Tim Burton: The Man who will President

Tim Burton is to be the next president of the Cannes Film Festival, the AFP (Agence France-Presse) revealed on January 26.

According to the French press agency, the US director of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street and Batman will be presiding over the prestigious film festival from May 12 to May 23. The director described his nomination as "a dream come true".

Festival president Gilles Jacob described Burton as a "magician", praising Burton for his cinematography.

"We hope his sweet madness and gothic humour will pervade the Croisette," he added, referring to the boulevard of Cannes by the sea.

Burton is famous for his Gothic and surreal films and animations, such as Sleepy Hollow and The Nightmare Before Christmas. However, Burton has also produced a children's film (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), a fantasy film (Big Fish), a biography (Ed Wood), two science fiction films (Planet of the Apes, Mars Attacks), and a musical (Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street). His next project, an adaptation of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll will hit the silver screen in March and will star Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter.


External Links:

http://www.france24.com/en/20100126-tim-burton-head-2010-cannes-film-festival-jury

http://www.france24.com/fr/20100126-tim-burton-president-prochain-festival-cannes-cinema
(Original page in French)

http://www.festival-cannes.com/en/about.html

"There is as much evil in us as there is good"

Such were the words spoken by award-winning film director Michael Haneke in an interview with the Guardian.

Austrian director Michael Haneke won the Palme D'Or at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival for his movie The White Band (Das weisse Band), a film shot in black and white and rife with graphic and disturbing depictions of violence and sexuality.

Haneke has made several controversial films in the past that have shown graphic violence and sexual explicitness and many of the characters in his films are forced to make difficult choices in extreme situations. For this reason, he has built up a reputation as one of the most pessimistic of film-makers in this century. Ironically, the numbing effect of the mass media on the human mind is a theme that is commonplace in his films.

The misdeeds and the outlandishly sadistic actions of the characters in his film also serve to highlight his idea of the innate evil in human beings:

"We're all continuously guilty, even if we're not doing it intentionally to be evil. Here we are sitting in luxury hotels, living it up on the the backs of others in the third world. We all have a guilty conscience, but we do very little about it." he says to Elizabeth Day of The Guardian.

Heneke does not shy away from such topics and does not admire what he considers to be the dilution or watering down of violence in cinema and in mainstream cinema and the media:

"The truth is obscene," he said with a shrug

In his latest film, a series of violent acts are carried out by children who all have some kind of contempt for authority figures, such as the parish priest, the baron who owns the land, and the head of every family. The children who carry out those acts of sadism become the Nazi generation whose minds are so weakened that they cling to Nazi ideology because it offers answers to these confused children.

"In places where people are suffering, they become very receptive to ideology because they're looking for something to clutch hold of, a straw that will take them out of that misery.

The less intelligent I am, the more easily I follow someone who is going to give me the answers."

Haneke's stark cinematography has led critics to say that his films glamorise violence, while he points out that there is more violence on television than in his work. Furthermore, he insisted:

"Art is there to have a stimulating effect, if it earns its name. You have to be honest, that's the only thing."

He does not deny his responsibility as a film-maker to entertain, although he finds it hard to live up to this responsibility when his audience "can only be entertained by distraction or by stupidities."
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Where do you find yourself agreeing with him? And where does he seem to be exaggerating? Does his undying belief in authenticity really justify the content of his films? I leave that to you to decide, everyone.

Until next time,

Journo-SEAL

Sources:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1149362/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/oct/25/interview-michael-haneke-white-ribbon