Influenced and inspired by Jean-Luc Godard, some young french directors (Jean Eustache, Francis Leroi, Jean-Michel Barjol, Romain Goupil, Luc Moullet) are talking about their problems in producing less expensive and more free films in the french industry of cinema of the 60’s.Read More »
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Faceted, fragmented, and oneiric, Philippe Garrel’s Elle a passé tant d’heures sous les sunlights… (She Spent So Many Hours Under the Sun Lamps) is more exorcism than expurgation, elegy than lamentation – an abstract, yet lucid chronicle of love and loss, death and birth sublimated through textural, self-reflexive impressions, visceral gestures, and metaphoric tableaux. A profoundly personal film dedicated to the memory of friend and fellow filmmaker (and May 68 idealist) Jean Eustache, and haunted by the unreconciled specter of Garrel’s failed relationship with Nico, the film opens to a crepuscular image of a couple – perhaps an actor and his lover (Jacques Bonnaffé and Anne Wiazemsky) as apparent surrogates for Garrel and Nico – in the midst of a breakup on a public street on a cold, winter evening, as their seemingly tenuous reconciliation is truncated by the subsequent shot of the couple returning home, and an all too familiar rupture as she once again lapses into the desensitized haze of heroin addiction in the distraction of his preoccupying rehearsals.Read More »
May 68 events seen through various 16 & 35mm shots, anonymous images made by young protesters who were filming during the night.Read More »
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“Les Hautes solitudes is a silent, black and white study primarily of three women – Nico, Tina Aumont and, especially, Jean Seberg – and the nature of performance (a man, Laurent Terzieff, also fleetingly appears). In a series of close up images of heart stopping beauty, the sort that bring to mind Jean Renoir’s claim that it was the power of the close-ups of actresses in the cinema of the ’20s that made him want to make films, Aumont and Seberg improvise psychodramas.” – Maximilian Le CainRead More »
After the generational upheaval of May ’68 and its aftermath, and the personal upheavals of drug addiction, depression, and shock therapy, Garrel made the conscious decision to turn away from the increasingly private poetry of his earlier work, at the center of which was his great love Nico. He turned to the great screenwriter Annette Wadamant, who helped him to organize his thoughts into a narrative of “things that happened to me,” and the result was this spare, elemental, devastating film about two damaged souls (Henri de Maublanc and Anne Wiazemsky) trying to build a life together as her child (Xuan Lindenmeyer) is taken away. As Serge Daney wrote, “It’s as if this autobiographical film has succeeded in holding its bearings without forgetting the trace of each stage of the journey it’s passed through.”Read More »
A 4-year-old child is the element from and around which the action develops, and brings sentiments and emotions to light. The French word “révélateur”/developper describes the product to develop or “reveal” film negatives.)Read More »
This is a highly experimental French film consisting of no more than 23 camera shots, total. It resembles nothing so much as one of Warhol’s earlier films, except that it is more episodic. Nico of the Velvet Underground portrays a different woman in each of the episodes. The first three concern her “rescues” from Death Valley, Egypt and Iceland by a young man to whom she eventually says “stay away from me.” Following that, she recites from various texts in German, French and English, makes various gnomic observations and encounters various men in various guises. All the men are played either by director Philippe Garrel or Pierre Clementi.Read More »
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Four chapters based on the birth of a ‘secret child’, or a film, with chapter titles: “La séction Césarienne” (Caesarian section: a descriptive detail introducing the mother); “Le dernier guerrier” (the last warrior: how the father sees himself); “Le cercle ophydique” (the serpent’s closed circle: the couple reunites at the psychiatric ward); “Les forêts désenchantées” (unfairy forests: the film in the making).Read More »
