Why I stopped writing this blog?

Two years ago I just stopped writing on this blog. The trigger was Google's decision to put all their services under one roof, the common factor being Google+. The consequence of that was that images I had posted here, with permission from film studios and distributors, in some cases with the specific request that they should be posted only on this blog, and nowhere else, were showing in my Google+ account under Photos. In one swap, Google put me in breach of copyright. Thanks you very much.

In anger, I just stopped carrying on with the blog.

However, Google's action was the trigger, not the actual reason, or reasons, to stop writing. Not long before that, I already had stopped posting the weekly what's on in British cinemas, as I had been doing since 2009, when Cinema-Architecture was started. I was just tired of spending a good deal of a day, or so, gathering information about the latest releases, some of the distributors' websites are just hopeless, about films, many of which I had not the slightest interest in them. In a way that heralded the end of the blog as it has been conceived: as a mouthpiece to show case the kind of cinema disregarded by the film studios, distributors, and chains, although in hindsight, it was not in the cards then,

I tried to make Cinema-Architecture to be as inclusive as possible in the world of arthouse and world cinema, yet I was receiving little support from many of the independent distributors whom, for understandable reasons, were more interested in well established media and blogs. That was the conundrum. I did not even get the support of the still existing Hull Short Film Festival. I was also involved in a support group for Hull Screen, then this city only independent cinema showing non-mainstream films. In spite of our efforts, audiences continued to dwindle. Talking to people, they seemed to have quite a narrow view of  arthouse cinema, not daring to go out of their comfort  zone. I also had the bitter experience of my views being disregarded (not so much by the support group committee, I hastily add) too often by members of the audience on post performance conversations, the unsaid feel of their belief as myself being quite ignorant, as I am not British.

I was also becoming disillusioned with the kind of films I was supposed to review, mostly Asian comedies and blockbusters, ie, Hollywood mainstream cinema being replaced by Asian ones. One of the Asian distributors stopped sending review DVDs, wanting me to increase my costs by incurring in a heavy use of my broadband connection.

In short, I did not gain enough support from non mainstream film makers and distributors, and plain disillusionment of their output.

John Akomfrah's The Nine Muses

Some films are there to be “consumed”, whilst others are to be “savoured”.
John Akomfrah's The Nine Muses falls in the later category.

A elegiac audio visual poem that explores not only
Caribbean and African immigration to Britain,
but the idea of memory being at the root of our humanity,
the Homeric Odissey still with us...

The Greek goddess Mnemosyne slept with Zeus for nine nights

An exploration of the idea of a journey by itself,
as the very concept of journey is about memory,

we see it by the use of Dewald Aukema's camera which is hardly ever quiet, a camera
that is always roving over the immutable wintry landscapes of Alaska

Are they immutable?

interpoled with archive footage depicting constant movement: trucks in wintry landscapes,
gritting lorries, river flooding through flooded towns...

we being the witnesses of the passage of space and time

as we leaf through the traces left behind in our landscapes, those places we call ours
sometimes a track on the snow

not monuments as we understand them, just traces,
perhaps traces that will be forgotten if we don't witness them

if the nine muses don't sing about them,
if the nine muses don't sing about the beauty of those wintry landscapes as the storm
rages crystallizing those instants into words, into songs...

we hear the voices from times past,
those of Homer, of Milton, of Beckett, of Joyce, of Emily Dickinson,
the voice of many others...

Is there a narrative in the world, in our memories?

A narrative as we have understand it throughout the centuries,
a narrative with a beginning, a middle,an end...

such as in an Hollywood movie...

The Nine Muses is not that...
It is an intense yet contemplative reflection on the nature of memory,
on the nature of traces of the journeys of humanity,

of the journeys undertaken by those unknown yet so influential
people from the Caribbean Islands, from Africa, from Asia, from so many places

voices from a place, from a time,

shaping this island, this island we have made ours as well,
adding our invisible yet still powerful monuments to its history...

Director and writer: John Akomfrah

Original score: Trevor Mathison

Music: the voices of Wagner, Schubert, the Gundecha Brothers, Leontyne Price, and others...

There are films which are “consumed”, there are films which are “savoured”. If you are one of those people who likes the first and dislike the second, The Nine Muses is not for you. If you are one of those who likes the intensity of flavour in your cinema, The Nine Muses is for you.

Those images... traces of history already recorded in my memory...

Official Selection Orrizonti, Venice Film Festival 2010,

London Film Festival 2010, Sundance Film Festival 2011, Sheffield Documentary Film Festival 2011

UK Release date: October 2011

Showing in Selected Cinemas in London and around the country

“I am obsessed with archival material: those ghostly traces of lived moments, those pariah images and sounds that now occupy a unique space somewhere between history and myth… How does one begin to say something new about a story everyone claims to know? … what considerations should govern how one constructs a “historical fiction” about events and lives that have been profoundly shaped by what the St Lucian poet Derek Walcott called, “the absence of ruins”? Lives without monuments, without the ‘official’ signature of recognition and interest.

This film is my attempt to suggest what some of those “ruins” might look like, a desire to look into that dark mirror of one’s own past in search of images, ideas, writers and music with which to construct such a monument.”

John Akomfrah

Distributed by New Wave Films

The UK Riots and their effect on UK independent film distribution

The following is a press release by Third Window Films:

Recently London and many other cities in the UK were hit by some of the worst riots in history, leaving 5 people dead, shops destroyed, mass-looting and hundreds of thousands of lives affected.

During these riots the Sony warehouse in Enfield was looted and burnt down. This warehouse was the main stockist for the majority of small to medium sized film and music distribution labels (along with some of the majors) in the UK. Third Window Films, along with Terracotta Distribution, Arrow Films, Network, Peccadillo Pictures, Dogwoof, BFI, Eureka and many more had most, if not all of their stock destroyed. We lost nearly 20,000 units of stock.

This is an undoubted tragedy and nobody is sure yet how this will affect the long-term situation for us and many of these companies, though what we can try to explain is that there will be a massive impact on the short term. While our stock was insured, it was only the number of units destroyed and units which will be replaced in terms of stock credit with Sony. Unfortunately with Sony's minimum top up of 500 units (luckily they've changed from the 1000 as previously required) we will need to pay for all the difference in units replicated against credit. For example as we had more than 10 films which had under 500 units of stock in at the time, we need to pay the difference for all stock below 500 to top it up to the minimum number. While this may only equate to around 3,000-4,000 units, it still means paying that amount at a time when we won't have been generating sales, which is another major problem with the situation...

This other major problem is that with this affecting so many companies, and right leading to the main Q4 campaigns, all other companies that are larger (we are one of the smallest in the UK) will have priority in having their titles replicated and put back into circulation. We should get a couple of our larger titles such as Confessions back into circulation quickly, but it may take a couple months before our catalogue titles get back into circulation, and with no units available for sale anywhere (Amazon is nearly sold out of all films across our whole catalogue) we will lose a massive chunk of our earnings over the next few months. Unfortunately as such a small company we don't have business interruption insurance which covers companies in the event of such situations. Ironically the larger companies have such insurance and yet their stock will be replicated first despite the fact they're covered for the eventual losses, so this will really hit the smaller companies the hardest (as is usually the case).

We will endeavor to get through this situation and plan on keeping our release schedule of 2011 on track. 'Sawako Decides' and 'Quirky Guys and Gals' will still be out October 3rd, though 'Underwater Love' has been moved to November 21st. We can't really plan too far into the future as we're really unsure right now as to how bad this will affect us.

What we ask of you, our fans, is to get the word out about us and other small niche labels like Terracotta Distribution, Arrow Films, Network, etc and get people interested in supporting independent cinema through these hard times. We don't have any new stock to send to stores, but there are still a few copies of our films on places like Amazon, Play.com and in high-street stores such as HMV and Fopp, so if there was a title you were thinking about picking up, please go out and buy it now so that we can convince stores that ours are worth restocking sooner rather than later. Alternately, we are trying to make many of our titles available to view online via MUBI so if you want to spread the word through that you can legally watch our titles through your PC or Playstation. 

Thanks for your support and we'll try hard to get through this!

What War May Bring: Elegiac! Exuberant! Exhilarating!

Veteran French film maker Claude Lelouch's song to life, just loved it!

While Ces amours-là may be his latest offering, it could well be his first, as it lays and clarifies - while not being really autobiographical, Lelouch confesses that he made it with fragments of reality, of memories, of life he has either witnessed or been a protagonist, such as the kiss filmed in the last scene - the foundations of many of his films such as that 1966 classic Un Homme et Une Femme. What War May Bring is an homage not only to 50 years of making romantic films, but to cinema itself and, last but not least, to people's endurance to the harshness and tribulations of war.

A Fellinesque aura to it, Ces amours-là is a story across three generations of a family, with a war thrown into it. As such, it is not really a war film, but war plays a big part in it, those scenes being both spectacular, humorous in parts, but always with a very tender eye cast on them. It charts the turbulent story of Ilva Lemoine (Audrey Dana), daughter of an Italian porn actress and prostitute and a cinematographer killed in the trenches of WW1, a woman whose only sin was to fall too easily in love, and to survive, in a war torn Europe. We first see her in the dock accused of murder, her pianist turned attorney and Auschwitz survivor's (Laurent Couson) spirited defence leading to her acquittal.

We then see her with a law student (Raphaël), her first and last lover, while going to plead to a cabaret owner turned German officer (Samuel Labarthe) in the Paris of 1942 for the life of her stepfather (Dominique Pinon, of Micmacs, Alien: Resurrection, The City of Lost Children, Delicatessen), a projectionist at the Eden Palace who has been condemned to be shot the following day at dawn together with 19 others as a reprisal for the murder of two SS officers in a Metro station. What she did not know is, by doing so, she actually condemned him to death anyway, as the Resistance thought he had grassed on them after his miraculous release.

After the Allies enter into Paris, in a storyline reminiscent of the Truffaut of Jules et Jim, she fell for two American GIs, Bob (Jacky Ido), a black former boxer who saved the live of Jim Singer (Gilles Lemaire) as they were parachuted into Normandy. Jim is a rich boy, heir to the Singer fortune, turned war photographer. When working as a usherette in the cinema, she was confronted by a vindictive mob accusing her of being a collaborator, being saved in the subsequent melee by Bob and Jim. She attempts to rebuild her life, moving to America with Jim, but the guilt about Bob's death in the Eastern European front leads to its failure.

Ces amours-là ends as it began, two generations of the family, an elderly Ilva (veteran and marvellous actress Anouk Aimée) and her daughter, a brilliant lawyer herself, watching Ilva's son direct the first film score he has composed, the two strands of the family, music and the law being reproduced. If anything, the film could be criticized by glossing over the darker side of guilt.

Lelouch has been, is, the eternal optimist of French cinema, Ces amours-là is no exception. It is an exuberant, exhilarating and elegiac homage to the romance of cinema, to music, to our capacity to endure tragedy, with a Fellinesque touch to it. A very Gallic affair, indeed.

Director: Claude Lelouch
Writers: Claude Lelouch, Pierre Uytterhoeven
Cast: Audrey Dana, Dominique Pinon, Jacky Ido, Gilles Lemaire, Samuel Labarthe, Raphaël, Anouk Aimée,


DVD & Blu-ray to be released in the UK on May 2nd, 2011

To buy or order at Amazon please click HERE


Distributed by Revolver Entertainment

Rebecca Hall and Mary Wesley's The Camomile Lawn

This morning I finished re-reading Mary Wesley's The Camomile Lawn, originally published in 1984. Mary Wesley knew how to tell a  story, a story of unfulfilled love and loss, a story of hope, and the glory of life. This is a story about a funeral in Cornwall of a Jewish violinist, a refugee from Nazi Germany. Funerals mean reminiscences. About the break of the war, the blitz, the loss of innocence, the need to have another human body next to yours, whoever that body was, because tomorrow could evaporate in the dust and fire of the next bomb.

Mary Wesley have told me more about the daily life during the blitz in London than all the other books and news footage from that time.

A 9 year old Rebecca Hall, who is currently in the cinemas in Please Give, played the part of Sophie, the beautiful Eurasian child with the slanted eyes and the enigmatic face, in the 1992 TV series of the book, directed by Rebecca's father, Sir Peter Hall.

WERNER HERZOG'S BAD LIEUTENANT PORT OF CALL: NEW ORLEANS

A kind of review

I was facing a film maker who does not only know how to tell a story, but also who knows how to tell that story beautifully. From the first scene of Port of Call: New Orleans I knew I was viewing something special: a cinematic jewel.

Herzog moves with complete fluidity and mastery of his medium from the darkest of dark film noir, exploring not only the inner recesses of human consciousness, but also the underbelly of an American Dream where broken glass lays underneath the streets paved with gold, to comedy and parody. A parody of the main character, the bad cop, the bad lieutenant, a deeply hero stumbling from shot to shot of whatever he can get, some times farcically. This film is also a parody of its genre, of noir thrillers: telling is not only the language of its characters, but also the scene where the bad cop asks to shoot again at a baddy already dead because he can see his soul dancing.

Post Katrina New Orleans is portrayed in all its luscious rusting decadence and dereliction, the cinematography being superb in conveying a feeling of impending doom, the film being a visual feast, pure and playful visual poetry. I can tell that not only Werner Herzog but also Nicolas Cage had loads of fun crafting Bad Lieutenant, regardless of the opinions of reviewers and the dons of film studies. Nicolas Cage’s performance as the bad cop is just magnificent in his portrayal of not only an obsessed man, a walking receptacle of drugs coming out of his eyeballs, but also in the mannerisms of a character played by Harvey Keitel in the original Abel Ferrara’s  movie.

And I have done it, I have done what Herzog thought what we would do, refer his take on the character to that of the earlier film. The word has spoken, damnation on me!

Jane Eyre

I am re-reading Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, as Cary Fukunaga's take on it should be released sometime in 2011. Mia Wasikowska (Alice in Alice in Wonderland) as Jane, with some fantastic actors such as Jamie Bell, Judi Dench, Michael Fassbender, Sophie Ward, and many others. Is Mia too pretty to play the part of plain Jane? Some people would say, yes. I think that Mia has a kind of flexible beauty, she can still be beautiful and plain.

Re-reading the book, it is clear to me that, whilst  Charlotte Brontë defines Jane as "... you were no beauty as a child", that is not the same that saying she was ugly. The regime of the educational establishment were she grew up meant that her manner, appearance and clothing were worked out to be plain. However, I disagree with the common assumption that she was 'plain Jane', she was not. Canons of beauty change over time, indeed in the past few years they have moved here in Britain. The book was written in the first half of the 19th century, Jane's plainness was defined within the idea of beauty of that time. Would she be considered plain nowadays?

I originally read the book in a Spanish translation some forty years ago. I understand that filming has just finished, or nearly, in Yorkshire. I am looking forward to it. Fukunaga's Sin Nombre was a brilliant film.

For a  just released still from the film please follow the link:

http://mia-wasikowska.net/2010-05-14/update_ID=428

See also USA TODAY for more information:
http://www.usatoday.com/life/movies/news/2010-05-14-brontes14_ST_N.htm

Post updated on May 16th, 2010.

Melancholia, Andi Engel and Artificial Eye

Leafing last night through an old Sight & Sound magazine (Autumn 1989)I found throughout the series of improvement works done in my flat, I came across to a film that Andi Engel (a German expatriate, one of the founders of Artificial Eye) made in 1989, with support from the British Film Institute. It seems to have been a reflection on the ideology of the 60s and 70s, when violence was seen as a legitimate means of achieving political or moral ends. It charts the story of a German expatriate living in London, and the murder of a former Chilean torturer visiting England.

What would have been the end of "Casablanca" if...

What would have been the end of Casablanca if the Lisbon plane had been grounded?

The freedom of the sky

How long will be until the first novel or film comes out based on the days (weeks, months?) that the skies of Europe were free of planes? When bird song could be heard in the South of London? What shape will they take? Romantic, disaster, utopian, dystopian, post-cataclysm, hopeful?

The Icelandic volcanic eruption clearly shows the fragility of our modern world. Gaia's warning?

Down with the Oscars!!!!

It's about time that the cinematic supremacy of the Oscars should be challenged. After all, this is not a ceremony rewarding films, but a ceremony rewarding American films, with the odd British one thrown in sometimes. This, year I was bitterly disappointed that Carey Mulligan's powerful performance as Jenny in "An Education" led to nowhere. On the plus side, this year the Oscars made history by giving the award to a woman as Best Director, it was about time, anyway. However, masterpieces such as The White Ribbon, A Prophet were relegated to that second class category of film not in the English language. Do that mean that only those people who have English as their first language can make good films? Almost any other film festival in the world celebrates film in any language, from anywhere in the world.

It is time that the American realize that they do not longer are the only people making good films in this times. After all, film was not an American invention, although they would believe it is, as they are so adept in rewriting history.

The Oscars is no more than a cultural imperialist relic which should be confined to the pit of history.

Down with the Oscars!!!!
Down with the Hollywood crap!!!!!

My first and only crush in a celebrity actress...

When Whistle Down the Wind came out back in the early sixties, I fell in love, desperately in love, with its young actress Hayley Mills. I was then a young boy myself, probably about the same age than Hayley, but separated by half the world and a language. I was then still living on a land that shakes... The film stayed in my mind for years, until BBC2 screened a few years ago and, presto, I got my video copy of it. I watched it again last night, my boyhood's crush on Hayley still vividly present in me, as the autographed photos she sent me over the next few years (two, actually), and a letter from her agent thanking me after I pointed out (I've been all my life a pain in the neck) that tigers do not exist in Southamerica, as shown In Search of the Castaways, just to find out that in the original English copy of the film there no reference to tigers, but to a jaguar (a case of the wrong translation in the subtitles in the Spanish language print). Still, I got the photos, which I kept for years. They were left back in Chile when I came to England... together with my childhood...

Watch the first ever "Alice in Wonderland" on line!

"Alice in Wonderland (1903), the first-ever film version of Lewis Carroll's tale, has recently been restored by the BFI National Archive and premiered at a celebration of the history of the classic story at the British Library." - BFI

Follow the link to watch it:

http://www.bfi.org.uk/nftva/work/alice.html?utm_source=20100302alice&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20100302alice

30 films from the noughties

30 films from the noughties that impressed me.

• A Ma Soeur
• Antichrist
• Banishment, The
• Battle in Heaven
• Believer, The
• Blackboards
• City of God
• Downfall
• Ghost World
• Hard Candy
• Inland Empire
• Innocence
• London to Brighton
• Machuca
• Man Who Wasn't There, The
• Niña Santa, La
• No Man's Land
• Of Time and the City
• Pan's Labyrinth
• Rabbit Proof Fence
• Red Road
• Russian Ark
• Silence of Lorna, The
• Spirited Away
• Time Regained
• Waltz with Bashir
• Whale Rider
• White Ribbon, The
• Wind That Shakes The Barley, The
• You the Living

Compiling this list made me realize how many films I missed during the last decade, although I intend to put a remedy to it. "35 Shots of Rum" is next in my films to view list, for example. Also, this is not a list of the best films I have seen, but a list of those who left a long lasting impression in me, in spite of some of them being flawed ("The Believer" is one of those). There are also many films which nearly made it.

In a way, this list was compiled in the mode of "Sight & Sound".

My 10 favourites films of 2009

As we are in that time of the year, here are my 10 preferred films of 2009. This list includes the films I have seen, there are many which I did not see such as "The Hurt Locker" and others).

1. The White Ribbon
1. Let the Right One In
2. Tony Manero
3. In the City of Sylvya
4. The Beaches of Agnès
5. Delta
6. The Silence of Lorna
7. Antichrist
8. Waltz with Bashir
9. Bright Star

My list of my 10 preferred films of the past decade to come.

Carey Mulligan in "An Education"

One of the mysteries of contemporary British cinema is why we don't see more of Carey Mulligan in the big screen, in serious roles that actually require acting. She can act with every cell of her body. "An Education" is one of those films that proves that she has a promising career in front of her, although she may still fall on the side if she tries to be a "star".

The state of foreign language films in Britain

"Andi Engel of Artificial eye is particularly critical of contemporary audience taste: 'The problem is not really to do with the actual number of films imported, but that those which are imported don't seem to be reaching audiences. When we started, we could bring in a film like Marguerite Duras' India Song and people would come to see it - not in vast numbers, I admit, but enough to cover our costs. If we showed a Duras film now, I'm convinced that many fewer people would come (...) People seem to have lost their curiosity about foreign films. Unless a film is really hyped by the press, what I call the Jean de Florette syndrome, they just don't want to know.'

(...)

Andi Engel is particularly scathing about the effects of what he sees as a critical bias towards Hollywood, perhaps encouraged by the way film studies have developed over the last twenty years. This is obviously most apparent in the popular press, though it also finds its critical and academic echo in other quarters. 'The term"art cinema" has become a dirty word to some people, something to be dismissed as bourgeois rubbish. Anything which is not genre cinema must be automatically bad-either it's entertaining or it's boring, there's nothing in between. It is not so much that people aren't interested in cinema, or prepared to take it seriously; it's that they are only interested in certain kinds of cinema and lack any cinematic curiosity. It's like going into a library and deciding you will only ever look at one part of it. It doesn't mean that you can't read; it means that you are not prepared to consider everything there is on offer, even out of curiosity. I find that attitude frightening.'"

What it is interesting in these quotations, apart from its content, is that they were written in 1989 (Sight & Sound - Autumn 1989).

Is there a future for arthouse cinema in Hull?

After the recent transfer of Hull Screen to Reel Cinemas, it looks like that purely commercial considerations will be the defining criteria for the programming of the cinema. Therefore all the gems that we used to enjoy are going to disappear from our city to be replaced basically by "arthouse blockbusters", if that definition were not an oxymoron. In other words, sub-titled blockbusters. yes, they may be very well made, excellent acting and cinematography. However, still blockbusters made to entertain. It is clear to me that the new Hull Screen fails the Tarkovsky test.

This also raises the question of what an arthouse film is?