Posts tagged Film

Take Martin Scorsese as a producer/narrator, a handful of art historians discussing art and film historians discussing film up to the first world war. Then let gallery owner Arne Glimcher direct it and call it Picasso and Braque go to the Movies.

Confusing? Well, there’s only a few relevant comparsions between their Cubist art and movies at the time. Like Edisons film of bodybuilder Eugen Sandow from 1894 pictured above.

The rest is hard to follow, unless you know your art and movie history of the period, but even if you do it’s not always clear.

Instead I want to read Standish Lawder’s book The Cubist Cinema, where he tries to tie cubist art and cinema of the 1910s and 1920s, hopefully more succesful.

To summarize: I learned some stuff about Picasso and Braque and more or less the same facts about early film I already knew. And did Picasso and Braque go to the movies? Apparently, because the title says so.

Based on a novel by Milan Kundera and made during the Soviet occupation. The Joke is about a man who, because of a joke written on a letter to his girlfriend, gets expelled from the Communist Party and has to spend six years at a military labour camp.

It’s using a lot of flashback sequences, because the film is structured around them, but they are well integrated in the story. You wonder how a movie like this could get made during the Prague Spring and released in 1969. It was, of course, banned by the goverment.

Not among my favourites of the Czech New Wave (those are Daisies and Diamonds of the Nights) but probably the boldest.

And I really want to watch more of Jires films.