oh movies

(Source: bbook)

untitledfilmblog:

“I met him at the hotel he was staying at — I was back in London for the London Film Festival — and I had read the script and I met him for coffee. And he kept on trying to leave! It had been ten minutes, and he said, “All right then,” and got up, and I was like, “Uhhh,” so I kept on trying to engage him in coversation. You know, Steve [McQueen] is an artist, and he’s very much of the mind-set that actors are artists, too, and everything around that is superfluous. We’re meant to create things, and that means taking away vanity and taking away the machine that surrounds it — though that [publicity] is a necessary thing and a good thing, because it gets people to watch the films that you do.

So he was talking about that, and he was like, “You’re an artist, you’re an artist!” And I said to Steve, “You know, I played Nina in The Seagull a couple of years ago, and I’ve never found a role onscreen that’s matched how difficult it was and how much I loved doing that part and how much it stayed with me. There’s no equivalent, and nothing I’ve done onscreen has been as hard or as interesting or as fun to do.” And then I read Shame and I was like, “She’s practically related to Nina, they’re like cousins, almost the same person. If I feel the way that I felt when I played Nina, I can play this onscreen,” which I’ve never been able to do, because I’m quite uncomfortable around cameras.

So I said that to Steve, and I said, “I’ve been thinking about getting this seagull tattoo on my wrist as a reminder, because there’s this brilliant thing Nina says in Act Four when she comes back and she’s completely fucked up — she’s had a child with this writer and she’s lost the baby and she’s lived in abject poverty, and she comes back and she’s fraught but she’s got this clarity — and she says, ‘I know now that it’s not about fame or glory or all the things I used to dream about. It’s the ability to endure, to bear your cross and keep the faith. I do have faith, and when I think about my vocation, I’m not afraid of life.’” [Beaming.] And I thought, That’s so sick! And it’s stayed with me, and when I told him about that little passage, he got excited and was like, “Yeeeah!” and I’m like, “I’ll get a tattoo!” and he’s like, “Great!” So it was sort of raucous and I got a call a couple of hours later that he was offering me the job, and I think it was only because I told him I was getting a tattoo. [Laughs.] I got the tattoo the following morning.”

- Carey Mulligan on how she got her part in Shame

You know who this is. 

Bear (10 minutes, 35 seconds) was Steve McQueen’s first major film. Although not an overtly political work, for many viewers it raises sensitive issues about race, homoeroticism and violence. It depicts two naked men-one of whom is the artist-tussling and teasing one another in an encounter which shifts between tenderness and aggression. The film is silent but a series of stares, glances and winks between the protagonists creates an optical language of flirtation and threat.

In defiance of cinematic convention, the film opens with a close-up shot of one man’s shoulder. The camera then moves slowly upwards and to the right, traversing his face with a proximity that suggests it is almost feeling its way across the contours of his skin. After less than a minute, the slow rhythm of this opening shot is interrupted by a dynamic scene of sparring between the two men. Throughout the film, the disorientating camerawork and silent movement of the two bodies moving across a shaft of light, adds to the existing sense of ambiguity. Light sometimes dances off the reflective sweat on their skin, sometimes throws them into shadow and sometimes momentarily blinds the viewer when its full glare is uninterrupted. At certain moments, close-up shots from underneath the men’s two interlocked bodies tend towards abstraction with swinging genitalia the only markers for orientation amid a confusion of limbs. Near the end of the film, a back-edited sequence of feet circling around the camera, taunting and dodging each another, recalls the fragmented movement of Eadweard Muybridge’s nineteenth century locomotion photographs. This scene can be particularly related to the interest in early cinema which has informed much of McQueen’s work.

Like all McQueen’s early films, Bear is black and white. It was shot on 16mm film but has been transferred to video and is installed floor to ceiling across one wall in a black room. The floor of this room is highly polished so that a reflection of the image falls across it and the viewer is unable to stand outside its presence. McQueen’s strategy of displaying the work in an enclosed space and on a scale above human proportions has important implications: ‘You are very much involved in what’s going on. You are a participant not a passive viewer,’ he has explained. In addition, the silence of Bear is intended to be disconcerting: ‘The whole idea of making it a silent piece is so that when people walk into the space they become very much aware of themselves, of their own breathing,’ McQueen has commented. ‘I want to put people into a situation where they’re sensitive to themselves watching the piece’ 

- via the tate collection

(Source: mattjayblog)