Reeling by on Celluloid…

I just stumbled upon this short gem of a documentary on Sven Nykvist. I had no idea this existed (apparently it was part of an MGM Bergman box-set that came out about six years ago). Sven Nykvist: my hero.

PART 1/2

PART 2/2

If you’re interested in the master cinematographer, and his work with Ingmar Bergman among many other luminaries, check out the wonderful documentary Light Keeps Me Company (Ljuset håller mig sällskap). It was directed by his son Carl-Gustav Nykvist about ten years ago — at the time when the famed lenser was forced to retire from shooting; after being diagnosed with Aphasia (he passed away in 2006).

Nykivst interview excerpts can also be seen in the excellent 1992 cinematography documentary Visions of Light — as well as on the film: The Making of Fanny and Alexander (available in the bonus materials of Criterion’s box-set release of the film).

I uploaded this short excerpt from the Light Keeps Me Company Nykvist film. It briefly chronicles his work on the set of Fanny and Alexander; his lighting of Ingrid Bergman on Autumn Sonata; and his somewhat tumultuous, but fruitful, collaboration with Tarkovskiy on Offret (“The Sacrifice”).

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Finally, have a look at this sampling of Nykvist’s superb ASC, BSC and Oscar-nominated work on Philip Kaufman’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. This piece is the incredibly effective and moving section dealing with the Prague Spring and subsequent Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

“For The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988), we had to match grainy, scratched 8mm archive footage we had from the Prague uprising. We shot footage of Daniel Day-Lewis and Juliette Binoche in Lyon on 35mm, making sure to keep the background blurry. We then transferred the footage to 8mm, mishandled it so it got scratched, and blew it back up to 35mm with visible edges. The authentic 8mm material was also blown up to 35mm. The result was quite convincing. The sequence is six minutes long and feels improvised but it was the most planned sequence in the film (it took a month to shoot). A story-board artist made drawings to indicate exactly how the new images had to be shot to match the archive footage.”

-Cinematographer Sven Nykvist

SOURCE: “Cinematography” – Ettedgui, Peter – Published August 15th 1999 by Focal Press

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Criterion Collection: Sven Nykvist

MUBI Profile

Bergman Foundation Bio

On the Shooting of The Sacrifice with Andrey Tarkovskiy

Ahh, yes! I’ve been trying to find this video online for years. For anyone interested in Kieslowski, this is the consummate interview with him. It best encapsulates who he was, and why he made the movies he did. Along with the interview, there’s some terrific behind-the-scenes material from The Double Life of Véronique. The dvd version of this is in the disc-2 supplements of Criterion’s release of the film.

PART 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

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In this 24-minute interview from 2006, cinematographer Slawomir Idziak recalls the Véronique production; and traces his artistic beginnings under the closed Communist system in Cold War Poland, where within the relative artistic freedom of the Lodz film school, he began his long series of collaborations with Kieslowski.

PART 2

The Reason for God; pastor Tim Keller’s brilliant 2008 case for faith in Christ; ranks right at the top of my list of modern Christian thinker’s works. Keller has often been compared to C.S. Lewis in his ability to tackle the big theological questions in a clear, easy to understand fashion — yet not simplistically. I find his approach meticulously comprehensive, and intellectually satisfying. For an engaging summary of the book, you can check out the 80-minute clip above. It’s a 2008 Keller lecture at UC Berkeley. A good chunk near the end includes a probing audience Q&A that’s well worth listening to as well.

A more recent in Keller’s Reason for God talks is this presentation he gave at Dundonald Church in Wimbledon, UK about a year ago.

PART I:

Dr Tim Keller, “The Reason For God” Part 1 from Dundonald Church on Vimeo.

PART II:

Dr Tim Keller, “The Reason For God” Part 2 from Dundonald Church on Vimeo.

I just completed Keller’s new book, King’s Cross; which I reckon as his best yet. In The Reason for God, a detailed survey of the most common philosophical and intellectual objections to Christianity were addressed. King’s Cross comes at the question from another vantage point; namely as a careful inquiry into the pivotal character: Christ himself.

In a recent interview with MSNBC, Keller touches upon the fact that the very identity of Jesus is often ill-defined in our modern culture — as he’s diluted, marginalized or co-opted into many agendas across the political and social spectrum. His new book successfully filters out this contemporary static with an illuminating analysis of Jesus Christ from the gospels (in this case the book of Mark). After all, there’s absolutely no point to scriptures, or the Christian faith, if this central figure — Christ — is not who he claimed to be. C.S. Lewis stated it most succinctly when he wrote:

“Christianity is a statement which, if false, is of no importance, and, if true, is of infinite importance. The one thing it cannot be is moderately important.”

Of additional, and critical, interest is the reliability of the gospel accounts themselves. An academic movement came to the fore in the late 19th century that opined the New Testament could only be taken as legendary myth prose — handed down as they were in the oral-tradition of the time, and modified to suit the particular agendas of the early church leaders. Keller argues quite successfully in his new book that this couldn’t have been the case; but, in fact, the gospels have very strong corroborating evidence that identify them as eyewitness testimonies. On this specific subject, he points to (in the book and in several recent interviews) the current work of biblical scholar Richard Bauckham titled Jesus and the Eyewitnesses.

The clip below is a presentation on King’s Cross that Keller made about two weeks ago at Belhaven University. Of special note: there’s a fascinating discussion near the end (about the 25 minute mark) where he recounts a beautiful story about how J. R. R. Tolkien guided his friend and Oxford colleague, C.S. Lewis, toward belief and faith in Christ. Lewis was an atheist at the time, and it was chiefly through Tolkien’s demonstrating that most legends, and fairy tale myths, are not wishful thinking lies, but, in fact, have validity that point to the real fairy-tale ending — that of Christ’s breaking into, and redeeming, a broken world.

UPDATE 8/30/11:

Keller fielding some wonderfully tough and probing questions from Martin Bashir and David Eisenbach at a Columbia University symposium. Check out the notes for this video at its YouTube page. There’s a listing of all the topics discussed, and where they occur on the video timeline…

Earlier in the year I first discovered the great Dutch-born, Australian émigré, director Paul Cox. In his biopic Molokai (based on the life of Father Damien of Molokai) I recognized a philosophically kindred filmmaking voice. What really sealed my admiration for the auteur was a recent viewing of his wonderful Van Gogh documentary Vincent (Ebert’s review). This is the finest cinematic portrait I’ve seen of the inspiring Dutch painter. John Hurt’s powerful narration in the voice of the artist (culled from his wealth of written correspondence) reminds the viewer that Van Gogh’s beautiful gift to humanity was as much his writing; as it was his marathon ten-year oeuvre of paintings.

Below is an enlightening 55-minute interview with Paul Cox (circa ’96, I think) where the making of Vincent, and his career up to that point, is discussed. Forgive the weird interlaced motion-strobing in parts. I think that may be an artifact of some kind of PAL to NTSC conversion…

PART 1|4 ~ PART 3|4, PART 4|4

On the topic of Van Gogh, I became seriously interested in his life about six or seven years ago after reading Irving Stone’s masterpiece, semi-fictionalized, biography: Lust for Life. About the same time, I first heard Don McLean’s moving ballad: Starry Starry Night — which, incidentally, has become so associated with the painter that it’s played daily over the house p.a. at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. If I had to pick one all-time favorite song, this may very well be it.

Self-portrait | Musée d’Orsay (click on image for larger version) | petrus.agricola | flickr

Yes! It’s here! My Holy Grail of Criterion — nay — all-time Blu-ray releases. Thank you Criterion!

Blu-ray.com Review

Three Colors: A Hymn to European Cinema | By Colin MacCabe

Fanny och Alexander (1982)

Criterion Blu-ray

– Walt Whitman (Song of Myself)

I’ve just watched Terrence Malick’s magnificent Magnificat The Tree of Life. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a film this packed to the gunwales with symbolism… ideas… emotional imagery… In fact, I very much feel compelled to view this again within the next week or so to mull it deeper. My mind has been turning it feverishly in the hours since I left the theater. The film is about a lot of things — perhaps, especially, about being. Ecclesiastes being. As in: why are we here — what’s the point of this life? The answer, if you can call it that, seems to be a cosmological survey of glory: Genesis to Revelation. Alpha to Omega. And in the glory tour, I’m not just referring to the much discussed (and breathtaking) Creation sequence. I’m talking about the movie as a whole. The story is an often confounding, unsettling and enigmatic glory. If you try to take the measure of God — and I think Malick dramatizes those big questions with real aplomb — this is the kind of beautiful riddles upon riddles answers you get; and that I find deeply satisfying in their cinematic expression. If ever there was a film that simply demanded that the answers to those questions not be resolved in pat terms — in conventional narrative — then this is it. And they aren’t.

One thing that struck me utterly on first viewing (and my favorite parts of the film) were the depictions of early childhood and nascent being through the eyes of a child. The toddler scenes of young Jack are simply the best screen depiction I’ve ever seen of juvenescence. The only other film that even approaches this excellence in presentation of the world of children is Jacques Doillon’s wonderful 1996 masterwork: Ponette.

A quick note on the music. Alexandre Desplat crafted an elegantly subtle score. You may have heard, from circulating clips and trailers of the film, some of the gorgeous variety of other classical cues. Of special note is Zbigniew Preisner’s powerful song Lacrimosa. It’s from his symphony: Requiem for my Friend — written in memory of his friend and creative collaborator Krzysztof Kieslowski.

The classical, non-Desplat, music makes up a major part of the film. Here’s the entire index from The Tree of Life production notes (scroll down to page 39 for the complete list).

I leave you with this tremendous essay of the film from the The Niles Files blog:

Terrence Malick’s Song of Himself V – The Tree of Life

– by, Niles Schwartz | June 8, 2011