FILMARE/FILMAGE or SHOOTING (A LUCIAN PINTILIE PORTRAIT)
– Rare intimate documentary about Romanian filmmaker Lucian Pintilie – the director of (arguably) the best Romanian movie ever, “The Re-enactement” (1970) – shooting his first film after the 1989 Revolution, “The Oak” (1992), following a long period of work in exile. The soundtrack of the documentary contrapuntally uses audio fragments from his previous body of work (film and opera).

– “…being not just a “making of” but more than that. Like its title suggests – “a film in the film”- it was an opportunity for the birth of another creation (…) The crew, made up practically of one member – Gabriel Kosuth – did a forceful documentary about this. For weeks and weeks he recorded with such a sensibility Pintilie’s directorial work – his relationship with the actors and the painful, agonizing, passionate team work – that the spectator gets initiated almost unconsciously into the mystery of his creation.” – DUNA TV INTERNATIONAL review (15.12. 2002)

filmage (gabriel kosuth, 1992).mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 7 min
Size: 	964 MiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	700x574 ~> 765x574
Aspect ratio:  	4:3
Frame rate: 	25.000 fps
Bit rate: 	1 800 kb/s
BPP: 	0.179
Audio
#1:  	2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s (Stereo)

https://nitro.download/view/A44869A40807A24/filmage_(gabriel_kosuth,_1992).mkv

Language(s):Romanian
Subtitles:English

The post Gabriel Kosuth – Filmare/Filmage (1992) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
In 1988, Nela, a young schoolteacher, tries to carry out the will of her late father, an officer of the Securitate (Ceausescu’s secret police) who wants his body to be used for medical research. She decides to leave Bucharest to teach in a small provincial town, where she meets Mitica, a doctor at the hospital who is obsessed with saving the life of a Christlike patient whom the authorities wish to let die. They both share an odd sense of humor and see themselves as kindred spirits, but their relationship produces less than welcome results. The Oak is a vivid look at Romania before Ceausescu’s downfall.

1.61GB | 1h 40mn | 1024×576 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/065CC56EC9D48AE/Lucian_Pintilie_-_(1992)_The_Oak.mkv

Language:Romanian
Subtitles:English

The post Lucian Pintilie – Balanta AKA The Oak (1992) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Starring Harvey Keitel, just a year after his turn in the American masterpiece Pulp Fiction and two years after the controversial indie double whammy of Bad Lieutenant and Reservoir Dogs, Ulysses’ Gaze would win multiple awards the world over, including the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival (the film would not take the Palme d’Or, the festival’s highest honor, prompting Angelopoulos to shockingly declare, “If this is what you have to give me, I have nothing to say.”).

In the film, Keitel’s character, A (yes, that’s how he is known), is a filmmaker himself, returning to his Greek homeland after decades of absence to attend the screening of one of his more divisive films. Following the contentious presentation, he heads out on what is essentially a duel journey; he at once begins a voyage of memory and revisitations, while more explicitly also attempting to locate the earliest films made by the Manakis brothers, pioneering directors of the region during the birth of cinema. It’ a personal and professional conquest reminiscent of Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2 or Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories.

As A travels, seemingly back and forth through time, through his memories and perhaps even those of others’, he encounters family members who have since passed, and various lovers, new, old, all played by Maia Morgenstern. To be sure, the film has its ambiguous qualities, and as A traverses through various Southeastern Europe locales, the film can tend to present more questions than answers. In his (one star!) review of the film, Roger Ebert also raises some questions, among those about the casting of Keitel. No doubt, he was an interesting choice, but in a film like this, finding an actor who could perhaps best play a character who is so vague to begin with seems of a secondary concern. (Ebert does at least credit the film for some of its remarkable images, particularly the enormous, dismantled statue of Lenin as it’s loaded onto a barge, recalling the huge stone hand hovering in the air in Landscape in the Mist (1988).

Most of Angelopoulos’ work is impressive — at the very least, his movies are markedly distinct in style and tone — but Ulysses’ Gaze is situated roughly between two of his most remarkable films, Landscape in the Mist and Eternity and a Day (1998). Not the most prolific director, his next film, also one that is particularly first-rate, was The Weeping Meadow, in 2004. Regardless of how many years passed between his films though, Angelopoulos, like most great filmmakers, maintained a notable aesthetic consistency in his output. There was almost always a slow, meditative pace to his films, emphasized by his meandering, single-take camera movements, often gliding across barren landscapes that suggest a time and place out of step with the modern kinetic world, and this was typically complemented by a somber, brooding musical score by Eleni Karaindrou. And then there’s the weather in his films: snowy, rainy, overcast, windy, dull, quiet. It all adds up to a measured tempo and a sense of humanistic repose. Ulysses’ Gaze is exemplary of these formal qualities.

Ulysses’ Gaze could certainly be thought of as one of those pretentious “artsy” films. It’s slow, complicated, and unusual, all objections hurled at many foreign film directors – Andrei Tarkovsky, Bela Tarr, and Miklos Jancso being among those most similar to Angelopoulos – but these traits do not a bad film make. It just needs to be viewed in a different mindset, with different expectations, and, if at all possible, with a different frame of reference when it comes to world cinema. Ebert suggests that “A” stands for Angelopoulos, and if that’s the case (very likely), then knowing the filmmaker’s body of work would also probably be beneficial in unraveling what would then have to be seen, again, like the Fellini and Allen pictures, as an autobiographical exploration as much as anything else.

Ulysses’ Gaze, like the best of the late, great Theodoros Angelopoulos, is full of extraordinary visuals, starkly haunting locations, an air of mystery and uncertainty, and a plot complex in its causal development. All this and more make the film well worth a look … or a gaze.

2.60GB | 2h 49m | 990×572 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/72B11B2923C2CC3/Theodoros_Angelopoulos_-_(1995)_Ulysses’_Gaze.mkv

Language:Bulgarian,Greek,English,Kurdish,Romanian,Albanian,Serbian
Subtitles:English,Greek,French

The post Theodoros Angelopoulos – To vlemma tou Odyssea Aka Ulysses’ Gaze (1995) first appeared on Cinema of the World.