Strange Islands.

La Jetée 

by Chris Marker (1962).

(French, with English subtitles).

La Jetée is perhaps the most ‘fictional’ of Marker’s output, weaving its story of a nuclear-devastated Paris in the near future; it is far from conventional. Lasting 29 minutes, shot in black and white and consisting almost entirely of still photographs – imaginatively blended with dissolves, wipes and fades – this is the bare bones of science fiction. It highlights why we are attracted to SF in the first place: not for bug-eyed aliens or galaxy-hopping spaceships, but for the way in which the form can twist our most cherished versions of reality inside out.

La Jetée‘s virtue is its immediate, haunting ability to evoke the emotions of love and desire; its use of photomontage poignantly conjures up the frozen moments that constitute memory.

- via review by Simon Sellars

A fishing spot along the Tamagawa River.

Kurosawa and Chiaki are fishing.

It is during the shooting of Seven Samurai: only half the film is finished, the budget is all used up, shooting is interrupted.

Chiaki: So, what’s going to happen?

Kurosawa: Well, the company isn’t going to throw away all the money it’s already put into the film. So long as my pictures are hits I can afford to be unreasonable. Of course, if they start losing money then I’ve made some enemies.

Money is found shooting is begun again; money is used up, shooting is interrupted. Kurosawa and Chiaki go fishing again.

Kurosawa: (Dangling his line with some satisfaction.) Now they’ve gotten in this deep, they have no choice but to finish it!

And, indeed, Seven Samurai finally got finished; it took over a year and was a big hit.

Chiaki’s house.

He and Kurosawa are drinking; both are rather drunk.

Kurosawa: Hey, Chiaki. You probably got more for appearing in the picture than I got for directing it. You’re too expensive!

Chiaki: (Frowning silence. Then his inner-voice speaks, though no one hears:) It isn’t that I’m too expensive; it’s that you’re too cheap.

At the golf course.

Kurosawa and Chiaki are playing golf. Kurosawa hits the ball. It goes off to one side. Chiaki hits the ball. It goes high and straight - a beautiful shot.

Kurosawa: (Dejected.) Why is it I’m so lousy?

Chiaki: When you are making films you are a demon of strength; when you can’t hit the golf-ball you are like some little girl. Where is this strength; where does it go?

Kurosawa: It is quite enough if a human being has but one thing where he is strong. (As though to console himself.) If a human being were strong in everything it wouldn’t be nice for other people, would it?

Written by Minoru Chiaki upon being asked for a word-portrait of Akira Kurosawa.

Quoted from The Films of Akira Kurosawa by Donald Richie.

Image: Seven Samurai film poster via wikiM

Akira Kurosawa: Tarkovsky and Solaris

“I met Tarkovsky for the first time when I attended my welcome luncheon at the Mosfilm during my first visit to Soviet Russia. He was small, thin, looked a little frail, and at the same time exceptionally intelligent, and unusually shrewd and sensitive … After the luncheon party, I visited his set for Solaris.

Concerning Solaris, I find many people complaining that it is too long, but I do not think so. They especially find too lengthy the description of nature in the introductory scenes, but these layers of memory, of farewell to this earthly nature, submerge themselves deep below the bottom of the story after the main character has been sent in a rocket into the satellite station base in the universe, and they almost torture the soul of the viewer like a kind of irresistible nostalghia toward mother earth nature, which resembles homesickness. Without the presence of beautiful nature sequences on earth as a long introduction, you could not make the audience directly conceive the sense of having-no-way-out harboured by the people “jailed” inside the satellite base.

I saw this film late at night in a preview room in Moscow for the first time, and soon I felt my heart aching in agony with a longing to returning to the earth as quickly as possible. Marvellous progress in science we have been enjoying, but where will it lead humanity after all? Sheer fearful emotion this film succeeds in conjuring up in our soul. Without it, a science fiction movie would be nothing more than a petty fancy.

These thoughts came and went while I was gazing at the screen.

Tarkovsky was together with me then. He was at the corner of the studio. When the film was over, he stood up, looking at me as if he felt timid. I said to him, “Very good. It makes me feel real fear.” Tarkovsky smiled shyly, but happily. And we toasted vodka at the restaurant in the Film Institute. Tarkovsky, who didn’t drink usually, drank a lot of vodka, and went so far as to turn off the speaker from which music had floated into the restaurant, and began to sing the theme of samurai from Seven Samurai at the top of his voice.

As if to rival him, I joined in.

For I was at that moment very happy to find myself living on Earth.”

Text and images via nostalghia.com

” Unless one turns out the lights or follows the score, one confronts the deep embarrassment of listening to musicians who aren’t there. The embarrassment is present, if latent, even when one listens alone. It is one reason why many people, not all of them unmusical, find themselves fidgeting or rereading liner notes or paging through a magazine instead of listening as they had intended to do. Compare the movies: first there were moving pictures, and no one expected pictures to talk, but still the silence was embarrassing. To keep people’s minds on the screen, to keep them from becoming self-conscious and losing interest in what they saw, music was needed; and by 1929, when talkies arrived, cinemas accounted for more than three-quarters of all  paid musical employment in England, according to union statistics. There was nothing like this to meet our embarrassment before the talking machine. There still isn’t. The ear is accosted, but the eye can wander and take the ear along. And in a group the eye is embarrassed wherever it turns - whether to the loudspeakers, or the space between them, or other eyes, or the interior of its eyelid (people will think you’re asleep).”

Evan Eisenberg - The Recording Angel (1987)

Image: French Poster from 1902ish via

Ikiru (生きる, “To Live”)

Original Japanese Poster for Akira Kurosawa’s film Ikiru (1952)

via

“One can discern in this film similarities to a platonic dialogue in which poetry and philosophy are found next to one another.

Here in fact we are witnessing not a journey but a form of conversation in which the heroes uncover their inner worlds.

My impression is that true philosophers are always poets and vice versa.”

Andrei Tarkovski via Nostalghia.com

Stalker film poster by Jean-Michel Folon via

Kurosawa: The Last Emperor.

… A documentary about the film director Akira Kurosawa. (1 of 6)