Casts & Crew
Also Directed by Yves Montmayeur
Documentary about the Japanese filmmaker Takashi Miike, where we see him attend film festivals, personal influences and of course the study of his main films, apart from the opinions about him by other filmmakers such as Takeshi Kitano or Kinji Fukasaku.
Guy Maddin, who has been nicknamed the Canadian David Lynch, is undoubtedly one of the last remaining Magi of cinema. Despite living in the middle of the digital age, this heretical director hailing from the snowy plains of Canada has spent 25 years transposing the uncommon and the uncanny onto screens over-saturated with naturalistic imagery. A lover of primitive cinema, he has cunningly summoned the light-and-shadow techniques and experimentations of the Golden Age of film to resuscitate a unique cinematographic language which plays with the spectator’s unconscious by means of visual trickery as disturbing as it is absurd. In an attitude as playful at that Maddin’s films this documentary follows the mediumistic experiments of this master of illusion, filmed during the ‘’spirit’’ shootings he presented in Europe.
He has a unique, impenetrable face. He's also an artist of many different facets. Takeshi Kitano embodies the new Japanese cinema, the archetype of the merciless Yakuza, but he is also a subversive visual artist, an unbridled TV comedian, an instigator of the conservative Japanese society... After dissecting artists like Guy Maddin, Yves Montmayeur creates this portrait of one of the most important auteurs in contemporary filmmaking.
A cinematographic “cadavre exquis”, whose entrails reveal the odd nature of a (un)certain Belgian cinema. Authors, directors, actors who have proved that imposture could be an act of creation. Convinced that any so-called “new” cinematographic production was in fact a rehash of what had already been made, these pirates of images snuck as forgers, liars, tricksters, usurpers, … Outlaws of the cinema who falsified its form. From the filmed imposture of Man Bites Dog to Jan Bucquoy’s fabulist biopic, everything participates in the dynamiting of institutional language through simulacrum and absurdity. This free journey in the “cine-belgitude” has for vocation to approach these marvellous eccentrics followers of a overexcited and stripping situationism.
A documentary on Asia Argento, made during the making of "the Heart is Deceitful Above All Things." Cinema has always been a part of her life, so much so that she cannot separate her childhood souvenirs from her film career. With Abel Ferrara, Peter Fonda, Marilyn Manson, Rancid, John Robinson...
A documentary about Hong Kong cinema mythology via Julien Carbon and Laurent Courtiaud’s experience as screenwriters in the HK film industry, working for Wong Kar-wai, Tsui Hark, Daniel Lee and Johnnie To
Christopher Doyle is one of the best known and most acclaimed directors of photography in world cinema. Born in Australia, he sees himself as an Asian citizen rather than a Westerner. His artistic contribution to the films of Wong Kar-wai, Zhang Jimou and Fruit Chan films, among others, is indisputable. Filmed in DV and Super8, this documentary is a kind of wild and stylized road movie -- from Bangkok to Hong Kong, via New York. The camera follows this eccentric and outrageous artist as he gives us his thoughts on his past and present work. From the recent sets of Invisible Waves by Thailand's Pen ek Ratanaruang, and M. Night Shyamalan's Lady in the Water, to the locations in Hong Kong where he shot some of his most famous pictures, such as In The Mood for Love and Dumplings, Chris Doyle talks about his cinematic fascination for Asian culture.
Johnnie got his gun is a mix of interview snippets with To, these are taken from various sources and are cobbled together with clips from including Breaking news, P.T.U and The Mission amongst others. It seems Montmayeur did do an interview but it's so chopped up and mixed in it feels insignificant. Prominent members of casts and crew also feature in interview form but again from many different times and sources.
