Palais de Tokyo, originally uploaded by pablogt.

Here are some of the pics from the trip.

Recently (five months ago) I saw the movie Le Samourai by Director Jean-Pierre Melville recommended to me by a respected miami artist and seconded the same night by dig. So I eagerly put it on top of my netflix list. I saw it and made notes while I watch it in the hopes of making some comments about it here. Time passed and today I decided to do it with the music background of Cansei de Ser Sexy.

I have to say that these are the type of movies I need to see. It confirms the idea in my head that there is art cinema out there to be explored. Since, I have seen many other Melville movies, but none is as good as Le Samourai. The first thing I noticed about the first shot that lasted like an eternity, it was a movie painting without the moving. Little by little I notice someone on the right side of the frame. It was Alain Delon, other than being one of my mother’s idols, I always noticed that many talked about him as if he was a joke because he starts every sentence about himself with “Alain Delon thinks …” all in the third person sentences, and always about himself. At least that was the way he was portrayed by Les Guignols and it always made me laugh about Delon. Yet this movie changed all that. This movie is a Masterpiece.

I think Melville was influenced by Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard and I can imagine movies by Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog and John Frankenheimer’s Ronin are influenced by this one. This movie definitely did not have any blah-blah. There was not dialog during the first 10 minutes. There was a very Japanese / American thing to this movie. Every car and the clothes were very Americana while the personality of the protagonist was very japanese Bushido style. He spoke with few words, filled with passion and straight to the point. He was detached from everything and everybody. A scene where he is stealing a car is so powerful it needed to be seeing many times. He seems lost, without hope, or future, suicidal… it ends with a suicide by cop scene. Every frame seems pure. There is an elegance of iconography that lets you know everything without words. A bit like a medieval church in film. It is 1966 but it feels like it happened at any time. The solitude feeling of this movie is universal and timeless. At one point during the movie I wrote in in my notes “he is me, I am him” I do not feel that now but apparently while I was watching I did. The formal beauty of this movie makes it a kind of cinema that I would like to shoot myself. It was in my opinion a controlled form of minimalism that we don’t see today in cinema, a very silent movie that focused on masculinity and the beauty of being a true gentleman. What can I say, I admire being gentile and true, as it is hard to do that these days where everybody is right and there is not need to have guilt or personal regret for anything we do.

The more I see movies that include Isabelle Huppert’s talents, the more I realize that she can easily be the subject of inspiration for infatuation, crazed, fascination and obsession. As redundant as all these adjectives may seem, I do mean their subtle and different meanings.

The more I see her movies, the more it is evident to me that the following characteristics appear again and again. She knows what she wants; she seduces à volonté, she is always ready to make herself happy, to fulfill her sexual desires without a care of her love ones, basically ready to deceive. She is smart, witty and manipulating. She is always ready to smile at a joke and play with hidden and private humor. She is always lovely. She feels her emotions all the way without self-consciousness. She is always ready for the unthinkable. She is trully all the way or no way, ready to play. She is ultra human. I have the impression that her true personality is not far from her multiple representations of herself in other movie characters.

Now, before starting this text, I of course googled her and found, not to my surprise, that she has being used for multiple infatuation acts by contemporary artists for what seems a couple decades already, many artists have capture her magic in photos and the latest seems to be Roni Horn where she portraits Isabelle in only facial expressions of her different movie roles, truly a masterpiece idea. Please visit the examples here to see my point: a, b, c, d.

Not realizing this, when I started this text, I had already painted her, well only her legs in a scene from I Heart Huckabees. I painted that painting because of the extreme erotic desire I felt when I saw that scene, which of course was not properly translated to oil but I felt this image could decipher as a single icon a part of our existence as well as going towards my wish of the portrayal of today’s desires.

I started watching Krzysztof Kieslowski’s The Decalogue, I could not believe how much emotion can be achieved with so little effort. It is all about the faces, they convey it all, and it reminded me of John Cassavetes’ Shadows.

I first heard of Mishima from a friend I loved, she told me that he was one of Japan’s greater writers. Time passed and I later purchased in an impulse many of Philip Glass’ recordings. One of them was Mishima, I loved the music and listen to it for more than a year… and one day I had the curiosity of renting the movie (only to be found on netflix, of course). Well, watching a movie when you know all the music by heart is an exhilarating experience, like feeling more every musical accent, or experiencing more of the frames. I have not read any of his books, but now I have a reason to do so. Does anybody know which book of his would be good to start with?

I later saw Glass in concert in Miami with the Screens, good stuff.

As I just reached 2000 movies watched in netflix and I just watched my first Fassbinder movie Love Is Colder Than Death (1969) by Rainer Werner Fassbinder recommended to me by colleague Vince, I wonder, how many other great directors am I missing out on? Probably lots, but can anybody recommend me anything amazing like Fassbinder?

The following movie was recommended to me by David Leroi
In turn I recommend it to you, this movie is one of the best movies to come out in the past three years and it is a true visual experience… see it!

There is a Band/Musician I recently discovered while seeing Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers

Mulatu Astatke rocks in my opinion. The recordings are from 72-74 but feel fresh to me.

little bird