Documentarists tend to be an eccentric breed. They need to be, since none of the main film festivals allow their films into competition (an incomprehensible decision), and to get a documentary into a cinema these days is a fraught process. But there is no more highly personal yet elusive film-maker than Chris Marker. His importance lies not in how many audiences have been affected by his films, but in how many of his fellow film-makers regard him as something of a genius.Read More »
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A few months later, (L’Herbier) directed Rose-France, an excessive and disturbing poem, filmed in the form of a weird symbolist collage. In this movie he started to experiment with special effects and celebrated the young actor Jaque Catelain, an expressive beauty, a true Dorian Gray, whose presence would mark almost all of his silent films. His mastery of the medium earned him a two-year contract at the Gaumont Film Company.Read More »
Adapted from Bernstein’s Le Bercail, the film follows Evelyne’s attempt to reconnect with her family after a traumatizing experience with a young writer.
Evelyne Landry, intellectuelle et passionnée, a épousé un homme bon et droit, mais fermé à tout ce qui intéresse la jeune femme. Jacques, écrivain secondaire et arriviste, la persuade de son amour. Elle s’enfuit avec lui abandonnant mari et enfant. Sa liaison ne lui apporte que déception, elle rompt avec Jacques et, repentante, demande son pardon à Etienne Landry qui finit par le lui accorder.Read More »
From Jordi Torrent’s program notes for “Raúl Ruiz: works for and about French TV,” at Exit Art (Nov 1987):
LA PRESENCE REELLE works through four axes of plot which are intercut throughout the film:
1. Adam Shaft, an out-of-work actor who recently worked on an interactive video disk documentary about the Avignon Theatre Festival, and who is now in a studio watching the program with the help of a computer specialist. Through conversations between Shaft and the computer specialist we find out that only 10% of time-space images in the video disk have been recorded from actual footage and the rest of the disk has been created by the computer using the ‘real presence’ of living beings. At one point Shaft complains because in the video disk his images are saying things that he never said. The computer specialist explains to him that his words have been used to create an entity that thinks and talks by itself, but that will not necessarily say things that Shaft would have thought or said.Read More »
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Recently restored (in 2001) by Centrimage for ZZ Productions, Maldone is one of the great achievements of French silent cinema. It was the first genuine masterpiece from Jean Grémillon and is also a very good example of the documentary style of film from this period. It was released in October 1928 but was not a great success, bringing and end to Charles Dullin’s film production ambitions (Dullin also stars in the film as Maldone).Read More »
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Ruiz returned to Portugal, the locale of many of his films, to adapt Dostoevsky’s The Eternal Husband, and the end product, Fado, Major and Minor, is among the most elliptical and intriguing works in his filmography. Jean-Luc Bideau stars as a tour guide who after blacking out returns to his apartment to find a mysterious intruder (Melvil Poupaud) who holds him accountable for the death of his lover. After premiering at Cannes, the film all but vanished due to rights issues, but it endures for Ruiz’s toggles between tragedy and farce, black and white and color, pop music and the traditional fatalistic sea shanties of its title.Read More »
Michelange Quay’s stunning first feature seductively begs the viewer to abandon the rules of traditional storytelling and instead embrace a poetic,… Michelange Quay’s stunning first feature seductively begs the viewer to abandon the rules of traditional storytelling and instead embrace a poetic, cinematic language. Eat, for This Is My Body tells of the evolution of power in Quay’s native Haiti and the colonial relationship between black boys and white women.Read More »
Renowned French photographer and Nan Goldin disciple Antoine D’Agata offers this visual essay of Tokyo prostitution circuits that isn’t for the easily offended. By exploring the prostitutes’ filthy working rooms and capturing the sex workers as they service clients, shoot heroin, and masturbate with their own blood, D’Agata effectively shatters the standard perception of the porn industry. ~ Jason Buchanan, RoviRead More »
A film shot as a serial, searching for a real cinematographic form, far from its fairy origins. Beautiful trip to Nice where you can feel Perret’s joy to film. The walk of Bosco-Maurice Lagrénée in the city and on the Promenade des Anglais, the triumph of the return of Captain de Valen-Emile Keppens from the colonies, the poor orphan Marie-Laure, every thing recalls the poetic realism that will be in fashion later in the French cinema, even if there is a reactionnary background in L’enfant de Paris. It makes us think of Duvivier, Carné, Vigo already…Read More »