Harun Farocki

“De madre alemana y padre indio, Harun Farocki nació en la isla de Java en 1944. Estudió cine en Berlín. Entre 1973 y 1984 fue editor de Filmkritik, la revista de cine más influyente de Alemania. Dio a conocer la desconcertante potencia de su concepto del cine en 1969, con EL FUEGO INEXTINGUIBLE, un documental que en plena guerra de Vietnam examinaba con parsimonia y desapego el proceso de producción del napalm. 

Desde entonces no ha parado de filmar -lleva ya más de 60 películas-, de profundizar la pertinencia excéntrica de los temas que aborda y de perfeccionar una forma cinematográfica única, regida casi exclusivamente por el principio del montaje, donde la curiosidad periodística se entrelaza con la reflexión y engendra, en la huella de Godard, de Jean-Marie Straub o de Alexander Kluge, un “cine de ensayo”. Por su precisión, su escrupulosidad, su pasión por el detalle, los de Farocki son verdaderos documentales clínicos; exploran sus objetos con paciencia, con tenacidad, con una exhaustividad compulsiva que hace de su nitidez conceptual una forma nueva de la hipnosis o la alucinación”.

En enero Cathy Crane y yo comenzamos, en Estados Unidos, una investigación para una película con el título provisorio deGefängnisbilder (Imágenes de prisión). Buscamos el material de las cámaras de vigilancia instaladas en las penitenciarías, material de instrucción para sus guardias y funcionarios, así como documentales y largometrajes cuya temática incluyera la vida en la prisión. Llegamos a conocer a un detective privado, un activista de los derechos civiles que lucha por las familias de los prisioneros muertos en las cárceles californianas, y que lee a Hans Blumenberg cuando no tiene más remedio que esperar en algún lado.
Un arquitecto nos mostró los planos de una nueva penitenciaría para "delincuentes sexuales" en Oregón, donde se había tachado un tercio de los edificios, justamente los planificados para rehabilitación y terapia. La Legislatura había denegado los fondos. En Campden, cerca de Filadelfia, un guardia me mostró la cárcel; detrás de los vidrios, como si estuvieran en la jaula de los leones, los hombres me miraban de reojo y con desdén. Vi mujeres peinándose unas a otras como en un film de Pasolini. El guardián me contó que en los techos de las salas de estar había respiradores por donde se podían lanzar gases lacrimógenos. Sin embargo, nunca los habían utilizado porque las sustancias químicas se descomponían con el tiempo.
Imágenes de la cárcel de máxima seguridad de Corcoran, California. La cámara de vigilancia muestra una parte del patio de cemento cuya forma se parece a una porción de torta; allí se les permite a los prisioneros, vestidos con pantalones cortos y casi siempre sin camisa, pasar media hora por día. Cuando un prisionero ataca a otro, quienes no están involucrados se arrojan al piso y se cubren la cabeza con las manos. Conocen de sobra lo que sigue a continuación: el guardia hará un llamado de advertencia y luego disparará con balas de goma. Si los que pelean no se detienen, usará balas de plomo.
Las imágenes son mudas; delante de la cámara, pasa la huella humeante del arma recién disparada. La cámara y el arma están exactamente una junto a la otra; el campo visual y el campo de tiro coinciden. Es obvio que el patio se construyó en forma de segmentos circulares para que nadie pudiera protegerse de las miradas o de las balas. Uno de los reclusos, generalmente el atacante, cae. En muchos casos está muerto o herido de muerte.
Dentro de la cárcel, los presos forman parte de bandas con nombres tales como "Fraternidad Aria" o "Mafia Mexicana". Cumplen largas condenas y fueron recluidos lejos del mundo, en una cárcel de máxima seguridad. No les quedan sino los cuerpos, cuyos músculos desarrollan permanentemente, y la pertenencia a una organización. Su honor es para ellos más importante que la vida; y luchan aun sabiendo que serán baleados. En Corcoran, se disparó más de dos mil veces contra los camorristas. Los guardias dijeron que a menudo sus colegas mandaban deliberadamente al patio a los miembros de grupos antagónicos y hacían apuestas con respecto al resultado de la pelea, como si se tratase de gladiadores.
Con el propósito de ahorrar material, las cintas de las cámaras de vigilancia corren a una velocidad reducida. En los registros a los que tuvimos acceso, los intervalos eran prolongados, de modo que los movimientos aparecen entrecortados y no fluidos. Las peleas en el patio se asemejan a un videojuego barato. Resulta difícil imaginar una representación menos dramática de la muerte.

Fuente: http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4Q8iH57SDeDFNNF0AHa0nNf_rBdqyA78ZUIKjywGf-xK65K2R41Ow_try1QuZVLrO_9kwiqjTaqGH7rDtv_lRPcIdZvwtZ7tOSdhG9ed21sI5tiY6zSVssrQ6pA-CnQ-I_eiYRTPeZ2A/s320/farocki+1.png&imgrefurl=http://laregioncentral.blogspot.com/&usg=__VzqhNnqCYjMZM5z4UmEqA_WIesw=&h=241&w=320&sz=116&hl=en&start=167&sig2=iKTgeaaPaSwxamXPZu6_jw&um=1&tbnid=gTEZy0seYYizbM:&tbnh=89&tbnw=118&prev=/images%3Fq%3DHarun%2BFarocki%26ndsp%3D21%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dsafari%26rls%3Den-us%26sa%3DN%26start%3D147%26um%3D1&ei=3omcSqKBEMaEtwf2o5HLBA 

El cine de Farocki me pareció difícil de ver, creo que es interesante cirtas criticas que hace comparando dos lugares, situaciones o gente pero creo que se queda mucho en eso y es repetitivo.

Me gustó ver las películas porque es un cine distinto al que se ve usualmente y creo que se pueden tomar ideas a desarrollar.

“Who is Farocki?” was the now famous heading that Cahiers du cinéma used in what was probably the very first essay about Farocki in 1975. That is a long while ago, and it confirms that 'Harun Farocki' has been around for a long while: already by 1975 he had been making films for a decade. The first time I wrote about Farocki was in 1983, the first time I introduced him to a live audience was in 1993, by which time I could with some justification call him “Germany's best-known unknown filmmaker”. A year later, Farocki had his first major retrospective in the United States, following several festival screenings of hisImages of the World and Inscription of War (1988). After becoming every student film-club's favourite meditation on the media and modern warfare in the age of smart bombs and Operation Desert Storm, Images of the World quickly advanced to something of a classic: the reference film, the anchoring point for seminars on Paul Virilio, on the essay-film as a hybrid documentary but politically subversive film genre, on the 'limits of representation' after Auschwitz andSchindler's List, as well as – this needs to be rediscovered after September 11th – the definitive film about terrorism. As happens so often with pioneers: they go unrecognised in their own country until someone else – often far away – 'discovers' them, and travellers bring back the news of what an exceptional talent has all these years been living right in their midst. It is therefore no exaggeration to say that, with a dozen feature-length films, and some 60 films altogether, along with a collection of essays in German, a bi-lingual collection of his own writings, and another book on Farocki about to be published in English, Harun Farocki has advanced to being one of Germany's best-known known filmmakers. Since the early 1990s, television and installation art has preoccupied Farocki at least as much as the cinema. What better place than the museum to confront the cinema once more with itself and its history? A curious set of parallels has evolved between the museum as a space of contemplation, and the electronic vision machines and their role as social instruments of surveillance; the museum as a site of aesthetic distance and reflection, and scientific instruments of calculation, of mathematics as means of measuring and monitoring. Both are now the expression of a control society which has replaced dialogue and democracy with sensoring and data-mining, just as it has muted – in our parts at least – the hard power of the coercive disciplinary society by the soft power of self-policing and self-fashioning. In installations such as Schnittstelle/Interface (1995) Farocki once more examines his own method of work ('work', 'place' and 'camera') and tries to locate the crossroads at which he finds himself. For video art and the digital media now challenge a filmmaker's craft; they intersect with the prime function which the (still) photographic image used to have for Farocki's view of history, and they interface with his analysis of the politics of the image. Now that he has completed another installation, Ich glaubte, Gefangene zu sehen/ I thought I saw Prisoners (2001) it seems that Farocki has completed yet another change in his long career. Not so much a change of medium or of the technological apparatus, but of the entire dispositif of the visible. What has shifted is his way of thinking about and of being in the world. Farocki captures in devastating mini-narratives the new social deployment of images, making one sense the unimaginable quantities of their recording and storage, alerting one to their replay and circulation in opaque and unaccountable sites of power. We are forced to share the point of view of blind eyes and of machine intelligence, scanning ever more of them for information – of what? And for whom? Installation art returns us to the spatial dimension of the image: but Farocki has also noticed for us how prisons and supermarkets, video-games and theatres of war have become 'work-places' – of subjects as much as of commodities. They are spaces that are converging, once one appreciates how they all fall under the new pragmatics of the time-space logic of optimising access, flow, control. These sites a filmmaker has to take cognisance of and recognise him/herself implicated in, but so has the spectator, whose role has changed so much. As one walks through Farocki's works, which have become our worlds, one realises that he may be one of the few filmmakers today capable of understanding the logic of this convergence, contesting its inevitability and yet feeling confident enough to continue to believe in the wit, wisdom and the poetry of images. This certainly makes Harun Farocki an important filmmaker: probably Germany's best-known important filmmaker.

http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/02/21/farocki_intro.html

Science is Fiction Jean Painlevé

Sus documentales me parecen impresionantes, no es solo grabar animales, en ellos se refleja su mirada, con curiosidad, amor y respeto, se agradece mucho ver esas imagenes ya que son cosas que no podemos ver facilmente.

Jean Painlevé fue el padre de los documentales sobre la naturaleza y la divulgación científica. Su trabajo se destacó en distintas áreas y fue caracterizado por levantar un gran revuelo en la comunidad científica.

Siendo fiel a su lema “la ciencia es ficción” Painlevé filmó mas de 200 documentales que variaban desde la vida sexual de los pulpos hasta la obsesión masturbatoria de los chimpancés en cautiverio.

Jean creció con un fuerte amor por la naturaleza y la fotografía, combinación que, luego de graduarse en la Sorbona en zoología y biología, daría vida a su particular carrera cinematográfica. Ya desde sus primeros trabajos Painlevé aúna sus conocimientos científicos con expresiones artísticas propias del medio cinematográfico. Gracias a esto gana la resistencia de la comunidad científica que no tarda en calificar su cine como “entretenimiento para ignorantes”. Como contrapartida, la vanguardia de la década del veinte celebra su trabajo y se rodea de amistades como Jean Vigo, René Clair, Luis Buñuel y Sergei Eisenstein. Incluso el afamado fotógrafo Man Ray utiliza metraje de Painlevé de una estrella de mar en su film L'Etoile de Mer. Su obra se caracteriza por una mirada irreverente sobre las criaturas y particularidades de la madre naturaleza, dotada muchas veces de un llamativo humor negro alejado de los impersonales relatos científicos, la utilización de bandas sonoras de jazz, una música atípica para los documentales de esa época, y un montaje un tanto anárquico que tal vez sea extensión de sus propias posturas políticas. Painlevé fue un anarquista autoproclamado que tomó parte de protestas anti-nazis durante toda la Segunda Guerra Mundial, desempeñándose a su vez como director del Comité de liberación del cine francés que cofundo durante la guerra. Más tarde fundaría el instituto de cine científico, que ayudó a distribuir y exhibir documentales científicos de todo el mundo. A lo largo de su vida, Painlevé realizó más de doscientos documentales científicos. Cada uno de sus trabajos tuvo tres versiones distintas: una para la comunidad científica, otra para universitarios, y otra para el público en general. En la Videoteca del Centro Audiovisual Rosario se encuentran disponibles cuatro de sus obras más recordadas. “El caballito de mar” tal vez sea la más famosa de su filmografía. Realizada a principios de los años treinta, es el único film de ese período rodado bajo el agua. Pero no solo se destaca por su innovación técnica sino por su trasgresión a la hora de mostrar las particularidades propias de la naturaleza. Aquí es el caballito de mar macho el encargado de cargar con los huevos y parir a las crías, en una justiciera inversión de roles. La mirada extrañada continúa en “El vampiro” que se sirve de tomas de “Nosferatu” de Murnau para introducirnos en el mundo del vampiro sudamericano, un espécimen real que chupa sangre a lo que encuentra. Aquí hace gala una vez más del humor negro al aclarar que “por respeto a la raza humana se utilizará un cobayo en vez de un ser humano” para pasar a ilustrarnos como el vampiro le chupa la sangre a sus víctimas poniendo de almuerzo a un pobre hamster. La crueldad de la que es capaz la madre naturaleza es un rasgo abordado con frecuencia en su obra, pero sin abandonar nunca el sentido del humor. “Asesinos de agua dulce” nos hace pensar desde el título en gigantescos tiburones devorando lo que encuentran a su paso. Nada más alejado, los asesinos en cuestión son unos diminutos bichitos marinos que se matan de la manera más simpática posible. Para culminar el combo bizarro que nos regala este científico de lo maravilloso contamos con “Los amores del pulpo” un trabajo con música propia de una película de ciencia ficción donde esta criatura casi extraterrestre se arrastra y copula de manera desvergonzada.

(mondopulpo.blogspot.com/.../pulpos-y-documentales-jean-painlev.tml -)

Chris Marker -La jeteé

La Jeteé

Este filme me parece que tiene una gran idea, tomando elementos del cine y de la foto fija, logra narrar una historia que transcurre en tiempos diferentes. Para mi, uno de los elementos mas importantes que hace funcionar La jeteé es el sonido, los ambientes sonoros que crea y como lo une con la imagen es genial. Me gusta pensar que nuestra memoria esta construida de esa forma, refractada y con tiempos pasados, presentes y futuros, no hay que tener confianza en ella.

Encontré un analisis platonico de la Jeteé, tiene cosas interesantes.

Platonic Themes in Chris Marker's  La Jetée by Sander Lee

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Sander Lee teaches Philosophy at Keene State College, New Hampshire. He is the author of Woody Allen's Angst: Philosophical Commentaries on his Serious Films (McFarland, 1997). 

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Chris Marker's 1962 short film La Jetée (1962) is probably best known today as the inspiration for Terry Gilliam's 1995 film 12 Monkeys. Some also consider it an influence on other popular time-travel films such as theTerminator series. Most serious critics acknowledge that Marker's film is vastly superior to any of its imitators in its brilliant use of still images and sparse narration to construct a story which is both compelling and haunting. Indeed, an enormous amount has been written about Marker's body of work and about this film in particular. In the face of this critical outpouring, it may be thought that nothing new or interesting could possibly be said about the film. In this brief essay, however, I wish to approach the film in a manner which I believe offers an interpretation not normally associated with it. I contend that La Jetée may be used to illustrate themes normally associated with Platonic theory. In making this claim, I am not suggesting either that this was Marker's intention in creating the film, or that this interpretation is the only valid one. Instead, I am arguing that the film may consistently be interpreted in this manner and that such an interpretation enriches one's appreciation of the film.

Throughout this discussion, I will assume that the reader is familiar with the basic principles underlying the best-known elements of Plato's "Theory of the Forms" as it is presented in dialogues such as "The Republic," especially in his famous analysis of the "Myth of the Cave." I shall also assume that the reader is familiar with La Jetée.

La Jetée begins with the description of a memory. That memory of an event which occurred "on the main jetty at Orly, the Paris airport, sometime before the outbreak of World War III" is described as "the only peacetime image to survive the war" (1). Following the war, the survivors retreat into caverns beneath the ruins where a small group of those who believe they were the "victors" oppress the rest. These rulers run involuntary time-travel experiments on their victims in order "to reach food, medicine, sources of energy." As in Plato's famous cave, the film presents us with a group of "men living in a sort of cavernous chamber underground" (2). These men are obsessed by their desire to obtain tangible wealth and power. They experiment on their prisoners in order to use time-travel as a device for possessing that power. In this way, the rulers, as embodied by their leader "the Head Experimenter" (Jacques Ledoux), are like the occupants of the cave who mistakenly view the shadows on the wall as the true reality, failing to recognize that they are mere representations of that which is truly real and valuable.

They choose the film's protagonist (Davos Hanich), simply referred to as "the man whose story we are telling," because his obsession with a memory from before the war makes him an excellent candidate for successful time travel. We are told that earlier experiments failed resulting in disappointment, death, or madness. These earlier victims were not able to successfully time travel because they lacked the necessary innate capacity required for such exploration, namely an obsession with an internal image which is valued more highly than sensations derived from empirical experience.

Like Plato's philosopher, the protagonist in La Jetée cares more for his internal vision of the truth than for the objects and shadows coveted by most other people. It is significant that time travel in this film is achieved by looking within oneself and undergoing a form of dialectic struggle which initially causes suffering. We see the man lying down with his eyes covered as he endures the pain of "stripping out the present":

On the tenth day, images begin to ooze, like confessions.

A peacetime morning. A peacetime bedroom, a real bedroom. Real children. Real birds. Real cats. Real graves.

These "real objects" are clearly more significant than anything to be seen in the cave. They may be viewed as Platonic forms, ideal notions of the way bedrooms, children, birds, cats, and graves ought to be. In this film, these peacetime images (still, eternal, unmoving) are analogous to the images perceived by the soul in the realm of forms prior to the trauma of birth. Not everyone has an equal capacity to uncover these forms. Those who do must look within themselves dialectically to "remember" those glimpses of reality which they have within them. They are wise to the extent that they pursue the knowledge of these forms not in order "to reach food, medicine, sources of energy," but for their own sake. The protagonist in the film never shares his rulers' concern for material objectives. The one time he asks for a power source, when he visits the future, it is clear that he is simply parroting lines written for him by his masters.

It is true that the man is initially overwhelmed by the "fabulous materials" which surround him when he enters the peacetime world on the thirtieth day, so much so that he loses track of his real goal, making contact with the woman he remembers from the pier at Orly. But, of course, this also happens to Plato's philosopher who, upon initially being forced to leave the darkness of the cave into the light of the sun, finds "his eyes so full of its radiance that he could not see a single one of the things that he was now told are real" (3).

When at last he meets and talks to the woman of his dreams (Helene Chatelain), she is not surprised to see him:

They are without memories, without plans. Time builds itself painlessly around them. Their only landmarks are the flavor of the moment they are living and the markings on the walls.

In this perfect realm, there is no time other than the present. Platonic perfection, the true reality, is unchanging and eternal.

It is in this scene that Marker pays homage to a classic film that clearly influenced him:

They walk. They look at the trunk of a redwood tree covered with historical dates. She pronounces an English name he doesn't understand. As in a dream, he shows her a point beyond the tree, hears himself say, "This is where I come from ..." - and falls back, exhausted.

The English name she pronounces must be "Hitchcock" for they are reenacting an exchange between Madeleine Elster (Kim Novak) and Scotty Ferguson (James Stewart) from the film Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958).Recognizing this influence, Terry Gilliam inserts a more explicit homage to Vertigo in 12 Monkeys when he has his characters escape temporarily into a movie theater showing a Hitchcock retrospective. Awakening from a nap, James Cole (Bruce Willis) watches the tree trunk scene from Vertigo and immediately associates the story of those characters with his own.

Moving back to La Jetée, while the woman sleeps, the man reflects that "in this world to which he has just returned for a while, only to be sent back to her, she is dead." This is an odd way of putting things, as it is only in this world of the past that she would seem to be alive, not dead. This is confirmed by the fact that in the next line we are told "she wakes up." However, if we accept the Platonic interpretation of these peacetime images, then the woman may be viewed as "dead" even in the world he is visiting. If that world is indeed the perfect and unchanging realm of forms, then nothing there is alive in the usual sense, as life implies the dynamic of change and the necessity of mortality. But the world he is visiting does not contain mortal creatures engaged in the activities of life.

This fact is emphasized in his next encounter with the woman:

Around the fiftieth day, they meet in a museum filled with timeless animals. Now the aim is perfectly adjusted. Thrown at the right moment, he may stay there and move without effort.

This scene is perhaps the strangest in the film. If he were actually visiting the past, then why would they go to a museum filled with stuffed animals? Why not visit the zoo and see living animals who breathe and move? Indeed, why would there even be such a museum filled with stuffed versions of animals who are not extinct? Furthermore, the woman herself is identified with these motionless creatures both in the statement that, "she too seems tamed," and in the way the man observes her neck appreciatively in a manner similar to the way he regards the animals. From a Platonic perspective, the answer to these questions is clear. The animals and the woman herself are "timeless" because they are perfect beings, ideal notions of the true essences of such creatures.

Having now proven that he has the capacity to uncover and appreciate the core elements of knowledge, the rulers decide he is ready to achieve their actual goal, the possession of a power source from the inhabitants of the future. The rulers in the cave are shortsighted fools, a fact reinforced by the need of many of them to wear strange-looking telescope-like glasses. Blinded to the truth by their desire for power, they squander the man's ability to attain true knowledge in order to use him merely as a means to earthly powers. Once he makes contact with the inhabitants of the future, their recognition of these facts, and their superiority are made immediately evident. Up to this point in the film, the man has been the wisest person we've encountered. Only he has had the ability to discover truth within himself without risk of madness or death. But now, in the presence of the inhabitants of the future, he is the inferior one. Bathed in the bright light of their wisdom, he must wear sunglasses. For their part, the inhabitants of the future have no need to cover their eyes. In fact, they are shown with marks on the center of their foreheads, the traditional Hindu indication of a third eye turned inward towards self-discovery.

As mentioned earlier, the man's message to the inhabitants of the future is not his own:

He recited his lesson: because humanity had survived, it could not refuse to its own past the means of its survival. This sophism was taken for Fate in disguise.

Those in the future recognize that the man has been sent by ignorant messengers concerned only with the shadows on the wall. Using a reference to the relativistic "sophists" of Plato's own time, Marker makes clear that the idealists of the future reject the weak reasoning of those only concerned with worldly gain. They give the man a power unit not because they are moved by his arguments, but because they realize that the possession or lack of such material rewards is too trivial to occupy their thoughts. They give the cave dwellers what they want in order to be rid of them. If they deny this request, then undoubtedly the fools of the past would continue to pester them with irrelevant pleas.

Having fulfilled his task, the man knows that the rulers in the cave will inevitably destroy him out of the fear that ignorance breeds; the fear that he might reveal to their subjects that he, not the rulers, was the origin of their new power, and fear of his superior intellectual skills which might at some later point be used against them by political rivals. The people of the future also realize that the man was just a tool of the cave dwellers so, in recognition of his intellectual potential, they offer to transport him to their time where he may learn to fully actualize his talents. But the man refuses their "pacified future, he wanted to be returned to the world of his childhood, and to this woman who was perhaps waiting for him." His wish is granted and it is there, on the pier at Orly that the man meets his destiny, "he understood there was no way to escape Time, and that this moment he had been granted to watch as a child, which had never ceased to obsess him, was the moment of his own death."

This ending, beautiful in its aesthetic symmetry, nevertheless raises various questions for my Platonic interpretation. Why do the inhabitants of the future grant the man's request when they surely know what will happen to him when he returns to his past? If they are embodiments of Platonic wisdom then they must be completely good, yet how can it be good to send a man to his death? Indeed, why must the man die as the result of his seemingly moral desire to re-enter the realm of forms? In addition, how is it possible that a vision-impaired minion of the cave dwellers is able to enter the past formerly barred to him in order to carry out this execution? And, most importantly, if the world of the past is the perfect realm of forms where all is static and eternal, then how can an assassination (surely a momentous change) take place there?

The answer to these questions lies in a realization of the nature of the man's true desires, desires revealed in the narration's description of the future as "pacified." A true Platonic realm would of course be pacified in that it would be purely intelligible with no place for emotion or activity. Yet, at the end, the man is clearly motivated by passion, not intellect. In the last scene, when the man recognizes that he is finally in the location of his most vivid memory and that the object of his desire, the woman, is standing waiting for him in her assigned place, he loses all composure and runs towards her. His running is the most active visual impression of actual movement presented in the course of the entire film.

This motion, and its strongly emotional motivation, make clear that the man is in fact not revisiting the Platonic perfect realm of essences. Instead, he has chosen what Plato would call the realm of the appetites, the very realm where the power of the cave dwellers is at their greatest. In our own time and culture, we may have elevated the search for romantic love to the level formerly occupied by the pursuit of selfless philosophical inquiry, but, following Plato, the inhabitants of the future have not. Having offered the man the greatest opportunity anyone could seek, namely the possibility of true wisdom untainted by emotions or desire, the future dwellers lose all interest in the man when he, like the others of his time, opts instead for feeling over intellect. Accordingly, the assassin is easily able to pursue the man into a realm much like his own in which all is determined by desire and apparent movement is accepted as the true reality. The poignancy of this story, as in traditional classical Greek tragedy, lies in the hero's fatal flaw. Although intellectually superior to all others of his time, in the end he reduces himself to the level of his enemies when he chooses to discard the noble path offered to him by the future in order to wallow in a nostalgic illusion of adolescent romantic love.

It is in this choice that the man resembles Scotty Ferguson (James Stewart), the protagonist of Vertigo, the film which Marker explicitly references in the tree trunk scene. Like the man in La Jetée, Scotty is obsessed by his memory of a mysterious woman who seemed the living embodiment of all his desires and dreams. He mistakenly believes this woman to be real and accordingly devotes himself to the attempt to transform a flesh-and-blood woman, Judy (Kim Novak), into his fantasy lover Madeleine. Just at the moment when the fantasy seems complete, the sight of her necklace breaks the spell. Finally recognizing that everything he sought was based on a hoax, Scotty is now compelled to destroy what he once most passionately sought. By forcing Judy to reenact her crime, he brutally crushes the Madeline identity returning her to the role of an accomplice in a sleazy murder scheme. Unable to cope with Scotty's cruelty and rejection, Judy recoils in horror at the approach of the nun on the stairs and hurls herself to the same death imagined by Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore) for his fictional Madeleine.

The last image of Vertigo, a haunting view of Scotty, arms akimbo, staring into the abyss, reveals the danger inherent in any obsessive attempt to actually live out one's most private fantasy of the perfect romantic mate. Marker has cleverly remade this story in a manner which emphasizes similar themes while providing us with an equally haunting ending.

"Ilha das Flores"

Es un documental con un ritmo muy dinámico y bien logrado, es divertido y creo que la critica que hace a la sociedad capitalista en la que vivimos es muy atinada.

Me gustó el humor que maneja, desde el principio te recuerda con un texto que es un documental "This film is not fiction" y asi sigue recordandonos en el lugar donde vivimos y como hacemos a un lado lo que no queremos saber.

With a perfect logic, and a pace of video clip, Jorge Furtado exposes the wild Brazilian capitalism, where there are two countries: for those that can afford, and for the millions of miserable that are below a pig in the hierarchy of disputing garbage. This documentary is a devastating and overwhelming social critic to our modern society and may be seen as a funny satire by foreigners, but unfortunately reflects the sad reality of my country.

(http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097564/)

This is considered the best short film in Brazilian history: Ilha das Flores, which obtained the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, first direction that narrated the cycle of a tomato from the planting fields to the stench filled dumping grounds where human beings feed upon food thrown away as not fit even for pigs. The circular and fragmented structure of the narrative, which would create a collage with different signs, ended up as a Furtado trademark. Without any opportunity to direct a feature film during the hard years lived by Brazilian cinema during the Nineties, he lent his creativity as a television scriptwriter, revolutionizing what was, until then a conservative language used in miniseries and specials on the TV Globo network.

(http://www.elojoquepiensa.udg.mx/ingles/revis_06/secciones/cinejour/copiaba.html)

"El hombre de la cámara" Me parece muy interesante, las tomas me gustan mucho, en cuanto a su forma y contenido, como juega con los tamaños y perspectivas me parece geniál.

La película transcurre mostrándonos tomas, encuadres y movimientos de cámara audaces (para la época y para hoy) que crean sensaciones de suspenso, acción, paz, sensualidad, por medio de ritmos de diversos grados, pantallas divididas etc.

La cámara se va independizando del camarógrafo hasta convertirse en un “ser” autónomo introduciendo otra vez la ficción (con sensación de ciencia ficción) con fines metafóricos.

En El hombre de la cámara podemos encontrar tal vez la primera expresión del documentalista subjetivo, lírico, experimental, entre otras cualidades artísticas y estéticas, pero ante todo (y lejos del primer comentario de los alumnos) la película deja la sabrosa sensación de haber degustado el cine en el amplio sentido de la palabra.

(http://sierpegrana.blogspot.com/2007/07/el-hombre-de-la-cmara-dziga-vertov.html)

Se ha relacionado con una modalidad de documentales urbanos que tuvo éxito en la época, las "sinfonías de grandes ciudades", ejemplificadas por películas como Berlín, sinfonía de una gran ciudad (1927), de Walter Ruttmann, o Lluvia (1929) de Joris Ivens. Lo que distingue a la obra de Vertov de las citadas es la voluntad de realizar un análisis marxista de las relaciones sociales mediante el montaje. Además, El hombre con la cámara pone el acento en el proceso de producción y consumo del cine (rodaje, montaje y contemplación).

Este texto habla sobre Dziga Vertov, su influencia y el cine que propuso.

Film Truth and Dziga Vertov’s “Man With a Movie Camera”

Primarily in the 1920’s, filmmakers such as Dziga Vertov experimented with a theory called kino pravda, or “film truth.” Perhaps even more of a montage than what was produced by Pudovkin and discussed by Eisenstein, kino pravda set out to capture fragments of reality and combine them to reveal a deeper truth, one not readily visible to the naked eye. This truth would be one accessible only through the eye of the camera.

Vertov called fiction film a new “opiate for the masses” and belonged to a movement known as kiniks (or kinokis) who hoped to abolish non-documentary film-making. His “Man With a Movie Camera” was Vertov’s response to critics who rejected his earlier “One-Sixth Part of the World.” Because of its experimental nature, Vertov worried this later film would be ignored or destroyed, hence the film’s opening statement:

“The film Man with a Movie Camera represents
AN EXPERIMENTATION IN THE CINEMATIC TRANSMISSION
Of visual phenomena
WITHOUT THE USE OF INTERTITLES
(a film without intertitles)
WITHOUT THE HELP OF A SCRIPT
(a film without script)
WITHOUT THE HELP OF A THEATRE
(a film without actors, without sets, etc.)
This new experimentation work by Kino-Eye is directed towards the creation of an authentically international absolute language of cinema – ABSOLUTE KINOGRAPHY – on the basis of its complete separation from the language of theatre and literature.”

Despite Vertov’s claims that filming could capture reality without intruding, cameras of the day were large, loud, and could not be hidden easily. To be truly hidden, Vertov and his brother Mikhail Kaufman attempted to distract their subjects with something else, something louder than the camera. So even if the camera itself was not imposing itself on the scene, the necessary distraction would alter the “truth” to some extent. Therefore, “film truth” could not technically be a reality during Vertov’s time as a filmmaker.

Much like Vertov’s earlier “Kino-Pravda” series, 23 short documentaries created over a period of three years, “Man With a Movie Camera” contains a propagandist element. Vertov wished to create a futuristic city following the Marxist ideal, an industrialized city built on the back of workers and their hard labor. Much of the film’s style seems to borrow from the earlier “Berlin: Symphony of a Great City” by Walter Ruttman. However, these stylistic choices do seem to create a symbolic language which is generally effective.

While “Man With a Movie Camera” may not fully realize the goal it sought to portray, a “truth in film,” it may have inadvertently produced a true statement of the era which produced it. The film contains an optimism, idealism and naivety representative of its place in history.

When the dust settled from the October Revolution in 1917, there was a brief, shining period of uninhibited artistic experimentation in Russia. Before the authorities clamped down on such “decadent” behavior, Russian artists in the 1920s explored communist ideals with more sincerity, hope and optimism than probably at any other time in history in every medium, from architecture to graphic design. In the realm of film, this exploration manifested itself as Kino-Eye, or camera eye. Devotees of this filmmaking style believed that the camera should be used to record the truth of Soviet life without the aid of screenplays, actors, makeup or sets. “I am kino-eye, I am mechanical eye,” wrote Dziga Vertov in the Kino Eye Manifesto in 1923. “I, a machine, show you the world as only I can see it.” The crowning achievement of the movement was the 1929 film Man with a Movie Camera, made by Dziga Vertov (a name that translates to “Spinning Top”) and his brother, Boris Kaufman. The film presents the day in the life of a Soviet city from morning until night, with citizens “at work and at play, and interacting with the machinery of modern life.” 

Sadly, things didn’t end well for Dziga Vertov in Russia, though they ended better for him than for most people in his position. When Socialist Realism was declared the “official form of art” in 1934, many of his colleagues were ostracized or exiled. Vertov was able to get away with a couple more films in the 30s, but they were edited to conform to the government’s expectations. After his last creative film, Lullaby, in 1937, Vertov worked on editing Soviet newsreels for the rest of his life. Interestingly, his brother Boris was able to move to America and worked with Elia Kazan and Sidney Lumet as a cinematographer. Kazan infamously named many colleagues as communists to McCarthy’s committee, but Vertov’s brother wasn’t one of them. I wonder if the two brothers stayed in touch, and how they felt about their work and how their lives had diverged. Was Vertov a bitter man as a news editor? Not necessarily; a lot of people, even when robbed of their ability to make art, made up excuses and remained devoted to communist ideals to the very end.  And how did his brother Boris Kaufman fare in the paranoid environment of McCarthyism? Who felt that he got the better end of the deal, I wonder?

Los espigadores y la espigadora de Agnes Varda

Me pareció un documental muy interesante y profundo, la forma en que conecta las ideas sin perder su intensión general me parece brillante y poético.

Creo que Agnes Varda siempre tiene ese toque de sencillez y honestidad sin sacrificar calidad o discurso, en "Los espigadores y la espigadora" hace de una cosa simple y cotidiana como la basura una obra de arte, eso lo aprecio mucho en el cine en general, con menos belleza y menos "grandes eventos" que otras obras, logra por medio de su mirada cinematográfica expresarnos ideas y sentimientos grandiosos.  

Varda se involucra mucho con este documental, nos muestra su vejez y sus reflexiones sobre lo que pasa, dejándote lugar como espectador para crear tus propias reflexiones y conclusiones. Para mi una de las partes mas bonitas es cuando deja la cámara grabando con la tapa del lente balanceándose y un jazz de fondo, es como uno de esos errores de la vida que acaban siendo mas poéticos que algo que se planeo.

Una papa en forma de corazón, un reloj sin manecillas, su mano arrugada, señal de que no queda mucho tiempo. 

Me dio mucho gusto ver está obra de Agnes y poder comentarla.