Le otto montagne, 2022. Wildside, Rufus, Menuetto Film
”For today’s blackboard I wrote a haiku:
Christmas is hellish,
Lose yourself in a bookshop;
All will be well (ish).”
Shaun Blythell, Confessions of a Bookseller
(Entry: Tuesday, 22 December)
Le otto montagne, 2022. Wildside, Rufus, Menuetto Film
Le otto montagne (The Eight Mountains), 2022
Felix van Groeningen, Charlotte Vandermeersch
For someone who loves the mountain as much as I do, this film felt like a call home. It is an ode to the mountain peaks and friendship. Is there anything more beautiful than that? A film in harmony with the seasons, a film that takes its time to unfold. A city boy, Pietro, and Bruno, a village boy, meet in an isolated village in the Italian Alps, where Pietro’s family spends the summers. A profound bound forms between the two, which will shape and mark their adult lives. Childhood unites them (the film is also an ode to childhood and its free and unspoiled spirit), life takes them on different paths and tragedy reunites them again, with the mountain and the beauty of nature, with its untamed and unpredictable force, always presiding over their existence. As for the visual beauty of the film, words are truly unnecessary, but the key element was the filming on 35 mm. It’s another thing that makes this film so special, personal and emotional. And I am going to quote cinematographer Ruben Impens in an interview with Association Française Cinématographique:
“At the start, we almost intuitively considered CinemaScope for a film such as this… you’re tempted to say “the bigger, the better!” In reality, it’s very hard to capture the feelings you feel when you look at a landscape in two dimensions. Whether that be a painting or a movie screen. For example, you can’t manage that just by shooting with a wide angle. On the contrary, on a mountain, strangely enough it is the long focal lengths that I feel best translate the emotions of the landscape. […] To return to the 1.37 aspect ratio, once we’d analysed our scouting photos and we’d reflected on the visual form of the film we were about to shoot, we realised that the mountains were almost already epic enough by themselves… We didn’t need to add to it. Being able to place the characters in the lower part of the frame, with the mountains above them, was something we liked, in a sort of triangle that we often repeated like a theme throughout the film. For example, even in the interiors, such as the studio where Lucas lives in Turin, you can see the diagonal theme with the mansard roof. And then, there were also the windows of the alpine chalet, or the vacation house in the valley, with its little windows that were perfect for 1.37 aspect ratio.”
Sur les chemins noirs, 2023
Denis Imbert
Dylan: “And you? Why are you walking?”
Pierre: “I’ve always walked. Everyone walks at their own pace. That’s why it’s hard walking with other people. If a man walks out of step with his comrades, he’s hearing a different drum.”
Dylan: “That’s nice.”
Pierre: “It’s Thoreau, Henry David Thoreau.’
Dylan: “Zorro?”
Pierre: “Thoreau!”
Dylan: “Never heard of him.”
Pierre: “He’s a great writer. He’s written lots about nature and… walking.”
Dylan: “Sorry, but school was never my thing.”
Pierre: “Literature isn’t school.”
Dylan: “No, but…”
Pierre: “It’s another kind of school. Lots of writers never went to school.”
Dylan: “Sorry, but it’s really not my thing.”
Pierre: “Not your thing? You’re right, stay as you are.”
Jean Dujardin is Pierre Girard, a famous writer and explorer. One night, after a foolish fall from a floor of his building, he is left in a coma. When he wakes up, scarred for life and barely standing, he decides to cross France on foot. If the scene above, taking place between Pierre and Dylan, a young man, whom he meets on the road and who accompanies him for a while on his walk, is your only take-away from the film, it is worth it.
Still Walking, 2008
Hirokazu Koreeda
At the time of the film’s release Koreeda revealed that he made Still Walking in response to his parents’ death. “In the past five or six years I lost both my parents. As an ungrateful son who used the demands of his profession to excuse long absences from home, to this dat I find myself troubled by regrets.” This may be my favourite of his films. I believe that it’s subtleness and quiet beauty will stay with me. It has some of the tender touch of Yasujirō Ozu’s Tokyo Story. “The characters are utterly ordinary people; the film takes place over the course of a single summer day”, Koreeda explained after the film’s release. “Unlike in an American television drama, nothing of consequence happens during their rare, overnight family reunion. Yet over the course of this day, as deceptively tranquil as a calm sea, the tide flows in and out, and wavelets constantly ripple the surface.” It’s magical how the camera comprises time, how it gives way to resentments, regrets, fundamental truths or unspoken hopes. So simple in terms of storyline, yet so rich in substance and meaning.
Le otto montagne, 2022. Wildside, Rufus, Menuetto Film
Reading
I have recently had the pleasure of meeting Shaun Bythell, the writer of The Diary of a Bookseller and the owner of The Bookshop in Wigtown, Scotland, and attend a dialogue between him and my good friend Vlad Niculescu. It is true, Shaun is warm, honest and irreverently funny. He didn’t really have to make the case for the importance of books for me, which is why I enjoyed the conversation even more. One morning earlier this week I heard one of my favourite radio hosts suggesting the audience to just leave the Christmas shopping and do something better, like going to a concert. In the vein of Shaun Bythell’s own words quoted at the beginning of this newsletter, I’d pass on the advice to give up any commercial Christmasy activities and spend the day, or any given December day, in a bookshop.
In Confessions of a Bookseller, Shaun reveals that bookselling is “far from the idyll you might imagine. Beset by bizarre requests from customers who appear not to know what a shop is, locked in an endless struggle with Amazon and terrorised by his bin-diving, poultice-making employees, Shaun documents his trials and tribulations with a sharp eye and even sharper wit. This is the inside story of a life lived in books: from the pleasures of the unexpected find to the friendships forged over shared tastes and the sadness of finishing a really good book.”
Listening
The soundtrack: The Eight Mountains, with music composed by Daniel Norgren
The podcast: The Wild Life, with Miriam Lancewood the latest episode from The Adventure Podcast, where the host, filmmaker Matt Pycroft, speaks to adventurer and author Miriam Lancewood, who along with her husband, Peter, gave up their possession years ago and moved into the wilderness of New Zealand with a tent and a bow and arrow. Ben Fogle named them the freest people he has met. And if you listen to Miriam, the felling is that, yes, she is a truly free human being. It’s a revelation. “You are what you are surrounded about, if you are in a city you, will become that, if you are in the mountains, you will become that.” A truly fascinating story and insight into a life that is very very rarely lived.
The album: Graffiti on the Train, Stereophonics
Making
If I were to single out one brand, more likely a maker, especially this particular time of year, someone who is small, fairly new opened, fiercingly and authentically beautiful and completely devoted to making things their own way, then that one would be Rag of Colts. I have a personal affinity to Caroline Strecker’s way of making bags, the most characterful there are, handmade from repurposed saddles that have a feeling of heritage and quality and storytelling. I have talked to Caroline to do an interview together, but her newly opened integrated shop and studio has kept her hands fairly full, so we had to postpone our chat for the time being. But peaking inside her little shop, this little world of craftsmanship that is woven around something that is truly lived in and felt, a recognition of what is truly meaningful, fills me with all the joy.
Exploring
Wim Wenders’ photography book Journey to Onomichi. „I have always wondered where my favorite film (yes, of all times) Tokyo Story (or Tokyo monogatari in Japanese) actually takes place, except in Tokyo, of course. Yasujirō Ozu’s masterpiece from 1953 depicts a small seaside fishing town in which the story begins and ends. An old couple departs from there, in order to visit their kids in the big city one last time. After their return, the old woman dies, and her husband is left alone. Eventually someone told me that this coastal town was called Onomichi, in the South of Japan. So one day my wife and I made the reverse journey and traveled from Tokyo to Onomichi where we stayed for a week.“ – Wim Wenders
On a more recent trip to Japan, Wim Wenders talked again about the work of one of the greatest filmmakers in history, Yasujirō Ozu: “Never before and never again was film ever again so close to its essence and its purpose.” He was interviewed in Kamakura, where Ozu lived and shot some of his films, and where, forty years ago, Wenders himself interviewed Ozu’s legendary actor Ryū Chishū for his film TOKYO-GA.
Le otto montagne, 2022. Wildside, Rufus, Menuetto Film
The regulars: The interviews, newsletters and podcasts I turn to every week and/or every month because they are that good. Craig Mod’s newsletters: Roden and Ridgeline. Soundtracking, with Edith Bowman. The MUBI Podcast. Alicia Kennedy’s newsletter. Gone to Timbuktu, Sophy Robert’s podcast on the art of travel. Wachstumsversuche, with Sarah Schill. Sirene, Racquet, and Yolo Journal, all in print.
Our notebooks “In a Lonely Place” make for the perfect gift. For artists, scribblers and dreamers alike.
Available on shop.classiq.me / Wim Wenders being interviewed in Kamakura. Wim Wenders Foundation /
Some more December reading. Classiq Journal
