French

“Quatre-vingt-treize (Ninety-three, 1914/1921) by Albert Capellani & André Antoine with Paul Capellani, Henry Krauss and Philippe Garnier

The story takes place in Brittany in 1793 during the Terror. While the Marquess of Lantenac (P. Garnier) joins the Chouans (royalist insurgents), his nephew Gauvain (P. Capellani) becomes a soldier in the Revolutionary army. The third character is the former priest, Cimourdain, who becomes the head of the Revolutionary army. He was the one who opened Gauvain’s eyes to the new ideas by giving him Rousseau to read. In this adaptation of Victor Hugo’s novel the destiny of the three characters are heading for collision. The film shooting was stopped abruptly by the beginning of WWI. A few years later, André Antoine took over as Capellani was unavailable to finish it as he was in America. The film didn’t came out until 1921. Obviously, in the space of 7 years, cinema had moved forward dramatically and Quatre-vingt-treize was undoubtedly dated when it came out.Read More »

A successful ad man engages in illicit affairs in this romantic comedy satire. Serge (Serge Gainsbourg) is an annual winner at the advertising awards festival held annually in Venice. When he meets the pretty British woman Evelyne (Jane Birkin), he sets her up in an apartment and plans to leave his pregnant wife. The newfound love of the immensely shallow couple is shattered when Evelyne runs off to marry a speedboat racer. Serge continues working for the advertising firm and continues his search for love affairs without commitmentRead More »

An interesting documentary on Renoir’s Regle du Jeu. From the series Image Par Image. Told entirely in images from the film, no talking heads. With optional English subtitles.Read More »

Lucas has invented a new computer language but at the same time he has been informed about his strange terminal illness during which he has been gradually losing his memory. Shortly after that he meets Blanche who acts as a medium in a bizarre traveling show. Dying Lucas follows her to the sea resort where they spend together several days and nightsRead More »

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:
A pulse-pounding political thriller, Greek expatriate director Costa-Gavras’s Z was one of the cinematic sensations of the late sixties, and remains among the most vital dispatches from that hallowed era of filmmaking. This Academy Award winner—loosely based on the 1963 assassination of Greek left-wing activist Gregoris Lambrakis—stars Yves Montand as a prominent politician and doctor whose public murder amid a violent demonstration is covered up by military and government officials; Jean-Louis Trintignant is the tenacious magistrate who’s determined not to let them get away with it. Featuring kinetic, rhythmic editing, Raoul Coutard’s expressive vérité photography, and Mikis Theodorakis’s unforgettable, propulsive score, Z is a technically audacious and emotionally gripping masterpiece.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 »