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i watched ‘across the universe’ last night and fell deep deep in love with it. it might seem schmaltzy at times (i cringed a bit when bono came on and was just too poseur-ish) and sometimes it feels like the story is just there so that they can fit the songs in, but who cares?? i loved it, it was a good break from exams and some bits were fabulous. i loved when prudence, a vietnamese-american cheerleader, walks across a football field with burly ballet-dancer footballers tackling each other in slo-mo around her while she sings ‘i want to hold your hand’ to another cheerleader. some bits were just beautiful. i’d watch it just if you’re interested in how they’ve covered the songs, wldnt necessarily go for the story. the bit when a giant poster of uncle sam starts singing was great, as was the bit when a priest does a whirling-dervish kind of dance, followed by a dozen salma hayeks as a nurse in ‘happiness is a warm gun’.

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definitely this blog… i havent done much of the academic-thing. i havent blogged about readings and rarely about the films that we watched during the semester. i guess this blog is my idea of what we looked at over semester, in some convoluted way. thats my attempt to excuse this blog as an academic offering-for-assessment. i like to watch. and thats what this is about. watch and see and look.

married to the sea

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Human Rights Arts and Film Festival – 27th Nov-15th Dec

Website here

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4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days (Mungiu, 2007) Romania: 

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The Axe in the Attic
Director: Ed Pincus & Lucia Small, USA, Release: 2007, Runtime: 110When Ed Pincus and Lucia Small watched Hurricane Katrina play out on their televisions, they felt incapable of standing idly by. They began by simply filming the TV screen, and then set out for New Orleans, with stops along the way in cities and small towns that had offered refuge to victims of the storm. The stories they discovered are harrowing portraits of human survival and bureaucratic red tape, rendered in classical cinema verité style. Yet The Axe in the Attic is also a startling investigation into the ethics of documentary filmmaking, as Pincus and Small question their ability to remain neutral in the face of apocalyptic chaos.
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so stunning:

Flight of the Red Balloon (Hsiao-hsien, 2007), France:

Hou Hsiao-hsien’s ineffably serene film is not so much a remake of Albert Lamorisse’s children’s classic as a complex homage refracted through the complications of life in modern Paris. Juliette Binoche is Suzanne, the proprietor of a marionette theater and the single mother of a lonely boy named Simon (Simon Iteanu) who spends his days with his Chinese au pair Song (Song Fang). Simon and Song watch as the adults around them come apart at the seams, with joy and anguish, love and hatred…while the red balloon drifts across the Parisian landscape. Hou’s film is heartbreakingly beautiful, and it is graced with a truly magnificent performance from Binoche.
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Dans La Ville De Sylvia (Guerin, 2007), Spain/France:

During a few languid summer days, a young foreigner spends his afternoons sketching in an outdoor café. He is looking for a woman named Sylvia who he’d met years before in the same city, but he is also sketching the many attractive young women he sees everywhere, any one of whom could be her. Then one fine afternoon, he thinks he’s actually seen her, and he sets off through the city to confront his memory. José Luis Guerín’s lovely, exceedingly graceful work eloquently captures the feeling of being in love with love, and the youthful sense of a world filled with an almost limitless sensuality.

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heaps more at the new york film festival site

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 (Alexandra, Alexander Sokurov)

 (I Just Didnt Do It, Masayuki Suo)

 (Margot at the Wedding, Noah Baumbach)

 (The Orphanage, Juan Antonio Bayona + produced by Guillermo del Toro)

 (The Romance of Astreé and Céladon, Eric Rohmer)

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“With The Outsiders, I got so many letters from kids saying, “Oh, we love The Outsiders, and we love Matt Dillon, and we love all the blah-blah-blah. But where’s the scene where such and such? And where’s the scene where—?” And I had shot all those scenes. Then my little granddaughter’s class was reading The Outsiders and they wanted me to come and talk to them. So I quickly went back and looked for the old cut and put it together, with all the scenes I knew they were reading in the book. And I thought it was better than the originally released version.”

full interview here

And, the very very odd and interesting ‘Sofia Mini’ website, complete with movies, pictures, music + ‘make poetry’ section

‘a sofia of one’s own’, worth a look

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Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg on the set of the movie Slogan, June 1968.

By Gilles Caron/Contact Press Images.

“Marianne Faithfull, who worked with Serge in the early 60s, says, “I was very sad when he died. I thought by the time I’d grown up and gotten off drugs that there’d be a time when I’d work with him again. I still miss him. And every time I start to make a record I think, Fuck, it’s so annoying that he’s dead.”"

Pretty interesting article, which I ended up reading instead of doing my essay….

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The second-floor hallway of Serge Gainsbourg’s house, at 5 bis Rue de Verneuil, 16 years after his death.

Photograph by Jean-Baptiste Mondino.

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“A small mechanical box rising and falling in a long black void.

Rise and Fall is an art space in the Curtin House lift.

A parasite space on an existing mechanism in the public realm.”

 Rise and Fall
Level 6, Curtin House
252 Swanston St
Melbourne, 3000
Victoria, Australia

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ACCA 

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‘How far can the acts of recognition daily performed in the practical activity of women and men be informed by or produce an understanding of the nature of the social process in which they are caught up? To a large extent the possibility or otherwise of a cognitive artistic practice which can aim to produce understanding about the world stands or falls on the answer to this question.

… the Althusserian position claims that the attempt to represent the social formation can produce only “the natural world of the dominant ideology”. Behind this view lie two crucial concepts developed by Althusser, first, “ideology in general” and second, “the ideological category of the subject”. Althusser proposes a distinction between “ideology in general”, which is necessary to the functioning of any society, and specific ideologies belonging to particular social formations at particular points in their history – bourgeois ideology, for instance. “Ideology in general” is theorised as a material force rather than merely a set of false ideas circulating in people’s heads that should by now have been changed by Socialist teaching and example. It acts as a material support to specific ideologies, and is a structure providing the necessary mediation between (1) the forces and relations of production, (2) the social institutions they give rise to, and (3) the individuals who have to live through them.

Ideology enables men and women to make sense of their world and feel in control of it. However, it is in their practical activity rather than in their ideas that ideology materialises itself… ideology is a necessary component of human society; “it is not an abberation or a contingent excrescence of History; it is a structure essential to the historical life of societies.

Ideology is able to materialise itself in the activities of women and men precisely because they operate under the illusion of being concrete individuals at the center of and to a mesure initiating their lived experience, because they perform the daily acts of recognition which maintain and perpetuate the structures and institutions of the social formation” (Gledhill, 829-830)

Just an extract of stuff I’ve been reading for an essay on women and cinema + myths + althusser and it explained stuff clearer than other writers.

why the picture of laika? because i read this article  today and it broke my heart. plus today, 50 yrs ago, laika went into space. and its more interesting than reading about cup day.

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A Pakistani paramilitary soldier stands alert on a roadside, a day after Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf declared a state of emergency, in Quetta, 04 November 2007. Pakistani police arrested the acting leader of former premier Nawaz Sharif’s party Javed Hashmi, after rounding up cricket legend Imran Khan and senior lawyers under a state of emergency. Up to 500 people have been arrested across Pakistan in a crackdown launched after the declaration of a state of emergency, Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz said.
8:43 a.m. ET, 11/4/07

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A Look at Rights Suspended in Pakistan

By The Associated Press – 8 hours ago

A look at some of the restrictions and suspended rights in the state of emergency declared by Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf:

_ Protection of life and liberty.

_ The right to free movement.

_ The right of detainees to be informed of their offense and given access to lawyers.

_ Protection of property rights.

_ The right to assemble in public.

_ The right to free speech.

_ Equal rights for all citizens before law and equal legal protection.

_ Media coverage of suicide bombings and militant activity is curtailed by new rules. Broadcasters also face a three-year jail term if they “ridicule” members of the government or armed forces.

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