France

Quote:
La Ricotta (starring Orson Welles) represents a key moment in Pasolini’s career. This complex work marks a stylistic advance over his earlier films and with it, Pasolini comes of age as a man of the cinema. Although La Ricotta is an outcry against the betrayal of religion, it was perceived as blasphemous by the right-wing homophobic political enemies of Pasolini. He was put on trial and charged with “insulting the religion of the state,” a Fascist law that was still on the books. Pasolini was sentenced to four months in prison, eventually amnestied, and all of RoGoPaG was banned. La Ricotta is a dazzling amalgam of trenchant social satire, neo-realism, pathos, and burlesque comedy by the man Susan Sontag has called “indisputably the most remarkable figure to have emerged in Italian arts and letters since the Second World War.”Read More »

Synopsis:
A clueless police inspector stumbles his way through a provincial murder investigation, in this shocking — and shockingly funny — change of pace from premier French auteur Bruno Dumont (L’humanité, Hadewijch).
Originally conceived and broadcast as a four-part miniseries, Bruno Dumont’s P’tit Quinquin works seamlessly when screened in its cinematic version.
Dumont has again chosen to shoot his new film against the countryside of his birthplace, the Boulonnais region around Calais; apart from that, the film marks a notable change in tone for this immensely creative filmmaker. (Well, it does share one other thing in common with his earlier films: like L’Humanite, the film centres on a police detective investigating a murder.)
P’tit Quinquin is — believe it or not for those who have been following Dumont’s career — a comedy. Little prepares you for the adventure, rollicking and slapstick, in this idiosyncratic screwball of a film. Chuckles abound — at times you can’t quite believe what you are seeing — but, not surprisingly in the hands of a director who has always managed to keep a firm, controlling hand on his material, the film never spirals into silliness. Wit and intelligence prevail.Read More »

Quote:
The master of the French New Wave indicts consumerism and elaborates on his personal vision of Hell with this raucous, biting satire. A nasty, scheming bourgeois Parisian couple embarks on a journey through the countryside to her father’s house, where they pray for his death and a subsequent inheritance. Their trip is at first delayed, and later it is distracted by several outrageous events and characters including an apocalyptic traffic jam, a group of fictional philosophers, a couple of violent carjackers, and eventually, a gross display of cannibalism. By the time the film concludes, their seemingly simple journey has deteriorated into a freewheeling philosophical diatribe that leaves no topic unscathed. With Week End, Jean-Luc Godard reaches an impressive plateau of film originality, incorporating inter-titles, extended tracking shots, and music to add an entirely new grammar to film language. The result is a deeply challenging work that will most certainly invigorate some viewers just as much as it will as frustrate others.Read More »

From IMDB:
Another Louis Jouvet’s tour de force., 8 March 2003
Author: dbdumonteil
Some movies do not need a director at all:when Louis Jouvet is the lead,he carries everything on his shoulders.Here he’s got two parts: a crook and an honest man ,who is his perfect double. Jouvet is so good,a perfectionist extraordinaire ,that you do believe there are really TWO different actors on the screen,one self-assured,smart and tricky,the other one a born-sucker. Nevertheless, best scenes are to be found at the beginning:Jouvet selling a castle on the historical register to a couple of nouveaux riches: his crook becomes a true noble ,and when he says to these bourgeois he despises “call me excellency as everybody does”,his behavior compels respect.Read More »

Synopsis:

‘One rainy night, a stranger arrives in a nondescript seaside town and checks into a cheap hotel. All that is known about him is his name – Pierre – and everyone he meets is suspicious of him. He appears to know the area well; he seems to be in good health. But why is he here? Why is he so sad?’
– French Film SiteRead More »

Synopsis
In a South American country, a US official, Michael Santore, is kidnapped by left-wing guerrillas. His captors accuse him of being a CIA agent, responsible for training the local police in techniques of torture and anti-sedition. As the guerrillas attempt to extract a confession from Santore, the authorities, headed by an extreme right-wing government, are closing in on them… Read More »

A minimalist recitation by Barbara Ulrich of Book 2 chapter 6 of Montaigne’s Essays.Read More »

DURAS AND CINEMA
Assembling archives, documents, getting ghosts to talk, is always dangerous: there is a risk of losing the living. But Dominique Auvray, who was known to the great lady in more than one way (besides being her script girl and editor, she also directed a beautiful film portrait of M.D.), knows what to do when it comes to arranging and adding today’s actors’ voices, and inviting them all (past, present, lasting insistences) to twirl, along with us, in the dance.Read More »

In 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle), Jean-Luc Godard beckons us ever closer, whispering in our ears as narrator. About what? Money, sex, fashion, the city, love, language, war: in a word, everything. Among the legendary French filmmaker’s finest achievements, the film takes as its ostensible subject the daily life of Juliette Janson (Marina Vlady), a housewife from the Paris suburbs who prostitutes herself for extra money. Yet this is only a template for Godard to spin off into provocative philosophical tangents and gorgeous images. 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her is perhaps Godard’s most revelatory look at consumer culture, shot in ravishing widescreen color by Raoul Coutard. (Criterion)Read More »