Prologue: Finding Work
Berlinale, like several other international film festivals, has a "market" component to the festivities separate from the regular, film-going experience, an entire other beast where a multitude of producers, distributors, sales agents and others gather to meet and make business. At such "market festivals" there can be a sickening intimacy between the grounded, simple pleasure of watching a movie as an audience member and the cut-throat bustle and shill of film (and festivals) as a vertiginously complicated business interest and commerce. We all know (or at least we should) that film isn't just an art but an industry, and therefore a business. But the results of the actual production of something—the films themselves—seem terribly distant when a festival submerges one not in the "work" of filmmaking, but the moneymaking and marketing of filmmaking, a distressingly abstracted negotiation of chits, widgets, icons and hucksterism.
Stepping out...
Berlinale, like several other international film festivals, has a "market" component to the festivities separate from the regular, film-going experience, an entire other beast where a multitude of producers, distributors, sales agents and others gather to meet and make business. At such "market festivals" there can be a sickening intimacy between the grounded, simple pleasure of watching a movie as an audience member and the cut-throat bustle and shill of film (and festivals) as a vertiginously complicated business interest and commerce. We all know (or at least we should) that film isn't just an art but an industry, and therefore a business. But the results of the actual production of something—the films themselves—seem terribly distant when a festival submerges one not in the "work" of filmmaking, but the moneymaking and marketing of filmmaking, a distressingly abstracted negotiation of chits, widgets, icons and hucksterism.
Stepping out...
- 3/1/2011
- MUBI
The 11th Tokyo Filmex opened with Apitchatpong Weerasethakul’s beguiling Uncle Boonmee, Who Can Recall His Past Lives (pictured left). The opening film set the tenor of the week to come — experimental, personal, willing to take chances. At the opening ceremony festival director Kanako Hayashi gave a shout out to the man who pretty much put Japanese film on the Western critical map, Donald Richie. All eyes in the audience turned toward the frail, but unbowed, man who graciously acknowledged the accolades. Over the last year the 86-year old Richie has been conspicuously absent from the film scene that he helped create, floored by age and illness. The fact that he appeared almost daily during the festival to watch films made the film-going experience for all a bit more profound. And when Abbas Kiarostami, who showed up for the Japanese premiere of Certified Copy, gave his kudos to Mr. Richie,...
- 2/27/2011
- by Nicholas Vroman
- Filmmaker Magazine - Blog
"Actor Ryo Ikebe died of sepsis at a Tokyo hospital on October 8," reports Tokyograph News. "He was 92."
For Variety, Mark Schilling notes that Ikebe originally intended to become a director for the Toho studio. "His soft-featured, city-bred good looks drew the attention of Toho helmer Yasujiro Shimazu, who cast Ikebe in the 1941 pic Fighting Fish (Togyo)." Following World War II, "Ikebe moved from young leading man roles to a wider range of parts, such as the elite bureaucrat who falls into self-destructive dissipation in Minoru Shibuya's Modern Man (Gendaijin, 1952) and the cheating businessman in a troubled marriage in Yasujiro Ozu's Early Spring (Soshun, 1956)." He then rode the Japanese New Wave, "starring as an ex-con who takes up with a fast-living younger women in Masahiro Shinoda's seminal gangster pic Pale Flower (Kawaita Hana, 1964)," which, of course, has just screened in the Shinoda Masterworks series at this year's New York Film Festival.
For Variety, Mark Schilling notes that Ikebe originally intended to become a director for the Toho studio. "His soft-featured, city-bred good looks drew the attention of Toho helmer Yasujiro Shimazu, who cast Ikebe in the 1941 pic Fighting Fish (Togyo)." Following World War II, "Ikebe moved from young leading man roles to a wider range of parts, such as the elite bureaucrat who falls into self-destructive dissipation in Minoru Shibuya's Modern Man (Gendaijin, 1952) and the cheating businessman in a troubled marriage in Yasujiro Ozu's Early Spring (Soshun, 1956)." He then rode the Japanese New Wave, "starring as an ex-con who takes up with a fast-living younger women in Masahiro Shinoda's seminal gangster pic Pale Flower (Kawaita Hana, 1964)," which, of course, has just screened in the Shinoda Masterworks series at this year's New York Film Festival.
- 10/13/2010
- MUBI
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