by ·Comments Off on Chats Perches / Case of the Grinning Cat (2004, Chris Marker)

A different kind of movie than the other Marker works I’ve seen. Really this is what I’d been waiting for: the politically-engaged street filmmaking of the 60’s and 70’s combined with the travelogue gaze and personal essay style (with distancing commentary) of Sans Soleil. Didn’t fill me with joy like most of Marker’s movies do, however… more contemplative and sadder, takes more time to think about each section and let them all sink in. Uses public artwork of cats to weave from Sept. 11th reactions to political situations in France to the death and imprisonment of friends and entertainers in such a way that, like Sans Soleil, I don’t realize what the film is about until I watch it again. Two versions of the film… first time I played it with English narration, then a couple weeks later I ran the French version with live sound and no narration, just scattered intertitles. Shockingly (since I usually love Marker’s narrations) I liked the second way better. But then, I got more out of it having just seen the English version. So I’d recommend both as a double-feature!
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Quotes below are from the English commentary.

Opens with a flash mob in Paris. People mill around opening and closing umbrellas, to music from Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
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November 2001 Paris. September 2001 New York.
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Cats on a roof, on buildings high and low, hidden in a tree.
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The metro, a bridge, signs of Paris from long ago. Presidential election at the end of year… the left is split, so the far-right candidate Le Pen comes close to challenging the incumbent Chirac, who is defensively re-elected after protests in the streets against Le Pen.
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“Let’s face it: these girls with their war paint are lovely, but the fascist legions are not besieging our gates. And if Le Pen is a dictator, it’s mainly against his own people. Yet what we see here coming onstage is an entire generation that was spoken of as being apolitical.”
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More about the cat, appearing in the evening news and all over the internet.
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March 19th, Bush (backed by Blair) declares war on Iraq, but UN inspectors find no weapons. More street protests in Paris, but as with the American protests of the time, they’ve splintered into hundreds of mini-demonstrations. “Why should the streets of Paris be less chaotic than the rest of the world.”
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The plundering of Iraqi museums in April, a “die-in” for the victims of AIDS in June. “In these times, we the people gathered to watch eleven billionaires kicking a ball. What about the French team? Stalinesque-sized posters, as we had never seen the like of in Paris – and not one goal recorded.” More about street demonstrations with “a certain fuzziness in the symbols.” “It’s a great asset in life, not to know what you’re talking about. Marker follows political and popular developments with great interest but without total enthusiasm, removed from it all. Seems like he’s either saying “it’s nice that they’re trying, but their struggles are shadows of the struggles I lived through” or “this is what I was once like, with the same futility and wasted energy.”
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Sees a personal friend (below) in a street crowd, then records news footage relaying that friend’s death at age 79 soon afterwards. Flashback to 1999, at a concert benefitting a cause that same activist friend had supported, Marker had filmed a young singer, who five years later had become famous for accidentally killing his actress girlfriend. “And you wonder why the Cats abandon us?”
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What if they left us for good?”
‘We were the Freedom Cats. If you didn’t catch the message, just move on!’
And then – comes a sign.
The same unknown hand has painted circles of Cats on the sidewalk, to watch over our sleep.
Thank you, Cats.
We will badly need you…
…wherever we go.

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This film is dedicated to M. Chat and those who, like him, are creating a new culture.
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by ·Comments Off on Celine & Julie Go Boating (1974, Jacques Rivette)

Apr 2008:
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Watched again with a very small, mildly unhappy audience. Oh how will I meet some fellow Rivette fanatics in my town if not at a public Celine & Julie screening? Love love love the last twenty minutes or so when they attack the fiction house, but the parts in the middle where they interfere in each other’s lives (Celine driving away Julie’s lover, Julie wrecking Celine’s job) are great fun also. Still don’t know what to make of Julie meeting her grandmother at the house next door to the fiction house.

Catching up with the cast: “Julie” had not-huge parts in Renoir and Fellini films, was recently in Ruiz’s Time Regained with La Belle noiseuse star Emmanuelle Béart. Marie-France Pisier played the dark-haired flower-fearing woman in the fiction house, also appeared in Time Regained, as well as Phantom of Liberty, Trans-Europ Express and got her start starring in Truffaut’s short Antoine & Collette.

Remembering the cat in the final shot, I paid attention to all the cats in the movie this time. Not much to say about that, though.

Feb 2007:
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Incredible movie. Been thinking about it a lot. Lived up to expectations after I’d been wanting to see it for 6-7 years. Delightful to watch for all three of its hours, playful in every sense.

Dark-haired Celine meets red-head Julie, and they goof around for a long time, then…

James Crawford in Reverse Shot:

From the outset, Céline’s been on the run from a mysterious mansion with a gruesome secret. And so, just as the title predicts—in French, ‘aller en bateau,’ literally translated as ‘to go boating’ has a colloquial meaning of approximately ‘to get taken for a ride’ or ‘get caught up in a story’—Céline and Julie get wrapped up in discovering said secret.

The two take turns entering this house and comparing their experiences, trying to change the outcome and learn the secrets within. They mess with each other’s personal lives (jobs and friends), experiment with spells and legends and memory, and seem to never stop enjoying themselves. A big ol’ metaphor for movie watching, filmmaking, audience participation, getting caught up in the action. Out 1 is at the theater and Celine & Julie is at the movies.

Released the same year as another movie to blow my mind on video lately, Edvard Munch.

Will have to see this again and again.

Celine & Julie:
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Feuillade-ing through town:
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Bulle Ogier (Out 1’s Pauline/Emilie)
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Director Barbet Schroeder as the guy in the fiction house:
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The girl from the house, rescued:
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Going boating:
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by ·Comments Off on The Black Cat (2007, Stuart Gordon)

Late into SHOCKtober (Oct. 18th), I have finally unpacked my office enough to uncover the disc holding season two of “Masters of Horror”. Katy’s little brother is joining me for the celebratory kickoff screening, so I choose episode eleven, Stuart Gordon’s entry. It’s been a Gordon-filled month and his stuff is always either effective (“Dagon”) or entertaining (“Dolls”) or more usually both (“From Beyond”). Disappointingly, what we’ve got here is a slow-moving period piece that failed to impress or entertain.

The movie is supposedly based on Poe’s “The Black Cat”, but it’s actually an “Edgar Allen Poe In Love”, where we watch Poe’s visions and dreams that inspire him to write “The Black Cat”. Poe fans on the IMDB comment board enthusiastically rave about all the references to Poe’s life and stories scattered throughout the movie. Sort of a condensed look at Poe, implying that Gordon and usual co-writer Dennis Paoli will not be exploring each Poe work in-depth (this is the second after “Pit and the Pendulum”) as they have been doing for HP Lovecraft (seven films and counting).

Never heard of most of these actors and the only thing that turns up on IMDB is that half of them have been in the “Highlander” series for some reason. MoH trademark eye-gouging is here, but no nudity and I suppose an enthusiastic Jeffrey Combs will have to be our token celebrity casting.

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