The director’s audacious new film about Auschwitz’s commandant was 10 years in the making. He explains how it was made – and the importance of finding light in the darkness
Kategorie: Movie
‚All of Us Strangers‘ by Andrew Haigh (2023)
„All of Us Strangers“ (2023) by Andrew Haigh based on the novel „Strangers“ by Taichi Yamada, last scene:
HARRY
How long will this last?
A beat. A memory of something Adam’s Mum said to him.
ADAM
I can’t answer that. I suppose we
don’t get to decide when it’s
over.
(then)
For now, why don’t I just hold you
a bit longer.
Harry looks as if he may be about to say something but
decides against it. They don’t need to declare their
love. Actions are enough.
Harry turns over and lets Adam hold him from behind. The
same position Harry was in downstairs. But now he is no
longer by himself.
HARRY
(barely a whisper)
It’s so quiet in here. I never
could stand how quiet this place
was. Will you put a record on?
ADAM
What would you like?
HARRY
You choose.
The piano introduction to THE POWER OF LOVE by FRANKIE
GOES TO HOLLYWOOD starts to play. We don’t need to know
how. Adam whispers with the opening words.
ADAM
I’ll protect you from the hooded
claw / Keep the vampires from your
door.
Harry smiles.
As the song builds, Adam holds Harry tighter, comforted
at last, cared for at last, no longer strangers. Harry’s
breathing slows.
“Love is the light, scaring darkness away”.
While All of Us Strangers was tricky, both tonally and as a story rooted deeply in internal experience, another challenge of the project for Alberts was figuring out how to grapple with the way in which the protagonist ends up “slipping between these worlds of the 1980s and contemporary London” in the story.
“We wanted the audience to feel dislocated, but anchored, not mired in confusion, but consistently questioning, is this real? Is this not real?” says the editor. “I feel like you always want to have an audience ask those questions, and you want to keep them active, and to keep putting the puzzle together. But when you’re creating a film that is essentially a bit of a puzzle, it’s always a question of, is this puzzle going to fit together? Because you can create a puzzle that doesn’t quite fit together, and people are just like, ‘I don’t know what’s going on.’”
This is often the case, Alberts says, “in early cuts of films,” though All of Us Strangers was “delicate editorially,” on the whole, and could have easily been steered in the wrong direction.
Part of the goal for Haigh, as far as the viewing experience, was to leave his audience looking inward and asking themselves questions of their own lives in the aftermath. “We wanted the film to live on and linger on in their minds, so that asking those questions reveals stuff about their own lives and stuff about their own stories,” he says, “stuff about the people they’ve loved in their lives and the people they’ve lost.” https://deadline.com/video/all-of-us-strangers-editing-andrew-haigh-jonathan-alberts-interview/
And what the hell is the ending about?
In the last scene of All of Us Strangers, Adam and Harry cuddle up together on a bed. Harry asks Adam to put on a record, and without him doing so, The Power of Love by Frankie Goes to Hollywood comes on – Adam was watching an old Top of the Pops performance of it from 1984 when Harry came knocking at the beginning of the film. The song contains the deeply romantic declaration “I’ll protect you from the Hooded Claw / Keep the vampires from your door”; in a (to him, unconscious) allusion to the lyrics, Harry had told Adam, as the older man turned him away, “there’s vampires outside my door”.
Now Adam and Harry can truly love, console, protect and care for each other, but it’s a brutally bittersweet image as it’s happening in some kind of supernatural realm, not real life. As the camera gets further and further away from the spooning lovers, it depicts them as one of a constellation of stars in a night sky, perhaps the other lonely strangers of the film’s title.
So is Adam also dead? I don’t think Haigh means us to think that he is. I think the image says that love is strong enough to smash the boundary between life and death, and that it’s our only defence against the infinite darkness that surrounds us, something Adam has come to understand after spending a lifetime running away from his own desperate need for human connection. Now, I think I may have something in my eye …
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/jan/26/all-of-us-strangers-sex-death-ghosts-and-that-ending-discuss-with-spoilers
Much of All of Us Strangers’ emotional power comes from the brutally repressed Adam attempting to dispel his feelings of shame and isolation in order to be seen and loved for the person he truly is. To this end, he takes the opportunity, denied to him by their death, to come out to his mum and dad, separately. His mum is shocked – “Isn’t it a very lonely life?” – and worried about Aids. His dad, not unkindly, says: “We always knew you were a bit tutti-frutti.” Says Haigh: “The coming-out scenes are about the importance of being known. It’s very hard to move through life if you feel you’re not understood. And if you’re not understood, you feel you’re alone.”
Adam asks his father why he would never come into his room to comfort him when he was crying after being bullied at school – something else Haigh suffered. “I was about nine, and the kids around me knew something was different about me before I really did,” he says. “So you’re like, ‘I don’t understand why you’re calling me these names.’ But they could feel it somehow. When my mum saw the film, she was like, ‘Is this what happened to you?’ And I was like, ‘Yes.’ If you’re a queer kid, you don’t want to tell your parents you’re being bullied, because they’re going to think you’re different, and that’s the last thing you want. It’s the hardest thing, sometimes, about being queer within a family – you’re not like your parents and you have a secret.”
As its narcotic, dreamlike feel sets in, All of Us Strangers increasingly wrongfoots the audience. “I saw the film as a spiral, and it kept getting woozier and stranger,” Haigh says. Adam starts to get feverish, which is unexplained in the film, though Haigh points out that it happens after his mother mentions Aids. “I think all of us gay men of that generation know that every time we had a bit of a sweat if we were having sex with other people, we were suddenly terrified that we were going to have HIV,” Haigh says. “A swollen gland was not just a swollen gland. I wanted to have that trickling under the surface, that Aids is another fear that Adam has buried. I’m telling a ghost story – what are the things that haunt him?”
Although the film has a particular, queer point of view, Andrew Haigh believes its universal themes make it accessible to everyone. “All of us are children, a lot of us are parents, a lot of us are in a relationship or not finding love. Look, I want 15-year-olds to see this movie, not just people our age. If I had seen this film when I was 15, it would probably have made a big difference to me.”
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/dec/29/a-generation-of-queer-people-are-grieving-for-the-childhood-they-never-had-andrew-haigh-on-all-of-us-strangers
Perfect Days by Wim Wenders
A journey into Wim Wenders’ meditative cinema: Perfect Days, a breath of fresh air that celebrates the extraordinariness of the everyday through a personal visual and auditory reflection, capturing the landscapes of Tokyo’s working class and the philosophy of the hic et nunc. A photograph of Komorebi, the natural phenomenon of sunlight filtering through the trees.
Hirayama embodies the quintessence of Komorebi (木漏れ日), a japanese word describing sunlight shining through the leaves of trees, creating overlapping layers of light and darkness; a powerful metaphor for the central theme of this meditative cinema: a way to recognize and surrender to the invisible and transcendental beauty of the here and now.
“At a certain point in his life, Hirayama decided to leave a condition of extreme privilege for a simple life, cleaning toilets, and he does it with pleasure; he is happy. He lives modestly as a service person, invisible to others, but he sees everything. The routine is not a burden for him; instead, it gives him a lot of freedom. In our lives, the term ‘routine’ often carries a negative connotation, but he experiences it as a ritual, and each time he performs it as if it were the first.” (Wim Wenders)
Quelle: Perfect Days – EN – Muse
An ‘Oppenheimer Moment’ For The Progenitors Of AI | NOEMA
Governing a technology that could shatter societies.
The movie director Christopher Nolan says he has spoken to AI scientists who are having an “Oppenheimer moment,” fearing the destructive potential of their creation. “I’m telling the Oppenheimer story,” he reflected on his biopic of the man, “because I think it’s an important story, but also because it’s absolutely a cautionary tale.” Indeed, some are already comparing OpenAI’s Sam Altman to the father of the atomic bomb.
Quelle: An ‘Oppenheimer Moment’ For The Progenitors Of AI | NOEMA
For further reading:
https://cybernews.com/editorial/ai-oppenheimer-moment-regulation/
Salomé Jashi on Taming the Garden
Trees travel in Salomé Jashi’s Taming the Garden, a jaw-dropping record of sublime beauty and gutted community. The Georgian filmmaker chronicles the pharaonic transport of massive trees — excavated from the earth, hauled overland (and upright) inch by inch, then ferried on the Black Sea — at the behest of billionaire businessman and politician Bidzina Ivanishvili. But this is no simple story of eccentric whims; Jashi’s expansive, wide-angle views let us feel the visceral impact when towns and villages must give up 100-plus-year-old trees, like losing some part of their hearts.
„When I saw it in reality for the first time, even though I was anticipating it, I felt dizzy, I felt like vomiting, which was a really interesting feeling. It meant that something fundamental was off, was shaken up. So I felt this metaphor that you just explained physically in my body. I don’t think the screen can actually convey the magnitude and the dimensions of what we witnessed there and what the people witnessed. But I hope that this meaning of taking away something fundamental, like uprooting something fundamental inside ourselves, is conveyed in the film.“ (Salome Jashi)
Some time ago, the entire country of Georgia witnessed a surreal scene – a large tree floating in the sea. That was when we learned that the most powerful man in the country had a new passion – to own century-old trees on his private estate. Witnessing this image was like seeing a glitch in the real. It was as if I had seen something I should have never seen. It was beautiful, like real-life poetry, but at the same time it seemed to be a mistake, a kind of discomfort.
I embarked on filming this process as Georgia’s whole coastline was involved in implementing one man’s desire. I wanted to explore what was behind this mesmerizingly strange image; to tell about the ambition of a powerful man, who alters landscapes, moves trees, leaves witnesses perplexed – all for the sake of his pleasure.
I am fascinated by environments and how these environments affect people. More precisely, how we perceive others, and ourselves, in specific environments. The contradiction between settings and the people in them is what often drives my vision.
To me, the film does not have a one-dimensional line as to what it is about. The material spoke of many different aspects of life, which found symbolic expressions in the film, such as the idea of manhood, or forced migration, or uprooting, which is not just a physical process. I also relate the theme of uprooting to my country, where values and a sense of stability is constantly floating. I see the film as an evocative journey into a surreal world, which paradoxically is also fact-based.
We were filming for almost two years. I would travel with my small team to the coast each month to try to capture elements for the film. It was a challenging process as nothing was properly planned. We were dependent on the natural elements like wind, rain, unexpected circumstances in the workers’ routine, even the general political situation of the day. The process of transplanting trees was very slow and key elements would happen very fast. But the biggest
challenge was connected to the local inhabitants. Since the wealthy man behind the scenes is also the most politically powerful man in the country, they were often scared to even appear in front of the camera fearing possible consequences, the fear which we, like other fragile democracies, have in our blood.
– Salomé Jashi
„Another Round“ by Thomas Vinterberg
The Danish director’s new Oscar-winning film Another Round is about a group of teachers who dedicate themselves to getting drunk. He talks about losing control, patching up his friendship with Lars von Trier and the death of his daughter
Quelle: Thomas Vinterberg: ‘There is a great need for the uncontrollable – but little room for it today’
‘Nomadland’ Review: The Unsettled Americans
Frances McDormand hits the road in Chloé Zhao’s intimate, expansive portrait of itinerant lives.
Quelle: ‘Nomadland’ Review: The Unsettled Americans
„But the deeper resonance is that Nomadland feels like a Covid-19 movie. It’s about isolation and about learning to overhaul your life. That’s the sort of story we can all find a place in, because we’ve all had to do it. We’re all having to find new communities and new ways of living. There’s something about this movie’s understanding of loss that especially resonates this year.”
Some scenes out of the film script: BOB WELLS: We not only accept the tyranny of the dollar. We embrace it. We gladly live by it our whole lives. I think of the analogy as like a work horse. The work horse that is willing to work itself to death and then be put out to pasture. That’s what happened to so many of us in 2008. If society is throwing us away and putting us out to pasture , we work horses have to gather together and take care of each other , and that is what this is all about. (…) I think that connecting to nature and to a real true community and tribe will make a difference for you. I hope so.
»Alles, was ich besitze, bin ich«, sagt die Nomadin Swankie in Chloé Zhaos »Nomadland«. »Ich muss nirgendwo hin zurückkehren und etwas holen. Ein Nomade zu sein ist eine Entscheidung, kein Umstand.« Und es ist keine leichte Entscheidung, wie man nach über 100 Minuten einsehen muss. Denn oftmals sind es soziale Notlagen, Arbeitsverlust, Trennungen oder der Verlust des Hauses, der immer mehr Menschen in den USA dazu zwingt, ihr Leben in einen Van zu packen und sich aufzumachen, down the road. (…)
McDormand spielt darin die 61-jährige Fern, die aus ihrem Haus raus muss, weil die ganze Stadt infolge der Wirtschaftskrise geschlossen wird. Ihre Reise in ein neues Leben führt geografisch vom Mittleren Westen bis nach Kalifornien und zeitlich durch ein Jahr. Sie arbeitet im Winter in einem Amazon-Lager, im Frühjahr putzt sie Toiletten in einem Nationalpark, im Sommer kellnert sie in einem Touristencafé, im Herbst hilft sie bei der Ernte. McDormand hat sich für den Film tatsächlich an die Förderbänder und hinter den Tresen gestellt, die Aufnahmen sind authentisch, was ihrer Figur eine große Glaubwürdigkeit verleiht. Ihr Leben im Van ist karg, hat nichts mit der Vanlife-Romantik zu tun, die uns oftmals in den sozialen Medien begegnet. Kälte, Krankheiten, Pannen – all das muss sie allein durchstehen. McDormand spielt ihre vom Leben gezeichnete Figur grandios, in stiller Zurückhaltung, die Welt beobachtend. Ihrem müden Gesicht ist die Krise einer ganzen Gesellschaft eingeschrieben.
Doch sie trifft auf eine Gemeinschaft am Rand der amerikanischen Gesellschaft, die sich selbst hilft. Beim »Home on Wheels«-Treffen lernt Fern andere (echte) Nomaden wie Susanne, Swankie, Derek oder eben Bob kennen, die im Film ihre Geschichten erzählen. Und es wird deutlich, dass hier Menschen aus der Not heraus eine Tugend machen und uramerikanische Werte wieder beleben. Wie die Trapper und Pioniere passen sie sich dem Rhythmus der Natur an und verfolgen die wichtigen Dinge im Leben. Sie helfen ihren Nächsten und begegnen der Welt mit Offenheit und Wertschätzung.
Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin – Documentary Film by Arwen Curry
Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin is a feature documentary exploring the remarkable life and legacy of the late feminist author Ursula K. Le Guin. https://worldsofukl.com/
„The Great Hack“
Netflix’s The Great Hack Brings Our Data Nightmare to Life https://www.wired.com/story/the-great-hack-documentary/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=onsite-share&utm_brand=wired&utm_social-type=earned … via @wired
Loving Vincent
Comprising of 65,000 frames, each one is an oil painting recreated in the same style and technique as Van Gogh’s. The results are breathtaking.
via ‘Loving Vincent’ a Review — Anndelize: Visual Artist
Please also read this: https://theplaidzebra.com/before-he-died-van-gogh-wrote-a-letter-to-his-brother-explaining-how-a-true-artist-must-live/