14:14, 13 October 2012 - Monoskop

The Green of the Grass: Harun Farocki in Filmkritik 79
If you do not read thrillers you might not understand why such a film deserves to be
admired. This lightness of touch, perfect timing, and a feeling of happiness is only
achieved when I succeed in throwing the wash into the machine, register a letter at
the post office and return to the laundromat at the very moment the tub stops rotating.
Red Line 7000 (Howard Hawks, USA 1965) is about the stupidity of life, excessively
so, without letting itself be affected by it.
In Une femme douce (Robert Bresson, France 1968/69) a man and a woman are sitting
mutely opposite each other, both having a bowl of soup. Bresson cuts from the
soupspoon of one person, which is being lowered, to the other soupspoon, which is
being raised to the mouth of the other person. The movements of the spoons link
man and woman in the same way pistons connect the wheels of a locomotive. Shotcountershot,
it is a technique of film language that has received much criticism –
Bresson criticizes it by applying it with precision. (1984, p. 65)
I’m trying to comment on this shot-countershot technique while taking shots from
both sides; placed side by side they are meant to yield another image, and that
which exists between the images should become visible. (1981, p. 516)
Pialat tries to make films without any rhetoric, films that never leave you observing
afterwards: ‘well edited’ or the like. (...) That is also why his scenes do not begin
with a few panoramic shots to introduce a scene and set its mood, nor with what is
held to be the opposite and is in fact the same thing: namely an affected leaping into
the scene. (1981, p. 117)
In Topaz (USA 1969), I thought it was amazingly brave for Hitchcock to make a film
in which two thirds of it include a stupid wall and a stupid door that can be seen
with a splash of light on them. [...] With Hawks and Hitchcock there is this glaring
ugliness that blows me away. (1983, p. 32)
I have a theory that only in the American studio system were there people who
could break the rules by cutting on action without action, that is, cutting from a further
shot to a closer one taken from the same angle. And they could do this without
staging a grand movement to distract the eye so that you don’t notice the images not
fitting together. (1979, p. 490)
One advantage film photography has over still photography are the actors, who direct
the viewer’s gaze through the images. How nice it is to look at a stretch of water
being traversed by a ship. Without the ship the gaze would head off into the distance
where it would be buried by an obscure immensity, now it skims like a flat
stone across the wake of the ship, a trace whose imprint the water bears for a surprisingly
long time. (1983, p. 327)