Hercules & Love Affair - Stay Ready

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Hercules & Love Affair - Stay Ready
Our creative work consisted basically in simplifying photography: cleansing it of the artificial glossy look of the films of the recent past. Our models were the films of the silent era, (Griffith, Chaplin, etc.), when cinematographers made unique and fundamental use of natural light.
Using natural light as often as possible meant using only natural window light for day interiors, like the great Dutch painter Johann Vermeer. For night interiors it meant using very little light, from a single justifiable source, such as a lantern, candle, or electric light bulb.
In this sense, Days of Heaven is a homage to those creators of images in the years before sound whose works I admire for their raw quality and for their lack of artificial refinement and gloss.
Cinema — the visual presentation of film — became very sophisticated in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s. As a filmgoer, I like the photography of these films, particularly the early sound pictures, but it is not the style I look for in my own work.
As in all my films, I was inspired by works of great painters. For this particular project, I was influenced primarily by American painters such as Andrew Wyeth and Edward Hopper.
Besides being a very educated and knowledgeable man of the arts, Terry Malick is also a collector of classic still photographs. His collection of turn-of-the-century reproduction books became a guide for designing clothes and sensing the mood of the people of the era.
...
In this film, however, Malick and I felt it would be better not to follow convention, to use no lights, and to expose instead more for the shadowed areas. The effect of this was that the sky would come out overexposed (“burned”), thereby losing its blue hue. This was an effect that pleased Terry.
Malick, like Truffaut, follows today’s tendency to eliminate color. The blue sky bothers them. They seem to feel that the blue sky gives the landscape a postcard quality, as though it was put there for vulgar tourist publicity.
Photographing Days of Heaven, Néstor Almendros
Gena Rowlands photographed by Sam Shaw & Larry Shaw in "Cassavetes' Streams"
Chain (2004) : Jem Cohen
"I don't even have time anymore... I don't think they'd understand."
Paul Thomas Anderson at The Master premiere in 2012
Master Gardener (2022) : Paul Schrader
Drinking Movies: Down and Out at Cannes
By Inney Prakash June 18, 2026
Screenshot of Ulrike Ottinger’s Ticket of No Return.
I first got sober at the Cannes Film Festival in 2019. Two days into the festival, I woke up with my ever-present hangover in a hilltop apartment lent to me by a Parisian friend. After deciding to spend my modest savings on what should have been a cinephile’s fantasy vacation, my initial endorphin cloud cleared to reveal my true motivations: an attempt to escape depression, temporarily forget my unemployment, and ward off paralysis about what to do with my life. Nicolas Cage went to Las Vegas to drink himself to death in Leaving Las Vegas (dir. Mike Figgis, 1995), Tabea Blumenschein in Ticket of No Return (dir. Ulrike Ottinger, 1979) went to Berlin, and I went to Cannes.
In the Ottinger film, Blumenschein’s character, Sie, chooses Berlin because it’s unfamiliar—nihilism is easier to indulge in a place full of strangers. She tumbles through the night in a surreal and plotless sequence of vignettes that conjures the aimlessness of a good bender. Her drink of preference is cognac; she downs it several glasses at a time. After she picks up a homeless woman as her drinking buddy, the pair cavorts around town, now sousing in a bar, now a cafe, now a hotel. They’re followed by a chorus of three women in matching suits—embodying “Common Sense,” “Social Issues,” and “Accurate Statistics”—who babble about the dangers of alcoholism. “Did you know that between Moscow and Los Angeles,” asks Accurate Statistics, “only ten percent of the population is teetotal?”
Looking around, I felt that in Cannes the statistic might be 0 percent. Not that people were falling down drunk everywhere; it’s just the kind of place where the hands of the clock are lubricated by a steady stream of cocktails and champagne, and deals are made to the clinking of glasses. That second afternoon, as my temples throbbed with anguish, I recounted the number of drinks I’d had the previous day and into the night. My standard order was a well tequila with a tall glass of anything on draft. I was already in a precarious financial position, but my trip had turned me into a walking converter of EUR into ABV. The bars in Cannes had no stools for solitary lingering, so I’d head from one to the next without ever sitting down.
It had previously been suggested to me by friends, strangers, a therapist, and a tarot card reader that I had a problem with alcohol. Despite the fact that I’d been drunk almost every night from ages twenty-one to twenty-seven, I found this notion absurd. It might have been true that I drank because of my problems. Depression, penury, loneliness; these were ailments for which alcohol was a salve. However, I didn’t feel that alcohol made my life any more difficult than it already was. If anything, it made it a little more bearable, and often more fun. I found camaraderie in bars, and I hung around one back home in Detroit so often that they’d hired me as a bartender. The two or three times I’d been convinced to go to an AA meeting, they seemed exactly like how they were portrayed in movies: pathetic, cultlike gatherings in dingy, fluorescent-lit church basements.
But waking up in Cannes at 3 P.M., hungover and suicidal in the dark—in my drunkenness I had failed to deduce the process by which a simple mechanism lifted the metal grate covering the door to the balcony—compelled me to turn on my phone and google “AA meetings in Cannes.” It turned out that a group of British expats had established a meeting in an inconspicuous church on the far side of the Croisette. I made my bleary way there, walking past the Carlton Cannes, recognizable from To Catch a Thief (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1955), to the address listed online. Thankfully, the meeting was in a small, skylit room on the ground floor rather than in the basement. A lanky, acerbic Londoner who reminded me of Withnail from the nihilistic, liquor-drenched film Withnail and I (dir. Bruce Robinson, 1987)—ironically, Richard E. Grant, who plays Withnail, is allergic to alcohol—gave that day’s “qualification,” spending roughly twenty minutes recounting the series of events that had brought him before us. Whenever somebody gives this kind of testimony, the specifics are often quite entertaining—any number of addiction memoirs can attest to this—but the broad strokes remain the same: at some point in their life they discovered the power of substances, were beholden to them for a shorter or longer period of time, and eventually reached a point of such abject humiliation or near fatality that they became willing to do anything to quit.
The “Anonymous” part being foundational, I’ll omit this man’s name and the details of his story, but suffice to say that he had risen to a high place in his industry, drank himself into a self-imposed exile in the South of France, slit his wrists in public, and eventually been taken in by a sober boat captain who trained him to work as a sailor. If I was more receptive to his tale than any I’d heard before, I attribute that fact partly to the heavenly shaft from the skylight that illuminated this reformed sailor, and partly to the rugged charisma that made certain drinkers romantic figures to me in the first place, but partly, also, because it involved a suicide attempt. I had tried to kill myself when I was seventeen by swallowing pills and spent two weeks committed to a psychiatric ward. I drank every night, my self-mythologizing suggested, because I still thought about suicide every day.
Ticket of No Return is explicit on drinking as an expression of the suicidal impulse; at one point, we cut abruptly to Blumenschein’s character reciting Hamlet’s soliloquy “To be or not to be.” In the film, Ottinger herself appears, swigging a bottle of clear liquor and reading from a notebook: “As far as I know drunkards, they’d rather die than drink. Wondrous plan, to heighten a pleasure so that it leads to death.”
Complete text over at The Paris Review
Fine Young Cannibals - Johnny Come Home
Bonjour Tristesse (2024) : Durga Chew-Bose
Robert De Niro - A Bronx Tale (1993)
Miss Hokusai (2015)
With unaffected grace and charm, Llúcia Garcia plays Marina, an easy-going, good-natured teen who shows up in Vigo in 2004 with her digital video camera, keen to meet her dad’s folks – whom she hasn’t seen in years. (These opening scenes are interspersed with quotations from her late mother’s diary about coming to live in Vigo with Alfonso, or Fon, Marina’s dad.) Her uncles and aunts, affectionate and enthusiastic and welcoming in their various ways about Marina, all have the same initial reaction, whose significance Simón cleverly reveals: they are stunned at her resemblance to her mother. It is as if Fon’s wife has come back from the grave to stir up very mixed feelings.
Almost immediately, Marina finds discrepancies between what she has always been told about her dad’s life there with her mum, and what these people are now telling her. Part of her reason for being there is to locate official paperwork confirming Fon’s paternity in order to get a grant to study cinema, and she is stunned to discover the family still do not acknowledge her as one of their own. Her existence is missing from Fon’s death certificate.
Now she has to persuade her cantankerous and difficult grandparents to swear an official deposition. And they clearly are wary of her – the tetchy grandma even claims that she does not look like her mother. Her grandpa just gives her a grotesquely huge amount of cash for her cinema studies – transparently a crude payoff to get her to go away.
-Peter Bradshaw
"Mascha [Schilinski] had a vision that the film - in its overall conception, should not follow a classic dramaturgy, but should have an associative, fragmentary structure that tells the story in the same way that memory works. We wanted to create a visual language that looked more like inner images than what we see directly - like a memory in your head that you can no longer access in all the details precisely. We began the process with conversations like these... the goal was that there should be no main narrative time, and everything else becomes a flashback. Rather, everything was supposed to be a memory - as if everyone were remembering from a distant future. We had this idea for the camera to behave like a ghost who has the ability to float through the house to observe the inhabitants - and through time, as if time would not exist at all. In that respect, stylistically, we tried to bring everything together rather than move it apart. We realised that the set design, costumes, props, practical lights, and, of course, the cast made it clear enough what time period we were in."
-Fabian Gamper
Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed (2023) : Stephen Kijak
My kingdom for Al Pacino's perfect prison issue bomber jacket in Jerry Schatzberg's Scarecrow.
Arthur Jafa, ***** (still), 2024.
Alexandre Desplat - Under the Spell