by ·Comments Off on The Train Rolls On / Embassy (1971/73, Chris Marker)

It’s the late 60’s, early 70’s, and Chris Marker has got himself a Great Cause. Inspired by Aleksandr Medvedkin (Alexandre Medvedkine) and by political and social unrest in France and elsewhere, Marker and his friends have decided to read lots of Lenin, to try to make films that change the world, and ultimately to try putting film production into the hands of the people, the workers.

Marker hadn’t been greatly involved with the French New Wave movement, but he was present at the end of it, contributing to the 1967 omnibus film Far From Vietnam, wherein Marker, Resnais, Godard, Ivens, Lelouch, Varda and Klein voiced their support for the communist north vietnamese, while Rohmer, Rivette, Truffaut and Demy stayed out of it, pursuing their own romantic ideals.

Marker, Godard and others started making purely political works and stopped putting their names on their films, using collective names. I can’t find copies of some of these films (Cinetracts, Battle of the Ten Million) and can’t find English subtitles for most others (Far From Vietnam, Sixth Face of the Pentagon, À bientôt j’espère, Les Mots ont un sens), so it’s pretty much just these two, The Train Rolls On and Embassy. I’m filling out the rest of the timeline by quoting heavily from Catherine Lupton‘s amazing book on Marker.

1967-1977
Marker goes “beyond the privileged status of the auteur-director into the humbler and less visible functions of producer, fund raiser, editor, facilitator and general fixer, ensuring the exposure through [production company] SLON of other people’s work while continuing to make his own (unsigned) films.”

FAR FROM VIETNAM, 1967
“Under the auspices of SLON (which also happens to be the Russian word for elephant), Marker instigated, edited and wrote the commentary for Far From Vietnam, a collective portmanteau film made to protest against American military interventionism in Vietnam.”

A BIENTOT, J’ESPERE, 1968
In support of striking workers in southeast France, they started on “a film about the strikes, entitled A Bientot, j’espere (‘Hope To See You Soon’).” Workers complained that the film was pessimistic, that they came off as victims. “Marker’s response to these criticisms was that he and Marret would always be outsides to the workers’ lives, and that the logical step forward was for them to begin making their own films.” And so the Medvedkin group was born.

CINETRACTS, 1968
After the May ’68 business, “The Estates General of the Cinema sponsored a series of collective short documentaries recording the May events from the perspective of students and striking workers. Following an idea suggested by Chris Marker it also produced the Cinetracts. These were a series of anonymous, combative and often strikingly eloquent visual pamphlets, filmed on silent black and white 16mm-negative stock using easily assembled materials – still photographs, collages and texts – in order to respond quickly to unfolding events. Marker, Godard, Resnais, Jean-Pierre Gorin (who formed the Dziga Vertov Group with Godard), Philippe Garrel and Jackie Raynal were among the better-known contributors to the series alongside young militants with no prior experience of film.”

LES MOTS ONT UN SENS, 1970
“Number 5 in the [SLON counter-information newsreels] series, On vous parle de Paris: Maspero, les mots ont un sens (‘Maspero, Words Have Meaning’), is an affectionate portrait of the left-wing publisher and bookshop owner Francois Maspero, who was a contributor to Far From Vietnam and would later publish the commentary to Le Fond de l’air est rouge. Maspero is one of the most satisfying and likeable of Marker’s films from this period, achieving an exemplary balance of quirky human warmth with a clear and inventive form of political argument.”

1970-71
Marker worked as a still photographer on Costa-Gavras’s film The Confession, then made a film about the shoot called Jour de Tournage, and a film on the controversy surrounding The Confession, number 6 in the newsreel series, Le Deuxieme proces d’Artur London.

BATTLE OF THE TEN MILLION, 1970
“Both [Les mots & Artur London] consider the question of how committed socialists and revolutionaries can acknowledge past mistakes, undergo productive self-criticism and still maintain their basic political beliefs, in a climate where their political opponents on the right take such criticism as proof of the total failure of communism. … This dilemma comes sharply to the fore in The Battle of the Ten Million, a clear-eyed account of the failure of Fidel Castro’s ambitious project for Cuba to achieve a 10-million-ton sugar-cane harvest in 1969-70.”

LE TRAIN EN MARCHE, 1971
“The French version of Happiness was accompanied in cinemas by Le Train en marche, an introduction to Medvedkin, Happiness and the film-trains based around an animated interview with Medvedkin filmed in a train depot in the Paris suburd of Noisy-le-Sec. Its core motifs are the eye, the hand and the train.”

image

A 10-min intro about trains in the 1920’s traversing russia/asia acting as bookmobiles, then a change of narrator voice when Medvedkin is introduced, and his story takes us away. His crew watched and filmed the techniques of successful and unsuccessful farmers and showed the films to each other to help increase production, then moved on to steel plants.

Medvedkin: “We realized that the cinema could be not just a means of entertainment, a way of arousing aesthetic emotions, but also a great and forceful weapon capable of reconstructing factories, and not just factories but the world, making it a better place. Such a cinema in the hands of the people was a powerful weapon.”

In the last bit, he talks about his motivation for filming Happiness, which makes sense now that i know Le Train en marche was screened as an introduction to that film.

A pretty straightforward documentary with english voiceover rather than subtitles on my copy, using archive footage (but none from the actual cine-trains, which had all been lost). No cats or owls or tricks, though halfway through the movie, Marker reveals the camera crew filming Medvedkin.

From the sound of it, Marker’s Medvedkin Group has at least partially succeeded. In CM’s own words: “I think that it’s this fabled and long forgotten bit of history… that underlies a large part of my work – in the end, perhaps, the only coherent part. To try to give the power of speech to people who don’t have it, and, when it’s possible, to help them find their own means of expression. The workers I filmed in 1967 in Rhodesia, just like the Kosovars I filmed in 2000, had never been heard on television: everyone was speaking on their behalf, but once you no longer saw them on the road, bloody and sobbing, people lost interest in them. To my great surprise, I once found myself explaining the editing of Battleship Potemkin to a group of aspiring filmmakers in Guinea-Bissau, using an old print on rusty reels; now those filmmakers are having their films selected for competition in Venice.”

VIVA LA BALEINE, 1972
“Ecological politics are not usually mentioned as being among Chris Marker’s preoccupations, but they are at the heart of a short film he co-directed with Mario Ruspoli in 1972, Viva la baleine / Long Live The Whale… a sharply politicized re-take on Ruspoli’s anthropological study, which now sets the archaic practices of the Azores whaling communities in the context of a pointed condemnation of industrialized whaling.”

CHILE & PATRICIO GUZMAN, 1973-75
Marker traveled to Chile to make a film about the new socialist government under Salvador Allende but “discovered that the Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzman and his colleagues already had the job in hand” so CM instead helped bring their films to France and contributed financial assistance for Guzman’s later three-part The Battle of Chile, 1975, after the government’s 1973 takeover by a military dictatorship.

EMBASSY, 1973
In late ’73, “Marker transposed recent events in Chile into a remarkable fictional document, L’Ambassade (Embassy). As a fictional commentary on the contemporary political world, Embassy invites comparison with La Jetee. Despite their evident differences, the films share a measured, inexorable narration, and a catastrophic transformation of Paris that leaves a small group of survivors trapped.

image

“Wednesday, 2 days after the coup”

Lupton’s notes: “An unexpected response to Pinochet’s 1973 coup d’etat in Chile. A Super-8 film apparently found in an embassy -as it’s written in the original title-, where political activists had taken refuge after a military coup d’état. But the events -and their setting- are not what they first appear to be.”

8mm film with no direct sound. Also English voiceover rather than subs on this one, a bored-sounding reporter voice.

“You are all motherfuckers as dumb as corpses quarrelling in the grave. The only lesson to draw is that all political directions have gone bankrupt.”

I admit I snickered at the ending. Shades of Cradle Will Rock as the “truth” behind the film is revealed: “From a window of the embassy I took my last shot, the van that was leading them into exile from that city we had known when she was free: Paris.”

THE LONELINESS OF THE LONG DISTANCE SINGER, 1974
“La Solitude du chanteur de fond fused personal friendship and the pressing political concern of the moment by filming the rehearsals and final performance of [Yves] Montand’s one-man benefit concert for Chilean refugees, held at the Paris Olympia on 12 February 1974 and his first stage appearance for six years. … [Loneliness] was released in December 1974 with the dormant If I Had Four Camels [completed in ’66], but it was the Montand film that attracted critical accolades, as a fond and revealing homage to one of France’s best-loved film actors and popular entertainers. … Loneliness is a minor masterpiece of observational documentary…”

SPIRAL, 1975
Marker helped initiate and wrote the commentary for the film Spiral, helmed by a French sociologist expelled from Chile, Armand Mattelart, and editors Jacqueline Meppiel and Valerie Mattelart. “The title of the film, Spiral, derived from its proposed spiral structure of seven successive phases of right-wing reaction leading up to the coup of 1973, many of which also delved back in history to consider, for example, the past roles of the military and the United States in Chilean affairs.” The film was largely edited from archive footage, then matched to a 3-hour Marker-written commentary and edited to 155 minutes for final release. “Although Marker was not involved at every point of the film’s production, Spiral nonetheless stands as an instructive precursor to Le Fond de l’air est rouge. It develops the same intricate marshalling of archive resources as Marker’s later film, representing the arraignment of conflicting social forces at a given moment in history by playing off film extracts informed by different political perspectives against each other.”

Hope I’m able to see more of the above films sometime. Learning French would help. Meanwhile I’m either tackling Grin Without a Cat next, or taking a Patricio Guzman or Alexander Medvedkin sidetrack before heading boldly forth into the 1980’s.

by ·Comments Off on Persepolis (2007, Marjane Satrapi)

Co-directed with Vincent Paronnaud. Tied with Silent Light for the jury prize at Cannes.

Beautifully illustrated and well-animated story, alternately light and heavy, following author/director Marjane’s life from the mid-late 70’s to the mid 90’s. I have to grudgingly admit that the people who say the second half of the film isn’t as good are kinda right, but overall it’s such a wonderful movie, the kind that I wish I could make everybody watch: an artistic movie promoting peace, cross-cultural understanding and individual integrity. I love that the phrase “the price of freedom” is invoked not to justify the loss of lives in a “freedom fighting” war, but as a personal cost, that Marjane’s final flight from Iran to France for the sake of her personal freedom will mean never seeing her grandmother again.

Since I don’t know anything about Iranian history or politics, here’s a timeline combining this movie’s events with stuff from wikipedia and IMDB:

1921 – Qajar Dynasty ends, the “good” Shah is in power
1941 – Shah’s son takes control
1950s- new Shah becomes “increasingly autocratic”
1963 – The House Is Black
1969 – The Cow
1969 – Marjane Satrapi born
1970 – Kiarostami’s first short film
1974 – The Traveler
1977 – The Report
1979 – Shah leaves the country, Iran becomes an Islamic Republic under supreme leader Ayatollah Khomeini
1980 – Iraq invades Iran
1984 – Marjane goes to Vienna
1987 – Where Is The Friend’s Home?
1987 – The Cyclist
1988 – Iraq/Iran war ends
1989 – Ayatollah Ali Khamenei becomes supreme leader
1989 – Khameini issues fatwa against Salman Rushdie
1989 – Marjane gets married in Tehran
1990 – Close-Up
1994 – Marjane gets divorced
1995 – The White Balloon”
1997 – Taste of Cherry
1998 – The Apple
1999 – The Wind Will Carry Us
2000 – The Circle
2000 – Persepolis book published
2001 – Kandahar
2002 – Ten
2005 – Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is president (still under Khamenei)
2006 – Offside

by ·Comments Off on Not On The Lips (2003, Alain Resnais)

Resnais films a 1925 libretto by André Barde (which was also filmed in 1931, but nobody seems to know much about that version) with much of the same crew and cast as his 1997 Same Old Song. Movie is shot like a straight period piece in hazy color (or was it my DVD which was hazy?), almost like a play, with longish wide shots and not many close-ups. Comedy/musical style, characters look into camera and talk to the audience. Songs are decent, nothing memorable or amazing, with subtitles annoyingly translated to rhyme in English. No big setpiece numbers, in fact it abruptly changes scenes just as one was about to begin. A few interesting cinematic bits – when characters leave the room they are seen fading away accompanied by a sound of fluttering birds.

I like the movie a lot, enough to see it a second time and show it off to Katy (assuming correctly that she’d like it a bit more than Private Fears). But is it simply a cute, charming light-hearted musical? Is Resnais Trying To Say Something Here? Does this fit in with the grand cinematic master’s important themes of life & death, memory & time, his intricate puzzle-box editing schemes? Of course, I’ve watched the 50’s and 60’s movies and then jumped 35 years through time to watch Not On The Lips, so I’m missing a significant amount of development. Before jumping all over the internet for theories on what’s going on with this film, the only clues I have are the fading-out/fluttering-birds bits. The story is set around the time Resnais was born, and all these characters would be long dead… ghosts still inhabiting their stage-play world performing to a nonexistent audience? Is that stretching it? Anyway, most of the other author of online reviews are suffering from the same lapse as I am, comparing this one to Hiroshima and Marienbad instead of, say, Smoking or Stavisky. I’ll get to ’em all soon though. For a start I’m picking up that most of his works since 1980 have been about artifice and theatricality rather than time and memory.

What am I missing? “Alex” says “Resnais has often made extensive play between beautiful surface spectacle and underlying reality a central feature of his work.” He points out that rich steelmen Eric and George both have weird sexual hang-ups, and says that George is seen reading a far-right-wing newspaper and sings a racist song (must not have been translated that way on our DVD). Then Alex tries to make a point about how the less-rich Charley and Faradel are more thoughtful but less successful with women, but he’s lost me there.

Alex: “Both Valandray and Thompson are portrayed as quite unattractive figures. Many critics have painted Thompson’s portrayal as anti-American, but Resnais’ Georges Valandray is, if anything, much more darkly presented. Georges sings a strange song (“I was pushed aside”) that is openly racist and anti-immigrant (cutting heavily against the thesis that the movie is purely light-hearted). Georges is specifically shown reading the far-right-wing newspaper of the 1920s and 1930s, Action Francaise. In addition, Georges’ eros is shown up as highly flawed – he gives several bizarre speeches comparing love-making to steel-making, speeches which attempt to explain why he values virginity so highly, yet the speeches come off perverse and even disturbing, while the all of Georges’ other speeches are very elegant and pleasing.”

Michael Sicinski on the late films:
“Instead of using complex editing schemes to delve into Proustian time, late Resnais uses distancing techniques to explore both artifice and the false temporality of cinema. Like a more populist Manoel de Oliveira, Resnais has concerned himself with the relationship between theatre and cinema, particularly the theatre’s immediacy and the way his stagy films embalm this immediacy into irrevocable distance. Some, like Smoking / No Smoking, highlight this with theatrical gimmicks (multiple characters played by only two actors) whose awkward transition into cinema turns a light middlebrow entertainment into something eerily impenetrable. Others such as Mélo and Same Old Song, use artifacts from the past to undercut the cinematic present with the past’s obdurate alterity. Not on the Lips is another experiment in this vein, and my befuddled reaction to it has to do with my inability to access it on any level other than the intellectual.”

Greg Muskewitz:
“The operetta is a genuine reflection on the deceptiveness — albeit playful deceptiveness — of the human condition that Resnais has so creatively carved out in his long-spanning oeuvre.”

Rosenbaum:
“The characters’ exits are marked by lap dissolves that make the actors appear to evaporate, accompanied by the sound of fluttering wings — something Resnais says he did for musical and rhythmic reasons.”

“Like Melo, which adapted a serious boulevard play of 1929, Not on the Lips offers a profound history lesson — one that becomes tricky once one realizes that despite the close attention to 1925 details, it has no visible relation to any French film made during that period. It’s like an artifact from a parallel universe where film history took a different turn. In this respect, it’s unlike Resnais’ previous flirtations with musicals: Stavisky (1974), with its lovely Stephen Sondheim score; Life Is a Bed of Roses (1983), with its operatic segments; and Same Old Song (1997), which appropriates Dennis Potter’s use of lip-synched pop songs. Despite its playful allusions to theater — shadow-play silhouettes to introduce actors, an unrealistic lighting change in the midst of a monologue, a finale that musically thanks the audience for not leaving early — Not on the Lips is closer to a dream than a pastiche, a fantasy grounded in memory and imagination.”

Story via IMDB:
“Gilberte, in middle-age, flirts with men but loves her husband Georges, wishing he were more demonstrative. He’s negotiating a deal with an American, Eric Thomson, who turns out to be Gilberte’s first husband from an annulled and secret stateside marriage. Along with her sister Arlette, Gilberte begs Eric not to tell Georges about the marriage. Meanwhile, a young artist, Charly, pursues Gilberte while Arlette tries to match him with the young Huguette, who loves him.”

The Eric Thomson sham is carried off, and when their hand is forced, the sisters claim that Arlette is the ex/wife… she kisses Eric, sparks fly. Charly goes to hanger-on Faradel’s bachelor pad to meet Gilberte but finds himself happily with Huguette. Gilberte makes up with husband Georges. Faradel doesn’t necessarily end up with meddling landlady Madame Foin, but wouldn’t that make for a quadruply happy romantic ending?

Two sisters: Isabelle Nanty is the girl who gets set up with Dominique Pinon in Amelie… Sabine Azéma is the pious/sexy caretaker in Private Fears and has been in everything else since the early 80’s:
image

Jalil Lespert, of Le Petit lieutenant, whom Katy says looks like Crispin Glover:
image

Lambert Wilson: dan the barfly in Private Fears, also in The Belly of an Architect, plays evil frenchman parts in recent hollywood movies:
image

A hopping party:
image

Love behind the hedges – there’s Audrey Tautou at lower-right. Georges, on the left, played Lionel in Private Fears and like Sabine Azema he has been in all of Resnais’ movies since ’80 except for I Want To Go Home.
image

L: best supporting actor winner Darry Cowl, R: Daniel Prévost from The Dinner Game
image

A happy ending:
image

I liked this little trick where Georges and Gilberte are talking in the hall, then they get edited into the kitchen mid-conversation:

image
image
image
image
image
image

by ·Comments Off on The Story of Marie and Julien (2003, Jacques Rivette)

“Something is going to happen.”

I enjoyed the movie a lot, more than the other post-breakdown Rivette films I’ve seen. Along the way, tried to draw connections to his other work and figure out what it all means. Might be difficult since I haven’t watched related works Duelle and Noroit yet, but this was supposed to be part one of the still-unfinished four-part series, so I thought it might work.

We’ve got such Rivette favorite themes as…

Performance and ritual:
image

…secrets hidden in an old house:
image

…and a sinister photograph:
image

We’ve got such late-period trademarks as the fade to black after each scene, the ordinary household details of daily life, and the minimal music score.

So yeah, I followed the story, tried to figure out what was happening and why, and guessed I had an alright grasp of things. Bopped around the web looking for opinions.

DVDverdict didn’t like it much:

Béart and Radzilowicz, improbably matched as lovers but fine as actors, go through their paces with all due seriousness, but in the end there’s little momentum, little of interest, and little reward. At the core of the story is forbidden love, and what we will do in its name, but Rivette’s proficient, clinically precise filmmaking refuses to embrace the one element of his story upon which even Marie and Julien’s personal tragedies hinge.

On a separate review on the same site, DVDverdict rather did like it:

One’s growing realization that the strange emotional affect of the characters, and dialogue that sometimes comes off as artificial and intellectually abstract, are both servants of plot and not merely pretentious art film conceits is a great source of delight.

Then I hit up Senses of Cinema, which proved that neither I nor DVDverdict had any idea what we were watching, and made me feel bad all week for not having thought of any of this stuff by myself.

Before getting into that, despite author Michael J. Anderson’s statement that “a traditional analysis which details the plot and characterisations utilised in the narrative is of little use in talking about Rivette’s film,” I’m gonna lay those out just so I don’t forget ’em later.

Julien (Jerzy Radziwilowicz, Walser in Secret Defense) works from home as a clock repairman, alone but for his cat.
image

He dreams of a chance encounter with Marie (who he met one time a year earlier) that ends with her trying to stab him. Goes out and has a chance encounter with Marie, who agrees to go out for coffee but never shows up. So he goes back to blackmailing Madame X (Anne Brochet, of Intimate Strangers and a 1992 French Phil K. Dick adaptation), who runs a phony business and may have killed her own sister.

Finally Marie (Emmanuelle Béart, of La Belle noiseuse, Strayed, an Assayas, some Chabrols and Mission: Impossible) mysteriously reappears. They’re both lonely and attracted to each other, and he soon asks her to move in. Cue transition from part 1 (“Julien”) to part 2 (“Julien et Marie”).

Julien et Marie:
image

The two have hot role-playing sex together, finishing each other’s erotic stories. Marie moves in but remains mysterious, spends her free time secretly rearranging an upstairs room, and sometimes disappears to a hotel and has to be tracked down. She is let in on the blackmailing plot, but while Julien is meeting with Madame X, Marie appears to be meeting with X’s dead sister (Bettina Kee of Va savoir).

More dead than alive:
image

Things get more ghostly when Marie also appears to be dead, having killed herself months earlier after an argument with her then-boyfriend, as we move to parts 3 (“Marie et Julien”) and 4 (“Marie”). Keeping in mind the dream at the beginning and the unreal tone to the meeting pictured above, I start to wonder which parts of the story are actually happening.

Marie acts more strange, starts chanting in a foreign language, and remodels the upstairs room to look exactly like the one in which she hung herself, then is stopped by Julien when she tries to ritualistically repeat that action. The blackmail plot plays out, and the two sisters meet and work things out.

image

“Now I am yours. You are mine. Where I must go you will accompany me. For what I must do you will help me. Don’t fail me, or you will lose the very memory of me.”

Julien rebels and it happens. Marie disappears to him, though we still see her. This is where an ordinary ghost story would end… he broke the rules and the prophecy came true… but Marie becomes real again, her blood is restored and they get their happy ending.

image

Oh, and I’d read an article on Kino Slang a while back about this movie but had forgotten and thought it was referring to Duelle. Fun to watch the documentary moments in the film as Julien’s cat responds to the camera crew and boom mic offscreen.

Alas, 30 years on, Rivette gets reproached when in Histoire de Marie et Julien he crystalizes some of his former narrative terror and anti-illusionism into one brief shot of a cat on a man’s chest recoiling from the camera and the boom, the whole appartus bearing down on them in a tracking shot. A Bazinian anti-illusionism. Once the camera settles, the cat stares up at the boom mic. Perhaps the man is “covering” for the cat when he looks up too and says “nosing around upstairs again?

image

On to the great analysis from Senses of Cinema:

Rivette structures his film not as a dream or a series of dreams, but instead eviscerates any distinction between dream and reality, establishing a logic present only in fiction – there is no distinction between consciousness and subconsciousness, dream and reality, life and death, but rather, all is fiction.
…
With the opening “Julien” intertitle, Rivette suggests that this character may be constructing the narrative: for instance, there is simultaneous depiction of desire (that Marie needs him, that she is free, that they meet on the street; and more directly later in the film, a cut from Marie stroking Julien’s arm to the pair making love) and anxiety (the knife, the fact that she stands him up) woven throughout the opening section of the film. Yet, this evident focalisation – the narrative being told through Julien – does not last, as Marie quickly becomes a co-creator of the pursuant narrative. In a more directly self-aware moment of creation, for instance, Marie speculates about two sisters in a photo that she and Julien are examining: “one is dead, the other alive.” Likewise, Marie asks Julien to tell her about the “forest”, which leads into an erotic fantasy narrated first by Julien, and then by Marie herself. (At this point they are co-creators of the narrative, taking turns constructing the incident.) Moreover, there are also scenes in which Julien plays no part at all, such as a mysterious nocturnal meeting – that once again Rivette suggests may be a dream – between Marie and the dead woman from the photo, who imparts a fragment of information and gives her a secret hand signal. And then there are also the subsequent intertitles: “Julien and Marie”, “Marie and Julien” and “Marie”, which similarly denote shifting narrative perspectives.
…
Indeed, if anything, Marie seems to occupy a special place in the narrative, as it is she and not Julien who seems aware of the fact that they are in a narrative.

And there’s more about the theatricality of the film… stuff that I should’ve been able to catch. Ugh… next time I need to either try harder, or find articles to read BEFORE watching the movie. Maybe I’ll try that with Duelle then see if I can fend for myself with Don’t Touch The Axe.

image

by ·Comments Off on Je t’aime, je t’aime (1968, Alain Resnais)

A suicidal man haunted by memory is picked by a massive computer system as the ideal candidate to send to the past in a time-travel experiment. But enough about La Jetee, here’s a full-length full-motion movie from six years later.

I don’t know if the computer was aware that the man had killed his woman on vacation in Glasgow by turning up the gas while she slept, or if the scientists were aware that the man would be able to re-experience his past having no free will to change it. The results are, of course, a fragmented Resnais film jumping back and forth willy-nilly through the last 2-5 years of this guy’s life.

Star Claude Rich, who looks somewhat like Michael Showalter from The State, was in Jean Renoir’s final film The Elusive Corporal and would later play the offscreen cranky father in Coeurs.

Rich is with this girl Wiana (Anouk Ferjac from The War Is Over) sometimes, but mostly he’s with young Catrine (Olga Georges-Picot, who wasn’t in many memorable films before she killed herself in ’97). He is occasionally happy with Catrine, but he cheats on her and she knows it. They’re both depressive, and she has no life outside of their relationship, doesn’t enjoy vacation, is becoming more of a burden.

Now I’m told that some of the “past events” that Claude experiences are actually dreams he had. Wonder if the hot girl in the mirrored bathroom asking him to wash her back was one of those.

Just a dream? Carla Marlier (Zazie‘s aunt):
image

After being trapped for who knows how long bouncing through time and memory (90 minutes as the movie’s running time, or infinitely longer?), Claude finds himself reliving his attempted suicide by gun. Does he manage to affect his past this time by succeeding where before he had failed? His body appears on the hospital grounds, and the technicians run out to collect him, with a final shot of Claude’s mouse companion still caught inside his glass dome in the machine.

image

The mouse appears earlier, running across the beach right around the moment that Claude was supposed to be sent back (it was to be one year ago, for a duration of one minute).

The time machine:
image

This idea of time travel doesn’t seem like it’d be very useful to the scientists, rather more like traveling through your own memory than actually moving in time… though it does show that Claude’s body disappears when he travels. And the scientists, besides having invented/created the thing, don’t seem very capable of handling the machine or Claude.

image

Holm says “it was a weird film that was openly laughed at in the States.”

Andy says “If we become stuck in our own time loop of visiting the past the memories can become too overwhelming. Suicide in context of the movie becomes a means to end or break the flow of time and memory.”

The time machine premise seems like a useful tool for Resnais to explore the obsessive cross-cutting of memory that he’d already played with in Muriel and Marienbad.

Resnais: “There are absolutely no flashbacks or anything of the sort.”

image

image

image

image

Watched again June 2008 with a group. Very plain look to the sets, clothes… not a visually stylish movie except in the editing. I like it more the second time around. Would like to watch a higher quality copy next time.

September 2014: wish come true, a restored 35mm print at Filmstreams.

by ·Comments Off on Mr. Freedom (1969, William Klein)

“I’m very happy to announce that we’ve destroyed at least half of the country. I hope now they’ll understand that aggression does not pay.”

That sums up the whole movie. It’s so obvious and loud and obnoxious and garish and that’s probably just what it intends to be. But it makes for an unpleasant viewing experience. I can’t imagine this movie screening in theaters without walkouts by exasperated viewers saying “I GET it already” (but probably saying that in french).

All-American titular superhero is introduced blithely massacring a black family in the middle of their dinner. Then Dr. Freedom (Donald Pleasence) calls to tell him that his French equivalent Captain Formidable has been killed and commies are invading France from neutral Switzerland. It’s up to Mr. Freedom to save the ungrateful French, not for any love of the country but to stop the dreaded domino effect and protect the world from communism.

Doesn’t play like a proper movie at all. Sometimes it feels like an advertisement (America’s priorities are more Capitalist than Democratic), and sometimes like a bunch of people goofing around and pretending to make a movie. The dubbing ain’t great, either.

Some funny touches: the american embassy in France is a wal-mart full of dancing girls. And sometimes the cheapness of the project turns into a lo-fi charm. Superfrenchman is played by a balloon with easily confused henchmen, and the also-inflatable Red China Man breathes frozen fog that settles on the ground.

Freedom of course ends up destroying most of France, his french guide Marie-Madeleine turns out to be a commie traitor, Russian Moujik Man is somewhat of an ally but can’t really be trusted. Freedom, not too fazed by the death of all his compatriots and followers, prevails through violence. Sadly it’s not a dated period piece and what Klein’s saying about American foreign policy applies perfectly well today.

Criterion: “Delightfully crass, Mr. Freedom is a trenchant, rib-tickling takedown of gaudy modern Americana.” It’s funny to think how many Criterion completists will soon own this movie.

Movie plays better in stills. When considering the screen shots I took, it seems almost like a good movie, clever and funny and ramshackle without the loud, boisterous, stagey dialogue to distract. In other words, it’s a much better movie when you’re not actually watching it. And since Klein was renowned in the 50’s as a still photographer and appears in Marker’s still-composed La Jetee, I’ve kept more screenshots than the film might deserve.

The introduction of Marienbad star Delphine Seyrig as Marie-Madeleine, yowza.
image

Dr. Freedom:
image

Captain Formidable is played by classy French icon Yves Montand:
image

“Anti-freedomism is at a new high.” Can’t get enough of that dress. Note Marie-Madeleine’s placement in front of the red portion of the map, foreshadowing the revelation that she is a communist spy. Just kidding.
image

Over a temporarily fallen Freedom, L-R: Moujik Man, Red China Man, Jesus & Mary
image

Freedom celebrates the defeat of Superfrenchman… I don’t remember exactly what went on here:
image

Forcing the maid to taste the poisoned food she brought. Nice shot setup:
image

I love this shot so much. The matching hair, the goofy look on Freedom’s face, the unexplained picture of Hitler hanging on Marie-Madeleine’s wall:
image

Serge Gainsbourg very nearly survives to the end:
image

Freedom! Now available in a convenient spray!
image

by ·Comments Off on White Mane / The Red Balloon (1953/56, Albert Lamorisse)

The Landmark theater of course played these Academy-ratio films in widescreen, ho-hum.

WHITE MANE, b/w, boy who lives on the marshes in southern France with his father and little brother (played by director’s son / star of Red Balloon) loves a wild horse, wants to capture it. Nearby ranchers also want to capture it. After a chase, boy rides the horse into the river and floats away, swept out to sea.

RED BALLOON, bright color, boy finds balloon which magically follows him around the city. Adults conspire to keep him away from his balloon, and other kids want to steal and destroy it. When the kids are successful, balloons from all over the city fly over and lift the kid up over Paris.

Jimmy says both movies are about the perils of acquisition. Both have somewhat the same ending… the kid getting (more or less) what he’d desired, a sense of freedom and imminent danger.

The two won a bunch of awards at Cannes, and Red Balloon got an original screenplay Oscar beating out The Ladykillers and La Strada. Remarkable for a movie with almost no dialogue. The two share excellent camerawork and primitive post-synched sound. I haven’t heard of anything else by photographer Edmond Séchan. Lamorisse made some other lesser-known children’s movies, including the earlier “Bim” and a widescreen Red Balloon sequel “Stowaway in the Sky”. The documentary he was filming over Iran when he died in an accident got an Oscar nomination after its completion. Best of all, he invented the board game RISK in ’57.

by ·Comments Off on Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959, Alain Resnais)

The faces of the leads are not shown until the fifteen minute mark. For the first sixth of the movie there’s only the poetic narration faded with shots of their bodies and hands.

I don’t know what to say when confronted with Resnais or Marker movies, keep throwing out “poetic narration”.

image

Rest of the movie is conventional by comparison with the intro and with 90% of “Last Year at Marienbad”, but then “Marienbad” came afterwards and I’ve watched it a bunch of times, so I would have to say that.

IMDB plot: “While shooting an international movie about peace in Hiroshima, a married French actress (Emmanuelle Riva) has a torrid one night stand with a married Japanese architect (Eiji Okada). They feel a deep passion for each other and she discloses her first love in times of war in the French town of Nevers to him. He falls in love with her and asks her to stay with him in Hiroshima.”

image

The film is such a dream that when I finish watching it I seem to wake up and forget most of the details. This is the second time I’ve seen it and it never quite sticks. Ahh, dvd commentary will help.

Writer Marguerite Duras is a novelist whose book is sitting on my bedside waiting for me to read (update: oooh, it was good). Lead actor Okada was in Naruse’s “Mother”, “Rififi In Tokyo”, “X From Outer Space” and “Lady Snowblood”. He played the lead in “Woman in the Dunes”, the main character’s boss in “The Face of Another” and the man in white in “Stairway to the Distant Past” (released the same year Okada died). Riva (still alive) was in “Kapo” the same year, then starred in “I Will Walk Like a Crazy Horse” and played Binoche’s mother (?) in “Blue”. Shot by super master Sacha Vierny (“Marienbad”, “Muriel”, Bunuel, Ruiz, Greenaway) and Michio Takahashi (“Gamera vs. Barugon”). Editor Henri Colpi won the palme d’or at cannes two years later (tying with Viridiana) with his directorial debut.

image

Below is from the commentary track.

The intro reminds of Pompeii and “evokes the very beginnings of life”.

On the woman’s visit to Hiroshima’s hospitals and landmarks: “it will never be more than a theme-park experience”

Scenes from “Children of Hiroshima” are used precisely for their lack of authenticity, and the images remind of Nazi death camps.

Resnais was commissioned to make a film about the atomic bomb with Marker scripting, but it fell through, leading instead to this film.

Resnais and Varda both love cats (surely not as much as Marker does!)

Duras “would become the high priestess of French literature in the 1960’s and 70’s”

Despite not writing his own screenplays, “Resnais can fairly be described as an auteur because a majority of his feature films and many of his shorts deal with the nature of memory and its relationship to the present. Memories have a vivid present-tense quality in Resnais’s cinema and in Marienbad… they are almost indistinguishable from current incidents.”

Hey wow, he mentions “The Koumiko Mystery”.

The star of “Children of Paradise” had a similar thing happen – an affair with a german officer, then publically shamed with hair cut off after the war.

Resnais is an expert on comic books.

image

image

image

image

by ·Comments Off on Private Fears In Public Places (2006, Alain Resnais)

All those people smiling on the cover of the DVD tricked us into expecting a romantic comedy, not these wintry intertwined tales of sad, lonely Parisians.

Relationships: Thierry and Charlotte are real-estate agents. Thierry lives with his younger sister Gaelle. Gaelle is dating men from the internet and meets Dan. Dan is breaking up with his girlfriend Nicole. Nicole is looking for a new apartment with the help of Thierry. Dan hangs out a a hotel bar tended by Lionel. And Lionel’s elderly father (offscreen Arthur) is looked after part-time by Charlotte.

Difficulties: Charlotte, very religious, secretly likes to tape herself dancing in naughty lingerie. Thierry sees one of the tapes and becomes attracted to Charlotte. Gaelle catches her brother watching the tape and gets angry. Nicole is frustrated with Thierry and can’t find an apartment. Charlotte and Lionel don’t know what to do with Lionel’s horrible father. Aaaand Gaelle sees Dan talking with Nicole and runs off.

Written by the same playwright who did Smoking/No Smoking, Private Fears etc was the original title and Resnais changed the film’s title to Coeurs. Easy enough to see why. He shoots one careful scene at a time (no cross-cutting), softly falling snow behind every window and over every scene transition, every once in a while a sudden zoom (signifying what?). Soft and incomplete boundaries between people, beginning with a bedroom split in half by a wall (so the two “rooms” share a window), then Lionel’s bar, his father in the other room with the door always open, a curtain of beads, a glass wall between the real-estate agents’ desks. Gaelle’s failure to connect with Dan helps her reconcile with her brother. Charlotte’s aching hidden desire to express herself frustrates Thierry but helps free Lionel. The actors are all super, and their characters are affecting, building up to a snowing-indoors finale.

Music by Mark Snow (X-Files!) and shot by Assayas fave Eric Gautier, who also did Gabrielle and Into the Wild.

Nicole – Laura Morante of The Son’s Room
image

Dan (left) – Lambert Wilson, the english guy from Not On The Lips
image

Charlotte – Sabine Azéma, star of Melo, Not On The Lips, Same Old Song and Smoking
image

Gaëlle – Isabelle Carré of various films I’ve never heard of
image

Lionel – Pierre Arditi of Melo, Smoking, Same Old Song
image

Thierry – André Dussollier, Audrey’s lawyer? uncle? in A Very Long Engagement and in Same Old Song, Melo and Rohmer’s Perceval le Gallois
image

Arthur (offscreen) – Claude Rich of Stavisky

Dave Kehr:
“At first, Resnais’s mise-en-scene seems stiff and broadly theatrical, emphasizing the divisions within the decor and between the characters; then, the camera becomes more mobile, rising above walls and partitions, as the characters seem to break out of their established orbits and begin colliding with each other. The playing becomes more naturalistic, the lighting more gentle, and the geometry of the compositions less harsh as seemingly appropriate couples begin to form.” … “At 84, the eternally elegant, emotionally reserved Resnais seems to be allowing the mask to slip a bit: this is the quietly devastating testament of a deeply lonely man.”

Keith Ulrich in Slant:
“There’s more than a whiff of contempt in the way Ayckbourn conceives his seven upper-class characters, all of whom circle in and out of each others’ lives with contrived dramaturgical abandon, but Resnais’s inquiry into their tragicomic malaise is genuine, at best enraptured.”

Jonathan Rosenbaum:
“It’s an archetypal and at points almost insufferably clever piece of boulevard theater — the sort of thing Resnais has been producing periodically ever since he adapted the French play Melo in 1986 and began mining his childhood playgoing experiences. At the same time, it’s a lyrical lament that doubles as a comprehensive retrospective of his career. The characters, invested with an almost tragic tenderness, are by and large played by actors Resnais has been using for two decades. When Dan and Gaëlle trade confidences in the hotel bar, we could almost be back in Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), just as a camera movement exploring part of a flat summons up Last Year at Marienbad (1961) and a montage of domestic objects returns us to Muriel (1963). All three of these films, to some degree, are about private fears in public places, a theme that’s come up again and again in his work.”

and
“The film’s constant snowfall, not at all indicative of typical Paris weather, is a personal invention with no counterpart in the play. (Another is the 19th-century portraits and landscape paintings, by Turner and others, that crop up in some of the flats, pointing toward the characters’ unacknowledged Victorianism.) This magical heavy snow, viewed through windows and used in transitions bridging the film’s 54 short scenes, is as laden with metaphorical nuance as the snow in Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons. It’s so central to the overall mood and visual texture that when we suddenly see it falling inside a kitchen during a climactic scene, shortly before the camera starts to encircle two characters, the moment’s emotional logic is perfectly pitched. Fundamentally, Resnais has always been an expressionist, using his settings and compositions to evoke the inner states of his characters. Here, tying expressionism to social critique, he becomes an improbable but unmistakable blood brother of Carl Dreyer, turning material written by others into a highly personal testament that burns its way into our souls.”