Friday, 24th January 2003, 2:16pm
An opinion by:
Nette
Lumiere et Companie by Liv Ullman et al
Got a new toy for Christmas so now I am scouring the dvd shelves of the local video shop, hunting for hidden treasure and cool stuff I've missed up until now. So this is how I unearthed this gem. This is my favourite kind of movie - 52 second vignettes filmed by 40 different directors all over the world with the original camera invented by the Lumiere brothers. The vignettes have a lot in common with web cinema, which is one of my obsessive pastimes. There is an amazing luminosity to these films and the tempo is often somehow so thoughtful.
It is fascinating to see how each director responds to the challenges and limitations differently. Some really rise to the occasion and use beautiful crane shots, like Andrei Konchalovsky, or large complex sets with many actors, like David Lynch. You can't help suspecting that some of these directors borrowed from their current movie sets and just did a quick shot to please the creators here. So then you have Liam Neeson just kind of smiling into the camera - worth money, I'm sure, but not conveying much. Those were my least favourite, the clips that treated the motion camera as a still camera, with people just gazing back for half a minute. Suddenly the 52 seconds felt really long. Oh no, wait, I disliked the very staged tributes to the Lumieres the least, all those fake 1920's hats. My favourites where either moving shots from trains or the ones that managed to tell a little, quick story. And my very favourite was by Abbas Kiarostami, a close up of a frying egg while an answering machine records a plaintive call. Well, that's me, loving the layering of sound and image and the psychology the action implies - the eggs matter more than the woman on the phone. Ew, why? What happened?
Not enough female directors but other than that many directors to discover. And a lot of thoughtful commentary on what it means to make movies. Highly recommended [JL]
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