Festival in Cannes (Jaglom) - article on Harry Jaglom's new film

[maxrael]

Apologies if this have been posted already... i don't remember seeing it! (but that doesn't mean much!)

The guidelines say i should refrain from posting the entire article due to possible copyright infringements, so here's a couple of good paragraphs followed by a link to the complete article written by James Morrison.

"The truth is that even when Welles had studio resources at his command, he used them in unusual ways, and once he no longer had them, he elaborated an alternative style radically at odds with conventional approaches. For The Other Side of the Wind, Welles shot footage over many years, with the disorienting effect that characters age appreciably, and illogically, from scene to scene. In the footage that's been shown publicly, the movie exhibits a casual mastery--astonishing shots tossed off as if they were easy, with an air of indifference, and without the overt bravura of Kane--and an exhilaratingly impromptu quality. Watching Welles' late films, you feel you're seeing a whole new way of making movies--as if a true professional, sick of it all, had happily reverted in the end to the simpler pleasures of the genuine amateur.
Before his death in 1985, Welles appeared in Jaglom's films A Safe Place (1970) or Someone to Love (released in 1988), and Welles' photo still appears, movingly, at the start of Jaglom's films, in the logo of his production company. What Jaglom learned from Welles' late work is that movies, always in danger of slipping into a stifling mechanism, can be best when you make them up as you go along. Even Welles' last Shakespeare film, the great Chimes at Midnight, has at the base of its magisterial vision an adventurously makeshift quality--stitching bits of different plays joyously together, and reveling in B-grade production values, to give the movie an immediate rush much at odds with typical Shakespeare films. It's classic without ever feeling dourly "classical."

Jaglom adapts the impromptu quality of late Welles, but manages nothing of the polyphonic sense of narrative that energized even Welles' most radically experimental films (like the little-seen masterpiece F for Fake). Jaglom's scenes are often literally improvised, and since they never strive for the kind of emotional rawness of, say, John Cassavetes, they don't typically escape the lumpish inertia that such scenes always risk. "

from:
http://indyweek.com/durham/2002-03-27/movie.html