASA for moon landing. These lenses were super - fast 50 mm. F/0.70 lenses especially developed for low light situations. The lenses had huge apertures and allowed Kubrick and cinematographer to shoot scenes lit with actual candles to an average lighting volume of only three candlepower , "recreating the huddle and glow of a pre-electrical age."
The result seemed potentially more realistic, the method gave a particular period look to the film which is very similar to to eighteenth century paintings, particularly owing a lot to William Hogarth with whom Thackeray had always been fascinated.
William Hogarth was a major English painter, printmaker, social critic who has been credited with pioneering western sequential art.

It is said for Barry Lyndon that the film is consciously a museum piece, its characters pinned to the frame like butterflies.

Worker and Collective Farm Woman

The Worker and Collective Farm Woman was created by Vera Mukhina in 1936 in Moscow. It is a gigantic stainless group of a worker and a collective farmer for the Soviet Economic Achievement Exhibition of 1936. It was so impressive that it became for the Soviet consciousness almost the Russian equivalent of the Statue of Liberty.
What really impresses me in this work is the male and female being together fighting for the same goal. The same can be seen in Russian Constructivist who included both men and women in their work. Constructivism in Russia was mostly influenced by Italian Futurism but they did not possess the same value or violent hostile to the idea of woman creativity. For several reasons, women played a very important role in the Russian avant - garde of the revolutionary years. First of all, the Revolution made a deep impact on Russian society. The other reason for that was the Constructivism which pushed the limits of visual arts, drew artistic practice into areas, such as textile design, which were mostly practiced by women.
In the year 1947, the sculpture became the symbol of the Russian "Mosfilm" Studio. It is maybe the oldest and biggest film studio in Europe and Russia. Commonly considered greatest film directors of Soviet like Eisenstein and Tarkovky and japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosowa have all produced films in that studio.

On the official website of the studio, it is indicated that the majority of motion pictures on the market are created by the studios on Mosfilm premises, which are led by famous Russian cinematographers Vadim Abdrashytov, Valentin Chernykh, Georgy Danelia, Svetlana Druzhinina, Andrey Eshpai, Sergei Govorukhin, Sergei Kolosov, Vladimir Menshov, Vladimir Naumov, Gleb Panfilov, Sergei Soloviov, Alla Surikova etc.
Still today, Mosfilm continue to expand as a film studio and it accommodates state of art technologies, non stop film productions, experienced creative professionals working in all over aspects of film making from pre - production to post - production and a rare collection such as weaponry props since the time of eigtheen century to now, tanks, costumes and landscapes.
The famous symbol of Worker and Collective Farm Woman was appeared for the first time in 1947, in the film "Spring" by Grigoriy Alexandrov.
The website of the Mosfilm can be visited in this link:
http://eng.mosfilm.ru/

The Quest To Regain Egypt's Antiquities

One of the first artifacts that visitors see in the entrance of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo is a fake. It is a reproduction of the Rosetta Stone and unfortunately it is not the only replica.
Today I found out on BBC News that Egyptian Archeologists will travel to the Louvre Museum to collect five ancient fresco fragments stolen from a tomb in the Vally of the Kings in the 1980's but it is reported that there are many other stolen antiquities which they also want back.
The original Rosetta Stone is kept in British Museum. The Stone dates back to 196 BC and was very important for the modern decipherment of the hieroglyphics because it has two Egyptian language scripts (hieroglyphs and demotic) and one in classical Greek. It was discovered by the french in 1799 and given to the English under the terms of the treaty of Alexandria is one the most high profile items that Egypt's chief archeologist would like returned.
Another artifacts that they wish to be returned is the 3,500-year-old bust of Queen Nefertiti, wife of the famous Pharaoh Akhenaten that I mentioned before in this blog.
It is also reported in BBC News that thousands of artifacts were spirited out of Egypt during the period of colonial rule and afterwards by archeologists, adventurers and thieves. According to a 1972 United Nations agreement, artifacts are the property of their country of origin and pieces smuggled out must be returned.
"I am very happy that story became very big because this will warn every museum all over the world not to buy stolen artifacts," says Mr Hawass. (Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities) "This will preserve the heritage not only of Egypt but of whole World."

Interiors by Woody Allen

I recently saw the film "Interiors" by Wood Allen which was released in 1978. The film is considered to be Bergmanesque which means that it has been largely influenced by Bergman films which the director doesn't hesitate to agree with the idea. I find the film very important in the sense that I thought that the whole film was an attempt to make a large definition of art or history of art.It is about personal feelings (interiors) that we all possess as individuals and it is about how hard it is to find a way to express ourselves. It is about a family, three sisters, a mother and a father, and sister's husbands. The father is a successful lawyer in New York and he is in his late sixties. The mother is interested in art in general and because of that all his daughters are somehow related to art business. The older sister is a poem writer who is very successful at what she does, the other sister doesn't really know what to do but she is looking for a way to express her feelings through several mediums and the elder sister is an actress who appears mostly on television serials and B movies. One day, the father, suddenly decides to leave her wife and go on by his own. Devastated by the idea, the mother goes into depression and tries to kill herself several times. And the relations in the family becomes very complicated. In a way, the mother wants her husband back but the father already meets with someone and decides to marry her.
Now you may ask, what has got all of these to do with art. Actually, I am much more interested in oral references that the film provides us. During the film, we hear the characters talking about Henri Matisse, African Masks, Ancient Greek Architectures and churches in Europe. And I believe that these are the essential key points that the director wants us to look at.
When the father and the mother first meet after their separation, the mother mentions about the exhibition of a Matisse painting in New York. In 1908, Matisse wrote "A work of art must carry in itself its complete significance and impose itself upon the beholder even before he can identify the subject matter." That was one of the first overt claims that an artist's responsibility is only to himself and that he is bound by no rules in seeking to express himself.


But is this what the father wanted? Let's try to understand his new girlfriend which he is about to marry. The first time he introduces his girlfriend to his daughters, they are shocked by her relaxed and open behavior and that makes them sick. The reason why is because the daughters cannot be that open minded and free in expressing whatever they like to say. The women unlike them is not sophisticated intellectuality but knows how to enjoy life, how to dance, how to drink and eat. And in a particular time, the father mentions her passion to the African Masks and talks about her collections. Now if we think about African art and masks in general, we will understand that most them influenced impressionism and therefore modernism. Artists such as Picasso for example were also collectors of African Masks because they were in fact fascinated by the way they found ways to express themselves, for them what was important was not representing the reality but the reality they saw or imagine. There work was based on essentials and they were mostly abstract. For this subject matter, I believe it is very important to read the first chapters of "The Story of Art" by Gombrich to get a better understanding.


Later on, in the diner, the couple mentions about their trip to Greece, Athens. And the women later adds that she has been in Europe before and visited all the churches and she was sick of it. But she was fascinated by the architecture of Athens. We all know that for years in Europe, churches had great impact in art making. It was only after the churches lost their power in the eighteen century that art became a more self centered craft. Therefore I find very important to look at the scene where the father declares that he is going to marry with someone else. There are in the church.