The history boys (2006) - Nicholas Hytner

I'm a Jew... I'm small... I'm homosexual... and I live in Sheffield. I'm fucked.

How do I define history? Well it's just one fucking thing after another.

[about A.E. Housman]
Timms: Wasn't he a nancy, sir?
Hector: Foul, festering, grubby-minded little trollop! Do not use that word!
[Hits him on the head with an exercise book]
Timms: But you use it, sir!
Hector: I do, sir, I know, but I am far gone in age and decrepitude.

[talking about the Holocaust]
Posner: But to put something in context is a step towards saying it can be understood and that it can be explained. And if it can be explained that it can be explained away.

Can you, for a moment, imagine how depressing it is to teach five centuries of masculine ineptitude?

Timms: I don't always understand poetry!
Hector: You don't always understand it? Timms, I never understand it. But learn it now, know it now and you'll understand it... whenever.

The more you read, though, the more you'll see that literature is actually about losers. It's consolation. All literature is consolation.

Fuck the Ren-ai-ssance! And fuck literature, and Plato, and Michaelangelo, and Oscar Wilde, and all the other shrunken violets you people line up. This is a school, and it isn't normal!

One flew over the cuckoo's nest (1975) - Miloš Forman

Quotes from the film:

Jesus, I must be crazy to be in a loony-bin like this.
You're no crazier than the average asshole out walking around on the streets and that's it!
Which one of you nuts has got any guts?

Why Forman likes this film:
"It was that final scene because that was the dream of anybody living in communist times, to pick up something and throw it through the bars."

Other quotes from Forman:
Why do political leaders and producers want films which are sentimental?
They don't want life. They want fairy tales. They think that people don't need the truth, that they, the people, need leaders. So, they want to portray life not the way it is, but the way they think it should be, and give the audience some role models to follow.

The protagonists in your films, with few exceptions, are people who are on the fringe, underdogs. Do you have a sympathy for the underdog?
Who doesn't have a sympathy for the underdog? Of course, I do. We create institutions, governments and schools to help us live, but every institution has a tendency, after a while, to behave not as if they should be serving you, but that you should be serving them. That's when the individual gets in conflict, because we are paying these institutions with our taxes, we are paying them to serve us and help us live, and not to tell us how to live and dominate us. I wouldn't say it's the underdog but it's always the conflict within the individual and the institutions. Instead of underdogs, let's talk about dogs. If you corner a dog, he's ready to bite you. That's the reality. Otherwise he's a loveable, wonderful creature. If you corner him, he can behave abominably. And so does a human being. When an individual is cornered by society or an institution, well, he can behave abominably and I can't really hide it or glorify it. Neither. It's just a fact of life.

Interview

Jana Aranya / The middleman (1975) - Satyajit Ray

Ray interview

Memento (2000) - Christopher Nolan

The wikipedia mentions this as a neo-noir, psychological thriller with a unique, non-linear narrative! This is just one of those stupid, crappy films like Matrix and many others that derive their cult status thanks to a lot of wannabe geeks and other jerks who know nothing about films, let alone non-linear narratives, and think that a puzzle makes a good film.

Les Lutins (2007) - Various

Be Quiet - Sameh Zoabi

Fais de beaux rêves - Marilyne Canto

Grand Bassin (Le) - Fabianny Deschamps

A bras le corps - Katell Quillévéré

Deux vies du serpent (Les) - Hélier Cisterne

De sortie - Les Films Hatari

Loup blanc (Le) - Pierre-Luc Granjon

Volets (Les) - Lyèce Boukhitine

Toi, Waguih - Namir Abdel Messeeh

Bonbon au poivre - Marc Fitoussi

Cindy, the Doll is Mine - Bertrand Bonello

Course nue (La) - Benoît Forgeard

Comment on freine dans une descente ? - Alix Delaporte

Dérives - Bill Barluet

Même en rêve - Alice Taylor

Homme de la lune (L’) - Serge Elissalde

The silence (1963) - Ingmar Bergman

Originally titled 'God's silence'.
Criterion collection essay by Leo Braudy

Ester: Where's the doctor? Must I die all alone?

"My original idea was to make a film that should obey musical laws, instead of dramaturgical ones. A film acting by association—rhythmically, with themes and counter-themes. As I was putting it together, I thought much more in musical terms than I'd done before. All that's left of Bartók is the very beginning. It follows Bartók's music rather closely—the dull continuous note, then the sudden explosion."
— Ingmar Bergman, Bergman on Bergman

"Ester loves her sister; she finds her beautiful and feels a tremendous responsibility for her, but she would be the first to be horrified if it were pointed out that her feelings were incestuous. Her mistake lies in the fact that she wants to control her sister—as her father had controlled her by his love. Love must be open. Otherwise Love is the beginning of Death. That is what I am trying to say."
— Ingmar Bergman (1964)

"For me the important thing is that Ester sends a secret message to the boy. That's the important thing: the message he spells out to himself. To me Ester in all her misery represents a distillation of something indestructibly human, which the boy inherits from her."
— Ingmar Bergman, Bergman on Bergman (1969)

"The Silence is the great watershed movie of Bergman's career, perhaps of Sixties art cinema: the work of a filmmaker no longer able to contain the creatures and archetypes surging in the playroom of his imagination. These include a troop of dwarfs (out of Tod Browning by Velazquez), an eldritch rag-and-bone man and his horse, several tortured sex scenes, a boy urinating in the hotel corridor, and the choric grind and roar of war machinery—tanks, planes—outside the hotel's windows. Late Bergman meets early Buñuel blended with mid-period Fellini. But The Silence isn't L'Age d'or with angst or 8½ with religious guilt. Bergman's discovery of free association—because it comes from a mind so austere and hermetic—is more nightmarish and far more powerful in its cosmic disgust. The outrage that greeted The Silence—howls of bishops, scissorings of censors, even feces-smeared toilet paper sent to the director—denoted public horror at a morally serious moviemaker surrendering (it seemed) to a libertine, Dadaist nihilism. But The Silence is a massively serious movie. Its deconstruction of the unconscious in a world drifting toward secularity opened the way to modern directors like Kieslowski and Lars von Trier, for whom cinema is a glorious trapdoor art. Linear storytelling is at worst impossible, at best a matter of negotiating ground that can open up beneath you without notice."
— Harlan Kennedy, "Whatever happened to Ingmar Bergman?"
Film Comment (July-August 1998)

Bergmanorama on Silence

Enduring love (2004) - Roger Michell

Based on the Ian McEwan novel, the film seems to differ a lot from the book. Need to read the book again, but the film seems to lose a lot of the subtlety of the novel.

Videograms of a revolution (1992) - Harun Farocki

In Europe in the fall of 1989, history took place before our very eyes. Farocki and Ujica's "Videograms" shows the Rumanian revolution of December 1989 in Bucharest in a new media-based form of historiography. Demonstrators occupied the television station [in Bucharest] and broadcast continuously for 120 hours, thereby establishing the television studio as a new historical site. Between December 21, 1989 (the day of Ceaucescu's last speech) and December 26, 1989 (the first televised summary of his trial), the cameras recorded events at the most important locations in Bucharest, almost without exception. The determining medium of an era has always marked history, quite unambiguously so in that of modern Europe. It was influenced by theater, from Shakespeare to Schiller, and later on by literature, until Tolstoy. As we know, the 20th century is filmic. But only the videocamera, with its heightened possibilities in terms of recording time and mobility, can bring the process of filming history to completion. Provided, of course, that there is history. (Andrei Ujica)

Harun Farocki conceived of and assembled Videograms of a Revolution together with Andrei Ujica. Ujica, who was born in Timisoara in 1951, is a Rumanian writer who has been living in Germany since 1981, where he is a lecturer in literature and media theory. He has good connections to Rumanian friends and colleagues who not only opened up the television archives to the authors but also enabled them to get in contact with cameramen from state film studios and with numerous amateur videographers who had documented the events on the streets of Bucharest, often from the roofs of highrise buildings. "If at the outbreak of the uprising only one camera dared to record," said Farocki, "hundreds were in operation on the following day." (Dietrich Leder, Film-Dienst 24/92)

Still life (1997) - Harun Farocki

According to Harun Farocki, today’s photographers working in advertising are, in a way, continuing the tradition of 17th century Flemish painters in that they depict objects from everyday life - the “still life”. The filmmaker illustrates this intriguing hypothesis with three documentary sequences which show the photographers at work creating a contemporary “still life”: a cheese-board, beer glasses and an expensive watch.

Inextinguishable Fire (1969) - Harun Farocki

"When we show you pictures of napalm victims, you'll shut your eyes. You'll close your eyes to the pictures. Then you'll close them to the memory. And then you'll close your eyes to the facts." These words are spoken at the beginning of this agitprop film that can be viewed as a unique and remarkable development. Farocki refrains from making any sort of emotional appeal. His point of departure is the following: "When napalm is burning, it is too late to extinguish it. You have to fight napalm where it is produced: in the factories." Resolutely, Farocki names names: the manufacturer is Dow Chemical, based in Midland, Michigan in the United States. Against backdrops suggesting the laboratories and offices of this corporation, the film proceeds to educate us with an austerity reminiscent of Jean Marie Straub. Farocki's development unfolds: "(1) A major corporation is like a construction set. It can be used to put together the whole world. (2) Because of the growing division of labor, many people no longer recognize the role they play in producing mass destruction. (3) That which is manufactured in the end is the product of the workers, students, and engineers." This last thesis is illustrated with an alarmingly clear image. The same actor, each time at a washroom sink, introduces himself as a worker, a student, an engineer. As an engineer, carrying a vacuum cleaner in one hand and a machine gun in the other, he says, "I am an engineer and I work for an electrical corporation. The workers think we produce vacuum cleaners. The students think we make machine guns. This vacuum cleaner can be a valuable weapon. This machine gun can be a useful household appliance. What we produce is the product of the workers, students, and engineers."

Hans Stempel, Frankfurter Rundschau, June 14, 1969

Prison images (2000) - Harun Farocki

A film composed of images from prisons. Quotes from fiction films and documentaries as well as footage from surveillance cameras. A look at the new control technologies, at personal identification devices, electronic ankle bracelets, electronic tracking devices. The cinema has always been attracted to prisons. Today's prisons are full of video surveillance cameras. These images are unedited and monotonous; as neither time nor space is compressed, they are particularly well-suited to conveying the state of inactivity into which prisoners are placed as a punitive measure. The surveillance cameras show the norm and reckon with deviations from it. Clips from films by Genet and Bresson. Here the prison appears as a site of sexual infraction, a site where human beings must create themselves as people and as a workers. In Un Chant d'amour by Jean Genet, the guard looks in on inmates in their cells and sees them masturbating. The inmates are aware that they are being watched and thus become performers in a peep show. The protagonist in Bresson's Un Condamné à mort s'est échappé turns the objects of imprisonment into the tools of his escape. These topoi appear in many prison films. In newer prisons, in contrast, contemporary video surveillance technology aims at demystification.

- Harun Farocki

War at a distance (2003) - Harun Farocki

In 1991, when images of the Gulf War flooded the international media, it was virtually impossible to distinguish between real pictures and those generated on computer. This loss of bearings was to change forever our way of deciphering what we see. The image is no longer used only as testimony, but also as an indispensable link in a process of production and destruction. This is the central premise of "War at a Distance", which continues the deconstruction of claims to visual objectivity Harun Farocki developed in his earlier work. With the help of archival and original material, Farocki sets out in effect to define the relationship between military strategy and industrial production and sheds light on how the technology of war finds applications in everyday life.

- Antje Ehmann

Nothing Ventured (2004) - Harun Farocki

What we know as direct cinema has been around for over 40 years. Given the esteem in which story is held today and the lack of esteem for conceptual effort, one would imagine that this would be the predominant form of portrayal. In "To Be and to Have" (Être et avoir) Philibert did succeed in making a documentary which was direct cinema but he remains the exception. A documentary which chooses to use purely narrative form is necessarily direct. Free from commentary or any other literal explanation, a film of this kind seeks to avoid disintegrating into good or bad generalities.

- Harun Farocki

Pictures of the world and inscriptions of war (1988) - Harun Farocki

The film concentrates on the use of images as used by human beings post-enlightenment to distance them from reality. In April 1944, American pilots had made aerial photographs of the Buna works, without even suspecting that in doing so, they had also photographed the concentration camp Auschwitz for the first time. It was not before 1977 that the photographs were properly evaluated. During enlightenment, images of buildings were used for the first time to scale buildings instead of actually climbing them for the same purpose. In the '60s, Algerian women were photographed for the first time to create photo-identity cards issued by them by the then ruling French.
How do images change your perception to create a reality that is farther away from you, preserving it for posterity at the same time, seeming to absolve you from taking any action? How does that distance make it easy to destroy things?

One must be just as wary of pictures as of words. There is no literature without linguistic criticism, without the author being critical of the existing language. It's just the same with film. One need not look for new, as yet unseen images, but one must work with existing ones in such a way that they become new.

http://www.farocki-film.de/

Dead man's letters (1986) - Konstantin Lopushansky

Underground reflections on life in monochrome lighting.

Rumble fish (1983) - Francis Ford Coppola

Why did Coppola want to do this pretentious bike-gang film after having made Godfather I and II, Apocalypse now, and The conversation?