Claire Denis at the NYFF

Claire Denis with two actors (Isaach de Bankolé, William Nadylam) from her new film The White Material during the Q&A at the NYFF on Saturday, October 10. It is the third film that Denis has shot in Africa, following Chocolat (1988) and Beau Travail (1999), each made a decade apart. It's as though Denis, who spent her childhood in various regions of Africa, was periodically drawn back to the country she first considered her home. (Born in Paris in 1948, Denis – whose father was a civil servant – spent most of her childhood moving from one part of Africa to another. She only returned to France as a teenager. Not surprisingly, her interests as a filmmaker have often been focused on displaced individuals living on foreign soil – which was her own experience both growing up in Africa and returning to France as a young woman.) This is not to say that these films should be understood as autobiographical or sentimental. Indeed, Denis is one of the least sentimental directors working today. She has also developed, over the years, an impressionistic, rhythmic style of filmmaking that should be seen by all who are interested in rethinking the nature of "narrative" as it applies to the medium of film. (The best place to start? See I Can't Sleep and Beau Travail. And see The White Material, if/when it finally picks up a US distributor.)

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Michael Haneke at NYFF

Here is a photo I took of Haneke (sitting on the far left-hand side) during the Q&A that followed the October 7 screening of his new film The White Ribbon. Some of Haneke's responses surprised me, including his claim that a filmmaker should not impose a predetermined plan or schema on their work. It's hard for me to understand what this could mean coming from someone who, in the past, has made such formally rigorous works as 71 Fragments for a Chronology of Chance (which, as the title suggests, consists of 71 scenes, most in long takes) and Code Unknown (a series of precisely controlled sequence shots). The audience responded with great enthusiasm to his latest film – winner of the Palme d'or at Cannes in May – and this was not a big surprise considering that The White Ribbon is easily the most polished and classically structured (narratively-speaking) of all his films. Personally, I wouldn't have minded a bit more provocation.

Interesting technical aside: The White Ribbon was shot with color film stock and then developed in black-and-white. The result, according to Haneke, was not always to his liking, so they did some digital tinkering (with silhouettes, for example) in postproduction. (The effect of this, at times, is to make the film look – unfortunately, as far as I'm concerned – as though it were shot with a digital camera.)

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Cinephile Alert

If you haven't come across it yet, I recommend that everyone check out the website entitled "The Auteurs" (www.theauteurs.com). What makes it particularly nice is that along with articles about new films and filmmakers, and a discussion forum for members of the site (with endless top ten lists), they also stream films, some for a small fee and some for FREE (including the films restored by the Scorsese sponsored non-profit organization, World Cinema Foundation). The emphasis throughout is on alternatives to mainstream film and, because it is an internationally run webpage, it allows the student of film to discover a number of works that previously may have escaped his or her attention. This month the free steaming films includes a number of remarkable debut feature films: Agnès Varda's La Pointe Courte (1956), sometimes referred to as the origin of the French New Wave; Roman Polanski's Knife in the Water (1962); Jane Campion's Sweetie (1989); and Lynne Ramsay's Ratcatcher (1999). It's a great website for current and future cinephiles. Join today!

Film Form/Film Practice on YouTube

We've created a YouTube page to accompany the blog. It will include clips planned for (but not always seen in) class, as well as some "bonus" material. Make sure to watch my "mash-up" video of Chris Turiello's Bolex project, as well as an early Bolex work by Caldwell Lever entitled L'Uomo del mare (Man of the Sea). Visit our YouTube page here: http://www.youtube.com/user/filmformfilmpractice.

Film Form Fall 2009