Sight and Sound (Juni)

Die größeren Artikel im Juni-Heft von Sight and Sound, der vom British Film Institute herausgegebenen Zeitschrift:

- "All I Desire" über Pedro Almodóvars neuen Film "Bad Education" (La Mala Educación). Die Kritik ist online.

- "A Silky Sadness": Jonathan Romney über Nuri Bilge Ceylans "Distant" (Uzak). (Hier die offizielle Website des Regisseurs.) Zur Biografie des Regisseur erfährt man dies:

An admirer of the modernist big guns - Ozu, Bresson, Antontioni, above all Tarkovsky - Ceylan enrolled on a four-year filmmaking course in Istanbul but left after two years. He was 36 when he made his short, having already found success as a commercial photographer.

Über Ceylans bisher drei Filme (Kasaba, Mayis Sikintisi und eben Uzak), die sich nun zur Trilogie runden:

Together the three films offer a contemplation of childhood and adulthood, country and city, and present and past, together with a self-portrait of the director and an enquiry into the use or futility of cinema itself. The whole becomes greater than the sum of the already dazzling parts in a way comparable to Abbas Kiarostami's Koker trilogy.

Und über Uzak:

Uzak surely shows Antonioni's influence in its fresco-like images of a grey, lifeless Istanbul in winter. The film also uses dead time in the leisurely, sometimes almost subliminally comic fashion of certain Asian directors - Edward Yang or Sang-soo Hong, for instance. There's even a hint of the somnolent wit of Ming-liang Tsai in the priceless three-minute locked-shot scene where the two men watch Tarkovsky's Stalker on television: the studiedly monotonous sequence in whicht the Stalker's party ride a railway trick into the Zone. After a while the bored Yusuf leaves; checking the coast is clear, Mahmut puts on a porn video.

Dann noch der Link (im Heft leider falsch als ideefix.com statt ideefixe.com) zu Ideefixe.com, wo man die türkischen DVDs von Ceylans Filmen online kaufen kann.

- B. Ruby Rich mit einer Liebeserklärung an Uma Thurman und Quentin Tarntino anlässlich von "Kill Bill 2" (unsere Kritik) , den sie als "radical remapping of traditional family values" begreift.

- Interview mit dem iranischen Regisseur Babak Payami, dessen jüngster Film "Silence Between two Thoughts" im Iran nicht in den Kinos gezeigt werden durfte. Über Payami erfährt man:

Babak Payami is an Iranian-born Toronto resident who grew up in Afghanistan and is currently working in Italy.

Der Film hat eine finstere Prämisse:

Ein Henker erfährt, that he can't execute the woman who is his target because she's a virgin and will therefore go to heaven. It then transpires that headman Haji's plan is that the executioner, a young zealot, should marry the virgin so he can deflower her and then carry out the sentence.

Payami über einen Film, aus dem nichts wurde:

Then during the post-production work on my next film Secret Ballot (2001) in italy I put together enough resources to initiate a project based on my story of an Afghani labourer deported from Iran who seeks to find and kill Osama Bin Laden in order to win himself a home. The story was loosely mldelled on Conrad's Heart of Darkness with some original twists. I was supposed to visit the Afghanistan/Pakistan border area in late October 2001 to organise the production, but then September 2001 happened and everything fell apart. I felt then that I would be riding on sensationalism whereas before 9/11 the hunt for Bin Laden and what happened to Afghanistan were concepts not many people cared about.

Begleitet wird der Artikel durch ein weiteres Interview mit Jafar Panahi, dessen jüngster Film "Crimson Gold" (unsere Kritik) gleichfalls ein Opfer der Zensur wurde.

- Gespräch mit Kim Ki-Duk zu "Frühling, Sommer, Herbst, Winter - und Frühling", "a sumptuous meditation on rage and redemption." (Die Kritik ist online.)

- Beginn einer neuen Serie über berühmte Schauspieler. Folge 1: Rudolph Valentino.

Dann wie stets, jede Menge Rezensionen, mehr als 70 Stück, genauer gesagt, als Aufmacher die Kritik zu James Rays Borderline-Journalismus-Film "Shattered Glass":

Based on a true story, the film charts the rise and fall of Stephen Glass (Hayden Christensen), a young staff writer on the influential Washington-based political magazine The New Republic whose glittering career was cut short following revelations that he fabricated many of his reports.