@martinscorsese_

Nothing Expendable about these three . . . . .

Repost from @thefilmfoundation_official By Kent Jones During a discussion of Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind, Scorsese remarked that the editing of many scenes “comes down to a matter of frames.” You could extend this observation to a rule of thumb. If there’s 1 clear marker that separates a great movie from an ordinary one, it’s the evidence that every image or succession of images comes down to a matter of frames: every particle of every 24th of a second counts & is bound to every other particle. If you want a clear illustration, watch Bruce Conner’s films, 5 of which—Cosmic Ray, Ten Second Film, Report, Mea Culpa and America Is Waiting—were restored by @anthologyfilmarchives with grants from the Avant-Garde Masters program, created by NFPF & TFF. A sizable amount of his work is comprised of found footage pulled from industrial films, commercials & live TV coverage. Many of his films were constructed over great lengths of time & now exist in multiple versions, each one a living force—ceaselessly changing, throbbing with associations & dynamic shifts that create the sense of being everywhere at once, micro & macro, inside & outside of an event that appears to be creating itself before our eyes, echoing our own experience. To say of Conner’s films that every frame matters is to put it very mildly. Mea Culpa & America Is Waiting, which served as rock videos for the first 2 songs on David Byrne & Brian Eno’s 1981 proto-sampling album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, offer a stark contrast with standard rock videos of the same period: they are pure compressed kinetic energy as opposed to the vague impression of kinetic energy created by a systematic succession of shock cuts and speed changes. Cosmic Ray is also a music film (the cosmic Ray’s last name is Charles) that bursts the screen open and floods right into your system, just like the silent, mind-bending Ten Second Film. Report is Conner’s response to the assassination of JFK, a film trauma that is immediate & reflective at the same time & a shock to the system. It seems that Report is now in an intense dialogue, across the span of 50 years & counting, with Bob Dylan's new American lament, Murder Most Foul.

Repost from @thefilmfoundation_official • To read Kent Jones’ post this week about CRISIS (1963, d. Robert Drew) click the link in The Film Foundation’s bio. @ethandre

Repost from @thefilmfoundation_official • By Kent Jones I don’t remember the first Albert Lewin film I saw or how old I was when I saw it, but I was immediately entranced. I was taken with his literate and touchingly formal approach to moviemaking, his moving adherence to and belief in high culture and its trappings, his powerful sense of myth, his exacting production design, and his pull toward brooding and meditative quietude. He shared many of these qualities with Val Lewton. Both men had come out of the studio system and served as right-hand men to superstar production executives—Lewton worked for David O. Selznick, Lewin for Irving Thalberg—and both of them went in far more individualistic directions than their former mentors. And apart from the respective levels of their budgets and shooting schedules, there was one crucial difference. Lewton exerted a powerful and unmistakable influence on each of the films he produced, but he never directed. He preferred to stay in the background. Lewin also produced some truly beautiful films, but when he became a director, he declared himself as an artist. You can hide as a producer. But to quote David Fincher, if you think you can hide as a director, you’re nuts. The mythic undertones and overtones, the swooning romanticism, the idiosyncratic and occasionally awkward grammar and pacing—he unashamedly owned all of it. The Film Foundation has helped to facilitate the restorations of three films directed by Lewin—The Moon and Sixpence, The Private Affairs of Bel Ami, and his greatest, the hypnotic and throbbingly beautiful Pandora and the Flying Dutchman—in addition to So Ends Our Night, a lovely adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s Flotsam. I like to celebrate Lewin, because his films are very special to me, and because at this particular moment in our culture, when people are so cavalier about shutting the door on the past, they seem particularly fragile. To see the films of the past only through the lens of the present, as opposed to allowing every film to fully reveal itself and thereby illuminate the moment of its making, is a great sadness. Especially when it’s used as a means of marginalizing such soulful films.

Repost from @thefilmfoundation_official • By Kent Jones This morning, I looked at a diagram on the 𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑺𝒕𝒐𝒓𝒚 𝒐𝒇 𝑴𝒐𝒗𝒊𝒆𝒔’ website, an educational curriculum developed by TFF, offered at no charge, & used by teachers around the country. The concept of the diagram is simple: 3 circles represent Cinematic Reading, Narrative Reading & Historical/Cultural Reading respectively, & the areas where they converge. When the majority of people discuss a given movie, odds are they're speaking in terms of 1 of these. To read any film from the viewpoint of only 1 is to do it an injustice. It’s common to speak of documentaries solely in terms of what they’ve “documented,” but that begs the question: why are some great while others aren’t? Kopple’s Harlan County USA, included in the “American Laborer” module, is a stunning document of a bitter strike in KY mining country, but it’s also a great film with a powerful narrative drive. Preminger’s Advise and Consent, included in the developing “Politicians & Demagogues” module, is often spoken of in cinematic terms, but is also a juicy multi-character melodrama that becomes increasingly sensational & its wildest improbabilities are kept in check by a careful observance of behavior, decorum, clothing, movement & speech, rooted in a particular time & place. Every element intermingles with, buoys & sustains every other element & enrichs the greater whole. I was born in 1960 into a world that now seems as distant as the exoplanet Kepler 443-B is from earth. Cinema & network TV comprised the territory of motion pictures back then. Now, moving images come at us constantly, 150 characters is commonly considered writing & 300 words a tome, history is treated as a plaything & much suffering is tolerated. Literacy is crucial, verbal & visual. Literacy can’t be checked in a box nor downloaded. It can’t be purchased nor won. It can only be acquired, with the help of great teachers & programs. It’s what allows you to see, to separate the words & images that are there to be consumed, the ones that are meant to sell you something, ones that tell you lies & ones that are simply offered to you in a spirit of wonder & delight.

Repost from @thefilmfoundation_official • Elia Kazan was so mighty a force in American theatre, acting and cinema that it’s possible to feel and benefit from the effects of his work and his practice without even realizing it. He’s also known for his second appearance before the terror-inducing House Un-American Activities Committee in 1951, when he named the names of many of his fellow Group Theatre members. Any attempt to reduce or simplify the relationship between Kazan’s art and this action is ultimately doomed to failure, no matter what the intention or political motivation. It’s incontestable that the power of Kazan’s artistry and the thematic scope of his work intensified after his second HUAC appearance. But what seems truly remarkable now is the way that, in film after film and in a variety of forms, he meticulously and painstakingly dramatized the gut-wrenching feeling of being torn in two directions—as Kazan put it in his autobiography, “That’s what a difficult decision means: either way you go, you lose.” Wild River, with Montgomery Clift, Lee Remick and Jo Van Fleet, is not one of Kazan’s best-known movies, but it is one of his greatest, and it was beautifully restored by the team at Fox led by Schawn Belston—if you care about film restoration, you probably know his name already, and if you don’t, you need to. The outline of the film’s narrative is, at this moment, painfully relevant. Clift is the progressive government official who arrives in the rural south in the mid-1930s to remove people from land that has been in their family for generations, in order to complete the TVA dam project—he and his agency destroy ways of life in order to save actual lives from the slow-motion catastrophe of further flooding. There’s a special lyricism to Wild River that feels almost otherworldly, and it has some of the most emotionally and visually exquisite passages in all American cinema. And I think that Kazan achieved something absolutely unique: he gave dramatic and cinematic form to ambivalence, right up his film’s final heartbreaking image. By Kent Jones @ethandre

Happy Mother’s Day to my beautiful wife who is an amazing mother to our daughter, Francesca. And to my mother, who will be loved and missed forever.

Family Zoom call...

Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and The Band opens in select theaters on Friday! Tickets: http://bit.ly/OWBTickets

Fantastic work by @jr

Had a blast shooting with @JonahHill. Thank you to for having me. @cocacola