"You participate in the narration of the film with the light, with the ambience, with the climat of the image. So, the image is not only a technical performance, it is part of the storytelling, it participates in the narration. And that is the deepest definition, I think, for cinematography."
"As humans, we always want the fireworks. We want the show. But actually a volcano is always erupting. And, as is also true about cinema, the more you learn about the language of a director, the more you can appreciate the idiosyncrasies or the details."
Color is often dulled entirely, and reality, both visually and morally, appears black and white...When the world is reduced to such simple terms, all that is left is for you to hover your crosshair over that burning target and pull the trigger.
Unless the viewer is aware of the overall structure and has a stopwatch, no cut will be expected and each will appear devoid of motivation, at least according to the conventions that govern editing in Hollywood, art-house, and even many avant-garde films.
Through decades of a certain kind of documentary storytelling and news reporting, audiences are so used to seeing images of poverty and abjection that the even the smallest act of affection comes across as extraordinary and radical.
Through Szumowska and Englert’s grounded observations of everyday people and communities runs a current of intensity that erupts in moments where the regular brushes up against the otherworldly.
The Green Knight invites authorial skepticism, searching through hundreds of years of English folklore and literature to arrive at something altogether more slippery yet truthful about how narrative bends to serve its master.
His films can be quite melancholy, as this one is, but they often, especially his more recent ones, vibrate with giddiness, the ever-alert camera finding the right, often idiosyncratic angle; Shyamalan still believes, with the resoluteness of a child, that movies are magic, even if they are for adults.
It is clear that, for some, certain forms are still anathema to what constitutes serious cinema, and that changes in approach, personnel, or temperament are acceptable so long as they do not disrupt our preconceived notions of the author’s vision.
There are fantastical elements in the film, mainly the presence of ghosts who play music when Dora and, later, Mario are near death, but they never intersect with the central relationship of Mario and Marta.
An older woman walks along Steinway Street in Astoria with a strong sense of purpose. She is shot by an unknown cameraperson who wields his lens like a sniper, tracking her as she moves. The woman periodically stops men on the sidewalk, earnestly asking benign questions that quickly becoming intensely personal.
People reliving or articulating past traumas on screen is fairly standard in social issue documentaries. What is most striking about Silent Voice is that it presents its main subject, Khavaj, and his personal story without inflicting more pain or describing it in detail, even if the shocks to his mind and body are still painfully tangible.
The diasporic condition naturally invites questions of duality that are far from merely symbolic, except here characters are bound to one nation, mobility interrupted, mired in debt and stymied by pervasive institutional corruption.
The film follows the creation of the Documentary Village, a festival and a post-production hub in the village of Lussas, in southern France.
The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin) runs a total of 480 minutes, or the span of an average workday. Shot for 27 weeks, spread out over a period of 14 months, it follows Tayoko Shiojiri over the course of five seasons, in her village in Kyoto Prefecture.