France

Re-view 1: Memories of a Hyperstitional Practitioner
A review of a Chris Marker ‘event’? One is never enough. Not only because Chris Marker is, as we were told this weekend more than once, more than one. But also because re-viewing, seeing again, looking back is so integral to the Marker experience.
Chris Marker is a systematic con-fuser of fact and fiction, best known for La Jetee (1962) and Sans Soleil (1982), explorations of time, memory, images and revolution (terms whose contiguity – and near synonymy – is a consistent theme of his work). The form that Marker perfected in the rightly celebrated Sans Soleil has been called the ‘film-essay’, though this does little justice to the astonishing singularity of his theory-fictional time-travelogues, which conjoin politics, pop culture and ethnography in a breathtakingly lyrical but intellectually clear-eyed plane of consistency.
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Quote:
India runs counter to all usual cinema: here the image is only the complement of the idea that provokes it. India is a film of absolute logic, more Socratic than Socrates. Each image is beautiful not because it is beautiful in itself, like a shot in [Eisenstein’s] Que viva Mexico!, but because it is the splendor of the true and because Rossellini starts with the truth. There where the others won’t arrive except in twenty years perhaps, he has already gone on from.India embraces world cinema, as the theories of Riemann and Planck embrace geometry and classical physics. In a coming issue [of Cahiers du Cinéma], I shall prove why India is the creation of the world.
Jean-Luc GodardRead More »

Twenty-eight-year-old Tom leads a life that might be termed as criminal. In doing so, he follows in the footsteps of his father, who made his money from dirty, and sometimes brutal, real estate deals. Tom is a pretty hard-boiled guy but also strangely considerate as far as his father is concerned. Somehow he appears to have arrived at a critical juncture in his life when a chance encounter prompts him to take up the piano and become a concert pianist, like his mother. He senses that this might be his final opportunity to take back his life. His piano teacher is a Chinese piano virtuoso who has recently come to live in France. She doesn’t speak a lick of French so music becomes the only language they have in common. Before long, Jacques’ bid to be a better person means that he begins to yearn for true love. But, when he finally has the chance of winning his best friend’s wife, his passion only succeeds in scaring her. And then, one day, his dubious past comes to light…Read More »

Quote:
The essential question arises: how do you express routine and habit, essentially anti-dramatic notions which are organic to this job? How do you film a job so it becomes the only source of dramatization?

A few visual ground rules are established: respect the different colours of street lighting (yellows and blues), not correct or soften them; eliminate as far as possible any descriptive shots and particularly any framing that over dramatizes an action; stay with the cops and see what they see when they tail or pursue suspects; never leave the point of view of the pursuer; refuse all stylistic effects inherent in the thriller genre; stick to the characters, follow their rhythm, reflect the routine and unstable nature of their life, and think at the same time as they do. A difficult choice, because the audience has a thousand formal, ideological references in its head – American references in particular: promotion of individualism, rejection of collective spirit, predominance of plot. I want to overturn these references.Read More »

IMDb:

Gaby Morlay is Irène, the wife of a famous and wealthy lawyer (Charles Vanel), who falls briefly for a young and handsome pianist (Georges Rigaud) while on vacations on the French Riviera. When she comes back to her married life in Paris, she falls prey to a blackmailer, the pianist’s jealous former mistress, while her husband’s behavior becomes more and more unpredictable… Charles Vanel is as usually very good as the betrayed and yet not so innocent husband, a part he has played often. Garboesque Gaby Morlay is less convincing (more theatrical) as his wife. I guess there is nothing to expect from this movie but its premise, which is a melodrama in the French pre-war upper bourgeoisie, with a set of good actors of that time (a special mention to Suzy Prim as the “mistress”, charmingly vulgar, a real Parisian bird), leading men in tuxedos and ladies dressed in lamé gowns and furs. Read More »

This South American adventure drama finds Charles (Charles Aznavour), a youthful
Frenchman traveling to Paraguay to start a new life. Seeking out a rich uncle, the
idealistic nephew is rejected by his miserly relation, and he goes on to get involved with
a shady woman and a band of gun runners who supply arms for the revolution of the
week. Charles and his new girlfriend head for the border after a shootout with federal
troops, and a kindly railroad worker hides the couple in an abandoned copper mine.
Charles is later thrown in prison while the girl becomes a concubine, but her violator is
killed when Charles escapes to rescue her and exact revenge. A pretty harrowing
composition could be written by the young couple on “How I Spent My Summer
Vacation.” ~ Dan Pavlides, RoviRead More »

Plot review:
The misadventures of three women in the same apartment block. After being disappointed with a boyfriend who wants her to whip him and having a lesbian fling with a schoolfriend, Joelle (Maryline Guillaume) finally manages to lose her viriginity with her teacher, Hector, but they are dicovered by her father and she is kicked out of their apartment.
Martine (Carole Gire) is dissatisfied with her husband and seeks pleasure elsewhere, for example with her friend (Dolores Manta and her husband). Martine’s husband finally leaves her.
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Inspired by “Les Bonnes”, Jean Genet’s play (itself based on the true story of the Papin sisters), adapted by Jean Vauthier (a writer and avant-garde playwright, which is probably why the dialogue is so theatrical. He died in 92 but he was born in 1910 so his centennial was this year, but he is totally forgotten) and by an uncredited Louis Jouvet (according to imdb)
André Malraux, then Minister of Culture (yes, there was, still is, such a Minister in France) wanted the movie to the Cannes Festival. The followers of the Surrealism movement took the Papin sisters case as paradigm of class revolt, and a signal that a social revolution was already taking place. Romantics saw in these grisly murders the emergence of absolute Evil, like Lautréamont in `Les Chants de Maldoror’. Philosophers engaged in the socialist movement wrote passionate texts in defence of those maids, like Jean-Paul Sartre in `Le Mur’, and Simone de Beauvoir in `La Force de l’âge’. Jacques Lacan, in `Écrits’, will develop his first scientific essay on psychoanalysis, following the Papin criminal case. (imdb’s only user comment)Read More »

Based on the 1836 novel by Balzac (wiki)

Quote:
Script-writers who adapt Balzac or Dostoievsky excuse the idiotic transformations they impose on the works from which they construct their scenarios by pleading that the cinema is incapable of rendering every psychological or metaphysical overtone. In their hands, Balzac becomes a collection of engravings in which fashion has the most important place, and Dostoievsky suddenly begins to resemble the novels of Joseph Kessel, with Russian-style drinking-bouts in night-clubs and troika races in the snow. Well, the only cause of these compressions is laziness and lack of imagination. The cinema of today is capable of expressing any kind of reality. What interests us is the creation of this new language. (…) The fundamental problem of the cinema is how to express thought.
Alexandre Astruc, The Birth of a New Avant-Barde: La Camera-Stylo (1948)Read More »