audience participation
I was at the London Film Festival again, treading the red carpet. The red carpet was not for me, of course, or even for the film I was seeing. No doubt they'd have preferred to roll it up before I could even get on it. But in the hectic atmosphere of the LFF there just wasn't time - so I got to preen myself in front of a couple of bewildered tourists, who possibly mistook me for the assistant focus puller on An Education.
I was going to see Bruno Dumont's Hadewijch. Dumont's films have a certain fascination for me. He is unafraid of sounding pretentious (his first film was called La Vie de Jesus and his second L'Humanite - and he isn't even French!*) and refreshingly reluctant to explain anything. Most of his work seems to deal with a private interior world having to deal with 'reality', though it is increasingly hard to tell where the interior world ends and the outside one begins (if indeed it ever does begin). The showing of the film, in which Dumont's interior world is exposed to the gross gaze of the cinema goer, is in a sense a continuation of the drama - especially if, as here, there's a Q and A.
So I got to see Dumont himself explaining - not without humour - how God assisted him in the making of the film and enduring the questions of people who dared to ask what was 'really happening' in certain scenes. I mean, how vulgar! There was a lot of Gallic shrugging in the responses and one question was branded 'idiotique'. It was a great performance.
As for the film, I can't defend it or explain it but I was thoroughly engrossed. Hadewijch starts with a nun being expelled from a convent, but as Variety has pointed out, it is not The Sound of Music. If Bruno Dumont made The Sound of Music, Julie Andrews would be gang-raped in slow-motion by Nazis. And there would be no music.
No doubt it is fair to say that cinema audiences just aren't up to the rigorous task of watching films these days. In the Q and A for Eyes Wide Open, a man asked the director whether the film was based on fact. On hearing that it was based on a combination of research and imagination the man dismissed the film entirely, claiming: 'It isn't art if it's not true.' It was as though he had never heard of fiction.
Wonder what he makes of the Harry Potter movies?
*He is really. That was a joke.
I was going to see Bruno Dumont's Hadewijch. Dumont's films have a certain fascination for me. He is unafraid of sounding pretentious (his first film was called La Vie de Jesus and his second L'Humanite - and he isn't even French!*) and refreshingly reluctant to explain anything. Most of his work seems to deal with a private interior world having to deal with 'reality', though it is increasingly hard to tell where the interior world ends and the outside one begins (if indeed it ever does begin). The showing of the film, in which Dumont's interior world is exposed to the gross gaze of the cinema goer, is in a sense a continuation of the drama - especially if, as here, there's a Q and A.
So I got to see Dumont himself explaining - not without humour - how God assisted him in the making of the film and enduring the questions of people who dared to ask what was 'really happening' in certain scenes. I mean, how vulgar! There was a lot of Gallic shrugging in the responses and one question was branded 'idiotique'. It was a great performance.
As for the film, I can't defend it or explain it but I was thoroughly engrossed. Hadewijch starts with a nun being expelled from a convent, but as Variety has pointed out, it is not The Sound of Music. If Bruno Dumont made The Sound of Music, Julie Andrews would be gang-raped in slow-motion by Nazis. And there would be no music.
No doubt it is fair to say that cinema audiences just aren't up to the rigorous task of watching films these days. In the Q and A for Eyes Wide Open, a man asked the director whether the film was based on fact. On hearing that it was based on a combination of research and imagination the man dismissed the film entirely, claiming: 'It isn't art if it's not true.' It was as though he had never heard of fiction.
Wonder what he makes of the Harry Potter movies?
*He is really. That was a joke.
posted by martin at 11:01 AM
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