January Film Events

VINGT Paris Launches Monthly Film Series! VINGT Paris launched its monthly film series with a screening of Urban Explorers: Into the Darkness at Le Beverly Cinéma Tuesday night with Melody Gilbert’s Urban Explorers: Into the Darkness, an award-winning documentary about the urban explorer movement in the US, Scotland, France and around the world.  Did you miss it? Get on the mailing list for the next screening by sending us an email with film group in the subject line.

VINGT Paris Monthly Film Series
Subject: “film group”
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Projo Collectif continues its Apéros-Projos with a whole new year of movie-going and networking at Café de Paris.  Celebrate the festival Clermont-Ferrand with animated shorts. 6 January at 21h00.

Au Café de Paris
158 rue Oberkampf
Métro Ménilmontant

La Cinémathèque Française continues its tribute to American directors with its retrospective of Steven Spielberg’s work beginning Monday 9 January, and a look back at Robert Altman’s oeuvre beginning 18 January.  Revisit your childhood and one of Spielberg’s two cinematic themes with E.T. (e.g., “Pinocchio”; the other being “Nazis are bad people”), or catch his only mature film (and get a realistic taste of 1970s Europe and Mathieu Almaric’s brilliant Polanski-esque performance) with Munich.  Pretty much anything you see by Altman will be great, so just throw a dart at the schedule and go see whatever it lands on.  Begins 9 January.

La Cinémathèque Française
51, rue de Bercy 75012
Métro: Bercy

Oooh, meet Daniel Sobrino, Jean Goudier et Cyril Holtz, the sound team that won the César for Best Sound in 2011for Gainsbourg (vie héroïque) at Forum des Images on 12 January.  It takes a village to make a film, and the free Ciné-debats de la Sorbonne series aims to introduce audiences to every single village person that help make movie magic. 12 January at 19h30.

Forum des Images
Porte St Eustache, 75001
Métro: Chatelet-Les Halles

Hey you Brits! This year is Queen Elizabeth’s Diamond Jubilee!  Watch what could have been / may yet come to pass in Derek Jarman’s Jubilee (minus the punk rockers, because we all know that punk is dead).  At Forum des Images, 15 January at 21h00.

Forum des Images
Porte St Eustache, 75001
Métro: Chatelet-Les Halles

Life on Planet Manga is the theme at Centre Georges Pompidou this month, featuring animated films originally destined for adolescent audiences but, as Manga does, often blending the pedestrian and the mature in stunning imagery. Begins 18 January.

Centre Georges Pompidou
Place Georges Pompidou, 75004 Paris
Métro: Rambuteau

You may have heard of Klaus Barbie, the “Butcher of Lyon,” but have you ever heard of Beate Klarsfeld?  She’s the woman who tracked him down, had him arrested and tried as a Nazi war criminal.  She’s also the subject of the documentary Berlin-Paris. Die Geschichte der Beate Klarsfeld (Berlin-Paris: The Story of Beate Klarsfeld) screening at the Goethe Institut on 20 January in the presence of Mme Klarsfeld and the director.  VOST.  Friday 20 January at 19h30.

Goethe Institut
17 avenue d'Iéna, 75116 Paris
Métro: Iéna

23 January is the Chinese New Year, and the Festival de Documentaires Les Écrans de Chine marks the occasion with screenings and discussions of China’s new wave of independent filmmakers.  Faced with the challenges and rewards of China’s burgeoning economy, today’s Chinese filmmakers are tackling documentary film in a whole new way. Begins 21 January.

Festival de documentaries chinois
Various cinémas

December 2011, Vingt Paris Magazine

The Show You Missed

Film Review: Inni

Directed by Vincent Morisset

Concert films are tricky things.  On the one hand, they seem like the next best thing to being there.  But then there’s the rub: the thing about a great concert is you have to be there.  It’s the whole point.  Of course, not everyone in the world was in attendance at every legendary concert: Hendrix at Woodstock, The Who at Kilburn, Prince at, well, anywhere.  So the rest of us schmucks are stuck with concert footage or, to be nice about it, the concert film.

Very few concert films work, mostly because inherent in film is the fourth wall – the very thing that rock & roll exists to tear down.  But sometimes a good director, paired with the right band, breaks through and you get a film like Stop Making Sense (1984), or The Last Waltz (1978), or even Born to Boogie (1972) (which not only had the advantage of a good director, but a director who understood high of live performance and the caprices of rock & roll fame better than any other director, ever).  Other than these select few and a handful of others, most concert films fall flat into the concert footage category, never rising above a mere documentary recording of something really cool… that you missed.

Inni, the concert film that accompanies Sigur Rós’ 2008 multi-media album of the same name, falls into this second category.  Screened at Commune Image in Saint Ouen in late November as part of the Journée Air d’Islande, Inni was the day’s highlight with two screenings for Sigur Rós fans.  Moody, stark, shot in grainy black and white (in some places the film stock underwent three post-production processes to create the effect of found archival footage), the film takes you on stage with the boys during their 2008 performance in London’s Alexandra Palace.  

While a few close-ups are striking visual treats – Jónsi’s contorted, wailing face, or Kjarri Sveinsson’s hands coaxing those haunting notes out of the piano keys – most of the footage seems to be of the empty space between performers on stage.  Intercut with actual archival footage of band interviews over the past decade, Inni is more fine arts thesis film than concert film; the director placing more importance on being “arty” than on giving us a true concert experience. The liner notes for the film state that it depicts “how it feels for both band and fan to experience Sigur Rós live,” but that’s exactly the problem.  It’s impossible to interpret how a fan experiences Sigur Rós live because each experience is highly subjective and personal.  Keeping the camera almost entirely onstage and at angles no fan will ever get to see at a live show may provide a very intimate portrait from Sigur Rós’ perspective, but the fans are left on the other side of a decidedly opaque fourth wall.

That being said, the Journée Air d’Islande was not all art film and Sigur Rós.  The main café space served an all-day Icelandic brunch that included some delicious, possibly not very Icelandic, brownies.  Icelandic sweaters were on display (reminding me of the Reykjavik airport, where my family used to stock up on sweaters and Toblerone during our layovers to and from Germany), and a very nice lady provided Vingt Paris’ resident Icelander with some proper yarn to darn his heirloom sweater with.  The day started with the documentary Rock in Reykjavik (1982), an award-winning documentary about the music scene coming out of Iceland, although the big shows were for screenings of Inni.

Journée Air d’Islande, produced by Sinny & Ooko and Air d’Islande, managed to encompass all the best exports from Iceland over the past 20 years: music, film, sweaters, brownies (sure, why not?) and, best of all, Icelanders.  I think I’ll stick to Sigur Rós live, thanks, but Journée Air d’Islande definitely whetted my appetite for more culture Islandais.

December 2011, Vingt Paris Magazine