Interviewer: Do you think people understand you?
Bresson: I don’t know if they understand me, but is the issue here the film or me? If its the film, I think - I’d rather people feel a film before understanding it. I’d rather feelings arise before intellect.
The Russian Ark: This movie was shot in a single take. The cinematographer Tillman Buttner, used a Steadicam and high-def digital technology; joined with some 2,000 actors in a tight-wire act in which every mark and cue had to be hit without fail to get the whole film in one shot. (x)
Knowing how much Sinatra hated cheesecake, Brando purposely flubbed each take so that Sinatra would have to eat piece after piece of cheesecake. (x)
Gwynplaine’s (Conrad Veidt) fixed grin and disturbing clown-like appearance was a key inspiration for comic book talents writer Bill Finger and artist Bob Kane in creating Batman’s greatest enemy, The Joker.
“Bill Finger had a book with a photograph of Conrad Veidt and showed it to me and said, “Here’s the Joker.” Bob Kane (x)
One of the legends about this film was that Ed Wood used hubcaps as flying saucers. When really they were made from cheap model flying saucer kits purchased at a local toy store. But the “hubcap myth” was such a good story that Wood continued to claim it in interviews.(x)
Buster Keaton blows off some steam by playing cards with wife Eleanor Keaton after being told he can’t do a stunt because it was too dangerous. Buster says, ”I know what I’m doing. That is not dangerous. That is child’s play…I could do worse things in my sleep than that.” (x)
The shadow dance idea occurred to choreographer Hermes Pan and Fred Astaire during rehearsals, when three different light sources illuminated Astaire producing three shadows. (x)
Ladislaw Starewicz: Although his name nowadays means very little, Starewicz ranks alongside Walt Disney, as one of the great animation pioneers, and his career started nearly a decade before Disney’s. He became an animator by accident - fascinated by insects, he bought a camera and attempted to film them, but they kept dying under the hot lights. Stop-motion animation provided an instant (if slow) solution, and Starewicz discovered that he had a natural talent for it. He subsequently made dozens of short films, mostly featuring his trademark stop-motion puppets, but also live action films(x).
watch The Revenge of a Kinematograph Cameraman (1912) here.
“A form of cinematic punctuation very strongly identified with Kurosawa is the wipe. This effect is created through an optical printer, in which, when a scene ends, a line or bar appears to move across the screen, “wiping” away the image while simultaneously revealing the first image of the subsequent scene. In Rashomon the use of the wipe emphasizes motion in traveling shots, marking narrative shifts and marking temporal ellipses between actions.” (x)
