Alright, you eager Summer movie blockbuster fans, cool your jets. There will be plenty of fast cars, fist fights, and superheroes headed your way in the next couple of months. For now, we can settle down for a bit of culture, a deep dive into high art. Oh, but don’t be fooled by the title, this isn’t a literal translation of the centuries-old Bizet opera. Nor is it the 50’s revamp that starred the much-missed Harry Belafonte. True, there’s a song or two, but the main mode of communication, aside from the dialogue, is dance. No tutus are seen, as it’s a gritty tale of murder of desire along the much-in-the-news Southern border involving a vet named Aidan on the US side, and on the other side, a sultry young beauty on the run named Carmen.
And the opening scenes are set on her side, near...
And the opening scenes are set on her side, near...
- 5/12/2023
- by Jim Batts
- WeAreMovieGeeks.com
“Carmen” didn’t begin life as an opera: French Romantic writer Prosper Mérimée conceived this tale of Spanish passion and tragic jealousy in 1845, thirty years before his compatriot Georges Bizet brought it into its best-known, aria-rich form. But it’s a story that thrives on operatic delivery, hinging on emotions so large and loud they beg to be sung at the top of one’s lungs. That makes it the opera that filmmakers can’t leave alone, even as they tend to switch out the music: Its screen interpretations range from Otto Preminger’s Broadway-rooted “Carmen Jones” to Jean-Luc Godard’s daring, Beethoven-infused “First Name: Carmen” to Robert Townsend’s Beyoncé-starring “Carmen: A Hip-Hopera.” With the plainly titled “Carmen,” ballet star and first-time feature director Benjamin Millepied joins that club, mostly eschewing song in an attempt to conjure the material’s intensity through dance. He is only intermittently successful.
- 4/21/2023
- by Guy Lodge
- Variety Film + TV
Georges Bizet has been revered as one of the world’s most influential composers of all time.
His works have had a lasting impact on the music world, with some of his compositions, such as “Carmen,” remaining beloved classics to this day. Bizet’s works have a unique and timeless quality to them that make them stand out from other composers.
This article will explore the life and works of Georges Bizet and examine why his music has stood the test of time. We will look at some defining features of his works and discuss how he combined elements from different musical traditions to create music that continues to inspire new generations.
We will also explore how Bizet’s musical genius influenced other composers and how it has been utilized in film and theater productions, making him an iconic figure in classical music.
Introduction to Georges Bizet’s Life and...
His works have had a lasting impact on the music world, with some of his compositions, such as “Carmen,” remaining beloved classics to this day. Bizet’s works have a unique and timeless quality to them that make them stand out from other composers.
This article will explore the life and works of Georges Bizet and examine why his music has stood the test of time. We will look at some defining features of his works and discuss how he combined elements from different musical traditions to create music that continues to inspire new generations.
We will also explore how Bizet’s musical genius influenced other composers and how it has been utilized in film and theater productions, making him an iconic figure in classical music.
Introduction to Georges Bizet’s Life and...
- 3/14/2023
- by Music Martin Cid Magazine
- Martin Cid Music
Miami Dade College’s Miami Film Festival marks its 40th edition, running March 3-12, with a full-blown return to the in-person festival experience with a sidebar of only 10 titles available online.
“We’re celebrating the human connection and getting back into cinemas again,” says programming head Lauren Cohen who in her first year flying solo at the helm, is putting her personal stamp on the festival with female-centric topics dominating the Master Classes.
“It’s our 40th anniversary, which is such a milestone for us, we want it to be bigger and better than ever,” she continues.
Opening with Ray Romano’s directorial debut “Somewhere in Queens” and wrapping with Stephen Frears’ “The Lost King,” this edition features a dozen world premieres, three North American premieres, eight U.S. premieres and 14 East Coast premieres.
Given Miami’s allure and reputation as a music capital, a serendipitous number of this year...
“We’re celebrating the human connection and getting back into cinemas again,” says programming head Lauren Cohen who in her first year flying solo at the helm, is putting her personal stamp on the festival with female-centric topics dominating the Master Classes.
“It’s our 40th anniversary, which is such a milestone for us, we want it to be bigger and better than ever,” she continues.
Opening with Ray Romano’s directorial debut “Somewhere in Queens” and wrapping with Stephen Frears’ “The Lost King,” this edition features a dozen world premieres, three North American premieres, eight U.S. premieres and 14 East Coast premieres.
Given Miami’s allure and reputation as a music capital, a serendipitous number of this year...
- 3/3/2023
- by Anna Marie de la Fuente
- Variety Film + TV
By Abe Friedtanzer
There have been many films recently about young women crossing the border from Mexico to the United States and coming across someone whose attitude towards illegal immigrants softens considerably after the chance meeting. But Carmen is something different entirely, an update of much older material, based on a Seville-set novella and opera from the 1800s by Prosper Mérimée. This time the setting is present day in surroundings that will be more familiar to audiences but just as enchanting…...
There have been many films recently about young women crossing the border from Mexico to the United States and coming across someone whose attitude towards illegal immigrants softens considerably after the chance meeting. But Carmen is something different entirely, an update of much older material, based on a Seville-set novella and opera from the 1800s by Prosper Mérimée. This time the setting is present day in surroundings that will be more familiar to audiences but just as enchanting…...
- 9/13/2022
- by Abe Friedtanzer
- FilmExperience
“Carmen” is many things: a novella (by Prosper Mérimée) inspired by a Pushkin poem (“The Gypsies”); a classic Bizet opera inspired by that novella; an archetype wrought by said opera of the sexy, fearless and feared woman; and countless interpreted films, from Cecil B. DeMille’s silent saga to Otto Preminger’s adaptation of the all-Black musical to Carlos Saura’s flamenco masterpiece.
Now comes what French-born choreographer and first-time feature director Benjamin Millepied (he who choreographed “Black Swan”) is calling his “Carmen” from a parallel universe, an original modern-day drama with music and dance set on the U.S./Mexico border, with its same-named protagonist reimagined as a headstrong Mexican immigrant fleeing violence, seeking sanctuary, falling for an American Marine and — what else? — finding herself.
Mostly, though, Millepied’s debut — premiering at the Toronto Film Festival and featuring rising star Melissa Barrera (in the title role) and Irish actor...
Now comes what French-born choreographer and first-time feature director Benjamin Millepied (he who choreographed “Black Swan”) is calling his “Carmen” from a parallel universe, an original modern-day drama with music and dance set on the U.S./Mexico border, with its same-named protagonist reimagined as a headstrong Mexican immigrant fleeing violence, seeking sanctuary, falling for an American Marine and — what else? — finding herself.
Mostly, though, Millepied’s debut — premiering at the Toronto Film Festival and featuring rising star Melissa Barrera (in the title role) and Irish actor...
- 9/11/2022
- by Robert Abele
- The Wrap
Located somewhere between a classic opera, a modern dance piece, and a deadly fever dream — between the timeless beauty of ancient myth and the modern nightmare of America’s current immigration policies — Benjamin Millepied’s “Carmen” is stretched across a few too many borders to ever feel like it’s standing on solid ground. And yet, (Nicolas Britell) for the kind of aggressively unclassifiable movie that would never exist if not for these two artists reaching beyond their disciplines to create it themselves.
Loosely inspired by Georges Bizet’s 1875 opera of the same name — so loosely, in fact, that Millepied thinks of his film as less of a re-telling or adaptation than he does a version of Bizet’s tragedy from a parallel universe — this “Carmen” moves the action from the southern tip of Spain to the northern cusp of Mexico, pares the source material’s busy story down to the brink of abstraction,...
Loosely inspired by Georges Bizet’s 1875 opera of the same name — so loosely, in fact, that Millepied thinks of his film as less of a re-telling or adaptation than he does a version of Bizet’s tragedy from a parallel universe — this “Carmen” moves the action from the southern tip of Spain to the northern cusp of Mexico, pares the source material’s busy story down to the brink of abstraction,...
- 9/11/2022
- by David Ehrlich
- Indiewire
Didier Brunner – producer of “The Triplets of Belleville,” “The Secret of Kells” and “Ernest and Celestine” – is readying his next production, ’Prends Garde à toi!,’ an adaptation of the ‘Carmen’ story led by one of France’s freest creative spirits: Sébastien Laudenbach.
Laudenbach’s feature debut, “The Girl Without Hands,” an adaptation of a Brothers Grimm fairy tale, was acquired by Gkids for North American distribution. It also took Annecy’s 2016 Jury Prize. He is now directing his second animated feature, “Chicken for Linda!”
“Prends Garde à toi!” is inspired by both Prosper Mérimée’s 1845 novella and Georges Bizet’s 1875 opera, the title (literally “Beware!”) being a famous repeated warning from Carmen’s entrance aria in the opera.
Laudenbach’s third feature, the 2D animated feature is set up at Paris-based Folivari, the production company founded by Didier and son Damien Brunner in 2014, which has seen rapid success with 26-part...
Laudenbach’s feature debut, “The Girl Without Hands,” an adaptation of a Brothers Grimm fairy tale, was acquired by Gkids for North American distribution. It also took Annecy’s 2016 Jury Prize. He is now directing his second animated feature, “Chicken for Linda!”
“Prends Garde à toi!” is inspired by both Prosper Mérimée’s 1845 novella and Georges Bizet’s 1875 opera, the title (literally “Beware!”) being a famous repeated warning from Carmen’s entrance aria in the opera.
Laudenbach’s third feature, the 2D animated feature is set up at Paris-based Folivari, the production company founded by Didier and son Damien Brunner in 2014, which has seen rapid success with 26-part...
- 6/15/2021
- by John Hopewell
- Variety Film + TV
Close-Up is a column that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. The retrospective The Many Sins of Walerian Borowczyk is showing February 12 - June 18, 2017 in the United States and in many other countries around the world.As the reverberation of horses fervently neighing and clomping their hooves begins to permeate the opening credit soundtrack of The Beast, one may recall the similarly orchestrated donkey brays that introduce Robert Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar (1966). Or, given its title, and the very basic concept of a young woman becoming enamored with an savage creature, one may be tempted to compare this 1975 feature to the many variations of Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve’s classic fairy tale, La belle et la bête. One would be more than a little confounded, however, by making either inadequate association. If Walerian Borowczyk’s semi-porn-semi-art-semi-monster movie bears any resemblance to another film or story, it would be...
- 3/21/2017
- MUBI
The eight-film series This Is Softcore: The Art Cinema Erotica of Radley Metzger opens today at New York's Film Society of Lincoln Center with Carmen, Baby (1967), Metzger's "take on Prosper Mérimée’s 19th-century novella that inspired the Bizet opera Carmen," as Stephen Holden notes in the New York Times. Plus: Melissa Anderson in the Voice on Camille 2000 (1969), Maitland McDonagh in Film Comment on Score (1973), Steve Macfarlane's interview with the 85-year-old director for Slant, an overview of the oeuvre from Dennis Harvey in Keyframe and Adrian Curry's collection posters for Metzger's films in the Notebook. » - David Hudson...
- 8/7/2014
- Fandor: Keyframe
The eight-film series This Is Softcore: The Art Cinema Erotica of Radley Metzger opens today at New York's Film Society of Lincoln Center with Carmen, Baby (1967), Metzger's "take on Prosper Mérimée’s 19th-century novella that inspired the Bizet opera Carmen," as Stephen Holden notes in the New York Times. Plus: Melissa Anderson in the Voice on Camille 2000 (1969), Maitland McDonagh in Film Comment on Score (1973), Steve Macfarlane's interview with the 85-year-old director for Slant, an overview of the oeuvre from Dennis Harvey in Keyframe and Adrian Curry's collection posters for Metzger's films in the Notebook. » - David Hudson...
- 8/7/2014
- Keyframe
I first came to know of Radley Metzger through his posters, which bears out what the 85-year-old erstwhile king of high-class erotica told me recently, that “my respect for poster design came from my realization that more people would see my posters—for a longer period—than would see my films.” That should be rectified somewhat next week when the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York embarks on a week-long, 8-film retrospective of Metzger’s legendary, ground-breaking “Art Cinema Erotica.”
The poster that first caught my eye was for a 1975 film directed by one Henry Paris. The film was the arrestingly titled The Opening of Misty Beethoven and I was struck by its combination of the austere and the voluptuous: its clean, monochrome simplicity, its beautifully balanced composition, and its nice use of the blocky serif typeface Clarendon, a favorite of mine. That juxtaposed with the lead-off quote...
The poster that first caught my eye was for a 1975 film directed by one Henry Paris. The film was the arrestingly titled The Opening of Misty Beethoven and I was struck by its combination of the austere and the voluptuous: its clean, monochrome simplicity, its beautifully balanced composition, and its nice use of the blocky serif typeface Clarendon, a favorite of mine. That juxtaposed with the lead-off quote...
- 8/2/2014
- by Adrian Curry
- MUBI
Montiel movies: From the blockbuster La Violetera to new versions of Carmen and Camille (Please check out the previous post: "Legendary Spanish Star Dead at 85."] Next in line for the sensual, husky-voice performer was a second tear-jerking hit: Luis César Amadori's La Violetera ("The Violet Peddler," 1958), for which Montiel is supposed to have earned $1 million dollars. In this romantic musical melodrama, she plays Soledad Moreno, a flower seller in the Madrid of the early 1900s, who falls in passionately love with an aristocrat played by Italian star Raf Vallone. As to be expected, class issues arise. Soledad flees for France, where she becomes (surprise!) a singing sensation. What follows includes tears, despair, a deadly iceberg (heard of the Titanic?), psychological and physiological trauma, and, finally, eternal love. Pictured above: A very sexy Montiel in a risque Gina Lollobrigida-like pose. “La violetera was even bigger than El último cuplé,...
- 4/10/2013
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
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