I wanted to post bits from different Pontecorvo interviews which I found interesting:

Q- Everyone asks, why have you directed so few movies?A- It’s true I make one film every eight or nine years. I am like an impotent man, who can make love only to a woman who is completely right for him. I can only make a movie in which I am totally in love. If you had the list of films I’ve refused – The Mission, Bethune, etc., you’d have a telephone book.
In my opinion, a film is a synthesis of form and content, but a synthesis based on a counterpoint of sound and image. It’s not always that the visual image is more important than the sound image.

Pontecorvo: About three years ago the BBC defined my work as “the dictatorship of truth.” In my cinema, when faced with the choice of distancing oneself from reality or using an effect that might be used to win the popularity with the public, I always renounce these possibilities and stay close to reality

ME: You were in the anti-fascist resistance. Did your experiences help in making the film?

GP: Yes, of course. In certain details every clandestine struggle is very much the same. The resistance against fascism, whether in
Paris or
Rome, and the struggle against the French colonial occupation in
Algeria confronted common problems and used similar techniques. So my experiences helped a lot and it was very natural and easy for me to imagine what I would have done in these conditions.

I also had great help from the people of the Casbah in
Algiers, an extremely poor section of the city, which was built around small alleys, because they could relate the details of what actually happened to them.

ME: As we speak the
US military and their allies are doing the same things in
Iraq—mass roundups, torture, and assassination—that you dramatise in the film. Could you tell me what you think about the occupation?

GP: I am terribly hostile to any form of foreign presence in another country.
Iraq should have total autonomy.

There is a scene in The Battle of Algiers that is very appropriate to the Iraqi situation. At a certain moment some journalists ask Ben M’Hidi, one of the resistance leaders: “Do you think the FLN, the Algerian organisation, will be able to defeat the mighty French army?” and he replies, “No, but I think that it will be more difficult for
France to hold back the course of history.”

Although there are differences between
Algeria and
Iraq, these comments are valid to the situation in
Iraq. In the end,
Iraq and all other countries where there is pain, sacrifices and battles against occupation, will succeed in defending their own independence. In the long run, therefore, I think
Iraq will, soon or later, be a free country. I hope this happens because it is not automatically assured.

The recent information about
US torture of Iraqi prisoners provides a stronger argument to those all who regard the occupation as unjust and illegal. And remember we are only discussing the tortures that have been exposed.

ME: When you made The Battle of Algiers and Burn there were a number of left-wing filmmakers making movies with an anti-imperialist message. Why do you think there are so few directors dealing with these themes today?

GP: Unfortunately there has been an ugly lowering of filmmaking standards compared to 15, 20 or 30 years ago. There is less interest in politics by filmmakers; in other words, there is less interest shown in the problems of other people. This is expressed by the fact that producers who in an earlier time would have accepted certain themes are no longer interested because they think the public would not like them.

For directors, it’s a bit different because their interests are not entirely economic but political and moral. There are people that want to make serious films, but they have problems finding producers. The level of political interest in the media and in the European public, unfortunately, has lessened.

Irene Bignardi’s article on the film and its history is pretty in-depth and very interesting. It can be found at http://www.arts.arizona.edu/mar453/Making%20of%20Battle.htm

Terrorism and Torture in The Battle of Algiers: An Interview with Saadi Yacef can be found at http://www.arts.arizona.edu/mar453/Cineaste%20Interview.htm

An analysis of the controversial scene in the movie where the three women detonate bombs at different locations can be found at http://pov.imv.au.dk/Issue_20/section_1/artc1A.html

I imagine you have this idyllic life in your old rural house, with your husband composing, you writing. Then I read that your children love the band Offspring. That must shatter the peace.

Jamaica Kincaid: Oh yes! Offspring and Green Day. And their favorite song, which I think is by Green Day, begins: Mom and Dad don’t look so good. [Laughs.] We always take it personally when the kids start to sing that.

It helps to write the essay when shes not on a depressing-and-tough-writing pedestal

“Why write? Why make film? there is obviously no single answer to this. Perhaps it is not so much a question of “making” as that of allowing things to be (or not to be) and to take form on their own. Perhaps resistance in this context is not to go against, but to assume a difficult freedom, one that also refutes itself as ‘freedom’” (Trinh T. Minh-ha)

Thats a quote taken from an interview, which can be found on JSTOR under “Woman, Native, Other: Pratibha Parmar interviews Trinh T Minh-ha”

More on Minh-ha

An interview

Examples of her art

“It’s my nature now, to record. To try to keep everything I’m passing through, to keep at least bits of it. I have lost too much so now I have these bits that I have passed through.”

“These were our last times together. I began to feel that I had been turning on one spot around my memories. I began to feel if anything can be done for Lithuania, it can only be done by the people that live there. That the only way that I can be useful to Lithuania is by building myself from scratch, from the beginning, and then giving myself back to it, back to Lithuania, however I am.”

“I do not know where I am, and going to, where I am coming from. I have seen some beauty. Glimpses of beauty and happiness. Yes, la beauté. And it is still beautiful in my memory. And it is real, as real as this film”.

Also, I came across these photographs by Peter Sempel

susan:        i’ve always wanted a dad, i know not having one affected me
gabrielle:   ofcourse it did, everyone needs a strong male role model
edie:          no they dont, i grew up without a father and it didnt affect me one bit
lynette:     edie, how old were u when u lost ur virginity?
edie:          point well taken

(smirks all round….)

When Matt, the guy, watches his girlfriend Lisa masturbate during the movie, its a moment of intense sadness – you watch Matt watching Lisa, you feel his complete removal from the act, and, I think, his loneliness (as this scene occurs towards the end of their relationship) as he walks away. Any sexual excitement or interest is removed from this scene as you see things from Matt’s vantage point.

Je Tu Ille Elle’s sex scene for me, in a similar way, was almost a moment of leave-taking, an ending or like a brief interlude. If it was to be expressed in a non-sex way, it would probably be like those moments when you see an old friend you’ve fallen out of touch with, and then you meet and have a superficial conversation with, where you say “oh we HAVE to hang out” or “we should meet up sometime” and you know you wont. Hmmm… maybe I’m meandering now. I was reading somewhere about patterns of consumption in the film, and the sex scene for me fits in there as well…

Also, I came across this reading of Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975)… I love the bit about Akerman’s height

‘Domestic labour has probably never been documented in such painstaking detail in a fiction film… the positioning of the camera in relation to the profilmic event at the same time constructs the representations of the woman’s routine works as a discourse of women’s looks, through a woman’s viewpoint. Chantal Akerman…has said that the relatively low mounting of the camera corresponds with her height and thus constructs a woman’s eye-view on the action. more important, perhaps, is the refusal to set up privileged points-of-view shots. the relentless distance of the camera’s (and the spectators) look and the duration involved in representations of Jeanne’s activities mean that the fact of prostitution, the visualisation of the murder, in some respects evens out into equal significance with the many conventionally less important images: Jeanne peeling potatoes…Finally, the refusal of reverse shots in the film entails a denial of the “binding-in” effect of the suture of classic cinema: the spectator is forced to maintain a distance in relation to both narrative and image, constructing the story and building up narrative expectations for herself’. (Annette Kuhn, Women’s Pictures: Feminism and Cinema)

“Why I made that film”
Michael Winterbottom’s sexually explicit new film was always going to make headlines. But when its female star said she would rather remain anonymous, Nine Songs had all the ingredients for a media frenzy. Margo Stilley speaks for the first time to Charlotte Higgins
Guardian article about 9 Songs: http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1220540,00.html

http://community.livejournal.com/foto_decadent/1403878.html

 I read about this in the Age, and decided to go take a look at the spread… still trying to get my head around this. Follow the link for the rest of the pictures

so unfortunate, yet so perfect

this is a picture of a hospital down the road from my home in Karachi, Pakistan, actually known as “Park Lane Hospital”. The “a” got zapped out

Here are some links re: Agnes Varda:

http://www.indiewire.com/people/int_Varda_Agnes_010308.html 

Also, from JSTOR: 

Reflections in a Broken Mirror: Varda’s Cleo de 5 a 7

Roy Jay Nelson The French Review, Vol. 56, No. 5. (Apr., 1983), pp. 735-743.

http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0016-111X%28198304%2956%3A5%3C735%3ARIABMV%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Y  

From Feminine Masquerade to Flâneuse: Agnès Varda’s Cléo in the City

Janice Mouton Cinema Journal, Vol. 40, No. 2. (Winter, 2001), pp. 3-16.

http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0009-7101%28200124%2940%3A2%3C3%3AFFMTFA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-P  

Agnes Varda: A Conversation

Barbara Quart; Agnes Varda Film Quarterly, Vol. 40, No. 2. (Winter, 1986-1987), pp. 3-10.

http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0015-1386%28198624%2F198724%2940%3A2%3C3%3AAVAC%3E2.0.CO%3B2-W  

I was thinking about Felicity’s question in our tute about utopias when I went to watch Children of Men. Spoiler follows. 

http://www.thehumanprojectlives.org/indexnew.php

The movie’s dystopic future – one in which women are unable to conceive/have children and the world is basically going down the drain and eating in on itself – just creeped me out. In Children of Men, a young black woman, Kee, miraculously conceives the first baby in 18 years and the movie follows her attempt to escape from London (a grey, depressing cesspool where the government/military fights it out with human rights groups in 2026) onto the “Human Project’s” Noahs-Ark-like safe ship, Tommorow, with her baby girl.

I hated how so many scenes from the movie looked so depressingly familiar to me, how I felt I could easily picture them in newspapers or on tv – images of refugees or illegal immigrants publicly displayed in cages and their treatment in prisons (which really brought back memories of the Abu Ghraib pictures) angered and saddened me because I didnt find them implausible, I didnt find them futuristic or impossible, they looked completely possible.

I hated how Kee’s baby doesnt remain a baby at the end of the film, she becomes a symbol of hope, faith and depressingly, a future baby-breeding machine (as presumably, Kee and her baby are the only “fertile” females in the movie). Kee expects to give birth to a boy through the movie, and is surprised when she has a baby girl, a change in the narrative that I’m still wondering about. The movie deals with and criticises issues of immigration, government crack-downs on migrants (legal and illegal), the essentialising of nations and notions of nationality and the marginalisation of Others such as gypsies or those of mixed ethnic or racial backgrounds. With all this as a backdrop, the movie left me with the idea that the future face of the human generation was that of a hybrid/racially mixed body. While this is positive, I didnt like the use of race in the movie, the construction and maintenance of binaries or divisions and Clive Owen’s neo-Adam or Noah-like character. I didnt understand why women were the ones rendered infertile in the movie, and not men, I didnt like that the problem lay within women, and I really disliked several moments that hinted at or seemed to go back to a negative historical period where black women were used as breeders, wet nurses or nannies, where a gender is narrowed down to its biological functionality or utility. I’m wondering if any of this makes sense. I guess its pretty scattered….

I’m not saying boycott the movie. Alfonso Cuaron’s work is amazing, I think CoM interesting to look at and my boyfriend had a completely different take on it. I still dont know what my idea of utopia would be or if I even think its possible for things to change in terms of politics, environment, religion, acceptance, attitudes or priorities. Maybe I’m just cynical or feeling particularly pessimistic right now. When I think of positive change, I guess I think locally or personally, not nationally or globally. Something that really struck me in a lot of the readings from this course was the belief or widely-held idea of change perpetuated by a few. It makes me sad that I dont really buy into the idea of political/any change coming about through student/youth demonstrations as much as I used to and I’ve become more cynical about it, but I think it would make me even sadder if EVERYONE stopped believing in it and stopped demonstrating different opinions or ideas. Maybe I’m just being a lazy cynic and counting on others to demonstrate my opinion or believe for me.

I realised, during the demos at uni about Lebanon etc, that I believe more in dialogue, educating people through writing, filming, talking, music, attitudes etc.

In terms of post-9/11 treatment of immigrants and government/public hysteria or misconceptions created through fear, check out Kenny Glenaan’s “Yasmin”