Sunday, October 11, 2009

Stream of Consciousness

Okay, so try to stay with me on this but I was looking up some things on youtube and I realized how much I try and relate things with one another. I was searching for 16mm short films to see what other people have done with the medium since that is what we have to shoot with for my cinema production class. I came across this video:


(1min 54sec)

^I'm not sure how I feel about this film actually because the shots are all of contemporary things such as big billboards, cars, highways, helicopters, and amusement parks. I feel a little bit as if with this medium we should be preserving something and mixing that old time feel of the film with new shiny things and technology doesn't feel right. Anyway, the piano music in the film was from Amelie which was a french film made a couple years ago with Audrey Tautou. So I decided to youtube some scenes from Amelie and I came across this one:

(40sec)

^This is one of my favorite movies and the director Jean-Pierre Jeunet is one of my favorite directors of all time. He hasn't made that many films but they are ALL worth watching. His earlier movies, Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children are a bit more obscure in terms of the narrative than his more recent films like Amelie and A Very Long Engagement but they are all visually stunning. Jeunet has a very distinct style and all of his films have that strange greenish tint that favor the reds and the greens and he uses a lot of camera motion. This scene with the moving camera of the train station reminded me of another short film that Jeunet recently made for Chanel as an advertising campaign for their fragrance. Here is the short he made:

(2min 22sec)

^Jeunet uses similar shots of the train stations and his style becomes very fluid. Its fun to see how he uses his consistent style to tell different stories. I think this short film for Chanel is kitschy and cheesy but it is interesting to see how much control Chanel gave Jeunet with the film because it is shot 100% in his style. The film took a couple months to shoot and had an incredibly huge budget for the final product of a little over a 2 minute film. I wonder what he could have produced with that budget if he was making a film for himself rather than for a company.

A couple stills I liked:


A Very Long Engagement

CHANEL N°5


Listening to: Georgia on My Mind by Ray Charles

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