HEAT AND SUNLIGHT won the Grand Prize at Sundance and is rarely shown these days, so step up. It's a good example of early Direct Action and also an early tape to 35 mm. transfer. We'll be showing a release print from that time, so it should be interesting. Hope you can make it. I'll be there, as well as Steve Burns, producer.
Rob
Just wanted people to know about two events in the Bay Area. Jean Shelton, the first lady of San Francisco theatre is once again on the stage. First time in 30 years I think, although she's been teaching all that time. But this time she's got to get up and SHOW us what she means. She and her son Chris are playing the leads at the Actor's Theatre, 855 Post, SF in A TRIP TO BOUNTIFUL. Be sure and go up on the web under Actor's Theatre, San Francisco for show times. After the play I was in that inchoate state I rarely experience. Deeply moved. Stumbling around. Changed. Grateful that profound simplicity... honesty, know- how and personal depth had come together to make a work of art worthwhile. After the play Jean told me how she uses everything she knows and teaches... and then discards it and "just goes". It's that "just going" that haunts me. There's a purity in it, a way of being just, well, just being, I guess. I think you're born with it, but you can't always keep it. People get spoiled, jaded, disheartened. Or just too successful. I'm sure Jean has had her share of the pitfalls. I suppose she could have started phoning it in, if it were in her to do that. But I don't think it is. She told me she feels deep gratitude for being able to live her life in the theatre. But if you're going to be an artist I think gratitude and humility require something else. And she has it. Jean spots what's fake and points it out. And she sees what works and celebrates it. And after that she
"just goes."
Jacques Thelemaque and Diane Gaidry are a team of artists, relatively speaking, just starting out. Their first feature film THE DOG WALKER, directed by Jacques and featuring Diane, is opening in the Bay Area on Aug. 11, at the Opera Plaza, the Shattuck and the Rafael Film Center. Please go and see it. These are genuine fighters in the battle for a cinema which starts in the dirt and on the ground and aspires to tell us what we almost never hear i.e. that we live in OUR skin, live OUR lives, and that unless we can be OURSELVES, we're no good to anyone. American cinema almost exclusively sponsors illusions about things we cannot be and should not even aspire to. But Jacques and Diane don't buy that cotton candy. They live in LA and they fight it every day. They are the leaders of the Filmmaker's Alliance down there, an organization with the great motto "Greenlight yourself" which helps filmmakers get a toe hold, not in the industry, but in the shoes they put on every day. I recently saw TRANSACTION, a short film they did together as a director/actress team. It moved me to tears. Go to THE DOG WALKER. Watch TRANSACTION. It will be on- the- job learning in how to value what's genuine in American cinema.
Rob
An article in AdAge.com discusses the announcement of mega-online retailer Amazon.com entering the world of online video content distibution. The service, which is referred to as Amazon Digital Video -- or Amazon "DV" -- has evolved over the past year from a music-themed offering to a video-centric one, according to production-studio and TV-network executives briefed on the plans. The reason? Apple, these executives said, already commands such a large share of digital-music sales that Amazon felt it would be too difficult to break into the market.
Further signs that for us independent producers, there is an emerging of multiple avenues for our content to be seen by the world. We will stay tuned, to be sure.
michael
Last Sunday I went to Hou Hsiao- Hsien's new film THREE TIMES at my favorite theatre, the 99 seat house at the Rafael Film Center in San Rafael. More a screening room than a theatre it's a jewel of a room... comfortable, intimate, it seems to wrap around you, putting you in the mood for feeling, thinking, receiving. The film started out awkwardly, returning to the same annoying angle in a pool room where Shu Qi, lead player in all three of the film's segments, worked as a waitress, repeatedly showing us she (and the director) knew nothing about the game. Pool is huge in parts of Asia, particularly in Taiwan and the Phillipines so Hou Hsiao- Hsien had resources he chose not to exploit. I wondered why and that distracted me from a film which demanded patience. But patience was rewarded. This is a film everyone should see. It's about delicate moments of feeling which most critics would call "small". To me they're not small. They are the essential DNA, the organic bottom line. We may imagine a wider, more sensational world "out there", but most of us have little real contact with it. And to the extent that we feel that reality is "out there" and not all around us, we ignore our most precious connections. The first story, set in 1966, is about shy lovers who finally hold hands, at the last moment. perhaps, they will ever have together. The second story circa 1911 is about a prostitute in an upper class bordello who waits, silently, for a lover's "plans" for her. The fact that he has none is never stated, shown only in his face where we see he knows his silence spells doom for her hopes in life. The third story subtitled "A Time for Youth" set in 2005 ends where it begins, with two modern, liberated, beautiful young people on a motorcycle zooming through freeway traffic. Their "liberation" is expressed in free sex, drugs, sado-masochistic snapshots and a demi-mondish immersion in what their pop music describes as "true" feelings. It is devastatingly sad. It made me think of Oshima's REALM OF THE SENSES where lovers learn that death is the final sexually obsessive high. When I walked into the theatre, the house was full. Of white heads. I saw a sea of grey hair, huddled together for thought, for sensibility, for hope that intelligence could still play a part in the cinema. It made me glad... and sad. Why wasn't the theatre filled with young people, with the hip hop generation? This is not an easy question. The answer I'd give is that the times don't lead the young toward art like this. Our culture is not yet ready for Hou Hsiao- Hsien. We're too loud. We're too brash. We're not heedful of the "small". Why should we be? We're consumers. We're invincible, never defeated in war, plenty of plastic in the wallet. The opium smoked in those bordellos of old is a bum trip set up against video games, iPods and camera cell phones which digitally document a cheerful descent into the action movie of our national life.
R.N.
