The epic roleplaying stunt Dau is now churning out epicly bad movies
polygon.com
polygon.com
My reading comprehension sometimes escapes me, but to me the article starts like I already know what it is talking about. So these people went about their daily lives being constantly filmed only on set? Round the clock? They lived there? They chose to do this?
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/jan/26/inside-the-stal...
> The cinematic behemoth was meant to unfold in a living, breathing three-acre recreation of postwar Moscow, built in the Ukrainian town of Kharkov. Cameras would follow hundreds of non-professional actors and thousands of extras day and night, as they lived life as if under the watchful eye of the KGB
It seems like an extraordinary system like that should involve ... a bit of elaboration.
The article seems to question more than just the quality of the film but the treatment of the actors, and other topics, but doing so without understanding how such a strange film was actually made seems off...
Even if the article wants also criticise some abuse that happened, the whole "who chose to participate, what did hey know, how do they feel about their experience, why" still seems like too much information/expectation. Just getting interviews and verifying them would take awful lot of work for basically review.
I feel like they raised the issues that sort of ask those questions.... did abuse happen?
Then yeah you kinda should explore that fact or not.
They did not went into bacstories and motivations of people who were actors or participants.
Looking at other article I'm not sure that it's a given fact or such. There are lots of vague articles but none seem particularly factual as far as what actually happened.
It seems strange to me to raise the question or say it happened but not actually address if it happened and the we say discuss how "well it's a movie review so I don't have to explain that".
Like Endemol's "Big Brother", on a city scale.
The abuse may also have become .. intrinsic to the project? The voyeuristic dominant seems to be a common type among film directors. He had a unique opportunity to control and film sexual interactions, and he may simply have decided to carry on with it because nobody stopped him.
https://kkbbd.com/2020/02/29/an-open-letter-to-carlo-chatria...
"We are obligated to reserve our judgment of the project as a whole — but we are within our rights to discuss DAU. Natasha, which is competing as an individual title."
"At the time when Harvey Weinstein is found guilty of sex crimes, in an era marked by the struggle against the culture of violence and abuse in the film industry, does the Berlinale see any ethical issues in screening a film that (by its own authors’ stark admission) contains scenes of real psychological and physical violence against non-professional actors, as well as unsimulated sex between people under the influence of alcohol?
In the festival directors’ opinion, would such a film be possible to exhibit if it were created in the so-called First World — for instance, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, or the U.S. — and used on-screen talent from these countries?"
(emphasis mine: "a film that (by its own authors’ stark admission) contains scenes of real psychological and physical violence against non-professional actors")
This is quite the list of participants of the film (from Wikipedia): European Cinema Support Fund Eurimages; Arte France Cinema, Société Parisienne de Production; WDR/Arte, Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg, Mitteldeutsche Medienförderung, Essential Filmproduktion; Swedish Film Institute, Film I Väst, Plattform Production; Hubert Bals Fund, AG Interfilm B.V.
I wonder how a young inexperienced director was able to access such backing with apparently so little oversight.
He is 45 and this is not the first movie he made. Got some prizes for previously too. Why did you assumed he is young or inexperienced?
Plus, the above mentioned institutions wont be on the set with you.
As far as I know, it's very unusual to be raising large amounts of money and backing for a personal project under those circumstances.
Yes his film "4" had some critical acclaim in a few second circuit indy festivals, but his family tree probably held a lot of sway too.
(This is all pulled from Wikipedia, happy to be corrected)
To my mind, this project more closely resembles the disastrous subject of the documentary We Live In Public [1]
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/feb/26/dau-natasha-rev...
Whether the suffering that's alleged to have taken place in its production was 'worthwhile' is an open and complex question, and its a perfectly valid moral position to believe that it was not. But to suggest that behaviour should be 'divorced from outputs' is not a logically consistent position.
Remember Joker and the terrified reaction to it? It got panned in review after review. I watched it and it was fantastic. I immediately understood why it got bad reviews because it correctly pointed out how the media are the source of many problems in our society.
The second paragraph provides an example to illustrate the first paragraph.
It's like it is convenient to mention because they didn't think the movie was good.
The review seems as callous to the plight of the actors as it claims the director was....
But SJW were outraged about the filming conditions years before already. It was a major production scandal, but the artists and backer sticked to it. Just an extremely long time.
You can watch them on the DAU website for a small fee. Corona killed the cinema prospects.
Are we really talking about whether a story that can only be told by traumatizing the hell out of unwilling people is a story still worth telling? Why assume that the story can only be told that way, rather than that it takes an incompetent hack of a director to decide that the best way to tell a story is to just shoot a million feet of film and figure out the rest in the edit suite? That seems to me at least as likely as the other.
I mean, it's not like we don't know how to tell stories about evil without behaving evilly ourselves. It doesn't take a working extermination camp to make a Sophie's Choice or a Schindler's List. Even if it did, would you think about excusing that?
I would think something like the great pyramids would be a more ambitious art stunt.