#tarsem singh dhandwar

[k-wame]

Daniel Sharman as Ares IMMORTALS (2011) | dir. Tarsem Singh Dhandwar

[micheles-journal]

*ੈ✩‧ ₊.ɢʀᴇᴇᴋ ᴍʏᴛʜᴏʟᴏɢʏ ɪɴ ᴍᴏᴅᴇʀɴ ᴘᴏᴘ ᴄᴜʟᴛᴜʀᴇ.₊ ˚☽˚.

𝒑𝒂𝒓𝒕 𝑰. - 𝒎𝒐𝒗𝒊𝒆𝒔

Immortals (2011)

the film was previously named Dawn of War and War of the Gods before being officially named Immortals

it was directed by Tarsem Singh Dhandwar, and it’s a fantasy action film

quick summary: This visually striking film reimagines the myth of Theseus, a mortal chosen by Zeus to fight King Hyperion, who seeks the Epirus Bow to release the Titans and destroy the gods. The movie features intense battles and redefines gods and Titans in a more action-focused narrative.

[cavenewstimes]

'Dear Jassi' Review: Tarsem Singh Dhandwar Delivers a Devastating Star-Crossed Romance

Simpleness serves director Tarsem Singh Dhandwar well. The India-born filmmaker, whose resumé consists of landmark video for the similarity R.E.M. and Deep Forest, has actually tended towards the stylistically baroque in such movies as The Cell The Fall Immortals Mirror and Self/lessNow, with his very first function in 8 years, he has actually gone back to the nation of his birth and made his…

[canmom]

Toku x Tarsem Tuesday Twenty-Two: The Fall & Immortals

Good Tuesday my friends! Tonight we’re hitting another on the ‘long overdue movie rec’ list, with Tarsem Singh!

To give a brief intro (which seems... honestly like I’m pretty sure most of my friends are way ahead of me on this guy, but it has become the tradition), Tarsem Singh Dhandwar is an Indian director who became prominent in the American music video industry in the 90s, before stepping into US feature films in 2000 with The Cell (so far the only one that I’ve seen thanks to @mogsk​ - a very dubious serial-killer story wrapping some astonishingly beautiful, abstract dream exploration sequences). But this was all, @lyravelocity​ tells me, essentially an elaborate warmup to his passion movie project The Fall, which was finally finished in 2006.

So what’s his deal? He’s known for his incredibly visually lush, intricate, baroque style of shooting. In part thanks to his long-time collaboration with Japanese costume designer Eiko Ishioka (until, sadly, her death in 2012), you can generally recognise a Tarsem Singh production by elaborately composed shots - either very stark with big blocks of colour or full of different layers of movement - and a great confidence with striking abstract and symbolic imagery calling after his music video work, along grand locations, clever editing... and, OK, mostly by someone being draped in loads and loads of cloth.

Also here’s a scene where he guros a horse, one of the more memorable in The Cell (more so in context). (It’s a tragedy honestly, that movie would work so much better as a short film without most of the dialogue, keeping most of the dream sequences and maybe a voiceless bit of how they enter the dreams bc that’s pretty striking as well. Alas the ‘vaguely genderous but not too much’ serial killer police procedural shit inbetween is sooo tiring.)

You can get a bit of a taste of his style in his music videos - one of the highlights maybe being that of Sweet Lullaby by Deep Forest:

...which intercuts colourful images of various people dressed up in Varanasi, India with more monochrome images of Soviet, US and Chinese architecture, all linked by a small girl going around framing pictures with a wooden block. Confusingly there is another music video for this song which is sometimes attributed to Singh (e.g. in the above playlist, and on Wikipedia), but IMDb says Singh directed the one I’ve embedded and attributes the other, earlier video of the Ndebele boy to David Lodge.

That said, Singh really came into his own once he had movie scale budgets to play with. So instead let me embed a fanvid someone did of The Cell.

Well, if The Cell could be seen as Tarsem taking a pretty conventional Hollywood horror story and injecting it with that sweet juicy Imagery he can do so well, hopefully his later projects is where things get really good... and that brings us to The Fall.

I mentioned above that all those ads and music videos were warmup for The Fall... and by that I mean more specifically that he used them to get access to shooting locations that would otherwise be impossibly expensive. Wiki writes:

According to the director's remarks on the DVD release of the film, Tarsem Singh largely financed the film with his own funds, determined to make the film according to his own vision, and paid members of the cast and crew on an equal basis rather than in more typical Hollywood fashion.

Singh's commentary indicates the film was made over a period of four years and incorporates footage shot in more than 20 countries, including India, Indonesia (Bali), Italy, France, Spain, Namibia, China (PRC), and numerous others, a few of which are not listed in the credits. Singh stressed the importance of on-location filming and lack of special effects in interviews because he found that modern techniques would not age well in comparison. He reportedly only took advertising jobs in places that he wanted to do location scouting for, and would fly out cast members to shoot scenes for the film using the same crew as he did for commercials.[7] Singh's focus on striking visuals combined with his commitment against using special effects when shooting scenes of the blue city in Jodhpur, as he provided locals with blue paint to refresh the paint on their houses.[8] This alternative to post-production effects resulted in the vibrant blue of the city in the film. Another location, the contemporary South African mental hospital which represents an early 20th-century Los Angeles hospital (the principal setting throughout the film) remained operational (in a separate wing) during filming, according to the DVD commentaries.[9]

So what was this all in service of?

The Fall is set up on two levels: a suicidal stuntman in an early 20th-century hospital wants a young Romanian girl Alexandria to steal morphine for him; hoping to bring her around, he spins her a story about her namesake, Alexander the Great, introducing a story within a story which is Alexandria’s imagination of the narrative being told. So it’s about the complexity of interpretation/communication and authorial control over the ‘reality’ of fiction, familiar territory to anyone who’s thought too hard about tabletop roleplaying games... and also a chance for Tarsem to go absolutely all out indulging his filmmaker’s tricks and use of colour and all those places he got to shoot.

I can tell you what the critics thought (kinda mixed: lot of love for the visuals but a lot of them apparently got bored?? are they like 4) but tbh the only opinion I’m interested in here is @lyravelocity​ and she loved it so I am hyped to the eyeballs.

Our second film takes the visual spectacle in another direction. Immortals (2011) gives Singh doing a spin on Greek mythology (though an original story rather than a direct adaptation). if you search for gifs you mostly find people were excited to gif the film’s shirtless guys, among them the Witcher guy who they have playing Theseus, and whoever this is...

...but compared a certain other ‘shirtless guys in cloaks doing highly stylised Hellenic violence’ film, this one hopefully has the virtue of not nakedly being fascist propaganda! Instead, well, Singh’s description of the aesthetic project he was pursuing sounds absolutely fascinating:

"Basically, Caravaggio meets Fight Club. It's a really hardcore action film done in Renaissance painting style. I want to see how that goes; it's turned into something really cool. I'm going for a very contemporary look on top of that so I'm kind of going with, you know, Renaissance time with electricity. So it's a bit like Baz Luhrmann doing Romeo + Juliet in Mexico; it's just taking a particular Greek tale and half (make it contemporary) and telling it."[11]

The critics generally seem to have felt that Tarsem’s visuals couldn’t save a tedious story, but hopefully they’re wrong, and regardless, I want to see it just out of curiosity about the aesthetic territory it’s able to find, you know? The more images to cross-pollinate...

Watching the trailer, you can definitely see this was made during the brief 3D filming fad, with lots of shots composed with different moving layers to show off the gimmick. (Toku Tuesday/Animation Night Theatres does not support 3D, so we’ll have to watch it flat.)  The Hollywood dialogue certainly does detract from those visuals... I’m almost tempted to try and track down the Greek dub. But we’ll see...

Our final feature is the much-overdue catchup on Kamen Rider Revice, which is apparently really hitting its stride now! So once we’ve seen lush Singh visuals we can settle in for some catboys.

Whatever-this-is-now Tuesday will start in about three hours at 7pm UK time, and we’ll watch Immortals first so @mogsk​ can get in in time for The Fall. Hopefully I’ll be able to get another animation out before that point, I’ll be streaming progress in the meantime!

[homocinematicus]

Immortals  2011 Tarsem Singh Dhandwar

[phantomviola]

Scarlet, pomegranate, imperial

Thanks @daisykatherine for the shades of red asks! scarlet: think of your favourite genre. what kind of media in that genre do you prefer - books, films, or tv series?

This one is so hard! If I have to pick one favorite genre, it has to be drama. Doesn’t matter if it’s a combo (comedy/drama, sci-fi/drama, romance/drama, etc.) I will always love it. In terms of what kind of media in that genre I prefer, I prefer TV series since you can really build up the drama and extend it over a longer period of time rather than in a film or a book.

pomegranate: favourite and least favourite fruits?

I have a lot of favorites. Top ones are apples, peaches, grapes, strawberries, and cantaloupe. Least favorites are mangoes, kiwis, and watermelon.

imperial: what film, in your opinion, has the best cinematography and/or special effects?

Wow, another tough one. I cannot pick just one but I can say directors Joe Wright and Tarsem Singh Dhandwar always pick amazing cinematographers for their films. Wright directed Pride & Prejudice plus Atonement while Tarsem directed The Cell and The Fall, all of which are favorite films of mine. Nearly every shot in these films are works of art and each one evokes a certain mood that elevates every scene.

In terms of special effects, you can’t beat the Star Wars classic trilogy. I’m also a big fan of Mad Max: Fury Road since they went old-school and did real stunts and didn’t use a lot of computer effects. 

[madeleineengland]

~ Olympus: The Battle of the Giants - by Francisco Bayeu y Subías.

~ Immortals by Tarsem Singh Dhandwar (2011)

[spoilersgr]

Η Lady Gaga εντυπωσιάζει με το καινούργιο βίντεο κλιπ για το «911», το τελευταίο σινγκλ από το άλμπουμ της, «Chromatica». Αυτό που μοιάζει με παράξενο όνειρο στην έρημο του Νιού Μέξικο προκύπτει να είναι ένας εφιάλτης στον πραγματικό κόσμο, καθώς η Lady Gaga ξυπνά, διαπιστώνοντας ότι παρ’ oλίγον δεν σκοτώθηκε σε φρικτό αυτοκινητιστικό δυστύχημα. Σε κατάσταση αμόκ, προσπαθεί με κοφτές ανάσες να πάρει αέρα, καθώς πλήρωμα ασθενοφόρου την επαναφέρει, ενώ με ταχύτητα περνούν μπροστά από τον φακό αστυνόμοι και διασώστες (υπαινιγμός στον τίτλο του τραγουδιού). Σε ανάρτησή της στο Instagram, εξήγησε τα πιο βαθιά επίπεδα της ιστορίας που αφηγείται το βίντεο κλιπ: «Αυτή η μικρού μήκους ταινία είναι για μένα πολύ προσωπική, η εμπειρία μου σε θέματα ψυχικής υγείας και ο τρόπος που πραγματικότητα και όνειρα μπορούν να αλληλοσυνδεθούν για να σχηματίσουν ήρωες, μέσα μας και γύρω μας». Αποκάλυψε επίσης ότι η σύλληψη της ιδέας για αυτή την ιστορία είναι του σκηνοθέτη Tarsem Singh Dhandwar, ο οποίος μοιράστηκε αυτή την ηλικίας 25 ετών ιδέα μαζί της «επειδή η ιστορία της ζωής μου του είπε τόσα πολλά», όπως τόνισε η ίδια. Στο ενεργητικό του, ο Tarsem – έτσι είναι γνωστός – έχει τα βίντεο για το «Losing My Religion» των R.E.M. και το «Hold On» των En Vogue. Σύμφωνα με τη Lady Gaga, «τα γυρίσματα έγιναν μεσούσης της πανδημίας, χωρίς να διαπιστωθεί ούτε ένα κρούσμα». Η τραγουδίστρια ευχαρίστησε επίσης και τους θαυμαστές της – τα Little Monsters της, όπως τους αποκαλεί – για την υποστήριξή τους: «Τώρα είμαι ξύπνια, μπορώ να σας δω, μπορώ να σας νιώσω, ευχαριστώ που πιστέψατε σε μένα όταν ήμουν πολύ φοβισμένη. Αυτό που κάποτε ήταν η καθημερινότητά μου στην πραγματική ζωή, τώρα είναι μια ταινία, μια αληθινή ιστορία που τώρα είναι το παρελθόν και όχι το παρόν. Είναι η ποίηση του πόνου». Πηγή: ΑΠΕ – ΜΠΕ

[k-wame]

LUKE EVANS as ZEUS IMMORTALS (2011) | dir. Tarsem Singh Dhandwar

[accesaucinemainvisible]

The Fall, un film, inédit en salle, de Tarsem Singh, au Pôle Etudiant de l’Université de Nantes le mardi 14 mars à 20h00

The Fall (Royaume-Uni/Inde/Etats-Unis, 2006, 107 min) un film de Tarsem Singh avec Lee Pace, Cantinca Untary et Justine Waddell Gratuit, ouvert à tous et en vostfr Dans les années 1920, Alexandria, une petite fille, se casse la bras. A l’hôpital de Los Angeles, elle rencontre Roy, un cascadeur d’Hollywood qui va lui raconter les aventures fantastiques d’une bande de héros dans le désert... Tarsem Singh Dhandwar est un réalisateur indien des plus visionnaires. Mais hélas, il n'a pas encore jusqu'ici réussi, dans sa carrière sur grand écran, à transcrire véritablement l'inventivité de ses clips musicaux, pour lesquels il s'est rendu célèbre ... à part avec The Fall. Tourné sur une période de 4 ans, dans une vingtaine de pays différents, ce film est un projet titanesque, et son ambiance singulière est assez inoubliable. Un conte épique par excellence, drôle et merveilleux, The Fall bénéficie d'un soin impressionnant donné à l'image, à la composition de la palette de couleurs, aux costumes ... Mais ce délire visuel est au service de l'intrigue du film, à mi-chemin entre Princess Bride et les aventures de Robin des Bois, en passant, pourquoi pas, par Mad Max. Les personnages y sont attachants et à l'image de la jeune fille du film, on reste pendus aux lèvres de Ray (Lee Pace, impeccable), conteur improvisé. Hélas, et malgré ses qualités, The Fall n'est pas sorti en salles en France. Venez alors profiter de cette occasion unique de le découvrir sur grand écran !

[karminaburana]

Mirror, Mirror (2013) - Dir. Tarsem Singh, Costume designer: Eiko Ishioka

[chamberceiling]

Tarsem Singh Dhandwar

[k-wame]

Man of Action LUKE EVANS as ZEUS IMMORTALS (2011 film) | dir.  Tarsem Singh Dhandwar