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Lindsey Wixson

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Isabelle Huppert

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Rihanna Ya she’s joined Isabelle Huppert, Lindsay Lohan, John Baldessari, and Wim Wenders to instant post status around here, (I’d also love to be at that dinner table).

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Lindsay Lohan I’m a little hurt she turned me down on Valentine’s Day. 

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We can see who Rick Ross stole his swag from.

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Rodarte Okay someone has to ask it, what the hell is George Lucas doing at a fashion show? Edit: I forgot to add Dakota looks amazing.  framenoir: Rodarte FW12 Front Row Dakota Fanning and George Lucas

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filmsdulosange: Masculin, Féminin, Jean-Luc Godard, 1966

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My Night at Maud’s It’s been a long time since I’ve watched this, (and by long time I mean 3 months). Tonight is a good night to watch it again.

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filmsdulosange: Anouk Aimée & Jean-Louis Trintignant in Un homme et une femme (1966, Claude Lelouch)

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Isabella Rossellini

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Kings of The Road This film is the story of two men, but it doesn’t take a Hollywood approach to the subject. American films about men - especially recent ones - are exercises in suppression: the men’s true relationships with women, or with each other, are displaced by story, action and the need to entertain. They leave out the real nub: why the men prefer to be together, why they get on with each other, why they don’t get on with women, or, if they do, then only as a pastime. My film is about precisely that: two men getting on together, each preferring the other’s company to that of a woman. You get to see the shortcomings of both of them, their emotional insecurity; you see them trying to be mutually supportive and to hide their faults. But with the passage of time they’re no longer bothered by these faults, and when they know each other well enough they begin discussing them. As a consequence of that, they split up. They split up because, on their journey across Germany, they’ve suddenly grown too close. It’s a story that you’re not often told in films about men. The story of the absence of women, which is at the same time the story of the longing for their presence! Doing the recce for False Movement, I kept coming across locations I couldn’t use because that story didn’t call for them. In the end I saw so many places that I liked in Germany that I wished I didn’t have a fixed story to follow. So I decided to make my next project a travelling film where I could put in anything I liked, where I would have the freedom of making up the story as we - literally - went along. A film that, even when we were halfway through shooting it, could still change totally. The idea of the truck came to me somewhere on the Autobahn I think between Frankfurt and Wiirzburg, when I had to drive along for miles behind two trucks which kept overtaking each other. I felt pretty angry with them, but when I finally managed to pass them I got a glimpse of the guys inside. It was a hot day and one of them was dangling his leg out of the window, and they were talking. It struck me that it must be quite pleasant, rolling along in a juggernaut, slowly and steadily; sleeping in it at night. I stopped at a lorry-drivers’ caff, and I liked the atmosphere there a lot, the way they were with each other, their politeness and attentiveness. There was this snug and secure feeling. I thought I might make my film about lorry drivers driving across Germany. To begin with, I thought of a travelling circus or a fair. But that would have entailed long stopovers in each place, and I wanted the film to get a move on. Later I had the idea of somehow using village cinemas in the Elm, and then suddenly it all clicked. It even gave me the fixed points for my itinerary: cinemas. From the distributors I got a large wall-map of Germany marking all the places with cinemas, and I drew up a route with over eighty cinemas on it, just along the border with East Germany, between Luneburg and Passau. I chose that route because it’s a long way off the main north- south routes in Germany. I took a fortnight and looked at all the cinemas. Many that were still listed on the distributors’ map were already gone. I took photos of cinemas like a maniac and barely looked at anything else. When I got back, I made a selection of twelve cinemas, almost all of which appear in the final film. Then I went on a second trip with Mike and Robby, my executive producer and cameraman. We looked at the twelve cinemas again and saw what else there was to see, in those places and on the road. Finally, just before we were about to start filming, I went off on a third trip concentrating on the landscapes and the people. But I abandoned that, because there was just too much. And then we started shooting. We had a storyline for the first few days, no more. Thereafter, there was just our route with its fixed points: a few village cinemas in Lower Saxony, Hessen and Bavaria. There was no screenplay, which was just what I wanted. But when we were about to start shooting I suffered nights of anxiety - should I structure the thing a bit more? And then a couple of times, in a panic, I started writing some feeble conclusion. Even after we started shooting I was still afraid that everything would go wrong. Then, in Wolfsburg, we got the bad news that the whole of the first week’s filming was unusable on account of a fault in the stock, and we’d have to reshoot it all. At first that floored me, but when I’d taken it in, it was suddenly liberating: what else can possibly go wrong now? Now we can go flat out! Our shooting schedule was completely useless anyway because of the mishap of the first week. Now we were ready for anything. We decided that a group of five of us would write the story: the two actors, the cameraman, my assistant and me. And for a while we managed to keep that up, but it meant it was two or three in the morning before we had the next day’s scenes ready. It exhausted us. We didn’t get much sleep, but the really shattering thing was trying to weld five imaginations into one. That really took it out of us. We meant to carry on, though, and it was only our growing tiredness that forced us to change tack. So from about the third week of shooting I did the writing in the evening with Martin, who typed, and then we went over the new scenes in the morning with the others. We kept that up until the seventh week, admittedly with lengthening pauses to recuperate. Finally we all felt completely physically wrecked. We had a two-week break in the filming. We’d covered just half the route. The end was miles off, and it looked more uncertain than ever. At night, in some village hotel room, I would sometimes be overcome with terror. I would be sitting around, and it would be midnight, or two or four in the morning, and I still had no idea what we’d be shooting in the morning …and with fifteen people on the payroll! Once or twice the next day would arrive and I still wouldn’t have any idea. Then we’d all sit around on location for a couple of gloomy hours and then push off back to the hotel. I think I needed those occasions just to realize what we were about. For the first time, I made the connection between money and ideas in making a film. Normally when you’re filming you aren’t aware that ideas carry price tags. In this film, though, there was often a direct link: if I haven’t managed to finish this page by tomorrow, I’ll be 3000 marks out of pocket. And then I would say to myself, all right, stuff the 3000 marks, I’m tired, and I need time to think. It only occurred to me to make this film because I knew I had the right team for it. The very notion of making a film with that degree of freedom depended from the start on my wanting to work with people whom I’d already worked with under different circumstances, in such a way that they could now all contribute as much as possible. I knew they too wanted to make a filmin that way, and I think that, though it sometimes got tough, everyone enjoyed it. I wanted a completely cinematic feel. Working with Robby guaranteed that. He knew that the language of the film would be cinematic, but that it would be made under entirely new circumstances. We wanted our adventure to show in the film, but not in its style or its appearance. We did a lot of practice shoots beforehand, with the actors and the truck. Hansi Dreher devised and built a camera harness for the truck, we tried out various film stock and filters. And we used the new Zeiss lenses, which are phenomenally sharp. We were going for depth, sharpness of focus and high contrast. That was the visual style, and for that we needed an awful lot of light. Even when we were filming out of doors we used screens or lights wherever possible. The last thing I wanted was for it to look like a documentary film. That’s also why we put the camera on tracks a lot and used crane shots. I knew from the start that the film would be in black and white. Whenever I thought of the story, it was always in black and white. A lot of that was to do with the truck, which would just have looked exotic in colour. It was orange! Ever since Alice in the Cities Robby and I had wanted to work in black and white again. It’s a pity that black and white has become the exception. It would be good for quite a lot of films if they’d been shot in black and white. For me, black and white is more realistic than colour. Black and white can be colourful, and colour can be very black and white. I learned a lot about the condition of rural cinemas, especially from the recces. It was noticeable that most of these cinemas belonged to women, especially older women, who went on running them with a real passion, and against any economic sense. They were well aware of the fact that there was no one to take over from them and that their cinemas would perish with them. Maybe that was why they were so determined. There were women who worked hard all day running a pub, just in order to hold on to their cinema. It made no money, they even had to subsidize it. ‘Oh, but it wouldn’t be a life without the cinema.’ The distributors - those who still bothered to supply these village cinemas - treated these women like din. For instance, none of these cinemas was allowed to determine its own programme, or ask for anything: if they wanted to be supplied they had to take a whole package, all that demeaning crap that only runs in sleazy downtown areas in cities. As a result, people who go to the cinema in the country are so unused to ever getting anything worth seeing that they’ve come to accept that garbage as ‘cinema’, and that’s how the distributors justify themselves in continuing to distribute it. In their rural operation, the distributors now work only with guarantee contracts, say 80 or 100 marks per film. If the box office doesn’t bring in that much, the cinema-owners have to make up the difference from their own pockets. I doubt if there’s another business in Germany that’s as badly exploited and exploitative as that. It’s glaringly obvious that a couple of years from now there will not be a single person left who will put up with this situation and that’ll be the end of the rural cinema. Kings of the Road is also a film about the end of the cinema. But for rock music, I’d have gone crazy. The Velvet Underground have got this line: ‘Her life was saved by rock and roll’. That’s why Bruno keeps a jukebox in the back of his truck, and a Dansette in the cab: two pieces of lifesaving equipment. In a way, the film is about the generation of men who spent their first pocket money on ‘Tutti Frutti’ or ‘I’m Just a Lonely Boy’, but who weren’t old enough to wear pointed shoes. Stand- ing wistfully around the scooters, watching some bloke riding around with his girl, pushing his hand up her shirt. They’re thirty now, ‘zooo light years from home’ just as they always were. It’s all gotta change.  -Wim Wenders

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Mick Jagger

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Nicki Minaj This may go down as my favorite cover of the year, time will tell.