Notes:

1990-1998: The Last Days of Celluloid – Before the Coming of Digital.

• The Apple (1998) dir. Samira Makhmalbaf
  • Feels like an intimate personal myth about parental love and how it can go wrong
• A Moment of Innocence (1996) dir. Mohsen Makhmalbaf
  • A real life policeman directs a film about his life
  • He casts a quite handsome actor to play his younger self, already adding a touch of glamour to the real story
• Where Is the Friend’s Home? (1987) dir. Abbas Kiarostami
  • Director filmed like a football coach
  • Wanted to take the fake things out of filming, like unnatural lighting, dolly shots, etc.
  • One of the greatest films about childhood and friendship
• And Life Goes On (1991) dir. Abbas Kiarostami
  • The film is about after the earthquake that struck where the director filmed the above film, and they went looking for the two boy actors that lived there but found something else; the love of human life
  • He made a short scene about him meeting a man who shared some of his values, and he fell in love with the woman playing his wife, but she did not love him back
• Through the Olive Trees (1994) dir. Abbas Kiarostami
  • Made this film about that one tiny scene in the above film, and his feelings for the woman who was playing his wife
• Days of Being Wild (1990) dir. Wong Kar-wai
  • Soft shadowing, shallow focus, beautiful natural colors
• In the Mood for Love (2000) dir. Wong Kar-wai
  • Time slowed down, a woman passing a man, he glances, music in 3/4 time, it rains like in a movie
  • The man and the woman are in separate marriages, but lonely
  • They are in the mood for love
• Irma Vep (1996) dir. Olivier Assayas
  • Director scribbled on the celluloid to show what directors sometimes do to actors
• A City of Sadness (1989) dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien
  • Late 1940s
  • Long, static shots, average 40 seconds each
  • Director said that holding a long shot holds a certain kind of tension
• Tokyo Story (1953) (introduced in Episode 3) dir. Yasujirō Ozu
  • Previous director was inspired by and revered this director
• Vive L’Amour (1994) dir. Tsai Ming-liang
  • About the loneliness of life in modern cities
  • At its end, a young woman walks to a park bench and cries, we don’t know exactly why
    • Waves of emotion cross her face as the sun comes out, we stay in a static shot
    • That scene lasts 7 minutes
• Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989) dir. Shinya Tsukamoto
  • “Combination of something that felt like eroticism and something hard like metal” -Director
  • Black and white captures the man’s terror and fear
• Videodrome (1983) (introduced in Episode 12) dir. David Cronenberg
  • Previous director was inspired by this film and this director
• Tetsuo II: Body Hammer (1992) dir. Shinya Tsukamoto
  • A man has transformed into a gun
  • 43 seconds of single frame shots of biology
  • Partially inspired by fear of technology
• La Roue (1923) (introduced in Episode 3) dir. Abel Gance
  • Above shot partially inspired by shot in this movie
• Ringu (1998) dir. Hideo Nakata
  • Film about people who die after watching a videotape
  • The horror is that it takes place in our own home
  • Avoided the christian idea of the soul made it distinctly Asian
• The Exorcist (1973) (introduced in Episode 11) dir. William Friedkin
  • Above director loved this movie and borrowed the normal setting from it
• Ugetsu Monogatari (1953) dir. Kenji Mizoguchi
  • Eerie cam of dreamlike female ghost
• Audition (1999) (introduced in Episode 4) dir. Takashi Miike
  • The camera is very stable
  • Uses blankness to surprise us with the terror
  • Used stillness as a counter to violence
• Breaking the Waves (1996) dir. Lars von Trier
  • About the suffering of a naive young Scottish woman
  • We follow her with a mostly handheld camera
• Homicide: Life on the Street (1993-1999) dir. Tom Fontana
  • No continuity, a burden to be freed of
• Dogville (2003) dir. Lars von Trier (introduced in Episode 2)
  • Director often operated the camera himself
  • Again, breaks the editing rules
  • Used no sets
• La Haine (1995) dir. Mathieu Kassovitz
  • Shot in black and white
  • Sometimes static camera stared at it’s black characters
  • The beauty of old style film techniques
  • About a black teenager
• Do the Right Thing (1989) (introduced in Episode 12) dir. Spike Lee
  • Previous film inspired by this one
• Humanité (1999) dir. Bruno Dumont
  • As unglossy as an early silent film
  • In the very last image, the man is filmed in medium long shot, and we glimpse handcuffs on him
    • Could the policeman be the rapist, or is he just an innocent man, paying for all out sins?
• Rosetta (1999) dir. Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne
  • About a feral teenage girl, who is desperate for a job
  • She runs throughout the film, and we follow her with a handheld camera
• Touki Bouki (1973) dir. Djibril Diop Mambéty
• Beau travail (1999) dir. Claire Denis
  • People say that cinema is men photographing women, but this movie is about women photographing men
  • The two men fight, the but director films their fight minimally, without testosterone
  • One of the men kills himself, and the last scene we see is him dancing to music, in the dark with lights, like in a disco, the death of disco and the death of celluloid
• Late Spring (1949) dir. Yasujirō Ozu
  • The director of the above movie compared the last dance seen of the previous movie to the last scene of this movie, the father peeling the apple alone, peeling the apple sadly, not sharing it, sitting alone in a chair
• Crows (1994) dir. Dorota Kędzierzawska
  • Used celluloid in a non-masculine way
  • About an older girl who kidnaps a younger girl, the girl is ignored by her parents
  • Film color coded in yellows and greens
• Wednesday (1997) dir. Victor Kossakovsky
  • Man tacks down every single person in the city who was born on the day he was
  • All photographed naturally, like a documentary
  • Celebration of real human beings in the last days of celluloid
• 24 Realities a Second (2004) dir. Nina Kusturica and Eva Testor
• Code Unknown (2000) (a.k.a. Code inconnu) (introduced in Episode 5) dir. Michael Haneke
  • Shot lasts 11 minutes, and the camera starts to move in complex ways
• Funny Games (1997) dir. Michael Haneke
  • Anxiety, sense that something is on the brink, that humanity is becoming something else
  • Boys brutally terrorize the family
  • He looks straight into the camera and asks if it’s enough, to us, it’s unsettling
  • The woman they are terrorizing shoots one of them, and the other frantically scrambles for the rewind button
  • The film rewinds, to right before
  • He is commenting on how we enjoy violence, it is revolutionary
• Persona (1966) (introduced in Episode 7) dir. Ingmar Bergman
  • The film melts in one scene