French filmmaker Leos Carax discussed the sacred nature of the image and the challenge of retaining its power on the big screen in the digital age in an on-stage conversation at the Doha Film Institute’s Qumra event on Monday.
The filmmaker said he had transitioned to shooting in digital in his segment of the 2008 feature Tokyo!, one of his first works after the death of his beloved cinematographer Jean-Yves Escoffier, who died age 52 in 2003.
Carax revealed this move had changed his filmmaking process as he took the decision to stop watching the dailies from then on, which resulted in him ditching his habit of doing multiple retakes.
The director admitted that 15 years on, he is not a huge fan of shooting in digital.
“I don’t come from there. I still feel It’s a bad thing, even for the eyes… it’s become such a problem with digital...
The filmmaker said he had transitioned to shooting in digital in his segment of the 2008 feature Tokyo!, one of his first works after the death of his beloved cinematographer Jean-Yves Escoffier, who died age 52 in 2003.
Carax revealed this move had changed his filmmaking process as he took the decision to stop watching the dailies from then on, which resulted in him ditching his habit of doing multiple retakes.
The director admitted that 15 years on, he is not a huge fan of shooting in digital.
“I don’t come from there. I still feel It’s a bad thing, even for the eyes… it’s become such a problem with digital...
- 3/4/2024
- by Melanie Goodfellow
- Deadline Film + TV
French filmmaker Leos Carax discussed the highs and lows of his 42-year career at the Marrakech International Film Festival on Sunday.
He was candid about the setbacks and sense of doubt about his place on set in the early days of a shoot, across his seven feature directorial credits to date spanning Boy Meets Girl (1984), The Night Is Young (1986), Les Amants du Pont Neuf, Pola X, Tokyo!, Holy Motors and Annette.
“With each film, it’s true I’ve only done a few, but I feel like a beginner, a bit like an imposter so I need to do lots of tests to get to know the new tools, the cameras as the film gets on the road. I become a technician in a way,” he said.
Carax said a series of near-chance meetings with people who would become long-time collaborators had been at the heart of his career as a director.
He was candid about the setbacks and sense of doubt about his place on set in the early days of a shoot, across his seven feature directorial credits to date spanning Boy Meets Girl (1984), The Night Is Young (1986), Les Amants du Pont Neuf, Pola X, Tokyo!, Holy Motors and Annette.
“With each film, it’s true I’ve only done a few, but I feel like a beginner, a bit like an imposter so I need to do lots of tests to get to know the new tools, the cameras as the film gets on the road. I become a technician in a way,” he said.
Carax said a series of near-chance meetings with people who would become long-time collaborators had been at the heart of his career as a director.
- 11/13/2022
- by Melanie Goodfellow
- Deadline Film + TV
The Beach BumEarly in his career, Harmony Korine was drawn to freaks—the aberrant and anomalous, the people who live (often badly) on the periphery of the mainstream. Hailing from Tennessee, he seemed to be saying, “Gooble gobble, one of us.” At the age of 19, Korine wrote the script for Larry Clark’s notorious Kids (1995), which concerns a freckle-faced, HIV-positive skateboarder with a penchant for having unprotected sex with virgins. The film was met with reverence and revulsion, and launched Korine’s career. Two years later, he released his debut feature as a director, Gummo, which is about two teens (Jacob Reynolds and Nick Sutton) who live in a tornado-ravaged city in Ohio. Korine wanted to portray the kind of life he knew as a child. It’s a scabrous film of vignettes that recall Mark Twain, yet more horrific—a montage of stupidity done in the face of unrelenting...
- 3/28/2019
- MUBI
Writer-director Tim Robbins goes all out to recreate a politically potent chapter of Broadway legend, the true story of the rebel Wpa production The Cradle Will Rock — with a dynamic sidebar about Diego Rivera’s provocative mural for the Rockefeller Center. An enormous cast works up the excitement of Depression-era revolutionary theater.
Cradle Will Rock
Blu-ray
Kl Studio Classics
1999 / Color / 2:35 widescreen / 134 min. / Street Date August 7, 2018 / available through Kino Lorber / 19.95
Starring: Hank Azaria, Rubén Blades, Joan Cusack, John Cusack, Cary Elwes, Philip Baker Hall, Cherry Jones, Angus Macfadyen, Bill Murray, Vanessa Redgrave, Susan Sarandon, Jamey Sheridan, John Turturro, Emily Watson, Bob Balaban, Jack Black, Kyle Gass, Paul Giamatti, Barnard Hughes, Barbara Sukowa, Gretchen Mol, Harris Yulin, Daniel Jenkins, Steven Skybell, Susan Heimbeinder, Audra McDonald, Leonardo Cimino.
Cinematography: Jean-Yves Escoffier
Film Editor: Geraldine Peroni
Costumes: Ruth Myers
Original Music: David Robbins
Produced by Lydia Dean Pilcher, Jon Kilik, Tim Robbins
Written...
Cradle Will Rock
Blu-ray
Kl Studio Classics
1999 / Color / 2:35 widescreen / 134 min. / Street Date August 7, 2018 / available through Kino Lorber / 19.95
Starring: Hank Azaria, Rubén Blades, Joan Cusack, John Cusack, Cary Elwes, Philip Baker Hall, Cherry Jones, Angus Macfadyen, Bill Murray, Vanessa Redgrave, Susan Sarandon, Jamey Sheridan, John Turturro, Emily Watson, Bob Balaban, Jack Black, Kyle Gass, Paul Giamatti, Barnard Hughes, Barbara Sukowa, Gretchen Mol, Harris Yulin, Daniel Jenkins, Steven Skybell, Susan Heimbeinder, Audra McDonald, Leonardo Cimino.
Cinematography: Jean-Yves Escoffier
Film Editor: Geraldine Peroni
Costumes: Ruth Myers
Original Music: David Robbins
Produced by Lydia Dean Pilcher, Jon Kilik, Tim Robbins
Written...
- 8/4/2018
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
We Are The Flesh (Tenemos la carne)
Blu-ray
2017 / Color / 1:85 widescreen – though the aspect ratio changes at the director’s whim/110 min. / Street Date February 28, 2017
Starring: Noe Hernandez, María Evoli and Diego Gamaliel.
Cinematography: Yollótl Alvarado
Film Editor: Yibran Asuad and Emiliano Rocha Minter
Written by Emiliano Rocha Minter
Produced by Julio Chavezmontes and Moisés Cosío
Directed by Emiliano Rocha Minter
Teetering on that thin edge between the ludicrous and the even more ludicrous, Emiliano Rocha Minter’s We Are The Flesh is a spittle-flecked, willfully deranged vision of life in a post-apocalyptic Mexico. Since its release in 2016, Minter’s movie, adrift in bodily fluids and overwrought speechifying, has been turning both heads and stomachs at film festivals across Europe.
An unconvincing mix of Living Theatre provocations and Eraserhead-like tableaus of bursting placentas and the drip, drip, drip of menstrual blood, Minter’s movie announces itself with the...
Blu-ray
2017 / Color / 1:85 widescreen – though the aspect ratio changes at the director’s whim/110 min. / Street Date February 28, 2017
Starring: Noe Hernandez, María Evoli and Diego Gamaliel.
Cinematography: Yollótl Alvarado
Film Editor: Yibran Asuad and Emiliano Rocha Minter
Written by Emiliano Rocha Minter
Produced by Julio Chavezmontes and Moisés Cosío
Directed by Emiliano Rocha Minter
Teetering on that thin edge between the ludicrous and the even more ludicrous, Emiliano Rocha Minter’s We Are The Flesh is a spittle-flecked, willfully deranged vision of life in a post-apocalyptic Mexico. Since its release in 2016, Minter’s movie, adrift in bodily fluids and overwrought speechifying, has been turning both heads and stomachs at film festivals across Europe.
An unconvincing mix of Living Theatre provocations and Eraserhead-like tableaus of bursting placentas and the drip, drip, drip of menstrual blood, Minter’s movie announces itself with the...
- 3/7/2017
- by Charlie Largent
- Trailers from Hell
The fourteenth entry in an on-going series of audiovisual essays by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin. Mubi will be showing Leos Carax's The Lovers on the Bridge (1991) May 10 - June 9 in the United States.Leos Carax’s Les amants du Pont-Neuf (The Lovers on the Bridge) is a true monument of 1990s cinema. It covers a lot of ground, on every level: starting down in the gutter and looking a little like a documentary about Paris’s homeless, it soon reaches a point where an inner switch is flicked and surrealistic, romantic poetry literally lights up the screen. Alex (Denis Lavant)—an emblematic tramp in the tradition of silent cinema, only muckier—spies the equally lost soul, Michèle (Juliette Binoche, never better than here), an artist who, due to encroaching blindness, is on the run from her bourgeois background. Once the film explodes with the rapture of their...
- 5/10/2016
- MUBI
Close-Up is a column that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Mauvais sang is playing April 2 - May 1 and Mr. X, a Vision of Leos Carax April 3 - May 3, 2016 in the United States.When lighting cigarettes, characters in Mauvais sang (1986) never shield the flame from wind. The smoke doesn't dissipate, but slithers away in tendrils. The air hangs, heated by an overpassing Halley's Comet that turns the cobblestone streets into a fire-walk. The male characters conduct their business shirtless, sometimes wrestling with a homoeroticism more Greek than closeted. A city-wide suicide spree, exacerbated but maybe not caused by the AIDS-like retrovirus "Stbo", leaves alive only thieves, fare-hoppers, vandals, gangsters. They inhabit Jean-Pierre Melville's exsanguinated Paris, designed as a hermetic MGM backlot. Red leaks down the walls. Holed up in an old butcher's shop, three thieves plan their last big score: stealing a serum to Stbo. The money will allow...
- 3/30/2016
- by Mike Opal
- MUBI
Perhaps we can thank the critical success of his 2012 masterwork, Holy Motors for the resurgence of interest in the early works of Leos Carax, including not only a new documentary about the enigmatic filmmaker, but restorations and notable Blu-ray transfers of his first two titles, Boy Meets Girl (1984) and Mauvais Sang (1986) from Carlotta Films.
The introduction of Carax’s onscreen alter ego Denis Lavant, present in each of his five titles except for 1999’s troubled Pola X, feels very much like a loving homage of the Nouvelle Vague mixed with sublimation of melancholy emptiness in 1980s excess and the hollow virtues of young adulthood. In comparison to his other titles, Boy Meets Girl does feel very much like Carax’s first film, an artist figuring out his emotional resonance, his stylistic fascinations, a title that, in look and style feels strangely similar to David Lynch’s first film, Eraserhead (1977), another...
The introduction of Carax’s onscreen alter ego Denis Lavant, present in each of his five titles except for 1999’s troubled Pola X, feels very much like a loving homage of the Nouvelle Vague mixed with sublimation of melancholy emptiness in 1980s excess and the hollow virtues of young adulthood. In comparison to his other titles, Boy Meets Girl does feel very much like Carax’s first film, an artist figuring out his emotional resonance, his stylistic fascinations, a title that, in look and style feels strangely similar to David Lynch’s first film, Eraserhead (1977), another...
- 12/2/2014
- by Nicholas Bell
- IONCINEMA.com
Leos Carax’s debut film Boy Meets Girl (1984), now beautifully restored and showing at the Film Forum from August 8th (as part of a larger Carax retrospective), is a manual on egocentricity. Posturing as a story of heartbreak, love and finally tragedy, Boy Meets Girl is in fact a soapbox for young Alex (Denis Lavant) to explain his extended ontology and the distended sense of its worth. Alex’s disinterest in cooperating with the world is matched only by his insistence to control it. What we are left with is transcendent self-involvement through time, space and person: otherwise known as being in your twenties. Shot in black and white and set in the Paris of anytime, Carax with one hand tips his cap to love story nostalgia and with the other fondles the petty egoism of love.
As the title suggests, boy does indeed meet girl. Alex is our boy,...
As the title suggests, boy does indeed meet girl. Alex is our boy,...
- 8/9/2014
- by Cuyler Ballenger
- MUBI
The 15th Mumbai Film Festival (Mff) presented by Reliance Entertainment and organized by the Mumbai Academy of Moving Image (Mami) scheduled between 17th-24th October is all set to showcase the best of contemporary French cinema and welcome artists for the 6th edition of the Rendez-vous with French Cinema co-organized with The French Embassy in India, Institut Français en Inde and Unifrance films.
As part of the festival highlights, Costa Gavras will receive the Lifetime Achievement Award during the opening ceremony in the presence of His Excellency Mr François Richier, Ambassador of France to India who will grace us with his presence especially for this occasion. Among others, Nathalie Baye, jury member of the international section, Mahamat Saleh Haroun, director of the film “Grigris”, Guillaume Brac, director of the film “Tonnerre” (Competition) and Leos Carax, well known film maker who will be conducting a masters class.
The special section “Rendez-vous...
As part of the festival highlights, Costa Gavras will receive the Lifetime Achievement Award during the opening ceremony in the presence of His Excellency Mr François Richier, Ambassador of France to India who will grace us with his presence especially for this occasion. Among others, Nathalie Baye, jury member of the international section, Mahamat Saleh Haroun, director of the film “Grigris”, Guillaume Brac, director of the film “Tonnerre” (Competition) and Leos Carax, well known film maker who will be conducting a masters class.
The special section “Rendez-vous...
- 10/18/2013
- by Pooja Rao
- Bollyspice
Gummo
Directed by Harmony Korine
Written by Haromy Korine
1997, USA
Gobsmackingly brilliant; Gummo marks the directorial debut of Kids writer and indie rebel Harmony Korine (Spring Breakers, Trash Humpers). Upon its initial release, Gummo drew critical fire and Korine was denounced as an exploitative brat with a movie camera. But what emerges from his twisted mind is a stylish, poetic, and brutally honest portrait of an American underclass whose misery is rarely addressed on the big screen. Korine arranges a total deterioration of narrative logic and social norms, and Gummo seems to be provocatively anti-everything: everything but life. Gummo is cruel, bitter, and sometimes offensive but also occasionally quite moving. For example: The infamous scene in which Solomon shoots the listless grandmother in the foot while his buddy disconnects her life support, could be read as an act of mercy. Gummo is full of despair, yet populated by an optimistic ensemble: “Life is beautiful,...
Directed by Harmony Korine
Written by Haromy Korine
1997, USA
Gobsmackingly brilliant; Gummo marks the directorial debut of Kids writer and indie rebel Harmony Korine (Spring Breakers, Trash Humpers). Upon its initial release, Gummo drew critical fire and Korine was denounced as an exploitative brat with a movie camera. But what emerges from his twisted mind is a stylish, poetic, and brutally honest portrait of an American underclass whose misery is rarely addressed on the big screen. Korine arranges a total deterioration of narrative logic and social norms, and Gummo seems to be provocatively anti-everything: everything but life. Gummo is cruel, bitter, and sometimes offensive but also occasionally quite moving. For example: The infamous scene in which Solomon shoots the listless grandmother in the foot while his buddy disconnects her life support, could be read as an act of mercy. Gummo is full of despair, yet populated by an optimistic ensemble: “Life is beautiful,...
- 3/30/2013
- by Ricky
- SoundOnSight
The surrealist sci-fi movie, starring Kylie Minogue, is already being described as the best film of 2012. Its reclusive director explains why he made it
Leos Carax stands alone outside the London hotel, smoking cigarettes with grim resolve and dearly wishing he were somewhere else or someone else, whatever comes easier. His coat collar is turned up. His eyes dart nervously behind prescription shades. He warns me that he has nothing to say, he hates doing interviews, he feels like a fraud. Driving to Cannes for the premiere of his latest film, Carax was hit by a lorry and forced off the road. It was a miracle he wasn't killed; by rights he should be dead. The thought makes him wistful and he very nearly smiles.
Perhaps it's the fate of all enfants-terribles to burn too brightly and then wink out. Carax is a case in point; a prodigiously talented little...
Leos Carax stands alone outside the London hotel, smoking cigarettes with grim resolve and dearly wishing he were somewhere else or someone else, whatever comes easier. His coat collar is turned up. His eyes dart nervously behind prescription shades. He warns me that he has nothing to say, he hates doing interviews, he feels like a fraud. Driving to Cannes for the premiere of his latest film, Carax was hit by a lorry and forced off the road. It was a miracle he wasn't killed; by rights he should be dead. The thought makes him wistful and he very nearly smiles.
Perhaps it's the fate of all enfants-terribles to burn too brightly and then wink out. Carax is a case in point; a prodigiously talented little...
- 9/28/2012
- by Xan Brooks
- The Guardian - Film News
Award-winning cinematographer Escoffier dies
Jean-Yves Escoffier, a French cinematographer who shot the original Three Men and a Cradle for Coline Serreau, has died of a heart seizure in Los Angeles. He was 52. A memorial service will be held at 5 p.m. Friday at the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena. He died April 1. A graduate of the Ecole Louis Lumiere in Paris, Escoffier was known in Europe for his collaboration with director Leos Carax, with whom he made three films: Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (The Lovers on the Bridge), for which he won a European Academy Felix Award; Mauvais sang (Bad Blood); and Boy Meets Girl. He received a Cesar Award for his work on Trois Hommes et un couffin, as the Cradle film was titled in French. Escoffier came to the United States during the early 1990s and shot 14 features, including The Crow: City of Angels, Gummo, Good Will Hunting, Nurse Betty, Possession and Cradle Will Rock. His last completed feature, The Human Stain for director Robert Benton, will be released in the fall by Miramax and Lakeshore. Before his death, Escoffier was working on director Wong Kar-wai's futuristic drama 2046. Escoffier also made many award-winning short dramatic films and documentaries. He shot the claymation project Le Chateau de sable (The Sand Castle), which won the 1978 Oscar for best animated short. He was director of photography for commercials and music videos, collaborating with Luc Besson, Jean Pierre Jeunet, David Lynch, Jean Baptiste Mondino, Phil Morrison and Mark Romanek.
- 4/16/2003
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
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