Facets' Daily Find

Ring out the year with Francois Truffaut's salute to Hitchcock!

Facets' Daily Find

Belgian exploitation filmmaker Jean-Louis Van Belle captures a darts match, Paris style, in his bizarro 1969 flick, Paris Interdit (Forbidden Paris). Not for the squemish!

Facets' Daily Find

How the Wizard of Oz should have ended. Pure hilarity.

Find more "movie endings" over at How It Should Have Ended. Beware: this site will eat hours from your life.

Facets' Daily Find

Sita Sings the Blues! In its entirety! This animated feature by Nina Paley was one of Facets' favorite films of 2008.

Click here for larger, hi-res version (and for info on donating to a fund to help Paley pay off the $50,000.00 loan she took out to pay for the film's music rights).

Facets' College Corner: Mall Girls

Guest blogger and Oakton Community College student Katarzyna Prokop attended the Polish Film Festival in America, which played in October at a variety of venues around the city, including Facets Cinematheque. Katarzyna reviews one of the more popular films in the festival, Mall Girls, exclusively for Facets Features.


On October 8th I had a chance to attend the 21st Polish Film Festival in America, which showcased a diverse selection of features. Mall Girls (Galerianki) was directed by a young Polish filmmaker named Katarzyna Roslaniec. This talented woman created a story with tough realism about today’s world of teenagers in Poland. The main character, Alicja, is an outsider and an ordinary student who wants to be like the popular girls in her class. She soon finds herself in a hip group of schoolgirls and discovers how they make money to buy the latest, fashionable clothes and cell phones. Along the way she undergoes a tough initiation. After school, her new group of friends goes to the local malls and takes money from strangers for sexual favors. The situation becomes more complicated when Alicja discovers that she has feelings for one of her classmates. She then has to decide if she wants to be accepted by the group of friends or go her own way and follow her emotions.

The storyline of the film made an impression on me, though the movie itself has its weaknesses as well as its strengths. The narrative structure of the film is very simple and undemanding because it’s linear. The viewer doesn’t have to pay special attention to the order of events, which makes the movie slightly dull and ordinary.

However, Roslaniec uses mise-en-scene very well. For example, the natural-looking lighting style and location shooting give a dark and depressing look to the movie. It perfectly illustrates the harsh reality of life in Poland among the poor segment of society, and it gives an idea of the type of environment teenagers grow up in. Poverty combined with peer pressure pushes adolescents to violent behavior, deprivation, drugs, alcohol, and prostitution. Troubled teenagers have no other way but to pick the path of self-destruction, which takes a toll on their emotions and sense of humanity.

Roslaniec also knows when to move the camera. In the opening scene, the camera follows a group of three girls walking in the mall and then later walking through school, which signifies that the action is going to revolve around them. Motivated camera movement also appears in the scene in which Alicja is going to see a man named Zbyszek who’s suppose to be her first sponsor. This telegraphed that something bad might happen, because the tension was heightened in the scene by the moving camera. In the fight scenes between Kaya and Alicja and later between Milena and Alicja, Roslaniec uses hand-held camera. It makes the scenes seem more realistic and adds a “you are there” feeling to the action.

Roslaniec employs a simple symbolism for the movie that is so integrated into the storyline that we don’t notice that it’s symbolism. We see a significant close-up of Alicja’s handmaid bracelets. The bracelets are a symbol of Alicja’s innocence. We see her taking them off when she finally decides to become a part of the group. It’s at that moment that she chooses to give up her purity and become like the rest of the girls.

The ending of the movie is happy even though it might not be that obvious to some viewers. In the final scene we see a close-up shot of Alicja’s face. She’s smiling and looking in the bathroom mirror, washing off her makeup and fixing her hair in the way she used to wear it. She’s becoming a regular and innocent girl again. By washing off her shameful past she goes back to her normal and ordinary life.

The Polish Film Festival in America was a very interesting experience, especially for someone like me, who comes from Poland. I haven’t had a chance to see a Polish movie in a couple of years. It was very strange but at the same time exciting to see a Polish film, mainly because Polish cinema differs so strongly from American.

Polish filmmakers have a more realistic, rough and sometimes pessimistic approach to their material. After seeing and experiencing both Polish then American movies, I can truly say that I’ve gained more appreciation for Polish cinema. Festivals like these are not only an entertainment for the Polish community in America, but they’re also very educational. They promote foreign movies all around the world and make people familiar with specific styles in filmmaking in other countries. Thanks to this experience I have noticed the artistic approach to filmmaking among Polish directors, and realized how less commercial it is in comparison to America.

Facets' Daily Find

Pictures at an exhibition de Chris Marker

Facets' Daily Find

Fight (or wallow in) the post-holiday blues with a stunning clip from Bela Tarr's Damnation.

Facets' Daily Find

The fingers. They hypnotize.

Facets' Daily Find

A short from the Czech Republic for the holiday travelers: Cesky Den, directed by Genevieve Bailey!

Programming the Perfect Christmas Marathon

Looking for new blood to spice up your Christmas movie marathon? Then head over to The Onion A.V. Club, where Facets Cinematheque Program Director Charles Coleman and Facets Editor Phil Morehart recommend a bevy of holiday weirdies and obscurities, from Santa-infused Martian adventures and holiday bombs starring Hulk Hogan to wintery superhero adventures and differing takes on Dickens' classic!

Facets' Daily Find

Space Nazis attack! In 2018!

Facets Features' Daily Find

Mad hours are spent at Facets Features headquarters scouring the web's nooks, crannies and deep recesses for interesting shorts, movie trailers and tidbits of cinemania. We do this out of extreme wanderlust, curiosity, and a sadistic desire to crack each other up. Now it's time for you, dear readers, to join the action.

Visit Facets Features every day for a new clip. We hope to regale with all sorts of awesomeness--interesting shorts from around the world, must-see trailers, oddball Youtube clips, rare archival footage from cinema past and more!

Let's start the action all adorable-like with a clip of actor Brian Cox (Manhunter, Zodiac, Troy) teaching his toddler the finer points of the Bard's best.


-Phil Morehart

Help Hallie figure out what happened at the end of Swimming Pool.

Last night I indulged in Ozon's beautiful film that's gained notoriety for its steamy sex scenes and mysterious ending. I'm all for ambiguity in the final moments of film— in fact, it is the mark of some of my all time favorite movies. (Rosemary's Baby, Adaptation, Blow-Up) However, the ending of Swimming Pool has me completely stumped and frustrated.

Was Julie an impostor or a hallucination? Was Sarah's novel inspired by her or did it create her? No explanation seems to adequately suit the haunting finale, so I'd like to reach out to you. Offer up your ideas and interpretations, and help me figure out what the hell I just watched!


-Hallie

The Perfect Gifts for Your Movie Lovers!

Find the right gift for that special film fan this holiday season at Facets!

With tens of thousands of DVDs, plus boxed sets, imports, and rarities, as well as Facets gift certificates and gift memberships from which to choose, you can't go wrong! Find them all and more at Facetsdvd.com today!

And don't forget about the Facets wares found at Cafepress! Everything from shirts, hats and hoodies to mugs, clocks and mousepads--all emblazoned with the iconic Facets "eye"!

What Are You Waiting For?

Well? Did you forget?

This is the last week to enter to win Valerie and Her Week of Wonders!

We have one DVD of Jaromil Jires' surreal Czech New Wave classic to give away. How can you win it? Easy. Sign up for Facets' weekly newsletter, This Week at Facets, for details!

Facets' College Corner: Breathless

In Introduction to Film (Hum 160) at Oakton Community College, the French New Wave was part of the course material for the semester. None of the students in class had ever seen a New Wave film before or knew much about it. As part of the final project, Rita Bhojwani chose to watch and write about Breathless, offering a beginner’s perspective on this classic film that really cuts to the heart of why it was so daring and shocking 50 years ago.


THE FRENCH NEW WAVE: BREATHLESS

Jean-Luc Godard’s film Breathless was one of the defining films of the French New Wave. The film embodied many of the characteristics of that movement, which represented a shift in cinema from the classic narrative style of Hollywood both visually and narratively. In general, the French New Wave cinema featured problematic protagonists, unhappy endings, dramatic shifts in tone and story, elements of playfulness, and the use of homage to pay respect to the movies in some way. The films were shot on location with hand held cameras, unaided by extra lighting, and the editing was always more jarring, begging to call attention to film-making techniques.

This is true right from the opening scene, where we meet our protagonist Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo). It isn’t spatially clear to the audience how he got there – he is thrust onto the scene without given a real introduction. We see him in the beginning just standing outside reading the newspaper with a cigarette in his mouth. We then see a woman with whom he has eye contact. We soon learn that this is his attempt to escape police detection. After this scene in the film, we never see the woman again.

There is lack of clarity in the “cause and effect” element, so common to traditional continuity editing, right from the start. In fact, the way the story progresses is atypical, with abrupt shifts in tone from a lot of action scenes in the beginning (killing the cop, stealing money etc.) to mundane everyday conversation between two lovers as the story progresses. Instead of the usual build-up of plot, which leads to a climax, we see the major part of the action in the beginning of the film; then, the pace of the film slows down in the middle with a very long take in which Michel is in his girlfriend’s bedroom making small talk as he keeps begging her to sleep with him – the scene lasts for almost half an hour. That scene seems anti-climactic, because the director focuses so much attention on the normal, mundane conversation of a couple before the action picks up again with Michel’s attempts to collect money and make his rescue for Italy.

Another very common element in the French New Wave films is the problematic, un-heroic protagonist. In this film, we learn our protagonist is a criminal, a thief who steals habitually without any remorse. He also commits murder, by killing a cop to avoid capture. After that he is constantly on the run, trying to evade the police, and along the way he keeps stealing. In one scene in the beginning of the movie, we see him visiting an old girlfriend and stealing all her money. He also steals numerous cars throughout the movie from a Ford to a Cadillac. He is not heroic and is not the moral center of the story, which was atypical at the time for traditional Hollywood films in the classical style. Michel has loose morals and ethics, and habitually commits crimes without any remorse. His girlfriend, Patricia (Jean Seberg), whose love he is trying to win, also has questionable moral standards. It is hinted in the film, as she talks to her employer at the restaurant, that to get ahead in her career as a journalist, she will need to sleep around. We then see her kissing him in the next scene, and she then returns to her boyfriend Michel. The two main characters in the film are both problematic and seem willing to stoop to low levels to get what they want, though herein lay the conundrum. Both Michel and Patricia don’t really get what they want in the end. One could argue Michel has a goal: to leave Paris and go away to Italy with his girlfriend. However, Michel seems to be wandering around aimlessly, either waiting for people to call him back, or never being able to get through to the people he is calling in his many futile attempts to recover money from his friend. This type of protagonist and leading must have been quite shocking to American audiences of the day who were used to heroic, goal-driven leading men and morally respectable leading ladies.

As the protagonist, Michel does not achieve his goal in the end. He loses the girl he loves, Patricia, who ends up betraying his whereabouts to the police. Most of the time, he acts on impulse, without carefully thinking through his actions. The biggest example is when he shoots the policing officer without any thought to the consequences of such an act, and then runs off. Another example of his impulsiveness is apparent in the scene when he jumps out of the taxi when he is with Patricia just so he can pull up the skirt of a woman walking on the street.

Completely contrary to the classic narrative style, we don’t have happy endings in the French New Wave films. Instead, one is treated to abrupt endings, leaving the viewer emotionally unsatisfied and perplexed in the end. In Breathless, Michel does not achieve his goal in the end, he does not get the girl because she turns him in to the police, and he is shot in the back as he is running away from the police. He suffers a tragic, albeit a fitting fate at the hands of the woman he loves. Moreover, the girlfriend, Patricia, in the end, offers us no clear explanations as to why she did what she did. Her behavior is rather bizarre. She actually tells him that she has turned him in to the police, and then rants on and on about how she did this because she was trying to find out whether she loved him or not, and feigns concern for him at the same time. The movie ends with a close up shot of her mimicking Michel’s gesture of rubbing his lips with his thumb. She coolly asks the officer what Michel said to her in the end. The audience is left gasping; what did she just do and why?

Throughout the film, Michel is seeing paying homage to Humphrey Bogart. In one scene in the movie, as he is walking on the street, he sees a poster of Bogart outside a cinema, and he stops to stare at it with full attention for several moments, and whispers, “Bogey,” and mimics Bogart’s expression in the poster. In repeated instances in the film, he is seen making the same gesture, rubbing his lips with his thumbs trying to emulate Humphrey Bogart. We also have an homage paid to the movie-going experience in general when Patricia playfully tells Michel, “Let’s go see a Western.”

The editing in the film was intentionally rough, forcing the audience to sit up and take notice. There was extensive use of jump cuts in the film. One such example in the film was when Michel and Patricia are in the car and he is complimenting her good looks, one detail at a time. With each detail he gives, we see a jump cut to a shot of her face, perhaps drawing attention to Michel’s real interest in Patricia—her looks. Then, in contrast, there are instances in the film where an entire scene is played out without any cuts. For example, when Michel first meets Patricia on the street, the scene of the two of them walking down the street is done in one continuous shot. There are no cuts, fades, or dissolves. And, as they both walk along the street, we can almost feel the shaky hand-held camera moving along with them. In fact, the entire movie was shot on location using a hand held camera giving the audience a “you are there” feeling throughout.

There were several instances in the film where the director clearly calls attention to technique via unmotivated camera movement. A good example is when Michel and his girlfriend are driving in the car, and the camera is focused on the streets of Paris instead of on the two of them. We just hear their voices. Along the way, we witness the people of Paris going about their everyday lives. We see people in those moments that are not central to the plot in any way, but it calls attention to the rhythm of everyday life. All throughout the movie, the lighting in the movie is natural-looking—a look quite different from the glamorous lighting of Hollywood studio films. Also, we see the use of direct sound where sound is recorded as they are speaking on location, giving the film a degree of naturalism or realism. For example, when Patricia goes to conduct an interview by an airstrip, we can clearly hear the sound of the planes’ engines, perhaps, at times, even louder than the reporter’s voices.

Lastly, another element of the French New Wave was its sense of playfulness. A few examples that come to mind are when Michel is in Patricia’s room. We see them towards the end of the scene making funny faces in the bathroom mirror, and Michel tries to pull up her skirt evoking a playful slap from her. That whole scene in the bedroom is rather playful where they are joking around and taking jabs at each other in a light-hearted way. This also bought a shift in tone in the film, which started out intensely with Michel committing various crimes to these playful, light-hearted moments. Another jarring example comes at the end of the film. As if to accentuate Michel’s tragic fate in the end, we see Michel making those same funny faces just as he is about to die, perhaps symbolic of the mockery he made of his life.

In Hollywood cinema, the classic narrative style was used so seamlessly that the audience did not notice any of the editing. The viewer got so completely absorbed in the story along with the escapism offered by the glamorized roles and the studio set designs that a happy ending would be the only fitting end to the story. In contrast, the French New Wave, while drawing inspiration from Hollywood films, provided an alternate view to the audience. It not only brought a degree of realism through documentary techniques (handheld camera, natural lighting, direct sound) to expose the nuances and problems of everyday life, it also purposefully drew attention to film editing and film techniques in reverence to them as part of the art of filmmaking. Godard’s film used all of these techniques so effectively, gripping the viewer, perhaps leaving one perplexed and perhaps a little breathless – thinking what did the director just hit me with and why?

It's That Time Again!

Blair Witch Turns 10

Has it really been ten years since we streamed out of theaters, arguing with our friends as to what actually happened at the end of The Blair Witch Project?

Co-director Eduardo Sanchez will be on hand this Saturday at the Portage to discuss and present the film as part of Terror in the Aisles 3, which also includes screenings of Night of the Creeps (with director Fred Dekker appearing) and, in the spirit of the holidays, the original Black Christmas (accept no subsitutions).

Check out the Chicago Tribune report on the event (also see the interview with Sanchez in today's print edition of the Sun-Times). And if you can't make it out, Facets has the films, of course (The Blair Witch Project buy rent, Black Christmas buy rent).


-Dan Mucha

Clouds in My Coffee

Reitman and Clooney take to the lonely skies.
By Lauren Whalen.


Single-serving life.

The same sanitized key card existence disparaged by Edward Norton's gravelly narrator in Fight Club is worshiped by George Clooney's gentlemanly protagonist Ryan Bingham, in Jason Reitman's new film Up in the Air. Employed by a "career transition" corporate firm (essentially, he is hired to fire people), Ryan travels for all but 40 days of the year and aspires to attain 10 million frequent flyer miles. Not for any specific trip, but to save for the sake of saving. As he proudly tells his young protegee Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick), only six people in the world have achieved this goal.

As he did in Thank You for Smoking, writer and director Reitman skillfully presents a fast-talking charmer and slowly but surely picks him apart. (There's even a fun cameo by everyone's favorite Marlboro Man.) Ryan may relish his free as a bird lifestyle, but it comes with a price, or several. Sure, his services are highly in demand--but the news he delivers is devastating to each and every recipient. And he enjoys the plush perks that come with gold rental car status and concierge keys, but his Omaha apartment is blank and bleak, he has no discernable friends, and his relationships with his sisters (Melanie Lynskey and Amy Morton) are strained at best. Even his saucy female counterpart and occasional lover (Vera Farmiga) deliberately remains elusive and may not be what she seems.

At times, Reitman relies a little too heavily on indie cliches (soft guitar music, long introspective shots that scream "where is my home?"). The quick cuts of Ryan packing for yet another trip are a bit excessive. Also, the film emphasizes a necessity for marriage and children, life choices that aren't necessarily appropriate for everyone.

What Up in the Air captures best, however, is an all too real sense of uncertainty and outright pain, in an era where all one has worked for can be eviscerated with a simple "have a seat." Reitman effectively employs the same technique used by Steven Soderbergh in The Informant!--employing actors primarily known for their comic skills in more brittle and brutal roles. Danny McBride, Zach Galifianakis, and the forever-brilliant J.K. Simmons turn in brief but memorable performances, all sad and poignant in their own way. As always, Clooney is a pleasure to watch. No matter what you think of celebrity culture, you simply can’t hate the man: he conveys an elegance and grace all too absent in today’s man-children actors.

The film’s females also shine: it’s wonderful to see Chicago theatre actress Morton onscreen, and after almost fifteen years of small film and TV roles, Heavenly Creatures’ Lynskey is finally—and rightfully—coming into her own. Hopefully this film will launch Farmiga's career into the mainstream, and it's nice to see Kendrick in something more substantial than Twilight. Fans of the latter should check out her darkly hilarious turn in the 2003 tribute to musical theatre geeks, Camp.

Up in the Air, while not a perfect film, contains many genuine moments stressing the importance of friendship and love in an insecure era, which will surely resonate with many viewers. An interesting fact, if IMDb is to be believed: Reitman wanted to make this film several years ago but was waylaid for various reasons. With the economy in the state it is, Up in the Air may just be in the right place at the right time.


Lauren Whalen is Facets' Development Coordinator. Find her writings on books, film, pop culture and more at The Unprofessional Critic.

A Hot, Beautiful Mess

Hallie Borden discusses what's playing at the Facets Cinematheque. Weigh in with your opinion in the comments section.

Christophe Honoré's La Belle Personne manages to strike a rare mix of being incredibly interesting and not at all enjoyable. The French high school melodrama modernizes the 17th century novel, "La Princesse de Cleaves," and takes great artistic liberty with its classical storyline. What makes La Belle Personne so fascinating is its complete detachment from any of its characters. Such a Shakespearean plot often calls for full involvement and empathy from the audience. Instead, Honoré encourages the viewer to look from afar with discerning eyes. La Belle Personne is a story of manic infatuation, star-crossed lovers, death and suicide, and passionate affairs, yet it is almost impossible to care about anything at all while watching. There is no chemistry in any of the romance, no drive in any of the obsession, and no tears shed over the lives taken. With this void, the tragedy is transformed into a commentary on the frivolity of melodrama.

What makes it so interesting is exactly what makes it so dreary and unentertaining. It's remarkable that La Belle Personne can elicit nothing stronger than a shoulder shrug during its dramatic climax, yet leave such a lasting impact after its conclusion. For that reason alone, it is worth seeing. (And the dreamy Louis Garrel doesn't hurt either.) If you're looking for something a tad more fun, however, try Honoré's previous work, Dans Paris.

Let the Holiday Clips Commence

Chicago hangs in the balmy 54 degree temperature range, at present, so the vibe is far from postcard-perfect holiday festive around these parts. You'll hear no complaints from me, though. Those who live through Chicago winters will take visits from the Heat Miser over the Snow Miser any day.


-Phil Morehart