The sublime and the mundane run hand-in-hand in Birdsong, Albert Serra’s stunningly photographed, intensely contemplative re-telling of the biblical journey of the Magi. Much of the sublimity derives from the film’s visuals, superbly tactile black-and-white images alive to the textures of the rocky landscape, which, along with the precise gradations of lighting (each scene seems shot at the one exact moment of day when its creation was possible) and the rustling of wind on the soundtrack, imbues the barren land with a richness of meaning commensurate with the Magi’s divine mission.

As the three men make their way across the terrain, Serra devotes huge chunks of time to the simple act of walking, fixing his camera at a distance from the men, turning their routine movements into acts worth contemplating. Much of the film’s sense of the mundane derives from the men themselves, three markedly unglamorous individuals (two are quite fat, one is very old) who bicker calmly, but these inelegant creatures also speak with wonder of angels and, like Serra’s camera, express their admiration for the latent mysteries of the everyday.

Critical comparisons between the Magi and Beckett’s tramps are not inapt, but Serra’s men evince a more subdued clownishness. In one scene, they bed down under a shade three, then complain unemphatically about the discomforts of their relative positioning, all the while barely moving. The scene’s funny, but the humor derives from such minute visual details – deliberately unemphasized in the fixed, overhead shot – as the way one of the men’s faces puffs up as he breathes. Earlier, a mesmerizing bit of underwater photography shot from below the Magi as they pull a boat out into the water starts as a bit of low comedy when one of the overweight men flops around uncouthly in front of the camera before the scene gives way to an unmixed beauty and the exact physicality of the bodies no longer marks the principal point of emphasis.

Finally, the film’s sublime spiritual climax – the men arrive in a Bethlehem so abstracted that it’s constituted by a single stone structure, then prostrate themselves at Mary’s feet, the scene becoming a virtual still while the film’s one bit of non-diegetic music, the piercing strings of the title song (“El Cant del Ocells”) rip through the soundtrack – is immediately followed by the movie’s most deflationary image – an overhead shot of the Magi, stripped to the waist, bathing in a fetid water trough. Birdsong rises to the divine on the quality of its imagery, but it always grounds its spiritual aspirations in an acceptance of the resolutely mundane. Through its long static takes and, with a sole exception, its lack of significant event, the film gives the audience ample freedom to register both sides of the equation, the striving for sublimity and the embrace of the everyday, each of which derive their power from the presence of the other.

An interview with Albert Serra

First  Don  Quichotte  in  Catalan, and now a peculiar version of the Adoration of the  Three  Kings.  How  do you describe your cinema?
I would  say  that  its  form  is  lyrical and  sophisticated,  but  its  heart  is very down to earth.

Why  do  you  twist  myths  in such  a  way?  Is  it  through  non- conformism? Revolt? Research?
I don’t twist anything. The myths are just starting points for making films which are  independent  from  them. The  faithfulness of  the  relationship that  the  images  maintain  with the  myth  as  we  know  it  in  our imaginations matters little to me.

Apart  from  its  subjects, your  cinema  presents  other particularities, notably technical: filming  in  video  or  with  non-professional  actors.  Why  these choices?
Because  it’s  easier  and  more amusing:  we  shoot  in  remote exteriors,  with  actor  friends  and Catalan-speaking  technicians,  like me,  without  undergoing  hours  of waiting,  without  the  limits  of  a script.  Saying  it  briefly,  without obligations…

Do  you  consider  yourself  as a  cinephile?  What  are  your inspirations?
Yes,  I  consider  myself  as  a cinephile,  even  if  I’ve  been  more influenced  by  life  itself,  literature, and  film  criticism.  I  find  cinema superficial.

Are you already thinking of your next film?
Yes,  unfortunately…  It’s my  job,  I don’t  have  a  choice. Of  course,  if one  day  I  have  enough money  to keep afloat without working, I will leave cinema, immediately

El cant des ocells - A. Serra (2008).mkv
General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 32 min
Size: 	2.64 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	960x576 
Aspect ratio:  	5:3
Frame rate: 	25.000 fps
Bit rate: 	3 750 kb/s
BPP: 	0.271
Audio
#1:  	2.0ch AAC LC @ 320 kb/s (Catalan, Hebrew)

https://nitro.download/view/12207AB5935EB05/El_cant_des_ocells_-_A._Serra_(2008).mkv

Language(s):Catalan, Hebrew
Subtitles:English, French, German

The post Albert Serra – El cant dels ocells aka Birdsong (2008) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Matt Zoller Seitz (The New York Times) wrote:
Elmore Leonard once said that the key to telling an exciting story was leaving out the parts that people skip. The “Don Quixote” adaptation “Quxiotic/Honor de Cavalleria” is composed of little else.

In adapting Miguel de Cervantes’s novel about the senile would-be knight, Don Quixote (Lluís Carbó), and his sidekick, Sancho Panza (Lluís Serrat), the film’s writer and director, Albert Serra, favors landscape imagery and natural sounds over dialogue and music.

Quixote meanders in fields of tall grass, inspects trees, ignores flies crawling on his armor or stares off into the distance while Sancho sits patiently, awaiting orders. This film’s opening section observes Quixote waiting for Sancho to fix a piece of his armor, then asking Sancho to make him a laurel wreath.

This film is a virtual definition of the phrase “acquired taste.” But if you invest yourself in Mr. Serra’s vision, the film’s emotional payoffs are devastating. They include a moment in which Quixote advises Sancho to renew his strength through prayer, a scene in which the two stare up at the sky accompanied by a rare burst of mournful acoustic guitar music, and Quixote’s near-final summation of his beliefs, which could double as Mr. Serra’s artistic philosophy: “Chivalry is the reasoning of action.”

1.84GB | 1h 47mn | 1016×572 | mkv

http://nitroflare.com/view/C57DDB171E89AAB/Honor_de_cavalleria_-_Albert_Serra_%282006%29.part1.rar
http://nitroflare.com/view/1FE202C78244DE1/Honor_de_cavalleria_-_Albert_Serra_%282006%29.part2.rar

Language(s):Catalan
Subtitles:English, Spanish, French

The post Albert Serra – Honor de cavalleria aka Honour of the knights (2006) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

857MB | 1 h 01 min | 1280×720 | mkv
http://nitroflare.com/view/A4D86CE3CBC7BC5/Roi.Soleil.2018.720p.WEB.x264-gooz.mkv

Language(s):None
Subtitles:None

The post Albert Serra – Roi Soleil (2018) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Casanova hires a new servant to witness the last moments of his life. Leaving a gallant and libertine Swiss castle, he decides to spend his remaining days in the poor and dark lands of eastern Europe. There, his society life and rationality begin to collapse under a romantic and violent force, represented by Dracula and his eternal power.

Golden Leopard at Locarno 2013

Quote:

Where did the idea for this film come from?
By chance, as with everything in my life. I was presenting “Honour of the Knights” in Romania, and a Romanian producer that saw the film and liked it told me: “you should do the same thing with Dracula”. I had never seen any films of the fantasy genre, nor Dracula, and I took it as a joke. However the weeks went by and the idea came back to me without thinking about it.
But as I’m not really interested in the theme of Dracula, I decided that perhaps merged with imagery I was closer to, the film would make more sense to me. I decided to cross the initial idea with Casanova, whose universe I was far more familiar with. And I realised how interesting it could be to make a film about night, and the transition from the lightness and sensuality of the 18th Century to the darkness, violence, and sexuality of the 19th Century, of Romanticism.

Had you read The Story of “My Life” by Casanova?
Quite thoroughly. That’s why the film is called “The Story of My Death” because not only it is about the end of his life, but the end of an era, and furthermore the end of a way of thinking. It’s a crepuscular film, though it bears no relation to the real world; it’s a fantasy.

It seems paradoxical…
It is. I wanted to create a pure fantasy, but as I was fairly familiar with the subject I couldn’t help but add more serious elements taken from literature (now a somewhat forgotten reference point in contemporary arthouse cinema), alongside other purely artistic elements. Instead of concentrating on coherence, I simply went adding layers of meaning. In the end, this became so excessive that there are scenes (such as the one where the servant is eating apples as he talks to one of the maids) where the different layers have become so piled up that even in a banal conversation there are four things going on at once, without any apparent hierarchy (which is what makes it truly fantastic).
The dialogue also has this quality, they are fantastical but at the same time very interesting from an historical and philosophical perspective.

How did you achieve this? Were they written beforehand?
I am very proud of the dialogue because it’s something relatively new in my films, or at least in such great abundance as this one. They are original and fruit of having understood the essence of the character of Casanova, his true depths, only in order to immediately forget it. That is how I went about it and, of his own accord, how the actor playing him went about it too, not caring in the slightest about his form of acting because he had already assimilated the whole essence of the character in his head. From there on the construction of the text is a secret I am not about to reveal here.

The female characters are another novelty. I never thought you could feel the same empathy for them as the male characters…
Well, I knew that the key would lie in the audition, that I would have to like them. I was lucky and the girls I chose (all from my hometown) are very innocent, but somewhat mysterious at the same time, they are ambivalent, they are pure and sophisticated at once, that ties in with the theme of the film very well.

Which, by the way, I still don’t know what it is. I have just seen the film and I don’t know what its theme is…
I didn’t know either, until someone that saw the final montage told me: hypocrisy. You never really know what the characters truly desire, strangely, you never know where their passiveness, where their fatalism ends and where their calculation begins. I wanted to make a film about the night and I ended up making this: a fantasy of our desires that are stylised by the night, but uncovered by the day.

Excerpt from the interview by Alvaro Arroba, So Film, September 2013

https://nitro.download/view/12DFFA3394A6B36/Historia_de_la_meva_mort.2013.mkv

Language(s):Catalan
Subtitles:English – French

The post Albert Serra – Història de la meva mort aka Story of My Death (2013) first appeared on Cinema of the World.