Showing posts with label Films. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Films. Show all posts
08 December 2011
Alice (Jan Svankmajer) (1988)
Alice is a 1988 Czechoslovak film directed by Jan Švankmajer. Its original Czech title is Něco z Alenky, which means "Something from Alice". It is a free adaptation of Lewis Carroll's first Alice book, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, about a girl who follows a white rabbit into a bizarre fantasy land. Alice is played by Kristýna Kohoutová. The film combines live action with stop motion animation, and is distinguished by its dark and uncompromising production design.
After more than two decades as a prolific director of short films, Alice became Švankmajer's first venture into feature-length filmmaking. The director had been disappointed by other adaptations of Carroll's book, which interpret it as a fairy tale. His aim was instead to make the story play out like an amoral dream. The film won the feature film award at the 1989 Annecy International Animated Film Festival.
Céline et Julie vont en bateau (Céline and Julie Go Boating) - 1974
English and Czech subtitles. Céline and Julie Go Boating (French: Céline et Julie vont en bateau) is a 1974 French film directed by Jacques Rivette.
Shot casually in a documentary style, we see a red-haired woman—we will learn that it is Julie (Dominique Labourier)--sitting on a bench in a pleasant but rather non-descript Parisian park. She is reading a book, we can see, on magic incantations. But after a few minutes of random looks around the park—children playing, a cat on the prowl for pigeons—Julie is suddenly taken by the sight of a lithe woman woozily staggering across the park, a long scarf dangling from her neck. No one else seems to notice the dazed woman when she drops that scarf except for Julie, who leaps up from her park bench. She calls after her. Julie will chase after Céline (Juliet Berto), at first seemingly only on the mundane task of returning a dropped scarf. But with just that simple act, the magic of the narrative—both of this particular story and, in Rivette's meta-approach, that of cinema itself—begins.
The film won the Special Prize of the Jury at the Locarno International Film Festival in 1974 and was an Official Selection at the 1974 New York Film Festival.
Shot casually in a documentary style, we see a red-haired woman—we will learn that it is Julie (Dominique Labourier)--sitting on a bench in a pleasant but rather non-descript Parisian park. She is reading a book, we can see, on magic incantations. But after a few minutes of random looks around the park—children playing, a cat on the prowl for pigeons—Julie is suddenly taken by the sight of a lithe woman woozily staggering across the park, a long scarf dangling from her neck. No one else seems to notice the dazed woman when she drops that scarf except for Julie, who leaps up from her park bench. She calls after her. Julie will chase after Céline (Juliet Berto), at first seemingly only on the mundane task of returning a dropped scarf. But with just that simple act, the magic of the narrative—both of this particular story and, in Rivette's meta-approach, that of cinema itself—begins.
The film won the Special Prize of the Jury at the Locarno International Film Festival in 1974 and was an Official Selection at the 1974 New York Film Festival.
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