Over the years, I've developed a fair amount of confidence in my abilities as a filmmaker. If the word came down that it's time to go out and make a movie, I feel confident that I could bring back something good. Whether or not it's great depends on how lucky we are and how in the zone I am, but I believe I can consistently make good films, and I hope do that for the rest of my life, if I'm able to. I have no confidence in my ability to produce and participate in the commercial marketplace. The commercial marketplace has always made me very nervous, probably more so than is necessary. That's something I need to get over. But money has one goal, which is to produce more money. If you look at the kind of films that come out of that, they're not usually the best films.
http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2010/05/the-cinema-of-recontextualized-relationships-colin-marshall-talks-to-filmmaker-andrew-bujalski-.html
Aficionados of bizarre commercial cinema might beg to differ with Bujalski about that, of course. Cult Movie Reviews is gaga over the 1965 "Italian crime caper movie" Seven Golden Men:
There are cool gadgets, there are scuba divers, there are charmingly odd 1960s cars, lots of wonderful 1960s fashions and fashion accessories....and there’s lots of glamour. Everything you want in a 60s movie in other words.
http://princeplanetmovies.blogspot.com/2010/06/seven-golden-men-1965.html?zx=e6f65955c28a2d2
John Waters has always insisted that art and exploitation films are the same thing ultimately, but of course they usually come across a little differently. So a Polish film about physical and spiritual squalor qualifies for sure as "arty":
What the Inuit language is to snow, Polish is to varieties of squalor and mess. Take melina, an alcoholic’s den, lined with old newspapers, empty bottles, cigarette butts, and plates of half-eaten food. Syf – the stinking pile of vegetable scraps behind the chicken coop or in the courtyard dump. Burdel – a general domestic disorder or filth which resists any human agency to set it right. Also, a brothel. Finally, bałagan – a deeper, more general chaos, bordering on moral corruption, which can be limited to a single house or pervade an entire society. A term with nearly spiritual overtones; when God spoke over the waters he was putting to rest a terrible bałagan. All these forms of disarray, moral and otherwise, are amply present in Wojciech Smarzowski’s The Dark House (Dom Zły ), one of the best Polish films to come out in the last five years.
http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/blog/2010/06/the-dark-house.html
The French actor Pierre Clementi, like many a performer before and since, was an interesting film-maker, whose works are however completely unknown in America or England. Rob Humanick champions them:
http://www.slantmagazine.com/house/2010/06/the-films-of-pierre-clementi/
Who could resist a movie described as " a viewing experience that makes everything from Un Chien Andalou to Inland Empire look relatively straightforward by comparison"? Well, none of my readers, anyway.
And speaking of Inland Empire, John Kenneth Muir takes on the challenge of making a kind of sense of David Lynch's monument:
http://reflectionsonfilmandtelevision.blogspot.com/2010/06/cult-movie-review-inland-empire-2006.html
Mubi (Mubi?) shares some very cool posters for Carl Theodor Dreyer silents:
http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/1970
Who would have guessed that the Maltese set for Robert Altman's 1980 Popeye (a vastly underrated movie, in my opinion) is still standing and now a museum?
http://tonyshaw3.blogspot.com/2010/05/robert-altmans-popeye-1980-film-set.html
Among notables born on this date are novelist William Styron, dramatists Ben Jonson and Athol Fugard, literary critic Irving Howe, anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, sociologist Erving Goffman, oceanographer Jacques-Yves Cousteau, football coach Vince Lombardi, football player Joe Montana, politician Henry Cisneros, photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, film director Michael Cacoyannis, composers Richard Strauss and Carlisle Floyd, soprano Rise Stevens, jazz drummer Shelly Manne, and actors Richard Todd, Gene Wilder, Adrienne Barbeau, Joshua Jackson, and Peter Dinklage. Through the great portrait photography of Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879), we have visual access to a range of Victorian noteworthies who otherwise might not be so vivid for us. Take this incredible picture of Virginia Woolf's mother Julia Stephen:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Margaret_Cameron
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