John Turturro, one of this year’s recipients of an honorary Heart of Sarajevo Award for career achievement took time between his sold-out masterclass and presenting an open-air screening of “Barton Fink” to visit the Variety Lounge, presented by the Sarajevo Film Festival and Bh Telecom.
Turturro, who said he was making his first visit to the Bosnian capital, described visiting various mosques, the Jewish Museum, Grand Synagogue and Jewish cemetery along with other historical sites.
Turturro, who acted in two of the fall film festival’s most hotly anticipated titles, discussed playing the ex-boyfriend of Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton in Pedro Almodóvar’s upcoming English-language feature, “The Room Next Door.” He will be going to Toronto to support that film and Sean Ellis’s “The Cut.”
Turturro mentioned the advantages of having a long-term relationship with a filmmaker, noting that, “It’s a big advantage because you develop...
Turturro, who said he was making his first visit to the Bosnian capital, described visiting various mosques, the Jewish Museum, Grand Synagogue and Jewish cemetery along with other historical sites.
Turturro, who acted in two of the fall film festival’s most hotly anticipated titles, discussed playing the ex-boyfriend of Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton in Pedro Almodóvar’s upcoming English-language feature, “The Room Next Door.” He will be going to Toronto to support that film and Sean Ellis’s “The Cut.”
Turturro mentioned the advantages of having a long-term relationship with a filmmaker, noting that, “It’s a big advantage because you develop...
- 8/22/2024
- by Alissa Simon
- Variety Film + TV
Leading European artists, including Maria Choustova (“Donbass”), Sergei Loznitsa (“Donbass”), Pawel Lozinski (“Film balkonowy”) and Radu Jude (“Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn”), have taken a stand to support the Israeli film community as it seeks to rally voices and help free over 220 hostages in Gaza.
These names penned a heartfelt letter addressing the resurgence of antisemitism across Europe and the significant part that European artists must play in raising the alarm. The letter will be sent to the European Film Academy with a request to circulate it among its 3,000 members ahead of the European Film Awards ceremony on Dec. 9.
In Israel, prominent filmmakers such as Ari Folman, Hagai Levi, Jasmine Kainy, Eliran Peled and Joseph Cedar (“Footnote”) have spearheaded an online campaign called Bring Them Home Now, documenting the stories of relatives whose loved ones, including children and elderly people, were abducted during the Hamas terror attack on Oct.
These names penned a heartfelt letter addressing the resurgence of antisemitism across Europe and the significant part that European artists must play in raising the alarm. The letter will be sent to the European Film Academy with a request to circulate it among its 3,000 members ahead of the European Film Awards ceremony on Dec. 9.
In Israel, prominent filmmakers such as Ari Folman, Hagai Levi, Jasmine Kainy, Eliran Peled and Joseph Cedar (“Footnote”) have spearheaded an online campaign called Bring Them Home Now, documenting the stories of relatives whose loved ones, including children and elderly people, were abducted during the Hamas terror attack on Oct.
- 11/2/2023
- by Elsa Keslassy
- Variety Film + TV
Alon Nechushtan’s latest project, Moving Voices, is coming to the U.S. through the month of November! The New York based jazz pianist will be joined by his international quartet, comprised of François and Louis Moutin, two brothers from France, and Lisbon-born vocalist Sara Serpa.
Moving Voices, which consists of original compositions from Nechushtan, is aimed to amplify immigrant voices and other inspirational stories centered around ordinary people who make extraordinary voyages, moving to and from new homes. Juxtapositions between perspectives present the promise of hope and idealization of journeys to the US with the terror-inspiring survival stories of the French migrant camp known as “the Jungle” to serve as the impetus in this movingly ambitious project. The compositions utilize excerpts from Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz, African poet Lenrie Peters, Italian Jewish Primo Levi’s emotional poem ‘Voices’, and Ethiopian-born writer Alemayehu Gebrehiwot, to tell stories about emigrating,...
Moving Voices, which consists of original compositions from Nechushtan, is aimed to amplify immigrant voices and other inspirational stories centered around ordinary people who make extraordinary voyages, moving to and from new homes. Juxtapositions between perspectives present the promise of hope and idealization of journeys to the US with the terror-inspiring survival stories of the French migrant camp known as “the Jungle” to serve as the impetus in this movingly ambitious project. The compositions utilize excerpts from Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz, African poet Lenrie Peters, Italian Jewish Primo Levi’s emotional poem ‘Voices’, and Ethiopian-born writer Alemayehu Gebrehiwot, to tell stories about emigrating,...
- 10/19/2023
- by Music Martin Cid Magazine
- Martin Cid Music
“Silk” screenwriter Peter Moffat is adapting Jonathan Freedland’s non-fiction book “The Escape Artist,” which tells the true story of two Jews who escaped from Auschwitz.
Margery Bone’s Bonafide Films has secured the rights to Freedland’s book, which is set to be made into a high-end limited series. Bonafide, who have a development and distribution deal with BBC Studios, recently produced Nicôle Lecky’s BAFTA-winning “Mood.”
“The Escape Artist” centers around nineteen-year-old Rudolf Vrba, a Slovakian Jew who manages to escape Auschwitz alongside fellow internee Fred Wetzler, and warn the world about what was happening. Their actions saved the lives of at least 200,000 Jews who were facing immediate deportation from Budapest to the world’s most notorious death camp.
“This is a story of how human beings can be pushed to the outer limits, and yet still somehow endure,” said Freeland. “How the actions of one individual, even a teenage boy,...
Margery Bone’s Bonafide Films has secured the rights to Freedland’s book, which is set to be made into a high-end limited series. Bonafide, who have a development and distribution deal with BBC Studios, recently produced Nicôle Lecky’s BAFTA-winning “Mood.”
“The Escape Artist” centers around nineteen-year-old Rudolf Vrba, a Slovakian Jew who manages to escape Auschwitz alongside fellow internee Fred Wetzler, and warn the world about what was happening. Their actions saved the lives of at least 200,000 Jews who were facing immediate deportation from Budapest to the world’s most notorious death camp.
“This is a story of how human beings can be pushed to the outer limits, and yet still somehow endure,” said Freeland. “How the actions of one individual, even a teenage boy,...
- 7/13/2023
- by K.J. Yossman
- Variety Film + TV
Peter Moffat is forging a TV adaptation of UK journalist Jonathan Freedland’s The Escape Artist with Mood production outfit Bonafide Films.
The Your Honor and Criminal Justice BAFTA winner is onboard to write the show telling the astonishing, true-life story of how Rudolf Vrba, a 19-year-old Slovakian Jew, along with fellow inmate Fred Wetzler, escaped from Auschwitz to warn the world about the Holocaust. The pair’s report led to the saving of 200,000 Budapest Jews from immediate deportation to Auschwitz. The project is not yet attached to a network and Bonafide has secured rights for TV.
Freedland is a highly-regarded British journalist who mainly writes on politics and international affairs for The Guardian but has also penned numerous works of fiction, some of which are under the pseudonym Sam Bourne.
Margery Bone’s London-based Bonafide has previously worked with Moffat on BBC drama The Last Post, which starred Jessie Buckley...
The Your Honor and Criminal Justice BAFTA winner is onboard to write the show telling the astonishing, true-life story of how Rudolf Vrba, a 19-year-old Slovakian Jew, along with fellow inmate Fred Wetzler, escaped from Auschwitz to warn the world about the Holocaust. The pair’s report led to the saving of 200,000 Budapest Jews from immediate deportation to Auschwitz. The project is not yet attached to a network and Bonafide has secured rights for TV.
Freedland is a highly-regarded British journalist who mainly writes on politics and international affairs for The Guardian but has also penned numerous works of fiction, some of which are under the pseudonym Sam Bourne.
Margery Bone’s London-based Bonafide has previously worked with Moffat on BBC drama The Last Post, which starred Jessie Buckley...
- 7/13/2023
- by Max Goldbart
- Deadline Film + TV
The words of Hannah Arendt have rarely seen more disturbing on-screen embodiment than in Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest.” An austere and incandescent Holocaust drama that premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on Friday, Glazer’s disquieting essay-film takes place almost entirely in and around the comfortable, middle-class home of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss, tackling both the banality and quiet domesticity of evil with eerie formal rigor.
Viewed from afar, Rodolf (Christian Friedel) and Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) live an idyllic and unexceptional life. They’re happily married, upwardly mobile strivers, with faith in their government and hope for the future. They follow sports, tend gardens and participate in collective projects for patriotic renewal. And they’re professionally satisfied — her as a stay-at-home mom raising a family of five, and him working right next door, overseeing the most macabre site of mass-genocide mankind has ever devised.
In fact, Glazer...
Viewed from afar, Rodolf (Christian Friedel) and Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) live an idyllic and unexceptional life. They’re happily married, upwardly mobile strivers, with faith in their government and hope for the future. They follow sports, tend gardens and participate in collective projects for patriotic renewal. And they’re professionally satisfied — her as a stay-at-home mom raising a family of five, and him working right next door, overseeing the most macabre site of mass-genocide mankind has ever devised.
In fact, Glazer...
- 5/19/2023
- by Ben Croll
- The Wrap
In 2008, filmmaker Luke Holland began hunting Nazis. He was not attempting to capture them, or bring them before a war-crimes tribunal, or put a bullet in their head. Holland merely wanted them to talk. The elderly men and women he sought out in the big cities and small burgs of Germany and Austria were the last living generation to have experienced the Third Reich firsthand. They had been members of the Hitler Youth, served as Waffen S.S. stormtroopers, guarded concentration camps. Others had simply watched as their neighbors were rounded up and shipped away,...
- 5/20/2021
- by David Fear
- Rollingstone.com
Soldiers, accountants, children … Luke Holland persuaded elderly Germans to account for what they did under Nazi rule, and the air of shrugging unrepentance is damning
Heinrich Schulze is a kindly-looking old man who lived as a child near the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen in Lower Saxony, Germany. In the course of Luke Holland’s quietly searing Final Account, Schulze returns to the old family farm to point out the hayloft where a group of escaped prisoners had once taken shelter. The escapees were starving and had begged him for some food. But then the guards came and retrieved them, which was of course very sad. Under further questioning, with a sheepish shrug, Schulze admits that yes, the prisoners were recaptured because he himself called the guards. As to what became of them after that? “Oh,” Herr Schulze scoffs. “Nobody knows that!”
Round them up and bring them out: the bystanders and functionaries,...
Heinrich Schulze is a kindly-looking old man who lived as a child near the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen in Lower Saxony, Germany. In the course of Luke Holland’s quietly searing Final Account, Schulze returns to the old family farm to point out the hayloft where a group of escaped prisoners had once taken shelter. The escapees were starving and had begged him for some food. But then the guards came and retrieved them, which was of course very sad. Under further questioning, with a sheepish shrug, Schulze admits that yes, the prisoners were recaptured because he himself called the guards. As to what became of them after that? “Oh,” Herr Schulze scoffs. “Nobody knows that!”
Round them up and bring them out: the bystanders and functionaries,...
- 9/3/2020
- by Xan Brooks
- The Guardian - Film News
When lauded Italian director Luchino Visconti first conceived of his big screen adaptation of Camillo Boito’s novella “Senso,” the “La Terra Trema” filmmaker aimed high: he wanted to cast no less than Ingrid Bergman and Marlon Brando in the film’s lead roles, a conspiring contessa and an Austrian deserter who woo amidst the dying embers of the Risorgimento. Both casting plans were waylaid by strange industry politics — Bergman’s then-husband Roberto Rossellini didn’t want the actress to work with other directors, while the film’s producers weren’t sold on the star power of Brando.
Still, “Senso” managed to make it to the big screen with some serious talent behind it: prolific Italian actress Alida Valli snagged the lead role, while Hollywood heavy hitter Farley Granger came on as her jilted lover. Behind the scenes, Visconti lined up eventual directors Franco Zeffirelli and Francesco Rosi as his own assistants.
Still, “Senso” managed to make it to the big screen with some serious talent behind it: prolific Italian actress Alida Valli snagged the lead role, while Hollywood heavy hitter Farley Granger came on as her jilted lover. Behind the scenes, Visconti lined up eventual directors Franco Zeffirelli and Francesco Rosi as his own assistants.
- 10/9/2018
- by Kate Erbland
- Indiewire
Describing his time in Auschwitz, Jewish chemist and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi stated: “monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.” The line between man and monster is obscure and when a person […]
The post ‘Border’ Review: A Tale of Nordic Folklore that Questions the Division Between Man and Monster [Fantastic Fest] appeared first on /Film.
The post ‘Border’ Review: A Tale of Nordic Folklore that Questions the Division Between Man and Monster [Fantastic Fest] appeared first on /Film.
- 10/1/2018
- by Marisa Mirabal
- Slash Film
Philippe Garrel. Photo by Darren Hughes.There’s no exact equivalent in film history for Philippe Garrel’s “family cinema,” as he calls it here. To immerse oneself in his work is to watch Garrel and those he loves (parents, partners, children) be transformed by age and experience, while their passions and preoccupations—that particular Garrelian amour fou—persist.After several decades during which Garrel’s films saw limited distribution and exhibition in North America, he's now experiencing something of a revival. Over the span of three days at the Toronto International Film Festival I enjoyed an impromptu Garrel family retrospective. In the Cinematheque program, Tiff debuted its recently-commissioned 35mm print of Jacques Rozier’s first film, Adieu Philippine (1962), which features a middle-aged Maurice Garrel in a supporting role. Actua 1 (1968), Philippe Garrel’s long-lost short documentary of the May ’68 protests, screened in the Wavelengths section, also in a new print.
- 1/13/2016
- by Darren Hughes
- MUBI
Closure elicited from justice is a wish survivors of the Indonesian genocide may never be granted. Buried under fearful silence and blatant impunity, the truth has remained a menacing secret for 50 years. Murderers must be regarded as patriotic heroes for their barbaric acts, while the victim’s families are perpetually tortured by the notion of a country ruled by tyrants reveling on the heinous bloodbath they orchestrated.
In Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary “The Act of Killing” these makeshift executioners are exposed not as monsters but as people who lost touch with their humanity and who could only carry on with their lives by glorifying their perverse deeds. Average villagers killing their neighbors with grotesque brutality is a more frightening image than any monstrous apparition. Guilt is transmuted into boasting that pretends to conceal their responsibility with lies. They found solace in the forced silence surrounding the appalling events.
For “The Look of Silence,” the indispensable companion piece to first film, Oppenheimer focused on the survivors, specifically on a brave family that persevered through the immeasurable pain. Retribution is not what they seek, even after the atrocities they have endured and the lurking possibility of more terror hanging over them. The mere acknowledgement of fault by the perpetrators, the Indonesian government, or the international community would open a path for healing a wound that’s been opened for half a century. But it’s easier for the guilty to ban any discussion and imposed their approved explanation painted with false courage, than admit that over 1 million people were savagely murdered.
The subjects in “The Look of Silence” are often quiet and contemplative, but their anguish transcends even when words fail to describe their tumultuous sentiments. Adi, the daring protagonist whose older brother was murdered during the massacres, faces the killers and questions their actions like no one had done before. Watching him witness their shameless pride is a difficult viewing experience that challenges one’s foundations to the core. Yet, to look away would be to enable their fictitious account and would disrespect even further the memory of those ravaged by denial.
Here are 12 essential points from our conversation with the brilliant documentarian behind these groundbreaking works
1. The Director's Cut of "The Act of Killing" is the version Joshua Oppenheimer wants everyone to watch
Werner Herzog said recently in Berlin "This is the only legitimate version of the film. If you haven't seen it you haven't seen 'The Act of Killing'" I agree.
2."The Look of Silence" and the "The Act of Killing" are intrinsically connected
I knew long before I started making "The Act of Killing" that I would make two films, and that they should hopefully be companion pieces to one an another and form a single work whose whole, I hope, is greater than the sum of the parts. The scene that inspired the making of the two films was actually the scene in "The Look of Silence" where the two men take me down to the river taking turns playing victim and perpetrator. I filmed that in January 2004. Eight months into my work filming the perpetrators, a year and a half before I met Anwar Congo and started making "The Act of Killing."
3. The perpetrators' boasting is not an act but a symptom of impunity
For the first eight months in this two-year period of filming every perpetrator I could find - at the insistence of Adi's family - I always filmed them alone because I was afraid that if I brought two together they might warn one another, "You shouldn't talk about this," in case they could get in trouble somehow. But eventually I had to know, "Are they only boasting for me and my camera? Is it something about me or would they also talk this way to each other?" To know that I finally had to take the risk and bring them together. I saw that when they were together they were even worse. They were reading from a shared script. The boasting is a symptom of impunity. I had to let go of whatever comforting hope there might be that these men were just monsters or insane. I realized that this monstrosity and this insanity here is collective. It's political.
4. What he witnessed in Indonesia is what could have happened in the West if the Nazis had won World War II
A thought came to me while I watched those two men coming down the slope helping each other down to the river and holding hands because it's slippery. They were being very tender with each other. In this interlock between these absurd and grotesque demonstrations of killing I thought to myself, "It's as though the Nazis had won World War II and you went to Germany and met the aging SS officers if the rest of the world had celebrated the Holocaust while it took place." I realized in that moment that this surreal scenario, "What if the Nazis had won?," is actually not the exception to the rule but the norm across the Global South. There's been atrocities across the Global South committed throughout the Cold War and since. The perpetrators usually remain in power and people usually remain in fear.
5. From their inception he had a clear idea of what he wanted to tackle in each film
After this I started to wonder, "Perhaps this impunity is the story of our times." I decided I would stop everything I was doing, address the situation and make right. That evening I noted in my diary, "Two films," one of about the boasting of the perpetrators. I came to understand that their boasting, like all boasting, is defensive and is compensating for insecurity and doubt. "The Act of Killing" became a film about the lies, fantasies, and stories the perpetrators tell themselves so they can live with themselves, and the terrible effects of those lies when imposed on the whole society. Then, the second film is about what it's like for survivors to have to continue living in such a regime. What does it do to human beings to have to live afraid for 50 years?
6. Both films are different but precisely complementary
I shot "The Look of Silence" after editing the uncut version "The Act of Killing." The Director's Cur of "The Act of Killing" is this kind of flamboyant fever dream even beyond what you see in the short version of "The Act of Killing." It's not even a documentary, I don't think really. It's non-fiction but a new kind of form. Cutting through the Director's Cut are these long moments of absolute silence where time stops and you just feel the hauntedness of the place where this is unfolding. I felt that "The Look of Silence" should be formally, not just different, but precisely complementary and in that sense form a single work with the Director's Cur of "The Act of Killing."One in which we enter any of those haunted places punctuating the "The Act of Killing's" Director's Cut and feel what would it be like to have to live there and to rebuild a life there.
7. Recognizing that the perpetrators are human beings is the only hopeful response
At first you hear people talking about monstrous things in monstrous ways, and you therefore hope that they are monsters because that has nothing to do with you. It's frightening to get over that thought and think, "Wait, they are not monsters, they are human." Once you get over that thought, and once you recognize that the perpetrators are human beings and that the perpetrators of every act of evil in our history have been human beings like us, you quickly realize that's the only hopeful response because if the perpetrators are monsters what can you do? You can identify them, capture them, somehow neutralize them, and then we become them. We are doing the same thing. You can capture then, lock them up, and kill them, but Primo Levi said very beautifully speaking of the Holocaust, "There may be monsters among us, but they are too few to worry about."
8. Empathy and doubt are key in preventing unthinkable violence from occurring
Once you recognize that all perpetrators are human beings, you also recognize that we ought to be able to find ways of living together where we practice the widest possible empathy and where we encourage people to doubt what authority tells then so it's harder to incite people to betray their individual morality and join groups that are doing things we know are wrong. We ought, therefore, to be able to find ways of living together where this kind of unthinkable violence would one day be truly unimaginable.
9. Justifications in the form of fantasies, lies and stories normalize atrocity
We need to understand how human beings do this to each and how being human, knowing what they've done is wrong, how do they live with themselves. What we quickly discover is that the way they live with themselves is they cling to lies, stories, fantasies to justify what they've done. Those justifications normalize atrocity and prepare the soil for its recurrence because now atrocity is normal, is natural, is appropriate instead of unfathomable. To understand these things we have to be willing to go close to the perpetrators and when we do that, yes, it's frightening.
10. One horrifying reenactment pushed him to overcome the most crippling fear of all
The most surreal and amazing scene is a complex one in the Director's Cut of "The Act of Killing" of how Anwar comes to play the victim, which is missing from the shorter version. It's a scene where he despairingly throws himself into the worst aspect of who he is but as a glamorous film noir character because he knows he can't escape the guilt. He is starting to realize it and he butchers this teddy bear. It starts as a game and he is pretending to be butchering a child. Herman is pretending to be a mother who is trying to save her own life by bribing Anwar with her child. Anwar butchers the child, but it's really a teddy bear. There is all this doubleness and it's absurd, and grotesque, and strange, and silly, and horrible. Filming it I was crying and I didn't realize I was crying. Anwar caught me and said, "Joshua you are crying."I felt my face and I thought, "I'm crying. It's the first time in my life I've cried without realizing it." I had eight months of nightmares and insomnia after that. I don't think that scene will give you nightmares or insomnia when you watch the film, but it was the straw that broke the camel's back for me. Coming out of that I felt stronger. I felt stronger because it was a trial by fire. Coming out I found I had overcome the most crippling fear of all, which is the fear of looking.
11. Survivors learn to live in with grace and love despite living in silent fear
The survivors have to find a way of surviving in that kind of fear. When survivors say, "Let the past be past," they say it out of fear and the perpetrators always say it as a threat, which means the past isn't past. It's always right there. It's ungrieved and it's unmourned because it's unrecognized. You cant even talk about it, but it's felt. The survivors are in this kind of awful silence born of fear. It's the silence of nitroglycerin, it's not the silence of still water. Within that, they have to find ways of living also with grace and with love. I think that's what drew me in part to Adi's family, because they've done that.
12. U.S. involvement proves fear is an integral part of the global economy
The film is not about [U.S. involvement]. If you ask, "What is the movie about?" The movie is not about what happened in 1965 or who was responsible. The film is about what it's like for survivors and for this family to live in fear for half a century. It's not about the history of that fear. That's a film worth making and a topic that I hope the film inspires people to explore. On the website for the film there is a whole section about the history and the context of U.S involvement. It's not gone into in depth because, for example, in the lived experience of Ramli's family they didn't know about that. Still, it felt important to me because I want the film to be a mirror in which we see ourselves, not a window into some far off place that's not related to us. I want people to understand that this fear is an integral part of the global economy. We see that very clearly in the U.S. clip because the most important part of what we see is that Goodyear was using salve labor drawn from death camps. Twenty years after German corporations did the same thing at Auschwitz. This was being celebrated on American television as a victory for freedom and democracy. For every viewer of my films who cares about freedom and democracy, and hope that's every single one, that should give them a reason to wonder whether the struggle of the so-called "free world" over the communist world was the real reason we did this. Or rather whether that was a pretext allowing everybody who participated, from the lowest ranking executioner to the highest ranking official in the Pentagon, the CIA and the Indonesian army, to be able to do what they were really doing, which was murderous corporate plunder.
"The Look of Silence" is now playing in Los Angeles at The Nuart and in NYC at the Landmark Sunshine Cinema...
In Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary “The Act of Killing” these makeshift executioners are exposed not as monsters but as people who lost touch with their humanity and who could only carry on with their lives by glorifying their perverse deeds. Average villagers killing their neighbors with grotesque brutality is a more frightening image than any monstrous apparition. Guilt is transmuted into boasting that pretends to conceal their responsibility with lies. They found solace in the forced silence surrounding the appalling events.
For “The Look of Silence,” the indispensable companion piece to first film, Oppenheimer focused on the survivors, specifically on a brave family that persevered through the immeasurable pain. Retribution is not what they seek, even after the atrocities they have endured and the lurking possibility of more terror hanging over them. The mere acknowledgement of fault by the perpetrators, the Indonesian government, or the international community would open a path for healing a wound that’s been opened for half a century. But it’s easier for the guilty to ban any discussion and imposed their approved explanation painted with false courage, than admit that over 1 million people were savagely murdered.
The subjects in “The Look of Silence” are often quiet and contemplative, but their anguish transcends even when words fail to describe their tumultuous sentiments. Adi, the daring protagonist whose older brother was murdered during the massacres, faces the killers and questions their actions like no one had done before. Watching him witness their shameless pride is a difficult viewing experience that challenges one’s foundations to the core. Yet, to look away would be to enable their fictitious account and would disrespect even further the memory of those ravaged by denial.
Here are 12 essential points from our conversation with the brilliant documentarian behind these groundbreaking works
1. The Director's Cut of "The Act of Killing" is the version Joshua Oppenheimer wants everyone to watch
Werner Herzog said recently in Berlin "This is the only legitimate version of the film. If you haven't seen it you haven't seen 'The Act of Killing'" I agree.
2."The Look of Silence" and the "The Act of Killing" are intrinsically connected
I knew long before I started making "The Act of Killing" that I would make two films, and that they should hopefully be companion pieces to one an another and form a single work whose whole, I hope, is greater than the sum of the parts. The scene that inspired the making of the two films was actually the scene in "The Look of Silence" where the two men take me down to the river taking turns playing victim and perpetrator. I filmed that in January 2004. Eight months into my work filming the perpetrators, a year and a half before I met Anwar Congo and started making "The Act of Killing."
3. The perpetrators' boasting is not an act but a symptom of impunity
For the first eight months in this two-year period of filming every perpetrator I could find - at the insistence of Adi's family - I always filmed them alone because I was afraid that if I brought two together they might warn one another, "You shouldn't talk about this," in case they could get in trouble somehow. But eventually I had to know, "Are they only boasting for me and my camera? Is it something about me or would they also talk this way to each other?" To know that I finally had to take the risk and bring them together. I saw that when they were together they were even worse. They were reading from a shared script. The boasting is a symptom of impunity. I had to let go of whatever comforting hope there might be that these men were just monsters or insane. I realized that this monstrosity and this insanity here is collective. It's political.
4. What he witnessed in Indonesia is what could have happened in the West if the Nazis had won World War II
A thought came to me while I watched those two men coming down the slope helping each other down to the river and holding hands because it's slippery. They were being very tender with each other. In this interlock between these absurd and grotesque demonstrations of killing I thought to myself, "It's as though the Nazis had won World War II and you went to Germany and met the aging SS officers if the rest of the world had celebrated the Holocaust while it took place." I realized in that moment that this surreal scenario, "What if the Nazis had won?," is actually not the exception to the rule but the norm across the Global South. There's been atrocities across the Global South committed throughout the Cold War and since. The perpetrators usually remain in power and people usually remain in fear.
5. From their inception he had a clear idea of what he wanted to tackle in each film
After this I started to wonder, "Perhaps this impunity is the story of our times." I decided I would stop everything I was doing, address the situation and make right. That evening I noted in my diary, "Two films," one of about the boasting of the perpetrators. I came to understand that their boasting, like all boasting, is defensive and is compensating for insecurity and doubt. "The Act of Killing" became a film about the lies, fantasies, and stories the perpetrators tell themselves so they can live with themselves, and the terrible effects of those lies when imposed on the whole society. Then, the second film is about what it's like for survivors to have to continue living in such a regime. What does it do to human beings to have to live afraid for 50 years?
6. Both films are different but precisely complementary
I shot "The Look of Silence" after editing the uncut version "The Act of Killing." The Director's Cur of "The Act of Killing" is this kind of flamboyant fever dream even beyond what you see in the short version of "The Act of Killing." It's not even a documentary, I don't think really. It's non-fiction but a new kind of form. Cutting through the Director's Cut are these long moments of absolute silence where time stops and you just feel the hauntedness of the place where this is unfolding. I felt that "The Look of Silence" should be formally, not just different, but precisely complementary and in that sense form a single work with the Director's Cur of "The Act of Killing."One in which we enter any of those haunted places punctuating the "The Act of Killing's" Director's Cut and feel what would it be like to have to live there and to rebuild a life there.
7. Recognizing that the perpetrators are human beings is the only hopeful response
At first you hear people talking about monstrous things in monstrous ways, and you therefore hope that they are monsters because that has nothing to do with you. It's frightening to get over that thought and think, "Wait, they are not monsters, they are human." Once you get over that thought, and once you recognize that the perpetrators are human beings and that the perpetrators of every act of evil in our history have been human beings like us, you quickly realize that's the only hopeful response because if the perpetrators are monsters what can you do? You can identify them, capture them, somehow neutralize them, and then we become them. We are doing the same thing. You can capture then, lock them up, and kill them, but Primo Levi said very beautifully speaking of the Holocaust, "There may be monsters among us, but they are too few to worry about."
8. Empathy and doubt are key in preventing unthinkable violence from occurring
Once you recognize that all perpetrators are human beings, you also recognize that we ought to be able to find ways of living together where we practice the widest possible empathy and where we encourage people to doubt what authority tells then so it's harder to incite people to betray their individual morality and join groups that are doing things we know are wrong. We ought, therefore, to be able to find ways of living together where this kind of unthinkable violence would one day be truly unimaginable.
9. Justifications in the form of fantasies, lies and stories normalize atrocity
We need to understand how human beings do this to each and how being human, knowing what they've done is wrong, how do they live with themselves. What we quickly discover is that the way they live with themselves is they cling to lies, stories, fantasies to justify what they've done. Those justifications normalize atrocity and prepare the soil for its recurrence because now atrocity is normal, is natural, is appropriate instead of unfathomable. To understand these things we have to be willing to go close to the perpetrators and when we do that, yes, it's frightening.
10. One horrifying reenactment pushed him to overcome the most crippling fear of all
The most surreal and amazing scene is a complex one in the Director's Cut of "The Act of Killing" of how Anwar comes to play the victim, which is missing from the shorter version. It's a scene where he despairingly throws himself into the worst aspect of who he is but as a glamorous film noir character because he knows he can't escape the guilt. He is starting to realize it and he butchers this teddy bear. It starts as a game and he is pretending to be butchering a child. Herman is pretending to be a mother who is trying to save her own life by bribing Anwar with her child. Anwar butchers the child, but it's really a teddy bear. There is all this doubleness and it's absurd, and grotesque, and strange, and silly, and horrible. Filming it I was crying and I didn't realize I was crying. Anwar caught me and said, "Joshua you are crying."I felt my face and I thought, "I'm crying. It's the first time in my life I've cried without realizing it." I had eight months of nightmares and insomnia after that. I don't think that scene will give you nightmares or insomnia when you watch the film, but it was the straw that broke the camel's back for me. Coming out of that I felt stronger. I felt stronger because it was a trial by fire. Coming out I found I had overcome the most crippling fear of all, which is the fear of looking.
11. Survivors learn to live in with grace and love despite living in silent fear
The survivors have to find a way of surviving in that kind of fear. When survivors say, "Let the past be past," they say it out of fear and the perpetrators always say it as a threat, which means the past isn't past. It's always right there. It's ungrieved and it's unmourned because it's unrecognized. You cant even talk about it, but it's felt. The survivors are in this kind of awful silence born of fear. It's the silence of nitroglycerin, it's not the silence of still water. Within that, they have to find ways of living also with grace and with love. I think that's what drew me in part to Adi's family, because they've done that.
12. U.S. involvement proves fear is an integral part of the global economy
The film is not about [U.S. involvement]. If you ask, "What is the movie about?" The movie is not about what happened in 1965 or who was responsible. The film is about what it's like for survivors and for this family to live in fear for half a century. It's not about the history of that fear. That's a film worth making and a topic that I hope the film inspires people to explore. On the website for the film there is a whole section about the history and the context of U.S involvement. It's not gone into in depth because, for example, in the lived experience of Ramli's family they didn't know about that. Still, it felt important to me because I want the film to be a mirror in which we see ourselves, not a window into some far off place that's not related to us. I want people to understand that this fear is an integral part of the global economy. We see that very clearly in the U.S. clip because the most important part of what we see is that Goodyear was using salve labor drawn from death camps. Twenty years after German corporations did the same thing at Auschwitz. This was being celebrated on American television as a victory for freedom and democracy. For every viewer of my films who cares about freedom and democracy, and hope that's every single one, that should give them a reason to wonder whether the struggle of the so-called "free world" over the communist world was the real reason we did this. Or rather whether that was a pretext allowing everybody who participated, from the lowest ranking executioner to the highest ranking official in the Pentagon, the CIA and the Indonesian army, to be able to do what they were really doing, which was murderous corporate plunder.
"The Look of Silence" is now playing in Los Angeles at The Nuart and in NYC at the Landmark Sunshine Cinema...
- 7/29/2015
- by Carlos Aguilar
- Sydney's Buzz
The actor spoke about working with Michael Cimino, William Friedkin and Woody Allen in a masterclass at Jerusalem Film Festival.
Following his appearance at the Jerusalem Film Festival’s (July 9-19) opening night gala of Nanni Moretti’s My Mother, where he was also presented with an honorary award, John Turturro joined author and Columbia University professor Annette Insdorf for an on-stage conversation at the Jerusalem Cinematheque. Here are a few highlights.
On portraying a ‘bad actor’ in Nanni Moretti’s My Mother
“I didn’t see it that way because anybody can be bad. You can see the best actor in the world struggle and I’ve seen all kinds of behaviour. I’ve had arguments with directors over the years – I won’t name them – but you’re under a lot of pressure as an actor. I’ve seen great actors, if they stay up all night, if they’ve had too much to drink...
Following his appearance at the Jerusalem Film Festival’s (July 9-19) opening night gala of Nanni Moretti’s My Mother, where he was also presented with an honorary award, John Turturro joined author and Columbia University professor Annette Insdorf for an on-stage conversation at the Jerusalem Cinematheque. Here are a few highlights.
On portraying a ‘bad actor’ in Nanni Moretti’s My Mother
“I didn’t see it that way because anybody can be bad. You can see the best actor in the world struggle and I’ve seen all kinds of behaviour. I’ve had arguments with directors over the years – I won’t name them – but you’re under a lot of pressure as an actor. I’ve seen great actors, if they stay up all night, if they’ve had too much to drink...
- 7/11/2015
- by matt.mueller@screendaily.com (Matt Mueller)
- ScreenDaily
No Italian-American actor loves returning to Italy to work in local films more than John Turturro. He played Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi in the late Francesco Rosi’s 1997 feature The Truce. Turturro frequently collaborates with director-cinematographer Marco Pontecorvo, who directed the actor in this year’s Tempo instabile con probabili schiarite and also shot the actor’s directorials Fading Gigolo and his Naples music doc Passione. Turturro holds dual citizenship in…...
- 5/19/2015
- Deadline
35 Cows and a Kalishnokov
What is the bond between a tribe of Ethiopian cattle farmers, dandy gentlemen parading themselves on Brazzaville streets, and the Kinshasan fetish wrestlers who appear in 35 Cows and a Kalishnokov in the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam’s (Idfa) competition this year? To propose a documentary about such a bond, an act of synthesis would be necessary, one which first deconstructs the rites and peoples exhibited, creating a web of meaning that would link the rituals.
Or, as in 35 Cows and a Kalishnokov, one could make a purely aesthetic film whose theoretical basis is but a shared continent, exotic landscapes and black skin. What director Oswold von Richthofen’s documentary offers up to its (inevitably) Western viewers is an image of Africa that is all color and form—rippling musculature, exotic hues, pierced faces, wild cries—regurgitating as always the same Western myth of Africa, a...
What is the bond between a tribe of Ethiopian cattle farmers, dandy gentlemen parading themselves on Brazzaville streets, and the Kinshasan fetish wrestlers who appear in 35 Cows and a Kalishnokov in the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam’s (Idfa) competition this year? To propose a documentary about such a bond, an act of synthesis would be necessary, one which first deconstructs the rites and peoples exhibited, creating a web of meaning that would link the rituals.
Or, as in 35 Cows and a Kalishnokov, one could make a purely aesthetic film whose theoretical basis is but a shared continent, exotic landscapes and black skin. What director Oswold von Richthofen’s documentary offers up to its (inevitably) Western viewers is an image of Africa that is all color and form—rippling musculature, exotic hues, pierced faces, wild cries—regurgitating as always the same Western myth of Africa, a...
- 1/27/2015
- by Yaron Dahan
- MUBI
Italian director and screenwriter died on Saturday.
The 65th Berlin International Film Festival (Feb 5-15) is to pay homage to Francesco Rosi, one of one of Italy’s most-celebrated and influential filmmakers from the 1950s to the 1990s.
The director and screenwriter, who inspiring the likes of Francis Coppola and Martin Scorsese with his Italian post-war neo-realist style, passed away on Saturday (Jan 10) at the age of 92.
In homage, the Berlinale has added Many Wars Ago (Uomini Contro) to the upcoming programme, Rosi’s 1970 anti-war drama set on the mountainous Austrian-Italian front during the First World War.
Berlinale director Dieter Kosslick said: “The loss of Francesco Rosi is the loss of an outstanding filmmaker. With their explosive power, Rosi’s films are still persuasive today. His works are classics of politically engaged cinema.”
Rosi’s films often examined corruption and criminality and some of his best-known films told the stories of real events and real people in order...
The 65th Berlin International Film Festival (Feb 5-15) is to pay homage to Francesco Rosi, one of one of Italy’s most-celebrated and influential filmmakers from the 1950s to the 1990s.
The director and screenwriter, who inspiring the likes of Francis Coppola and Martin Scorsese with his Italian post-war neo-realist style, passed away on Saturday (Jan 10) at the age of 92.
In homage, the Berlinale has added Many Wars Ago (Uomini Contro) to the upcoming programme, Rosi’s 1970 anti-war drama set on the mountainous Austrian-Italian front during the First World War.
Berlinale director Dieter Kosslick said: “The loss of Francesco Rosi is the loss of an outstanding filmmaker. With their explosive power, Rosi’s films are still persuasive today. His works are classics of politically engaged cinema.”
Rosi’s films often examined corruption and criminality and some of his best-known films told the stories of real events and real people in order...
- 1/13/2015
- by michael.rosser@screendaily.com (Michael Rosser)
- ScreenDaily
A roundup of news from the inaugural St Petersburg International Media Forum includes a busy French delegation and a local controversy brewing over Leviathan.
The King Of Madagascar, a kind of Russian answer to the pirate adventure films à la Pirates of the Caribbean, is being set up as a $ 16m international co-production by producer-director Oleg Ryaskov’s Moscow-based Bft Movie.
Speaking at the opening of St Petersburg International Media Forum’s (Spimf) co-production market this morning, producer Ryaskov revealed that the project - which is based on real historical events abouta Russian expedition by Peter The Great to the island of Madagascar in danger of being thwarted by Great Britain’s King George - has Spain’s Smartline Spain and the Us casting company Scott Carlson Entertainment on board as partners and is currently in talks with French and German production companies to join.
Ryaskov added that he intends to have American, European and Russian...
The King Of Madagascar, a kind of Russian answer to the pirate adventure films à la Pirates of the Caribbean, is being set up as a $ 16m international co-production by producer-director Oleg Ryaskov’s Moscow-based Bft Movie.
Speaking at the opening of St Petersburg International Media Forum’s (Spimf) co-production market this morning, producer Ryaskov revealed that the project - which is based on real historical events abouta Russian expedition by Peter The Great to the island of Madagascar in danger of being thwarted by Great Britain’s King George - has Spain’s Smartline Spain and the Us casting company Scott Carlson Entertainment on board as partners and is currently in talks with French and German production companies to join.
Ryaskov added that he intends to have American, European and Russian...
- 10/6/2014
- by screen.berlin@googlemail.com (Martin Blaney)
- ScreenDaily
A roundup of news from the inaugural St Petersburg International Media Forum includes a busy French delegation and a local controversy brewing over Leviathan.
The King Of Madagascar, a kind of Russian answer to the pirate adventure films à la Pirates of the Caribbean, is being set up as a $ 16m international co-production by producer-director Oleg Ryaskov’s Moscow-based Bft Movie.
Speaking at the opening of St Petersburg International Media Forum’s (Spimf) co-production market this morning, producer Ryaskov revealed that the project - which is based on real historical events abouta Russian expedition by Peter The Great to the island of Madagascar in danger of being thwarted by Great Britain’s King George - has Spain’s Smartline Spain and the Us casting company Scott Carlson Entertainment on board as partners and is currently in talks with French and German production companies to join.
Ryaskov added that he intends to have American, European and Russian...
The King Of Madagascar, a kind of Russian answer to the pirate adventure films à la Pirates of the Caribbean, is being set up as a $ 16m international co-production by producer-director Oleg Ryaskov’s Moscow-based Bft Movie.
Speaking at the opening of St Petersburg International Media Forum’s (Spimf) co-production market this morning, producer Ryaskov revealed that the project - which is based on real historical events abouta Russian expedition by Peter The Great to the island of Madagascar in danger of being thwarted by Great Britain’s King George - has Spain’s Smartline Spain and the Us casting company Scott Carlson Entertainment on board as partners and is currently in talks with French and German production companies to join.
Ryaskov added that he intends to have American, European and Russian...
- 10/6/2014
- by screen.berlin@googlemail.com (Martin Blaney)
- ScreenDaily
Chiwetel Ejiofor is hard to miss in great movies like Alfonso Cuaron's "Children of Men" and Spike Lee's "Inside Man," but the talented British stage and screen actor was handed the role of a lifetime in this year's "12 Years a Slave."
Ejiofor is undeniably spectacular as Solomon Northup, a free man turned slave, in Steve McQueen's 2013 awards darling, a current favorite for Best Picture. The haunting film -- arguably one of the most gruesome and accurate depictions of American slavery ever produced -- has thrust Ejiofor into the national spotlight.
Whether you've seen Ejiofor in the riveting Oscar-contender or not, there's still much to know about the talented British star. From his favorite holiday destination to his tragic beginnings, here are 15 things you probably don't know about Chiwetel Ejiofor.
1. Despite the recent attention, the talented actor was already established and had three Golden Globe nominations under his...
Ejiofor is undeniably spectacular as Solomon Northup, a free man turned slave, in Steve McQueen's 2013 awards darling, a current favorite for Best Picture. The haunting film -- arguably one of the most gruesome and accurate depictions of American slavery ever produced -- has thrust Ejiofor into the national spotlight.
Whether you've seen Ejiofor in the riveting Oscar-contender or not, there's still much to know about the talented British star. From his favorite holiday destination to his tragic beginnings, here are 15 things you probably don't know about Chiwetel Ejiofor.
1. Despite the recent attention, the talented actor was already established and had three Golden Globe nominations under his...
- 12/27/2013
- by Jonny Black
- Moviefone
For the past three years young distribution company Distrib Films has released a variety of important independent titles in France, including Armadillo, Tyrannosaur, Lapland Odyssey, The Silence, Painless, and Bedeville. Now headed by CEO Francois Scippa-Kohn the company has expanded its horizons and started distributing French-language films in the United States becoming a leading distributor in both sides of the Atlantic.
Francois Scippa-Kohn joined the team at Distrib in 2010 after heading Chrysalis Films, a company he started in 2008 and which distributed independent films in France like Let The Right One In, City Island and Primo Levi's Journey. Last year Scippa-Kohn became CEO of Distrib Films, a move that will prove crucial in the development of the company's American market.
Distrib Films current and upcoming titles include:
Becoming Traviata
Our Children (Belgium's Oscar Submission in 2012)
Billy and Buddy
Just a Sigh
For more information on Distrib Films visit Here...
Francois Scippa-Kohn joined the team at Distrib in 2010 after heading Chrysalis Films, a company he started in 2008 and which distributed independent films in France like Let The Right One In, City Island and Primo Levi's Journey. Last year Scippa-Kohn became CEO of Distrib Films, a move that will prove crucial in the development of the company's American market.
Distrib Films current and upcoming titles include:
Becoming Traviata
Our Children (Belgium's Oscar Submission in 2012)
Billy and Buddy
Just a Sigh
For more information on Distrib Films visit Here...
- 10/18/2013
- by Carlos Aguilar
- Sydney's Buzz
Over the past 24 hours, my Facebook newsfeed has been swamped with a single subject: Invisible Children’s Kony 2012 / Stop Kony campaign.
The campaign film was uploaded to Youtube on the 5th of March. Since then, #StopKony has been a trending topic on Twitter – both in Australia and worldwide, for several days. At time of writing YouTube listed the number of views at 11,624,969, which is likely to be shy of the actual total.
This is a phenomenal success by anybody’s standards. But what has made this single issue – which I think it’s fair to say was relatively far from most Australians’ minds until a day or two ago, such a hot topic – and why is the campaign such a viral hit?
Typically the videos that generate the most hits are short and funny. The Stop Kony video is just over 29 minutes long, and it’s heart rending from start to finish.
The campaign film was uploaded to Youtube on the 5th of March. Since then, #StopKony has been a trending topic on Twitter – both in Australia and worldwide, for several days. At time of writing YouTube listed the number of views at 11,624,969, which is likely to be shy of the actual total.
This is a phenomenal success by anybody’s standards. But what has made this single issue – which I think it’s fair to say was relatively far from most Australians’ minds until a day or two ago, such a hot topic – and why is the campaign such a viral hit?
Typically the videos that generate the most hits are short and funny. The Stop Kony video is just over 29 minutes long, and it’s heart rending from start to finish.
- 3/8/2012
- by Cathie McGinn
- Encore Magazine
He lived a remarkable life: a French resistance fighter, a friend of Jean-Paul Sartre and lover of Simone de Beauvoir. Yet he is best known for his epic film, Shoah, the definitive oral record of those who survived the Holocaust. Now, aged 87, he tells his own extraordinary story
One evening – we are not given a date, but it must be the early 1960s – the great French philosopher, essayist, novelist and pioneer of feminism Simone de Beauvoir was, as so often, at the theatre. But this was a stranger night than most. On De Beauvoir's left sat her lifelong companion and erstwhile lover, the greatest philosopher of his generation and founder of existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre. To her right was her current lover, the writer, former resistance fighter and film director Claude Lanzmann. And on stage: Lanzmann's sister Évelyne, a foremost actress of the day, playing the lead role in Sartre's play Huis Clos.
One evening – we are not given a date, but it must be the early 1960s – the great French philosopher, essayist, novelist and pioneer of feminism Simone de Beauvoir was, as so often, at the theatre. But this was a stranger night than most. On De Beauvoir's left sat her lifelong companion and erstwhile lover, the greatest philosopher of his generation and founder of existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre. To her right was her current lover, the writer, former resistance fighter and film director Claude Lanzmann. And on stage: Lanzmann's sister Évelyne, a foremost actress of the day, playing the lead role in Sartre's play Huis Clos.
- 3/5/2012
- by Ed Vulliamy
- The Guardian - Film News
New York. The Last Modernist: The Complete Works of Béla Tarr opens today at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and runs through Wednesday, and R Emmet Sweeney has a wide-ranging talk with the retired filmmaker. "Whether or not The Turin Horse turns out to be Béla Tarr's last film, as the gnostic, gnomic Hungarian master has claimed it will be, the sense of finality is absolute," writes the L's Mark Asch. Aaron Cutler for Moving Image Source: "Primo Levi writes in Survival in Auschwitz that the lowest point a human can reach is when he or she is forced to act without choice, performing tasks purely for his or her own survival. Freedom of choice is what separates humans from other animals. The Tarr crew (which, beginning with him and partner, Ágnes Hranitzky, has gone on to include a regular screenwriter [László Krasznahorkai], composer [Mihály Vig], and cinematographer [Fred Kelemen]) began by comparing humans to each other,...
- 2/3/2012
- MUBI
A fascinating book reveals the real-life scandal that lay behind Federico Fellini's La Dolca Vita
In glamorous Rome, Fellini's La Dolce Vita was the box-office hit of 1960, and launched Marcello Mastroianni as an international heart-throb. No film captured so vividly the flash-bulb glitz of Italy's postwar "economic miracle". After the drawn-out trauma of fascism, the nation was poised for a consumer boom of televisions, fridges and Fiat 500s. Daringly, Fellini disavowed the neo-realism of films such as Bicycle Thieves for the stylised fantasies of Hollywood. The Vatican not surprisingly objected to the scene in which Mastroianni makes love to Anita Ekberg in the waters of the Trevi fountain, and tried to have the film censored. Ever since, says the historian Stephen Gundle, Rome has endured as a fantasy of the "sweet life".
Yet all was not well behind the roseate flush of Italy's newfound prosperity. The miracolo italiano...
In glamorous Rome, Fellini's La Dolce Vita was the box-office hit of 1960, and launched Marcello Mastroianni as an international heart-throb. No film captured so vividly the flash-bulb glitz of Italy's postwar "economic miracle". After the drawn-out trauma of fascism, the nation was poised for a consumer boom of televisions, fridges and Fiat 500s. Daringly, Fellini disavowed the neo-realism of films such as Bicycle Thieves for the stylised fantasies of Hollywood. The Vatican not surprisingly objected to the scene in which Mastroianni makes love to Anita Ekberg in the waters of the Trevi fountain, and tried to have the film censored. Ever since, says the historian Stephen Gundle, Rome has endured as a fantasy of the "sweet life".
Yet all was not well behind the roseate flush of Italy's newfound prosperity. The miracolo italiano...
- 7/22/2011
- The Guardian - Film News
Ben Whishaw is putting the poets and dreamers behind him, and playing a ruthless 1950s hack. He talks to Amy Raphael about roles, trolls – and what gets him angry
Ask Ben Whishaw about acting and he twists in his chair, pushes his hair into various shapes, and, avoiding all eye contact, mutters: "I find it really hard to say anything coherent or interesting about the work I do." But ask him, out of slight desperation, about the government's cuts to the arts and he sits up sharply and squares his shoulders. "We're really going to feel it. I'm frustrated by the whole situation because I'm not sure I believe what we're being told about the deficit problem. It's frightening to see public services being cut and libraries being closed. Closing the UK Film Council felt shockingly barbaric."
Whishaw has rather taken me by surprise – not because he has opinions about government policy,...
Ask Ben Whishaw about acting and he twists in his chair, pushes his hair into various shapes, and, avoiding all eye contact, mutters: "I find it really hard to say anything coherent or interesting about the work I do." But ask him, out of slight desperation, about the government's cuts to the arts and he sits up sharply and squares his shoulders. "We're really going to feel it. I'm frustrated by the whole situation because I'm not sure I believe what we're being told about the deficit problem. It's frightening to see public services being cut and libraries being closed. Closing the UK Film Council felt shockingly barbaric."
Whishaw has rather taken me by surprise – not because he has opinions about government policy,...
- 6/30/2011
- by Amy Raphael
- The Guardian - Film News
As the hit musical Dirty Dancing prepares to go on tour, our reporter joins young hopefuls at open auditions, and asks how a low-budget film became 'a cultural event that lasted decades'
You could probably argue that Flashdance is the better film, but it is Dirty Dancing that captured our collective heart. They call it "Star Wars for girls". It's not much on paper: a family goes on holiday, and its late-teenage daughters fall in love, one with a good'un – Patrick Swayze on career-defining form – and one with a bad sort. Steamy dancing occurs, that's the main thing. When the stage version opened in 2006, it had the highest pre-sell in West End history. Now, they're holding open auditions in the regions, for the national tour.
At 7.15 on Thursday morning, there is a snake of girls standing outside a dance studio in Edinburgh, standing in first position from muscle memory, wearing...
You could probably argue that Flashdance is the better film, but it is Dirty Dancing that captured our collective heart. They call it "Star Wars for girls". It's not much on paper: a family goes on holiday, and its late-teenage daughters fall in love, one with a good'un – Patrick Swayze on career-defining form – and one with a bad sort. Steamy dancing occurs, that's the main thing. When the stage version opened in 2006, it had the highest pre-sell in West End history. Now, they're holding open auditions in the regions, for the national tour.
At 7.15 on Thursday morning, there is a snake of girls standing outside a dance studio in Edinburgh, standing in first position from muscle memory, wearing...
- 5/6/2011
- by Zoe Williams
- The Guardian - Film News
Netflix has revolutionized the home movie experience for fans of film with its instant streaming technology. Netflix Nuggets is my way of spreading the word about independent, classic and foreign films made available by Netflix for instant streaming.
Sorry, folks… there are simply too many great films streaming this week to post an image for them all, but that’s a good thing, eh? You’ve got your movie watching work cut out for you, due in great part to Miramax releasing damn near their entire catalog of films on one day!
B. Monkey (1999)
Streaming Available: 05/01/2011
Director: Michael Radford
Synopsis: Good-hearted schoolteacher Alan Furnace (Jared Harris) desperately wants some excitement in his life — and he may just get some. One lonely night at a London bar, Alan spies the raven-haired beauty Beatrice (Asia Argento) arguing with two friends, Paul (Rupert Everett) and Bruno (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers). Beatrice quickly befriends Alan and...
Sorry, folks… there are simply too many great films streaming this week to post an image for them all, but that’s a good thing, eh? You’ve got your movie watching work cut out for you, due in great part to Miramax releasing damn near their entire catalog of films on one day!
B. Monkey (1999)
Streaming Available: 05/01/2011
Director: Michael Radford
Synopsis: Good-hearted schoolteacher Alan Furnace (Jared Harris) desperately wants some excitement in his life — and he may just get some. One lonely night at a London bar, Alan spies the raven-haired beauty Beatrice (Asia Argento) arguing with two friends, Paul (Rupert Everett) and Bruno (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers). Beatrice quickly befriends Alan and...
- 4/29/2011
- by Travis Keune
- WeAreMovieGeeks.com
By Elliot V. Kotek
(from Moving Pictures, winter issue, 2011)
John Turturro goes behind the camera for the fourth time with “Passione,” a film that allows the actor-director to give a unique perspective on his Italian heritage and bring to the screen the beauty — and intrigue — of Naples in the form of a musical journey. As he tells Moving Pictures, “It just turned out to be one of these movies that you get involved in that’s way beyond you.”
Moving Pictures: You were born in the U.S., but here you take a trip back to — or a trip to — Naples in the story.
John Turturro: Well … there are people who are interested in their background and their culture. I think a lot of people who come to America, you know, want to become Americanized. My father was born in Italy and came when he was 6 years old,...
(from Moving Pictures, winter issue, 2011)
John Turturro goes behind the camera for the fourth time with “Passione,” a film that allows the actor-director to give a unique perspective on his Italian heritage and bring to the screen the beauty — and intrigue — of Naples in the form of a musical journey. As he tells Moving Pictures, “It just turned out to be one of these movies that you get involved in that’s way beyond you.”
Moving Pictures: You were born in the U.S., but here you take a trip back to — or a trip to — Naples in the story.
John Turturro: Well … there are people who are interested in their background and their culture. I think a lot of people who come to America, you know, want to become Americanized. My father was born in Italy and came when he was 6 years old,...
- 3/2/2011
- by admin
- Moving Pictures Magazine
By Elliot V. Kotek
(from Moving Pictures, winter issue, 2011)
John Turturro goes behind the camera for the fourth time with “Passione,” a film that allows the actor-director to give a unique perspective on his Italian heritage and bring to the screen the beauty — and intrigue — of Naples in the form of a musical journey. As he tells Moving Pictures, “It just turned out to be one of these movies that you get involved in that’s way beyond you.”
Moving Pictures: You were born in the U.S., but here you take a trip back to — or a trip to — Naples in the story.
John Turturro: Well … there are people who are interested in their background and their culture. I think a lot of people who come to America, you know, want to become Americanized. My father was born in Italy and came when he was 6 years old,...
(from Moving Pictures, winter issue, 2011)
John Turturro goes behind the camera for the fourth time with “Passione,” a film that allows the actor-director to give a unique perspective on his Italian heritage and bring to the screen the beauty — and intrigue — of Naples in the form of a musical journey. As he tells Moving Pictures, “It just turned out to be one of these movies that you get involved in that’s way beyond you.”
Moving Pictures: You were born in the U.S., but here you take a trip back to — or a trip to — Naples in the story.
John Turturro: Well … there are people who are interested in their background and their culture. I think a lot of people who come to America, you know, want to become Americanized. My father was born in Italy and came when he was 6 years old,...
- 3/2/2011
- by admin
- Moving Pictures Network
The king of Italian comedy leapt to his death last month. At least he avoided seeing Berlusconi survive the no-confidence vote
I don't know what awed us more: the way he chose to end his life or the corpus of films he left behind. I was in Turin, attending the Torino film festival, when the news struck us like lightning. The wires read: November 29, at 10pm, Mario Monicelli, 95, threw himself out of the window of his hospital room in Rome. Monicelli, the king of Italian comedy, the last of the greats, director of more than 60 films, many of them classics of the silver screen. Comedy in the noblest meaning of the term: Monicelli used laughter to denounce moral hypocrisy, social injustice, and historical untruths.
It's hard not to think of Primo Levi or Gilles Deleuze, who chose to end their lives in the same dramatic, violent and flamboyant manner. Monicelli...
I don't know what awed us more: the way he chose to end his life or the corpus of films he left behind. I was in Turin, attending the Torino film festival, when the news struck us like lightning. The wires read: November 29, at 10pm, Mario Monicelli, 95, threw himself out of the window of his hospital room in Rome. Monicelli, the king of Italian comedy, the last of the greats, director of more than 60 films, many of them classics of the silver screen. Comedy in the noblest meaning of the term: Monicelli used laughter to denounce moral hypocrisy, social injustice, and historical untruths.
It's hard not to think of Primo Levi or Gilles Deleuze, who chose to end their lives in the same dramatic, violent and flamboyant manner. Monicelli...
- 12/18/2010
- by Agnès Poirier
- The Guardian - Film News
My family is Sicilian and Naples has long held a fascination for me – for its beauty, its danger and above all its music. Passione is my attempt to put those feelings into film
My family is originally from Sicily and my father was from Puglia. My cousin Aida is half Neapolitan. Most of the Italians in New York are from Naples, Sicily and Calabria – the south. Naples itself reminds me a little bit of New York in the 70s, except everyone is crushed together more. It's so beautiful and so dangerous. It has a brutality, but also a sense of poetry – plenty of writers have lived there and written about it. Neopolitans have their own language and, most importantly, the people are unbelievably musical. The relationship between classical and popular music goes back a long, long time. Many classical musicians (and some great opera singers) have sung popular Neapolitan songs throughout the years.
My family is originally from Sicily and my father was from Puglia. My cousin Aida is half Neapolitan. Most of the Italians in New York are from Naples, Sicily and Calabria – the south. Naples itself reminds me a little bit of New York in the 70s, except everyone is crushed together more. It's so beautiful and so dangerous. It has a brutality, but also a sense of poetry – plenty of writers have lived there and written about it. Neopolitans have their own language and, most importantly, the people are unbelievably musical. The relationship between classical and popular music goes back a long, long time. Many classical musicians (and some great opera singers) have sung popular Neapolitan songs throughout the years.
- 9/9/2010
- The Guardian - Film News
… but the Shallow Grave actor is considering a move into comedy after primal scream soul-baring of Lennon Naked
Back in 1994, when Christopher Eccleston was playing a psychotic chartered accountant in Shallow Grave, he spent the best part of a day in a working mortuary pretending to be dead. There wasn't enough money to recreate the mortuary in a studio and, anyway, director Danny Boyle wanted to keep it real. So Eccleston, then 30 and best known for playing Derek Bentley in Let Him Have It three years earlier, was put in a drawer with a Glaswegian member of the crew.
"I was stark bollock naked and the Glaswegian, who was dressed in a parka, Doc Martens and jeans, kept saying, 'Are we finished? 'Cos I'm fucking freezing, by the way.' And all this time, I'm lying not only naked but next to a head that had recently been fished out of the River Clyde.
Back in 1994, when Christopher Eccleston was playing a psychotic chartered accountant in Shallow Grave, he spent the best part of a day in a working mortuary pretending to be dead. There wasn't enough money to recreate the mortuary in a studio and, anyway, director Danny Boyle wanted to keep it real. So Eccleston, then 30 and best known for playing Derek Bentley in Let Him Have It three years earlier, was put in a drawer with a Glaswegian member of the crew.
"I was stark bollock naked and the Glaswegian, who was dressed in a parka, Doc Martens and jeans, kept saying, 'Are we finished? 'Cos I'm fucking freezing, by the way.' And all this time, I'm lying not only naked but next to a head that had recently been fished out of the River Clyde.
- 6/18/2010
- by Amy Raphael
- The Guardian - Film News
Vladimir Nabokov's unfinished novella, The Original of Laura, is being published despite the author's instructions that it be destroyed after his death. Martin Amis confronts the tortuous questions posed by a genius in decline
Language leads a double life – and so does the novelist. You chat with family and friends, you attend to your correspondence, you consult menus and shopping lists, you observe road signs (Look Left), and so on. Then you enter your study, where language exists in quite another form – as the stuff of patterned artifice. Most writers, I think, would want to go along with Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), when he reminisced in 1974:
". . . I regarded Paris, with its gray-toned days and charcoal nights, merely as the chance setting for the most authentic and faithful joys of my life: the coloured phrase in my mind under the drizzle, the white page under the desk lamp awaiting me in my humble home.
Language leads a double life – and so does the novelist. You chat with family and friends, you attend to your correspondence, you consult menus and shopping lists, you observe road signs (Look Left), and so on. Then you enter your study, where language exists in quite another form – as the stuff of patterned artifice. Most writers, I think, would want to go along with Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), when he reminisced in 1974:
". . . I regarded Paris, with its gray-toned days and charcoal nights, merely as the chance setting for the most authentic and faithful joys of my life: the coloured phrase in my mind under the drizzle, the white page under the desk lamp awaiting me in my humble home.
- 11/14/2009
- by Martin Amis
- The Guardian - Film News
New Yorker Films
New Yorker assets were auctioned off on March 12 by Technicolor. Meanwhile The Cinema Guild will launch a new home video label with two titles originally slated to go through New Yorker Home Video. The first release will be Christian Petzold’s Yella on March 31, and the second will be Alexander Sokurov’s Alexandra on April 28. The Cinema Guild will take over the distribution of three other titles, recently released through New Yorker Home Video, The Order of Myths and The Unforeseen - both Independent Spirit Award winners, and Primo Levi’s Journey.
Cinetic Rights Management recently closed a deal with Cinema Guild to help distribute their video titles online. This will begin in April with titles such as The Unforeseen. The films will be released on portals such as iTunes, Amazon VOD, Hulu, SnagFilms, Joost, and more.
Zeitgeist Films also made a related deal, acquiring the company’s Three Monkeys.
It is New Yorker Films' sincere hope that the purchaser of their assets will be a well qualified distributor with the intention and ability to manage and distribute the films in a manner consistent with New Yorker Film's 43 year history in the independent film world.
Cinetic Rights Management recently closed a deal with Cinema Guild to help distribute their video titles online. This will begin in April with titles such as The Unforeseen. The films will be released on portals such as iTunes, Amazon VOD, Hulu, SnagFilms, Joost, and more.
Zeitgeist Films also made a related deal, acquiring the company’s Three Monkeys.
It is New Yorker Films' sincere hope that the purchaser of their assets will be a well qualified distributor with the intention and ability to manage and distribute the films in a manner consistent with New Yorker Film's 43 year history in the independent film world.
- 3/13/2009
- Sydney's Buzz
By Michael Atkinson
The new Chinese documentary "Please Vote for Me" (2007) has an irresistible arc: take a class of average middle class third-graders, give them the opportunity to vote for "class monitor;" tell the three candidates that they have to run campaigns, in order to net as many votes as they can; and let the political process run its course . that is, let it corrupt, humiliate and demoralize the children just as they were led to believe they were creating "democracy." Weijun Chen's film . which runs a mere 55 minutes . has an almost crystalline purity to its ironies. Three Wuhan children are "selected" by the teachers . two boys (one of whom is the incumbent monitor, and given to shoving his classmates around) and a girl, whose shy demeanor would seem to make her a dubious candidate. Right out of the gate, the campaigns become hilarious-yet-chilling mirror images of adult political...
The new Chinese documentary "Please Vote for Me" (2007) has an irresistible arc: take a class of average middle class third-graders, give them the opportunity to vote for "class monitor;" tell the three candidates that they have to run campaigns, in order to net as many votes as they can; and let the political process run its course . that is, let it corrupt, humiliate and demoralize the children just as they were led to believe they were creating "democracy." Weijun Chen's film . which runs a mere 55 minutes . has an almost crystalline purity to its ironies. Three Wuhan children are "selected" by the teachers . two boys (one of whom is the incumbent monitor, and given to shoving his classmates around) and a girl, whose shy demeanor would seem to make her a dubious candidate. Right out of the gate, the campaigns become hilarious-yet-chilling mirror images of adult political...
- 8/26/2008
- by Michael Atkinson
- ifc.com
'Cranford' leads BAFTA's TV nominations
LONDON -- The BBC1 costume drama Cranford led the way with four mentions Tuesday morning as nominations were announced for the April 20 British Academy Television Awards.
Cranford, the ensemble costume drama about life in a rural English village, earned best actress nominations for Judi Dench and Eileen Atkins as well as noms for best drama serial and the Sky+ special award, which is voted on by the public. Other Sky+award nominees are comedy Gavin and Stacey, Strictly Come Dancing and Britain's Got Talent.
Channel 4 is the most-nominated network with 23 mentions, BBC1 was second with 20 noms, ITV had 12, BBC2 earned 11 and the Five channel had one. Among the digital nets, arts channel BBC4 earned five noms, youth channel BBC3 took two and Channel 4 and E4 each received one.
Four first-time nominees make up the best actor category including stage and screen star Anthony Sher, who was recognized for Primo, the stage biopic of Hollocaust survivor and writer Primo Levi. Also nominated are Andrew Garfield for Boy A, Tom Hardy for Stuart: A Life Backwards and Matthew Macfadyen for Secret Life.
In the actress category, Dench and Atkins will vie alongside newcomer Kierston Wareing for Channel 4's It's a Free World and Gina McKee for her role in BBC1 drama The Street.
On the entertainment side, ITV1 hit Britain's Got Talent goes head to head with BBC1's Strictly Come Dancing, which has received its 3rd nomination, as well as comedian Harry Hill for Harry Hill's TV Burp and Stephen Fry in celebrity panel show "QI."
Burp's Hill also was named in the performance category alongside first-time nominees Simon Amstell for Never Mind the Buzzcocks, Alan Carr and Justin Lee Collins for The Friday Night Project and four-time performance nominee Stephen Fry for "QI."
In the international category, Family Guy takes on My Name is Earl, Californication and Heroes.
Stephen Merchant and David Mitchell receive individual acclaim this year in the comedy performance category for Extras Christmas Special and Peep Show respectively.
Cranford, the ensemble costume drama about life in a rural English village, earned best actress nominations for Judi Dench and Eileen Atkins as well as noms for best drama serial and the Sky+ special award, which is voted on by the public. Other Sky+award nominees are comedy Gavin and Stacey, Strictly Come Dancing and Britain's Got Talent.
Channel 4 is the most-nominated network with 23 mentions, BBC1 was second with 20 noms, ITV had 12, BBC2 earned 11 and the Five channel had one. Among the digital nets, arts channel BBC4 earned five noms, youth channel BBC3 took two and Channel 4 and E4 each received one.
Four first-time nominees make up the best actor category including stage and screen star Anthony Sher, who was recognized for Primo, the stage biopic of Hollocaust survivor and writer Primo Levi. Also nominated are Andrew Garfield for Boy A, Tom Hardy for Stuart: A Life Backwards and Matthew Macfadyen for Secret Life.
In the actress category, Dench and Atkins will vie alongside newcomer Kierston Wareing for Channel 4's It's a Free World and Gina McKee for her role in BBC1 drama The Street.
On the entertainment side, ITV1 hit Britain's Got Talent goes head to head with BBC1's Strictly Come Dancing, which has received its 3rd nomination, as well as comedian Harry Hill for Harry Hill's TV Burp and Stephen Fry in celebrity panel show "QI."
Burp's Hill also was named in the performance category alongside first-time nominees Simon Amstell for Never Mind the Buzzcocks, Alan Carr and Justin Lee Collins for The Friday Night Project and four-time performance nominee Stephen Fry for "QI."
In the international category, Family Guy takes on My Name is Earl, Californication and Heroes.
Stephen Merchant and David Mitchell receive individual acclaim this year in the comedy performance category for Extras Christmas Special and Peep Show respectively.
- 3/19/2008
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
- I admit to not knowing one damn thing about this writer named Primo Levi – all the more reason to be curious about this week’s release of Primo Levi's Journey – a Cinema Guild release. Narrated by Chris Cooper, this doc’s starting point begins in the winter of 1945, Primo Levi, one the century’s greatest writers (“If This Is A Man”), was liberated from the Auschwitz concentration camp. With the war still underway, he embarked on a thousand-mile journey to his home in Turin, Italy – a strange and beguiling odyssey memorialized in his book, “The Truce.” Sixty years later, director Davide Ferrario set out to follow in Levi’s footsteps. Retracing his historic trip through Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Rumania, Hungary, Slovakia and Austria, Primo Levi’S Journey weaves a path through a modern Europe that has both changed and remained eerily the same – from democratic rallies in
- 8/13/2007
- IONCINEMA.com
Film review:'The Truce'
In "The Truce", Francesco Rosi achieves something amazing: He's made a big, extroverted historical drama, complete with vast landscapes and swarms of extras, that also succeeds in evoking the most fragile, constantly shifting emotional states of its characters.
"The Truce" has an authentic spiritual dimension, a passion to separate the essential from the ephemeral in its exploration of human nature.
Based on Primo Levi's classic memoir "La Tregua" (The Reawakening), an account of the author's circuitous journey home to Italy after his liberation from Auschwitz in 1945, "The Truce" gets its strongest effects in some of its gentlest moments -- such as the expression of personal triumph on a man's face as he hands a precious slab of bread to a friend, realizing at that moment that despite all he's been through, his humanity hasn't been obliterated.
Levi, a research chemist by profession, described the experience of imprisonment and liberation with ferocious precision in three books, including "Survival in Auschwitz" and "Moments of Reprieve" in addition to "The Reawakening". Only a few scenes here depict the camps in operation, and then only in brief flashbacks, but their soul-squeezing atmosphere is vividly evoked in the behavior and body language of newly liberated prisoners.
Rosi has always had a special gift for using landscapes and enclosed architectural spaces expressively: the enveloping, official corridors of "Illustrious Corpses" (1976); the oddly canted perspectives of a sun-baked village perched on a mountaintop in "Christ Stopped at Eboli" (1979). In "The Truce", a journey from the cramped, gray chambers of Auschwitz into the desolate expanse of postwar Europe -- snaking across half the continent, deep into Russia and back out again, on foot and by train -- mirrors the expansion of constricted human spirits.
The larger mysteries of Levi's life, the evolution of the clenched prisoner of the memoirs into the acclaimed writer of playful essays and metafictional tales "The Periodic Table" and "The Monkey's Wrench" -- not to mention the forces that drove him to suicide in 1987 -- are beyond the scope of this, and perhaps any, film. But we see the beginnings of the process; and what's more, we feel them.
Rosi's sensuous approach turns out to be a perfect match for this material because so much of Levi's struggle to reconnect with the world is visual. Words like "seeing" or "observing" just don't measure up to the urgency of Levi's gaze; he seems to be interrogating reality, trying to peer all the way down into it, mining it for secrets that can help him reawaken.
John Turturro, as Levi, damps his trademark eruptive energy way down; the force of his personality remains, but as an impacted ember of intelligence. Speaking English with a soft Italian accent, Turturro shows the desperate intensity of Primo's watchfulness. "You are a scientist", a friend tells him. "You notice things". It's a description not only of a personality trait but also of the vocation Levi discovered at Auschwitz, to become a "witness" to the Holocaust. Where other prisoners burn their camp uniforms and seek to purge the experience from memory, Levi carefully saves his numbered prison shirt and wears it always under his new clothes.
There are aspects of Levi's account, especially its questing, analytical intelligence, that don't come across as powerfully onscreen as they do in print. When Turturro is required to recite some of Levi's written observations as lines of dialogue, his otherwise fine, fluid performance stiffens up.
"The Truce" is a great film in its ultimate effects, if not in every last detail. The decision to film the story in English, to build the film linguistically around Turturro, puts some of the European actors in supporting roles in an uncomfortable position, struggling with pronunciation when they should be living in the characters. Massimo Ghini, as Primo's ebullient buddy Cesare, and Agnieszka Wagner, as a radiant dumpling of a Russian nurse who plays a key role in reawakening Levi's senses, rise to the occasion. But Yugoslavian actor Rade Serbedzija turns one of Levi's pivotal traveling companions, a domineering, shrewd operator known only as the Greek, into a sub-Zorba stereotype.
In this context, though, all particular complaints are quibbles. What matters most about "The Truce" is that Rosi's magnificent film is altogether worthy of its subject.
THE TRUCE
Miramax Films
Director; Francesco Rosi
Screenplay; Francesco Rosi,
Stefano Rulli, Sandra Petraglia
Based on the book "La Tregua" (The Reawakening) by:; Primo Levi
Producers; Leo Pescarolo, Guido De Laurentiis
Directors of photography; Pasqualini De Santis, Marco Pontecorvo
Editors; Ruggero Mastroianni,
Bruno Sarandrea
Music; Luis Bacalov
Color
Cast:
Primo; John Turturro
Cesare; Massimo Ghini
The Greek; Rade Serbedzija
Daniele; Stefano Dionisi
Colonel Rovi; Teco Celio
Galina; Agnieszka Wagner
Flora; Lorenza Indovina
Running time -- 116 minutes
MPAA rating: R...
"The Truce" has an authentic spiritual dimension, a passion to separate the essential from the ephemeral in its exploration of human nature.
Based on Primo Levi's classic memoir "La Tregua" (The Reawakening), an account of the author's circuitous journey home to Italy after his liberation from Auschwitz in 1945, "The Truce" gets its strongest effects in some of its gentlest moments -- such as the expression of personal triumph on a man's face as he hands a precious slab of bread to a friend, realizing at that moment that despite all he's been through, his humanity hasn't been obliterated.
Levi, a research chemist by profession, described the experience of imprisonment and liberation with ferocious precision in three books, including "Survival in Auschwitz" and "Moments of Reprieve" in addition to "The Reawakening". Only a few scenes here depict the camps in operation, and then only in brief flashbacks, but their soul-squeezing atmosphere is vividly evoked in the behavior and body language of newly liberated prisoners.
Rosi has always had a special gift for using landscapes and enclosed architectural spaces expressively: the enveloping, official corridors of "Illustrious Corpses" (1976); the oddly canted perspectives of a sun-baked village perched on a mountaintop in "Christ Stopped at Eboli" (1979). In "The Truce", a journey from the cramped, gray chambers of Auschwitz into the desolate expanse of postwar Europe -- snaking across half the continent, deep into Russia and back out again, on foot and by train -- mirrors the expansion of constricted human spirits.
The larger mysteries of Levi's life, the evolution of the clenched prisoner of the memoirs into the acclaimed writer of playful essays and metafictional tales "The Periodic Table" and "The Monkey's Wrench" -- not to mention the forces that drove him to suicide in 1987 -- are beyond the scope of this, and perhaps any, film. But we see the beginnings of the process; and what's more, we feel them.
Rosi's sensuous approach turns out to be a perfect match for this material because so much of Levi's struggle to reconnect with the world is visual. Words like "seeing" or "observing" just don't measure up to the urgency of Levi's gaze; he seems to be interrogating reality, trying to peer all the way down into it, mining it for secrets that can help him reawaken.
John Turturro, as Levi, damps his trademark eruptive energy way down; the force of his personality remains, but as an impacted ember of intelligence. Speaking English with a soft Italian accent, Turturro shows the desperate intensity of Primo's watchfulness. "You are a scientist", a friend tells him. "You notice things". It's a description not only of a personality trait but also of the vocation Levi discovered at Auschwitz, to become a "witness" to the Holocaust. Where other prisoners burn their camp uniforms and seek to purge the experience from memory, Levi carefully saves his numbered prison shirt and wears it always under his new clothes.
There are aspects of Levi's account, especially its questing, analytical intelligence, that don't come across as powerfully onscreen as they do in print. When Turturro is required to recite some of Levi's written observations as lines of dialogue, his otherwise fine, fluid performance stiffens up.
"The Truce" is a great film in its ultimate effects, if not in every last detail. The decision to film the story in English, to build the film linguistically around Turturro, puts some of the European actors in supporting roles in an uncomfortable position, struggling with pronunciation when they should be living in the characters. Massimo Ghini, as Primo's ebullient buddy Cesare, and Agnieszka Wagner, as a radiant dumpling of a Russian nurse who plays a key role in reawakening Levi's senses, rise to the occasion. But Yugoslavian actor Rade Serbedzija turns one of Levi's pivotal traveling companions, a domineering, shrewd operator known only as the Greek, into a sub-Zorba stereotype.
In this context, though, all particular complaints are quibbles. What matters most about "The Truce" is that Rosi's magnificent film is altogether worthy of its subject.
THE TRUCE
Miramax Films
Director; Francesco Rosi
Screenplay; Francesco Rosi,
Stefano Rulli, Sandra Petraglia
Based on the book "La Tregua" (The Reawakening) by:; Primo Levi
Producers; Leo Pescarolo, Guido De Laurentiis
Directors of photography; Pasqualini De Santis, Marco Pontecorvo
Editors; Ruggero Mastroianni,
Bruno Sarandrea
Music; Luis Bacalov
Color
Cast:
Primo; John Turturro
Cesare; Massimo Ghini
The Greek; Rade Serbedzija
Daniele; Stefano Dionisi
Colonel Rovi; Teco Celio
Galina; Agnieszka Wagner
Flora; Lorenza Indovina
Running time -- 116 minutes
MPAA rating: R...
- 4/24/1998
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
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