Hey, that’s looks pretty fascinating…
Tilda Swinton is narrating his series. It’s apparently… ten one hour episodes!? Am I going to watch all of this? I mean, I’m interested in movies, but I hate documentaries. I guess we’ll see..
*gasp* In the HOV lane! I hope Swinton had a big enough crew with her!
Oh, I like that… I’m there for practical stuff.
It’s very difficult when you’re doing a movie that consist mostly of clips from other movies. Differences in form factor is fine, but differences in frame rate is deadly. This bit from a Chinese movie was kinda nauseating because it lurched so much. The other approach is to “smear” the frame to get the frame rate, and that looks even worse.
And I don’t know where they sourced this Dorothy Arzner movie from, but there’s so many artefacts here. It’s like it was taken from a 1998 era VCD?
Good! She’s awesome.
The sound on the clips is odd. They sound like they’ve been recorded in a shoe box. Very strange. A kind of very hard, short reverb. I hope all the episodes won’t be like this…
Wow.
Well, OK. They’re showing clips from interesting-looking movies, but the things they’re saying don’t really feel very insightful. I’m wondering who this movie is meant for? If it’s film students, it’s very… basic? Is that the word? It seems like the object here is to show people how to make movies, really. But it’s called “Women Make Films” because they’re only using movies directed by women.
I was expecting this to be a series of talking heads, but in its credit, it’s just one clip after another of movies. I like that.
Oh, I forgot all about the road movie aspect of this… but it’s not really well integrated? They just drop in some driving shots once in a while…
I’ve seen so many of the movies they’re showing clips of…
Believably is apparently set in Germany?
Yay! The shoe-box echo thing from the first episode is gone in the second episode! But… now the audio is slightly out of sync with the video? *sigh*
That’s a 240×320 pixel movie.
Hey, this section is pretty interesting… It’s about believably, and there’s two major insights: 1) Give the actors something to do (like taking off/putting on clothes) to avoid staginess, and 2) chaos is convincing.
*gasp*
Oh my god! Kinuyo Tanaka was a director, too!? She was in all the Ozu movies, but I didn’t know she’d directed movies… I wanna see them.
There’s a French-subtitled box set… Hm… Should I buy that? I think I should.
De rien.
Hey, Norway.
The audio/video sync issues are still present in the third part. I mean, er, sixth…
I didn’t know that Angelina Jolie directed a movie… it looks pretty interesting.
An honest cop!
That’s exactly how anybody would describe this shot.
This thing shows mostly short cuts from movies, but we got a good few minutes from the wonderful Est movie by Chantal Akerman.
I’ve seen ten (of the forty) sections now, and they’ve all been narrated by Tilda Swinton, but:
The documentary is narrated by Adjoa Andoh, Jane Fonda, Kerry Fox, Thandiwe Newton, Tilda Swinton, Sharmila Tagore and Debra Winger.
That doesn’t leave a lot of sections for the rest? Or… are there different versions with different narrators?
Secondly, we are meant to trust the narrator (and there are a few) that what she is describing is actually what we are seeing but there are many instances that the narrator’s assumptions do not look correct often because she is overly effusive and her description of what she says we are seeing can be easily questioned.
This person seems to believe that the narrator wrote the narration.
This 14 hour movie is written and directed by Mark Cousins, so while this is 100% about movies made by women, this isn’t. Don’t you think?
🎶 it’s like a movie by women directors not directed by a woman 🎶
But seriously, your enjoyment of this thing will depend on whether you find Cousins’ ideas about cinema fascinating or not. This isn’t really a film about women directors — it’s a Mark Cousins monologue about what makes movies work, and he’s using examples from women-directed films.
I’m kinda on the fence — he does say some interesting things, but much of it’s pretty basic.
The other attraction is to watch bits of movies that aren’t very famous, and some of them look pretty awesome.
I don’t usually watch documentaries, but I found this to be a whole lot better than 99% of them just by not having a lot of talking heads spouting a line before cutting to the next (which is apparently what people love to watch), so my opinion doesn’t count.
And I only watched the first four hours, so there’s ten more hours to go — but I’m not sure I’ll actually watch the rest. It’s… moderately interesting?
This post is part of The Tilda Swinton Project.
Women Make Film. Mark Cousins. 2018.
