By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com

Guy Maddin On Sirk And Fassbinder

Posted Friday, December 9th, 2016 - Comments Off on Guy Maddin On Sirk And Fassbinder

“I’m an ardent consumer of Fassbinder. Years ago, when I heard that he was a big admirer of Douglas Sirk, I went straight to the source — to the buffet Fassbinder dined out on — and found that there was plenty more. And what palettes! I love the look of Fassbinder movies. Some of them are also hideous in a way that’s really exciting. When you go to Sirk, it’s more standardized. The movies produced by Ross Hunter — those really lush, Technicolor ones. I know Sirk was a painter and considered himself a painter first for a long time. He really knew how to work his palettes and worked closely with whatever art director he had. I was a guest speaker for the Technicolor series at TIFF Bell Lightbox and we screened Magnificent Obsession. To prepare for that, I watched the movie with a pen and paper. I wroteto down the names of the palettes. Soon, I realized those general color terms weren’t good enough. I used to be a house painter and I remembered the great names of the 10,000 different colors you could get in a paint chip book. So, I started to try to name the colors. Sirk used 100 different off-whites, especially in the surgery scenes in Magnificent Obsession!”
~ Guy Maddin On Sirk And Fassbinder

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“By the time the draft was completed, and passed on to my frequent collaborator, director Kathryn Bigelow, I’d written something quite unlike the singular focus and sole protagonists of The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty. The effort to make Detroit a mirror of the chaotic times led to an ensemble piece, quickly shifting between characters in a nesting doll of movies within movies, a riot film that gives way to racial horror-crime that switches to a courtroom drama, with several detours along the way into a band’s journey, the miseducation of rookie cops and the adventures of a pair of young women experimenting with sexual freedom. It was, in short, a lot of ground to cover in a single picture. But Kathryn was encouraging, and over the proceeding draft we collaborated closely to hone the themes and scope, while attempting to keep alive the spirit of a tough and untamed narrative.”
~ Mark Boal on researching and writing Detroit

What are we doing wrong?
“Well, first of all, by “we” I assume you mean the public, the public approach or the public discourse, which means the discourse that takes place in the media. And for the purposes of this discussion, let us imagine that the media is white and thus approaches the topic of race as if they (the white people) were the answer and them (the black people) were the question. And so, in the interest of fairness, they take their turn (having first, of course, given it to themselves) and then invite comment by some different white people and some similar black people. They give what purports to be simply their point of view and then everyone else gives their beside-the-point of view.

“The customary way for white people to think about the topic of race—and it is only a topic to white people—is to ask, How would it be if I were black? But you can’t separate the “I” from being white. The “I” is so informed by the experience of being white that it is its very creation—it is this “I” in this context that is, in fact, the white man’s burden. People who think of themselves as well intentioned—which is, let’s face it, how people think of themselves—believe that the best, most compassionate, most American way to understand another person is to walk a mile in their shoes. And I think that’s conventionally the way this thing is approached. And that’s why the conversation never gets anywhere and that’s why the answers always come back wrong and the situation stays static—and worse than static.”
~ Fran Lebowitz, 1997