by ·3 Comments

“Blue… blue is very important.”

I’ve mostly been giving Chabrol a pass in favor of other French filmmakers who seem more interesting, but I checked this out as part of Shadowplay’s Film Club. It has already received the proper attention there, so I’ll just skip through…

image

Wild intro and last 15 minutes, not much heated activity in between. Hélène Régnier (Stéphane Audran, star of Babette’s Feast, lead girl’s mom in Thieves After Dark, also Coup de torchon, Discreet Charm, Dead Pigeon and numerous other Chabrol pictures) is our lead, and she’s pretty great. Her drug-addict husband Charles (Jean-Claude Drouot, playing the opposite of his overjoyed husband in La Bonheur) frankensteins out of his room one morning, attacks her, then clubs his son’s head into the corner of a dresser. She spends the rest of the movie dealing with the repercussions and gathering her wits. The kid is practically forgotten – total plot device.

image

Everyone turns out to be pretty well decent except for the husband’s rich dad (Michel Bouquet of The Bride Wore Black) who wants to use this incident to kick lowly Helene out of the family, and Paul, the two-faced creep he hires (Jean-Pierre Cassel, above, fresh from Army of Shadows and previously star of Renoir’s Elusive Corporal).

image

Helene stays at a boarding house near the hospital populated by nice, handsome Dr. Blanchard (Angelo Infanti, who experienced death-by-montage in The Godfather), a crazily-bearded hammy actor, three card-playing old women (“the Fates,” screams the DVD commentary), landlady Mrs. Pinelli, her drunk husband and their movie-fakey impaired daughter.

image

Intrigue: Paul, in collaboration with his always-nude sex-fiend girlfriend Sonia (Catherine Rouvel: Black and White in Color, Va Savoir), gets the loony idea to kidnap the landlady’s daughter, show her satanic sex films and pin it on Helene. But she’s not as dumb as Paul thought, and knows the difference between our Helene and Sonia in a wig. Paul then drugs Helene to keep his plan from crumbling – meanwhile Drouot is on the rampage, having killed his poor, sympathetic mother, runs into Paul who panics and stabs D. to death while a tripping Helene and the three card-playing women space out in the park watching balloons.

image

Funny to me: Marguerite Cassan plays the mother of Jean-Claude Drouot. She was in Renoir’s Picnic on the Grass which inspired Le Bonheur, which starred Drouot.

Movie is more musically interesting than visually. The commentary agrees: “It’s music that announces itself as music – it’s not to be forgotten, it’s to be paid attention to… an element of the filmmaking.”

image

English title was The Break-Up.

More hits from the commentary:
“Things in Chabrol’s universe do not happen for a reason.”
“The tension… is between civilization… and the beast within.”
“I’d say if the film has a flaw, she is a saint.”

image

“This is almost a caricature of a retarded girl. This has no basis in naturalism whatsoever. The existence inside this house is an existence on a different plane in a different style. This is a horror movie, it’s just a very strange, muted…” Comment makes me think of Celine & Julie Go Boating, but the movie doesn’t. The other common comparison is Sunrise because of a train ride scene. I think people are stretching.

image

by ·Comments Off on Lola (1961, Jacques Demy)

“We’re alone and we stay alone. But what counts is to want something… no matter what the cost. There’s a bit of happiness in simply wanting happiness.”

Oops, we were supposed to end Agnes Varda Month with Jacquot de Nantes but I couldn’t get the subtitles to work, so we watched Jacquot’s own Nantes-set first feature. Not a musical like we’d hoped, but a gorgeous widescreen black and white, slightly melancholic drama with a lovely Young Girls of Rochefort-reminiscent ending.

Our listless hero is Roland (Marc Michel of Le Trou), who just wants to get out of town until he meets his crush from a decade ago, dancer Lola (Anouk Aimée). He sticks around to see if anything will happen between them, but she’s not interested, waiting for her long-lost love (and father of her child), messing around with an American soldier (New Jersey native Alan Scott who speaks hilariously horrid French) in the meantime.

Separately, Roland and the soldier also meet a young teen girl named Cécile, and Roland meets her lovesick mother (Elina Labourdette of Bresson’s Les dames du Bois de Boulogne) who tries in vain to distract him from Lola. Roland kills time at his favorite cafe with a woman in her 60’s (one of the card players in La Rupture) who talks about her son who has been away for too long. Everyone turns out to be connected – she’s the mother of Lola’s missing boyfriend who returns home to them in the final scene – giving Nantes a small-town feel, but it’s made small through the characters, not by the crane shots which make Rochefort look like a stage set.

Demy’s cinema is interconnected: Lola returned in Model Shop and Roland is the guy who marries Catherine Deneuve in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

NY Times: “Cécile, it’s worth mentioning, is Lola’s real name. All these people are to some degree reflections of Lola or her vanished lover, and part of the pleasure of the movie lies in watching Demy choreograph this intricate play of mirror images as the characters flicker past one another – sometimes recognizing themselves, fleetingly, but more often not.”

R. Bergan: “Its circular construction, frothiness, and long tracking shots are reminiscent of Max Ophüls, the film’s dedicatee.”

Summer 2015: Watched again from the new blu-ray, replaced screenshots.

by ·Comments Off on Rage (2009, Sally Potter)

Loyally following the director’s intent, I watched this on an iPod. Seven episodes, supposedly released over seven days, but I started on day eight and watched at my own pace. Supposedly a fat young boy “blogger” is backstage at a fashion show watching events unfold over seven days, editing together segments from single-take interviews with participants backstage. Some of the performances are very fun to watch – especially Jude Law as a diva cross-dressing model who keeps dropping his fake accent. I’m happy to play along, expecting, if not a new favorite film along the lines of Yes and Orlando, at least a smart, good time. In the first place it seems a bad sign that she’s written a takedown of the fashion industry. I’ve seen enough Project Runway to know there’s no need.

J. Kipp:

The movie is supposedly being made on an intern’s camera phone and these actors embody characters eager to share their experiences about the bitter, hypocritical world of fashion. Does that sound remotely interesting to you? Not at all, I’ll bet, because you’re already way ahead of the movie—we know inherently that the fashion world is superficial, and having a gallery of famous personalities line up and preach to the art house converted is nobody’s idea of a good time.

Sorry, Kipp, but halfway through I realized the movie isn’t a fashion attack at all. It’s something worse – a woman my mom’s age coming to terms with the power of the internet. The fun performances start getting watered down by hysterical ones. Increasingly ludicrous plot developments undermine the movie’s believability, and it devolves into the kind of camp I’d feared it would be when I first heard the premise.

Potter:

Funnily enough, I never thought of it as a film about the fashion industry. I thought of it as a film about people who happen to be in that setting. But as a filmmaker, what’s interesting about it is that it’s a world dedicated to appearances. But what the story’s about is what lies behind appearances, the tension between what you see and the reality underneath. It’s not really about fashion so much as about industry in crisis and individuals becoming unmasked … and finally, the gradual dawning realization that the person in the room with power is the youngest one, because he understands this new age of information on the Internet.

So our blogger Michelangelo (never seen or heard) watches as fabulous designer Merlin (Simon Abkarian: “He” in Yes) launches his new fashion line with models Jude Law, Lily Cole (The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus), and at least two others unseen. Also at the company are serious Bob Balaban (Christopher Guest regular, the film critic in Lady in the Water), “invisible” hispanic worker Adriana Barraza (the medium in Drag Me To Hell), and Dianne Wiest (recently of Synecdoche New York but I remember her best from Edward Scissorhands) as a manager who yearns for the old times when everyone knew everyone and all manufacturing wasn’t done in China.

Highlights of the movie are the interviews with jaded critic Judi Dench, wiry war photographer Steve Buscemi, fashion mogul Eddie Izzard, and his nervous caffeine-addicted bodyguard John Leguizamo. Lily Cole and pizza delivery-man-turned-fashion runway motorcyclist Riz Ahmed (of Dead Set) have the only semi-interesting character developments (Cole flees the scene and stays at Michelangelo’s house – a sweet ending, and the only non-bluescreen shot)

Not faring too well: Swedish Ben Affleck-lookalike Jakob Cedergren and Last King of Scotland vet David Oyelowo as an ineffectual Shakespeare-quoting cop, both of whom act angry at Michelangelo towards the end yelling at him to stop filming, while they stand in front of his bluescreen and look into the camera.

A model dies in the runway, her long scarf caught in Riz’s motorcycle wheel and the company decides to hold another show two days later, in which another model is shot to death. By that time the movie’s plot has already become way suspect, and the themes of fame and success, image and the power of the internet have reared their ugly heads. Apparently guns were handed to all the models as part of the show, and the audience was overrun with kids attracted by Michelangelo’s blog videos and I’m not sure what happened then, but people start yelling into his camera that Mich is the one with all the power here because he controls their images’ distribution over the rabble-rousing internet. Adriana cries that she is no longer invisible, D. Wiest joins the protesters against her own company, and nobody thinks to slap Mich upside the head, take away his camera and remove him from the premises. Maybe it’s more of an interesting concept and performance piece than a finished product, but it got my strict attention and I’m still very interested in Potter and whatever’s on her mind, so I went quote-hunting.

NY Press:

Potter defies the digital era’s fascination with new technology by emphasizing its limitations. … Her video technique doesn’t substitute for cinematic variety or photochemical richness. Instead, strict adherence to the basic things that digital media record (a face, place, moment) helps to appreciate the difference between video and film. Eschewing the lazy carelessness of so many misguided digital enthusiasts, Potter’s rigor becomes a refreshing reminder of true cinematic values.

J. Romney:

The novelty turn is Jude Law cross-dressing as supermodel Minx, sporting a series of preposterous wigs and an intermittent Russian accent (is Minx from Minsk?). All flirty grandeur (“Are you shy because I am celebrity, yes?”), it’s Law’s most theatrical screen performance yet, but it’s perfect here, both a larky send-up of his own beauty and a comment on the catwalk model as imaginary woman. But the people most redolent of the flesh-and-blood humanity that fashion operates to obscure are Steve Buscemi and British model Lily Cole. … As a purely plastic creation, an unusually sensuous essay in cinema povera, Rage is oddly compelling, a genuine one-off.

Slant:

The sketch-like focus on dialogue and characterization, as opposed to plot or mise-en-scene, is clearly the most logical direction for the burgeoning online/mobile entertainment movement, where grandiose visual concepts are dwarfed into 3.5 horizontal inches and uninspired set pieces are scrubbed ahead with the flick of a pinky. The advantage of Rage is its stylistic redundancy and still-life portraiture feel; one could pause the film at any time to check their email and return without having severed the narrative flow. The disadvantage is that the movie’s serenely glabrous surface lacks dynamism: Aside from the colored backgrounds that match each respective character’s eyes, garments, and/or hair, there are no visual indicators of plot development or tension, which lends itself to 98 minutes of occasionally soporific sameness. … While the stark visual formalism of the experiment is ideal for shrunken PDA and laptop screens, the monochromatic backgrounds and crystalline digital sheen seem borrowed from online commercials. Mute the sound, and you’ve got an adequately produced Apple ad.

M. Atkinson:

Rage has made itself noteworthy as the latest effort of a name filmmaker to address … the fact that cinema, as it’s traditionally made and consumed, is being starved by digital culture. Everyone knows the drill – movies, TV, music, newspapers, publishing, etc. are all dying pig-stuck deaths because of the internet, although no one dares to say that the internet is, in fact, the problem, and increases its dominance at a very real and looming set of costs to us all. … The film’s proud artifice rubs the mock-doc set-up the wrong way if you’re keeping score, except that “fashion” is all about the dishonesty of surfaces, and Potter’s film seems to be less about its subject and story than about how to make movies with as little as possible (another Warhol principle) and conform them to the new digital world. (In an interview in the latest Sight & Sound, she calls it “survivalist filmmaking, a no-waste aesthetic.”)

Potter again:

I think there is a deeper feel of rage, a kind of quiet rage on a mass scale and not knowing where to focus this rage which is the negative end of globalization. The positive end is the internet in my view, but the negative end which is about greater and greater ownership by anonymous corporate entities and less and less about freedom for the individual.

About women filmmakers:

It is making some headway because when I first started there were no women in the context where I was working. And that was a very lonely place, and I’ve watched that shift gradually. People used to come up to me in all parts of the world and said oh I loved The Piano and I said no that was Jane (Campion). And she and I would meet up now and then at festivals and she would say that people keep telling me they love Orlando and I’d say yes, sorry. So it was as if there were two of us in a sort of vaguely conspicuous, visible place in the pantheon of directors and that’s changed surely.

by ·Comments Off on Agnès Varda shorts

Plaisir d’amour en Iran (1976)
An expanded version of Pauline and Darius’s trip to Iran in L’Une chante, l’autre pas. Pauline and a narrator comment on the sensuality of Persian architecture. I would’ve liked it if the feature had been edited more rhythmically like this short (or if the picture quality had been as good).
image

image

Du Coté de la Côte (1958)
Fun, half-hour exploration of tourism along the coast, more gentle than Vigo’s À propos de Nice and simpler than a Marker travelogue.

image

“These parks, overpopulated with merry people attracted by the Latin shore, foreshadow the dead people seeking eternal rest there. In both cases, space is limited because of its good quality. It is a well-rated coast.”

image

image

Les Fiances du pont Mac Donald (1961)
The short within Cleo from 5 to 7 is apparently considered its own little film. “I wanted to provide a little relief for Cleo. … So I thought at the beginning of the third part of the film, where films often have a lull, a weakness, a slow-down … I would introduce something uplifting. My other goal was to show Jean-Luc Godard’s eyes. At the time, he wore very dark glasses. We were friends, and he agreed to this little story about glasses in which he must take them off and reveal his big, beautiful eyes, like Buster Keaton’s.”
image

Ulysse (1982)
This was fantastic. Varda finds an old photo of hers, taken in 1954, and investigates. What was she thinking about at the time? What were the models in the photo thinking? She looks them up and asks. Agnes: “This almost painful investigation taught me so much about what an image says, what it says to each of us, and what it cannot say. It merely represents.”
image

AV: “How does she see her own goat image? Without making animals talk, like in American cartoons, or defining memory as a rumination of mental images, may I suggest that there is an animal ‘eatingmagination,’ a self-predatory imagination?”
image

Salut les cubains (1963)
Months after Cleo from 5 to 7 opened, Varda went to Cuba to photograph the country’s inhabitants for an exhibit which opened in Havana (introduced by Raul Castro!) before it moved to Paris. She also made this film out of the photos, narrated by Michel Piccoli. Subjects include the Castros, famous national artists, workers, dancers, posters and drawings and artworks. She creates action sequences, animating the photos, best of all with this guy dancing for the camera.
image

Mentions Marker’s Cuba Si, which came out a couple years before. In her introduction, Varda says twice that “we must place it in the context of 1962,” since the Cuban dream society didn’t turn out the way the French leftists hoped it would. Interesting that she made such a happy, idealist film as this, then her next feature would be the happiness-breakdown of Le Bonheur.
image

These last two were reissued in the 2004 collection Cinevardaphoto with a third, current short about a teddy bear collector, but somehow I didn’t have subtitles for that one. If Cleo from 5 to 7 and L’Une chante, l’autre pas revealed Varda’s kinship with the filmmaking of husband Jacques Demy, these shorts represent a definite (and oft-mentioned) kinship with Chris Marker, and either of them could stand alongside his best documentaries. The commentaries are more personal, less consciously witty. The images are wonderful, and the sense of investigation, of images and memory, the psychology of the films puts them on the Marienbad and La Jetee side of the new wave fence… my favorite side.
image

Elsa la rose (1965)
A portrait of Elsa in the words of her husband Aragon, who has spent their entire relationship writing and publishing poems about her. Varda calls them a “famous couple and fervent communists.” Elsa is filmed as Aragon imagines and remembers her, says she repeated the exercise with her own husband for Jacquot de Nantes. In voiceover, Piccoli reads the poems as fast as he can, a hilarious idea. First movie Lubtchansky and Kurant shot for Varda.
image

Elsa: “The readers of these poems expect me to be 20 years old forever. As I cannot satisfy this need for beauty and youth that the readers have, I feel guilty and it makes me unhappy. That’s what’s terrible, they’re not just for me.”

Réponse de femmes (1975)

“Women must be reinvented.”
image

Agnes has a few minutes to state the case of all women, socially and politically. Lots of nudity, which she points out is not exploitative unless used to sell a product or titillate viewers.

Coming attractions (when I’ve got subtitles): Black Panthers (1968)
image

by ·Comments Off on Guimba The Tyrant (1995, Cheick Oumar Sissoko)

Both this and Genesis required all my concentration to figure out who was who and what was happening.

A girl and her dad:
image

Magic man Mambi has a daughter Jangine, and he promises her in marriage to the son of powerful leader Guimba. Twenty years later she is beautiful and Guimba’s son is a perverted dwarf, so she wants to marry a hot dude instead. So Guimba, a scary, easily-angered man who hides from sunlight, drives her father and all hot dudes from the village and demands she marry the son as planned.

image

But the son doesn’t want to marry Jangine – he prefers his women more full-figured. This is fine with Guimba – he’ll let the son marry his large mistress while Guimba takes the girl for himself. The father sends some magic boogedy into town, Guimba kills his son then exposes himself to capture and ridicule by the townsfolk, and presumably kills himself.

image

Jangine would star in Moolaade (Katy recognized her; I didn’t). The griot appeared in Bamako, and the daughter’s father has been in everything: Finye, Yeelen and Genesis among them. We liked it alright – Katy says it was more confusing than Genesis, because at least she’d read the book of Genesis and seen Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat but with Guimba we had no frame of reference.

image

R. Ames in his African Filmmaking book:

Sissoko turned away from the basically realistic approach of his first two features with Guimba The Tyrant. Already, in Finzan, Sissoko had drawn on the popular Malian koteba theatrical tradition in the portrayal of Bala, the village idiot. Now in Guimba he moved further in the use of African oral traditions to shape the whole film – creating a narrative full of abrupt shifts in time and place and unexpected digressions – the shift in style typified by the appearance of a griot at the beginning and end of the film, introducing the tale and commenting on its aftermath. The inset story, which focuses squarely on tyrnny and the need to oppose it, has obvious contemporary relevance, as many commentators have noticed, to the overthrow of the Malian dictator Moussa Toure in 1991. But the film is shaped as a fable mixing elements of farce and the supernatural and with constant shifts in mood and direction. It chronicles the rule of Guimba and his dwarf son Jangine, putting emphasis on their brutality, on the constant praise-singing of their eloquent but two-faced griot, and also on their ludicrous sexual desires: Jangine rejects the beautiful Kani, to whom he was betrothed as a child, in favor of her more than amply proportioned mother, Meya. The exile of Meya’s upright husband by Guimba, who covets Kani for himself, trigers the ruler’s eventual downfall, chronicled in an often confusing sequence of confrontations played out in splendidly evocative costumes within the visually impressive setting of Djenne, one of Mali’s ancient Saharan trading centres. As Sissoko has rightly said, Guimba “opens the door to audiences for understanding our history through our cinema. Obviously, some aspects will seem odd or not readily comprehensible, but the door to dreaming and discovery is open to those who wish to enter it.”

image

by ·Comments Off on Junkopia (1981, Chris Marker)

Static (mostly) shots of outdoor junk sculptures near San Francisco, 5 minutes long. Shot with a guy who IMDB knows nothing about, and a guy who worked on Wenders’ Hammett as well as Ice Cube actioner xXx 2.

image

This was titled “Shorts watched September 2009 (on land),” as opposed to “on the plane“, but I only ended up watching the one.

Dude who named his domain after the film says: “The film was shot in Emeryville, near the east section of the Bay Bridge, but unless I’m mistaken the co-ordinates in Marker’s intertitles appear to be for somewhere in Redwood City.”

image

by ·Comments Off on Bizarro Saturday Morning

Another great set of Clay’s 16mm cartoons, and it’s been too long since the last one.

Mysterious Mose (1930, Dave Fleischer) is a proto-Betty Boop (she looks like a dog; a sexy dog) cartoon in which she is haunted by a sorta ghost casanova. The Great Piggy Bank Robbery (1946, Robert Clampett) is a weirdly violent Daffy Duck gangster parody. Since his “Duck Twacy” fantasy is spurred by a knock on the head while reading comic books, it’d be a good short to play before Artists & Models. It’s Tough to Be a Bird (1969, Ward Kimball) is a Disney doc about birds and watchers with musical cartoon segments. And We Have Met the Enemy, and He Is Us (1973, Walt Kelly) is an unfinished Pogo cartoon with a harsh environmental message. I think all the voices were done by one guy.

Bunch of TV stuff. Spiderman fights a bank robber in a mole-man costume. There’s a Casper cartoon (in which Casper does not appear) about a watch repairman who gets attacked by an eagle at the end. Ralph Bakshi contributes an episode of Captain America. A horrible show called Hoppity Hooper (set in Wisconsin) with a Rocky-and-Bullwinkle-repetitive bit about “the traffic zone” was the low point. The high point was the hilarious 60’s-70’s commercials for Mr. Wizard, Hot Wheels, Cheerios and the like. Real fun program… too bad the next one is scheduled for the same night Art Brut is playing.

image

by ·Comments Off on Go West (1925, Buster Keaton & Eddie Cline)

Not full of great gags. Seems like a feature to show off Keaton’s comic improv genius – but where’s that genius? Give Keaton a lasso and… the rope gets tangled and his hat falls off. Give him a basket of eggs and… he puts the eggs down then mistakenly steps in them. Not groundbreaking stuff here.

image

Mercifully short feature about Keaton taking Horace Greeley’s advice, moving west and falling for a cow. He hops trains, learns how to shoot, fails to learn how to milk a cow or do anything useful. When his host rancher’s herd is derailed by a rival, Buster drives the cattle through the city to the yards, saves the day, and gets to keep his own favorite cow as a reward (not the rancher’s cute daughter – the cow! ha!).

image

The city scene is the big showpiece. Has its moments (Keaton in a costume shop dressing up as the devil to get the bulls to chase him), but most of the humor derives from how unreasonably afraid of cows the townsfolk are. My favorite visual bit was early on, the movie demonstrating the passage of time by the length of his package of food as he rides the trains. After that I’m afraid it wasn’t entertaining enough to keep me awake late at night.

image

IMDB says a post-scandal Fatty Arbuckle had a cameo in the city. Guy who played the ranch foreman drowned filming one of his next movies.

image

by ·2 Comments

I think these might be time-lapse shots of the tide going out, but the picture quality is too poor to be sure. This is gonna be a rough one…

image

Opens with a closeup of Catherine Deneuve smiling, a good sign, but soon she and husband Michel Piccoli are in a car crash. Afterwards, she can’t speak anymore and he has a harry potter scar on his forehead. Some eerie, powerful string music and many close-ups of crabs later, we’re at a seaside town where the couple have come to recuperate. Apparently they don’t talk with the locals much because there’s plenty of gossip going around.

Sheet salesmen:
image

Doesn’t take long for things to get weird. Small hands drop buttons into pockets. Piccoli (whose character name is also Piccoli) gets scammed by traveling sheet salesmen. Fishermen provide La Pointe-courte flashbacks for the viewer. Piccoli beats a chef with a dead cat. But it’s not a comedy! Something dark and eerie is definitely going on.

Piccoli talks with a horse. The horse talks back.

Piccoli is a writer working on a story, and when we see him writing the dialogue being spoken by a woman across town, I’m never sure afterwards what is really happening and what’s part of his meta-movie.

horse: “What is your story about?”
MP: “It’s about a man who knows how to control people by remote control. … but it wouldn’t last very long, a minute at most. This guy would be a bad person, with an evil mind. He wouldn’t be human or animal anymore.”

Soon Michel meets a bad man with an evil mind, Mr. Ducasse, who lives in a tower. He’s hired kids to drop magic discs into townspeople’s pockets which enable their wills to be controlled by his super computer. Ducasse calls the townfolk his “creatures”, gets Piccoli to play a game of Battle Chess with him over the fate of the town and of MP’s wife. MP is losing, but decides he doesn’t have to take Ducasse’s crazy misanthropic shit anymore, destroys the computer and tosses Ducasse from the tower. I’ll let NY Times give away the ending below.

image

Other notes I took while watching:

Catherine writes him messages, which I can’t read from the poor picture quality, and even if I could read them, they’d be in French. I have nice DVDs of Varda and Demy movies here, but I choose to watch a junk bootleg instead. Odd priorities.

The dead cat came with a piece of iron that makes the lights go out and causes people to act strange.

He just told a rabbit that his wife is pregnant.

Thief Max burns money, puts on diving suit, gets shot by partner.

You can’t tell much about the camerawork from my lo-res letterboxed videotape, but it’s one of the first films shot by William Lubtchansky (a decade before he began his 30+ year relationship with Jacques Rivette) along with two others. Interesting that all of her films until 1977 had multiple credited cinematographers.

Village Voice calls it “really botched” in their roundup for this year’s retrospective… “If it’s about anything, it’s about the creative process in action and stars that fine actor Michel Piccoli as a novelist who bases the characters in his story on friends and acquaintances.”

Ebert: “a complex and nearly hypnotic study of the way fact is made into fiction. It seems to operate on many levels, but in fact it operates on only one, illustrating how fantasy, reality and style are simultaneously kept suspended in the mind of a creative writer.”

NY Times: “Then love conquers all. The survivors of the seven subplots make happy arrangements — for example, the statuesque hotel keeper (Eva Dahlbeck) gives up mistressing for the town doctor and begins with an underage busboy. The writer almost completes his novel. The wife gets her voice back, pronounces her husband’s name (“Edgar”), and has her baby — a bawling creature who at the end fills up the screen precisely to balance (and somewhat to resemble) a crab creature that fills it at the beginning.”

image

image

The movie’s studied anthropology and attack on human behavior reminds me of Resnais’ Mon oncle d’Amerique. And also of Bjork’s “Human Behavior.” There’s definitely, definitely… definitely no logic.

2025: Rewatched this in modern HD quality and replaced half the screenshots.

I am not a number – I am a free man: