FILMS I LIKED II

FILMS I LIKED II


The big illusion for most nations today, is to believe in the notion of territories and hermetic frontiers,to believe in their system.

The world today seeks common factors to the humanity. It tends to the unison.
The universal soldier preludes to the universal man.
The great writers, scientists, artists as well as languages are nowadays seen as a universal patrimony. They belong to the humanity.
On the other hand, we tend to meet the universal mercenary, the universal terrorist.
The natural tendency of the world is to the internationalization of everything, the problems as well as the solutions.
In a short time, when we ask someone about his nationality, he will reply: FROM EARTH!
A great film that suggests the future disappearance of frontiers is surely

LA GRANDE ILLUSION (The big illusion)
(Black and white French film
by Jean Renoir, 1937)

During the First World War, the Lieutenant Maréchal (John Gabin) and the captain de Boëldieu (Pierre Fresnay) undertake a flight of recognition above the German lines. They are shot down by the pilot Rauffeunstein. (It is the fall... Man suddenly changes of status: from master of the skies he bites the dust. ) The captain von Rauffeunstein (Erich von Stroheim) invites them for dinner before they are taken as POW’s… The two French arrive in a camp where incarcerated soldiers dig a tunnel to escape. Among them, there is Traquet (Julien Carette), a music – hall comedian and Rosenthal (Marcel Dalio), a rich Jew who receives sumptuous parcels from his family.
After several stays in different camps and various attempts to escape, Rosenthal, Maréchal and de Boëldieu arrive in a fortress run by the captain von Rauffeunstein, who is no longer a pilot because his spine is broken.(It is his fall ).He builds good relationship with de Boëldieu. But this last one puts up a plan to escape with Maréchal and Rosenthal. In fact, he sacrifices himself by playing a trick to allow them to escape alone. In the course of their trip to the frontier, Rosenthal and Maréchal dispute. They reach a farm where a German widow Elsa (Dita Parlo) welcomes them. Marshal and Elsa have an adventure. The woman helps them then, to gain their liberty. They finally, cross the Swiss frontier.
“La Grande Illusion” (The Big Illusion), pacifist masterpiece is also a relevant analysis of the mutation of History. The traumatisms (physical and psychological) of captains de Boëldieu and von Rauffeunstein make them discover that the future no longer belongs to them, that the values to which they believe and stick are more than an illusion now, and the only thing that is left to them ,is to disappear. In that, “La Grande Illusion” is a premonitory film.
And when Rosenthal says, in the film, this: «Nature does not care about the frontiers, frontiers are an invention of men. » It is the European Union that
speaks out of his mouth. And later on, the crawling globalization. In that respect, the film of Renoir is visionary!
Only, are we tempted to add, this globalization, has it to be made in the form of a diktat, imposition and domination?
Or has - it to be, a restructuring of the planet on the basis of each one’s capacities, specificities and virtues ,in order to make out of it, a synthesis based on the responsibility of everyone separately towards the others ,within the limits of his possibilities? Any new organization, any new system, has its reverse and John Ford in his film


THE GRAPES OF THE WRATH
(Film of John Ford-1940)


Shows us that the organization, the system transcend the individual. The system has its own logic that sometimes goes against the will of the individuals who compose it.
Any organization ultimately tends to the dehumanization.
The system commands. When a bank throws out a family in the street and seizes and sells the mortgaged farm, the employee of the bank charged of the execution of the decision of seizure, can feel remorse, pity, culpability, but can do nothing. The system wants it to be done so. It is the bank that functions in this way, like an inexorable machine.
Dispossessed of their land by powerful incorporated companies (System that pushes them in the downfall), sharecroppers leave the Oklahoma to rebuild their life (to be born again) in California.
Among these migrants, Tom Joad, an ex - convict, will play the role of a guide towards this new promised land, to which he leads his family and his companions, assisted by Casy, an ancient parson who has no longer the vocation( as if the misery weakens the faith). When the journey, punctuated with endurance and pain, comes to an end, the promise is not truly held. The chosen guides were not the right ones.
In this great social film, whose merit goes back to the challenge accomplished by the heroes, who become in the end, strangers on their own land, because of their poverty that pushes them to wandering, downfall, exclusion and violence.
Indeed the globalization is a new system to be instituted. But this unavoidable system, could it avoid the dehumanization which is the peculiarity of any system?
As far as it is true that, the characteristic of any system, is to alienate people, to create in the long run: mutants.
Will this process of globalization produce - new losers like these sharecroppers leaving the Oklahoma or:

LES MISERABLES (THE MISERABLE)
(French Film of John Paul le Chanois-1957
Starring Jean Gabin)

Who are a condensation in time of the long human misery that reoccurs under various forms throughout History? In this respect, we can say that there had always (at last up till now) been Jean Valjeans, Thénardier and Cosettes.
“Les Misérables” (Hugo’s book as well as the film), are the eternal and great real plea against the miseries of humanity.
Freed from the prison of Toulon where he purged a sentence of 19 years for stealing a loaf of bread and for repeated escape, Jean Valjean meets a bishop, Monseigneur Myriel, (human support of Christian moral values) whose charity will mark him forever. Become a prosperous manufacturer in Montreuil-sur-Mer under the name of Sir Madeleine, he promises to one of his workers, Fantine, to take care of her child Cosette, which is in pension at the Thénardier’s, who exploit her without mercy. The inspector Javert, convinced to have recognized in Sir Madeleine the convict Valjean, who he suspects to be recidivist, obliges this latter to escape. Valjean takes with him the young Cosette who he confides to the religious (a moral choice made by Valjean) of whom he becomes the gardener. But in Paris, Valjean is no longer safe from the tenacity of Javert. while Cosette has grown and is in love with Marius of Pontmercy, Valjean and Cosette have again to hide when burst riots that precipitate the events. On Parisian barricades, Jean Valjean saves the life of Marius. Javert, who is present, recognizes him, but fells into the hands of the rebels; he owes his safety only to the courage and to the clemency of Valjean (moral values again). Incapable to accept that a convict might save his life, Javert commits suicide. Cosette marries Marius and is richly endowed. The ancient convict, finally free, can lead a peaceful existence, but he will remain haunted by the misery that has accompanied him all his life.
Behind characters like Gavroche or his father, the innkeeper Thénardier, it is the suffering humanity that the film invites us to discover and while, at the same time it analyzes the system (always it) that precipitates peoples into misery and revolt. Condemning «the degradation of man and the downfall of the woman caused by hunger, Victor Hugo was right when he declared, about “Les Misérables”, that " books (I add: films) of this nature could not be useless. The film “The Miserable” is never useless because it reminds us of a very important thing:

The immorality of hunger.

If it is not well thought, who will be these new Jean Valjean, Fantine, Cosette, Thénardiers and other Javerts that will bring us the new crawling globalization ? Shall we live a new episode of “Les miserables”?
The peculiarity of these last two films is to put in a pictorial and fictionalized form, the defect (human): the unjust social system, which defects repeats itself throughout History under different forms.
Despoiling and misery reoccur through time under various forms. They push people to revolt, to crime, and for the weakest among them, to disenchantment, resignation or suicide.
In the «suicide”, it is the society that, by its values, implicitly, through the super-ego grafted on the psyche of the individual, kills the person.
The image of a comprehensive, tolerant, clement, giving a helping hand to the needy, society, is, in the super-ego of a person, of such a consolation, that it dissuades him from the suicidal act. The suicide is an act of desperation of the despaired towards the despairing that becomes the human society.
The world of globalization has become a building with its tenants .And these tenants tend to crush the weakest of them. And the weakest, is always the foreigner, he who is different .He, who has committed the imprudence of leaving his homeland, as in

THE TENANT
(Film of Roman Polanski-1976)

This film tells the act of desperation (suicide) of the desperate (Trelkovsky, a foreigner) against the despairing (the other tenants, the porter, the proprietor)
“The Tenant” remains a scheming, complex film, about a man pushed to suicide.
The questions raised in this film are in direct relationship with the unconscious rejection mechanisms that come into action and finally lead to this tragic end.
The story evolves around Trelkovsky, a young French of East - European origin who just moves in an apartment, after the woman who formerly occupied it, committed suicide by throwing herself through the window.
Just after his occupation of the apartment, the neighbors and the proprietor show an unusual intolerance to the noise (a pretext?). Subject to continuous laments, our protagonist becomes gradually paranoiac and concludes that his neighbors are pushing him to suicide like they had done with the preceding tenant. And unconsciously, that is what, in fact, they did!
The film, deals implicitly of the experience of being a foreigner (here in the particular context of the French society). To be foreign is seen as suspicious and with disdain and is often associated to hatred and exclusion.
Trelkovsky is solely identified by his name which indicates his country of origin (his strange name is use to isolate him). Trelkovsky is completely isolated (that is the objective of the people around him).
More, confronted with others, he means the difference and this difference is lived by others as disruptive and disturbing of law and order.
Here, the salvation is no longer in the encounter of the other. It is in running away from the other. It is like the endless escape of Jean Valjean or that of Doctor Richard Kimble in

THE FUGITIVE.
(American film of Andrew Davis-1993)

Fugitive through the force of circumstances and for whom ,the only thing that prevents him to commit suicide ,that still keeps him alive , is this " wait and hope for " a divine justice ,that wrote Alexandre Dumas about the hero of his novel “ The Count of Monte Christo” (which became a film like “Les miserables”) .
The suicides’ rate in a society is the indicator of its dehumanization. The absence of suicides in a society indicates that we are in the presence of a civilization that has chosen as criterion, foundation and goal: the human being well-being.
And here again, the only real lesson of solidarity and human charity is given by Dr Kimble.
Doctor Kimble, hunted, living unbearable situations, never lacks to his duty and even saves human lives at the risk of his own life! Here too, the values of salvation are the moral values.
We need a tremendous amount of courage to assume life and the unexpected. This unexpected that suddenly breaks into our life, brings us into a world we have never imagined and which becomes, finally, our destiny!

FILMS I LIKED

FILMS I LIKED

1- The Adventure of the Poseidon (Ronald Neame -1972)

The adventure of the human evolution tends to be the moral perfection which is the beauty. It is an eminently aesthetic tendency. At the climax of his evolution, man becomes the support of a moral value. Rather say, that the human being is, in the end, a moral value .The man is a medium. He is a biological substratum to abstracted values that are morals. The moral value is an aesthetic value. The finality of the human evolution is of a moral order, and therefore, inevitably aesthetic.
At the human level, the concept “better” can have only a moral meaning, otherwise it becomes racism .We can only valorize a human being among his likes by putting forward his moral values, not his race or his social status……..… There are valorizing functions because of the moral. Like the one of Reverend Scott, the main character of the film The Adventure of the Poseidon (Ronald Neame -1972) Ronald Neame seems to compare human adventure to his film The Adventure of the Poseidon.
The Adventure of the Poseidon is the story of a steamship coming from America and setting off through the Mediterranean Sea to Greece. The path is then completely reversed by a gigantic wave. Most of the passengers, projected against the ceilings, perish in the catastrophe. A group of survivors organize around a policeman and a priest (the reverend Scott). They ascend wearily, by following air pockets, to the part of the shell where the propeller is found, hoping to find an exit. They are finally delivered by an army helicopter. The biggest group listens to the orders of the officer on board, who advises them to remain still, on the spot (no initiative, no evolution): all will die drowned; an important number follows the doctor (Cartesian spirit) who suggests to go ahead: all will perish; just a small group follows the parson and the policeman who estimate that the salvation is found while going to the rear (return to sources, the History): only this group will be saved.
The group that will be saved will be the one who follows the parson. It will be put in safety by climbing a Christmas tree (religious reference = Jesus= moral model). Therefore, the salvation will come from the sky, the high, the sublime, the purification through tests and transformation as it has always been from the stone and caveman age until today. The object of the film is to show that only spiritual qualities can keep man away from the process of degradation that always watches for him. Trust people with great morality, such seems to be the supreme moral and the message of the film.

MY EVENING UNIVERSITY

We are the passengers of this spaceship that is the planet Earth. Indeed there are passengers of first, second and third class. It is a matter of means. But nobody, among these passengers has the right to undermine, to deteriorate this blue vessel and this in the name of the unity of humankind’s destiny. It is a matter of global safety.
It seems that those who are currently aware of this are the ones we commonly call the “green”: the ecologists. Perhaps they remain the only sensible people in a mad world.today
Will we be one day in the situation of Charlton Heston, in front of what remains of the Statue of Liberty (and of the world) in the film The Planet of the Apes, when in despair and in anger, he dropped the word: sadists?
Sadism is part of today’s reality. Only art can defeat it. But the good artistic seed needs a fertile terrain to develop. By helping man to understand the secrets of his constitution, to become aware of his endless capacities, and therefore to conquer his self respect, the cinema, will then have kept its promise of a dreams factory and a manufacturer of hopes, as well as an evening university with pedagogical and very agreeable courses to follow.
The Past has been lived only as a Present by man and the Future will be lived only as a Present too. The Present is the eternal point: it is a field of consciousness open to all the dimensions of life. It is also the time of the cinematographic spectacle. The great countries are those, which know how to father great masterpieces, in all respects.

Business and Development: The Private Path to Prosperity”

'Ever since I was a young boy growing up in the popular area of my town, in Eastern Algeria, I have always had a fascination with the Neighborhood Movie Theater.
All those wonderful movies, westerns, actions films, romance, comedies, war films, grasped my attention from the beginning to the end.

While the film was running on the screen, I was the hero. I was Gary Cooper, Kirk Douglas or Douglas Fairbanks. What was obvious to me: The hero was an entrepreneur.

Through time, I became aware that every film is a two-folded dream: The dream of the film’s hero to achieve a noble goal and the director‘s dream to make a film.

In the beginning, it was just a single idea of a single man. Then the man became a crowd and the crowd became people and the people achieved the goal:
the film as well as the hero’s need in the film.

However, this can only be achieved under two things: Freedom and the rule of law.
Freedom means you control your own life, your work, choose freely your partners, keep and enjoy what you earn.

Rule of law means you work in an environment of tolerance, security, mutual respect for the lives and property of everyone and fair commercial competition.

And when this kind of environment becomes available, the inherent contagious process of the hero’s individualist enthusiasm, by its exemplarity, spreads in the mass.

We feel then committed to our work, we make it ours, we make it a private matter and its achievement becomes a matter of personal honor. We feel self-responsible and endowed with a mission.

Almost all the films I was screening pointed, at the end, to this obvious fact:
Success is a private endeavor but a collective reward.

Later on, I became a filmmaker and a writer. I know now that successful filmmaking could not be any other thing than a private business because at the beginning, it is a personal idea, a personal challenge.

The proof, the only place where Cinema has remained strong is Hollywood because it has remained faithful to this credo.

But, let us look around.

Does not any human project look like a filmmaking one?

What if we consider any economic project as a filmmaking project? We will have : -the script (The company plan) -the actors (the workers) -the technicians (the staff) -And the Director (the manager).

As far as a film shooting is an ever-renewed challenge, and considered under this angle, any working day could be experienced as such and why not, in the end, lived as a sheer pleasure and a pure joy. This is what we call endurance.

But the first one who must experience this feeling should be the director. Then he will have to transfer his enthusiasm to his co-workers.

And in order to transfer his enthusiasm to his co-workers, the director should have an accurate idea of what he wants and the benefits that his co-workers are due to expect, that creativity will be fully rewarded.

In this respect, success is just putting intelligence into action, and action is the word that the director utters when he starts shooting his film.

Lasting development is just but intelligent business done by private undertaking in the way stated above.

And this is what, really, every successful film is.

In «Business and Development as well as in filmmaking: The Path is Private but Prosperity collective”

Thus: Action for a private endeavor,the new film on:

Putting Intelligence into acts?

Directed by YOU!

A SOCIAL FUNCTION FOR THE CINEMA?

"The Moon rises only by Night"

HAMMOUDI ABDELWAHAB

Story-boards from the fantasy film based on my script

"The Moon rises only by Night"

Excerpts from my book:

"Directors:The Lantern of Hope"

A SOCIAL FUNCTION FOR THE CINEMA?
There is no doubt that the artistic act is an act of production and that the emotion remains the first condition of its fulfilling and the condition of the artistic terrain’s fertility as well.
Another undeniable fact is that movies appeared in the twentieth century to cope with a social demand and need. The cinema is not the reflection of the reality .It is a facet of this reality. It is a component that came, at the appropriate time, to enrich it.
The cinema: is the dream of the human societies.
We dream in the movies: the obscure theatre recreates the night, the film: the dream images.
Everything, in the ceremonial of the film screening participates in deactivating the relationship of the spectator to the immediate reality. The darkness, the sitting position, the comfort preceding the projection induce a passivity that increases as the film moves on.
" Indeed, the spectator is not in state of hypnosis, but the autonomous alpha rhythm of his brain, as shown by the electroencephalogram, is more ample, more regular "1
The motor inhibition is therefore quite real. Slowly, the film asserts itself as responding to the same imaginary need of the dream.
Aren’t - we therefore entitled to wonder if, like the dream at the individual’s level, the movies have not got a repairing function of the spectators’ psyche?


1-(Edgar MORIN: Le Cinéma ou l’homme imaginaire- The cinema or the imaginary man -Gonthier1958 – Paris -My translation)


Closing for any reason a theatre, would not that amount to a displacement of the spectacle to the street to satisfy the need that the theater can no longer satisfy?
Could we not consider the spectacle in theatres, as a means for the audience, to unload their excess of energy of all sorts that has not yet, found its way in real life?
It seems that there is a movie function (nevertheless to be verified) that we seem not to acknowledge to cinema: it is its repairing function at the level of the audience’s imagination.
On the other hand, in the world of the moving pictures, Could we not class the films according to the objective that they aim to reach?
We will have, for example:

1 – The Beacon films (orientation).
2 – The Warning films.
3 – The Pedagogical films.
4 – The Mobilizing films.
5 – The Therapeutic films.

And in this respect, any important film is to be considered as an audience programming film (in the “data-processing” meaning of the term).
Anyway, when showing a film, we speak of a “program”, term that is strongly significant. That is for the cinema.
What about the people who make it?
PHILOSIRECTORS?
No doubt that among people who are extremely aware of the problems of our world, we find the filmmakers.
The status of the film director in a society is, before all, a status of an intellectual, a thinker.
Even if he does not tell it expressly, his film, if it is an important one, is here to suggest it.
An attentive perusal of some great films makes us aware, that these are our modern philosophers. If the word existed, we would call these moviemakers by neologism: “philosorectors” by contracting the words philosophy and directors.
When you listen to them through their interviews, on television or in specialized magazines, you are often struck by their knowledge and culture.
They are truly the spearhead of the human thought.
Many film directors have already given answers to many crucial issues.
And as a matter of fact, we must no longer feel ashamed, when speaking about psychoanalysis, to quote Hitchcock, Visconti besides Freud or when we speak about politics , sociology or any other human area of knowledge ,to quote Renoir, Fellini , Chahine, Ray ,Wilder , Ford, Spielberg, Lucas, Coppola to mention only a few among them.
The moviemaker (re)shows the beauty of the universe to people that have rendered blind, the banality of the habituation and it is not surprising that many among the filmmakers , fight to set love as a milestone and hope as an orientation for the human race.
Hadn’t this always been the dream of all the Prophets?
In this perspective, how about trying to see, through the movies, which are a human adventure among many others, the (GREAT) HUMAN ADVENTURE.
Acting and filmmaking are an intelligent act that addresses the human intelligence.
It is a process where the sole actors are: intelligence and emotions.
For our part, we have made this experience that consists in trying to see life through the camera’s lens.
Tremendous was our astonishment! We have gained in lucidity, and the following questions spontaneously occurred to our mind:

-Is this experience worth sharing?

-The movies: a great school?

And the answer seems to be: why not?