Monday, December 31, 2018
1. Roma
Roma
Director: Alfonso Cuarón
Cast: Yalitza Aparicio, Marina de
Tavira, Diego Cortina Autrey, Carlos Peralta
I loved this film!! It became for
me a close to portrayal of my own family domestic structure, although I didn’t
grow up in the Colonia Roma where the film takes place. Alfonso Cuarón's intensely
personal, dreamy black-and-white ode to his childhood in 1970's Mexico. It is a
profound act of empathy for his childhood housekeeper/nanny (as played by first
time actor Yalitza Aparicio), taking the story of one bourgeoisie family and
juxtaposing it with the revolutionary changes in the city at the time. The city
sequences are absolutely perfect, every detail is considered. The movie is
filled with comically inept or absent men, delicately choreographed long takes,
the intricacies of cleaning up dog poop, unforgettable set pieces (the New
Year's Eve party, the Corpus Christi Massacre), and the kind of lived-in
details that could only be drawn from memory. Some sequences like the one Cleo
is looking for her boyfriend reminded me of Fellini’s 8 ½. The movie, which
spans a tumultuous year in the family's life, sneaks up on you with a series of
moments, until the emotional weight of the entire thing crashes down on you
like the waves at Tuxpan in the climactic ocean scene.
The film is a technical craftsman
of the highest order, the Children of Men and Gravity director has an aesthetic
that aims to overwhelm -- with the amount of extras, the sense of despair, and
the constant whir of exhilaration. Cuarón's artful pans aren't just layered for
the sake of complexity: he's often placing different emotions, historical
concepts, and class distinctions in conversation with each other. What are
these different components in the painstakingly composed shots actually saying
to each other? The movie is filled with compositions like that, tinged with careful
ambiguity and unresolved tensions. I think is what I will call a greatly modest masterpiece.
2. First Reformed
First Reformed
Director: Paul Schrader
Cast: Ethan Hawke, Amanda
Seyfried, Cedric Kyles, Victoria Hill
I have to confess I have been a
huge Ethan Hawke fan so I felt I was compelled to like it, the film really
stands on its own. Ethan Hawke plays an angry and bitter minister in a small
and historic upstate New York church, who directs much of his bitterness at
political leaders and much of it at himself.
This is Paul Schrader’s drama
about an alcoholic ex-military chaplain going through a profound existential
crisis. Ethan Hawke stars as Reverend Ernst Toller of the First Reformed Church
in New York in this thoughtful film, which tells the story of a church with a
dwindling congregation, striving to adapt to a new age. When pregnant
parishioner, played by Amanda Seyfried, asks Reverend Toller to counsel her
husband, a tormented radical environmentalist who doesn’t want to bring a child
into a world which climate change is poised to destroy, Toller is plunged into
dealing with his own tormented past, until he finds redemption in an act of
exceptional violence.
It’s been a long time since we
saw another great Paul Schrader’ smovie, and with First Reformed, the
writer-director provides a magnificent companion piece to that earlier triumph.
Also indebted to Robert Bresson, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Ingmar Bergman,
Schrader’s religious drama) fixates on Reverend Toller ongoing crisis-of-faith
is accelerated by an encounter with an environmental activist beset by
hopelessness and anger. Toller’s ensuing relationship with that man’s wife as
well as the leader of a local mega-church forms the basis of Schrader’s
rigorously ascetic and occasionally expressionistic film, which is guided by
Toller’s journal-entry narration about his fears and doubts. Formally exquisite
and led by a tremendous performance from Hawke who can’t quell the darkness
within, it’s a spiritual inquiry made harrowing by both its mounting misery and
its climactic ambiguity. The ending, which almost veers into magical realism,
is a leap of faith for the audience and characters, adding up to nothing less
than the most moving shot of 2018. This is a true masterpiece I recommend
everyone check out.
3. Annihilation
Annihilation
Director: Alex Garland (Ex
Machina)
Cast: Natalie Portman, Jennifer
Jason Leigh, Gina Rodriguez, Tessa Thompson
This film is an unapologetically radical adaptation of Jeff VanderMeer's hit book. Both visually and intellectually, it was nothing less than a psychedelic horror movie about aliens, communication, and people's capacity for self-destruction. It was also an environmental allegory in a way few films dared to approach, an unsettling and hallucinatory tale of destruction and transformation, division and replication—dynamics that Garland posits as the fundamental building blocks of every aspect of existence, and which fully come to the fore during a climax of such surreal birth-death insanity that it has to be seen to be believed. The film combines elements of numerous predecessors (Apocalypse Now, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Thing) to create something wholly and frighteningly unique, it dares to dream in a language we can't quite comprehend.
It is also
an environmental allegory in a way few films dared to approach, an unsettling
and hallucinatory tale of destruction and transformation, division and
replication—dynamics that Garland posits as the fundamental building blocks of
every aspect of existence, and which fully come to the fore during a climax of
such surreal birth-death insanity that it has to be seen to be believed.
4. Black Panther
Black Panther
Cast: Chadwick Boseman, Michael
B. Jordan, Lupita Nyong'o, Danai Gurira
Director: Ryan Coogler
The film is an amazing mythical,
cool superhero drama that confronts modern political agonies in complex and
resonant ways. Marvel's first black superhero finally gets his dues, leaping
from the page to his first solo movie. After debuting in Captain America: Civil
War, Chadwick Boseman's T'Challa gets the origin treatment in director Ryan
Coogler's standalone effort. With the Black Panther not only being a superhero
but also king of an entire country, stands to bring something new to the tone of
the Marvel Cinematic Universe, wrapping it all in fantastic afro-futuristic
visuals.
Coogler's skillful balancing of a
high-tech spy gadgetry, ceremonial palace intrigue, fantasy action mayhem, and
subversive political critique is unparalleled in the larger Marvel Cinematic
Universe that Black Panther springs from. In the same way Creed, his propulsive
and knowing reboot of the Rocky franchise, paid tribute to and upended boxing
iconography. Coogler's take on superhero-dom is both pleasing and probing.
Basically, he's got Soundcloud jokes, rhino battles, and takes on imperialism.
The larger ideological conflict between the new king T'Challa (Boseman) and the
American revolutionary Killmonger (Jordan) has been seen before in the pages of
history books and comics, but it's never been given this type of eye-popping,
brain-scrambling, heart-pounding blockbuster treatment.
5. BlacKkKlansman
BlacKkKlansman
Director: Spike Lee
Cast: John David Washington, Adam
Driver, Laura Harrier, Topher Grace
Ron Stallworth was the first
black police officer in the Colorado Springs Police Department and in the late
1970s he went undercover to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan. The story is
relatively straightforward on the surface, the cop skillfully played by
Washington, infiltrates the local chapter of the Klu Klux Klan by phone and
attempts to gather intelligence info on the organization. The officer teams up
with white officer Flip Zimmerman, who was a stand-in when a white version of
Stallworth was needed. The infiltration was a success with the duo being
invited to lead the Klan's local chapter. The film first debuted at Cannes where
it competed for the Palme d’Or and eventually won the Grand Prix.
This drama is among Lee’s most
politically passionate films. No movie better connected today's shameful social
and political realities with America's history better than Spike Lee's latest
movie. The fact he was able to do so using the prism of the (mostly real) story
of a black police officer who infiltrated the KKK is incredible. The fact it
was often righteously funny—even when it was interrogating race, religion, and
deep-seated hatred was even more remarkable. Often, the film plays like the
pilot episode of a TV show given an essayistic overhaul. In addition to drawing
connections to cinematic history, from Gone with the Wind and Birth of a Nation
to Super Fly and Cleopatra Jones, he makes more than a handful of knowing nods
to the political present, having characters mimic the catchphrases of President
Donald Trump and ending the film with actual footage from last year's Unite the
Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Lee's message is proudly, defiantly
blunt; his stylistic approach is multi-layered and tonally ambitious.
6.The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
Director: Joel and Ethan Coen
Cast: Tim Blake Nelson, James
Franco, Liam Neeson, Zoe Kazan
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
lavishes the classical genre with love while nonetheless dissecting it with a
sharp analytical eye. Laced with a fatalism that’s emblematic of their finest
work, the Coens’ six tales progress from jaunty to gloomy, although there’s
plenty of humor and pessimism to be found in each of these captivating
installments. A six-part Western
anthology, centered upon a common theme: the Wild West’s relentless cruelty,
wanton violence, deadly recklessness, and cavalier abuses of unchecked power. As
with much of their best work, the stories all revolve around absurd twists and
fatalistic endings, but with an uncanny visual sheen that gives it the weight
of beloved old folk tales. Even for experienced film makers like the Coen
Brothers, the anthology format, where a series of shorts are presented as a
feature, is a tough challenge to conquer.
A bountiful anthology of Western
tales, from James Franco’s desperado trying to rob a remote prairie bank and
Tom Waits’s prospector searching for gold, to Liam Neeson’s showman endeavoring
to make a living with an armless-and-legless performer, and Zoe Kazan’s single
woman struggling to survive during a wagon-train trip across the plains, the
absurd and the mournful constantly converge in unanticipated and striking ways.
That’s most true of the dazzling opening discharge, in which Tim Blake Nelson’s
crooning gunslinger Buster Scruggs proves a simultaneous homage to, and critique
of, the Roy Rogers archetype and, by extension, the myths of the West it helped create.
The chapter starring the title
character played by Tim Blake Nelson is a little ridiculous and the Franco-led
bank robbery tale is too brisk but soon enough the movie finds its footing. In
addition to finding death, cruelty, and despair in the West, the Coen's also
find romance in the people and beauty in the landscape. What's the best
chapter? Probably "The Gal Who Got Rattled," an achingly moving epic
in miniature starring Zoe Kazan as wayward traveler Abigail and Bill Heck as
soft-spoken cowboy Billy. In a movie that's not afraid to make you laugh or
make you ponder some deep existential questions.
7. Widows
Widows
Director: Steve McQueen
Cast: Viola Davis, Michelle
Rodriguez, Elizabeth Debicki, Cynthia Erivo, Daniel Kaluuya
The great director Steve McQueen brought his
trademark seriousness to a "fun" genre film, remaking a British TV
show and turning it into one part feminist movie, one part social and one
part Viola Davis acting showcase. It opens with a confrontational open-mouthed
kiss, and only gets bolder from there, with lots of twists piled up toward the
end. Daniel Kaluuya is spectacular in a supporting role as a psychopath. And it
was also an important reminder that Elizabeth Debicki is really tall and really
good at acting.
8. You Were Never Really Here
You Were Never Really Here
Director: Lynne Ramsay
Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Ekaterina
Samsonov, Alex Manette, John Doman
Lynne Ramsay was the perfect
person to make a gritty hit-man thriller, as she upends every contrivance and
cliche of the genre. It was more intense, more visceral, more in tune with
psychological realism, and more hammer-ific. Whether it was Joaquin Phoenix
holding hands with one of his victims and singing a song, or the way the camera
artfully avoided showing the bloodiest set pieces inside a brothel, images from
this film still linger with me. Joaquin Phoenix reconfirms his status as his
generation’s finest leading man.
This crime story, adapted from a novella by
Bored to Death writer Jonathan Ames, is about an ex-soldier named Joe (Phoenix)
who finds himself tasked with recovering a kidnapped girl amidst a sinister
political conspiracy involving human trafficking. The tone of creeping dread
and fixation on violent revenge recalls Taxi Driver, last year's X-Men
shoot-em-up Logan, there should be nothing new to see here. Between Phoenix's
muted performance, Jonny Greenwood's string-drenched score, and Ramsay's
expressive jump-cuts, every image crackles with energy, style, and possibility.
It's a death-obsessed movie vibrating with life.
There’s plenty of bloodshed
throughout that underworld quest, yet Ramsay’s treatment of violence is
anything but exploitative; rather, her film resounds as a lament for the trauma
of childhood abuse, which lingers on after adolescence has given way to
adulthood. Reminiscent of Taxi Driver, and energized by Phoenix’s magnetic
embodiment of masculine suffering and sorrow, it’s a gut-wrenching portrait of
a volatile man’s attempts to achieve some measure of solace from his inner
demons sometimes via the use of a ball-peen hammer.
9. First Man
First Man
Director: Damien Chazelle
Cast: Ryan Gosling, Claire Foy, Corey Stoll, Kyle Chandler
I love movies about astronauts particularly this story and I
wasn’t disappointed. With Steven Spielberg serving as an executive producer,
Ryan Gosling as the lead character, and a plot based on James Hansen’s
biography of Neil Armstrong, First Man was always set to be a winner and so it
proved. Back in a time when the idea of walking on the moon was as ludicrous as
flying cars or teleportation, the film follows the story of the man who
accomplished what seemed impossible. It is the tale of the giant leap for
humanity. But it’s not all about going down in history. Armstrong is also shown
as he has to face tough questions – a heartbreaking “Do you think you’re coming
back?” from his son – to show the human side of the national hero who went on
one of the most dangerous missions ever. It’s no easy game being an astronaut.
Damien Chazelle explored the emotional sacrifices artists
must make for their work. His latest, a flame-kissed Neil Armstrong biopic
starring a tightly coiled Gosling as the mythical moonwalker, is similarly a
film about emotional repression and simmering male anger, but this time the
canvas is bigger (Literally: The movie switches to IMAX mode when Armstrong and
crew hit the surface of the big rock.) Chazelle's cold approach to examining
individuals with an unhealthy work-life balance has often felt overwrought to
me, but here, with Gosling stoically burying his feelings in pursuit of
celestial glory, he's launched himself into a different artistic stratosphere.
The flight sequences are visceral; the domestic scenes are no less tense.
10. Isle of Dogs
Isle of Dogs
Director: Wes Anderson
I am a Wes Anderson fan but this
film is visually cool but not as compelling as others. This stop-motion
animated comedy, about children’s efforts to thwart the extermination of dogs,
is Anderson’s third film in a virtual trilogy of revolt. With none of the richness
of his Fantastic Mr. Fox, Wes Anderson’s gorgeous new stop-motion tale is a
funny, touching, doggy delight. The
concept of sick dogs abandoned on a Japanese garbage island seemed so
self-consciously, yet Isle of Dogs is a delight: funny, touching and full of
heartfelt warmth and wit. With breathtaking visuals and an uncanny eye for
canine behavior, it transposes the kid-friendly charm of The Incredible Journey
to the post-apocalyptic landscapes of Mad Max via the Japanese cinema of
Yasujiro Ozu, and, most notably, Akira Kurosawa.
Despite its ghoulish details,
Isle of Dogs retains a soft, slapstick heart. The regular fights are animated
like a Tex Avery cartoon, with random limbs protruding from a swirling dust
cloud. Like the dogs themselves, the stop-motion has an endearingly scratchy
quality, a textured roughness contrasting with the symmetrical perfection of
the frame. Working primarily at London’s 3 Mills Studios, Anderson’s team of
animators keep things admirably physical with cotton-wool clouds and cellophane
rivers. Images on TV screens are rendered as old-school, hand-drawn cartoons. As
always, the imagery is the best part of any Anderson film. “Isle of Dogs”
engages an aesthetic of the ugly.
On one level, Isle of Dogs can be
read as a parable of disenfranchisement, a story of people (rather than pets)
being pushed to the margins. On another it’s a simple tale of a boy and his
dog, a heartbreaker with overtones of the much-loved Hachikō story. There’s
also an animal rights echo. Interpretations
are necessarily open-ended. While all barks are translated into English, the
human language, much of it Japanese, is largely unsubtitled. “You don’t
understand the words but you understand the emotion.” Some have argued that,
rather than foregrounding canine conversation, this technique casts the
Japanese characters in particular – rather than humans in general.
Perhaps a better question would
be “why aren’t the Japanese people translated?” Atari, who is the catalyst for
this story, remains untranslated until the very end, where most of his speech
is in deference to how hot he finds Tracy, with whom he has had no prior
interaction. I suppose Anderson thought he was being respectful toward Japanese
speakers by giving them something only they could enjoy. Instead, it only adds
an “Otherness” to Atari and his compatriots. Why can we understand Atari’s
canine cohort, but not him?
Tuesday, October 30, 2018
Blow UP 1966
Action minded Architectural Association Types, such as
Koolhaas and Tschumi hoped to deliver architecture as a tool for radical social
and political reinvention by using it to nourish unexpected events, with film
providing an alluring model. Passolini shooting hand held on the streets. Nemec
documenting the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia,
Godard and Marker, Russ Myers, montage, jump cuts, sex, violence, real life,
stars-film was cool as shit. It is no coincidence that Michelangelo Antonioni opened
Blow Up with a car full of Architectural
Association students/hippies carousing through London on their way to Alison and
Peter Smithson’s radical new building for The
Economist.
Jeff Kipnis. Perfect Acts of Architecture
The main plot is about Thomas (David Hemmings), a
professional photographer of great popularity, progressive and Apollonian, who
lives immersed in his chores as an artist on top of his game, he ends up being in
a strange way involved in a murder. On the other hand, the fact that it is an enlargement
of a photograph that he discovers is perhaps the most interesting part of the
whole plot. We see a Thomas who, after having photographed a couple in Maryon
Park on a seemingly calm morning, he is fascinated by the curiosity that lovers
produce him. A restlessness that, like Thomas it will also be awaken in the
viewer. We do not know what there is in the environment that smells rotten, but
we know that there is something that unbalances reality, and as Thomas goes
undressing the this mess, it is when we realize that there is some mastery in
the film particularly in this part of the story.
What is it that our eye sees or actually invents, what is
the reality that the retina stores? How many filters are needed before reality
is finally observed by the human eye? What possibilities does a fragmented
image of reality provide in support of the memory of a particular fact, as an
affirmation that the objective is the extension of an eye? as if it were a
store of memories in which the lack of vivid continuity, characteristic of a frozen
image is not enough but it is capable of spraying some type of reality, helping
to create optical deceptions that support universal theories about human
psychology and their interpersonal ways of communicating, capable of being grasped
even by a small focus of an open diaphragm. Because, no matter how deeply
hidden something is, in order to give meaning to any search, we have to rely on
something.
What we know for sure is that, although Blow Up begins
taking imprecise steps, showing off in order to show, wandering without an apparent
sense, it is at that moment when it seems that it ends up becoming aware of
itself and its objective, suddenly equipping itself of an interest that,
although it arrives late, it stays for a while, giving us, among others, the
scene of the park, in which the photography is so majestic that it reinforces
the mystery to the plot.
Thomas may be a hero, maybe a villain or maybe it's simply a
matter of finding a reward for the emptiness surrounding his hedonistic life,
but the point is that this mysterious aura seems to be a product of himself, as
Julio Cortázar said in the story Las
Babas del Diablo (belonging to the book Las Armas Secretas): “It is curious that the scene had a disturbing
aura. I thought that I had to do that myself, and that my picture, if I took it
out, that would restore things to its foolish truth.“ ---The story that Blow up
is based on, in any case doesn’t obscure the film, because the master of timing,
as how Cortázar is sometimes referred to, knows how to measure the words,
balancing it drop by drop to stimulate the reader’s expectation without slowing
down the story leading to the reader’s yawning.
That is why Antonioni uses ornaments that contextualize the
main plot, make it credible and, incidentally, illustrate what came to be
called the “swinging” London, a term coined by Time magazine in 1966 that was
taken as reference by the popular pirate radio station Swinging Radio England.
It is therefore, because of this context, on which of the sidewalks of London
flourished in culture, fashion and 'intellectuality' in equal parts, without all
this our photographer would have no reason to be.
It was a very fertile time for hedonism, experimentation,
psychedelia, drugs, the avant-garde in all areas of art, where music groups
such as The Beatles, The Who, The Kinks and many other groups that were part of
the so-called British Invasion in 1963 after the release by Capitol Records of
the single “I want to hold your hand” by The Beatles, which made possible their
entry into the charts of the American music scene, where the new trends were
called out by Queen Magazine, as well as the pop-art of Richard Hamilton,
famous for the use of discarded photographs of Marilyn Monroe, Andy Warhol. Fashion
photographers like Richard Avedon, not to mention the revolution that marked
the entry to the fashion market, Mary Quant's invention, the miniskirt. A
success that turned King Cross neighborhood into Chelsea (which was where the
Quant boutique called 'Bazaar' was founded) at the core of London fashion.
The dominant aesthetic, as the character of Thomas shows,
was the mod image, fitted jackets with three buttons, striking colors, fashion
designers such as John Stephen or Ossie Clarck. We only need to observe how every
one of the models that Thomas, with that arrogant air of a professional photographer,
directs with superiority, forces to straighten their posture to highlight the
fabrics, the body of the garments and the importance they had in the 'hipness'
of the moment, how to show it, how to wear it and, above all, how to create
fascination and beauty. Some models will have to succumb to the charms of the
protagonist in favor of fame on the catwalks.
Interesting and unprecedented is the fact that the Yardbirds
- later Led Zeppelin with Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton at the front - will star
in the film with their song Stroll On, a rewrite of Train Kept on Rollin’ to
which they changed the title and lyrics and featuring a young Jeff Beck who ends
up smashing his guitar in a psychedelic distortion attack. The same distortion,
although closer to American rhythm & blues of the time, by which Herbert
Hancock, greatly influenced by his close collaboration with Miles Davis,
composes a great soundtrack, he called the music score diegetic (about
presenting an interior view of the world. Thanks to the sensuality of the Austrian model/actress
Verushka, the film immerses us in the first minutes in a photo shoot that could
well be a sexual act, with its resulting visual zenith.
A show for the senses in which Antonioni's taste for the
sensuality of his characters is revealed, as shown in other more successful
titles such as his trilogy L'avventura (1960), La note ( 1961) and The Eclipse
(L'eclisse 1962) or The Red Desert (Il Deserto Rosso, 1964), where his fetish
actress Monica Vitti reappears making a brutal speech about fear. A round film
that shelters in itself, like Blow up, the visual concupiscence of Carlo di
Palma as director of photography.
Although the film contains great scenes to remember, like
the tennis game of the 'clowns'. Antonioni himself confessed, after the
premiere, that he would need to make another film to be able to explain with
precision the meaning of Blow Up. It is not enough to suggest analysis, it is
necessary to suggest stimulating the spectator to introduce himself, to be
hooked by the plot so that the audience ends up being interested in this game
of self-knowledge about the gaze and the target of the gaze, about the
emptiness and the human uprooting, about the incapacity of people to deal with
an environment that they distrust and that, above all, they do not understand.
The director already explains it in an interview: “Our drama is the growing
lack of communication and the inability to conceive authentic feelings; this
particular problem dominates all my characters.”
Nevertheless, this film had a great repercussion, filmmakers
like Francis F. Coppola confessed to having been inspired by it. In his case to
write the script of his film The Conversation (1974), in the case of Mel Brooks
in High Anxiety (1977), a driver makes so many enlargements of a photograph in
which the killer appears until he has one the size of a wall. In others, as in
the Indian film Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro (1983), its director Kundan Shah, making identical
use of the plot of Blow Up, conveniently decides to call the park where the
murder occurs “Antonioni Park”.
In the main competition section of the Cannes Film Festival,
Blowup won the Grand Prix du Festival International du Film, the festival's
highest honor.
Direction: Michelangelo Antonioni.
Country: United Kingdom and Italy.
Year: 1966.
Duration: 108 min.
Cast: David Hemmings, Vanesa Redgrave, Sarah Miles, Peter Bowles,
Jane Birkin, Gillian Hills, John Castle, Verushka.
Script: Tonino Guerra & Michelangelo Antonioni, based on
the story by Julio Cortázar “Las Babas del Diablo”, from the book Las Armas Secretas,
1959.
Production: Carlo Ponti.
Executive production: Pierre Rouve
Artistic direction: Saetón Gorton.
Photography: Carlo di Palma.
Assembly: Frank Clarke.
Sound: Robin Gregory.
Costumes: Jocelyn Rickards.
Makeup and hairdressing: Paul Rabiger and Stephanie Kaye.
Music: Herbert Hancock.
Producer: Bridge
Films.
Distributor: MGM.
Locations: Maryon Park, Plaza of the Economist Building,
Stockwell Road, Regent Street, Heddon street.
Tuesday, October 16, 2018
Rear Window 1954
Alfred Hitchcock once said: "If you do not experience a
delicious terror when you watch Rear Window,
then pinch yourself ... You may be dead."
"Rear Window" was one of Hitchcock's favorite
films, as it has been for the audiences as well as critics since it was
released by Paramount Pictures in 1954. For the director it represented the
extraordinary opportunity of having a whole film seen from the point of view of
a character. As for the audience, it gave him the opportunity to do something
that many would have wanted: To be the "voyeur" and spy on your
neighbors.
Alfred Hitchcock's film "Rear Window" is a Universal
Classic, featuring James Stewart and Grace Kelly as protagonists, accompanied
by Wendell Carey, Thelma Ritter and Raymond Burr. Produced and directed by
Alfred Hitchcock, the screenplay belongs to John Michael Hayes, based on
Cornell Woolrich's short story "It Had To Be Murder." Robert Burks
was the director of photography.
The argument is very simple: An immobilized man (James
Stewart) watches his neighbors through the back window of his apartment to pass
the time. He feels fascinated by one of the departments in particular, until he
slowly realizes that his owner has killed his wife. What follows is how the
protagonist convinces the other tenants that there has been a murder, and then tries
to have the killer caught, but not before he attempts to kill again. However,
in the hands of "The master", a simple story line becomes a humorous
and macabre tale able to play with the emotions of the viewer with only the
camera movement.
Hitchcock has always been a "voyeur", his camera
is the audience’s eyes. With "Rear Window" he exploits a weakness of
ours, which is to find out what the neighbor does ... and the problems that
this can cause.
The idea for the film came from different sources,
especially the infamous case of Patrick Mahon. In this case the murderer
dismembered the body of a girl and threw it piece by piece from the window of a
train, except the head, which he burned in his fireplace. Hitchcock assigned
the task of writing the script to John Michael Hayes, a former radio writer. The
director was so pleased with the finished script that Hayes would write three
of his following films: "To Catch a Thief", "The Trouble with
Harry” and “The Man Who Knew Too Much”.
Hitchcock also knew who he wanted for his leading man: James
Stewart who had worked with him on "The Rope" and felt that Jimmy
could be perfect to play Jeff, the photographer confined in a wheelchair who is
convinced that a murder has been committed in his apartment building. Hitchcock
also casted Grace Kelly to play Lisa Freemont, Jeff's girlfriend and
"legs". Completing the cast are Wendell Corey as Tom, Jeff's partner
in the war and now a detective; Thelma Ritter as Stella, Jeff's nurse, and
Raymond Burr, who plays Lars Thorwald, the accused of murder.
The film was shot entirely on set 18 of Paramount Studios. The
monumental decoration was 100 feet wide, 200 feet long and 30 feet high, with
structures that raised five and six floors. It was the result of months of
planning and construction. There were 31 apartments, with most of the action
taking place in eight fully furnished rooms, plus a maze of fire escapes,
terraces, an alley, a street and the back of the city.
It took more than a thousand arcs of giant lights to
illuminate the set from above, while more than two thousand varieties of small
lamps were used to have supplementary light. In fact, "Rear Window"
was so meticulously planned and calculated before starting the shoot itself,
that only a few hundred feet of film with disposable shots were discarded at
the end. For their movements, the actors playing Stewart's neighbors received
their instructions and directions through a shortwave radio with hidden
microphones.
Actually, Hitchcock found himself filming two movies, one
with sound and the other silent. The most elaborate shot was a long shot that
had to show the whole set at the beginning of the film. The camera had to be raised
high above the courtyard of the building, go from one window to the other
until, eventually; it stopped at Stewart's apartment. There, Hitchcock made the
camera run down his sweaty face until he was seen in the wheelchair, grabbed a
thermometer, slid down the casted leg, collected a group of magazines and a
shattered camera and then moved to the wall to show a picture taken at the
Indianapolis circuit.
This suggested that Stewart's character was a bold
photographer who had broken his leg when taking the picture that was on the
wall. It also established most of the elements that subsequently developed into
the action. There is a constant identification between the character of Stewart
and the audience-everything he sees is also seen by the spectator, everyone is
exposed to the dangerous potential of "voyeurism." The audience is
involved from the beginning given the fact that the credits are projected over
closed shutters that a will open one after the other. Then, the viewer is led
to identify with Stewart when he identifies with the suspect he is spying on.
Enjoying his leisure and wanting to find adventure, he is snooping in a less
innocent situation than the viewer watching a movie. And, naturally, the viewer
feels as frustrated as Stewart whenever the facts do not justify his
deductions.
Everyone likes to know what is happening around them. In
"Rear Window", James Stewart has an insatiable curiosity; so much so,
that at the end of the film not only has his other leg broken, but it also almost
manages to get himself killed. With a camera you can get into someone's
personal life and invade their privacy. However, Hitchcock always felt that in
reality he was never being an intruder in what he photographed. Instead he
thought that his function was to illuminate a situation and then let everyone
draw their own conclusions from what they saw.
Rear Window is one of the most memorable Hitchcock’s films.
After the credits, the camera slowly approaches the window and makes a first
superficial tour of the community's patio that ends with a close-up of Jeff
(James Stewart), asleep and sweaty, following an insert of the thermometer
indicating that the temperature is, in fact, very high, and without a single
word, Hitchcock has already given us a lot of data about the character, as well
as about the community in which he lives ".
Architects love this film in particular and it has been
analyzed under different lenses in studios and seminars. The film certainly
discusses issues of voyeurism; however other topics like architectural section,
event structure, the problem of front and back. -There is no apartment building
in NYC that has that middle courtyard, so the problem of a second façade comes
into the game.
Synopsis
For seven weeks, magazine photographer L. B. Jeffries, whom
everyone calls Jeff (James Stewart), has been confined to a wheelchair during a
New York heat wave. His leg and hips are immobilized in a cast because of the
accident he suffered when the wheel of a racing car he was photographing was
released from the car.
To pass the time in his Greenwich Village apartment, Jeff
likes to watch what his neighbors do. It is an extremely humid summer, so the
blinds, which would normally hide the view of the other tenants' private lives,
are rarely lowered.
During his constant gaze, he learns several things,
including that marriage is not something he wants to venture on anytime soon,
especially now that he feels pressured by his girlfriend, Lisa Fremont (Grace
Kelly), a sophisticated editor of a fashion magazine. When it comes to the
neighbors, it seems that either they are emotionally unstable or tragically
confused when choosing a partner: There's Miss Lonely Hearts, an eager spinster
of men who has candlelight dinners with an imaginary lover; there is also a
middle-aged couple without children who turn their love into a small dog, and
also a couple of newlyweds who spend the day making love behind the curtains.
Miss Torso is a curvaceous dancer who practices her exercises in her underwear,
much to the delight of her neighbors.
Then we also find the eccentric mature artist who is
completely dedicated to a new sculpture, while a frustrated music composer
tries to find inspiration in alcohol. And then there's Lars Thorwald (Raymond
Burr), a traveling salesman who sells jewelry, who constantly has heated
arguments with his handicapped wife.
Jeff's boredom makes him crave some excitement: "At this
moment I'd love to have a problem," he tells Stella (Thelma Ritter), an
ingenious nurse who comes to give him a massage every day. However, he does not
have to wait long to see his wishes fulfilled, since that same night Jeff hears
a horrifying scream and sees Thorwald making several trips carrying an aluminum
suitcase.
Armed with binoculars and a powerful camera, Jeff watches
Thorwald clean the suitcase, wash the walls of his bathroom and wrap a saw and
a kitchen knife in newspaper. Jeff begins to suspect that the salesman has murdered
his wife, chopped up her body and then disposed of her in the little garden part
of apartment’s courtyard. But his evidence is too unsustainable to convince his
girlfriend Lisa and Tom (Wendell Corey), his comrade-in-arms during the war and
now a detective in the homicide section. Jeff's suspicions increase when he
watches the little dog sniffing in the garden.
It also intrigues him to see Thorwald rummaging through his
wife's bag and jewelry. Lisa deduces that if the woman has gone on a trip, which
is quite possible and this would explain her absence. She would have to take
the wedding ring with her so she decides to do a little detective work; shortly
after the small dog is found strangled,
and all the neighbors have a horrified reaction confronting the fact.
All except Thorwald, who sits alone in his dark apartment.
Finally, convinced by Jeff's insistence that a crime has been committed, Lisa
and Nurse Stella become the photographer’s legs.
Stella begins to dig in the garden, while Lisa goes to the suspect’s
apartment during his absence, trying to find some clues. But she is surprised
by Thorwald, who is about to kill her if it wasn’t for the police intervention,
Jeff is the one that calls them in complete desperation -; Lisa is taken to
jail on charges of attempted theft, but not before she can make Jeff understand
that she has found the wedding ring - the necessary evidence -; but the killer
has seen where the girl was beckoning at, and that's how he starts to harass
Jeff. At Jeff's apartment, Thorwald confronts him and also tries to kill him.
Unable to move from his wheelchair, Jeff's only defense is
to use his camera and blinds Thorwald with the flash light. Just at the moment
when Thorwald has managed to catch Jeff, the police arrive and shoot the crazed
assassin, but not before Jeff has fallen through the window. Although he now
has both legs broken, Jeff feels happy, cared for and accompanied by Lisa.
Cast
James Stewart as L.B. "Jeff" Jefferies
Grace Kelly as Lisa Carol Fremont
Wendell Corey as NYPD Det. Lt. Thomas "Tom" J.
Doyle
Thelma Ritter as Stella
Raymond Burr as Lars Thorwald
Judith Evelyn as Miss Lonelyhearts
Ross Bagdasarian as the songwriter
Georgine Darcy as Miss Torso
Frank Cady and Sara Berner as the husband and wife, living
above the Thorwalds, with their dog
Jesslyn Fax as "Miss Hearing Aid"
Rand Harper and Havis Davenport as Newlyweds
Irene Winston as Mrs. Anna Thorwald
ted, Lisa
and Nurse Stella become the photographer’s legs.
Tuesday, October 9, 2018
L'Avventura 1960
In order to contextualize the importance of Antonioni and L’Avventura,
I would refer to Martin Scocerse’s list of favorite films. Without a doubt,
Martin Scorsese is one of the most recognized directors in the history of
cinema. Films like Taxi Driver, Casino or The Wolf of Wall Street, the New York
filmmaker has more than enough work to create his own list of the best films
ever. Invited to elaborate on this privileged ranking, Scorsese quoted great
classics such as Paisà (Comrade) by Roberto Rosselli (1946). Another Italian
classic is the work of Michelangelo Antonioni, undoubtedly, one of Scorsese's
favorite filmmakers. In regards to L’Avventura he said; "It's hard to
think of a film that has a more powerful understanding of the way people are
linked to the world around them, because of what they see, touch, taste and
hear," and concludes "visually, sensually, thematically,
dramatically, in all senses, is one of the great works of cinema".
Michelangelo Antonioni, L’Avventura is one of the key
milestones of the cinematographic modernity, in addition to the international
fame and of its director, Michelangelo Antonioni, especially at the root of the
enormous scandal that surrounded this masterpiece. When it premiered at the
Cannes Film Festival, the film was heavily booed and attacked mercilessly. It
was because of this failure that a series of critics and it was the filmmakers
with an affinity to this new cinematographic wave who demanded a second showing,
in which it received a Special Prize of the Jury "for its new
cinematographic language and the beauty of its images", from here on cinema
had a new masterpiece.
It seems to me that the central theme, which Antonioni
decided to discuss through this film, is human relationships and their lack of
communication. The director emphasizes the construction of the characters and
their dialogues. We can appreciate the way in which, in several sequences, the
characters Claudia (Monica Vitti) and Sandro (Gabriel Ferzetti) are completely
silent, while they walk through a room, or the exteriors of the great white
island. At other times, within a completely superficial dialogue, we can have another
level of reading, below which the real feelings of the characters are hidden;
those who cannot communicate.
In this film, the narrative construction is a very
attractive point. L’Avventura begins with some bourgeois characters that make a
trip on a yacht. After hours of travel, the crew stops on a small uninhabited
island, where some disembark, among them our protagonist trio: Anna, Claudia
and Sandro. Anna and Sandro are in a relationship, although she is very
dissatisfied with her partner, as her friend Claudia will later prove in the
film. During her stay on the island, Anna disappears; it is here where we find
an interesting moment, because a few minutes (considering that it is a long
movie), the main character disappears. This moment in the film reminded me a
bit of Psycho from Htichcock, a film in which something similar happens, the
protagonist disappears after thirty minutes of film. The film from that moment
on is about absence of the presence creating the metaphysical complexity of the narrative.
ey
milestones of the cinematographic modernity, in addition to the international
fame and of its director, Michelangelo Antonioni, especially at the root of the
enormous scandal that surrounded this masterpiece. When it premiered at the
Cannes Film Festival, the film was heavily booed and attacked mercilessly. It
was because of this failure that a series of critics and it was the filmmakers
with an affinity to this new cinematographic wave who demanded a second showing,
in which it received a Special Prize of the Jury "for its new
cinematographic language and the beauty of its images", from here on cinema
had a new masterpiece.
One thing that is extremely interesting about the film, is
that Antonioni was a part of Italian Neo-realism,
having worked as a screenwriter, among other things, for directors of the
stature of Roberto Rosellini. But, unlike the neorealist style where the
important thing is to film on the streets, not to use sets, as well as to focus
on the less "favored" classes of the country; Antonioni focuses his
gaze and speech on the Italian bourgeois class, making a cruel portrait and a
critique to this well-to-do class, the characters are boring, empty,
hypocritical and amoral.
This film was very popular at the time, because it was a
work of unusual transgression, one could almost say revolutionary. Perhaps modernity
was so obvious to the common spectator then, but still today remains one of
those films that has both that praise and detract this film as a work of art. L’Avventura
completely escaped the most elementary bases of film narrative by showing a
brutally sincere portrait of human relationships and their lack of
communication. Antonioni narrative style is clearly portrayed in the other two
films related to L’Avventura, the so-called "Trilogy of non-communication”;
La Notte (1961) and The Eclipse (1962).
All of them will search every smallest corner of the tiny
island but eventually give up. When the police arrive, they continue with the
search, also investigating along the waters of the rocky areas in case she had
decided to commit suicide, but there is no sign of Anna. It is impossible that
Anna, alive or dead, could remain on the island, so Claudia and Sandro decide
to continue looking for her on the mainland.
Following the analysis of the narrative construction of L’Avventura,
the fact is that we never learned what actually happens with Anna. This is an
excuse to unleash the main plot, just as Hitchcock did with Psycho. After the
disappearance, Claudia and Sandro begin to look for their friend. But behind
this, there is a hidden feeling that the two characters never express (a
resource that works for Antonioni to emphasize lack of communication), and that
is that they begin to have a romantic adventure and, simultaneously, carry out
the search for the lost friend.
What becomes more controversial of the film even today is
the fact that at no time is explained to us what has happened to Anna.
Antonioni does not care what happened to her character, but the consequences of
her disappearance, because while Sandro and Claudia seek for Anna they end up
falling in love. Therefore, what was supposed to be the central conflict of the
film fades away until it disappears in favor of what Antonioni really wants to
show us: the strange relationship between Sandro and Claudia, the fact that
they live a romance while they are looking for this woman. Who are they really
betraying? In a scene that takes place in the final stretch of the film, Sandro
goes away from Claudia to make an inquiry and when he returns she is terrified
because she was afraid that he had found Anna. She herself recognizes that she
has gone from fearing for her friend's life to being afraid that she is still
alive. This sick contradiction is one of the bases of the film.
Another controversial point is Antonioni's fulminating
portrait of the well-to-do and idle bourgeoisie; he would also attack in his
next film, La Notte. In particular, the initial scenes of the yacht trip are
especially cruel. All the characters are presented as boring, empty and even
pathetic. One of the couples, Giulia and Corrado, is especially shocking
because absolutely all their dialogues end up in an insult from him towards her
("The weather has gotten worse" "Please, do not be so didactic,
I see that the weather has worsened ";" Formerly, the Aeolian Islands
were volcanoes "" When we came here 12 years ago, you made exactly
the same comment "). In the middle of Anna's frantic search, Giulia
suddenly talks to Claudia at a certain moment about how badly her husband
treats her, as if she was not aware of the seriousness of Anna's disappearance.
Later, Giulia cheats on her husband with a young painter, but before giving
herself to him she makes sure that Claudia sees her, as if she wants to
compensate for the ridicule she has suffered before. It seems that she is
cheating on him more for revenge than for a real desire. In fact, all the
characters give off an amorality that is really annoying. They have no problem whatsoever
committing adultery among them and in fact this is what Claudia and Sandro do,
with the difference that they seem to really want each other while the rest do
it almost out of boredom.
It is remarkable the way that Antonioni has to show us the
existential void and the lack of communication that surrounds these characters.
The film begins with a conversation between Anna and her father in which that
lack is clear, but it is something that runs throughout the film and affects
even Claudia and Sandro. Although they are sincerely wishing, at all times
there is something underlying that gives us to understand that not everything
works as well as it should, that the characters are not completely united and
there is still something that separates them. Maybe Anna's ghost? Or, Claudia
and Sandro are simply destined to understand each other as little in the future
as Anna and Sandro did?
Despite the risk involved in carrying out such an abstract
film in its content, Antonioni does a tremendous job of direction that makes L’
Avventura an absolutely fascinating film. His obsession with landscapes, not
only natural but also urban, is evident here: the planes of the island and the
sea, the buildings of the towns visited by the protagonists and even the
characters themselves. Antonioni pampers each frame making his work look
especially beautiful and evocative, something that would lead to its maximum
expression in the last minutes of The Eclipse, in which it completely leaves
aside the plot to show a succession of almost abstract planes of a city. Few
directors have been able to work as well as he does the form the objects when
placing them on a plane.
Some of these landscapes become so abstract that they even
look like nightmarish images, like the empty town or the square where Claudia
is suddenly harassed by men who look at her maliciously. Like the disappearance
of Anna, there are elements that have no rational explanation, but this serves
to increase the unhealthy climate of tension that the characters live.
Perhaps one of the aspects that I liked the least was the
ending, in which Claudia finds Sandro with another woman and he, scared, gets
covered in the womb of the female, while Claudia leaves. Finally they are on
the roof of the hotel and Sandro cries, causing Claudia to put her hand on his
head as a symbol of forgiveness. It seems to me that, in this end, the
reactions are not very credible, something mechanical and implausible; above
all, it is difficult for me to believe and understand Sandro's final cry, as
well as Claudia's forgiveness. However I think that this also defines very well
the theme of the film; despite of the deceit, the weeping and other issues that
we could appreciate, both characters remain silent, without giving an
explanation of their actions and feelings, which emphasizes and summarizes very
well the lack of communication that the director wanted to present.
In this plane is reflected all the non-communication that
surrounds the two, their inability to solve their problems verbally; their
condemnation to love and at the same time hurt each other as the rest of the
characters in the film. This problem has seldom been exposed so beautifully and
simply, something that has such a dramatic meaning: the ineffectiveness of
human relationships and the inability not to harm the people we love most.
Under that apparent visual beauty, L’Avventura hides one of the most visceral
and disenchanted portrayals of human relationships in contemporary society.
Cast:
Claudia (Monica Vitti)
Anna (Léa Massari),
Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti)
Release date: June 29, 1960 (USA)
Director: Michelangelo Antonioni
Cinematography: Aldo Scavarda
Screenplay: Michelangelo Antonioni, Tonino Guerra, Elio
Bartolini
Antonioni and Monica Vitti during the filming of L'Avventura
Tuesday, October 2, 2018
Band of Outsiders 1964
This is a film about three characters: Odile (Ana Karina), a
rather naïve young girl, lives with her aunt in a house on the outskirts of
Paris and attends a course to learn English, there she meets his two companions:
Arthur (Claude Brasseur) and Franz (Sami Frey). Actually the two men are
full-fledged criminals who will take advantage of Odile's confidence and
convince her to steal from her old aunt's house.
With Band of Outsiders we could write several pages about
the avant-garde and the cinematographic aspects found in one of the most
important films of the French New Wave (Nouvelle Vague) of which Godard is one of the main players. Conceived
as a very personal review of American film noir, Band of Outsiders (Bande à
part 1964) is surely his freest film and the one that contains the most moments
of authentic "film joy" of Godard's entire filmography. In fact, it
seems that the director had the need to radically change the record after the
tough film Contempt ( Le Mépris 1963) when addressing this story of cops and
thieves (the script part of the pulp novel "Fools' Gold" by Dolores Hitchens ). This film is a cinematic game full of scenes, dialogues and images that run in the form
of digressions to the police plot and focus on the triangle formed by its three protagonists: the candid Odile, the opportunist Arthur and the introverted Franz. These relations whose evolution Godard is allowed to preview in the
vertiginous assembly in parallel to the visuals of the initial credits
(something practically impossible to perceive in a first viewing), this is the
first of the many games within the film.
For the spectators who are getting involved in the
film, we can mention some phrases chosen at random that could
frame the film: 3 weeks ago. A lot of money. English classes. A house by the
river. A romantic girl. Through the
voice-over, Godard continues playing with the idea of chance and the
banality of the plot, the story of the relationship between the three
characters. Arthur, sure of himself, starts his strategy of seduction towards
the "romantic Odile", before the helpless look of Franz (who
discovers with disappointed how Odile refuses again and again his cigarettes and
immediately will accept those from Arthur). As Godard tells us: "Now we
could digress and talk about the feelings of Odile, Franz and Arthur, however
everything is already clear enough. So let the images speak and close the parentheses.
"
And the images certainly speak, show, suggest and play;
Arthur caressing Odile's cheek, Odile putting on Franz's hat, Franz and Arthur
reading news of robberies and crimes in the press, the three characters
successively exchanging their position (and the relationship between them)
around the coffee table. And, of course, the already legendary sequence with
Arthur, Franz and Odile dancing in synchronized choreography one of the
wonderful musical themes of Michel Legrand (sequence quoted by Tarantino, fervent
admirer of this film, in Pulp Fiction). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1MKUJN7vUk Also American director Hal Hartley uses this scene as reference
for his film” Surviving desire https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7y4ATS5RTeg
After the sequence in the cafe, Franz and Arthur play
flipping a coin up in the air and bet who will stay with Odile: "Arthur
chose face. Odile screamed "heads" when she picks up the coin that had come out
tails. Franz drives away sad and lonely, with feverish eyes "while Arthur
continues his game of seduction. In the subway ("Arthur and Odile
descended to the center of the earth"), Odile sings J'entends, j'entends,
a song by Jean Ferrat from a poem by Louis Aragon, in one of the most beautiful
sequences of the film: the images of the metro and the streets of Paris, its
travelers, passers-by and beggars, dialogue with the poem of Aragon to take us
to the plane of Franz, sleeping alone, which Godard sets against the plane of
Arthur and Odile in bed.
Once Arthur, impelled by his sinister family (plotting to
betray Franz), decides to put his plan into action, Franz begins to open up
with Odile: asking her to decide between him and Franz to flee after the
robbery (they would go north, to "the land of Jack London: a new
digression, with Franz telling the story on
camera), giving her the book of the novel that makes him think about her as
well as reading to her a fragment of the novel. On her way to the house, Odile
looks at the Louvre, Franz explains that he once read that an American
had taken 9 minutes 45 seconds to visit the museum. So, while they wait for the
night to fall and be able to commit the robbery (all according to Arthur, and referring
to the tradition of bad B movies, they decide to do the same). The brief but
magnificent sequence of Franz, Arthur and Odile running through the galleries
of the Louvre is another of the playfully magical moments of the film. This
memorable scene was directly referenced by Bernardo Bertolucci in his film “The
Dreamers” 2003, the story of another love triangle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4MV1NLejQ0
The scene lasts less than 40 seconds but has become an icon
of world cinema. In fact, the whole movie is full of poetry made. This is mentioned
in the special DVD launched by the the criterion collection, it has references
of Paris in Cinq jours (Pierre Colombier-Nicolas Rimsky); in it Godard
invented a character named Jimmie Johnson, an American from California who
toured the entire museum in 9 minutes with 45 seconds. At the end of the scene,
Godard's voice reports that Arthur, Franz and Odile broke the record by two
seconds.
The scene can be interpreted in different ways. There will
be some critics who commented that Godard simply presents the shots, without
establishing any logical relationship with the whole film.. Jean Luc Godard, being an important figure of the transgressive avant-garde group "The French New Wave" (Nouvelle
Vague), expressed his ideology and the conception of his time in an open
manner. In the scene, the friends run in the opposite direction to the
circulation of the assistants, and they mock the security guard when he tries
to stop them in their run. The image could have all the burden of freedom
young people dismissed in those years, a desire for a different world.
This will be the last moment of play between the three
characters: the plan must be executed and, after a failed first attempt, in
which Odile begins to be aware of the true feelings of Franz and Arthur towards
her, the theft is consummated and Arthur finally exposes his treason pretending
to hide most of the loot. When Franz and Odile return to the house (like the
hero of a legendary novel, Franz has a dark premonition), they witness the
shooting between Arthur and his uncle, in which both of them die, Arthur's last
thought before dying was Odile's face.
The game is over. The shy Franz has finally gotten the love
of the candid Odile and both flee "to the warm countries" on board a
ship (in a wonderful tribute to Chaplin’s The Immigrant) in search of new
adventures. Godard makes an ironic promise, he will see it in one of his next films,
this time in Cinemascope and Tecnicolor called “Pierrot Le Fout”
Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Original Title: Bande à part /
Year: 1964 / Country: France / Production Company: Columbia
Films / Duration: 95 min. / Format: B / N - 1.37: 1
Screenplay: Jean-Luc Godard / Photography: Raoul Coutard /
Music: Michel Legrand
Cast: Anna Karina, Claude Brasseur, Sami Frey, Louisa
Colpeyn, Chantal Darget, Ernest Menzer
Release date: 07/29/1964 (Locarno Film Festival)
Tuesday, September 25, 2018
Antoine and Collette 1962
L'amour à vingt ans (1962) is a film composed of five
episodes directed by Renzo Rossellini, Shintarô Ishihara, Marcel Ophüls,
Andrzej Wajda and François Truffaut. Antoine et Colette, the episode made by
Truffaut, is a little wonder of barely half an hour, something like the missing
link for many of the followers of the character Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre
Léaud), who since The Four Hundred Blows (1959) starred in several of Truffaut’s
films.
Here we meet Antoine at age 17, independent, employed and
with a fondness for cinema, literature and music. While attending a Berlioz
concert he meets Colette (Marie-France Pisier), a girl somewhat older than he, He
falls irremediably in love with her and tries to conquer her by building
friendships through her parents, moving to an apartment whose balcony faces the
girl's, but she does not seem to correspond. Colette accompanies him to the movies and
concerts, accepts him as a friend and introduces him to his parents, who
welcome him almost like a son, but Antoine can’t go beyond sending him a love
letter and stealing a couple of kisses. In the last scene, at Colette's house,
she introduces her boyfriend. While the two go out to have fun, the poor and
disillusioned Antoine stays with the parents to watch television.
One could say that Antoine and Colette was largely
autobiographical in some respects. When Truffaut was seventeen years old, he
fell in love with a girl named Liliana Litvin that he met at the Cinematheque
francaise. He was so taken with Liliana that he left the suburbs where he
worked and moved to Paris so he could be closer with her. Liliana, on the other
hand, had an active social life and enjoyed the companionship of several
admirers (among them were Truffaut's friends, Jean-Luc Godard and Jean
Gruault), all of them competing for her attention.
Film Comment editor-at-large Kent Jones wrote, that
"the half-hour Antoine and Colette is among the most beautiful things
Truffaut ever committed to film. There is something bracing about its swiftness
alone, and about the way Truffaut slices confidently through his material, both
expository (Antoine's modest living situation, his job, his determination to
land Colette) and emotional (a love of Paris, a deep attachment to music, and a
burning desire for women, all three traits shared by the director and his alter
ego).
It would take six years to meet Antoine and Colette again,
this time in Stolen Kisses (Baisers volés, 1968), a wonderful film scored by Que reste-t-il de nos amours, by Charles
Trenet, one of those songs that will accompany them for the rest of their lives:
Baisers volés / Rêves mouvants / That reste-t-il of tout cela ... Colette,
taking a walk with her husband and son, meets Antoine, who is working as a
disastrous private detective. They greet each other, cross four words and say
goodbye. C'est la vie!
Producer: Pierre Roustang
Director: Francois Truffaut
Screenplay: Francois Truffaut
Cinematography: Raoul Coutard
Film Editing: Claudine Bouche
Music: Georges Delerue
Cast: Jean-Pierre Leaud (Antonie Doinel), Marie-France
Pisier (Colette), Patrick Auffay (Rene), Rosy Varte (Colette's mother),
Jean-Francois Adam (Albert Tazzi).
BW-30m.
The 400 Blows 1959
Young Antoine Doinel looks at the camera in the final shot
of the film but also he’s looking at us. He is interrogating us: what should I
do? What can I do now? We do not have the answer. We have no idea. The anguish
that boy’s rugged and sad vicissitudes reach their climax of impotence. What
will become of me? he seems to ask. What will become of him? we ask ourselves.
We have taken care of him and we have to abandon him to his uncertain luck. He
has the sea in front, he has freedom and life ahead, but, like the immensity of
water, freedom and life appear before the child with the paradoxical feature of
a limit.
François Truffaut, in one of the most unusual and
exceptional stories in the history of cinema, will continue to tell us the life
of Antoine Doinel over the next twenty years - as his interpreter, Jean Pierre
Léaud, grew up - in a short film and in three more films plus the short Antoine
and Collette. We know about his jobs, his hobbies, his loves, his marriage, his
heartbreak. Upon the director's untimely death, in 1984, forever suspended the
narration of the adventures and misadventures of that boy with the soul of a child-minded
adult who always did the thousand and one antics, which is what he means, in
French, by the title “Les quatre cents
coups”.
Antoine traverses his childhood through the emotional desert
of his family and through the hostile jungle of the school. He is an unloved
child. His mother became pregnant of him without wanting it. She is always
nervous, resentful in the presence of an unwanted child that reminds her of her
mistake, her life that went wrong. Antoine will soon discover that his father
is not his real father. Neither does he want to or is interested in him.
Antoine becomes a glob, a bulge that remains and annoys in the small space of
the apartment and in the burdened life of his parents. He has learned to get out
of the way, to disappear, to be submissive and diligent to go even more
unnoticed. But always fatally commits an error that materializes his existence
as something annoying to others.
At school, and not
infrequently due to chance, he is caught as the body of crime and punished
unjustly, as he writes. In that authoritarian and farcical school that is so
far away from educating under the republican motto of equality, freedom and
fraternity that the camera shows us, with acid irony, in a short shot. Stuffed
in a merchant's robe, the teacher that aspires to be in a police uniform, behaves
like a prison guard. And between both prisons, the home and the school, between
the emptiness of the lack of love and the weight of a blind law, the bitch of
his life elapses with two small oases of freedom: the street and his inner
world.
The street represents the friendship with René, the
companionship, the opening to the world of dreams that the cinema represents.
The cinema is Antoine's great hobby, and if one day he borders on happiness
with his parents, it is the day when he is taken to the cinema. The other great
hobby of Antoine is reading. The books allow him to survive in a corner of the
unpleasant domestic landscape. The books and films nourish the inner universe
of Antoine, expand it and enrich it, they provide a refuge from the aggression
and the inclemency of the outer wastelands. The books and the movies are the
real home and the real school for Antoine.
It is important to say that in spite of the scattered elements,
the four hundred blows is a film of autobiographical
content. François Truffaut was also a bastard son who was slow to discover that
the man who had given him his last name was not his real father. The misfortune
of Antoine was the misfortune of Truffaut, delivered, first, to the care of a
nurse and, later, to the successive care of his grandmothers. Bad student,
expelled from several schools, Truffaut also ended up in jail and in a juvenile
facility. Behind Antoine's taste for Balzac - for which he builds an altarpiece
- is Truffaut's love for books, expressed in numerous quotations and tributes
throughout his filmography, materialized in the adaptation of many novels,
sublimated to the end in Fahrenheit 451, the film based on a story by Ray
Bradbury, which showed a future cold and unlivable world in which the books
were banned and burned and an endeavoring group of men and women secretly memorizing
the masterpieces in order to transmit them to posterity.
The Antoine who sneaks into the cinema and who steals a
poster of “Summer with Monika, by Ingmar Bergman, is not far from the François
who at the age of fifteen already had founded a cinema-club and who, just a
year later, wrote movie reviews thanks to the support of André Bazin, the true
father figure in his life, to whom Truffaut dedicates his first film. Bazin,
critic and film theorist who sponsored the The French New Wave (Nouvelle Vague),
died of leukemia in November 1958, the month in which the shooting of The Four
Hundred Blows began, without actually seeing the great harvest that resulted
from his support for the enthusiastic group of young people that would change
the direction of French and world cinema.
Autobiographic? The movie could be like a novel, like a
poem, like a memory? Could a film be a personal testimony, a confession of one part,
an intimate chronicle? Until the arrival of The French New Wave (Nouvelle Vague),
no one had considered such a thing with a vocation and impetus for continuity.
And of course not under a stylistic guidelines related to such endeavor: realist
documentary , reflection of the everyday, low budget, lightness and simplicity
in the staging, recourse to non-professional or unknown actors, spontaneity in
the dialogues, flexibility in the follow-up of the script, rejection of
non-natural sets, refusal of academic rhetoric.
Truffaut and his first-time companions gave a new twist to
neo-realist postulates from Rossellini's proposal in particular-and transgress the
sclerotic and old narrative of French cinema for a few years, with films like The
400 Blows, giving way to a domino effect with the help of their English
contemporaries, they renew everywhere the vision of world cinema injecting it
with an unknown freshness and freedom that, despite the regression suffered in
the following years, still spreads everywhere.
Truffaut, gave a new light to modern cinema, tells us the
life’s episodes with a distance, with a lack of emphasis, with an informative
dryness and with an instantaneity that not only does not veil his touching and
moving vision, but he lets them flow until we, the spectators, capture all the
pain of the unfortunate Antoine Doinel, woven by the treacherous threads of
chance. Young Antoine gets entangled more and more in a chain of insignificant
crimes with punishment, robberies and lies that never deny his innocence and
whose serious consequences worsen his position with a deep strength, forged by
the previous suffering and by his condition as a survivor.
The desolate and questioning look that Antoine Doinel
directs us in the final scene (freeze frame) is not pathetic because it
anticipates new misfortunes, with not a few disadvantages, but also with
resources, the child knows, and we know, that he will have to address, from his confusion and helplessness, the arduous task of becoming a man without
love.
Cast.
Jean-Pierre Léaud as Antoine Doinel
Albert Rémy as Julien Doinel, Antoine's stepfather
Claire Maurier as Gilberte Doinel, Antoine's mother
Guy Decomble as Sourpuss, School teacher
Patrick Auffay as René Bigey, Antoine's best friend
Georges Flamant as Monsieur Bigey, René's father
Pierre Repp as an English teacher
Daniel Couturier as Betrand Mauricet
Luc Andrieux as Le professeur de gym
Robert Beauvais as director of the school
Yvonne Claudie as Mme Bigey
Marius Laurey as L'inspecteur Cabanel
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