Langauge of Pretense

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notjustmovies:

Gunnar Fischer passed away last night at the age of 100. His film credits end in 1979, but Fischer is most well-known for his work with Ingmar Bergman, with whom he collaborated on the director’s early films. Though Bergman is known today for his legendary work with Sven Nykvist, Fischer’s early contributions give his cinematography a feel all their own. In fact, much of the humor of Bergman’s early classics—The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, Smiles of Summer Night—stems from Fischer’s inventive, lightly surreal touch. Here is one of my favorite moments of a film he shot, the stark, insane dream from Wild Strawberries. R.I.P., Gunnar.

(via film-dot-com)

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I’d like to be for cinema what Shakespeare was for theatre, Marx for politics and Freud for psychology: someone after whom nothing is as it used to be.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder

mission accomplished, methinks. Happy birthday to one of the cinema’s great bearded maestros - he was very fat and he is now very dead, but i doubt i could accomplish in 100 lives what he did in his one brief stint, even if i had unfettered access to his truly unbelievable stash of cocaine.

keep an eye out for his sci-fi epic WORLD ON A WIRE in theaters on Criterion DVD & Blu-ray later this year / next winter. and Criterion, if you’re listening, i’m still waiting on a fancy edition of Fassbinder’s elegant and sweetly sadomasochistic MARTHA. do it, do it for the children.

(via criterioncorner)

(Source: film-dot-com)

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Picasso’s Magic Lantern by Jacques Prévert

This poem, by French surrealist poet Jacques Prévert, is one of the many works referenced in Pierrot le fou.

All the eyes of a woman in one picture
The loved one’s fate-tracked features under a still flower of sordid painted paper
The white weed of murder in a forest of chairs
A cardboard beggar disembowelled on a marble table
The ashes of a cigar on a station platform
The portrait of a portrait
The mystery of a child
The undeniable splendor of a kitchen sideboard
The immediate beauty of a rag in the wind
The mad terror of the trap in the eye of a bird
The absurd whinnying of a gored horse
The impossible music of a mule in bell harness
The bull put to death crowned with hats
A sleeping redhead’s forever-changing leg and the very big ear of the least of her worries
Perpetual movement caught by a hand
The immense stone statue of a grain of sea salt
The joy of every day and the uncertainty of dying and the iron of love in the wound of a smile
The humblest dog’s furthest star
And salty on a pane of glass the tender taste of bread
The line of chance lost and found broken and straightened bedecked in the blue rags of necessity
The astounding apparition of a Malaga grape on a rice cake
A man in a dive killing his homesickness with shots of red wine
And the blinding gleams of a bundle of candles
A window on the ocean opened like an oyster
A horse’s shoe a parasol’s nude foot
The incomparable grace of a turtle-dove all alone in a very cold house
The dead weight of a pendulum and its lost moments
The somnambulist sun which wakes Sleeping Beauty with a start in the middle of the night and sudden dazzle throws over her shoulders the hood of the fireplace and tails it after her in the smoke black masked with Spanish white and dressed in wallpaper
And so many other things
A wooden green guitar rocking the infancy of art
A railroad ticket with all its baggage
A hand that displaces a face that disfigures a landscape
The caressing squirrel of a nude green girl
Splendid smiling happy and immodest
Springing up all of a sudden from a bottle-rack or from a music rack like a panoply of green plants forever alive and phallic
It also springing up all of a sudden from the rotting trunk
Of an academic palm nostalgic and despairingly old beautiful as antiquity
And the melon bells of morning broken by the cry of an evening paper
The terrifying pincers of a crab emerging from under a basket
And a tree’s last flower with a condemned man’s last two drops of water
And the bride too beautiful alone and abandoned by her first husband’s pale fright upon the crimson couch of jealousy
And then in a winter garden on the back of a throne an agitated female cat and the moustache of its tail under the nostrils of a king
The quicklime of a look in the stone face of an old woman seated by a wicker basket
And shrivelled on the fresh redlead of a guardrail of an all-white lighthouse the two hands blue with cold of a wandering harlequin who looks at the sea and its tall horses sleeping in the setting sun and then awakens the foaming nostrils the phosphorescent eyes maddened by the lighthouse’s flashing rays and its terrifying turning fires
And roast lark in a beggar’s mouth
A sick young madwoman in a public garden who smiling a torn mechanical smile while rocking a lethargic child in her arms traces in the dust with her dirty naked foot the silhouette of the father and his lost profiles and presents to the passerby of her newborn baby in rags Look look my handsome my beautiful my wonder of wonders my natural child on one side a boy and on the other a girl every morning he cries but every evening I console her and I rewind them like a clock
And also the park guard fascinated by the twilight
A spider’s life suspended on a thread
The insomnia of a white doll with broken balance and its big glass eyes open forever and ever
The death of a white horse the youth of a sparrow
The door of a school in the Rue du Pont-de-Lodi
And the Grands Augustins impaled on the iron grill of a house in a little street which bears their name
All the fishermen of Antibes around a single fish
The violence of an egg in a soldier’s distress
The obsessive presence of a key hidden under a doormat
And the line-of-sight and the line-of-death in the plump authoritarian hand of a likeness of a delirious fat man camouflaged carefully behind exemplary banners and swastikad crucifixes draped and set-up spectacularly on the great mortuary balcony of the museum of horrors and honors of war the ridiculous living statue of his little short legs and long bust not succeeding in hiding in spite of his so grandoise and magnanimous Generalissimo smile the irremediable and pitiable signs of fear of boredom of hate and of shitstupidity engraved on his mask of fawn-colored cadaverous meat like the obscene graffiti of megalomania engraved by the lamentable torturers of the new order in the urinals at night
And behind him in the charnel house of a half-open diplomatic pouch in the very simple cadavre of a poor peasant assailed in his field by volleys of gold ingots from impeccable men of money
And close-by on a table an open grenade with a whole town inside
And all the woe of this razed and bled-white town
And all the guardia civile capering around a stretcher
Where a dead gypsy still dreams
And all the anger of a loving hardworking carefree and charming people that suddenly bursts out brusquely like the red cry of a cock whose throat is slit in public
And the solar specter of low-salaried men surging forth all bloody with bloody guts from a workers’ house holding lamp of Guernica and discovering in the full day of its raw true light and the frightful false tints of a discolored world worn threadbare bone-weary
Of a world dead on its feet
Of a world condemned
And already forgotten
Drowned charred in the thousand fires of running water of the common flood
Where the common blood flows inexhaustibly
In the arteries and in the veins of the earth and in the arteries and in the veins of its true children
And the face of no matter which of its children drawn simply on a sheet of white paper
The face of André Breton the face of Paul Éluard
The face of a wagondriver seen in the street
The flicker of a flick in the eye of a flower seller
The open smile of a chestnut sculptor
And sculptured in plaster a kinky plaster sheep bleating with truth in the hand of a plaster shepherd standing near a flatiron
Next to an empty box of cigars
Next to a forgotten pencil
Next to Ovid’s metamorphoses
Next to a shoelace
Next to an armchair worn down by the wear and tear of years
Next to a doorbell
Next to a still life where a cleaningwoman’s infantine dreams expire on the cold stone of a sink like a fish suffocating and dying on burning stones
And the house stirred to its foundations by the poor deadfish cries of the cleaningwoman suddenly dispairing ship-wrecked heaved-up by the floor’s groundswells and running herself around lamentably on the banks of the Seine in the gardens of Vert Galant
And there cast-up disabled she sits on a bench
And she takes stock
And she doesn’t see herself white and rotted by memories and mowed down like corn
A single room is left her a bedroom
And just as she’s going to play heads-or-tails with the vain hope of gaining a little time
A great storm bursts in the three-faced mirror
With all the flames of the joy of life
All the flashes of animal warmth
All the gleams of good humor
And giving a deathblow to the disoriented house
Sets fire to the bedroom curtains
And rolling sheets at the foot of the bed into a ball of fire
Uncovers smiling before the whole world
The jigsaw puzzle of love with all its pieces
All its choice pieces chosen by Picasso
A lover his mistress her heels around his neck
The eyes on the buttocks the hands a little everywhere
Feet raised to the sky and breasts upside down
Two bodies enlaced interchanged caressed
Love beheaded rescued ravished
The head abandoned rolling on the rug
Ideas abandoned forgotten miscarried
Rendered harmless by pleasure and joy
Ideas in anger baffled by love in color
Ideas grounded and astounded like the poor rats of death sensing the coming of the overwhelming shipwreck of Love
Ideas put back in their place at the door of the room next to bread next to shoes
Ideas calcified conjured-away volatized dis-idealized
Ideas petrified before the marvelous indifference of an impassioned world
Of a world refound
Of a world indisputable and unexplained
Of a world without knowledge of how to live but full of the joy of living
Of a world sober and drunk
Of a world sad and gay
Tender and cruel
Real and surreal
Terrifying and funny
Nocturnal and diurnal
Usual and unusual
Handsome as hell.

(Translated by Lawrence Ferlinghetti)