« Even cocks started small: Sundance's Aluminum Fowl | Main | Defining the trailer-maker's art »
December 08, 2005
Cheese it, it's cinema: Raul Ruiz
An extended transcript of a Sight & Sound interview with prolific Chilean-born, French-spoilt filmmaker and talker Raul Ruiz is a discursive wonder, including this bit: "One definition of cinema is that it is a kind of total art like the opera. Another is the extremist proposition of Bazin that cinematography is the only case in which a machine can make masterpieces without human interpretation. I suggested the students should mix both ideas since cinema is the totality of all the arts connected by poetry—meaning poetry in the sense of craziness, the poetry that Plato was afraid of. The French have a good expression for it—bricolage. I recalled Jack Valenti's statement that the French should stop making films and make what they know how to do—cheese. But to make cheese is very close to making films—it needs all kind of manipulation.
"The French way of making cinema makes one film very different from another so it's difficult to make them competitive, difficult to make them acceptable as a genre because you can say that this film is a mystery movie, or an erotic movie or a western." [A lot more at the link.]
Posted by pride at December 8, 2005 03:32 PM
Comments
Post a comment
Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)
(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)