Boston.com: Arthur Penn on the set of 1975’s Night Move

Arthur Penn, the stage, television and motion picture director whose revolutionary treatment of sex and violence in the 1967 film “Bonnie and Clyde” transformed the American film industry, died Tuesday night at his home in Manhattan, the day after he turned 88. (The New York Times: “Arthur Penn, Director of ‘Bonnie and Clyde,’ Dies” by Dave Kehr, September 29, 2010)

Great opening title sequence.

Roger Ebert’s Journal: “Roger Ebert presents At the Movies” September 10th, 2010

“Roger Ebert Presents At the Movies,” a weekly half-hour film review program, was announced today by its producers, Chaz and Roger Ebert. The program continues the 35-year-old run of a reviewing format first introduced by Gene Siskel and Ebert and later by Ebert and Richard Roeper.

It will return to its birthplace, launching nationally on public television with presenting station WTTW Chicago, where it began in 1975 as “Opening Soon at a Theater Near You” and then in 1976 as “Sneak Previews,” became the highest rated entertainment show in PBS history. The original format moved into syndication as “At the Movies” in 1982 with Tribune Entertainment and a quarter-century with Buena Vista Television.

The Eberts said the new program will air in January 2011, and in addition to reviewing new movies will expand into coverage of New Media, special segments on classics, on-demand viewing and genres, and an extended website. It will use the copyrighted “Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down”® format made famous by Siskel & Ebert. (read on)

Nina Leen fascination with the world veiwed through a camera lens extends to both the human and animal kingdom. Born in Russia, Leen grew up in Germany, Italy, and Switzerland, where she achieved acclaim as an animal photographer. Upon first arriving in the United States in 1939, her reporter’s eye led to a series of wryly amusing works on the habits and rituals of her newly adopted homeland. Her series on, “A Teenager Monopolizes the Telephone,” or her descriptions and images of “The American Male,” are timeless evocations of symbols of modern American society. (read on)

Read The New York Times obituary for Nina Leen. Browse her “teenagers” series for Life Magazine.

Roger Ebert seems to think this documentary is authentic. Others are speculating that it could be a big artistic hoax, something similar to Banksy’s Exit Through The Gift Shop documentary. But Casey Affleck says it’s all true (Time). Watch the trailers and visit the official website.

Alfred Hitchcock left a peerless legacy of the stylishly macabre. In this year’s Hollywood Portfolio, Keira Knightley, Javier Bardem, Seth Rogen, and other stars channel iconic moments from the director’s greatest hits. (see the whole slide show)

Spotted via Douglas Haddow’s Tumblr blog.

Previously on Skandalon : “Force By Northwest”

The Breakfast Club, John Hughes, 1985: “Hackers Will Be Expelled” [click for hi-res]

National Lampoon Vacation by Harold Ramis, 1983

About this project:

Often love affairs are instable, fleeting and unpredictable. It seems emotions change in a chaotic way. On this assumptions some mathematicians recently modeled a love relationship in terms of dynamic system. One of the case study of this kind of works is Jules et Jim, the autobiographical novel of Henri Pierre Roché and his cinematographic version by François Truffaut. The main psycho-physical features of the three characters and their long and turbulent triadic relationship have been synthesized in a mathematical model enlightening the relationship as a real chaotic system.

Since we strongly agree with Kurt Richardson that «there exists an infinitude of equally valid, non-overlapping, potentially contradictory descriptions» for any complex system. And there is «the need for synthesizing a wide variety of perspectives in an effort to better understand the problem at hand, and how we might collectively act to solve it» and we strongly agree with Paul Cilliers that when: «dealing with complexity there are simultaneous roles for the natural and the human sciences, for both mathematics and imagination», we asked our student to model the Jules, Jim and Catherine System form their point of view, using the designer visual attitude, to better understand it. (Density Design: “Jules et Jim” by Donato Ricci, January 23rd, 2009)

About Density Design:

Density Design is a research and teaching program. Born as a laboratory course in the final year of the Master Degree in Communication Design at the Politecnico di Milano, it develops into a research group. Using complexity as a keyword to understand reality, combining it with a continuous research for information aesthetics and representation, DensityDesign explores the emergent relationships among communication design, information visualization and complex systems. (more)

At first, I found those visualizations much more confusing than the film. Thus, the problem of modeling or representing : a guy (Henri Pierre Roché) lived his life, tried to understand it, to make some sense out of what he experienced. He than tried to create a model so that he could explain what he thought he knew about his life to other : a novel was born our of this effort. Truffaut read the novel, he experienced it and tried to make sense of the story he read, maybe using his own experiences. Than, he proposed himself to show what he thought and felt by the means of movie making, BW film, Cinemascope ratio, fixed frame, voice over reading, music, etc. Finally, design students watch the film (I don’t know if they read the book) and tried to visually represent in a static form, using science and imagination, the way they felt about the film, the way they understand it. It’s a big challenge, to say the least.

La Nuit Américaine fits squarely in that micro-genre of films which concern themselves with the process of making a film, a genre energised by Federico Fellini’s neurotic Otto e Mezzo (1962) and continued with Godard’s Le Mépris (1963), Paul Mazursky’s Alex in Wonderland (1970), Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories (1980) and, most recent, the Charles Kauffman-penned Adaptation (Spike Jonze, 2002). In fact, it is almost the case that every director whose work is heavily based on individual experience will inevitably yield such a piece. Truffaut himself speaks of this expectation when explaining his decision to make a film on the cinema: “Because it’s been in my mind for a long time. And I feel as if I’ve waited an enormous time to make it.” (Senses of Cinema: “Illusion 24 frames per second: François Truffaut’s La Nuit Américaine” by Danny Fairfax, 2005

• This photo along with 34 others can be found at Tout Le Cine.com
• A still from the opening sequence at Movie Stills Collection.
• An extensive dossier about the film in French at the Bibliothèque du Film (Cinémathèque Française).