Category: film festivals

Exclusive: La Mexicaine Le Interview

palais_chaillot.jpg

While the discovery of an underground cinema in the center of Paris has been widely covered, little or no attention has been paid to what the films actually played there. Les Arenes de Chaillot (The Chaillot Arenas) was created by La Mexicaine de Perforation, a group of self-labeled urban explorers who, for the last five or so years, have used the invisible and forgotten infrastructure of Paris as their own curatorial venue, putting on exhibitions, concerts, and, beginning last year, film screenings.
Early Sunday morning I spoke with Lazar Kunstmann, a filmmaker, editor, and the public spokesman of LMDP about the group’s objectives, ideas, and inspirations. Turns out there were at least two weekly film series, including Urbex Movie, the one that someone narc’ed out this past summer. Here’s what they showed and why:

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Mexican Consolidated Drilling Authority

That’s one suggested translation of “La Mexicaine de Perforation,” the amorphous group of urban explorers who built and operated a subterranean cinema in the center of Paris until it was discovered last month.
The group’s spokesman, Lazar Kunsman, originally explained the name in a French radio interview, but early English language reports of the movie theater botched both the original and the translation, and I unwittingly perpetuated their mistakes. La Mexicaine de la Perforation [sic] became The Perforating Mexicans [sic sic], which is what happens when British people think they speak French.
Le Mexico is the bar where the explorers would meet, and perforation is drilling, as in mining and quarrying. According to Language Log, the name shares its construction with industrial, utility, and institutional names in France.
This is all fascinating, I’m sure, but it’s not nearly as interesting as what films LMDP screened during its summer-long film series, Urbex Movie. I’m still working on that. [Thanks, Tristan, for the correction]
Related: Language Log deciphers “LMDP”

Wong Kar Wai talks about 2046

2046 barely screened at Cannes, after the director hand-carried the not-quite-finished print to the rebooked theatre. Now it’s being released in the UK, and it turns out Wong has actually re-edited it since May.
Read Howard Feinstein’s interview with WKW and his recounting of the tortured making of in the Guardian
“It was like being in jail” [Guardian UK]
Related: I, too, delivered an unfinished film to Cannes, a fact I mention because of the deep, meaningful resonance between Wong Kar Wai’s films and career and my own.

Correction: Explorateurs Urbains are NOT Cataphiles

My apologies for mistakenly calling the explorateurs urbains of La Mexicaine de Perforation cataphiles. In an interview on NPR, filmmaker Lazar Kunsman, the group’s spokesMexicain, explained that cataphiles are “more like nerds,” who just wander around underground without doing anything. Explorateurs, meanwhile, are seeking to produce new forms of creative expression, to create a viable, engaging alternative to the sterile, mainstream culture found aboveground.
So next time you run into a guy in the catacombs, just ask, “Why the hell did Harvey sit on Hero for so long?”
NPR interview with La Mexicaine de Perforation
Previous subterranean cinema posts, including a partial film programme

And That’s How Grizzly Adams Got His G-Class

What’s with all the film festivals this time of year (Venice, Telluride, Toronto, NY, American Film Renaissance)? If you haven’t heard of that last one, [Their slogan: “Doing films the right way”] for heaven’s sake don’t tell anyone; they’ll know you’re not one of them.
AFR is a conservative film festival full of true believers; Bryan Curtis, who must’ve drawn the short festival coverage straw over at Slate, does a bangup job of unpacking the messages of this obscure, oppressed, voiceless underclass.
After laughing endlessly at cruel Michael Moore fat jokes, Curtis reports how the crowd grew uneasy and confused at David Balsiger’s screening. The head of Grizzly Adams productions, Balsiger greenlighted his company’s latest film, on George Bush’s faith, after commissioning Gallup polls on what’s hot with big swaths of Middle America. Yay, Capitalism? Wha? You’d think these people hadn’t seen Austin Powers.
Sundance for Republicans [Bryan Curtis, Slate]
American Film Renaissance [what, no invocation?]
Grizzly Adams film and television

Bloghdad.com/Gunner_Palace

Tony Scott’s first report from Toronto really gives you a feel for the festival’s sprawl and cinematic frenzy, where you feel like you’re missing movies more than watching them. Meanwhile, he only mentions one film, and he mentions the hell out of it: Gunner Palace, Mike Tucker and Petra Epperlein’s documentary about US soldiers’ lives in Baghad. Here’s a taste:

Gunner Palace is so startling because it suggests – it shows – just how complicated the reality of this war has been. It may not change your mind, but it will certainly deepen your perception and challenge your assumptions, whatever they may be. I hope “Gunner Palace” makes its way quickly from this festival to American theaters, because it is not a movie anyone should miss.

Sure, but did you like it?
Sex, War, and Hype at Toronto Festival of Films [A.O. Scott, NYT]
See a trailer and clips at GunnerPalace.com

Now Playing at Les Arenes de Chaillot

The Guardian’s Jon Henley talks with members of La Mexicaine de Perforation, the urban explorers group who built and operated a cinema in a 4,000-sf uncharted quarry 60 feet under the Place de Chaillot in Paris. They called the cinema Les Arenes de Chaillot.
During the seven-week season, the Mexicans screened films by “Chinese and Korean directors but also Alex Proyas’ Dark City, Coppola’s Rumble Fish, David Lynch’s Eraserhead, and Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.
Clandestine group reveals how it built its cinema beneath the city [Guardian UK]

Now Playing at Les Arenes de Chaillot

The Guardian’s Jon Henley talks with members of La Mexicaine de Perforation, the urban explorers group who built and operated a cinema in a 4,000-sf uncharted quarry 60 feet under the Place de Chaillot in Paris. They called the cinema Les Arenes de Chaillot.
During the seven-week season, the Mexicans screened films by “Chinese and Korean directors but also Alex Proyas’ Dark City, Coppola’s Rumble Fish, David Lynch’s Eraserhead, and Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.
Clandestine group reveals how it built its cinema beneath the city [Guardian UK]

Love the Cin, Hate the Cinner

And Kiarostami said editing was irrelevant. The Observer’s Andrew Anthony calls Michael Moore “arguably the most ideological and emotive editor since Sergei Eisenstein,” about as high as praise can get for a maker of agitprop. He points to Farenheit 9/11‘s powerful juxtaposition of criticism and humor, raw and manufactured images and predicts it could make an unprecedented “historic difference.”
But Moore, it seems, not only exaggerates or sometimes ignores inconvenient facts, he’s insufferably self-aggrandizing and unpopular with more refined movie folk; he has bodyguards and a limo, and sends his kid to private school. To the ideologically pure–the armchair Marxist readership of the Observer, presumably–he’s a hypocrite whose buzz-making and popularity are to be barely tolerated.
Hey, I hate Moore as much as the next guy, but it is exactly the unfettered pursuit of unadulterated dogma that got us in this mess (pick your mess; this isn’t a bloghdad post). And besides, how seriously can Anthony’s Man of The People criticism be taken when it’s being made in the lobby of the Majestic?
[via greencine, who’s got an excellent collection of Cannes wrapup coverage. ]

Love the Cin, Hate the Cinner

And Kiarostami said editing was irrelevant. The Observer’s Andrew Anthony calls Michael Moore “arguably the most ideological and emotive editor since Sergei Eisenstein,” about as high as praise can get for a maker of agitprop. He points to Farenheit 9/11‘s powerful juxtaposition of criticism and humor, raw and manufactured images and predicts it could make an unprecedented “historic difference.”
But Moore, it seems, not only exaggerates or sometimes ignores inconvenient facts, he’s insufferably self-aggrandizing and unpopular with more refined movie folk; he has bodyguards and a limo, and sends his kid to private school. To the ideologically pure–the armchair Marxist readership of the Observer, presumably–he’s a hypocrite whose buzz-making and popularity are to be barely tolerated.
Hey, I hate Moore as much as the next guy, but it is exactly the unfettered pursuit of unadulterated dogma that got us in this mess (pick your mess; this isn’t a bloghdad post). And besides, how seriously can Anthony’s Man of The People criticism be taken when it’s being made in the lobby of the Majestic?
[via greencine, who’s got an excellent collection of Cannes wrapup coverage. ]

Cannes, you believe it?

bwahahahaha.
I feel the same way about Michael Moore’s masterful PR march to the Palme d’Or as Patrick Lang, ex-Pentagon Middle East intelligence chief feels about how Cheney & co were utterly duped by the Iranian intelligence agency and their frontman, Ahmed Chalabi:
“[It was] one of the most sophisticated and successful intelligence [insert ‘buzz-generating’ here] operations in history… I’m a spook. I appreciate good work. This was good work.”

Cannes, you believe it?

bwahahahaha.
I feel the same way about Michael Moore’s masterful PR march to the Palme d’Or as Patrick Lang, ex-Pentagon Middle East intelligence chief feels about how Cheney & co were utterly duped by the Iranian intelligence agency and their frontman, Ahmed Chalabi:
“[It was] one of the most sophisticated and successful intelligence [insert ‘buzz-generating’ here] operations in history… I’m a spook. I appreciate good work. This was good work.”

Souvenir Series, Sofia, and me

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve decided to shoot a fourth short film, which may be part of the Souvenir Series, or may not. We’ll see. It was not in the original outline of the series, and it’s out of the order I’d planned to shoot them, but the opportunity and idea presented themselves so clearly, I’ve decided to at least get it shot, then see where to take it.
Long story short, it’s a reconceiving of the baptism/massacre sequence from Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather. The scene is a classic, not only of storytelling and dramatic contrast, but of editing as well.
While it has the immediate feel of intercutting–jumping back and forth between simultaneous events–as this Yale film analysis site where you can watch (most of) the sequence points out, it’s unlikely that all the other mafia dons in NYC were actually assassinated at the same instant. They call it montage.
Frankly, I always thought they were concurrent events. The baptism scene provides a sense of linear time that is utterly absent from, say, Jennifer Beals’ rehearsal/welding scenes in Flashdance. (Gimme a break, she was on The Daily Show last night.)
Anyway, Seeing as how the baby in that scene was a weeks-old Sofia Coppola, and seeing as how I have a weeks-old baby myself now, and seeing as how I’m gonna be hanging out with the Coppolas tonight at a MoMA Film Department benefit, I thought I’d better start shooting.

ND/NF: Captive by Gaston Biraben

Gaston Biraben's Captive, image: filmlinc.comI saw Captive, the debut feature from Gaston Biraben, at New Directors/New Films last night; it’s a subtly powerful movie that gripped the sellout audience at MoMA Gramercy.
Captive is a fictionalized telling of real events, a surreal, politically charged story of, “You’re adopted…And then some.” A 15-year old Buenos Aires girl’s life is turned upsidedown when she learns her real parents were among The Disappeared, the tens of thousands of Argentines kidnapped, tortured and killed by the country’s military dictatorship in the 70’s. On top of dealing with a new family of strangers, the girl has to confront the chilling circumstances of her birth and her adoptive parents’ possible complicity in the systematic crimes of the junta.
By keeping a restrained, naturalistic focus on a the experience of one girl, the film tackles the third rail of the Argentine psyche–accountability for The Disappeared–with tremendous skill, and without devolving into political agitprop. Biraben coaxed a highly effective, intuitive performance from his star, Barbara Lombardo, which holds the film together.
Almost the entire audience stayed for the Q&A. Sensing, perhaps, Captive‘s potential for making great political waves, many questions were about where the film has shown and what was the reaction. It turns out ND/NF is one of the first screenings for Captive, so the impact is still to come. [The film was also at Palm Springs and San Sebastian, where it won the Horizontes award for Latin American films.]
This all serves as setup for the improbably story of Biraben’s getting the film made in the first place, and how he scored a cameo that elicited surprised howls of recognition from the New York audience. I spoke with Gaston and his co-producer/editor Tammis Chandler after the Q&A.

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