Where'd You Go, Bernadette

Shuttled?

===
Another underrated Linklater, with the underrating this time enhanced by multiple (four) reschedules of the theatrical premiere and no festival exposure whatsoever. "Enhanced," because it's a personal film that mixes class and romantic comedy with drama; contains prime intelligent lengthy Linklaterian discourse (Blanchett and Fishburne intercut with Crudup and Greer) on the vicissitudes of artistic integrity and mid-life crisis; plays its action out in exclusively drizzly settings (with Pittsburgh standing in for most of the Seattle-set interiors and some exteriors); and features a remarkable actress, the young Emma Nelson, wise beyond her years and light-years beyond the stupid teen portrayals of Olivia Wilde's Booksmart. Its art-design is also tremendously beautiful, which at some point in the last decades became a liability, for such things are "not realistic." Like Everybody Wants Some!! [2016], a beautiful entry in Linklater's body of work. See this when you can. •

===

Lloydie: The Boy from St. Thomas

Life / Weapon

===To address Lloydie: The Boy from St. Thomas at last: a 2019 7-minute short essay-film by Keifer Nyron Taylor that the director tells us captures the last days of his grandfather, Lloydie Plummer, exploring his violent upbringing in Jamaica, his close friends and the damage done to the family he built after migrating to the UK. The film can be watched free of charge here.

Taylor suggests that to describe all about Lloydie would involve invoking the distances between still snapshots of the family around Lloydie, who seems to exert a gravitational pull among those close to him, friends or spouse-partner, toward embrace, or the fate of the battered-faced. Used, user, abuser. An intertitle quotes a passage written by Lloydie during his time served at HM Prison Liverpool: "[My father's wife] told a lie and my dad beat me. I never went back. I saw him for the last time in Kingston before I left JA for UK in 1959. He is dead now."

Lloydie inhabits front-rooms. Who filmed him here, in the present, on this black-and-white 8mm (?) stock? The familiar glow of the resigned: those individuals who by some befalling hole up in a cave of their making, lamps off, telly on, striking out around 2 or 3 for some chore in the world. Through the film-stock, the drop-away to soundtrack silence, and the inert melancholy of the scenes themselves Taylor conveys to us that we're witnessing an end-of-days, perhaps illness encroaching by way of 'self-illusion'...

Lloydie inhabits front-rooms, and seems to have always been this way.

Along for the ride, Lloydie, passenger in his own vehicle, merges with those automobiles twisting through the passages of the motorway, Tarkovsky's Solaris inchoate.

Then the gathering for a funeral; a floral arrangement lining the rear windows of a hearse to spell "GRANDAD." An open casket, members of Lloydie's family and community filing by to pay their respects before, in one cut, he's resurrected on film nodding off from the perch of his settee as though to lend a ritual haze and to acknowledge, or gaze-down, in turn the attendant mourners.

Life swells wild with expectations, and grows tiresome. •

===

Sous le soleil de Satan

Full Mettle Pialat

===
Pialat's masterful Palme d'Or winner of 1987, Sous le soleil de Satan [Under the Sun of Satan] re-emerges in a new HD master of Gaumont (a rework of their early 2010s master) with the scene of the confrontation with Satan (Jean-Christophe Bouvet) restored to its presumably proper color-timing on the American Cohen Media Blu-ray. (I co-produced the Masters of Cinema DVD, and vaguely recall that the original surreal blue color filter over the scene, although initially approved by Pialat's estate and associates, including DP Willy Kurant, was tampered with by the lab at the time of outputting the HDCAM master tape.)

The straight-razor unites the tonsure and carotid. Add the chain and we have an incomplete catalogue of the holy utilities of the Church's mesmeric masochism. The twice-proclaimed "miracle" of the encounter with Satan suggests that Man and Servant dwell sous son soleil exactement.

"I was shown Man's misery and Satan's power for a reason."

Gabe Klinger's piece on the film, along with Pialat interviewings on it and other miscellany are here. Pialat's short films included on the Gaumont and Masters of Cinema DVD editions, Isabelle aux Dombes [Isabelle in La Dombes, 1951], his first film, and Congrès eucharistique diocésain. [Diocesan Eucharistic Congress.] are not included on the Cohen Blu-ray, but the stunning c. 2010 12-minute interview with Depardieu is. •

===
Notes, information, and remarks by Pialat on the director's short films, which span in their entirety 1951-1966, can be found here.

Kent Jones's 2008 essay on L'enfance-nue, and my translations of accompanying interviews with Pialat can be found at this blog here.

Emmanuel Burdeau's 2009 essay on Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble, and my translations of accompanying interviews with Pialat can be found at this blog here.

Gabe Klinger's 2010 essay on Sous le soleil de Satan, and my translation of a 1987 interview with Pialat, and a 2003 interview with Sandrine Bonnaire, can be found at this blog here.

Adrian Martin's 2009 essay on La gueule ouverte, and my translation of remarks about the film, can be found at this blog here.

Dan Sallitt's 2008 essay on Police (which he considers one of his favorite pieces of his own writing) has just been posted at his blog, here. A dossier of my translations of interviews with Pialat about the film has been posted here.

Dan's 2010 MoC essay on À nos amours. has also been posted at his blog here. A visual I made for the film along with my translation of the 1984 Le Monde conversation between Maurice Pialat and Jean-Luc Godard can be found here.

My essay on Passe ton bac d'abord... — "The War of Art" — can be read here. A dossier of my translations of four interviews with Pialat around the film can be read here.

Sabrina Marques's essay on Van Gogh is here, alongside Godard's letter to Pialat, and words from Pialat about the film.

===

Un flic

Menswear

===
Melville's final film, in which the master had decisively simplified his line. Un flic — A Cop [1972] — reductio ad absurdum, arbitrary, perfunctory even. Why not Four Hoods? Or An Informant? It's enough that in the quest of Delon's character ("Édouard Coleman") to put an end to criminal schemes, his ethos is the application of set, often unwritten policies; Melville renders Delon anonymous in spite of his movie-star-looks — what is a bit of a stunt in Le samouraï [The Samurai, 1967] in Un flic is perhaps an equally daring grounding of the man. In no other film — Le samouraï, L'armée des ombres [Army of Shadows, 1969], Le cercle rouge [The Red Circle, 1970] — are the steel blues and greys of the filters, gels, color-timing, sets, and wardrobes so persistent nor so ominous, nor so severe: take the seaside bank at the opening of the film, undoubtedly one of the bleakest locations in all of French cinema. The characters here represent "égarés," lost in time in a world unmoored from an actual present; Un flic is not so much a film of '72 as it is a proverbial train-set upon which Melville lays the tracks of his obsessions, underscored most movingly in the sequence involving the train and the helicopter, obvious miniatures that harken back to an earlier cinema, one of Merian Cooper and Alfred Hitchcock. To be stranded in the world of Un flic is to experience the least routine of pleasures. •

===

Poemquotes 15 - "VI. The Beacons" by Charles Baudelaire

my translation

===

VI. Les phares - The Flowers of Evil
[VI. The Beacons] [Les fleurs du mal]

Rubens, river of oblivion, garden of sloth,
Pillow of cool flesh where one cannot love,
But where life rushes and writhes endlessly,
As the air in the sky and the sea within the sea;

Leonardo da Vinci, mirror deep and dark,
Where charming angels, with a sweet smile
Charged wholly with mystery, appear in the shadow
Of the glaciers and pines that close up their country;

Rembrandt, sad hospital all filled with murmurs,
And decorated solely with a great crucifix,
Where tearful prayer rises from garbage,
Abruptly traversed by a wintry beam;

Michelangelo, vague location where one eyes various Hercules
Mingling with Christs, and raising fully upright
From powerful ghosts which in the twilights
Tear their shroud as they stretch out their fingers;

Boxer's rages, faun's impertinences,
You who knew how to round up the beauty of the boors,
Large heart swollen with pride, man sickly and yellow,
Puget, melancholic emperor of the convicts;

Watteau, that carnival where many illustrious hearts,
Like butterflies, wander aflame,
Cool, light settings illuminated by way of candelabras
Slipping into madness at this whirling dance-party;

Goya, nightmare replete with unknown things,
Of fetuses cooked in the midst of sabbaths,
Of old women in the mirror and of children in the nude,
Working at their stockings in order to tempt demons;

Delacroix, lake of blood haunted by bad angels,
Shaded by a wood of evergreen firs,
Where, beneath a pained sky, strange fanfares
Pass, like one of Weber's stifled sighs;

These curses, these blasphemies, these wails,
These ecstasies, these cries, these tears, these Te Deums,
Are an echo spoken back by a thousand labyrinths;
For mortal hearts, they are a divine opium!

They are a cry repeated by a thousand sentinels,
An order sent back by a thousand megaphones;
They are a beacon lit over a thousand citadels,
A call from hunters lost in the great woods!

For it is true, Lord, the best testimony
That we are able to bestow upon your dignity
Is this ardent moan rolling throughout the ages
Dying on the shore of your eternity!

====

Poemquotes 14 - "IV. Correspondences" by Charles Baudelaire

my translation

===

IV. Correspondences - The Flowers of Evil
[III. Correspondances] [Les fleurs du mal]

Nature is a temple where living pillars
At times allow confused words to emerge;
Man crosses them through forests of symbols
Observing him with familiar looks.

Like prolonged echoes mingling from afar
Within a tenebrous and profound unity,
Vast as night and clarity,
Perfumes, colors, and sounds give response.

There are perfumes fresh as children's fleshes,
Gentle as oboes, green as prairies,
— And others, corrupted, rich, and triumphant,

Having the expansion of limitless things,
Like amber, musk, bezoin, and incense
Singing the transports of the mind and the senses.

====

The Books I Read in 2019

The books I finished in 2019, not counting stuff that's been in-progress, dip-in-and-outs, essays, stories, poems, etc. etc... If it weren't for movies and the Internet this list would probably be three times as long, but you do what you can do.

In order from Jan to Dec '19 —

===

Counter-Clock World
by Philip K. Dick
1967

The Torrents of Spring
by Ernest Hemingway
1926

Un an après
[One Year Later]
by Anne Wiazemsky
2015

Nouvelles en trois lignes
[News in Three Lines / Novellas in Three Lines]
by Félix Fénéon
(translated by Luc Sante)
1906

McGlue
by Ottessa Moshfegh
2014

La Place de l’Étoile
by Patrick Modiano
(translated by Frank Wynne)
1968

La ronde de nuit
[The Night Watch]
by Patrick Modiano
(translated by Patricia Wolf, revised by Frank Wynne)
1969

Seduction: Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes’s Hollywood
by Karina Longworth
2018

Roderick Hudson {First Edition Version}
by Henry James
1875

Der Tod in Venedig
[Death in Venice]
by Thomas Mann
(translated by H. T. Lowe-Porter)
1912

The Power of the Dog
by Don Winslow
2005

Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile
by Herman Melville
1855

Angels
by Denis Johnson
1983

Le mythe de Sisyphe
[The Myth of Sisyphus]
by Albert Camus
(translated by Justin O’Brien)
1940/1955

1: Études de mœurs: Scènes de la vie privée: 4: La bourse
[1: Studies of Manners: Scenes from Private Life: 4: The Coinpurse]
by Honoré de Balzac
(translated by Clara Bell)
1832 / heavily revised in 1842

1: Études de mœurs: Scènes de la vie privée: 5: Modeste Mignon
[1: Studies of Manners: Scenes from Private Life: 5: Modeste Mignon]
by Honoré de Balzac
(translated by Clara Bell)
1844

Small Fry
by Lisa Brennan-Jobs
2018

Galactic Pot-Healer
by Philip K. Dick
1969

There Will Be No Quiet
by Stanley Donwood
2019

The Nickel Boys
by Colson Whitehead
2019

My Year of Rest and Relaxation
by Ottessa Moshfegh
2018

The Poorhouse Fair
by John Updike
1959/1977 (slight revision + intro added)

Where the Sirens Live
by Francesca Coppola
2019

The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice
by William Shakespeare
1603

Sled or Die
by Bob Walles
2019

Creatives
by Bob Walles and Tad Kimball
2019

Zuckerman: Vol. 8: The Human Stain (The American Trilogy: Vol. 3)
by Philip Roth
2000

The Films I Saw in 2019

First Seen of the Year: Chi-yari Fuji by Tomu Uchida

Last Seen of the Year: Giù la testa by Sergio Leone

====

8-1/2 [Federico Fellini, 1963]
9 Lives of a Wet Pussy [Abel Ferrara, 1976]
À bout de souffle [Breathless] [Jean-Luc Godard, 1960]
The Addiction [Abel Ferrara, 1995]
The Adventures of Schoolly D: Snowboarder [Mark Rance, 2004]
The African Queen [John Huston, 1951]
Alice in den Städten [Alice in the Cities] [Wim Wenders, 1974]
Alive in France [Abel Ferrara, 2017]
Alla ricerca di Tadzio [In Search of Tadzio] [Luchino Visconti, 1970]
Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution [Alphaville: One of Lemmy Caution’s Strange Adventures] [Jean-Luc Godard, 1965]
Andrei Rublev [Andrei Tarkovsky, 1966]
ANIMA [Paul Thomas Anderson, 2019]
Arabian Nights [Miguel Gomes, 2015]
Aquaculture [Artemis Shaw, 2018]
Bad Lieutenant [Abel Ferrara, 1992]
Ballet aquatique [Aquatic Ballet] [Raúl Ruiz, 2012]
Battle Cry [Raoul Walsh, 1955]
The Beach Bum [Harmony Korine, 2019]
Bend of the River [Anthony Mann, 1952]
Best Picture [Jay Giampietro, 2019]
Between Two Ferns: The Movie [Scott Aukerman and Zach Galifianakis, 2019]
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt [Fritz Lang, 1956]
The Big Combo [Joseph H. Lewis, 1955]
The Big Heat [Fritz Lang, 1953]
Blackmail {Silent Version} [Alfred Hitchcock, 1929]
Blackmail {Sound / 1.20:1 Version} [Alfred Hitchcock, 1929]
Blood Feast [Herschell Gordon Lewis, 1963]
Blue Velvet [David Lynch, 1986]
‘Blue Velvet’ Revisited [Peter Braatz, 1985/2017]
Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice [Paul Mazursky, 1969]
Bob le flambeur [Bob the High-Roller] [Jean-Pierre Melville, 1956]
Body Snatchers [Abel Ferrara, 1993]
Booksmart [Olivia Wilde, 2019]
Born Yesterday [George Cukor, 1950]
Der Bräutigam, die Komödiantin und der Zuhälter [The Bridegroom, the Actress, and the Pimp] [Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, 1968]
Brewster McCloud [Robert Altman, 1970]
Bukchon banghyang [Bukchon-Bound] [Hong Sang-soo, 2011]
The Burglar [Paul Wendkos, 1957]
By Sidney Lumet [Nancy Buirski, 2015]
La cabine de plage [The Beach Shack] [Agnès Varda and JR, 2017]
Carving Magic [Herschell Gordon Lewis, 1959]
The Champagne Murders [Claude Chabrol, 1967]
Changer d’image [Image-Changing] [Jean-Luc Godard, 1982]
The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith [Fred Schepisi, 1978]
La chasse au lion à l’arc [Lion Hunting with Bow and Arrow] {English-Language Narration} [Jean Rouch, 1965]
Chi-yari Fuji [Bloody Spear at Fuji] [Tomu Uchida, 1955]
Chronik der Anna Magdalena Bach [Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach] {English-Language Version} [Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, 1968]
Cinefile: Dark and Deadly: Fifty Years of Film Noir [Paul Joyce, 2008]
The Circus [Charles Chaplin, 1928/1969]
Cluny Brown [Ernst Lubitsch, 1946]
Come Back to the 5 & Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean [Robert Altman, 1982]
Coming Home [Hal Ashby, 1978]
Corkscrew Alley / Raw Deal [Anthony Mann, 1948]
Cowboy Joe [Jingjing Tian, 2019]
Daguerre-Plage [Agnès Varda, 2008]
Daigaku wa deta keredo [I Graduated University, But…] {Most Complete Extant Version} [Yasujirō Ozu, 1929]
Daisy Kenyon [Otto Preminger, 1947]
Damsels in Distress [Whit Stillman, 2011]
Dance in the Sun [Shirley Clarke, 1953]
Dan Deacon: “Sat by a Tree” [Daren Rabinovitch, 2019]
The Dark Mirror [Robert Siodmak, 1946]
Dead Pigeon on Beethovenstraße [Samuel Fuller, 1972]
Death in Venice [Luchino Visconti, 1971]
Département lettres modernes, Bibliothèque Nationale de France [Agnès Varda and JR, 2017]
Détective [Detective] [Jean-Luc Godard, 1985]
Detour [Edgar G. Ulmer, 1945]
Directed by Andrej Tarkovskij [Michał Leszczyłowski, 1988]
Distant Voices, Still Lives [Terence Davies, 1988]
Domino [Brian De Palma, 2019]
Le doulos [The One in the Hat / The Stoolie] [Jean-Pierre Melville, 1962]
Dream Crush: “Sharp Zone” [Douglas Burgdorff, 2019]
The Driller Killer [Abel Ferrara, 1979]
Drive a Crooked Road [Richard Quine, 1954]
Duel in the Sun [King Vidor, 1946]
Edgar G. Ulmer: The Man Off-Screen [Michael Palm, 2004]
El Camino [Vince Gilligan, 2019]
EOB: “Brasil” [Andrew Donoho, 2019]
Experiment in Terror [Blake Edwards, 1962]
The Eyes of Orson Welles [Mark Cousins, 2018]
Eyes Wide Shut [Stanley Kubrick, 1999]
Les fantômes d’Ismaël [Ismaël’s Ghosts] {Desplechin’s Intended Cut} [Arnaud Desplechin, 2017]
La femme du boulanger [The Baker’s Wife] [Marcel Pagnol, 1938]
Les femmes sont de nature créatives: Agnès Varda [Women Are Naturally Creative: Agnès Varda] [Katja Raganelli and Konrad Wickler 1977]
Field Niggas [Khalik Allah, 2015]
Le fils de Joseph [The Son of Joseph, 2016]
Fixed Bayonets! [Samuel Fuller, 1951]
Force of Evil [Abraham Polonsky, 1948]
For Me and My Gal [Busby Berkeley, 1942]
Forty Guns / The Woman with a Whip [Samuel Fuller, 1957]
Fourteen [Dan Sallitt, 2019]
The Frontier Experience [Barbara Loden, 1975]
A Fuller Life [Samantha Fuller, 2013]
Gabbeh [Mohsen Makhmalbaf, 1996]
The Gardener [Mohsen Makhmalbaf, 2012]
“Get DADDDY on the Phone!” [Leah Shore, 2019]
The Ghost Ship [Mark Robson and Val Lewton, 1943]
The Gingerbread Man [Robert Altman, 1998]
Gion no shimai [Sisters of the Gion] [Kenji Mizoguchi, 1936]
Giù la testa [Get Your Head Down] {Proper Italian Full-Length 157-Minute Cut} [Sergio Leone, 1971]
Golden Exits [Alex Ross Perry, 2017]
Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam. {German Domestic Version} [The Golem: How He Came into the World.] [Paul Wegener and Carl Boese, 1920]
The Good Liar [Bill Condon, 2019]
Gosford Park [Robert Altman, 2001]
The Great Buster: A Celebration [Peter Bogdanovich, 2018]
Greetings [Brian De Palma, 1968]
Gregg [Matías Piñeiro, 2017]
Green Room [Jeremy Saulnier, 2015]
Guerrilla [Douglas Burgdorff, 2019]
Gypsy [Mervyn LeRoy, 1962]
Häxan [The Witch] [Benjamin Christensen, 1922]
Der heilige Berg, eine dramatische Dichtung in Bildern aus der Natur [The Holy Mountain: A Dramatic Poem in Images from Nature] [Arnold Fanck, 1926]
HAIM: “Hallelujah” [Paul Thomas Anderson, 2019]
HAIM: “Now I’m in It” [Paul Thomas Anderson, 2019]
HAIM: “Summer Girl” [Paul Thomas Anderson, 2019]
Hélas pour moi [Alas for Me / Woe Is Me] [Jean-Luc Godard, 1992]
Hell and High Water [Samuel Fuller, 1954]
Hermia & Helena [Matías Piñeiro, 2017]
High Noon [Fred Zinnemann, 1952]
Hi, Mom! [Brian De Palma, 1969]
Home from the Hill [Vincente Minnelli, 1960]
House of Bamboo [Samuel Fuller, 1955]
How Have You Been? [Andy DeYoung, 2019]
Human Desire [Fritz Lang, 1954]
Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte [Robert Aldrich, 1964]
I Am Wanda [Katja Raganelli and Konrad Wickler, 1980/1991]
Image Makers: The Adventures of America’s Pioneering Cinematographers [Daniel Raim, 2019]
Lo incomparable de lo no comparable / The Incomparable of the Non-Comparable [Paul Grivas, 2019]
Irma la Douce [Billy Wilder, 1963]
Is It Raining? [Matías Piñeiro, 2016]
The Irishman / I Heard You Paint Houses [Martin Scorsese, 2019]
I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson: Season 1 [Tim Robinson, Zach Kanin, et al, 2019]
Ivanovo detstvo [Ivan’s Childhood] [Andrei Tarkovsky, 1962]
Jaguar [Jean Rouch, 1967]
Jane B. par Agnès V. [Jane B. by Agnès V.] [Agnès Varda, 1988]
Jazzy for Joe [Owen Kline and Andrew Lampert, 2014]
Jean Rouch, cinéaste aventurier [Jean Rouch: Filmmaker Adventurer] [Laurent Védrine, 2017]
Katok i skripka [The Steamroller and the Violin] [Andrei Tarkovsky, 1960]
King of New York [Abel Ferrara, 1990]
Knives Out [Rian Johnson, 2019]
Krotkaya [A Gentle Creature / A Meek One] [Sergei Loznitsa, 2017]
Kung-Fu Master! [Agnès Varda, 1988]
The Lady Said No [Frank Tashlin, 1946]
The Last Movie [Dennis Hopper, 1971]
The Last Waltz [Martin Scorsese, 1978]
Laura {Full-Version} [Otto Preminger, 1944]
Léon Morin, prêtre [Léon Morin, Priest] {Melville’s 128-Minute Uncut Version} [Jean-Pierre Melville, 1961]
The Leopard Man [Jacques Tourneur and Val Lewton, 1943]
The Lineup [Don Siegel, 1958]
Lloydie, the Boy from St. Thomas [Keifer Nyron Taylor, 2018]
Le lion volatil [The Vanishing Lion] [Agnès Varda, 2003]
Locate S,1: “Owe It 2 the Girls” [Clayton Rychlik, 2018]
The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog [Alfred Hitchcock, 1927]
The Long Goodbye [Robert Altman, 1973]
The Lost Footage [David Lynch, 2011]
Lost Highway [David Lynch, 1997]
Luchino Visconti [Carlo Lizzani, 1999]
Luchino Visconti: Man of Three Worlds [Francis Coleman, 1966]
Ludwig {Integral Television Version} [Luchino Visconti, 1973]
La madre (Troisième version) / The Mother (Third Version) / Jean-Marie Straub / 2012
Les maîtres fous [The Mad Masters] {Short Version?} [Jean Rouch, 1954]
Mammy Water [Jean Rouch, 1954]
La Marseillaise, chronique de quelques faits ayant contribué à la chute de la Monarchie [The Marseillaise: A Chronicle of a Few Events Having Contributed to the Fall of the Monarchy] [Jean Renoir, 1938]
La maschera del demonio [The Mask of the Devil] [Mario Bava, 1960]
Mean Streets [Martin Scorsese, 1973]
Mélo [Alain Resnais, 1986]
Merrie Melodies: The Cat Came Back [Friz Freleng, 1936]
The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) [Noah Baumbach, 2017]
Mikey and Nicky [Elaine May, 1976]
Mission: Impossible [Brian De Palma, 1996]
Mister America [Eric Notarnicola, Tim Heidecker, and Gregg Turkington, 2019]
Moi, un noir (Treichville) [I, a Black (Treichville)] [Jean Rouch, 1958]
Moonrise [Frank Borzage, 1948]
Ms .45 [Abel Ferrara, 1981]
Mulberry St. [Abel Ferrara, 2010]
Murder by Contract [Irving Lerner, 1958]
La musique [Music] [Agnès Varda and JR, 2017]
My Name Is Julia Ross [Joseph H. Lewis, 1945]
Napoli Napoli Napoli [Abel Ferrara, 2009]
Network [Sidney Lumet, 1976]
The New On Cinema Oscar Special [Gregg Turkington, Tim Heidecker, et al, 2019]
Ningen no jōken [The Human Condition] [Masaki Kobayashi, 1959-1961]
La noche de enfrente [Night Across the Way] [Raúl Ruiz, 2012]
Nostalghia [Nostalgia] [Andrei Tarkovsky, 1983]
Notorious [Alfred Hitchcock, 1946]
Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble [We Won’t Grow Old Together] [Maurice Pialat, 1972]
Ocha’dzuke no aji [The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice] [Yasujirō Ozu, 1952]
Offret [The Sacrifice] [Andrei Tarkovsky, 1986]
Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood [Quentin Tarantino, 2019]
One Plus One [Jean-Luc Godard, 1968]
One, Two, Three [Billy Wilder, 1961]
Panique [Panic] [Julien Duvivier, 1946]
Les parents terribles [The Frightful Parents] [Jean Cocteau, 1948]
Pasolini [Abel Ferrara, 2014]
Petit à Petit [Jean Rouch, 1971]
Petit cadeau pour JLG [Little Gift for JLG] [Marta Mateus, 2019]
Phantom Lady [Robert Siodmak, 1944]
Pickup on South Street [Samuel Fuller, 1953]
Picnic [Joshua Logan, 1955]
Plaisir d’amour en Iran [Giddiness of Love in Iran] [Agnès Varda, 1976]
Porojen parissa [With the Reindeer] [Erik Blomberg and Eino Mäkinen, 1947]
Prénom Carmen [First Name Carmen] [Jean-Luc Godard, 1983]
La prisonnière [The Prisoner] [Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1968]
Pulp Fiction [Quentin Tarantino, 1994]
La punition, ou les Mauvaises rencontres [Punishment, or: Bad Encounters] [Jean Rouch, 1964]
The Purchase Price [William A. Wellman, 1932]
Pushover [Richard Quine, 1954]
La pyramide humaine [The Human Pyramid] [Jean Rouch, 1961]
The Quiet Man [John Ford, 1952]
La ragazza che sapeva troppo [The Girl Who Knew Too Much] [Mario Bava, 1963]
Rain Phoenix: “Time Is the Killer” [Bobby Bukowski and Bradley Gregg, 2019]
Redemption [Miguel Gomes, 2013]
Redes [Nets / Networks] [Emilio Gómez Muriel and Fred Zinnemann, 1936]
Réponse de femmes à une question produite par Antenne 2 pour le magazine 'F. comme Femme' [Womens' Response to a Question Produced by Antenne 2 for the Magazine-Show 'F. comme Femme'] [Agnès Varda, 1975]
Ruby Gentry [King Vidor, 1952]
Sabrina [Billy Wilder, 1954]
Sandome no satsujin [The Third Murder] [Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2017]
Le scandale Clouzot [The Clouzot Scandal] [Pierre-Henri Gibert, 2017]
Scene Missing: The Story of Dennis Hopper’s ‘Last Movie’ [Alex Cox, 2018]
Scarlet Street [Fritz Lang, 1945]
Schoolly D: “King of New York” [Abel Ferrara, 1990]
Secret Beyond the Door… [Fritz Lang, 1947]
Senso [Feeling] [Luchino Visconti, 1954]
The Seventh Victim [Mark Robson and Val Lewton, 1943]
Shark {Reworked Only Extant Version - Producers’ Cut} [Samuel Fuller, 1969]
A Short Film About the Long Career of Abel Ferrara [Mark Rance, 2004]
Shukujo wa nani (w)o wasureta ka [What Did the Lady Forget?] [Yasujirō Ozu, 1937]
Les signes [The Signs] [Eugène Green, 2006]
So Dark the Night [Joseph H. Lewis, 1946]
Soft Focus with Jena Friedman: Episode 1 [Jena Friedman, 2018]
Soft Focus with Jena Friedman: Episode 2 [Jena Friedman, 2019]
Sokout [The Silence] [Mohsen Makhmalbaf, 1998]
Some Kind of Genius [Paul Joyce, 1986]
Son of Paleface [Frank Tashlin, 1952]
The Spiral Staircase [Robert Siodmak, 1945]
Star Wars: The Mandalorian: Season 1 [Jon Favreau, et al, 2019]
Steamboat Willie [Walt Disney and U. B. Iwerks, 1928]
Talking with the Vampires [Abel Ferrara, 2018]
Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines [Jonathan Mostow, 2003]
The Thing from Another World [Howard Hawks, 1951]
Thom Yorke: “Last I Heard (…He Was Circling the Drain)” [Art Camp and Saad Moosajee, 2019]
Three on a Match [Mervyn LeRoy, 1932]
Thunder Bay [Anthony Mann, 1953]
Tōkyō no onna [A Woman of Tokyo] [Yasujirō Ozu, 1933]
Touchez pas au grisbi [Hands Off the Loot] [Jacques Becker, 1954]
Trapézistes et voltigeurs [Trapeze-Artists and Acrobats] [Agnès Varda, 2008]
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn [Elia Kazan, 1945]
T-Men [Anthony Mann, 1947]
Tri Andreya [The Three Andreis] [Dina Musatova, 1966]
Two Against Nature [work-in-progress] [Owen Kline, 2019-]
Uncut Gems [Josh Safdie and Benny Safdie, 2019]
L’une chante l’autre pas [The One Sings the Other Doesn’t] [Agnès Varda, 1977]
Us [Jordan Peele, 2019]
Valkoinen peura / Den vita renen [The White Deer / The White Reindeer] [Erik Blomberg, 1952]
Veep: Season 7 [Dave Mandel, et al, 2019]
La vérité [The Truth] [Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1960]
Visages Villages [Agnès Varda and JR, 2017]
La Voie Lactée [The Milky Way] [Luis Buñuel, 1969]
Wanda [Barbara Loden, 1970]
The Wedding Party [Cynthia Munroe, Brian De Palma, and Wilford Leach, 1963/1969]
Western Union [Fritz Lang, 1941]
While the City Sleeps [Fritz Lang, 1956]
Wiener-Dog [Todd Solondz, 2016]
The Woman in the Window [Fritz Lang, 1944]
X [Roger Corman, 1963]
Ying Chun ge zhi fengbo [Storms at Ying Chun Pavilion / The Incident at Spring Inn] [King Hu, 1973]
Zoë Rising [Paul Rachman, 2011]
Zoe X O [Paul Rachman, 2004]

Anna Karina, 1940-2019

La Ligne de Chance

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Anna Karina in her final role for Godard, Anticipation [1967].

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A Woman of Tokyo

Apple on the Mantle

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A new iteration of a diseased world has wafted up and come to choke, pervasive since the last time this Ozu picture was screened with any real sincerity.

Tonight [Friday, November 8th, 2019, Echo Park Film Center in Los Angeles] Andy Rector has grasped the horns of the California day’s last steers, with the prospect of Renoir’s picture in mind to follow: we will experience beautiful animals pleading emergency. On our minds, the safe word remains: “Evacuate.” — For the world is burning, and we’re internalizing now bestial shrieks, are absorbing them deep, and a chance few hear sounding from the wreck: "Come to the theater for respite and relief..."

So shameful to be us, crying when the night is like a dawn menacing soft on the horizon. The irony of orange in Los Angeles County. Cinephiles, where do associations lead? An autumn shell on the horizon, East Coast connotations, but substantial heat, smoke in the high winds. Landowners elsewhere, envious, postulate nothing political per se in the burning of the planet, and yet, at this moment is that not all there is? Are these fires not, species-wide, our spectacular concern?

ASSOCIATIONS
A Woman of Tokyo [Tōkyō no onna, 1933] allocates its characters by a kind of human chain — taken in another sense, as illustrative elements of human bondage. A disturbance in one individual reverberates over to and within the others. (The undulations of a suspension bridge; the flail of prey in a web.) The title woman of Tokyo, Chikako (Yoshiko Okada), represents the center median, or medium in the sense of a substance through which emotion and judgment move in waves. She provides the context for the moral relativism that defines the attitudes of the characters. When Ozu proclaims in 1933 by title alone, that there is “A Woman of Tokyo” (“Tōkyō no onna”) — well, it’s comically inarguable. Considered more deeply, who dares to dismiss this? She is not merely a “woman in Tokyo,” she is “one of Tokyo’s women,” “a woman belonging to Tokyo” — a fateful figure. Adjacent to the vagueness, the quality of the everywoman/cipher, lies a specificity that comes perilously close to turning the phrase into a metropolitan euphemism. More broadly: Chikako is the Tokyo archetype of one who does what one must to get by in the big city.

She is at once the inscrutable and the presently apprehensible—an apple taken from a mantle. The upset of Chikako’s brother Ryōichi (Ureo Egawa) over the discovery of her moonlighting as a prostitute constitutes a split in the bond between siblings, a disruption of the expectations which one held for the other. What began as a pair soon becomes redefined as halves. (That apple on the mantle will reveal still more dimensionality [still-life, la nature morte] in the conclusion to Ozu’s 1949 Late Spring [Banshun].)

Other pairs in A Woman of Tokyo:

• Harue (Kinuyo Tanaka) and her older brother, a keisatsu (police-officer) referred to only by his surname, Kinoshita (Shinyo Nara) — here, the latter assumes the role of caretaker for the former, a reversal of the dynamic between Chikako and Ryōichi

• Kinoshita and an investigating officer from his bureau

• Two reporters working for rival papers

• A personnel manager and a clerk at Chikako’s place of employment

• The 47-minute 1933 Yasujirō Ozu film A Woman of Tokyo and the 2 minute 21 second Ernst Lubitsch short from the 1932 Paramount omnibus If I Had a Million, titled The Clerk

Ozu’s remarkable intertwining of the Lubitsch segment with his own film not only pays homage to Lubitsch and the Hollywood studio-system (and to his beloved Gary Cooper, visible on the back cover of the theatrical program for If I Had a Million, in which he stars in William A. Seiter’s sketch), but also echoes the structure of A Woman of Tokyo: like Woman’s seemingly curtailed ending, Ozu withholds the final punchline scene from the Lubitsch. There, after opening the random million-dollar cheque, Charles Laughton marches through a series of office doors belonging to his firm’s senior bureaucracy and, finally confronting the chief of the company, blows a raspberry his way. In Ozu, this has been excised. (But will be evoked time and again by the director through the series of children in his other films who stick their tongues out in defiance of stoic, unbudging parents.) The openness of A Woman of Tokyo results at least in part by its diminishment. As Andy writes in his own program for the screening, "The film is silent, seemingly by choice rather than technology, as if to say: the situation depicted is unspeakable." (And, I might add, also unraspberriable.) "We’ve found no explanation for the film’s odd length of 47 minutes — no industrial, or exhibition-related explanation. Perhaps the length is wholly the result of the story and the arrested way of its telling. A shorter film for the lives of the ruined or cut short; tragedy becomes brevity, and brevity becomes tragedy." In the curtailed structure, in the plain and complicated title of A Woman of Tokyo, a terrible universality is born.

A dialectical film, then, one in which people enter rooms and the first reaction before inevitable recognition is: Who are you? or: Why are you here?. Pairs, splits, — and mirrors which, paradoxically, in A Woman of Tokyo, estrange. Objectivity encounters disbelief, a sussing-out of what could or could not be true. “Tell it slant,” goes Dickinson’s phrase, now commodified as the tagline for an eponymous Apple show; the policy is characteristic of Ozu’s work, but perhaps never has the ellipsis functioned so powerfully in his films as the scene in which Chikako stares before the mirror and, as in Kiarostami’s Certified Copy [Copie conforme, 2010], the “divide” (in the senses of “split,” and of “distance”) becomes implicit. As such the scene might be said to stand as the locus, as in Cocteau or Bergman, of an irremediable trauma. And whereas in later films Ozu characters will have, literally and figuratively, built up a front, as suggested by the director’s framing en face, in A Woman of Tokyo they are presented obliquely: torsos directed to left or right frame, heads turned, at times we might say twisted, toward the camera. (This posture, in fact, recurs among the characters of many Ozus from this period, but to examine the practice requires a scope beyond the present text.)

The movie ends shortly after the mercenary reporters drop in on Chikako and Harue to scavenge details about Ryōichi. “There’s no big scoop here,” smirks one to the other. Soon images, objects, come spiraling back, imbued with a new absence of life, their inanimation now underscored. The film moves outside, the camera abandons the reporters, and a tracking shot fixed on the rubbish-strewn sidewalk begins to roll. Of this moment Andy observes that it “seems to draw a hyphen rather than a period on the story. A hyphen to life outside the film and the movie theater.”

How many tragedies will it take to change the world?•

Originally published at Kino Slang, Andy Rector's blog. Details on the program for that night are also available there, here.

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Pieces on Yasujirō Ozu at Cinemasparagus:

A Straightforward Brat [1929]

Friends Fighting Japanese-Style [1929]

Tokyo Chorus [1931]

A Picture-Book for Grown-Ups: I Was Born, But... [1932]

Where Have the Dreams of Youth All Gone? [1932]

A Woman of Tokyo [1933]

Passing Fancy [1933]

A Tale of Floating Weeds [1934]

Kagamijishi [1936]

The Only Son [1936]

There Was a Father [1942]
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Knives Out

It's the Only Way You'll Know I'm Telling the Truth

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One of the best 2010s American films. It's not a pastiche of Agatha Christie any more than, say, Bend of the River [Anthony Mann, 1952] is a pastiche of Western Union [Fritz Lang, 1941]. It does, however, rejuvenate the whodunnit in a manner akin to Ford's Stagecoach's [1939] modernization and modulation on the western. A cross-class group portrait, a social allegory of American heritage (both in the sense of "inheritance" and "the ancestral"), which brings to mind the families Trump, Murdoch, etc...

Rian Johnson wanders the house, or the house wanders the movie. It's one of the first mystery pictures in which the production design does not serve merely as a backdrop scrim of 'atmospheric touch.' Johnson doesn't dwell on the house as wealth-porn nor aspirational fetish; just as we are at the brim of projecting our own desires, our property envy, the film shifts to a lower-middle class milieu.

Final thoughts for now:
- The script and plotting are ingenious. I think RJ said it's a screenplay he'd been working on for seven years. There are no plot-holes or details unaccounted for.
- It's very funny.
- Maybe most movingly, Knives Out and Rian Johnson are earnest enough to imagine the idea of the pure Heroine (cf. Austen, et al) in a 2019 setting.

Very possibly a masterpiece. •

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Poemquotes 13 - "III. Elevation" by Charles Baudelaire

my translation

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III. Elevation - The Flowers of Evil
[III. Élévation] [Les fleurs du mal]

Above the ponds, above the valleys,
The mountains, the woods, the clouds, the seas,
On the other side of the sun, on the other side of the ethers,
On the other side of the far reaches of the starry spheres,

My spirit, you move with agility,
And, like a fine swimmer fainting in the flow,
You gaily traverse the deep immensity
With an unspeakable and manly delight.

Take flight far off from these morbid miasmas;
Go purify yourself in the superior air,
And drink, like a pure and divine liquor,
The clear light filling limpid spaces.

Behind the troubles and the vast sorrows
That encumber hazy existence with their load,
Happy the one who is able with vigorous wing
To set off toward the luminous and serene fields;

The one whose thinkings, like skylarks,
Take one free flight toward the heavens at morning,
— Gliding over life, and effortlessly comprehending
The language of flowers and silent things!

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Thunder Bay

Jimmy Has Green Eyes

(All images are details from iPhone photos taken of the film playing from the Kino Blu-ray.)

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As in quite a few of Anthony Mann's pictures, Thunder Bay [1953] involves building a basis for new opportunity and wealth. Here, Jimmy Stewart and Dan Duryea have fixed upon a Louisiana location where oil's projected for the construction of a rig and for their — and the town's — enrichment. It's 1946, Thunder Bay by name, Thunder Bay by Stewart's dynamiting the waters and inadvertently killing off a native economic staple of the town in the native shrimp population.

Every fiction involving a boat introduces pain-in-the-ass malfunctioning, the heroes' skill at jerry-rigging a fix, and at least two cantina fights. Often in the American cinema an observer as Melville's figures, rather the point-of-view comes straight from those whom immediately will suffer from the market indignities.

When they find the oil the white-bearded bastard turns his daughter over to Dan Duryea in a suit from a Burberry outlet-store.

Thunder Bay through its exaggerated tone and Stewart's dirty white fedora subverts the American ideal of economic progress through sheer industriousness. Stewart wins Joanne Dru before driving off in the end credits.

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Pieces on Anthony Mann at Cinemasparagus:

T-Men [1947]

Corkscrew Alley / Raw Deal [1948]

Bend of the River [1952]

Thunder Bay [1953]


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Bend of the River

Hidden Violence

(All images are details from iPhone photos taken of the film playing from the Kino Blu-ray.)

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Shares a plot-arc kick-off with Lang's Western Union from eleven years earlier.

The sympathetic/empathic relationship between Stewart and Kennedy: Kennedy about to be hanged; Stewart rubs his neckerchief. Kennedy chucks a knife into the back of a Shoshone warrior; Stewart has his turn doing the same moments later. They're two men with hidden pasts. Their semblances don't re-match until near the end. Kennedy takes over the caravan to redirect the food supply to the gold camp rather than the settlement, and proves himself just as much a hard-driver as Stewart, in a sequence whose shots Mann frames similarly. Before the two collide in battle in a sun-dappled river, and Stewart alone survives: his own neckerchief's disposed in the aftermath, his own hanging scar revealed for the first time "since [he was] a raider on the Missouri-Kansas border."

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Pieces on Anthony Mann at Cinemasparagus:

T-Men [1947]

Corkscrew Alley / Raw Deal [1948]

Bend of the River [1952]

Thunder Bay [1953]


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Corkscrew Alley / Raw Deal

Why Not Just Die?

(All images are details from iPhone photos taken of the film playing from the Criterion Channel.)

===Raymond Burr in silk lives on Jane Street, some stretch known as Corkscrew Alley, according to a street sign fastened to a lamppost. I deleted what I wrote originally here after I realized we weren't talking about the same Jane Street.

A jailbreak on-the-lamb picture, this 1948 Corkscrew Alley (Mann's or the screenwriters' intended title, I can't remember), more 'traditionally' noir in its scenario and set-up than the previous year's T-Men, but slightly more vital too: the dated quaintness of the counterfeit epidemic has been abandoned for the universal requisite of freedom, despite all prison sentence odds, and breaths of fresh air in the ostensibly 'free world,' that is, 'Corkscrew Alley.'

Violence between Mann in 1948 and more recent movies: here the energy-to-burst is tangible, O'Keefe nearly busts his aggressor John Ireland's eye on the taxidermied horn of a buck. This sequence veiled in netting progresses and everyone lives but Mann takes up the motif across Claire Trevor's literally fishnet-veiled face: one of these abrupt close-ups from outer-space (beyond the camera line) which adamantize the abstract and force the public to react. Take the phone in the foreground jutting like it's lost; anticipating the ring that will jostle Trevor and O'Keefe beyond... and it does, a mise-en-scène anticipating an action cause.

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Pieces on Anthony Mann at Cinemasparagus:

T-Men [1947]

Corkscrew Alley / Raw Deal [1948]

Bend of the River [1952]

Thunder Bay [1953]


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T-Men

Super Mr. T(ony Mann)

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For me the most impressive aspect of Mann's 1947 T-Men is the infiltration conceit, whereby Dennis O'Keefe and Alfred Ryder purport to have run with a since-dismantled outfit in order to gain access to a Los Angeles counterfeiting ring and make a deal involving engraving plates. Both men adopt thug-personae they don't dare to shed even in the face of mortal danger, a willing adoption of Stockholm syndrome that will ultimately blow up in both their bellies.

The film is intercut with creaky old-school "documentary" propaganda warning the audience of the dangers of counterfeiting, more than hinting that the almighty Treasury Department loses no battles. Jammed into one scene, a T-agent rebukes a cashier who's unwittingly received a fake bill: something along the line of, "If only more people took a moment to examine their money..." Sigh.

John Alton's cinematography's all angular ink but registers mostly as atmospherics and the 'labyrinth of moral confusion' trope.

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Pieces on Anthony Mann at Cinemasparagus:

T-Men [1947]

Corkscrew Alley / Raw Deal [1948]

Bend of the River [1952]

Thunder Bay [1953]

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The Long Goodbye

An Altman Peak

(All images are details from iPhone photos taken of the film playing from the Kino Blu-ray.)

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With 1973's The Long Goodbye Robert Altman obviously achieves perfection. It's as accidental and as circumstantial as the successful ignition of a match off any available surface.

The film consists of a series of short films, one-act plays, all sharing some throughline about one Terry Lennox's suspected murder; and then there's an ending that exudes a purest Cannon Films scene avant la lettre.

The Long Goodbye contains two of Altman's wildest, most brilliant sequences:

(1) Sterling Hayden as Sterling Hayden, in his golden period where he'd had enough of everything, right on the heels of The Godfather and ten years before the release of Wolf-Eckart Bühler and Manfred Blank's documentary Hayden portrait Pharos of Chaos. The most insipid, Hayden-indulgent grandstand captured on film à la Maidstone, and every second is marvelous. Altman lets it keep going, keep going... I thank him for this. Less is not always more, because most of the time more is. (,morons.)

(2) The Doberman biting, yipping, running growling confused at the beachfront as Marlowe pulls Mrs. Wade reluctantly to shore. An abstraction, like justice, that can not be reasonably codified nor critically decoded.

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Daisy Kenyon

A Workout at 40

(All images are details from iPhone photos taken of the film playing from the Kino Blu-ray.)

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For a long time I didn't think this film was worth watching again. It is duh. That was just talk.

Now that said, I don't know whom this movie was made for, besides every liberal American household. I'll tell a story. First, this is the tale of me and my best friend at Newport Beach. I'm Fonda and he's Andrews.

Next you've got a boring courtroom scene, made more boring because the topic at hand is divorce. No action; only glances; a little flitter-flutter of the hearts.

Do I have another story to tell? Nothing except that me and my buddy never respectively married, because, respectively and with all due respect, we never wanted to put up with the bullshit of the institution, and we're relatively glad now at 41. Had either of us been married, we wouldn't have gone to Newport acid; we wouldn't have been allowed the time to watch Otto Preminger's Daisy Kenyon nor simply to reflect on Newport and our crazy week.

At once I protest and endorse marriage. I protest and endorse this thing about children-having. But my loyalty would be to the woman I love, foremost, and not our (she nor I's) legal codification, and certainly not the slime-bucket of kids which is easily avoidable and whose future university is unaffordable as far as I see it for the movies I make and the jobs I take time off from. (Also unaffordable is when my children inevitably kill someone drunk-driving at 16 and it's a tragedy on the law-books, and their life is destroyed, and the collective family's is too above and maximally.)

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Napoli Napoli Napoli

Ferrara at the End of the 2000s

(All images are details from iPhone photos taken of the film playing from the Kino / Film Desk Blu-ray.)

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An inventive combination of documentary, fiction, meta-documentary... Portraitures of inmates in a Neapolitan women's prison, journalists, and community organizers; staged stories involving a local family (starring Abel's ex, Shanyn Leigh, as the daughter/sister) and a mafia arm wrapped up in contracting, ordered to carry out a hit; Abel and the crew roaming the alleys and projects, as the inmates of a men's prison recreate their daily routines.

Shot on circa-'09 prosumer HD, this is ethnology and sympathy, a cogent survey of the sub-communities that co-exist in Napoli x 3.

"People shouldn't worry so much about the corpse on the ground in a pool of blood. Because there are multiple deaths that happen before that: the deaths of young people's consciences; the destruction of their dreams."

A valedictory image of survivors: the Neapolitan incarcerated, the poor, the residents, and, tearing through Schoolly D's "King of New York" with full band under the end credits, Abel Ferrara himself at the end of the 2000s, on the cusp of a triumphant, sober, newly meaningful body of work.

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Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble

The Windshield

(All images are details from iPhone photos taken of the film playing from the Kino / Film Desk Blu-ray.)

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Nous ne vieillrions pas ensemble [We Won't Grow Old Together, Maurice Pialat, 1972] is a grand masterpiece, constructed out of the plane of the screen/camera itself, like the windshield of Jean's little blue car, an extension of (and crutch for) himself. The 180-degree rule made anew as Jean and Catherine vacillate endlessly, the set (the framing of the set) set-off from the camera by a line of demarcation, exemplified most directly in the cuts to the 16mm handheld shots from Jean's camera at the street bazaar.

Nightmares in Pialat's film that often goes unremarked: The French predilection for the seashore, body-exposing and loud; and that couples of that epoch got married like they were taking out a short-term loan.

"There's a man who cries in Ordet, a film by Dreyer." "Why?" "His wife's dead." "Parting's like dying." "But [Catherine's] alive, that's even worse."

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Notes, information, and remarks by Pialat on the director's short films, which span in their entirety 1951-1966, can be found here.

Kent Jones's 2008 essay on L'enfance-nue, and my translations of accompanying interviews with Pialat can be found at this blog here.

Emmanuel Burdeau's 2009 essay on Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble, and my translations of accompanying interviews with Pialat can be found at this blog here.

Gabe Klinger's 2010 essay on Sous le soleil de Satan, and my translation of a 1987 interview with Pialat, and a 2003 interview with Sandrine Bonnaire, can be found at this blog here.

Adrian Martin's 2009 essay on La gueule ouverte, and my translation of remarks about the film, can be found at this blog here.

Dan Sallitt's 2008 essay on Police (which he considers one of his favorite pieces of his own writing) has just been posted at his blog, here. A dossier of my translations of interviews with Pialat about the film has been posted here.

Dan's 2010 MoC essay on À nos amours. has also been posted at his blog here. A visual I made for the film along with my translation of the 1984 Le Monde conversation between Maurice Pialat and Jean-Luc Godard can be found here.

My essay on Passe ton bac d'abord... — "The War of Art" — can be read here. A dossier of my translations of four interviews with Pialat around the film can be read here.

Sabrina Marques's essay on Van Gogh is here, alongside Godard's letter to Pialat, and words from Pialat about the film.

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