‘Le Cinéma’ is a web series of short films on the theme of ‘the cinema’.
It is both a showcase of the film industry’s talents (both past and present), and the changing face and place of cinema today.
The depiction of the cinema is as a space of communal gathering – strangers grouped together in the dark around a single screen – and as a place of deeply felt personal experience through the identification with those images.
There remains something undeniably appealing about a work of cinema devoted entirely to the expression of love for the medium, particularly for those audience members whose passion for film may run as deep it does for me, as director.
The three-minute format seems to have had the beneficial effect of forcing me to conceive my segments in mostly visual and aural terms, rather than relying on narrative. The threat of the death of cinema and the communal movie experience hangs like an ironic shroud over “Le Cinéma,” an engaging compilation of 3 three-minute films.
I was inspired by a 1963 French-Italian New Wave drama film Contempt (French: Le Mépris), written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard. His film’s formula is simple: A affects B, which affects C. And yet there is an enormous amount left for the viewer to guess at and suppose.
“Godard is the first filmmaker to bristle with the effort of digesting all previous cinema and to make cinema itself his subject,” wrote critic David Thomson.
I was lucky enough to write and direct this series. My crew and I are in trimester 5 at SAE Institute Sydney, and we have all approached this with the dedication as if it was our Major work.
I am proud of the three films we have made and I can’t wait to share them with everyone. We all have our own stories of going to the cinema and this web series was created to release your imagination. It is up to your interpretation, and we hope you are swept away by the magic of cinema
This has been an amazing experience, and am grateful for everything I have been able to accomplish.
