Art & Film: Zeller/Lang/Riefenstahl

David Liu | 2 April 2012

From the canvas to the cinema.

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A Cinephile’s Instinctive Travels: Berkeley, California

Reliving the people and places I encounter through the sights and sounds of the films they inspired.

David Liu | 19 March 2012

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GREAT SCENES
The Searchers (John Ford, 1956) 

Shot 1: Ethan Edwards arrives on horseback with Debbie.

A man will search his heart and soul

Shot 2: For a simple man like Mose Harper, happiness comes in the form of a rocking chair.

Go searchin’ way out there

Shot 3: Ethan returns Debbie to her relatives. He stands on the porch and looks on wistfully.

His peace of mind he knows he’ll find 

The camera pulls back, revealing the visual motif of the framed doorway — the impenetrable barrier between danger and refuge, loneliness and fulfillment — one last time. 

But where, O Lord 
Lord where?

Enter Martin Pawley and Laurie Jorgensen, exuberant young lovers reunited at last. As they step inside the doorway, Ethan turns and walks off into the distance.

Ride away
Ride away
Ride away 

In a stroke of visual and aural poetry, Ford closes the door on one of the most haunted figures in American cinema.

Illusions of Past Lives

David Liu | 25 February 2012

“The mystery is that even if we know that it’s only staged, that it’s a fiction, it still fascinates us. That’s the fundamental magic of film. Illusion persists. There is something real in the illusion, more real than in the reality behind it.”

— Slavoj Žižek

Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941)

Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010)

—

“When events are represented through cinema, they become shared memories of the crew, the cast, and the public. A new layer of synthetic memory is augmented in the audience’s experience. In this regard, filmmaking is not unlike creating synthetic past lives.”

— Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Princess Mononoke (Hayao Miyazaki, 1997)

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2011)

Art & Film: Hopper/Allen

From the canvas to the cinema.

David Liu | 20 February 2012

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GREAT SCENES
Mr. Edison at Work in His Chemical Laboratory (William Heise/James White, 1897)

Born today — February 11: American inventor Thomas Alva Edison, whose 1,093 credited patents include the kinetoscope, the first fully functional motion picture camera.

By 1893, construction was complete on the world first film production studio, the Black Maria in West Orange, New Jersey. Here, cinematographers captured Edison at work in a mock staging of his actual chemical laboratory.

For Edison, who often employed ruthless tactics to advance his inventions — including bribing a theater owner in London for a copy of Georges Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon, then showing the film in New York City without compensating Méliès — the arrival of sound in motion pictures “spoiled everything.” In an interview with Reader’s Digest in March 1930, he cited D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation as his favorite film.