Here is a Peter Handke Adaptation from the 70s featuring Geraldine Chaplin and Music by Brian Eno.
about the novel:
In ”Short Letter, Long Farewell,” a German playwright is pursued by his wife, an actress, who wants to kill him. They scramble across the United States – Providence, New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Tucson, northern Oregon – to California, where they meet the director John Ford, who utters sage advice that enables them to part in peace. The novel is full of vivid snapshots of American characters and scenes, and the idiosyncratic mixture of narrative, interior monologue, natural description and cultural themes and cliches is a brilliant concoction.

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Early novella from Peter Handke – the German enfant terrible who had a great run in the 1970s similar to fellow countrymen Herzog, Fassbinder, and his pal Wim Wenders. Partly European-in-existential-crisis story (eh), but it’s also equally a road trip, love story, and revenge narrative with a handful of unsettling Hitchcockian elements.

It’s like “Goalie’s Anxiety” with a more ruminative first person narrator and more genre trappings, although they’re ultimately less important.

The book is deeply about the iconography of America with the story opening in Rhode Island and winding throughout the country. Some insights prove dated, some still relevant. It includes several nice digressions on the films of John Ford and has a substantial appearance by Ford himself in the last chapter of the book!

The tone and pacing is leisurely like an early 70s film but the prose is beautifully precise, unearthing startling observations every few paragraphs. Excellent essay about it by Greil Marcus in “Dustbin of History,” too

589MB | 1h 30m | 512×384 | avi

https://nitro.download/view/22146797AA137F3/Der_kurze_Brief_zum_langen_Abschied.avi
https://nitro.download/view/C07B77172C61E03/Der_kurze_Brief_zum_langen_Abschied_English_subtitles_corr.srt

Language(s):German
Subtitles:English

The post Herbert Vesely – Der Kurze Brief zum langen Abschied aka Short Letter to the Long Farewell (1978) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

While trying to raise money to prevent his car from being repossessed, George is attracted to Lola, a Frenchwoman who works in a “model shop” (an establishment which rents out beautiful pin-up models to photographers). George spends his last twelve dollars to photograph her, and discovers that she is as unhappy as he.

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Los Angeles has served as the backdrop for countless Hollywood movies but in Jacques Demy’s The Model Shop (1969), the French director’s first and only American film, the city becomes the real protagonist, with its sprawling urban landscape, oil derricks, desolate beaches and constant traffic providing a vivid canvas for a contemporary love story about romantic longing and unrealized dreams. Film writer Clare Stewart referred to the film in the quarterly film journal Senses of Cinema as “a road movie that doesn’t go anywhere” and that’s not a putdown, but an apt description of what Demy was trying to create here – a drifting, dreamy mood piece.

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On both a visual and conceptual level, The Model Shop is spellbinding, presenting Los Angeles as a cityscape of neon signs, billboards, Standard Oil gas stations, parking lots and people constantly in motion, driving to and fro in cars, chasing unobtainable dreams in the film capitol of the world, a place where cinematic dreams are the main export. Cinematographer Michel Hugo applies a palette of pastel colors to Los Angeles that brings a dreamlike gloss to even the pollution, industrial plants and urban sprawl of the city. The sound design of the film is equally evocative, blending the ambient hum of traffic with an eclectic mixture of music being broadcast from George’s car radio (Bach, Rimski-Korsakov, Spirit, Robert Schumann).

The Model Shop is much less successful in building dramatic interest in the free-form narrative and what happens to both George and Lola due to uneven performances and awkward dialogue. Gary Lockwood, 32 years old at the time of the film, seems miscast as a disenchanted 26-year-old who is too impatient and unwilling to follow the traditional career path for architects. His scenes with Alexandra Hay, playing his girlfriend Gloria, are so strained and unnatural that you can never really fully accept them as a couple who were once in love or even enjoyed a mutual sexual attraction. Maybe that’s the point. Perhaps their lack of on-screen chemistry together is meant to emphasize the fact that they’ve become complete strangers but on a dramatic level, their scenes are inert. Even more ineffective are Lockwood’s interaction with his friend, band musician Jay Ferguson of Spirit (playing himself and not doing a very convincing job) and his occasional philosophical musings, such as his realization that he could die if he’s drafted: “I guess I never really thought about it before. Death, you know – it’s insane!” Even Anouk Aimee, who retains her elegance and an air of mystery throughout, is saddled with some pretentious dialogue and, in one scene, where she is reciting her long, personal history to George, interrupts herself by asking him, “Do I bore you?”, as if signaling the viewer to overlook the exposition in favor of the real story, which Demy has visualized perfectly.

2.71GB | 1h 37m | 1024×576 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/6CECC02BB3265C7/Model.Shop.1969.576p.BluRay.AAC.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

Language:English
Subtitles:English

The post Jacques Demy – Model Shop (1969) first appeared on Cinema of the World.