FOOTNOTE continues to get renewed attention with its Academy Award nomination.
Will Cedar’s ‘Footnote’ take home an Oscar?
By HANNAH BROWN 02/26/2012 01:06 (Jerusalem Post
It’s the tenth nomination for an Israeli film in this category, and the fourth in five years. But no Israeli film has ever won the award.
Interesting analysis of the film's chances. Excerpt:
At the symposium for the directors of the movies nominated for Best Foreign Language Film in Los Angeles on Saturday morning, Cedar was asked about how he got the idea for Footnote. Reminded that he had been nominated for an Oscar before, he smiled and said, “I want to say that it originated here.”
But, he explained that although “it’s about recognition and awards and all the conflicting emotions that go along with needing to stand up on the podium,” the idea came to him when he was at a low point in his career. He was notified that he had won an unexpected honor, and assumed that it was intended for his father, Howard Cedar, an Israel Prize-winning scientist. As he waited to hear whether it was him or his father who was getting the honor, the idea for the film was born.
Also, Jonathan Poritsky interviews Cedar in
Heeb Magazine:
Filmmaker Joseph Cedar Talks Movies, Talmud and Committees. Excerpt:
The opening of the film is very fast. A lot of quick cuts, a lot of jumping through time and a lot of neat uses of editing and graphics.
I wanted to feel free to tell the story in the most entertaining style. I’ve always been aggravated by the formalism of this profession that I have. In each of my previous films I would come out with a bunch of ideas that I just didn’t know how to put in that I’m sure would have helped the viewer become more involved in the story.
While I was writing this film I was looking at some Talmudic textbooks. The way these philologists write, they are extremely economic in how they phrase a sentence. You have very short sentences and then a whole page of footnotes. Because their writing is so sparse, all the things they want to put in but are afraid to put in the primary text they just throw in the footnotes. Suddenly they really go wild. They feel loose to use any style and gossip and things that aren’t necessarily true.
I like that as an idea, that a footnote is a place that can allow you to be a little less responsible and less consistent. So we’ve created footnotes in the film. Stylistic footnotes, content footnotes, informative footnotes. It was really liberating for me. Anything I wanted to say I just did as a footnote.
Background
here and links.