Our favourite films often have a habit of making us mute, of striking us dumb (to use a more old-fashioned phrase). Once the lights have come up (or the desktop player window has minimised itself) we are left wondering, with a faint sense of embarrassment and a shrug of the shoulders, whether it is enough … Continue reading Maine Ocean (1985, Jacques Rozier)
Franju’s film is not, despite first appearances, just a film about insanity; it is also a film about being twenty-five, the age of Jean-Pierre Mocky’s protagonist and that age at which one is perhaps finally forced to put aside the things of youth and enter fully into the asylum that is contemporary adult society with … Continue reading La Tête contre les Murs (1959, Georges Franju)
“What was it like?” It’s a question often asked to a filmgoer once they have returned home, leaving behind their cinematic companions and rejoining those friends or family who wished to remain in the sunlight, not submitting themselves to the darkness of the auditorium and its resulting hints of eyestrain. Sometimes the filmgoer wishes they … Continue reading Brief, hurried thoughts on Le Deuxieme Souffle (1966, Jean-Pierre Melville) and Mark Rothko’s Untitled (Black on Gray) (1970)
Le Train En Marche, made in 1971 by Chris Marker and his SLON group, is the precursor in many ways to a more well-known Marker film; the 1992 feature The Last Bolshevik (Le Tombeau d'Alexandre). The latter film is a more complete reckoning with the life and work of Soviet film-maker Alexander Medvedkin, but … Continue reading Le Train En Marche (Chris Marker, 1971)
Bosphore (1964) Byzance (1964) La Corne d'Or (1964) Istanbul (1964) Maitre Galip (1964) Pehlivan (1964) On assignment Maurice Pialat and cameraman/cinematographer Willy Kurant go to Turkey, in disguise as the Lumiere brothers (less than a decade after Louis died), and send back a series of actualities, six in total. The opening trio work more in … Continue reading Pialat in Turkey
“There are a million places to put the camera, but there is really only one.”- Ernst Lubitsch Robert Bresson’s Le Proces De Jeanne D’Arc is a film about two things; the distance between and overlapping of separate worlds, and the reconstruction of a young woman freed from myth. What’s remarkable is the clarity of these … Continue reading Near to Here: Le Proces De Jeanne D’Arc (1962, Robert Bresson)
“But, my friend, happiness is not a joyful thing.” Was Max Ophuls the greatest, the most perfect of the classical film-makers? In a series of masterpieces throughout three decades (the 1930s, 40s and 50s) he composed images with the soft luminescence, hazy or precise, of Degas (with a similar feeling of constant movement), and stories … Continue reading Le Plaisir (1952, Max Ophuls)
La Poison represents Sacha Guitry condemning a perfidious public, and then gifting that condemnation to them in form of the bleakest, the sourest of comedies. This is not the sort of dark comedy which relies on infantilism, the adolescent or the easy expression (ironic or not) of bigotries and predjudices to make its effect, in … Continue reading La Poison (1951, Sacha Guitry)
Every so often a film just blindsides you. I have been a fan of Claude Chabrol almost as long as I’ve been a cinephile, my admiration stemming from early, formative viewings of Le Boucher and La Ceremonie, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Chabrol work quite like this one and was not expecting … Continue reading La Rupture (1970, Claude Chabrol)
Make no mistake: this is a beautiful film, beautiful for its modesty, its respectfulness, its clarity and piquancy of image both sundraped and nocturnal. Rendez-Vous de Juillet is a young film about young characters. It was not made by a young man, but it keeps its spirit and feeling of youthfulness because, like the young, … Continue reading Rendez-Vous de Juillet (1949, Jacques Becker)
