other French New Wave-ers

[SoNowThen]

sounds interesting, I will definitely check him out...

...merci.

[Gold Trumpet]

For SoNowThen: As much of a fan of Stanley Kauffmann I know you are, I thought you would like to see an excerpt from his original review of "Cleo From 5 to 7" in which he says, under his own belief, the rules one has to follow in making their own French New Wave film:

1.) Get a good cameraman. The worst of these films is interestingly, if not beautifully, photographed.
2.) Get a story. This is less important. Your story need not be gripping or valid.
3.) Cast the female lead with a photogenic girl, not necessarily an actress. Be guided by the soulful expressions of high-fashion models.
4.) Lay it on. "It" is the New Wave repertoire of stunts, camera techniques, and cutting. Examples: Use freakish faces for minor characters (this is candor). Use a little nudeness (this is maturity). Include long walks through a city, preferably Paris; just long, pointless walks - to show that you are as free of plot contrivances as Antonioni. Dwell on such bizarerie as street performers who swallow and regurtitate live frogs or push hatpins through their biceps (this shows how ugly life is and how you are facing it). Let your microphone record snatches of irrelevant conversations at neighboring cafe tables (this wraps your story in a naturalistic web). Retain the footage where passers-by stare into the camera (thus you prove that you "stole" your film from the street and that you wear rue with a difference). Do not omit Resnais backward jumps (cutting back to a moment just passed), as this expresses a mystique about time. Have your heroine sing a torch song, July Garlanded with Angst. And if you can work in some silent-film burlesque, a la Malle, you will demonstrate both your superiority to and your respect for early movies.

As you can guess, Kauffmann generally mocked The French New Wave. SoNowThen knows I'm not giving any opinion, but presenting him with a gift of writings from my favorite critic.

~rougerum

[SoNowThen]

If Stanley Kaufmann ever smiled, his face might crack.

I'll tell you my problem with this: when you try to make a film, nothing will ever be perfect. Some mistakes might end up interesting, some might just end up as mistakes. But critics who nitpick everything.... I mean, what is their function?

GT, I liked you better when you actually gave opinions. Have you watched any French New Wave films and enjoyed even a part of them? Tell us about that.

[Gold Trumpet]

I haven't seen enough French New Wave films to comment on the whole thing generally. My location is secluded and basically would force me to buy $40 criterion dvds just in order to see them. The French New Wave films that I have seen, I have already commented on in more specific threads. And what I posted is general mocking, Kauffmann's arguments for specific films go deeper than just "nitpick" everything. His arguments are more for the fundamentals of French New Wave.

~rougerum

[SHAFTR]

I'm taking a European New Waves Film Class and here are the films that we will be watching for the French New Wave section include....

...And God Created Woman (DVD)
Elevator to the Gallows (16mm)
Breathless (16mm)
Les Bonnes Femmes (35mm)
Hiroshima mon amour (16mm)
Vivre sa vie (16mm)

[SoNowThen]

Les Bonnes Femmes (35mm)

The more I think about this one the more I wanna see it again. Very interesting. The compositions especially made it so great, even though the camera rarely moved, the frames chosen were just fucking fantastic.


You get to see Vivre sa Vie on film? You are lucky. What a wonderful experience that was seeing for the first time (and each time after...).

[Seraphim]

I'm definitively going to check out Robert Bresson's bleak world vey soon (Mouchette and Au hasard Balthazar).

Does anybody know him, or does someone have any reflections about his work?

He was some kind of member of the New Wave, but different than Godard or Truffaut.

Much more serious, I guess. Much more in the league of Ingmar Bergman and Tarkovsky, both in ideas/ thoughts (very spiritual, religious questions, etcetera) and visuals (more like Bergman, I guess).

Bresson's world should be very difficult to get into. Much concentration is required, not for everybody...

I would love to see those films!!



Links:
Bresson
Bresson
Bresson
Bresson


By the way:
for New Wavers like Truffaut and Godard, Jean Cocteau was an early example and influence for the likes of Truffaut, Bresson, etcetera!
Check out Orphee (1949) especially: highly magical, poetic, surrealistic...special.

Cocteau was a poet more than a director...

Definitively search for that, if you like both the New Wave as the surrealistic stuff of Bunuel, Fellini...!


Cocteau
Cocteau
Cocteau

[SoNowThen]

I watched another great Rohmer movie last night, The Collector-Girl. It makes me even more excited for the upcoming couple Criterion releases of his moral tales. Here's an article about the movie:

"Most people admire the sheer obstinacy of Eric Rohmer, who continues to make rather donnishly talky films, generally grouped together under a vague theme, long after his sort of very French and certainly intellectual cinema went out of vogue.
Not everybody likes them. They are sometimes thought just too damned civilised. But a good many older critics, and certainly older cinema-goers, still find them a blessing among the crude clatter of Hollywood and the often boringly predictable 'art' of many of Rohmer's European contemporaries.

The Six Moral Tales form probably his most famous series. Most would vote for My Night at Maud's or Claire's Knee as the best of these variations on the theme of a man committed to a woman but deflected by a chance meeting with another. My favourite, however, is La Collectionneuse, the freshness of which makes up for its lack of sophisticated perfection of form. And Haydee Politoff's bikini-clad young collector of men, who is the fulcrum of the drama, adds an erotic frisson even Claire's Knee didn't manage. Rohmer's camera fixes on her as she walks, bronzed and half naked along the beach, as if to see if he can analyse not just her body but the nature which leads her to sleep with a different partner each night, virtually without thought or more than momentary pleasure.

The real central character, however, is Adrien, the good-looking but decidedly solemn intellectual who decides that he will not be seduced, much as he would like to be, but instead will wait for the English representative of true love briefly seen at the start of the film. He shares a St Tropez villa with the temptress and a rather more immediately likeable painter (Daniel Pommeruelle, a real-life artist). Rohmer analyses his three leading characters rather as if they were moths flying a little too near the light of desire. It's nothing like a conventionally romantic or erotic film, but its hazy aura of summer in the south of France gives it at least an air of romantic and/or sexual expectation.

What Rohmer is on about, of course, is the way human nature plays the game of love, with hesitation, subterfuge and often perversity. He has constantly returned to that theme ever since, with films as full of dialogue as most nowadays eschew it. The moral dilemmas are interior but the film-making is precise and objective. There is irony to spare, but little overt comedy and no parody.

Rohmer has said that his films reach out only to the small minority prepared for the cinema's less spectacular pleasures, and he certainly adhered to the tenets of the critic and writer André Bazinmore more than his fellow critics and film-makers with the influential New Wave Cahiers group (who in the end rejected him as reactionary).

Whether he actually is sometimes tiresomely old-fashioned is a moot point. Certainly he has more in common with Renoir, the old master of French cinema, than either Godard, Truffaut, Rivette or Chabrol. His point, well-made in La Collectionneuse as in all the Moral Tales, is that the secret dilemmas of individuals are as important as those of 'the people' or the state. But if that seems obvious, the films themselves seldom are. They are variations on a theme that almost seems to have a musical dimension - fluent, sometimes surprising and always intriguing to listen to if seldom powerful enough to rip your emotions apart.

Drama, for Rohmer, is made up of a number of frequently small incidents which culminate in an inevitable denouement. There are many kinds of film-making but Rohmer's would be very difficult to beat within the confines of his chosen metier."

(from The Guardian)

[godardian]

That Autumn thing from a couple of years ago, though... blandness. Would love to see that DV period thing that came out last year, though.

[SHAFTR]

I just watched My Life to Live and I really loved that film.  I really dig Godard's early stuff.  The story might not impress me that much, but I still find myself enjoying the films just b/c of Godard's ability to just show how good he really is.

Also I saw Hiroshima, Mon Amour and Chabrol's Les Bonnes Femmes.  I enjoyed both for different reasons.  Les Bonnes Femmes surprised me and I loved how crazy it was.  Hiroshima, Mon Amour is the closest thing to film as poetry.

[MacGuffin]

French Director Rohmer in Frail Health


French film director, Eric Rohmer (83), holds the Golden Lion career achievement award he received during the 58th Venice Film Festival, northern Italy, Sept. 7, 2001.

BERLIN - French director Eric Rohmer canceled a planned appearance Friday at the Berlin International Film Festival because of frail health, his producer said.

Rohmer, 83, had been expected to present his new spy thriller, "Triple Agent," a story of espionage and intrigue in pre-World War II Paris that had its world premiere in Berlin and is competing for the Golden Bear being awarded Saturday.

"He has terrible back pain and can neither sit nor stand," Rohmer's producer, Francoise Etchegaray, told a news conference. Rohmer's doctor advised him not to attend, she said.

Rohmer, known for leisurely explorations of human relationships in films such as "Claire's Knee" and "Pauline at the Beach," relied on words - not action - in his latest work. It is based loosely on the case of a former White Army Russian general who worked as a double agent for Stalin and spied on anti-communist Russian exiles in Paris.

The film got a lukewarm reception from the Berlin audience, but Greek actress Katerina Didaskalu, who plays the spy's wife, said dialogue can tell an exciting story.

"The characters of Eric Rohmer talk a lot, but we do the same," she said. "It's a very human thing to talk ... and I believe that's action, too."

[SoNowThen]

If he dies (or when, I should say), cinema loses a giant. I'd not watched any Rohmer until midway through last year, but since then it's been a monthly thing -- a very special treat.

I strongly urge those who haven't, to go check out some Rohmer flicks. Nice, slow, talky, simply presented yet anything but simple.

[samsong]

any jacques rivette fans?  i saw Out 1: Spectre today.  i'm gonna go ahead and put in my top ten of all time just because i'm sure i'm one of very few people in the world that have seen it and because it's french and it's four hours long.

i've only seen two of his films--this and La Belle noiseuse--but he is, for me, one of the most fascinating filmmakers, ever.  i will kill to see Celine and Julie Go Boating and L'Amour Fou, especially the latter. 

[polkablues]

Celine and Julie Go Boating 

The only Rivette film I've seen.  It's definitely worth it, if you can find it.  In some ways it's almost a philosophical precursor to Mulholland Drive, the way the characters and the story and even the "reality" of the story world metamorphose throughout the film.

[samsong]

i saw Celine and Julie Go Boating today.