SERGEI EISENSTEIN VS. TOM OF FINLAND

This is my reply to Matthew Hunt in my blog:
http://celinejulie.blogspot.com/2007/10/my-final-vote-for-31-horror-films.html

--Thanks for the link to the sketches of Eisenstein, Mat. These sketches remind me of TOM OF FINLAND.

--I’m not a real fan of Hitchcock, but I saw more than ten of his films just because they were shown on Channel 7 of Thailand about 13 years ago. It’s great that Channel 7 showed great films from time to time in the 1990’s, but sometimes they showed them late at night or in the early morning. They also showed some films by Andre Techine, Emir Kusturica, and Stanley Kwan. I don’t know if Channel 7 still shows some good films or not, because I rarely have time to watch TV nowadays.

--I just knew that TAXI DRIVER is partly inspired by PICKPOCKET. I haven’t seen PICKPOCKET yet, though I love Robert Bresson very much.

I knew about it from reading an article in Sight and Sound, in which Paul Schrader talked about PICKPOCKET. I knew about this article from a link in Girish Shambu’s blog.

Girish’s blog:
http://www.girishshambu.com/blog/2007/10/snow.html

Sight and Sound’s article on Robert Bresson:
http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/feature/49407

This is the quote from Paul Schader:

“I'd come from a very illogically driven religious background, a seminary, and then I'd fallen into the Los Angeles counterculture of 1968. I thought there was no middle ground - that where I came from and where I'd arrived were irrevocably separate. Yet when I watched this film, which was part of European art cinema but also from the world I'd come from, I realised those two worlds were not so far apart. I saw a meditation about a man and his room, about solitude and spirituality, and I recognised that there was a meeting place between past and present. I also realised that there might be a place for me in film-making: I'd thought I was a critic and that was where I belonged; I thought I couldn't make a film about a man and his room.

Three years later I wrote Taxi Driver, which is that film with a lot of anger in it. It's not meditative or transcendental, but it came from Pickpocket. So from one Bresson film came my book Transcendental Style in Film - Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer - and Taxi Driver itself, which arose from the incentive and justification to create that Pickpocket gave me.”