So I’m on day three of my movie challenge. My chosen theme was Aliens + French post-war cinema. The hardest part of this is not choosing movies, but simply making time every day to watch them.
Aliens: I don’t have much to say that hasn’t been added before. This was my first full viewing, and I was amazed at how patient the movie was. Aside from the facehugger, I don’t think you see an alien for the first hour. Also, the marines are certainly badass, but good lord are they colossally stupid. Ripley’s the one that has to point out explosives in a nuclear reactor are bad? They don’t want to know anything about the aliens beforehand?
Bob La Flambeur (Jean-Pierre Melville): The first half of this is fairly staid, until they start planning the heist, but that can probably be said about every heist movie. I appreciated how in the end this was actually an anti-heist. And Melville is a master of camerawork for even the simplest scenes. At one point Bob is in the kitchen, deciding between tea and whisky, and Melville stuck the camera in the top corner of the room, giving an overhead view. Totally unnecessary, but it worked.
Pickpocket (Robert Bresson): I didn’t like this. Wooden acting. The main character talks about how supermen should be able to do what they like, but is in no way a superman, but simply a common criminal.
There’s a reason why “Bressonian” is a word. He had a very painterly style and he preferred to use non-actors…hence the perceived woodenness. It all comes off very heavy, but man does he get some beautiful shots.
If you ever try him again, do see “A Man Escaped”. Of the Bresson films I’ve seen, that’s my favorite.
Pickpocket is probably his most “wooden” one, however the wooden acting thing is all about stripping away the artifice. The interesting thing about Bresson is that he makes you realise how inexpressive people are in real life and how little you look at people’s faces. Hence all the shots of feet and hands. It makes us uncomfortable and it feels unrealistic (at first anyway) but like a good poem it speaks volumes about life with economy.
I don’t think beautiful shots is really what he’s about either though, his earlier stuff is quite picturesque in particular Diary of a Country Priest. He wanted a spare look (very well achieved in Man Escaped) that didn’t elevate things above reality too much. Later on he used less music too because he felt it transcended the reality of the film too much, often he plays music at the beginning and end though to sort of whisk you in and out of the experience. Smart guy.
He was really one of the last narrative dramatists to explore alternative methods of acting/directing/etc in a proper commercial situation. Even films that are “avant -garde” or controversial like a Shame or an (barf) Antichrist rely heavily on “naturalistic” acting and slick lighting to make their points, Bresson (for me anyway) says a lot more by imbuing the make-up of the medium itself with his world-view.
I really like Bresson!
p.s. MikeP try and watch Riffifi, it’s a fantastic French film by a fantastic (exiled) American director.
The idea that people in real life are inexpressive is an interesting idea. Many people are certainly bored, or putting on a face. In documentaries, people often act artificial. I’m not sure, however, it makes for a “fun” movie.
Re: music. That took me out of Pickpocket as well. The music never seemed to quite match what was on screen. It felt more like music to be listened to by itself rather than atmospheric.
I’ve already seen Rififi, which I think makes it ineligible for the movie challenge. I will try a A Man Escaped a try someday.
The other is that, in retrospect, the whole time Gould/Marlowe is saying “That’s OK with me.” it really isn’t. Maybe it takes the end of the movie, and the constant soaking in injustice (the moll, etc) to finally push through the facade, and finally, finally, we see some of the anger that Marlowe’s been repressing the whole time when he settles with Terry. There’s a psychological defense that some authors refer to as ‘reaction formation’ in which people ostensibly like something they really fear/hate - it isn’t an exact match here (Marlowe’s fictional, after all) but there’s something similar in his repeated mantra and exaggerated agreeableness in situations that are anything but agreeable.
I would also note that movie Marlowe is a significantly different character than book Marlowe. That’s OK with me.
I’m confused. First, you say to watch genuinely great movies, then you suggest I watch an unwatchably bad and pretentious bit of late period Orson Welles wankery, a film that at a little over an hour feels longer than the extended cut of Fanny and Alexander.
Just finished movie #5. Thank God the French are polite enough to keep their movies at 1.5-2hrs, unlike some Hollywood blockbusters.
Mon Oncle (Jacques Tati): These feels like a more personal version of Playtime. Mr. Hulot + modern appliances = gold.
Elevator to the Gallows (Louis Malle): My favourite so far, just a great noir that at the same time play against expectations. Apparently Malle worked with Bresson, and the cinematographer also did Bob la Flambeur. And he was only 24!
This film has like three or four different titles, I always knew it as Lift to the Scaffold (much less dramatic!). It’s a good one, you should try and see The Fire Within, very pretentious (I think anyway) in places but really engaging nonetheless. All his later weird incest/violent sex/child in a brothel stuff I’m not a huge fan of.
We got to play around with rushes from a scene of Damage in film school once, it gave me the impression he got too comfortable. Almost nothing spontaneous or off-kilter came out of anyone, Jeremy Irons did his usual staring contest, it just seemed like a room full of wonderful actors that weren’t being pushed at all. I suppose he pushed Binoche in those sex scenes though…eugh.
Last weekend was a Harry Potter weekend on the Family Channel. Did those count? They are definitely better movies than what Spike was showing, the most recent three Star Wars movies.
I watched the first half of Kansas City Bomber, in which Raquel Welch struggles to maintain her dream of roller derby stardom despite jealous teammates and lecherous owners.
Whether I can keep this up for a whole week remains to be seen, but I kicked off my summer exploration of French New Wave cinema last night with Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless. It was my second attempt at Godard; my first, Masculin Feminin, was initially fascinating, but ultimately descended into boredom and tedium, and I never finished it.
This time, it was a completely different experience. Initially, I was only going to watch the first ten minutes or so – I figure the New Wave is disjointed enough already it doesn’t matter if I watch it all in one go, and I was tired – but found myself completely captivated by it. I was particularly impressed by the pacing, switching effortlessly from frenetic to languid and back again.
At first blush, I find Godard a bit brash, but there is a certain impish charm evident in his work (what little of it I’ve seen, anyway). I’m definitely going to watch more.
Breathless really is the perfect intro to Godard - it’s gorgeously shot (has any city ever looked as good as Paris does in Breathless?), it’s brimming with youthful energy and the sheer excitement at the possibilities of cinema, and Jean Seberg is crazy, crazy hot. As a calling card for the French New Wave, it’s without equal.
Watching a lot of Godard can be a pretty draining experience, so I don’t necessarily think you should go whole hog into the catalog. But if you’re interested, I suggest following up with Contempt and then Weekend, which gives you a real strong indication of his themes and strengths as a film-maker.
I finished up my week a few days ago, with Last Year and Marienbad, and Contempt, neither of which I enjoyed. I won’t comment on Marienbad, since I couldn’t even get through 20 minutes of it.
As for Contempt, I’ve see you, madkevin, recommend it before, and I don’t understand why. It certainly is well filmed, but the subjects of the movie - a dysfunctional couple, and movie-making politics - were utterly boring. There are lots of good films about moviemaking, and the people involved - 8 1/2, American Movie - but no one cares about infighting between directors and producers. I would really like to know what you see in Contempt, because I’m missing it.
Marienbad, as far as I’m concerned, is one of the most overrated films of all time. It’s an interesting idea but it’s so one-note. So dull.
Since we’re speaking about Godard generally I think the problem he often has is that he addresses ideas about how a film is made too often. The things I like about Contempt on reflection are all about technique, things like the car crash, the use of tracking and his use of cinemascope. The characters are fairly dull.
I think the most successful of his films are Vivre Sa Vie and Bande a part, they manage to fuse interesting characters with interesting ideas about the medium in an engaging way.
Part of it is the backstory to the making of the movie itself, which is one of the greatest fuck-yous any director has ever given to the mainstream American movie establishment. Contempt had a high budget ($1 million bucks of 1963 money), certainly the largest budget Godard ever worked with. The producers of the film insisted he use Bridgitte Bardot as the female lead, solely based on her looks. Godard’s response is the opening of the movie: you see Bardot lounging in bed, but in sections, cut into parts by close up and editing. Even without knowing the backstory, the scene itself works perfectly well as a comment on how mainstream movies perceive women as sexual objects.
Contempt is dripping with that sort of self-reflection. Godard spends his million dollars making a widescreen movie that he almost immediately undercuts by having Fritz Lang of all people comment early on how widescreen is only good for filming “snakes and funerals”, and then decides to give up the middle third of the movie to a claustrophobic apartment as we watch a marriage disintegrate.
(Contempt also proves without a shadow of a doubt in my mind that, had he wanted to, Godard could have been a very successful mainstream movie maker. One of the common criticisms of the avant-garde is that the people involved are simply incapable of making anything else, but that’s not true of Godard at all. The opening Italian vistas in Contempt are insanely beautiful, which makes his decision to shut the viewer inside for the middle of the film even more maddeningly funny to me.)
This is probably not the first time I’ve said this here, and it probably won’t be the last, but almost every movie of his first period (Breathless to Weekend) contains one-third pretention, one-third frustration and one-third genius. Watching how he positions the camera throughout the apartment during that section of Contempt, shooting essentially in real time as he carefully composes shots to maximize the feeling of alienation the couple has from each other, is a technical marvel to me. It’s using the language of movies in such a strong way, but it’s also maddening because you want to see them, and their alienation becomes your alienation.
Anyway, that’s just scratching the surface. Contempt is one of those 60s masterpieces like Fellini’s 8 1/2 or Antonioni’s trilogy that I could just unpack forever.
Good points well made madkevin! I agree that Godard could have made some really successful mainstream pieces, have you seen Weekend? I don’t think I’ve ever seen better arguments on screen in my life.
Yep, Weekend is brilliant. (I recommended it to Omniscia upthread.) I think of Weekend as the absolute apex of his whole early period, which is of course how Godard intended it to be. (The end titles are hilarious: a French play-on-words that switches the phrase “End of Film” for “End of Cinema” - in other words, Weekend was supposed to be the end of cinema.)
Weekend is most famous for that insane tracking shot of the traffic jam, and justifiably so: another technical tour-de-force that works like one of those jokes that starts funny, but then gets irritating as it goes on, only to cycle back around to be really funny again. But there’s so much more he packs into Weekend it’s almost embarassing- setting the Bronte Sisters on fire, that indelible image of a skinned rabbit, the titles proclaiming Weekend as a “movie found on a scrap heap”.
I keep hoping Criterion announces a bluray of it soon. They released this incredible poster of it, apparently just to tease me:
