French films are shit. Porquoi?

http://www.lefigaro.fr/flash-actu/2012/07/16/97001-20120716FILWWW00341-deces-de-l-actrice-tsilla-chelton.php

Tatie Danielle has died.

ilx loves its traditions but someone nix this thread

^^

William Klein season at Tate: http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/search?f[]=im_vid_47%3A1862

One for the Left Bank completists I guess..

Again: http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/eventseries/william-klein-films-1958-99

Should I see Les Enfants du Paradis?

heh that's a bit conventional for you right

i have never seen it probably because 'theatricality' as a trope doesn't really appeal

maybe worth seeing some earlier carné first

Love it

a must, other Carné too sure.

Techine's Unforgivable from this past year was pretty good esp the acting.

Loved Le Quai des Brumes, and, guff about 'poetic realism' aside I guess that's fairly conventional.

Other thing is I'm watching Rivette's Out 1 which is big on theatre and what's outside the stage...of course what is outside here is v different.

Just don't know if its worth the three hours...xp

fwiw, i loved the new digital print of Le Quai des Brumes, too, but i'm afraid the Enfants du Paradis revival bored me shitless, and i bailed at the halfway point.

Nilmar is right to suggest that it is very 'theatrical' in terms of both performance and staging - 'all the world's a stage' etc etc. it also seems to me to be a film that's quite hard to disentangle from its heroic production backstory.

to love it like gukbe, i think you wld maybe have to great affection for the central clown character, whereas i found him p insufferable.

needless to say, it is not v much like out one - or l'amour fou - which may be a gd or bad thing according to taste

Hors Satan is shit, bcz Bruno Dumont made it.

I thought it was impressive: the cinematography for a start was really well done for sure, but unlike many films it was made to be utterly crucial and integral to the overall scheme. You'd have to go back to Pavese's Devil in the Hills or maybe see Glauber Rocha's bandits in the Brazilian Sertão for parallels. Its as if the environment has such an effect upon their imaginations that they HAVE to act upon it, for good or bad and certainly for righteous ways. The film is mostly dialogue-less, a certainly disquieting one at that.

Other more obvious parallels in French film and w/Dreyer. However this has a realism that completely jars against the 'supernatural' occurences -- Dumont sure is a good catholic, the events made to look as miracles and also given room to be seen as non-miracles...recalling Pasolini.

I suspect the biggest problem is you may need to have watched some of those older films beforehand to get a handle on what's going on, otherwise they could be reduced to nastiness in the countryside w/pretty pictures...whereas you don't need that when picking up Dreyer or Pasolini. Not sure if it stands on its own terms.

From his wiki I see his next film stars Juliette Binoche.

I mentioned Polisse on another thread, which I enjyoed a lot.

Hor Satan is one of those (many) films that I'm glad I saw, afterwards, but found a bit of a trial at the time. Like Peter Greenaway, Dumont says he wants audiences to dwell on the film like someone would dwell on a painting. I find that a hard thing to do on a single viewing, and it's hard to summon up the motivation to take on multiple rewatchings of it.

One thing I did find interesting was the effect the title cast over the whole film. I suppose I assumed "Satan" referred to him, which may well be wrong. I wonder how I'd have seen him if I hadn't known the name of the film.

(which is Hors Satan, not Hor, yes, I know)

Christian iconography was mined to bits in the scenes depicting the manner in which the girl would rest upon the man's shoulder.

Great title...well it depends on how your read the Jesus story - he was a man, after all, capable of kindness but also moments of impatience and cruelty.

Yes. I came out of thinking: "maybe this is actually close to what the historical Jesus was like".

http://www.fandor.com/blog/daily-jeanne-moreau-85

Maybe a last job in a Bruno Dumont film?

what is Moderato Cantible like?

i'd never heard of it

I feel like Duras is the great lost French auteur of the 60s and 70s, had no idea she had another script job (and one of her own novels too). Genuinely intriguing.

and Moreau played her in a film!

I've seen nearly all of Maurice Pialat's features, but Under Satan's Sun for the first time today, and I somewhat empathize with the booers at Cannes. Maybe I'm just getting a low tolerance for minimalist spiritual melodramas, even with self-flagellation. (Exception: Gerard Depardieu is rather amazing in a pivotal miraculous scene.)

I quite liked Demy's Model Shop. (More than the two musicals I'm supposed to like...Rochefort was OK.) I can see why the guy who made L.A. Plays Itself had good things to say about it--it really is as much about driving around L.A. as anything else (plus the two main characters express their love for the city). Loved seeing Fred Willard and Spirit--Ed Cassidy even gets a line. (Thought another character was Robbie from My Three Sons, but no.) Lockwood's blonde girlfriend, Alexandra Hay, reminded me of Mena Suvari in American Beauty. Checking her name, I realize I know her from the universally celebrated The Love Machine. If you can look past the same language stiltedness that you find in Zabriskie Point and Fahrenheit 451--weird, because it's mostly English people speaking English--it's a great looking film, with other good stuff too. Thinking that the model shop scenes may have influenced Paris, Texas.

Watched Sexual Chronicles of a French Family the other day.

I wasn't amazed by it - watchable, more or less documentary style study of, well, what it says in the title. You see private lives of the parents, grandfather and young adult sons and daughter, and their various boyfriends and girlfriends. The position that it occupies – of liberal-progressive-middle-class openness about sexuality – seems like an assimilation to me, as if there were something lost in practical acceptance.

However, precisely because of that, I thought it was interesting as an example of a film that almost definitely wouldn't get made in Britain, and interesting how that cultural divide is still there (this no longer a question of direct censorship but of culture). Over here, attempts by Guardian relationships columnists (insert other relevant strawmen here) to be laid back and chill about sexuality, partaking of the same spirit as this film, don't seem to hold much sway against the spirit that informs The Sun's 'relationship photo stories'.

as for Demy, he's getting a 2-week NYC retro in October.

Jacques Becker's Antoine and Antoinette is recirculating (beginning in NY today) -- a romantic comedy with a really slight lottery-ticket plot, but the leads are very sexy and have great chemistry, and the unglamorous Paris locations and ensemble players give it juice.

http://www.fandor.com/blog/daily-jacques-beckers-antoine-and-antoinette

A poll of the 100 best French films. I have never made it 30 minutes into #1, and dislike #2.

http://www.lesinrocks.com/2014/03/05/cinema/top-100-plus-beaux-films-francais-11468683/

Great showing on #9 there.

Morbs u should try #1 again. Eustache is all that he's said to be and more.

Director I clearly need to investigate a little further: Jacques Rozier.

Is this list the French equivalent of the IMDB top 250? It looks like critics picked, and The Intouchables isn't listed, so maybe not.

Richard Brody's twitter stream has the major complaints

only 18 critics

http://www.lesinrocks.com/2014/04/01/cinema/plus-beaux-films-francais-les-tops-des-critiques-11493878/

I see that Sans soleil, with just 1 vote, was in the 60s or 70s on this list, so a very small sample, et al.

I fancy a Eustache now and then but that poll is ridiculous

ahem, "poll" as in, "i polled my friends at this bar table..."

I'm all for gay pr0n in the top 20 or so.

All top 20 slots should probably be gay secks, actually.

Finally saw one of my Holy Grail films: Alain Jessua's Life Upside Down. (Everyone has their own list--films either out of circulation for ages, or that require paying way too much for bootleg copies over the internet.) I first became interested in it 35 years ago because of a great review in Stanley Kauffmann's A World on Film. A friend had it on VHS, so now that my player is hooked up, I was able to borrow her copy (a traded bootleg).

Similar to Shoot the Piano Player, but without the pathos--as the film progresses, it moves closer to something like Safe (how I remember it anyway, it's been a while). It does achieve a kind of small-scale perfection. Memorable final shot. Not sure why it disappeared, or why Criterion or somebody doesn't make it available.

http://s3.amazonaws.com/auteurs_production/images/film/life-upside-down/w448/life-upside-down.jpg?1289469325

anyone have firsthand opinion of Jacques Rozier, or Maine Océan in particular?

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2012/02/jacques-rozier-odd-man-out.html

http://www.fiaf.org/events/spring2014/2014-05-27-cs-maine.shtml

Never seen it.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x18vsxg_master-class-de-arnaud-desplechin_shortfilms?start=802
oh! france and their integration of anglicism

un autre que je vais voir "en ligne" étant donné que j'ai eu de la misère à le télécharger: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xi7u6w_la-master-class-d-agnes-varda_shortfilms : elle le dit d'emblée "master class? ne lui plait pas :-)

Anyone like That Man from Rio (1964)? Hardly "great," but often very funny and Belmondo zips through it like an heir to Cary Grant, Harold Lloyd and Jerry Lewis (doing a number of great fight/chase/plane stunts).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceB4bqJVEYg

Definitely interested to see. Is it still playing?

two more days at FF

now held over

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/04/The_Mother_and_the_Whore.jpg

Does anybody else like this film, "The Mother and the Whore" (1973)?

219min of following an idealistic slacker played by Jean-Pierre Léaud. It's a pretty light affair, but one I love to watch as a comfort film, plus beautiful black and white paris.

I can't understand why it's not on DVD yet. I have a taped copy, but no longer have a working tape player

I've tried to watch it twice, hated the first 20 minutes both times. (Library videocassette from New Yorker Films.)