.

The Gold Rush (Charles Chaplin, 1925)

Charlot, all alone on New Year's Eve... {watch the entire scene on YouTube}

A Holiday Classic

It's A Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, 1946)

Îngheţată asortată #4

Sleeping Beauty (Julia Leigh, 2011)

La belle endormie/ The Sleeping Beauty (Catherine Breillat, 2010)

Taxi Driver, remade

Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976), un remake de Michel Gondry, stil Be Kind Rewind (Gondry, 2008):

La piel que habito: Director's Notes

La piel que habito/ The Skin I Live In (Pedro Almodóvar, 2011)

Skin is the frontier that separates us from others: It determines the race to which we belong, it reflects our emotions and our roots, whether biological or geographic. Many times it reflects the state of the soul, but the skin isn't the soul. Although Vera has changed her skin, she hasn’t lost her identity. [...]

A story of these characteristics made me think of Luis Buñuel, Alfred Hitchcock, all of Fritz Lang’s films (from the gothic to the noir). I also thought of the pop aesthetic of Hammer horror, or the most psychedelic, kitsch style of the Italian giallo (Dario Argento, Mario Bava, Umberto Lenzi, Lucio Fulci…), and the lyricism of Georges Franju in Eyes Without a Face. After evaluating all these references, I realized that none of them fit with what I needed for The Skin I Live In. For some months I thought seriously about making a silent film, in black and white, with captions that showed descriptions and dialogue, paying tribute to Fritz Lang and F. W. Murnau. After doubting for months, I decided to go my own way and let myself be guided by my intuition — after all, it’s what I’ve always done — without the shadow of the maestros of the genre, and renouncing my own cinematic memory. I only knew that I had to impose an austere narrative, free of visual rhetoric and not at all gory, although a lot of blood has been spilled in the ellipses that we don’t see. I’ve been accompanied on this journey by José Luis Alcaine, the director of photography, to whom I didn’t explain what I wanted but rather what I didn’t want; he knew how to give the photography the density, the glow, and the darkness that suited it best. The composer Alberto Iglesias, the only artist I know without an ego; tireless, versatile, patient, capable of looking in one direction and then looking in the opposite direction if I wasn’t satisfied, always subject to the dictates of the story and my way of feeling it. And actors who were generous and precise, despite the obvious discomfort of some of their scenes. I’ll name them all: Antonio Banderas, Elena Anaya, Marisa Paredes, Jan Cornet, Roberto Álamo, Blanca Suárez, Eduard Fernández, Susi Sánchez, Bárbara Lennie, and José Luis Gómez.

- Pedro Almodóvar, "Some Notes About The Skin I Live In", 

in TASCHEN's Magazine (Winter 2011/2012) [pdf]

Elena Anaya practices the "warrior" position, with a little help from Almodóvar
(Taschen's Magazine, Winter 2011/2012)

La voix humaine (x2)

- după un text de Jean Cocteau -

Anna Magnani in "La voce umana", in L'Amore (Roberto Rossellini, 1948)

Ingrid Bergman in The Human Voice (Ted Kotcheff, 1966)

Cântece cu film #4

Cântecul: Balada de la trompeta, Raphael



Filmul: Balada triste de trompeta/ The Last Circus (Álex de la Iglesia, 2010)

Let's dance! #2

Enid (Thora Birch) dances to Jaan Pehechaan Ho in Ghost World (Terry Zwigoff, 2001)

+ clipul original, fără întreruperi:

Mohammed Rafi - Jaan Pehechaan Ho, extras din filmul indian Gumnaam (Raja Nawathe, 1965)

Împotriva intenţiei regizorului

Înlănţuirea *wink* secvenţelor în ordine cronologică:

Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994)

(via Vulture)

Îngheţată asortată #3

The Ides of March (George Clooney, 2011)

The Candidate (Michael Ritchie, 1972)

Director's Intro

Přežít svůj život (teorie a praxe)/ Surviving Life (Theory and Practice)
(Jan Švankmajer, 2010)

Ladies and gentlemen, we couldn't raise enough cash. This was supposed to be a regular feature film, but since we didn't have the money, we had to use a much simpler technique - paper-cut-out animation, like in the old kids TV programs. So we were able to shoot the whole thing in the studio and keep the transport costs to a minimum. We also saved money on actor's fees, as we mainly used just photographs of them, and on catering - because photographs don't eat. So this is not a formal experiment, just a poor imperfect substitute for a live-action film. A kind of fusion movie. I've called it a psychoanalytical comedy. Psychoanalytical because one of the characters is a psychoanalyst. As for the comedy, I'm pretty sure you won't find much to laugh at. Neither did we when we were shooting. One morning I was woken up by a dream and I said to myself it looked like the opening scene of a film. So I wrote the other scenes. I've always wanted to make a film in which dream blends with reality, and vice versa. As Georg Christoph Lichtenberg tells us: only the fusion of dream and reality can make up the complete human life. Sadly, our civilization has no time for dreams, there's no money. The reason I've included this introduction is not to gratify my narcissism. It is because when we finished cutting the film, we discovered that it was too short. That's what animated films do. They shorten time. They are quite simply faster than live-action movies. Two and a half minutes. Not a lot.