Sunday, February 28, 2010

Obayashi - Lubitsch - Godard - Murnau - Lang - Sirk: MoC January + February 2010 Releases




House [1977] by Nobuhiko Obayashi. Available in a DVD edition, with an anamorphic presentation of its original 1.55:1 ratio. The cinema revival event of 2010 on both sides of the Atlantic is one of the purest author expressions ever detonated, the blood of the poet splashed through the cage of the Super Ape. It's relentlessly worked, and a truly free film: something on par with the masterpieces of Seijun Suzuki from 1980's Zigeunerweisen onward but of a worldview all Obayashi's own. A tremendous interior vision articulates the truth of the real sky, the perfect manor moonlit isolate, the eminence of the exurbs. House preserves, protects, and reaffirms the retardant: for a soul was on fire.

The original Japanese theatrical trailer accompanies the feature, along with ninety minutes of video interviews with Obayashi and associates that take the elegiac "we had such crazy ideas in the day" tack. A 40-page full-color booklet contains a 2009 essay by Paul Roquet and loads of production stills.

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A selection of Ernst Lubitsch's excellent pre-Hollywood works have been brought together in a six-disc DVD boxset, Lubitsch in Berlin: Fairy-Tales, Melodramas, and Sex Comedies: Six Films by Ernst Lubitsch, 1918-1921. Each film is presented with optional English subtitles and in its original 1.37:1 ratio — German-language intertitles intact.

Ich möchte kein Mann sein [I Wouldn't Like to Be a Man, 1918] — A deleterious pore-ridden elder gets invited into the home of the young Ossi Oswalda (who anyway is never ingenuous) for discipline-and-punish. He ends up possessing her. We never find out what the absent uncle makes of it all. One of the first entries in a genre that Lubitsch alone invented and Fritz Lang proceeded to develop: the comedy of cigar-fucking.

Die Puppe. [The Doll., 1919] — The doll-girl (that is, Ossi again, here in imitation of an automaton) becomes an agent of freedom in a stilted, mechanistic social strata-sphere. This massively ironic picture is Lubitsch's most extreme early iteration of his obsessive "mistaken-identity" theme.

Die Austernprinzessin. [The Oyster Princess., 1919] — Several viewings might reveal this to be the strangest of the Ossi-Lubitsch collaborations: for all its kineticism (the movie's got an epic foxtrot scene in its center) one feels that the director has begun to explore the possibilities of equilibrium, of turning scenes into 'blocks,' of slowing things down, not keeping the machine so tightly wound. It's important: he'll need a new rhythm for the films that immediately follow, then again in '29.

Sumurun [1920] — Next to the following film in this set, one of the two circulating Lubitsch movies not many people can find a lot of love for. (His final silent, 1929's Eternal Love, might also share this dubious distinction.) It's worth revisiting, pocked as it is with stabs at ambiance — and more. For example: Imagine if there were a scene in a Star Wars film in which George Lucas had a band of traveling minstrels show up in a town, and one of the troupers is a hunchbacked lutist, and a crowd gathers, but then another member of the group starts performing a belly-dance in the immediate vicinity, and this distracts the crowd away from the original performer so that they all skirt off to watch the more provocative show. The hunchback gets mad, rushes over and slaps the belly-dancer in front of her spectators, who jeer as he drags her back inside one of the troupe's wagons. It would be a beautiful example of a perfect scenaristic episode. Except it doesn't happen in George Lucas. It happens in Ernst Lubitsch.

Anna Boleyn [1920] — The titular "Anna" being a Germanization of the historical "Anne." Maybe a little heavy, arguably a little too long, but still one of the great films about open secrets.

Die Bergkatze [The Mountain-Lion / The Wildcat, 1921] — This one's almost totally about shapes and forms. There's a part where the fortress commander's sitting down in his throne enjoying a smoke, flanked by swooping geometry and a pure sphere at rest atop a cylinder. It's a 'representation' or an 'indication' of artillery, but sublimated into form for the sake of form. Because ordnance, by its nature, is too idiotic to really deserve being filmed.

A sixth disc contains Robert Fischer's 2006 feature-length documentary Ernst Lubitsch in Berlin: From Schönhauser Allee to Hollywood. The set also includes fantastic short essays for each of the films, written by David Cairns (Sumurun, Anna Boleyn), Ignatiy Vishnevetsky (Die Puppe., Die Austernprinzessin.), and Anna Thorngate (Ich möchte kein Mann sein, Die Bergkatze). A newly commissioned score written, performed, and recorded by Bernard Wrigley soundtracks Die Puppe., and is a great example of silent-film-accompaniment done (and recorded) with some sensibility — that is, it lacks histrionic piano plinky-plonk and chilly-razor digital tonality.

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Une femme mariée, fragments d'un film tourné en 1964 en noir et blanc [A Married Woman: Fragments of a Film Shot in 1964 in Black and White, 1964] by Jean-Luc Godard, newly reissued in a Blu-ray edition in its original 1.37:1 ratio, with a glorious 1080p image, exquisite grain-structure, and a truly robust uncompressed soundtrack. All of the features of the DVD edition have been retained and updated for the Blu-ray. In April I wrote here about the DVD edition:

••••••••••


[I]ncluded [...] is the original 3-1/2-minute trailer for the film (approx. two minutes longer than that listed in the filmography of the Centre Pompidou's 2006 volume Jean-Luc Godard: Documents), created and edited by Godard himself (presented in true 1080p HD, non-uprezzed, for the Blu-ray).

Accompanying the disc: an 80-page perfectly-bound book (cited by voters in the 2009 DVDBeaver year-end poll as among the best DVD 'extras' of the year) that contains:

— A carefully crafted cover.

— Film-credits for both the feature and the trailer.

— An editorial preface on the release, on "Godard-style" graphic pastiches in JLG-related media collateral, and on the commodification of cinema and physical/virtual "home video" media.

— A short inquiry into the nature and use of "production stills" in media and press.

— A new two-page 'overture' to the film by Luc Moullet....

— A new 20-page roundtable discussion on the film, and its relationship to the entirety of Godard's oeuvre from the '60s to the '00s, between Luc Moullet, Bill Krohn (of "Kinbrody and the Ceejays" notoriety), and me.

— A new 21-page investigation into and analysis of the film, by Bill Krohn.

— A new statement about the film by its star, Macha Méril.

— A new and exclusive English translation by me, running 12 pages, of Godard's genius 1978 lecture on the film, and its relationship to Ingmar Bergman's work, to Flaherty's Nanook of the North, to Rossellini's Francesco giullare di Dio, and to the world and the Image at large, as originally transcribed and presented in the long-unavailable and absolutely vital Introduction à une véritable histoire du cinéma.

— JLG's Hitchcock collage.

— The relevant excerpts from Jean Racine's Bérénice, presented in the original French, with new parallel English translations by me.

— Endnotes, featuring remarks by myself and Andy Rector.

••••••••••


This is the Godard film (a) in which time tends to stand still the most (as always in Godard, both analysis and sensuality are being presented and are occurring; moreover, in Une femme mariée we get the sensuality of this analysis alongside the analysis of sensuality); (b) in which JLG proves (in the mathematical sense) 'documentary' ≠ 'acting', that is, he reveals the precise moments when the former reveals, in turn, its subsumption of the latter.

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City Girl [1930] by F. W. Murnau. Available in a Blu-ray edition, in a 1080p presentation with original 1.19:1 aspect ratio. The most overlooked late-Murnau film has been given new life in high-definition, and the results are stunning. It seems to me impossible from here on out to relegate City Girl to "minor" status; it could very well come down to the Blu-ray format's bringing us as close to celluloid as we're ever likely to experience in a home setting (on a TV/display-esque device) that the strengths even of the Fox-imposed sequences alone have been made freshly and powerfully evident. (Yes, Blu-ray might well be the site of the first truce between the projection purists and the home-theater'acs.) To speak briefly of the qualities of the film as a whole: It's the sequel of sorts to 1927's Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, insofar as Murnau takes the denuded premise — a 'simple' man and a 'simple' woman love each other, have their love tested across the milieux of city and country, and in the end achieve an apotheosis or platonic ideal of Love and are thus redeemed (thus "Love Is All," a sentiment not unfamiliar to those who've seen the close of the director's Faust) — and hones it further at the level of story and a newly linear mise-en-scène, thereby accessing previously untapped and soaringly lyrical modulations in the emotional array. This latest viewing also revealed to me something I hadn't picked up on in previous screenings: a mystical 'transference' of blame and guilt that leaps from one character to another in the course of the proceedings like an electrical charge (articulated by the postures of the bodies), or as though these people are connected by a psychic chain, with each successive manifestation of the transference betraying a 'prime,' then 'double-prime' (etc.) set of characteristics at the "leap". To diagram all the permutations of this phenomenon in detail will require its own blog-post — but I did just want to make a public note of the fact, which will also hopefully serve as a reminder for me to explicate it when a few free hours come my way.

The disc also includes a new and exclusive audio commentary by David Kalat, and a production-still-heavy 28-page booklet with a 2003 essay by Adrian Danks.

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M [1931] by Fritz Lang. Available in both Blu-ray and DVD editions — with a to-die-for 1080p presentation on the former, and a high-def progressive transfer on the latter, the film appearing on both in its restored form and with its original 1.19:1 aspect ratio. M is linked to Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse in the same way that the end of each scene in both films is linked (or rather, 'rhymes') with the opening image or sound of the scene directly following. While this internal architecture is fairly pronounced in both works, I only reiterate here its existence to forefront the idea that these two films constitute as concerted a diptych in the Lang oeuvre as the bi-fold structures of Die Spinnen, Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler., Die Nibelungen, or the Indian Epic. (M and Das Testament even share a common character in Otto Wernicke's Herr Kommissar Lohmann.)

Two separate audio commentaries supplement the feature: one with Anton Kaes and Eric Rentschler; the other with Peter Bogdanovich, Martin Koerber, Torsten Kaiser, and intermittent excerpts from Bogdanovich's 1965 audio interview with Fritz Lang. Also included: the rarely seen 1932 British release version of M created by committee after Lang's original had left German theaters — this version features different actors, takes, and Peter Lorre's first English-language performance. Last but not least, Erwin Leiser's fascinating 1968 documentary Zum Beispiel Fritz Lang [For Example: Fritz Lang], in which Lang discusses his career at Ufa. A 48-page booklet contains Fritz Lang's 1931 essay "My Film M — A Factual Report"; a 1963 interview with Lang; detailed notes by Anton Kaes and the relevant script excerpt pertaining to a scene still missing from the restored version of the film; an essay by Robert Fischer titled "Mörder — Meurtrier — Murderer: The Multi-Language Versions of Fritz Lang's M"; and a massive amount of production stills and original production artwork.

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There's Always Tomorrow [1956] by Douglas Sirk. Available in a DVD edition, with a high-definition anamorphic transfer of the film presented in its original 1.85:1 aspect ratio. Sirk was one of the two or three greatest film-namers in cinema history — I mean, the titles of his films throughout the Hollywood phase are exceptional and stand as doubly, sometimes trebly ironical commentary upon the events their pictures disclose. — ALL I DESIRE. — MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION. — ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS. — THERE'S ALWAYS TOMORROW. — WRITTEN ON THE WIND. — THE TARNISHED ANGELS. — A TIME TO LOVE AND A TIME TO DIE. — IMITATION OF LIFE. And the titles are all the more extraordinary, or surprising — or magnificent — because the vision of the cinema that they would seem to 'advertise' (for so often in Hollywood cinema, especially that of the '40s and '50s, the titles were like circus-barkers) not only lives up to but exceeds the promotion. "THERE'S ALWAYS TOMORROW" is one of my favorites. In one sense, the title's hopeful, averring: "If not today, then the next day," and invoking the eternal promise of tomorrow. But listen closely and you can hear, as though under the breath: "It's never gonna happen" — because anyone who ever says "there's always tomorrow" never makes a move in the present — and reality is all only past-and-present. And the title is, therefore, shattering. Among the picture's other brilliant aspects there's Barbara Stanwyck, one of the greatest of all screen actresses in one of her greatest performances. And then there's the theme of the home as a prison, carried over from Sirk's 1949 Shockproof, and given form not only in the claustrophobic clouds of parlor furniture and a series of arbitrary dividing walls and screens (erected so as to 'define rooms' or, as was often explained unironically by the wise adults of my childhood years, to 'divide up space'), but in the candlesticks that rise from the dining room table like spears and (via Sirk's brilliantly shifting camera) unite and divide characters in tableau-like compartments, and would-be conspiratorial alliance versus one another. (Stanwyck and MacMurray positioned in the space between two candles, with the son in the segment demarcated to the right; then the camera shifts at the precise moment where dialogue constructs a new tension/alliance, and new demarcations form — etc. This occurs three or four times in the scene.)

Also included on the disc is a rough only-extant version of the original American theatrical trailer, a 1956 dialogue and continuity script (as an on-disc PDF file), and Pascal Thomas's and Dominique Rabourdin's incredible 61-minute 2008 documentary Quelques jours avec Sirk [A Few Days with Sirk]. A 40-page booklet contains an essay by Andrew Klevan and excerpts from a wonderful 1977 interview with Sirk by Michael Stern.

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On an unrelated note: I finally saw Casablanca for the first time ever. It's a film by Michael Curtiz, by the way, though the studio and the collective unconsciousness fails to acknowledge that it has an author — these Stadt-der-Arbeiter-esque entities often opt to credit it to "the genius of the system" instead, whatever that means. Anyway, there's a separate essay for that; right now, it's enough to say I thought it was great. (Or maybe not entirely enough to say such. Not to take the sentiment off the rails, but it's important to remark that I watched Casablanca on the Blu-ray that was a released a couple years ago — and that Blu-ray is awful. After viewing the movie, try though I might have, I couldn't find any indication about its awfulness in any of the reviews online; were reviewers at that point just too grateful to have Blu-ray technology in their hands at last? It's perplexing. It is very obviously awful. Here's how: The film grain has been scrubbed out of the image. Every shot looks flat, and every human being's skin casts a 'gleam' akin to light bouncing off a white plastic surface in Kubrick's 2001. I'll never watch this disc again, and can only hope it gets revisited for a re-re-re-re-remastering somewhere down the line. As it stands, the Blu-ray of Casablanca is a crime against film preservation.) (Quick sidenote: and another unremarked-upon awful Blu-ray release: The Godfather, in which a strange 'MotionFlow'-esque/frame-smoothing algorithm has been seemingly applied at some stage in the authoring, such that the film no longer appears to play back at 24-frames-per-second, but rather some 'inbetween-24-and-30' video standard. Again: unwatchable. And, from what I can tell, undetected! I swear I'm not losing my mind — and that my television settings are perfectly calibrated, from MotionFlow OFF to Full Pixel Mode and all the rest... Every other Blu-ray I've seen on my 'set-up' looks not only superb but downright just.)

So back to Casablanca by Michael Curtiz. It was delightful finally to glean some context for all the legendary lines from Julius Epstein's, Philip Epstein's, and Howard Koch's script that have permeated culture, from "Here's lookin' at you kid" through to "I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship" and on to the non-existence of "Play it again, Sam." But one extract sneaked up quietly... I'd never heard this line before seeing the film, and it struck me as maybe the most poetic and personally resonant of them all:

"The geography

may be a little

difficult to arrange..."


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Thursday, February 18, 2010

Godard on the Death of Rohmer


I woke up this morning to find an email from Andy Rector, via Samuel Bréan who wrote: "In this week's issue of Les Inrockuptibles (742, 17/2/2010), Jean-Marc Lalanne describes the recent evening that the Cinémathèque Française dedicated to Eric Rohmer, with onstage tributes by collaborators, a screening of Le genou de Claire, etc."

The article ends with the following (my translation appears below the French version) —

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Mais le choc de la soirée vint de la découverte d'un petit film signé Jean-Luc Godard réalisé pour l'occasion. Sur un écran noir se succèdent les titres des plus célèbres articles de Rohmer dans les Cahiers. En voix off, Godard évoque des images sorties des limbes : deux jeunes amis, parlant ensemble dans la nuit ; les mêmes dans la cuisine de la mère de l'un, leur préparant à manger, débattant encore de films... Rarement on avait entendu Godard parler de choses si personnelles, très simples et très nues. Le film se clôt sur un plan furtif du cinéaste, un peu hagard face à sa webcam. Déjà il a disparu. On aimerait le retenir. On aimerait les retenir tous les deux.

•••


But the shock of the evening came with the discovery of a small film by Jean-Luc Godard created for the occasion. Over a black screen, the titles of Rohmer's most famous articles from the Cahiers appear one after another. In voice-over, Godard evokes images pulled from the ether: two young friends, speaking to one another through the night; the same pair in the kitchen of one of their mothers, making food, going back and forth discussing films... Rarely have we heard Godard speak of such personal things, very simple and very exposed. The film closes with a furtive shot of the filmmaker, face slightly haggard in his webcam. With that, he's gone. You want to hold onto him. You want to hold onto both of them.

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A piece I wrote about Rohmer on the day his death was announced appears here.

Tributes by Louis Skorecki and Michel Mourlet appear here.

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Sunday, February 14, 2010

The 'Dragnet' / Cinemasparagus Convergence


From Jack Webb's Dragnet. Episode 42: "The Big Departure" [1968]. (Transcript via Badge714.com.) —

FRIDAY: "Yeah, well, [the Pilgrims] had a few things going for them that you don't. They knew how to hunt. How to use an axe. How to build a house. Start a fire without matches and bank it at night so it wouldn't go out. You know how to do all that, of course. And you're going to grow this."

[Friday holds up a packet of asparagus seeds, which the kid claims he bought.]

MOBLEY: "Oh, yeah, I really dig fresh asparagus."

FRIDAY: "When do you think you'll eat it?"

MOBLEY: "This summer."

FRIDAY: "Asparagus takes two years. The Pilgrims could raise their own food — which you can't. And even so, half of them died the first year. But you prepared for that too, didn't you?"

MOBLEY: "I don't know what you mean."

FRIDAY: "You've got shovels."

MOBLEY: "Alright. Big deal. We're not the frontiersmen of all time. But Dennis and Paul are very bright people — mature, intelligent — "

FRIDAY: "And high-principled."

MOBLEY: "That's right."

FRIDAY: "What was that one about materialism?"

MOBLEY: "We've rejected material values."

FRIDAY: "Oh, yeah. Well, what are you going to do when the batteries run down?"

MOBLEY: "We've got a generator."

FRIDAY: "And when there's no more gas?"

MOBLEY: "Okay. So we won't listen to the radios."

WAGNER: "That's not vital!"

GANNON: "But food is. And you'll run out of it sooner than you think. Then you figure you'll start eating wild goat. Well, it's not prime rib. But maybe you'll acquire a taste for it. You'd better — three times a day."



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Thursday, February 04, 2010

Vishnevetsky/Bujalski




A great interview with the great Andrew Bujalski by the great Ignatiy Vishnevetsky at The Auteurs Notebook here.

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Monday, February 01, 2010

iPad





I've had a bunch of conversations with friends since January 27th regarding the latest Apple device, and most of these chats have found me circling around the fact that the press and the 'commenters' are not grasping (yet) the profound implications and unison endgame of the iPad — are not drawing conclusions far enough out to the paradigm shift that the device certainly signals in terms of human beings' relationship to a 'computing interface' (and their potential and actual facility with a grammar of interface) and in terms of revenue acquisition for beleaguered publishers and 'content'-creators. Above all, the self-assumed pundits miss the base essence of the iPad's 'is'ness' as a kind of Athenian, or essentially Delphic — or, neo-platonic — ideal of mobility and fluidity, as a means of access to and connection (not even just 'interaction') with content, i.e., contemplatable stuff with which to interface, s'exposer. There's been so much hand-wringing instead over the "annihilation of the physical book," which I don't for a second believe in (because there's a pre-disposed compulsion in mankind toward tactility, and because 'computing' never did extinguish inscription — speaking for myself [though I'm sure millions would agree], not being able to underline or make notes in the margins of novels would amount to a totally unacceptable self-effacement, would basically incinerate a whole history of [re-]reads, of workings through aesthetic/intellectual schemata),.......... or over the lack of support for Flash, or the present absence of a built-in camera.

So that's a really brief abstract of my feelings re: the iPad. Due to lack of time and lots of work, I'll hand things over now to quotes from / links to a few articles I read today (on my iPhone, at dinner) that get to the codexical crux of the matter —

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"By the time the bells, whooshes and clicks died down, I couldn’t say the future had arrived, but I’m pretty sure we can see it from here.

" 'It was like someone came back from five years into the future and handed this to us,' said John Gruber of Daring Fireball, a respected tech blog.

"The iPad’s promise was hinted at before Mr. Jobs hit the stage. The set was dominated by a large, comfy chair. Since the birth of the personal computer, we have been hunched over, squinting at screens — great big terminals, laptop displays, tiny screens on PDAs. With the iPad, the screen has come to us as we lean back in ease.

"Critics who suggested that Apple unveiled little more than an iPhone that won’t fit in your pocket don’t seem to understand that by scaling the iPhone experience, the iPad becomes a different species. Media companies now have a new platform that presents content in an intimate way."


— David Carr, in The New York Times — the full piece is here.

"In the rush to slobber over one's self, the real point of the iPad was either missed or dismissed in a whiff of epic proportions. To whit [sic] I submit this humble rejoinder to the hordes. At the end of the day, at the end of this decade, the iPad will be seen as the first device that collected all the media together in one truly portable place. The real power of the iPad model will thus come not from the monetization of any one thing but in the creation of a whole new form — a form of forms, if you will."

— Michael Conniff, at The Huffington Post — the full piece is here.

"The iPad represents a fundamental shift in the metaphors and language of 'computing.' Or rather it extends that shift that was tested first in our pockets with the iPhone, and brings it to our desks, our coffee tables... everywhere else. The iPad is a huge change.

"We have lived for the past thirty-plus years in an engineer's universe of computing, where layers of implicit understanding — about file structures, multiple programs, menu idiosyncrasies, nomenclature — are required to figure out how to make your computer do what you want it to do. To many of us, these metaphors are completely embedded in our brains. So we can't understand how someone like, say, my mother, can't figure out how to use her scanner software. ....

"I don't know if the iPad will be commercially successful, but I believe it represents a fundamental shift in the metaphors of computing, as significant as the move from text to graphical interfaces."


— Hugh McGuire, at The Huffington Post — the full piece is here.

"What you're seeing in the industry's reaction to the iPad is nothing less than future shock.

"For years we've all held to the belief that computing had to be made simpler for the 'average person'. I find it difficult to come to any conclusion other than that we have totally failed in this effort.

"Secretly, I suspect, we technologists quite liked the idea that Normals would be dependent on us for our technological shamanism. Those incantations that only we can perform to heal their computers, those oracular proclamations that we make over the future and the blessings we bestow on purchasing choices.

"Ask yourself this: in what other walk of life do grown adults depend on other people to help them buy something? Women often turn to men to help them purchase a car but that's because of the obnoxious misogyny of car dealers, not because ladies worry that the car they buy won't work on their local roads. ....

"With the iPhone OS as incarnated in the iPad, Apple proposes to do something about this, and I mean
really do something about it instead of just talking about doing something about it, and the world is going mental.

"Not the entire world, though. The people whose backs have been broken under the weight of technological complexity and failure immediately understand what's happening here. Those of us who patiently, day after day, explain to a child or colleague that the reason there's no Print item in the File menu is because, although the Pages document is filling the screen, Finder is actually the frontmost application and it doesn't have any windows open, understand what's happening here. ....

"The tech industry will be in paroxysms of future shock for some time to come. Many will cling to their January-26th notions of what it takes to get 'real work' done; cling to the idea that the computer-based part of it is the 'real work'.

"It's not. The Real Work is not formatting the margins, installing the printer driver, uploading the document, finishing the PowerPoint slides, running the software update or reinstalling the OS.

"The Real Work is teaching the child, healing the patient, selling the house, logging the road defects, fixing the car at the roadside, capturing the table's order, designing the house and organising the party."


— Fraser Speirs — the full piece is here.



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Steve Jobs throughout the 1990s, in the NeXT years and his return to Apple in 1997 (his comments from a few years ago on 60 Minutes about The Beatles that I wanted to include are unembeddable):







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Eléna et les hommes



Just released from the magnificent Versus Entertainment label in Spain: a gorgeous and beautifully designed new DVD edition of Jean Renoir's 1956 masterpiece Eléna et les hommes [Eléna and the Men], bearing the title Elena y los hombres.



Included across the two discs: Renoir's introduction of the film made for the 1962 series of French television broadcasts. — The extraordinary L'Album de famille de Jean Renoir [Jean Renoir's Family Album], Roland Gritti's 16-minute 1956 documentary screened in French cinemas with Eléna et les hommes at the time of the feature's original release, in which Renoir discusses his family and his father the painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir in particular. — And last but not least, the first part (of three) of Jacques Rivette's classic 1967 film made for Cinéastes de notre temps, Jean Renoir, le patron [Jean Renoir: The Boss]. The discs feature removable Spanish subtitles across all elements; in the case of L'Album de famille de Jean Renoir the removable Spanish subtitles appear on black bars to cover up... English subtitles burnt into the master.

The package's physical centerpiece is the perfect-bound, glossy, full-color 72-page book that contains a short 1995 essay about the film by Carlos Losilla; an extract from a 1998 essay by Àngel Quintana; and a full reprint of the conversation that Andy Rector and myself had about the film in 2008 at this blog and at Kino Slang, translated into Spanish by Stefan Ivancic and retaining all the original imagery from the version that appeared at Cinemasparagus. (Earlier today I caught word that Cahiers du cinéma España described the discussion in their review of the release as "a great lesson in cinema.")

You can read our conversation in its original English-language form —

here
(in the version with my image-selection)

or here
(in the version with Andy's image-selection)


Congratulations and sincere thanks to the entire Versus team who put together this outstanding release: Adrián Guerra, Gonzalo del Pozo, Juan Molero, Nuria Bermejo, Pepe Tito, and Alejandro Miranda.

Above all — if you haven't seen it, watch, rewatch, and rewatch again Eléna et les hommes! It's one of the most sublime films ever made, and must be at least 412 times more three-dimensional than Avatar.

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