puttnies

A fine recording of John Cassavetes, shot in Hollywood 1965, while he was editing "Faces", and 1968 in Paris, when the film was finished. A visiting TV team from France is listening to the credo of Cassavetes that you can make independent, free films in America if you dare to follow your convictions and forget about the limits of your credit card. Wonderful, life enhancing, a must for every film student. What a pity that it is not a bonus on the Cassavetes box. I saw this documentary recently on "arte" in Germany, and I was fascinated by the truth of many of his statements. The camera is attached to the man, moving around him hand-held, and the interviewer is just triggering his word-flow. A stage for this great filmmaker and some of his collaborators, including a listening Gena Rowlands.

I saw this debut film - apparently the diploma work of a student at the Berlin "Universität der Künste" - recently on German public television. A young woman, the filmmaker, remembers in a very discrete and poetic way the unfinished love that she shared with her male cousin. The credits indicate later that he died in his early twenties. What is so outstanding is the use of authentic amateur family footage, snapshots and tape recordings that basically tell the story of this love by the very sensitive display of their hidden meaning, invisible at the time of shooting. If you consider the incestuous topic – the off voice describes at the end their sexual encounter – and all the aesthetic traps that open up with it (especially in the current German doku-soap film style) you can only admire the beauty of this little masterpiece.