Daniel Mesguich

Quote:
“The abstraction of the story and the concrete presence of the natural settings apprehended with a beautiful sense of the frame infuse a mythical dimension to this worthy successor of Jean Epstein’s Breton films.”

“This is Azimi’s third film in Brittany, he has already shot Les jours gris in 1973 in Dinan and Utopia in 1978 in Cap Fréhel.
“Here everything overlaps: the sea, the sky, the flat orange of the sun, the clouds and the foam around the rocks, the salt. Only the island tears.”
(auto-translated)Read More »

Quote:
Robbe-Grillet turned once again to painting and literature for inspiration in his next film. In 1976 he had written a ‘picto-novel’, La Belle Captive, which reprinted some of Magrittes’s paintings including La Belle Captive itself. His 1983 film of the same name used paintings by both Magritte and Edouard Manet as a launching pad, each painting a ‘generation cell’ for the film’s ideas and narrative. Magritte’s Belle Captive is a great painting – formal, poetic, mysterious, it hints at all sorts of possibilities. The drawn curtains open onto a beach and sky. In the stony foreground there is an easel and a painting that visually links the world behind the curtain with the vista in the distance. It’s an audacious, inspiring work that’s a self-conscious reflection on the process of painting, but is also eerie and enigmatic, exuding a strange beauty.Read More »