Watch and Learn: Movies about Making Movies, maybe.

Well, to continue, here are some movies which aren’t explicitly about making movies but are, or can be read that way and maybe some that I forgot in the previous two posts.

“F” for Fake
Orson Welles pulls a humdinger out of his head. A movie about fake artists and deception, it is witty, brilliant, and more fun that you would imagine. I remember watching Orson do magic on The Merv Griffin show years ago, in those sad years of decline and Paul Mason wine, but he paid his dues to make his movies. And here, in his billowing clothes and with this rolling-thunder voice he is a delight. The movie links the fakery with magic through misdirection, a misdirection that Welles has the gaul to warn you about then do it, turning fiction into fact into fiction into fact tra la la la la again. It’s about the art of moviemaking and the director guiding the viewers to see what he wants them to see.

Through the Olive Trees
How could I have forgotten this? Crap. Well, I did say addendum infinitum. This was the first Abbas Kiarostami film I saw, way back in the Metro Cinema days in the NFB theatre. It’s a movie about making a movie in a ravaged landscape, a film about an actual event starring the participants from that event in a fictionalized re-enactment. Or so I recall, but the levels of narrative and meta-meta-meta narrative are headspinning. It’s lovely that way. So simple on the surface but underneath it just swirls away. And slow slow slow. It takes it’s time. It’s a love story and the last shot, of the young man running and running and running to meet a woman and declare his love is a long yearning and so beautiful. I think I saw this in the DVD bin the other day and why I didn’t buy it I don’t know. I must go back.

Salaam Cinema & A Moment of Innocence
I’ll continue on the Iranian film front because it is just ripe for this kind of stuff. Mohsen Makmalbaf’s film (his daughter, Samira, makes awesome stuff, too) is a documentary about the search for actors for a new film he is making. The film he is making is A Moment of Innocence, a film about his past and the time he stabbed a police officer. Amazingly, one of the people who shows up is the police officer he stabbed. And Makmalbaf hires him to guide the young actor who will play the police officer. What?! Is this real? Salaam Cinema is a cruel but a meaningful version of all those reality contestant shows (I have never seen American Idol and its ilk). I think it opens on a massive crowd shot of people waiting to go in to audition, and I remember being stunned way back in 1996 that Iran had such a vibrant film scene—this was just before the explosion of it in North America. It’s great. A Moment of Innocence came during the explosion, when distributors picked them up and they played the arthouse circuit, which is how I saw it. Together they make one of the great pairings in cinema—not a sequel, but more of a diptych, each one adding meaning to the other. God, how I want to see these now. Like Through the Olive Trees, A Moment of Innocence has a melodramatic ending that just rips your heart out. Just awesome.

Gimme Shelter
Another documentary, but the opening, where it shows the Stones all gathered about the Steinbeck watching the Maysles’ footage, makes it more than just a band film—it is also a film about the making of itself, and the decisions about the event at Altamont. It is also just a fantastic documentary and the last time perhaps that the Stones were just a great band. You see them become the Rolling Stones, rock stars, in Robert Frank’s C*cksucker Blues, but here you just get the boys. That’s about all the relevance it has to this list, but given the state of pop celebrity and all the reality shows with fake people being even faker on camera, it’s so refreshing to see a documentary which so carefully shows people as people, without the persona interfering. Innocent, really.