“Realism, anyway, is never exactly the same as reality, and in the cinema it is of necessity faked”  
                                     - Jean-Luc Godard

Film dans le Film

Tokyo Story (1953) 
by Yasujiro Ozu

  Ozu's representing reality of the 50's Japanese society. The story consists of a social commentary on Japanese middle-class family life and more acutely, an examination of human mortality, alienation, and modernity.

Hiroshima, mon amour (1959) 
by Alain Resnais

  The Japanese man begins to ask the French woman about herself. “What are you doing in Hiroshima?” he asks. “I am acting in a film” the woman replies. It is not only part of the fictional world of the film, it’s also a self-reflexive comment on the production of the movie. the French woman is indeed acting in a film, and that film is HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR.

8½ (1963) 
by Federico Fellini

  Federico Fellini's self-reflexive autobiography with what is widely believed to be his finest and most personal work. In Fellini's alter ego Guido Anselmi, a film director overwhelmed by the large-scale production he has undertaken. He finds himself harangued by producers, his wife, and his mistress while he struggles to find the inspiration to finish his film. The stress plunges Guido into an interior world where fantasy and memory impinge on reality. Fellini jumbles narrative logic by freely cutting from flashbacks to dream sequences to the present until it becomes impossible to pry them apart, creating both a psychological portrait of Guido's interior world and the surrealistic, circus-like exterior world that came to be known as "Felliniesque"

Contempt - Le Mépris (1963) 
by Jean-Luc Godard

  The film was backed by three big producers: American Joseph Levine; the Italian Carlo Ponti; and the French Georges de Beauregard. Levine insisted upon a nude scene with Bardot as a way of making the film commercially attractive. Godard obliged but made the scene self-reflexive. Bardot’s character, Camille, asks her husband what parts of her body he likes and the scene was filmed using a variety of colour filters, as well as ordinary light, which draws attention to the artifice of what we’re seeing. The audience is not going to be allowed to enjoy the sight of Bardot’s body in a straightforward manner. Le Mepris’s self reflexivity is evident from the title sequence, in which a camera tracks across the screen before turning to face the audience. The narrative continues the theme. It concerns the conflict between art and commerce, a schism that Godard himself was struggling with.

Videodrome (1983) 
by David Cronenberg

  A sleazy cable-TV programmer begins to see his life and the future of media spin out of control in a very unusual fashion when he acquires a new kind of programming for his station.
“And therefore whatever appears on the television screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch it.” 
                                                 — Brian O’Blivion in Videodrome

The Double Life of Véronique (1991) 
by Krzysztof Kieślowski

  Two main characters: Weronika lives in Poland & Véronique lives in Paris. They don't know each other. Weronika gets a place in a music school, works hard, but collapses and dies on her first performance. At this point, Véronique's life seems to take a turn and she decides not to be a singer. The film tells a complex narrative of two young women who are existential copies of each other. The film hinges entirely on ineffable qualities: the interconnectedness of humanity, dual personalities, alternative realities, mysticism, sensation, attraction.

Arirang (2011) 
by Ki-Duk Kim

"Through Arirang I understand human beings, thank the nature, and accept my life as it is now" 
                                                                 - Kim, Ki Duk

The film addresses a personal crisis Kim went through, sparked by an incident during the filming of his previous film and by the departure of a couple of close colleague filmmakers.

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