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March 28, 2007
[LOOK] One Perfect Film: Jonathan Demme's Perfect Kiss
Recently, filmmaker Joe Swanberg (Kissing on the Mouth, Hannah Takes The Stairs) told me he thought Jonathan Demme's Stop Making Sense was as close to perfect as nay movie he knows. Directed by Demme and shot by Henri Alekan, the video for New Order's "Perfect Kiss" (1985) always struck me as a perfect film: the band performing music in a practice room, their activity a cross between daydreaming and operating a submarine, with patient close-ups worthy of Dreyer. It's 10 lovely deadpan minutes; I stood there beside myself thinking hard about the weather... From a 1998 Guardian interview with Demme: "One of my favourite things in watching any performance on film is when there isn't a lot of cutting going on and when you get a chance to become really absorbed in the artist in hand. The same way we do, hopefully, at a concert, when we get a chance to really trip in to something that's happening on stage. Whether the singer's singing, or one of the other musicians is playing, we sort of stay there instead of cutting round with our eyes a lot." (H/T Faisal Qureshi at Screen Grab.]
Posted by Ray Pride at March 28, 2007 01:42 PM
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