Le Joli Mai Poster
Le Joli Mai Poster
Carlyle Group said Wednesday that it will partner with co-founders Mark Getty and Jonathan Klein and the Getty family in buying the company from another private equity firm, Hellman & Friedman.
AFC: What do you mean, you never know?
By Gérard de Battista
May 1985, filming Level Five on Okinawa, Japan’s southernmost island. Extremely small team : Marker and me, him with a Walkman-style tape recorder modified by Antoine Bonfanti, and me with an Arri 16 SR, a Zeiss 11-110mm zoom lens, a backpack containing a magazine, film, and changing bag.
It was the fortieth anniversary of the American landing on the island and the battle that followed. The film talks about the war in general and we filmed the different battlefields, ceremonies, families visiting the battlefields and cemeteries (there were many deaths at Okinawa, American and Japanese soldiers and civilians killed in the bombings, or collective suicides by entire families…). We generally managed to get around using taxi drivers who spoke English, and so filming was both discreet and mobile. …
Decasia Blu-Ray Review
The title of Decasia rhymes with “fantasia”, and the film is the epitome of an obscure arthouse title. However, for fans of Blu-ray, and especially for regulars at Blu-ray.com, the subject matter should be anything but arcane. Participants in this site’s lively forum have spent literally hundreds of hours debating the mechanics of film as it is represented in the digital medium of high definition. Discussions of grain, film stock, preservation and restoration are common, and the artistic and technical judgments of those tasked with translating images stored as film emulsion into the binary code of ones and zeroes are closely scrutinized.
Carlyle Group to buy photo, video distributor Getty Images in $3.3 billion deal
By Associated Press
Projection Publique: Chris Marker, explorateur du siècle
Il est mort le jour de ses 91 ans, le 29 juillet. Jusqu’au dernier moment, il aura surveillé le score de son film Chat écoutant la musique sur YouTube. Rien d’anecdotique à cela, mais une curiosité sans fin pour les techniques modernes et un amour des chats, deux des nombreuses facettes de l’homme qui avait choisi de s’appeler, le plus souvent, Chris Marker.
Marker aura été, toute sa vie, un « homme de son temps ». Tellement en phase avec le présent qu’il n’aura cessé d’en explorer toutes les dimensions, dans l’espace, la durée, les idées et les techniques. Avant et mieux que d’autres, il aura compris les périls de la médiatisation, et choisi de ne pas apparaître en public. Après la mort d’un chat particulièrement cher, il prendra l’apparence de celui-ci, nommé Guillaume-en-Egypte, pour émettre commentaires, apologues et facéties. Lors de la mobilisation-réflexe après le 21 avril 2002 qui vit une foule spontanément descendre dans la rue suite à l’arrivée de Le Pen au deuxième tour des présidentielles, il reconnaitra comme un signe fraternel la présence parmi la foule de chats, et de masques de chats – ceux du peintre et street artist Thoma Vuille – faisant écho aux chats ornant les murs de la ville. Ce sera son dernier long métrage, Chats perchés (2004), aux confins du journalisme militant et du cinéma, avec les ressources de la vidéo légère dont il aura toute sa vie accompagné les mutations.
What’s new with Docuseek2
The What’s new with Docuseek2 blog will document the progress of the new Docuseek2 website. Docuseek2 is a search tool into the collections of some of the best documentary and social issue films available in the U.S.; it is also a reference tool for the collections; and an e-commerce site, too. Registered users will be able to preview titles and purchase streaming rights at the site, and view the media at Docuseek2 or embed a player on their course management page or library site.
Jonathan Rosenbaum’s 1981 Review of “Tighten Your Belts”
From The Soho News, October 6, 1981. I’m embarrassed to confess that over three decades later, I have no recollection at all about Tighten Your Belts, Bite the Bullet apart from what I wrote about it, although I’m happy to report that the film is still in distribution, and available from Icarus Films. — J.R.
September 25: Grateful as I am to see both the 48-minute Tighten Your Belts, Bite the Bullet and the 54-minute Resurgence: The Movement for Equality versus the Ku Klux Klan in one dynamite double-bill, I can’t help but wonder if the only reason why they’re shown in the above order is that the latter is six minutes longer. I bring this up only because Tighten Your Belts strikes me as conceivably the most intelligent, powerful, and informative rabble-rousing leftist film that I’ve seen in years, and can’t imagine why the festival organizers didn’t want to maximize its impact by showing it second. …
Tighten Your Belts, codirected by James Gaffney, Martin Lucas, and Jonathan Miller over four and a half years and costing a third as much as Resurgence, is a stunning example of how this work and economy can pay off in dividends. Expertly incorporating animation, live-action interviews, and other footage of diverse kinds with a good jazz score (by Nick Scarim), the film has the rare virtue of using all its materials to build a clear linear argument that progresses at every stage. Contrasting the recent fiscal crises in New York and Cleveland and the antithetical approaches taken by their mayors, the filmmakers delineate and document the capitulation of New York to the caprices of banks and the resistance of the city administration of Cleveland to corporate takeover, sparked by the forging of a broad popular front by the exciting Dennis Kucinich.
Exemplary in its clean, polemical construction, Tighten Your Belts, Bite the Bullet deftly incorporates a specific popular struggle – the 18-month campaign in Brooklyn’s Northside to keep a firehouse – into its overall argument, without succumbing to any of the temptations of a political travelogue. In other words, it means business. It sends you out of your seats making you believe that positive change is actually possible – and that if any single force finally succeeds in radicalizing the American working class, it may well be the good ole Reagan administration.
