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

Citizen Kane 1941

In addition to the use of wide angles, low angles, depth of field, the narrative technique of flashbacks, Citizen Kane was a kind of criticism about the use of the press by the powerful. What can be said about Citizen Kane that has not been said so far? 77 years have passed since its premiere on May 1, 1941 at the RKO Palace on Broadway in New York. Today the film is still considered a masterpiece that divided the history of American cinema.

The film, inspired by the life of press mogul William Randolph Hearst, consolidated a very young Orson Welles as one of the most important characters in the history of cinema. He was only 25 years old when he starred, wrote, directed and produced this story that speaks of ambition, corruption and power, but also of loneliness and betrayal, of hurt feelings where lack of love is key to understand the behavior of Charles Foster Kane.

Welles, who directed and acted in the film at the age of 25, captured the relationship between power and the media; the main character Charles Foster Kane uses his newspaper, Inquirer, for propaganda purposes in favor of campaigns of personal interest and as a tool to finish off his enemies. The enormous influence that the press has on citizens was the main reason that prompted Kane to buy the Inquirer newspaper, initially thinking about giving voice to the people. The great importance of what is being published is reflected on the protagonist's obsession by personally reviewing all the articles.

Hearst and the Press.

Experts agree that Foster is a caricature of American businessman William Randolph Hearst, who controlled the newspapers Examiner and Morning Journal. In 1898 he published the declaration of war made by the United States to Spain.  On April 25, 1898 the battleship Maine of the US Navy sank in the Bay of Havana due to a fortuitous explosion. Hearst sent the cartoonist Frederick Remington to the site, who once there found that there was nothing strange to give news and that the sinking could not be attributed to the war with Spain so he sent a telegram: "Everything is calm. There will be no war, I want to return, "Hearst replied:" You provide illustrations that I will put the war. "

Citizen Kane has been leading for 50 years the top ten on the list of best films of all time from the prestigious magazine Sight & Sound. Since 2012, it is Vertigo, by Alfred Hitchcock, which occupies the first position in the ranking that the British publication makes every decade with the help of 846 critics, programmers and distributors.

The renowned critic Roger Ebert said that Citizen Kane was, officially, the best film in history. The passage of time has only stoked the strength of their images, the power of their narrative language with the use of flash-backs, a spectacular staging with scenarios where small details are appreciated, the use of highly contrasted images and the insistence of depth of field, as well as the wide angles and the long sequence shots, which supposed a revolution in cinematographic aesthetics and that have had inspiring effects in later works.

The use of the narrative technique of flashback, the inclusion of the viewer in the plot, camera movements, positioning and angles, as well as sound and editing make the film one of the best American feature films in history of cinema, ratified by the American Film Institute.

"Apart from his impeccable script, which addresses issues such as vital futility, nostalgia, the value of simplicity or ambition, Citizen Kane brought a multitude of technical advances such as an elaborate staging, the detailed use of wide angle and depth of field, the fluid capacity to move the camera beyond the frame, the ingenious use of montage or its innovative use of sound as a narrative mechanism ",

On The Set

Filming this feature was not an easy task. Hearst tried to boycott it and in fact he succeeded. Its premiere was scheduled two and a half months earlier but was postponed due to pressures exerted by the almighty press tycoon, who would attack the film in its media and try to prevent the film from being distributed.

Total creative freedom

Welles was an ambitious young man who was trained in theater and radio. He had carte blanche to do what he wanted despite of not having previous experience in the world of cinema. This was guaranteed by the succulent contract with RKO studios, which would make him the best-paid filmmaker with greater independence in the history of American cinema. Welles moved like a fish in the water during the filming and brought his companions of the Mercury Theater to the set, among them his great friend Joseph Cotten.

Three years earlier, in 1938, he had achieved unparalleled success with his radio address of The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells. It was a narrative that caused panic among the listeners, who took believed the extraterrestrial invasion. As a result of that, he achieved the genius label and his first film recorded his mastery as a filmmaker.

Controversy

The controversy that generated the film was such that RKO Pictures received monetary offers to destroy it before its public premiere. After a negotiation with Hearst's lawyers, the film company pressured the director to remove some fragments of the film. One of the deleted scenes referred to the suspicious death of Thomas Ince, a movie mogul who died during a Hearst birthday party. During its production, Citizen Kane was known with the code of RKO 281. At first the film was going to be called “American”, but the head of RKO George Schaefer suggested to change it to Citizen Kane. Orson Welles thought about calling the film “John Q”.

The script

There is an open debate about the true authorship of the script, which was awarded the only Oscar of the nine nominations in the 1942 Oscar edition. The veteran screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, a heavy drinker and addicted to the game, had attended many of the parties organized by Hearst in Hollywood. Once, the tycoon denied Mankiewicz entry to one of them, claiming he had problems with alcohol. The veteran film critic Pauline Kael published in 1971 in The New Yorker an investigation that pointed to Herman as the author of the script in an alcoholic rehabilitation center where he was locked up to comply with the writing of the text. In the article Raising Kane the journalist demystifies the role that Welles had in the script and ensures that, despite appearing in the credits, he did not collaborate in a single line. This position was not liked by many critics like Peter Bogdanovich, filmmaker and great friend of Welles who refuted many of Kael's claims. Charles Lederer, screenwriter and one of the journalist's sources, insisted that the Screen Writers Guild was never called upon to arbitrate the issue of credits. In any case, Welles' tendency to egocentricity often moved him to disdain the contributions of his collaborators.

Welles kept the set closed, limited access to footage, and controlled Citizen Kane's publicity to make sure the plot was kept a secret. The first months of filming Welles kept the curious and the press away claiming that they were just rehearsing, which paid off. Filming took place between June 29 and October 23, 1940 on the Paramount set in Hollywood. It was also shot at Balboa Park and the San Diego Zoo, as well as at Oheka Castle in Huntington, New York.

The mystery of Rosebud

Rosebud is the great secret of the story, the last word that Kane says before dying and has come to be considered one of the most important last words in the history of cinema. Only at the end of the film does the viewer know that Rosebud is the name of the sled Kane played as a child, the image of a longed-for childhood. But Rosebud is much more; in fact it was the affectionate nickname that Hearst gave to the private parts of his lover, the actress Marion Davies, whom he tried to cast in vain to stardom. In the film, Davies is presented as a frivolous and interested woman, but the truth is that when Hearst went bankrupt, she helped him overcome the crisis by selling her valuable jewelry.

About Rosebud Welles said that it was a resource to "tear" the story. "The Rosebud trick is what I like least about the movie. It's just that, a trick, and it looks like it's taken from a third book about Freud for beginners, "he said. Steven Spielberg bought the famous sleigh at an auction in 1982 for $ 50,000. When Orson Welles heard about this, he said: "I thought we had burned it."

Narrative Error

Maybe few people will have noticed, but the truth is that Citizen Kane has an important mistake at the beginning of the film. If Kane dies alone in his room, how is it possible that the press is intrigued to know the meaning of Rosebud, the last word that comes out of his mouth? Legend has it that there were those who realized the error before the premiere of the film, but Welles asked them not to tell anyone. It seems that critics did not realize this "error", because the film had an overwhelming majority of positive opinions after its release, although it was a commercial failure.

Reference.

Orson Welles claimed that, before performing Citizen Kane, he had prepared himself by watching the film The Stagecoach (1939) by John Ford about 40 times. He locked himself in his house and watched the legendary western each time with a different technician in order to clarify doubts and be clear about how he was going to present his story. So, when he showed up on the set, he really knew what he wanted for his movie.

The original negatives of the film have been lost. They were destroyed during a fire in the 70s. Also, the entire crew that was part of the film has died. Kathryn Popper, the last actress who was still alive, passed away in March 2016. Popper served as personal assistant to Orson Welles and was the one who pronounced the famous phrase "What is Rosebud?"

Cast:

Orson Welles,  Joseph Cotten,  Everett Sloane,  George Coulouris, Dorothy Comingore,  Ray Collins,  Agnes Moorehead,  Paul Stewart,  Ruth Warrick, Erskine Sanford,  William Alland,  Alan Ladd,  Arthur O'Connell

Awards

1941: Oscar Awards: Best Original Screenplay. 9 nominations

1941: National Board of Review: Best Film

1941: Circle of critics of New York: Better film

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

The film signed by Robert Wiene under the suggestive title of Cabinet of Doctor Caligari (Das Kabinett des Dr Caligari) is considered the first horror film. His legacy in modern cinema is evident, but not only for obvious reasons. While the most striking aspect of the film is the ingenious avant-garde design of the sets (mise en scene), palpably unreal and theatrical, in this revolutionary psychological thriller by director Robert Wiene, there are other elements, more subtle, that have become habitual of cinematographic narrative techniques. Architecturally speaking the film deals with issues of representation like 2d and 3d, flatness and depth all in terms of the set design.

Although the "unreliable narrator" was already fundamental in literature (since the time of the Greek playwright Aristophanes), it had not yet been used in cinema. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari introduces him with the character of Franzis (Friedrich Fehér). The story told by Franzis begins with a love triangle in appearance quite innocent (two friends compete for the love of the same woman), but of course, appearances deceive.

The writers, Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer, initially wrote the plot as a criticism of the attitude of the German government during the First World War: Caligari is a villain who induces an innocent sleepwalker to commit murder. However, during the production process, the story was drifting towards something more complex and led to another first in the cinema: the unexpected ending.

Janowitz and Mayer were inspired by a dark 11th-century story about a trickster monk who exerts a mysterious influence on a man he welcomes. In his script, the monk becomes a doctor, whom Franzis and his rival, Alan (Hans Heinrich von Twardowski), meet at a town fair.

The strange Dr. Caligari (Werner Krauss) appears as a showman who shows the ghostly Cesare (Conrad Veidt) lying inside his so-called cabinet (actually, a coffin). Caligari, the "master" of Cesare, assures that he "knows all the secrets" and invites the audience to ask him anything. Alan, visibly upset, asks: How long will I live? To which Cesare replies: Until dawn. Here is another resource of horror movies taken from innumerable stories: the fool who tempts fate. The unfortunate Alan is found dead the next morning.

The expressionist style

The aesthetics and style of the film were greatly influenced by the legendary Max Reinhardt, director of the Deutsches Theater in Berlin. His anti-realist style, inspired in turn by the expressionism of the early twentieth century, combined the artificiality of the theatrical setting and the manipulation of darkness (instead of light) to create chiaroscuro envelopes, thus generating a mysterious and disturbing atmosphere.

Wiene uses lighting with astonishing ability to suggest that we are only witnessing an extravagant melodrama, an idea reinforced by the frequent and sinister close-ups, most of the supposedly insane Caligari, to convince the public that he is seeing a story of good and evil . However, when it becomes clear that the perspective of any character should not be taken literally, the distorted backgrounds and angles begin to make sense. They do not obey only a disturbing style, but are part of the plot: the sets of Walter Reinmann, Walter Röhring and Hermann Warm seem to reflect a world gone mad.

One of the reasons for the prevalence of the film is that it is the first that leads the public into the mind of a madman, anticipating Hitchcock's psychosis. His horror reverberates in our own fear of the mask of sanity with which even the most disturbed individuals can deceive us.

Robert Wiene Director

Born in 1873, in Breslau, Wiene wrote and directed in 1913 the short film Die Waffen von Jugend (The Weapons of Youth), the first of about twenty films (long and short) that he made during the silent era. After a prolific career in Germany, he fled the Nazi regime in the early 1930s and settled in France. He died of cancer when he shot The Ultimatum (1938), and was finished the also exiled Robert Siodmak.

Main films

1913 The weapons of youth.

1920 The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari

1923 Raskolnikov.

1924 The hands of Orlac.

s of strangeness, irrationality, elements of a imaginary world where there is no sense, but that reflects a very real feeling, such as sexual desire, when a woman's breasts are seized, there is a rebellion to express her beliefs.

An Andalusian Dog 1928

An Andalusian dog, by Luis Buñuel, is a title that marked a before and after in the history of cinema. Let's go back no less than until 1929, year in which the creators were for the effort to break with conventional rationality and impose a logic subverted. There are many things that are widely known about An Andalusian dog. That it was possible to realize thanks to the 25,000 pesetas that the mother of Luis Buñuel contributed with; that the script was co-written by the director and by Salvador Dalí; that Federico García Lorca felt alluded to by the title of the film, to which Buñuel always responded by saying that he did not refer to the poet from Granada but that he corresponded to that of a book of his own poems; that the plot development of the film does not follow a logical order, in correspondence with the essential postulates of surrealism; that the soundtrack is composed of Argentine tangos and music by Richard Wagner ... But, perhaps, there is an element that seems to be only to make a brutal impact on the viewer but that makes full sense according to the characteristics of An Andalusian dog. Of course, we are talking about the first sequence, in which a razor cuts the eye of the protagonist. Apart from the sadistic component that the image shows, as a reflection of the destructive instincts that populate our unconscious, there is a second intention: to announce that An 

Andalusian Dog aims to take down our conventional gaze and discover a new form of film narration.

But, first of all, to be fair, An Andalusian Dog is not the first title that introduced the avant-garde into cinema. This honor corresponds to La Coquille et le Clergyman by the director Germaine Dulac, which was held a year earlier, in 1928. We cannot deny that the fact that Germaine Dulac was a woman meant that this background does not have the recognition it deserves. But it is no less true that Buñuel did achieve something that the short film by Dulac did not; while in La Coquille et le Clergyman the composition of the images was very important and that caused the film to have a certain static character, Buñuel ( thanks, especially to having been assistant director in several titles of Jean Epstein and Jacques Feyder) was able to give the film a dynamic character with an extremely intelligent use of editing and a masterful use of the cinematographic space (and flagrant violations of it) , which gave the short film an agile rhythm that, later, would be the hallmark of the Aragonese style.

An Andalusian dog (Un chien andalou) does not have any dog nor any Andalusian. It is believed that the title is a surrealist "homage" to Federico García Lorca, who was already at odds with the directors. The poet of course took it for granted. Buñuel was 29 years old (it was his first movie) and Dalí 25. They both decided to make an experimental cinema, emerged as directly as possible from the subconscious. Buñuel said: "We wrote the script in less than a week, following a very simple rule: not to accept an idea or image that could give rise to a rational, psychological or cultural explanation."

Indeed, everything in the film escapes logic. The script, written in six days, captured the first images that came to mind to the two young men, among them the famous razor in the eye.  Just in case, at the premiere, Buñuel stayed behind the stage armed with stones, smelling a lynching. The case is that An Andalusian dog became an indisputable cult film that marked thousands of filmmakers and other subsequent artists, from Magritte or Man Ray to David Lynch or the Pixies.

Imagine the bewilderment of the people when you saw the movie at the premiere. Not only because of the little knife scene ... Sex, violence and sacrilege are in almost all frames: putrefying Donkeys (a possible reference to "Platero and I", which both artists hated), hands with ants (a reference in Dalí's work), bishops dragged as a criticism to Catholicism.

The film aimed to bring the dreams that these artists had to a level of expression, so the images do not have much connection in terms of history, but in each of them you can highlight the elements of strangeness, irrationality, elements of a imaginary world where there is no sense, but that reflects a very real feeling, such as sexual desire, when a woman's breasts are seized, there is a rebellion to express her beliefs.

FILMHAUS Fall 2108

I've been wanting to do this since I came to A&M. Our first architecture film club FILMHAUS. Thanks to AIAS, Emily Majors and Austin Madrigale. Fridays at 5pm. C 105.  Discussion at the end of the film.