by ·Comments Off on George Kuchar shorts (1960-1978)

I, An Actress (1977)
“This film gives an insight into my directing techniques while under pressure.”
A good way to start things off… George directs a screen test for a young actress and ends up in front of the camera flamboyantly showing her how he wants the scene performed. The funniest film of the evening, and it wasn’t even “written” to be funny. J. Steffen says it “becomes a commentary on his own camp persona and on the eternal problem of directing actors with wills and personalities of their own.”

Hold Me While I’m Naked (1966)
The famous one! Kuchar plays a film director whose actress quits mid-shoot out of disinterest and because George has asked her to take her clothes off. He calls around but finds nobody else, and falls into a crisis. Hilarious little movie. Played very straight, as George claims he was actually quite depressed. I wouldn’t say that the editing reminded me of Breathless and Parajanov, but Steffen did say that.

I Was a Teenage Rumpot (1960)
The young Kuchar brothers discovered three people who look completely unlike movie stars and began filmmaking careers in order to get these people onscreen. This sums up what makes Kuchar interesting and worth watching, and where all the John Waters comparisons come from. A glorious no-budget fake melodrama starring the ‘differently-shaped’ Arline, Edie and Harry.

Sylvia’s Promise (1962)
Sylvia promises that if Mike will only settle down and marry her, she’ll lose weight. The joke ending is that eight years later, they’re married and she’s lost three pounds.

Anita Needs Me (1963)
I’m not doing a good job describing these movies, and I don’t even remember which one this is because I’ve waited too long after the screening to write about ’em (ten days is too long?!?), but they’re totally fun to watch, short enough to never outstay their welcome, and different enough from each other to make seeing a bunch in a row worthwhile. It was a hoot of a screening, and I’d watch any one of ’em again.

Eclipse of the Sun Virgin (1967)
GK: “Painstakingly filmed and edited, it will be painful to watch, too.” This was my favorite of the bunch, just awesome. Unbelievably, I couldn’t remember what to say about it so I just watched it again on Ubu web… and I still don’t know what to say about it! Um, something about piano playing and humiliation and the color red? It’s poetry, and it is awesome.

Knocturne (1968)
Starring Joyce Wieland, Michael Snow’s wife. I think this one was less narrative than the others, and I’ll leave it at that.

The Mongreloid (1978)
George with a late-70’s mustache reminiscing on the time he shared with his dog Bocko. Brief sound dropouts were replaced in post-production with tiny bursts of music, keeping a playful edge on this otherwise diary-like personal short.

This was a very good program, and Kuchar is a good speaker, full of stories about an entire adult life spent making cool underground films, and the people he’s known (John Waters, Michael Snow, Ken Jacobs, Jack Smith, Jonas Mekas). Wish I could’ve made it to the other nights of screenings, featuring his storm-chasing films and diary videos. Wait, this just in:

Wild Night In El Reno (1977)
As watched on Ubu web. 6 minutes long, storm over a motel builds into the night. Probably some nice footage, but the online video flattens it out and uglies it up, and my sound dropped out after a minute. No substitute for the wonderful Eyedrum screening.

GK: “At the age of 12 I made a transvestite movie on the roof and was brutally beaten by my mother for having disgraced her and also for soiling her nightgown. She didn’t realize how hard it is for a 12-year-old director to get real girls in his movies.”

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This will be one to watch again when I know more French, or just when I’ve lived longer.

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Chapter 1(a), “Toutes les histoires” (“All the (Hi)stories”)

Dedicated to Mary Meerson (Langlois’s companion who helped run the Cinematheque) and Monica Tegelaar (producer of Raoul Ruiz’s On Top of the Whale).

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IMDB says parts one and two came out in the late 80’s, and the rest followed in the late 90’s. This one seemed more like a 50-minute trailer than an episode. Montage of archive footage, still and moving, edited and faded and superimposed and blended together. The footage includes scenes from films of course (rules of the game, great dictator, day of wrath, germany year zero) but lots of stills (producers, directors, Thalberg, Hughes) and paintings. Lots of focus on World War II, and ending with that Germany Year Zero segment, the whole thing came off as vaguely depressing. Maybe that’s why it took ten years to get the rest of the episodes made?

Three images overlapped: (1) Rita Hayworth dancing, (2) a drawing of Howard Hughes in his final days, (3) the witch-burning scene in Day of Wrath.

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Chapter 1(b), “Une Histoire seule” (“A Single (Hi)story”)

Dedicated to John Cassavetes and Glauber Rocha (Brazilian director of Black God, White Devil).

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Surprising number of references to Godard’s own films. Tons and tons of stuff I am not getting because I don’t know much French (I pick up half the film titles and some of the short sayings printed onscreen) or art history, and haven’t seen most of the films. Should’ve known better than to think part two would be more straightforward or make more sense. Even if I don’t know what it’s saying, I still get interesting juxtapositions of images and nice shots from great films seen and unseen, which is enough to keep me watching. Sounded like I heard some Leonard Cohen and Neil Diamond.

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Chapter 2(a), “Seule le cinema” (“Only Cinema”)

Dedicated to Armand J. Cauliez (a writer, published a book on Jacques Tati) and Santiago Alvarez (Cuban filmmaker).

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Fast-forward a decade. Same ol’ thing here, but two big changes:

(1) Not just montage of pre-existing footage edited with Godard in his study anymore. An actual actor, Julie Delpy, reading poetry. Also an interview with Godard by another guy (couldn’t be Serge Daney – he died in ’92), 90% untranslated.

(2) Me getting a little tired and pondering making my own historie(s) of cinema instead

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Chapter 2(b), “Fatale beauté” (“Deadly Beauty”)

Dedicated to Michele Firk (film writer turned militant radical, killed herself in Guatemala to escape arrest) and Nicole Ladmiral (actress in Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest).

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Sabine Azema (above) recits some poetry, much of it untranslated. Godard types at his typewriter some more. I listened in the headphones and a background noise (JLG’s pet bird?) frightened me. Something about photography being invented in black and white as the colors of mourning to note the death of reality. And something about women, and murder, and Band of Outsiders and Rancho Notorious and Gone With The Wind. Good to see that Godard appreciates Tom Waits.

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Chapter 3(a), “La Monnaie de l’absolu” (“The Coin of the Absolute”)

Dedicated to Gianni Amico (Italian filmmaker, assistant director on Bertolucci’s Before the Revolution and Godard’s Le Vent d’est & James Agee (film writer, champion of Chaplin’s Monseiur Verdoux, writer of Night of the Hunter and The African Queen)

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or part 3A, the war and futility episode. WWII talk leads into an appreciation of Italian Neorealism and the most clearly presented introduction to a certain aspect of cinema and history thus far in the series. Says that Italian cinema in the 40’s and 50’s changed film like Manet (the godfather of modern art) changed painting. Closes with a nice montage of Italian film (minus too much onscreen block text and crazed fade transitions) set to a Richard Cocciante song. This episode has a clear point and meaning and narrative arc and supporting arguments… I don’t understand. Maybe the others have too, and I’ve been missing it. Juliette Binoche appears with Alain Cuny (of Les Amants and La Dolce Vita), who died in 1994, four years before this episode aired. Julie Delpy looked mighty young in her segment too – maybe all this footage was shot in the 80’s and not finished editing until ten years later.

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Chapter 3(b), “Une Vague Nouvelle” (“A New Wave”)

Dedicated to Frederic C. Froeschel (head of a cine-club in Paris, 1950) and Naum Kleiman (Russian film critic, director of the Moscow Film Museum).

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“Becker, Rossellini, Melville, Franju, Jacques Demy, Truffaut. You knew them.”
“Yes, they were my friends.”

A personal episode, sometimes celebratory but more usually melancholy. Godard himself is the guest speaker this time, but he’s actually into it, not just distractedly reciting behind his typewriter. These things never quite seem to begin, the opening titles still playing when the episode is half over. Some 400 Blows, some Henri Langlois, more goings-on about the death of cinema. What, is video the new art form?

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Chapter 4(a), “Le Côntrole de l’univers” (“The Control of the Universe”)

Dedicated to Michel Delahaye (actor in Out 1, Alphaville, plenty more) and Jean Domarchi (1950’s, 60’s Cahiers critic, had a bit part in Breathless).

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Another really good one. Probably not coincidentally, all the voiceover on this one is translated, so I was able to understand it. Lots of voiceover – it’s getting to be more of an essay lately and less of a purely visual slideshow. Still plenty of that dull video text, white-on-black block lettering. The thing always drags a little when JLG decides to move those words around the screen for thirty seconds before returning to the film clips. When there were clips, it seems half of them were by Hitchcock, “our century’s greatest creator of forms.”

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Chapter 4(b), “Les Signes parmi nous” (“The Signs Among Us”)

Dedicated to Anne-Marie Miéville (one of Godard’s collaborators since 1976) and to Godard himself.

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I hope nobody stumbles across this entry hoping to learn about the film, because I really doubt I understood most of it. More more more war images in this section (have I mentioned that the film is obsessed with WWII?) and more ponderings on love, death, art, history, man, the state, and Charlie Chaplin. And it seems to me that Godard is terribly depressed. Anyway, here’s a good bit of the voiceover from the last eight minutes:

I need a day to tell the history of a second…
I need an eternity to tell the history of a day.

We can do everything except the history of what we are doing. It is my privilege to film and live in France as an artist. Nothing like a country that every day walks further down the path of its own inexorable decline.

I am the fugitive enemy of our times. The totalitarianism of the present as applied mechanically every day more oppressive on a planetary scale. This faceless tyranny that effaces all faces for the systematic organization of the unified time of the moment. This global, abstract tyranny which I try to oppose from my fleeting point of view. Because I try, because I try in my compositions to show an ear that listens to time. And try to make it heard and to surge into the future.

The only thing that survives from one epoch is the art from it created. No activity can become an art until its proper epoch has ended. Then, this art will disappear. Thus, the art of the 19th century – cinema – made the 20th century exist, which barely existed.

Cinema feared nothing of others or of itself. It wasn’t sheltered from time. It was the shelter of time. Yes, image is happiness. But beside it dwells nothingness. The power of the image is expressed only by invoking nothingness. It is perhaps worth adding: The image, able to negate nothingness, is also the gaze of nothingness on us. The image is light. Nothingness, immensely heavy. The image gleams. Nothingness is that thickness where all is veiled. The most fleeting moments possess an illustrious past. If a man passed through paradise in his dreams and received a flower as proof of passage, and on waking, found this flower in his hand… What is there to say? I was that man.

Thought I’d watch the Cannes 1988 press conference, but after the first three minutes (“video artist” Godard passionately attacking television) it all turns French.

From a belatedly-discovered interview between JLG and J. Rosenbaum:

JR: Yes, but it also isn’t legally acknowledged that films and videos can be criticism.
JLG: It’s the only thing video can be — and should be.

With that strong distinction between film and video, it occurs to me that JLG considers Histoire(s) as being about cinema but not being a work of cinema itself. I watch Breathless on my TV and say I’ve seen one Godard movie, then I watch Histoire(s) on my TV and say I’ve seen two Godard movies. JLG should like to smack me for such a thought.

by ·Comments Off on Jean Vigo films (1930-34)

I don’t know why I didn’t get L’Atalante upon first viewing. Maybe ’twas the low-grade VHS tape I rented, or maybe I was drowsy or impatient, but now I see it’s almost as beautiful and twisted a love story as Sunrise.

Provincial girl marries a barge captain passing through town then finds that spending life on the boat with his two assistants is less excitingly romantic than she’d imagined. Tension mounts between the captain and the gruff-looking but tender Jules leading the girl to flee the ship to see Paris on her own. But she doesn’t fare well and the captain goes into a depression, so Jules goes and finds her for a tearful reunion finale.

Not the fault of the video, I guess, because many shots were out of focus on the 35mm print. Must’ve been rough to do so much location shooting in 1934. So many other gorgeous shots and ideas scattered throughout that it’s easy to overlook technical shortcomings. Movie holds a poetic, dreamy state throughout, and the ending seems deserved despite the captain being kinda unlikeable most of the time.

Jean Dasté got small roles in Jean Renoir films, and many years later, larger roles in Francois Truffaut films. He was also the sympathetic teacher in Zero For Conduct.
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Dita Parlo appeared in Grand Illusion and didn’t do much acting after the 30’s.
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Michel Simon was more well-known, starring in The Two of Us, Rene Clair’s Faust, Port of Shadows and at least three by Renoir. Jacques Rivette did a 100-minute Cinéastes de notre temps with him in ’66.
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Cats are thrown at people from offscreen, an obvious influence on Dario Argento.
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Happy ending:
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Zero For Conduct, by contrast, was less anarchic hilarity and slightly more tedious than I remembered it. Still a fun boarding school romp with good characters (the dwarf headmaster, the head-standing supervisor played by Dasté who is on the kids’ side from the start) and great portrayal of repressive school life, friendships and rivalries and minor (and in the end, major) rebellions.

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I watched the above two at Emory on 35mm last November but delayed posting this until now because I wanted to go through the rest of the Artificial Eye DVD.

I dug the Cinéastes de notre temps episode by Jacques Rozier (new-wave filmmaker with Adieu Philippine, also shot some of the stuff on the Contempt DVD and the Cinéastes episode on Bunuel excerpted on the Viridiana DVD). 90 minutes of Vigo stories and interviews with the three L’Atalante leads thirty years later. Michel Simon looks the same, and Dita Parlo is very recognizable when she smiles. Now that I know what Jean Daste looked like in the mid-60’s, I’ll look out for him in The War Is Over. Didn’t realize that Jean Vigo knew Jean Painleve… and Painleve has an indirect connection to Oskar Fischinger.

Not much to say about the two shorts. The Jean Taris doc has some cool photography, but I wouldn’t say it’s worth watching over and over. The Nice doc is more creative, has lots of cool photography, and is definitely worth watching over and over.

Jean Taris, swimming champion:
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À propos de Nice
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by ·Comments Off on Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957, Frank Tashlin)

I’d heard this was one of those forgotten comic masterpieces, have to say I was underwhelmed. Humor and references seem state-of-the-art to 1957 – I got Groucho’s “you bet your life” cameo but probably missed a lot more.

an alarmed Tony Randall:
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In high cinemascope color, a cross between Tashlin’s cartoony style, an advertisement (since our protagonist is an ad-man) and a regular 60’s comedy (Tash was ahead of his time). Tony Randall (from Let’s Make Love) is our ad-man, who makes a deal with superstar Rita Marlowe (Jayne “The Girl Can’t Help It” Mansfield). She’ll do a bunch of ads for his makeup company client, saving him his job (and eventually earning him an unwanted promotion to president) if he’ll publically pretend to be her new boyfriend to make her ex, Bobo Branigansky, want her back. The ex, also a TV star, sort of a Hercules/Tarzan type, is played by Mickey Hargitay, a bodybuilder who would play Tarzan for real three years later. Betsy Drake (not a big star, best known for being Cary Grant’s wife throughout the 50’s) plays Tony’s pissed-off fiancee who threatens to leave him over the whole Rita thing, and 16-yr-old Lili Gentle (one of her only movie roles) is Tony’s excitable niece, a bit Rita fan.

a very red Lili Gentle:
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It’s all about knowing where we belong, being happy with our lot in life, finding true love, and making fun of television. Tony and the president of the ad company (John Williams of Dial M For Murder) end up a farmer and a gardener, and Tony’s boss (Henry Jones of 3:10 To Yuma and Vertigo), a born ad-man, ends up an ad-man. Joan Blondell (star of 1930’s musicals, Nightmare Alley) has an interesting part as Rita’s washed-up assistant who yearns for the life she could’ve had with the love of her youth, a milkman, and gets Rita thinking about her own young love, George Schmidlap (Groucho, below).

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Katy somewhat liked it, but I have a feeling she’s about done with Frank Tashlin comedies, so I’ll save Artists and Models for another time and go back to the always reliable Billy Wilder (although she didn’t like Ace in the Hole either, hmmm).

check out Rita and her matching poodle:
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by ·Comments Off on Doomsday (2008, Neil Marshall)

Maaaan, what part of “from the writer/director of Dog Soldiers and The Descent” made me want to watch this, even for free? At least it was a midnight screening so I didn’t waste too much precious time on it, but the thought that I could’ve spent even half of that time playing Wii instead shall always haunt me.

People whose work I will avoid from now on:
– Marshall, of course
– actor David O’Hara (The Departed, upcoming Wanted)
– producer Steven Paul (Ghost Rider, The Uninvited, Castlevania)
– producer Benedict Carver (Bratz, Tekken, Castlevania)
– cinematographer Sam McCurdy (Hills Have Eyes II, Bob Hoskins pic Outlaw)
– editor Andrew MacRitchie (recent James Bond films, Sahara, Victims, Solomon Kane)
– production company Rogue Pictures (Seed of Chucky, Balls of Fury, Hack/Slash, The Strangers, Castlevania)

In other words, don’t see Castlevania!

Bob Hoskins and Malcolm McDowell paychecked it on this one – guess I don’t blame them. Anyway, this is a rip-off of 28 Weeks Later in which the girl from Resident Evil wanders into a post-apocalyptic Irish Yojimbo war between some non-magical Lord of the Rings castoffs (led by McDowell) and some Mad Max wannabes (led by two stuntmen-turned-actors). This leads to a buncha ineptly-shot action scenes, but don’t think this is an action movie – most of the runtime is dedicated to boring wordy exposition which wasn’t even appreciated by the couple sitting next to me who loved the movie. There’s an A.I. flesh fair, and some token cannibalism, and lots of unexplained futurey stuff and plot holes galore. Marshall also loves to show us pointless gruesome gory details including a cow, a rabbit, and more than a few people exploding or getting eaten or shot or run over. An ugly, stupid, trashy movie.

by ·Comments Off on Sans Soleil (1983, Chris Marker)

MAR 20, 2008
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Saw on 35mm for the first time. I do not know this movie as well as I think I do… lots of forgotten parts (the town in Iceland buried in ash) and mis-remembered bits. I was grateful to see it projected, but don’t feel that it loses too much on television – gonna keep happily watching the DVD for years to come. If I have a favorite movie right now, this is it.

A new favorite line: “At nightfall the megalopolis breaks down into villages, with its country cemeteries in the shadow of banks, with its stations and temples. Each district of Tokyo once again becomes a tidy ingenuous little town, nestling amongst the skyscrapers.” This is the impression I got from some Japanese movies.

Checked out the DVD again and watched some of the extras. The Chris Darke short didn’t teach me much, just strengthened my belief that nearly all video-art installations consist of too-small TV screens in too-large white rooms full of uncomfortable folding chairs.

DEC 30, 2006
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A reminder of the attempted Chris Marker Marathon begun in late August. Showed it off to Jimmy & Dawn.

A movie about memory, images, directing and editing, making pictures, turning life into art and vice versa.

“I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining. We do not remember, we rewrite memory much as history is rewritten.”

Explanation for the electronically processed images: “He showed me the clashes of the sixties treated by his synthesizer: pictures that are less deceptive he says—with the conviction of a fanatic—than those you see on television. At least they proclaim themselves to be what they are: images, not the portable and compact form of an already inaccessible reality.”

Owls and cats! Digitally processed images. Tarkovsky’s Stalker. Three children on a road in Iceland. Apocalypse Now. Sacred symbols at Macy’s. Teens dancing in the streets. The same scene in Vertigo that Marker references in La Jetee. Kamikaze. An image. A memory. A glance.

Even better than I remembered, and I remembered it as a masterpiece. Such a good documentary that it may not be a documentary at all. The best travelogue ever.

If this site didn’t already exist, I may have felt compelled to create it myself.

Dawn loved it. Jimmy too, I hope?

The Chris Marker Marathon will continue someday. Got some Rivette to watch first, I think.

by ·Comments Off on Smiley Face (2007, Gregg Araki)

I think Gregg Araki has nothing to do with Arakimentari, the photographer doc I kept almost-renting a couple years ago. Rather he’s the director of hottt indie films Mysterious Skin and The Doom Generation.

A talked-about hit of Sundance 2007, this predictably turned out to be a breezily likeable little comedy which relies on the idea that watching someone act extremely stoned will stay funny for 90 minutes. It pretty much does. Mostly I liked the bummer ending and the rest was pretty okay, a time waster. Rented it as a palate-cleanser after Redacted, which was rumored to be crappy and which I feared would put me in a bad, bad mood like Road to Guantanamo and The War Tapes did… but I kinda loved it so there was no need.

Anna Faris with her mouth hanging open:
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Watching someone who is very stoned is, of course, hilarious. Anna Faris (who I do not remember from Brokeback Mountain) is very good, but could leave her mouth hanging wide open less often. There are also hilarious cameos by actors I mostly don’t know. In reverse order of how well I know them, they were:
– Danny Trejo, who doesn’t have much to do here
– Brian Posehn, who plays a big pothead on the Sarah Silverman Program
– John Cho, Harold himself
– Danny Masterson (Hyde in That 70’s Show), awesome as Jane’s roommate
– Adam Brody (skydiver in The Ten) as the dealer
– John Krasinski (The Office U.S.), who I’ve never seen before but I’ve heard his name a lot, in a good role as Jane’s duped love-interest
– Jane Lynch (Christopher Guest movies) as an unimpressed casting director
– late 70’s star and Hitchcock actor Roscoe Lee Browne as the narrator

Anna Faris with her mouth hanging open:
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Actually I had a better time wandering the IMDB looking up names than watching this movie. Get this, Anna Faris is gonna star in Kids In America this year. Her co-stars are a different guy from That 70’s Show, a different guy from The Ten, a guy who is playing Hitchcock in a fakey bio-pic, and someone from the previous Gregg Araki film.

Anna Faris with her mouth hanging open:
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by ·1 Comment

Wow, this was a lot better than I thought it’d be. Why did nobody like it… because it was fakey or obvious? Aren’t all B. De P. films fakey and obvious? But they way he puts those fakey pieces together, and their very in-your-face obviousness (or audacity) make for compelling pictures. This seems like an angry, hastily-assembled statement against the war, but at least it is an angry statement against the war, and against injustice, and one which is interestingly different from anything else out there – attention-grabbing, appealingly watchable, and truthful even as it makes stuff up.

Firstly, it does not seem documentary-like, even when the camera work is handheld. Very purposeful movements, good framing, not pretending like this is Really Happening To Real People, and this style is a great success. It’s a nice blend of the Blair Witch / Diary of the Dead aesthetic with some actual professional photography. I guess after YouTube, studios think people want to see crappy handheld home-movies a la Cloverfield, but De Palma, in not making his camera work “realistic,” has made a fakey movie, but an improved one. Also by using this documentary approach, he has a built-in excuse to employ his signature long takes, a stylistic bit that nobody seems to be commenting on.

Angel Salazar unwittingly filming his own kidnapping:
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At most half of the movie is this soldier’s handheld “doc” of his war experiences… the rest is made of leisurely intercut segments from similarly visually-enhanced sources: a French-made documentary on a checkpoint, a security camera, a legal video deposition, news footage, and websites with streaming video (!). It’s an interesting new way of incorporating the scary internet into a feature film… really just a website cut-and-pasted into the middle of the movie. The point being that each of these sources either progresses the story by giving us more information than a single source could provide, or gives us a new view or perspective on events we’ve seen.

Movie ends with “real” photos from the war, which have been censored by order of the cowardly film studio (HDNet/Magnolia)’s legal department, closes with a staged photo by B de P, I don’t know why exactly.

from the French doc:
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BdP: “The US government has co-opted the Fourth Estate. It made the networks buy its spun, whitewashed version of the facts. The government has made sure there are no images that are too upsetting. We don’t see the soldiers being hurt or killed. And we don’t see Iraqi civilians being hurt or killed. I’ve been watching this incursion into the Middle East and, being a director, I naturally wonder: Why are they leaving certain things out, and where are they? Even in the case of my movie, where I tried to get these images in, I got redacted.”

A redacted photo:
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I see nothing to complain about here. This movie shouldn’t have died like it did at the box office (I definitely would’ve gone if it hadn’t disappeared so quickly) and it shouldn’t be getting so many anti-American accusations by people who haven’t watched it. It’s specifically a film by an American about American troops killing the people they are supposed to protect, and that’s dangerous idealogical territory to be treading, so who we needed to tell the story was a filmmaker who walks hard like De Palma, who can’t (judging from an interview I just read) seem to tell when he’s being provocative or embellishing the truth, and who is well used to backlash. Not being an actual documentary, I didn’t find it as heartbreaking as The War Tapes (though they have similar endings), watched it with a more artistic remove, but from what little I’ve read in the media and Redacted-related articles and interviews, the story is real and is worth telling. Better to tell it now while it’s still happening (the soldiers were actually just acquitted, no surprise there) than to wait 60 years when it’s safe enough to make a Flags of Our Fathers prestige-pic out of it. It’s too bad the people who haven’t heard the story aren’t gonna see it here. Better luck next time, Mr. De Palma.

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Angel’s helmet-mounted night-cam shoots conflicted compadre McCoy:
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by ·Comments Off on My Night At Maud’s (1969, Eric Rohmer)

Jean-Louis is a Catholic engineer with an interest in mathematics and a dislike for Blaise Pascal (the mid-1600’s scientist and philosopher). JL meets up with old long-time-no-see friend Vidal, who takes him out dancing and then to visit Vidal’s friend Maud, a single mother, at her house on Christmas night. The section at Maud’s house must be at least a third of the film’s running time. Vidal is attracted to her, but she’ll have none of that. He gets drunk and finally walks home, Leaving JL to fend for himself. They talk about life, love, religion and Pascal, JL sleeps next to Maud but they only kiss once. The next day JL meets Franciose, a girl he has noticed at church, and makes a date with her, then joins Maud and Vidal out hiking in the snow, talking like comfortable old friends. Another friendly kiss. JL gives Francoise a ride home, stays over at her place (but in a separate room), flash-forward they are married with a kid, he meets Maud, and we find out that Francoise had an affair with Maud’s ex husband, but all is forgiven and the family goes to romp in the surf.

Like a more fleshed-out story of The Bakery Girl of Monceau, but this time the women have histories and personalities, and the bakery girl (or Maud) is much harder to write off. JL has a deeper character than anyone in the first two Moral Tales – Criterion calls him “one of the great conflicted figures of sixties cinema.”

JL and Maud:
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On the film’s style, Kent Jones says “No one’s films are more ‘written,’ more narrative based, or more logistically tied to particular places and times of year.” True that, an extremely talky picture, and reliant on its snowy seasonal setting. Finely but simply shot in black and white. No real visual or plot excitement, no stylistic heightening of mood or emotion, but a deeply thought-out script and characters evolving before our eyes. This particular week from Christmas to New Year’s is one of the most important in JL’s life, and we see (or hear) his changing and challenged beliefs, principles and decisions, creating the kind of real human complexity very rarely seen in movies.

Came out a decade after its closest (so far) kin in New Wave cinema, The 400 Blows, probably the quietest and most reserved film of 1969, the year of The Gladiators, Mr. Freedom, Topaz, Satyricon and Easy Rider (but to be fair, also the year of Andrei Rublev, Passion of Anna and Army of Shadows). Third of the Six Moral Tales, the last four of which were shot by Néstor Almendros, who also worked with Truffaut and Barbet Schroeder and later shot Days of Heaven.

More Kent Jones:

What are the chances that Jean-Louis and Maud will have a life together? Based on her luck with men and his avowed preference for Catholic blondes, not so great. Based on their immediate affinity for each other, not so small. “You are a happy soul, despite appearances,” observes Maud of Jean-Louis—and the essential rightness of this observation is what makes Rohmer a greater artist than Bertolucci and also points to what gives My Night at Maud’s its special spark and effervescence. … Current fashion would favor Maud as the voice of reason when she tartly dismisses Jean-Louis’ prevarications: “I prefer people who know what they want.” Yet there’s something equally admirable about Jean-Louis’ insistence on adhering to his story and fulfilling his own platonic conception with Françoise, a decidedly unhappy soul. The necessity of choice, the pain of choice: no film is better at illuminating these two ­equally real aspects of living. There are no moments of grace in My Night at Maud’s. … Yet there are intimations of grace in the slow, serpentine movement toward intimacy between Maud and Jean-Louis.

Maud and Vidal:
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Movie picked up a few screenplay awards, but mostly beaten out by the big political films of the era – Lindsay Anderson’s If… for feature at Cannes, Costa-Gavras Z for foreign film oscar and, ahem, Patton for screenplay oscar.

Vidal – Antoine Vitez (a smallish part in Truffaut’s The Green Room).

Franciose – Marie-Christine Barrault (Queen Gueneviere in Perceval le Gallois, also in Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories)

Maud – Francoise Fabian (the lawyer Lucie in Out 1 and the mother in Secret Defense)

Jean-Louis – Jean-Louis Trintignant, who worked with (in order) Roger Vadim, Jacques Demy, Alain Robbe-Grillet, René Clément, Claude Chabrol, Costa-Gavras, Bertolucci (star of The Conformist), André Téchiné, Kieslowski (Red), and Patrice Chéreau (Those Who Love Me Can Take The Train).

JL and Francoise:
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