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)

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.

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).

Metropolis: All New Restauration ― Behin The Scenes

Seldom has the rediscovery of a cache of lost footage ignited widespread curiosity as did the announcement, in July 2008, that an essentially complete copy of Fritz Lang’s METROPOLIS had been found. (more)

“The father, the mother and their three kids live at the outskirts of a city. There is a tall fence surrounding the house. The kids have never been outside that fence. They are being educated, entertained, bored and exercised in the manner that their parents deem appropriate, without any influence from the outside world. They believe that the airplanes flying over are toys and that zombies are small yellow flowers. The only person allowed to enter the house is Christina. She works as a security guard at the father’s business. The father arranges her visits to the house in order to appease the sexual urges of the son. The whole family is fond of her, especially the eldest daughter. One day Christina gives her as a present a headband that has stones that glow in the dark and asks for something in return.”

Michael Haneke meets The Royal Tannenbaum.

About:

”ABEL RAISES CAIN is an unprecedented glimpse into the life and bizarre career of infamous underground media prankster, Alan Abel. Over the past half-century, Abel has made a name for himself several times over with stunts that are just ridiculous enough to be believable, especially to a media that feeds on salacious, far-fetched stories. Alan’s daughter, Jenny, tells her firsthand account of what it was like growing up with this lovable but slightly demented prankster for a father.”

Watch the trailer. Learn more on Wikipedia.