August 13, 2007

Shorts, 8/13.

"Maybe we should initiate, you and I, a cinephiles' Long Shot Hall of Fame," suggests Michael Atkinson.

Sunrise

"[W]e all have our favorites, beyond the celebrated examples (Murnau's marsh walk in Sunrise, Welles's bordertown swoon in Touch of Evil, Kalatosov's street funeral in I Am Cuba, Godard's traffic jam in Week End, Antonioni's summary courtyard circle in The Passenger, Scorsese's Copacabana hustle in GoodFellas, Sokurov's Winter Palace tour in Russian Ark, etc)... but what about the long shots we've forgotten about, or never heard praised?"

Following a sort of abbreviated history of the evolution of one cinephile's taste, the Self-Styled Siren declares that she is "firmly on the side of the Bergman lovers." But for Scott Balcerak, blogging at Dr Mabuse's Kaleido-Scope, "what is really being mourned here is the passing of a certain type of cinephilia - the previous generation's definition of cinephilia."

Shadow of a Doubt Jonathan Lapper posts "A Birthday Tribute to Alfred Hitchcock." On a related note, Andy Horbal: "Shadow of a Doubt appears on the surface to be a Hitchcock film without a MacGuffin, but really that plot device is just hidden in plain sight: his name is Uncle Charlie..."

"Shine a Light is the Stones as up close and personal you're ever going to get," writes Craig McLean, who talks with Martin Scorsese about making it. Also in the Guardian: Rosanna Greenstreet's rapid-fire Q&A with Ed Harris.

Adam Sternbergh profiles Mary-Louise Parker for New York.

"Merv Griffin, a big-band singer who became one of television's longest-running talk-show hosts and formidable innovators, creating some of the medium's most popular game shows before becoming a major figure in the hotel and gambling businesses, died yesterday in Los Angeles," write Richard Severo and Edward Wyatt. "He was 82." Richard Zoglin for Time: "His show didn't have the cachet or the clout of Carson's. But Griffin and his producers were smart enough to realize that to compete they had to take more chances, and that made him more receptive to some of the era's most groundbreaking new talent." More: AJ Schnack and Joe Leydon.

Elizabeth Murray Back to the New York Times: "Elizabeth Murray, a New York painter who reshaped Modernist abstraction into a high-spirited, cartoon-based, language of form whose subjects included domestic life, relationships and the nature of painting itself, died yesterday at her home in upstate New York," writes Roberta Smith. "Ms Murray belonged to a sprawling generation of Post-Minimal artists who spent the 1970s reversing the reductivist tendencies of Minimalism and reinvigorating art with a sense of narrative, process and personal identity." Time's Richard Lacayo: "I can't think of another contemporary artist who gave me more sheer pleasure over the past few decades. In the 1970s, when everybody just knew that painting was dead, Murray and a handful of others - Susan Rothenberg, Brice Marden and Philip Guston to name three - came along with the kind of vital pictures that said: 'Says who?'"

The latest pinch hitter for the Reeler: John Lichman.

Excerpts from two books: The Warhol Economy: How Fashion, Art and Music Drive New York City and The Rough Guide to the Velvet Underground.

An annotated list from Nick Schager at IFC News: "When B-Listers Go Abroad."



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Posted by dwhudson at August 13, 2007 3:57 PM

Comments

There's a phenomenal extended shot in Dario Argento's TENEBRAE, where the camera prowls all over the sides of a weird modern apartment building (with a couple of ventures into the interior). Was executed by the same DP as the "summary courtyard circle" in THE PASSENGER, Luciano Tovoli.

Posted by: Neil Young at August 14, 2007 1:30 AM

Among the most purposeful of contemporary deployments of long shots are, of course, found in Michael Haneke's films -- uppermost among which, perhaps, is the early tracking shot on the streets of Paris in CODE UNKNOWN... Also, those in work of Carlos Reygadas (inspired, respectively, by Tarkovsky and Antonioni, in JAPAN and BATTLE IN HEAVEN), Tsai Ming Laing (especially GOODBYE, DRAGON INN and WHAT TIME IS IT THERE?), and Paz Encina's 2006 PARAGUAYAN HAMMOCK.

Long live the long shot.

Posted by: Rob Sica at August 14, 2007 10:47 AM

There's also the semi-opening shot of "Absolute Beginners" which is discussed at length in "The Player."

And the opening of "Bonfire of the Vanities" which may cover the longest distance in a single shot.

Posted by: Fred at August 14, 2007 2:27 PM

I might be alone on this...but did anyone notice how much Scorsese spoke in the third person, or was that a mere formatting error by the Guardian? If the former is indeed true, man...this year's Oscar sweep must've really gone to his head. He even says "Marty," for chrissakes.

Posted by: at August 14, 2007 3:14 PM

Allow me to suggest three bravura sequence-shots from the Israeli director Amos Gitai. The opening shot of his rather disappointing film about the 1948 War of Independence, Kedma, is a slow tracking shot across the deck of a ship jammed with Jewish refugees trying to get into Palestine (pre-Israel, remember); the camera glides down a stairway and through the over-populated underbelly of the ship to rest on a couple who, if memory serves, begin making love. The film's last shot is an energetic lateral track back-and-forth with the protagonist, who has an astonishing monologue of at least seven minutes as he becomes increasingly agitated in his dismay at the violence out of which the new nation is being born.

Finally, Gitai's contribution to the 9/11 film was a nine-minute-plus sequence-shot of a bombing in a Tel Aviv street as experienced from a bewildering array of perspectives, both a bravura piece of high-intensity filmmaking and a mordant joke at the expense of both the US and Israeli journalists.

Kippur, his best film, also has some memorable long takes, but because Kedma is actually not one of his better films, those two struck me as worth mentioning.

Posted by: George Robinson at August 14, 2007 3:34 PM

I definitely noticed the third-person overload in the Scorsese interview. I did assume it was poor formatting on the part of the Guardian, as I've seen them make similar mistakes. But if not ... wow.

Posted by: Karina at August 15, 2007 11:55 AM