Tyler Knudsen – Press Play Video Blog

Watch: Robert Bresson, Master of the Self-Sustaining Shot

Robert Bresson was a French filmmaker whose minimalist approach to filmmaking and dedicated precision in his style made him a favorite among his contemporaries and the following generation of filmmakers—most notably Jean-Luc Godard and Andrei Tarkovsky, both of whom cited him as a strong influence. His filmic philosophies of using real locations, non-actors, and retaining authorial control helped to inspire the start of the French New Wave.

Bresson was born in 1901 in central France and later moved to Paris where, as a young man, he wanted to be a painter. In fact, he didn’t make his first feature film until he was already in his early forties. By that time, he had been a prisoner of war for a year and his debut film, released in 1943, would be his only feature film made during the Nazi occupation of France. The film is titled ‘Angels of Sin’ and follows a young woman who decides to become a nun. ‘Angels of Sin,’ as well as his second film, would be the only of Bresson’s films to feature a cast of professional actors.

His time spent as a prisoner of war would influence one of his most famous films, titled ‘A Man Escaped,’ which follows a French Resistance fighter in Nazi-occupied France named Fontaine, who is taken prisoner. The film traces Fontaine’s attempts to escape the prison, and the story is based on a real person named Andre Devigny who managed to escape a Nazi-run prison in France during World War II. Bresson tells this story as factually as possible—the events are not sensationalized, and this allows us to better connect with the experience of Fontaine’s predicament and put ourselves in his shoes.

Catholicism would also be a major influence on his work, showing up in nearly all of his films, and several center entirely around the religion. Bresson himself was said to have identified as a “Christian Atheist,” although it is unclear to what extent. The themes of his films range from finding salvation and redemption to commentary on French society.

Perhaps his most famous film, titled ‘Pickpocket,’ follows a thief learning and practicing techniques to master his craft. Bresson’s discipline as a painter most likely contributed to the precision of his shots. He would storyboard his shots alone and then set his drawings aside never to look at them again during production. He is well-known for fragmenting the body through composing shots of hands or feet, which was part of his aim to find and define the language of film as opposed to many other films, which could just as easily be done on the stage.

In his forty years of filmmaking, Bresson would make only thirteen films, yet his impact on cinema as an art form leaves us with a masterful and unique demonstration of what the medium can do.

Clips:

‘Angels of Sin’ (1943 dir. Robert Bresson)
‘Diary of a Country Priest’ (1951 dir. Robert Bresson)
‘A Man Escaped’ (1956 dir. Robert Bresson)
‘Pickpocket’ (1959 dir. Robert Bresson)
‘The Trial of Joan of Arc’ (1962 dir. Robert Bresson)
‘Au hasard Balthazar’ (1966 dir. Robert Bresson)
‘Mouchette’ (1967 dir. Robert Bresson)
‘A Gentle Woman’ (1969 dir. Robert Bresson)
‘L’argent’ (1983 dir. Robert Bresson)
‘Breathless’ (1960 dir. Jean-Luc Godard)

Tyler Knudsen, a San Francisco Bay Area native, has been a student of film for most of his life. Appearing in several television commercials as a child, Tyler was inspired to shift his focus from acting to directing after performing as a featured extra in Vincent Ward’s What Dreams May Come. He studied Film & Digital Media with an emphasis on production at the University of California, Santa Cruz and recently moved to New York City where he currently resides with his girlfriend.

Watch: Nicolas Winding Refn’s Brutal Style, and How It Evolved

Nicolas Winding Refn is a Danish filmmaker responsible for some of contemporary cinema’s most brutally stylish films. Refn’s parents also work in film—his father is a director and editor and his mother is a cinematographer. His parents found their inspiration in the French New Wave, which Refn compared to the antichrist. He was quoted saying, “how better to rebel against your parents than by watching something your mother is going to hate, which were American horror movies.” He found his own inspiration to become a filmmaker after watching the 1974 American horror film ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.’

After seeing what Kevin Smith was able to do with his extremely low-budget 16mm comedy debut, ‘Clerks,’ Refn decided to make his first film, titled ‘Pusher.’ Like ‘Clerks,’ ‘Pusher’ was shot on 16mm and filmed in real locations with a shoestring budget. ‘Pusher’ would eventually become the first installment in a trilogy of films about a drug dealer with the next installments being completed nearly a decade later.

His second film titled ‘Bleeder’ is another hard-hitting crime drama—this time, about a group of friends who work at a video store in Copenhagen. His next film, and first English language film, is titled ‘Fear X.’ It stars John Turturro as a man trying to solve his wife’s murder. The film was not well received and was a financial failure and ultimately caused Refn’s production company, Jang Go Star, to go bankrupt leaving Refn over a million dollars in debt.

But Refn made his comeback with a film titled ‘Bronson’ in 2008. The film stars Tom Hardy in the titular role as a famous English criminal in prison who spent many years in solitary confinement due to his outrageous behavior. The character was loosely based on real-life prisoner Michael Gordon Peterson— named one of the UK’s most dangerous criminals. He followed ‘Bronson’ with ‘Valhalla Rising’—a Viking film shot in Scotland that follows a warrior named One-Eye.

Several of these films reached some level of acclaim, but they were mostly unsuccessful financially. It wasn’t until 2011’s ‘Drive’ that Refn became a major player in contemporary American cinema. ‘Drive’ is a highly stylized modern day noir film about a Hollywood stunt driver who finds himself up against some of Los Angeles’ most dangerous gangsters. The film really struck a chord with American audiences who praised Ryan Gosling’s silent tough guy protagonist and the 80s synth pop aesthetic. ‘Drive’ ended up winning Refn the Best Director prize at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival.

He teamed up with Ryan Gosling again for his most recent film, titled ‘Only God Forgives,’ which he characterizes as a western that takes place in the Far East. The film was shot entirely in Bangkok, Thailand and follows a man coaxed by his mother into taking revenge on an almost supernatural police lieutenant who was responsible for the death of Gosling’s murderous brother. Refn takes the hyper-stylized aesthetic of ‘Drive’ even further in ‘Only God Forgives’ with an intensely powerful soundtrack composed by Cliff Martinez and highly saturated yet brooding neon colored lights, which is possibly related to his colorblindness.

Refn’s next feature, titled ‘The Neon Demon,’ is set to be released in 2016 and I, for one, cannot wait to see how his creativity continues to evolve.

Watch: Sergio Leone’s Western Journey

How could it be that one of the greatest directors known for directing films about the American west was not an American himself?

Sergio Leone was born in 1929 in Rome, Italy to parents already working in the silent film industry—his father was a director and his mother was an actress. He became inspired to start a career in film himself after visiting his father’s film shoots. He met his frequent collaborator, Ennio Moriconne, at a young age while they were classmates in school.

At 18 years old, he got his first job in the industry as Vittorio de Sica’s assistant during the classic film ‘The Bicycle Thief.’ After a period of writing screenplays, he went on to work as an assistant director for more than 30 films including the 1959 William Wyler epic ‘Ben Hur.’ He worked on many epics similar to ‘Ben Hur’ as an assistant director, but when he worked on a film titled ‘The Last Days of Pompeii,’ he took over the job as director when the original director got sick during the beginning of production. He continued working as an assistant director after this, but soon these “sword and sandal” epics (as they were called) started flopping at the box office. Because of this, the Italian film industry decided to switch to making westerns, after the westerns coming over from Hollywood started to gain popularity. So, the Italian film industry started to produce films in Italy about the American west and had their directors use more American sounding names to try and trick Italian audiences into thinking that they were authentic Hollywood westerns—and thus began the era of the “Spaghetti Western.”

His first “Spaghetti Western” was titled ‘A Fistful of Dollars,’ which was only produced as a way to earn back money spent on a larger film titled ‘Guns Don’t Talk.’ ‘A Fistful of Dollars’ would cost much less money to make because it would use all the same sets, costumes, and other materials made for ‘Guns Don’t Talk.’ However, A ‘Fistful of Dollars’ was significantly more successful than ‘Guns Don’t Talk’ and it ended up becoming the first “Spaghetti Western” to make it to America. Because of this, Leone was able to use his real name.

‘A Fistful of Dollars,’ which would become the first in a trilogy that also contained ‘For a Few Dollars More’ and ‘The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,’ was more or less a reimagining of an earlier Akira Kurosawa samurai film titled ‘Yojimbo.’ Clint Eastwood, who played the protagonist of ‘A Fistful of Dollars,’ was relatively unknown at this time ,and Leone actually discovered him as a cast member of a television show called ‘Rawhide.’

Directly after the ‘Dollars Trilogy,’ Leone started another trilogy—the first installment, an epic titled ‘Once Upon a Time in the West,’ shocked audiences with Hollywood ‘good guy’ Henry Fonda cast as a brutal child murderer. The next installment, titled ‘Duck, You Sucker’ (also known as ‘A Fistful of Dynamite’ or ‘Once Upon a Time… the Revolution’) takes place during the Mexican Revolution. It would be Leone’s last western film.

The third installment (and Leone’s last film) was released 13 years later and is set in New York City during the prohibition era. This would be the first and only time that Leone would work with Robert De Niro who played the lead character, Noodles. What binds these three films together is the greed and corruption in the shaping of America from the turn of the century up to the 1960s. Each takes Leone’s personality and style to an even grander scale and reveals the breadth of his artistry. Even though ‘Once Upon a Time in America’ is not a western as many of his iconic films were, it was a beautiful and fitting end to a remarkable career.

Clips used:

‘The Bicycle Thief’ (1949 dir. Vittorio De Sica)
‘Ben Hur’ (1959 dir. William Wyler)
‘The Last Days of Pompeii’ (1959 dir. Mario Bonnard, Sergio Leone)
‘The Searchers’ (1956 dir. John Ford)
‘A Fistful of Dollars’ (1964 dir. Sergio Leone)
‘Guns Don’t Talk’ (1964 dir. Mario Caiano)
‘For a Few Dollars More’ (1965 dir. Sergio Leone)
‘The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly’ (1966 dir. Sergio Leone)
‘Yojimbo’ (1961 dir. Akira Kurosawa)
‘Once Upon a Time in the West’ (1968 dir. Sergio Leone)
‘Duck, You Sucker!’ (1971 dir. Sergio Leone)
‘Once Upon a Time in America’ (1984 dir. Sergio Leone)

Watch: Meet Jean-Pierre Melville, Cinematic Dreamer

[A transcript follows.]

Jean-Pierre
Melville was a French filmmaker celebrated for some of France’s greatest crime
films. He was born Jean-Pierre Grumbach on October 20^th, 1917. He
chose the last name ‘Melville’ after notable author Herman Melville, most famous
for writing the epic tale of the sea ‘Moby Dick.’ He started using the name
‘Melville’ as part of the French Resistance during World War II in Nazi
occupied France, in which he fought in an Allied invasion of southern France
called ‘Operation Dragoon.’

When he was only six years old, he was given a small hand-crank camera, which
is when he says that he decided that he wanted to be a filmmaker. He became a
lover of film as a child—citing the first time he saw a talkie called ‘White
Shadows in the South Seas’ as the day he fell in love with cinema. He spent
most of his youth watching around five movies a day.

After World War II ended, he tried to become an assistant director to no avail,
so he started his own studio and made films independently. The genre that he
seemed most comfortable in was noir gangster films—his first being a 1956 film
titled ‘Bob le flambeur’ (or ‘Bob the Gambler’) about a gambling addict who
aids in a casino heist. The film used a great deal of hand-held camera work and
location shooting, which caught the eye of then film critic Jean Luc Godard.

Melville was an early hero to the champions of the French New Wave because of
his aesthetic and is penchant for shooting on location with natural light.
Godard drew a great deal of inspiration from ‘Bob le flambeur’ and Melville
even had a cameo in Godard’s first feature film, ‘Breathless.’ Allegedly, it
was Melville who suggested that Godard use jump cuts in the film which went on
to be one of the film’s most memorable features.

‘Bob le flambeur’ would become one of the main films to incite the French New
Wave—a film movement that strived for truth in the image by taking a documentary
approach to filmmaking. However, Melville once said,

“All my films hinge on the fantastic. I’m not a documentarian; a film is first
and foremost a dream, and it’s absurd to copy life in an attempt to produce an
exact recreation of it. Transposition is more or less a reflex with me. I move
from realism to fantasy without the spectator ever noticing.”

This does not only pertain to subject matter, but production technique as well.
Melville was one of the first to move effortlessly between soundstage shooting
and location shooting.

Perhaps Melville’s most famous film and most influential is 1967’s ‘Le
Samouraï’—starring Alain Delon—about a hitman who lives the code of the Samurai. ‘Le
Samouraï’ is a beautiful convergence of the Hollywood noir with the Japanese
samurai film and all against the backdrop of 1960’s France. Delon’s
intensely cool Jef Costello character has been credited as the inspiration for
the protagonists of such films as ‘Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai,’ ‘The
American,’ and ‘Drive’ to name a few. ‘Le Samouraï’ displays Melville’s mastery
of style and tone and has deservedly earned its cult status.

Melville’s entire filmography is a treasure trove of French cinematic
greatness. Whereas there wasn’t enough time to go over them all, no doubt
whichever you pick, you are in for something special.

Credits:

‘Les Enfants Terribles’ (1950 dir.
Jean-Pierre Melville)

‘Bob le Flambeur’ (1956 dir. Jean-Pierre
Melville)

‘Léon Morin, Priest’ (1961 dir. Jean-Pierre
Melville)

‘Le Doulos’ (1962 dir. Jean-Pierre Melville)

‘Le Deuxieme Souffle’ (1966 dir. Jean-Pierre
Melville)

‘Le Samouraï’ (1967 dir. Jean-Pierre Melville)

‘The Army of Shadows’ (1969 dir. Jean-Pierre
Melville)

‘White Shadows in the South Seas’ (1928 dir.
W. S. Van Dyke, Robert J. Flaherty)

‘Breathless’ (1960 dir. Jean-Luc Godard)

‘Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai’ (1999 dir.
Jim Jarmusch)

‘The American’ (2010 dir. Anton Corbijn)

‘Drive’ (2011 dir. Nicolas Winding Refn)

Watch: Milos Forman’s Vibrant, Versatile Career

[Transcript follows:]

It is March 29^th, 1976 at the 48^th Academy Awards ceremony in Los Angeles, California. Czech filmmaker Miloš Forman has just won the Academy Award for directing ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’—a film that would win (along with best director) best lead actor, best lead actress, best screenplay, and best picture. ‘Cuckoo’s Nest’ was the second of only three films to win the Oscar in all five of these categories—following ‘It Happened One Night’ in 1934 and preceding ‘The Silence of the Lambs’ in 1991.

There is no doubt that it was Forman’s brilliance as a director that made ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ the classic that it remains today. However, ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ was only Forman’s second feature film since moving to the United States. You see, Miloš Forman got his start as a director in his home country of Czechoslovakia, with his first big film being 1965’s ‘The Loves of a Blonde’, about a factory girl during the war who moves in with a jazz musician and his parents. ‘The Loves of a Blonde’ was a major film in the Czech New Wave—a film movement in the 1960s started by film students rebelling against the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia that started in 1948.

Forman’s next film, titled ‘The Fireman’s Ball,’ is a comedy about a volunteer fire department in a small Czech town. There was a great deal of controversy surrounding the film after its release due to the censors of the Czechoslovakian Communist party who felt that the film satirized the government. It was banned after only a few weeks. These films gained recognition outside of Czechoslovakia and both were nominated for Best Foreign Film at the Academy Awards.

Shortly after the release of ‘The Fireman’s Ball,’ Forman was visiting Paris when the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia occurred to squash the loosening restrictions on media, speech, and travel that was taking place in 1968. He decided to leave his home country permanently and take up residence in New York City. It isn’t hard to see why Forman was the perfect choice to direct a film about a man rebelling against the oppressive staff of a mental hospital.

After the enormous success of ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,’ Forman directed the psychedelic counterculture musical ‘Hair.’ Both ‘Hair’ and ‘Cuckoo’s Nest’ were previously performed in the theater, as was his next picture, ‘Amadeus.’

‘Amadeus’ earned Forman another Best Directing Oscar and the film took home the Best Picture prize at the 57^th Academy Awards ceremony. Both ‘Amadeus’ and ‘Cuckoo’s Nest’ made use of many character actors playing the smaller roles, which came to be a trademark for the director. Many of these actors got their start in Forman’s films including: Christopher Lloyd, Vincent Schiavelli, and Danny DeVito.

This affected his style greatly. Because there were often many characters in one scene, it was essential for the scenes to be built upon reaction shots. We can see a similar approach in his later films as well. Miloš Forman is responsible for some of cinema’s most iconic films and his unique perspective helped bring the influence of the Czech New Wave to a new generation of filmmakers.

Films:

‘It Happened One Night’ (1934 Dir. Frank Capra)
‘The Silence of the Lambs’ (1991 Dir. Jonathan Demme)
‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ (1975 Dir. Miloš Forman)
‘Loves of a Blonde’ (1965 Dir. Miloš Forman)
‘The Firemen’s Ball’ (1967 Dir. Miloš Forman)
‘Hair’ (1979 Dir. Miloš Forman)
‘Amadeus’ (1984 Dir. Miloš Forman)
‘The People vs. Larry Flynt’ (1996 Dir. Miloš Forman)
‘Man on the Moon’ (1999 Dir. Miloš Forman)

Watch: Who Is Jonathan Glazer?

[A transcript follows:]

The ultra-bizarre surrealist nightmare ‘Under the Skin’ sparked a lot of discussion when it came out last year and the name Jonathan Glazer found its way onto the lips of many film enthusiasts, but what you may not realize is that you’ve been watching his work for years.

Let’s go back a bit. For the past 20 years, Jonathan Glazer’s directorial efforts have mainly been television advertisements and music videos. You may recognize his 1996 video for Jamiroquai’s ‘Virtual Insanity’ where Jamiroquai appears to slide around the room as he dances. The effect is quite an ingenious one. He was a theater design major at Nottingham Trent University in his native country of England, and we can see how this knowledge came into play in his creative solution for the video.

It seems obvious that his experiences working on music videos and commercials allowed for much more experimentation than if he had focused on directing features from the beginning, but it’s much more than that. He also had the invaluable experience of heading a Guinness campaign that provided the opportunity and constraint to communicate information economically. These ads pack a lot into a short timeframe—whether it’s character, story, or atmosphere.

The next thing these commercials and music videos did was provide logistical experience in a shoot much shorter than a feature film. And sometimes the scale of the production was quite substantial. This ad for Bravia, which he directed in 2006 (after his first two feature films), used 250 crew members and was made pretty much entirely out of practical effects. It took 10 days to shoot and the result is nothing short of epic.

His first feature film, made in 2000, was titled ‘Sexy Beast’ about a gangster called out of retirement to aid in a heist. His second, made in 2004, was ‘Birth’—a film about a boy who claims to be the reincarnated soul of a woman’s deceased husband. The films display Glazer’s playful creativity and striking visual style, but none more so than his most recent endeavor—’Under the Skin.’

I don’t know about you, but I am really looking forward to seeing what he does next—whatever that may be.

Credits:

Films:
Under the Skin (2014 dir. Jonathan Glazer)
Sexy Beast (2000 dir. Jonathan Glazer)
Birth (2004 dir. Jonathan Glazer)

Music Videos:
“Street Spirit” by Radiohead (Music Video dir. Jonathan Glazer)
“Virtual Insanity” by Jamiroquai (Music Video dir. Jonathan Glazer)
“Rabbit in Your Headlights” by UNKLE (Music Video dir. Jonathan Glazer)
“The Universal” by Blur (Music Video dir. Jonathan Glazer)
“Karma Police” by Radiohead (Music Video dir. Jonathan Glazer)
“Karmacoma” by Massive Attack (Music Video dir. Jonathan Glazer)

"Treat Me Like Your Mother" by The Dead Weather (Music Video dir. Jonathan Glazer)

Commercials:
Wrangler – Ride (Commercial dir. Jonathan Glazer)
Guinness – Surfer (Commercial dir. Jonathan Glazer)
Guinness – Swim Black (Commercial dir. Jonathan Glazer)
Guinness – Dreamer (Commercial dir. Jonathan Glazer)
Volkswagen – Protection (Commercial dir. Jonathan Glazer)
Stella Artois – Last Orders (Commercial dir. Jonathan Glazer)
Stella Artois – Whip Round (Commercial dir. Jonathan Glazer)
Levis – Kung Fu (Commercial dir. Jonathan Glazer)
Levis – Odyssey (Commercial dir. Jonathan Glazer)
Barclays – Chicken (Commercial dir. Jonathan Glazer)

Sony BRAVIA – Paint (Commercial dir. Jonathan Glazer)

Clips:
Jonathan Glazer: The Making of Jamiroquai’s "Virtual Insanity"
Jonathan Glazer: Keeping It Alien – Jonathan Glazer on Under The Skin
Jonathan Glazer: BRAVIA "Paint" Behind the Scenes
DP/30 Short Ends – Jonathan Glazer talks Under The Skin

Music:
“Andrew Void” – Under The Skin OST
“Virtual Insanity” by Jamiroquai
“Karma Police” by Radiohead

Watch: Who Is Andrei Tarkovsky?

A transcript follows:

There is no one in the history of cinema who photographs the poetic beauty of nature quite like Andrei Tarkovsky. He made only seven feature films and yet, his impact on cinema remains one of the most substantial. Tarkovsky was born in the Soviet Union on April 4^th, 1932— his mother, a literature scholar and proofreader, his father, a famous Soviet poet. Having a poet for a father obviously influenced his own work greatly. His style can be appropriately described as ‘visual poetry.’ His stylistic trademarks consist of long unbroken takes, beautiful contemplative scenes of nature, unconventional narrative structures, and surreal imagery.

In 1954, he went to a film school in Moscow called the State Institute of Cinematography where he made his first short film titledThe Killers—based on the short story by Earnest Hemingway. His start in film school was very well-timed. Prior to 1953, there was much censorship in the Soviet Union because of Joseph Stalin. But after Stalin’s death in 1953, Nikita Khrushchev took over and reversed many of the censorship laws as part of his “de-Stalinization” which came to be known as the “Khrushchev Thaw.” Because of this, film students like Tarkovsky were now allowed to view films from outside of Russia including the films of Kurosawa, Buñuel, Bergman, Bresson, the Italian neorealism movement, and the French New Wave movement. These films were a big influence on him—he especially loved Bergman and Bresson. Bergman eventually returned the affection saying, “Tarkovsky for me is the greatest, the one who invented a new language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection, life as a dream.”

In 1959, Tarkovsky teamed up with a classmate to make The Steamroller and the Violin. They wrote the screenplay together and Tarkovsky directed it. The film was his senior project and went on to win the First Prize at the New York Student Film Festival in 1961. In 1962, Tarkovsky directed his first feature film titled Ivan’s Childhood about a 12 year old orphan boy named Ivan during World War II. It was the only film he directed that he did not write the screenplay for, but he was around the same age as Ivan during the war and drew from his own experience while making the film.

Every film he made was somewhat autobiographical, but none more so than The Mirror, which touches on his experiences during the war, his mother, and the absence of his father. In 1939, he fled Moscow with his mother and sister to live with his grandmother in the countryside, which is reflected in the film. The Mirror is a beautifully haunting piece of filmmaking that evokes a dreamlike atmosphere.

The beauty of the natural world is a major theme in all of Tarkovsky’s work, but almost the entirety of his most famous film doesn’t take place on Earth at all—rather it takes place on a space station orbiting a planet known as Solaris. It was a considerable departure from his comfort zone being so removed from the naturalistic setting found in all of his other films and yet, Tarkovsky’s unique perspective shines through.

When asked what advice he would give to young directors, he said, “It requires sacrificing of yourself. You should belong to it, it shouldn’t belong to you. Cinema uses your life, not vice versa.”

Clips used:

Solaris (1972 dir. Andrei Tarkovsky)
Stalker (1979 dir. Andrei Tarkovsky)
The Mirror (1975 dir. Andrei Tarkovsky)
The Sacrifice (1986 dir. Andrei Tarkovsky)
The Killers (1956 dir. Andrei Tarkovsky, Marika Beiku, Aleksandr Gordon)
Yojimbo (1961 dir. Akira Kurosawa)
Un Chien Andalou (1929 dir. Luis Buñuel)
The Seventh Seal (1957 dir. Ingmar Bergman)
Pickpocket (1959 dir. Robert Bresson)
Rome, Open City (1945 dir. Roberto Rossellini)
Breathless (1960 dir. Jean-Luc Godard)
Andrei Rublev (1966 dir. Andrei Tarkovsky)
The Steamroller and the Violin (1961 dir. Andrei Tarkovsky)
Ivan’s Childhood (1962 dir. Andrei Tarkovsky)
Nostalgia (1983 dir. Andrei Tarkovsky)

Watch: Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina: A Marriage on Film

[Extended transcript follows.]

[Jean-Luc] Godard contacted [Anna] Karina after seeing her in a Palmolive
commercial. He asked her to play a small role in ‘Breathless.’ She refused when
she found out the part required nudity. Godard cast her in the lead role of his
next film, ‘Le Petit Soldat.’ Halfway through production, the cast and crew
went out to dinner—including Karina and her boyfriend. Godard wrote her a note
and put it in her hand under the table. It said, “I Love you. Rendezvous at the
Café de la Paix at midnight.” Karina left her boyfriend and began a
relationship with Godard. They were happy. The production of Godard’s next
film, ‘A Woman is a Woman’, found the couple often arguing. Godard adjusted the
story to reflect the difficulties of their relationship in a humorous way.
Karina became pregnant over the course of filming. Godard proposed and they
were soon married. A friend and fellow filmmaker, Agnes Varda, cast the couple
in a small part of her film ‘Cleo From 5 to 7.’ Godard was usually preoccupied
with his work and would often leave Karina home alone. In the spring, she had a
miscarriage and fell ill. When her health returned, she acted in another film
while Godard attempted to set up a new project. Karina began an affair with her
co-star. In 1961, Karina decided to divorce Godard, but they made up and
started work on ‘Vivre sa vie.’ In 1963, Godard wrote and directed a film about
the end of a marriage titled ‘Contempt.’ It drew largely on his relationship
with Karina with many lines being things Karina actually said. Their divorce
was finalized at the end of 1964. Many of Godard’s subsequent films starring
Karina dealt with their relationship. In ‘Alphaville,’ Karina’s character does
not know the meaning of the word “love.” In ‘Pierrot le fou,’ Karina’s
character betrays the male lead. Their last film together, ‘Made in U.S.A.,’
has Karina shoot and kill a man meant to represent Godard himself. Despite the
bitterness on set, these films feature many close-ups of Karina, which seems to
suggest a longing. The last film in Godard’s cinematic period, titled
‘Weekend,’ depicts a harsh world littered with fiery car wrecks and rife with
anger and even cannibalism. The film ends with the words, “end of cinema.”

Tyler Knudsen, a San
Francisco Bay Area native, has been a student of film for most of his life.
Appearing several television commercials as a child, Tyler was inspired to
shift his focus from acting to directing after performing as a featured extra
in Vincent Ward’s What Dreams May Come. He studied Film & Digital
Media with an emphasis on production at the University of California, Santa
Cruz and recently moved to New York City where he currently resides with his girlfriend.

Watch: Exploring the Set-Ups in ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’

If
we search for the setups that contribute to the climax of ‘One Flew Over the
Cuckoo’s Nest,’ we will find two that are very important to the emotional
payoff of the film’s conclusion. By studying these scenes, we can better
understand how these setups were cleverly concealed. In most cases, a setup
should not call attention to itself. Even a close-up of an object will
convey to an audience that the object is significant and will be revisited
later in the film. The trick that is employed in ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s
Nest‘ seems to be the consolidating of setup scenes with character building
scenes. ‘Cuckoo’s Nest’ is a character-driven story; how R.P. McMurphy
behaves dictates the direction of the plot. The sink scene—a scene that centers
entirely on the idea of a payoff that will ultimately come to pass—can still
manage to hide the setup by using the scene as a way to show that McMurphy
believes that he can triumph over the system when he can’t.