Film director

The article’s aim is to compare the specificity of two theoretically quite remote professions — that of a film director and a teachers. The analysis of differences and convergence points of the said jobs is to capture and particularise the potential of their mutual inspiration. What constitutes the exemplary material around which the presented research revolves are: the elements of the school didactic-upbringing process, work with film crew, and producing and theatrical play. Significant reference points for the analysis were the greatest role models in the field of pedagogics and film directing.
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Celem artykułu jest porównanie specyfiki dwóch teoretycznie dość odległych zawodów - reżysera filmowego i nauczyciela. Analiza różnic i punktów zbieżności tych zawodów ma na celu uchwycenie i uszczegółowienie potencjału ich wzajemnej inspiracji. Wzorowym materiałem, wokół którego obracają się prezentowane badania, są: elementy szkolnego procesu dydaktyczno-wychowawczego, praca z ekipą filmową, produkcja i przedstawienie teatralne. Istotnymi punktami odniesienia dla analizy były największe wzorce do naśladowania w dziedzinie pedagogiki i reżyserii filmowej.

This is Farsi version of the brilliant and invaluable book has been edited by Paul Cronin.

From Amazon page: "An invaluable analysis of the director's art and craft, from one of the most revered of all film school directors. Alexander 'Sandy' Mackendrick directed classic Ealing comedies plus a Hollywood masterpiece, Sweet Smell of Success. But after retiring from film-making in 1969, he then spent nearly 25 years teaching his craft at the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles.

Mackendrick produced hundreds of pages of masterly handouts and sketches, designed to guide his students to a finer understanding of how to write a story, and then use those devices peculiar to cinema in order to tell that story as effectively as possible. Gathered and edited in this collection, Mackendrick's teachings reveal that he had the talent not only to make great films, but also to articulate the process with a clarity and insight that will still inspire any aspirant film-maker."

From Lessons from a master, Zoë GreenSat 20 Nov 2004:

"Perhaps the book's richness stems from the fact that Mackendrick did not intend it as his definitive comment on directing. Over the 25 years he spent at Cal Arts he amassed and refined a wealth of handouts and diagrams designed to help his fledgling directors acquire a strong sense of story structure. With this foundation laid, they studied cinematic devices and learnt how to take an idea, process it, and redeliver it to an audience as an effective narrative.

Mackendrick was tough on his students, and they (eventually) appreciated it. "Student films come in three sizes, too long, much too long, and very much too long," he told them on day one. His tactics were clever. Many of his students initially railed against absorbing traditional theories of montage, coverage and three-act structure, saying that "plots are old fashioned". Mackendrick simply asked them to follow his formula as a "temporary exercise" which they would be "perfectly entitled to discard later". Immersed in his boot camp, they found that they were putting words to ideas that they held subconsciously. Mackendrick was ready for them. "As an instructor the only things I can teach are what you already know."

This may be true, but it's overly modest; Mackendrick had developed his ideas over decades of professional directing, so he'd made his mistakes the hard way. His writing style is a wonderful mixture of co-conspiratorial musing and succinct commands. In one paragraph he'll dismiss his magnificent Sweet Smell of Success - "Looking back I cannot say I am surprised at its poor reception" - and then move forward to a string of pithy observations: "Exposition is BORING unless it's in the context of some present dramatic tension or crisis." "PASSIVITY is a capital crime in drama." His students must have loved it; a directing teacher who didn't put them down, yet rapped out opinions like gunfire.

To the meat of the matter: this is an eminently readable volume, but it is something of a challenge too, which is exhilarating. It requires focus. It's like the textbook you wish you'd had earlier; but as Mackendrick says, "Work is the only real training". Whether you use this book to help you reflect on your working practice or see it as an enjoyable insight into the development and execution of a film idea, there's a great deal packed into these pages. Part one covers dramatic construction, with an enjoyable section entitled "Slogans for the Screenwriter's Wall". I am especially fond of "BEWARE OF FLASHBACKS, DREAM SEQUENCES AND VISIONS".

You can then opt to undertake the exercises Mackendrick set his students, or proceed to the comparison of two drafts of a scene from Success. After this, there's a fantastic chapter on working with actors, taking the wise and often ignored stance that the director "must have respect for his actors". If this is a given with you, consider the concept of the actor as "meat-puppet" currently at large in some California classrooms.

Part two is more taxing, and covers film grammar. You can expect to emerge from this section with a solid understanding of the development of editing, point of view, axes, eyelines and camera set-ups. It's all beautifully illustrated by Mackendrick. As a bonus there's a chapter called "Drawing Lesson". If you can write legibly, Mackendrick argues that there's no excuse for you to be "wholly inept" in your attempts to sketch the human form. You need to be able to draw your idea of a medium long shot, and he shows you how.

Having limbered up your mind, the proponent of "making a disciplined effort in the development of fertile invention" equably signs out, leaving you raring to get back to work, six figure deal or otherwise. Which, I think, is what he would have wanted. "

This paper compares two films of the 1970s, which constitute mile-stones of Greek avant-garde cinema: Modelo (1974) by Kostas Sfikas and Idées Fixes / Dies Irae (1977) by Antoinetta Angelidi. It uses these particular Greek cases as a starting point in order to examine wider issues partaking to the theory and practice of avant-garde cinema. It investigates the premise that avant-garde film-making combines form experimentation with political radicalism, enacting a politics of form. It attempts to explore certain strategies and techniques which may constitute such politics, and to see what a revolutionary text made in the language of cinema may be.

In early October 2015, the world community was shaken by the news of the death of a cinema pioneer. In lieu of an obituary, the following " purloined " letter, which will never be read by its recipient, recounts an imaginary (and, therefore, real) encounter and insists on the meaning of this absence.

http://filmiconjournal.com/blog/post/46/a-letter-to-chantal-akerman-meditation-and-farewell

Ana Kokkinos is an Australian screenwriter, producer and director who has worked in film and television for almost thirty years. Best known for her fictional films – Antamosi, Only the Brave, Head On, The Book of Revelation and Blessed – her work is often bold and confrontational in its exploration of the alienation, estrangement and visceral distresses of those outside the mainstream. In the first major study of the director, Ana Kokkinos: An Oeuvre of Outsiders offers new readings of and across her fictional oeuvre by broadly tracing the deployment of the outsider as an organising motif.

Antoinetta Angelidi has been one of the few representatives of avant-garde cinema in Greece, consistently and persistently since the 1970s. The term ‘avant-garde’ is not one she has used for self-description until relatively recently, in accordance with a certain reluctance to pronounce the term, characteristic of the members of the ‘second avant-gardes’ of the 1960s and 1970s. There have been other terms to describe this kind of cinema, such as ‘non-narrative’, ‘poetic’ and ‘experimental’, none of which is exactly co-extensive with the other, each of which enters an equally controversial and complicated definitional dialectics. I will avoid entering the details of this debate and limit myself to a few remarks. ‘Avant-garde’ is an approach to the arts (and cinema) and not a specific visual style. It implies a definition of art as revolution in the sense of subverting existing structures and creating new ways of perception and expression. It involves a radical questioning of the institution of art; a structural belief in the indissoluble relation between form and content, and the subsequent revolutionary potential of form; the subversion of conventions, including the ones regarding representation and narration; and the transcending of categorical distinctions, including the one between art and life. There is no doubt that Angelidi’s work fulfils this definition. Having studied extensively Angelidi’s films and texts, and after many conversations during a life-long creative collaboration, I have observed the recurrence of dreams as a central element of her work. Dreams define her personal theory and poetics. They appear, in multiple ways, as a point of intersection between epistemological levels and categorical divisions. I have tried to organise these multiple encounters with dreams in the following nine groups: (1) significant dreams that defined her life-path; (2) the structural similarity between the dream-mechanism and cinematic semiosis; (3) dream as a model for conceptualising her film poetics; (4) the technique of writing down her dreams as a part of her filmmaking process; (5) dreams as raw material for her films; (6) dreams as represented in her films; (7) dream-communication as a simile for creative collaboration; (8) dreams as a part of her teaching technique; (9) lucid dream as a simile for her films’ address to their spectators. The following conversation took place in Greek, in Athens on the 22nd of July 2017.

Dentro de la promoción cinematográfica en las redes sociales, cabe considerar, junto a las cuentas oficiales, todos aquellos perfiles de los agentes involucrados en la producción, creación y comercialización. Partiendo de esta base, el texto se centra en los perfiles de los directores de cine español, una de las figuras más destacadas de esta industria. Para abordar este tema escasamente explorado, esta investigación analiza, mediante un método mixto, la presencia de los directores en las redes, los hipervínculos con otros espacios digitales que sustentan en las descripciones de sus perfiles, las identidades que proyectan, la verificación de sus cuentas, los contenidos de sus portadas, la cantidad de seguidores que acumulan y las diferentes estrategias y contenidos promocionales que utilizan. Los resultados obtenidos muestran un escenario en el que más de la mitad de los directores de cine español usan sus redes sociales con fines promocionales, especialmente durante el lanzamiento de sus producciones. No obstante, sus perfiles presentan limitaciones a la hora de establecer conexiones con otros espacios digitales, ser detectados frente a posibles perfiles falsos, crear grandes comunidades de seguidores y diseñar estrategias y contenidos que respondan a los nuevos paradigmas comunicativos y a las dinámicas de estos espacios sociales.

Compared to earlier waves of political cinema, such as the Russian revolution films of the 1920s and the militant Third Cinema movement in the 1960s, in today's globalized and digital media world filmmakers have adopted different strategies to express a commitment to politics. Rather than directly calling for a revolution, ‘post-cinema’ filmmakers with a political mission point to the radical contingencies of history; they return to the (audio-visual) archives and dig up never seen or forgotten materials. They reassemble stories, thoughts, and affects, bending our memories and historical consciousness. Following Deleuze and Guattari's geophilosophical ideas in A Thousand Plateaus filmmakers can be considered metallurgists. Discussing the work of Tariq Teguia, John Akomfrah and others, this article investigates several metallurgic strategies that have a performative effect in reshaping our collective memory and co-constructing the possibility of ‘a people to come.’

This book can be a good resource for anybody who teaches contemporary cinema//European cinema and cultural studies//Eastern European cinema and cultural studies//Romanian cinema//film auteurs.

http://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/65srs4wx9780252040764.html

Acclaimed British director Michael Winterbottom is renowned for the abundance and diversity of his output. His films span a wide range of genres in art house and mainstream cinema alike, from the heritage film to neo-noir. Working with different genres gives Winterbottom a framework in which to explore favored themes, while incorporating new ideas and taking on new challenges. At the same time, his manner of undermining familiar generic qualities and frustrating audience expectations also refreshes the genres he explores. In 'The Cinema of Michael Winterbottom,' Deborah Allison investigates Winterbottom’s contributions to contemporary cinema, using ideas of genre as a critical tool. Focusing on eight films, Allison examines the ways he adopts, inflects, and challenges the main attributes of the films’ associated genres, enriching a highly personal and idiosyncratic style of filmmaking. The potency and integrity of his authorship unites films as generically diverse as the road movie 'Butterfly Kiss,' western drama 'The Claim,' sci-fi romance 'Code 46,' and docudrama 'The Road to Guantanamo.'

“Deborah Allison has grasped [Winterbottom’s] distinctive modus operandi, which no other filmmaker would dare imitate, or could afford to. Her tour of Winterbottom’s glorious ups and occasional downs, a mid-career assessment, confirms Winterbottom’s place as the most versatile and prolific director of his generation. The reader can decide whether Winterbottom’s determination to take on so many varied challenges is courageous or crazy, or both.” (David D'Arcy, Screen International)