Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSWill-o'-the-Wisp.The New York Film Festival has revealed the lineup for their Currents section, dedicated to films "testing and stretching the possibilities of the medium." The program includes new films from João Pedro Rodrígues, Ashley McKenzie, Bertrand Bonello, Helena Wittmann, and more. This year's crop of Revivals was also unveiled, featuring the highly anticipated restoration of Jean Eustache's The Mother and the Whore.61 films will be preserved through funding from The National Film Preservation Foundation. Grant recipients include the 1921 mystery-western Trailin’—starring Tom Mix, considered the first on-screen cowboy—and The Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy (1980), one of two feature films Kathleen Collins completed before her premature death.Cinema company Cineworld, owner of the Picturehouse chain in the UK and Regal Cinemas in the US, could be facing imminent bankruptcy, per recent reports.
- 8/23/2022
- MUBI
Emmanuel Mouret on the César award-winning costumes by Pierre-Jean Larroque and production design by David Faivre: "The sets could be a bit like a screen for the silhouettes." Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze
Cécile de France, who has one of the most charismatic smiles in French cinema, shines as Madame de La Pommeraye in Lady J (Mademoiselle De Joncquières aka The Art Of Seduction), Emmanuel Mouret's fresh take on an episode from Diderot's Jacques the Fatalist, the same one Robert Bresson so brilliantly turned into his 1945 film Les dames Du Bois De Boulogne.
Madame de Joncquières (Natalia Dontcheva) with Madame de La Pommeraye (Cécile de France) and Mademoiselle de Joncquières (Alice Isaaz) with the Marquis des Arcis (Edouard Baer)
In particular the scenes with her friend, Lucienne (played beautifully by Laure Calamy), are a standout of acting on at least three levels. Their conversations function like a palimpsest, questioning with the slightest winks,...
Cécile de France, who has one of the most charismatic smiles in French cinema, shines as Madame de La Pommeraye in Lady J (Mademoiselle De Joncquières aka The Art Of Seduction), Emmanuel Mouret's fresh take on an episode from Diderot's Jacques the Fatalist, the same one Robert Bresson so brilliantly turned into his 1945 film Les dames Du Bois De Boulogne.
Madame de Joncquières (Natalia Dontcheva) with Madame de La Pommeraye (Cécile de France) and Mademoiselle de Joncquières (Alice Isaaz) with the Marquis des Arcis (Edouard Baer)
In particular the scenes with her friend, Lucienne (played beautifully by Laure Calamy), are a standout of acting on at least three levels. Their conversations function like a palimpsest, questioning with the slightest winks,...
- 3/6/2019
- by Anne-Katrin Titze
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
Like a crafty Casanova who masks his true intentions while assiduously charming his latest prey, “Mademoiselle de Joncquieres” takes a stealthy and slow-burn approach before fully revealing its true colors as a shrewdly choreographed roundelay of scheming, seduction and revenge in the spirit of “Les Liaisons Dangereuses.” Freely adapted from the same section of Denis Diderot’s “Jacques le Fataliste” that inspired Robert Bresson’s “Les dames du bois de Boulogne” — but, unlike Bresson’s modernized 1945 version (co-scripted with Jean Cocteau), set in the same 18th-century period as Diderot’s original — writer-director Emmanuel Mouret’s exquisitely mounted and beautifully photographed film begins as a leisurely paced dramedy of manners, brimming with archly clever bons mots and politely tamped passions. But then things take a darker turn, and the movie becomes all the more enjoyable as elegantly nasty fun with serious mortal stakes.
During the regency of Louis Xv, Madame de...
During the regency of Louis Xv, Madame de...
- 9/27/2018
- by Joe Leydon
- Variety Film + TV
Mubi's retrospective, The Crimes of Jean-Pierre Melville, is showing from February 2 - March 6, 2018 in the United States.Jean-Pierre Melville (née Grumbach) took his nom de guerre from the American writer Herman Melville during his time fighting in the Resistance. The Moby-Dick scribe was popular in France, thanks in part to Jean Giono’s fawning translation of that mammoth cetacean opus, though it was the psycho-sexual eccentricities of Pierre; or, the Ambiguities that inspired the name change. The filmmaker’s exacting minimalism bears few obvious aesthetic similarities to the writer’s voluble, serpentine prose, and he lacks Herman’s circuitous sense of dark humor, but they did share an affinity for the details of method, and (lonely souls both) for the lives of solitary men. Working usually within constructs of the mystery and thriller genres, the filmmaker obsessed over details, finding small, particular insights in the ephemera and trivialities of routine.
- 2/4/2018
- MUBI
Welcome to a pair of vintage mysteries with George Simenon’s popular Inspector Jules Maigret, a gumshoe who gets the tough cases. Top kick French actor Jean Gabin is the cop who keeps cool, until it’s time to rattle a recalcitrant suspect. In two separate cases, he tracks a serial killer in the heart of Paris, and travels to his hometown to unearth a murder conspiracy.
Maigret Sets a Trap
and
Maigret and the St. Fiacre Case
Blu-ray (separate releases)
Kino Classics
1958, 1959 / B&W /1:37 flat; 1:66 widescreen / 118, 101 min. / Street Date December 5, 2017 / available through Kino Lorber: Trap, St. Fiacre / 29.95 ea.
Starring: Jean Gabin, Annie Girardot, Jean Desailly, Olivier Hussenot, Lucienne Bogaert, Paulette Dubost, Lino Ventura, Dominique Page / Jean Gabin, Michel Auclair, Valentine Tessier, Michel Vitold, Camille Guérini, Gabrielle Fontan, Micheline Luccioni, Jacques Marin, Paul Frankeur, Robert Hirsch.
Cinematography: Louis Page
Film Editor: Henri Taverna
Original Music: Paul Misraki...
Maigret Sets a Trap
and
Maigret and the St. Fiacre Case
Blu-ray (separate releases)
Kino Classics
1958, 1959 / B&W /1:37 flat; 1:66 widescreen / 118, 101 min. / Street Date December 5, 2017 / available through Kino Lorber: Trap, St. Fiacre / 29.95 ea.
Starring: Jean Gabin, Annie Girardot, Jean Desailly, Olivier Hussenot, Lucienne Bogaert, Paulette Dubost, Lino Ventura, Dominique Page / Jean Gabin, Michel Auclair, Valentine Tessier, Michel Vitold, Camille Guérini, Gabrielle Fontan, Micheline Luccioni, Jacques Marin, Paul Frankeur, Robert Hirsch.
Cinematography: Louis Page
Film Editor: Henri Taverna
Original Music: Paul Misraki...
- 12/9/2017
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
With a seemingly endless amount of streaming options — not only the titles at our disposal, but services themselves — we’ve taken it upon ourselves to highlight the titles that have recently hit platforms. Every week, one will be able to see the cream of the crop (or perhaps some simply interesting picks) of streaming titles (new and old) across platforms such as Netflix, iTunes, Amazon, and more (note: U.S. only). Check out our rundown for this week’s selections below.
A Cure for Wellness (Gore Verbinski)
The asylum-based film is a fairly interesting mini-genre to deconstruct. These movies almost always deal with perceptions of reality, questions of the self, and an innate fear of those in positions of power who operate in worlds of the ethereal. The question of the protagonist’s madness is almost always central, and the uncertainty over whether their paranoia is unfounded or justified is...
A Cure for Wellness (Gore Verbinski)
The asylum-based film is a fairly interesting mini-genre to deconstruct. These movies almost always deal with perceptions of reality, questions of the self, and an innate fear of those in positions of power who operate in worlds of the ethereal. The question of the protagonist’s madness is almost always central, and the uncertainty over whether their paranoia is unfounded or justified is...
- 6/2/2017
- by The Film Stage
- The Film Stage
What Are You Watching? is a weekly space for The A.V Club’s film critics and readers to share their thoughts, observations, and opinions on movies new and old.
Earlier this month, I decided to finally revisit Les Dames Du Bois De Boulogne, Robert Bresson’s second feature, which was co-written by the multi-talented Jean Cocteau. It had been a damn long time since I’d seen it, and maybe I expected to find out that the movie was more ”Bressonian” that I remembered. It’s a transitional and atypically cosmopolitan work, set in Parisian nightclubs and high society bedrooms and made with professional actors, unlike his subsequent films. But instead, I found myself almost awed by its angular sense of figure, which is like that of a black-and-white Art Deco illustration. The stylization is pitched differently; here, Bresson’s direction of the actors and his use of the...
Earlier this month, I decided to finally revisit Les Dames Du Bois De Boulogne, Robert Bresson’s second feature, which was co-written by the multi-talented Jean Cocteau. It had been a damn long time since I’d seen it, and maybe I expected to find out that the movie was more ”Bressonian” that I remembered. It’s a transitional and atypically cosmopolitan work, set in Parisian nightclubs and high society bedrooms and made with professional actors, unlike his subsequent films. But instead, I found myself almost awed by its angular sense of figure, which is like that of a black-and-white Art Deco illustration. The stylization is pitched differently; here, Bresson’s direction of the actors and his use of the...
- 11/25/2016
- by Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
- avclub.com
Aux quatre coinsOrigins in art are forever in doubt. Popular culture seems to imagine that what we now call the French New Wave emerged from thin air with François Truffaut's The 400 Blows (1959) and Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (1960), but that blinkered narrative ignores features ranging from Agnès Varda’s Le pointe courte (1955) and Claude Chabrol’s Le beau Serge (1958) to Alain Resnais and Marguerite Duras’s Hiroshima, mon amour (1959). Even before these, the filmmakers we associate—through later fame, scandal, obscurity, venerability, and legend—with the New Wave made short films, a medium encouraged by the theatrical practice, now long gone in France, of regularly exhibiting dramatic and documentary short films in cinemas. Early shorts by Jacques Demy, Chris Marker, Truffaut, Godard, and others reach back into the mid-50s, but only two of the New Wave’s anointed truly began their filmmaking at the halfway point of the 20th century: Eric Rohmer,...
- 10/17/2016
- MUBI
Benedikt Erlingsson: "Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, they were circus artists doing their stuff live." Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze
Sigur Rós composers Georg Hólm and Orri Páll Dýrason (who worked with Björk), Andrei Tarkovsky, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Leonardo DiCaprio, The Revenant, teaming with Lars von Trier's producer Marianne Slot (Melancholia, Antichrist, Breaking The Waves, Dancer In The Dark, Dogville, Nymphomaniac) came up, as Benedikt Erlingsson, director Of Horses And Men (Hross I Oss), spilled the beans on The Show Of Shows: 100 Years Of Vaudeville, Circuses And Carnivals (Storyville).
Frédéric Boyer with Anne-Katrin Titze: "It's what cinema did in the beginning - King Vidor and the Russians - it's exactly editing." Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze
Robert Bresson's Les Dames Du Bois De Boulogne, Christopher Walken on theatre and Michelangelo Frammartino's Alberi, Celia Rowlson-Hall's Ma, and Journey To The West by Tsai Ming-liang during earlier Tribeca Film Festivals inside PS1 MoMA's Vw Dome,...
Sigur Rós composers Georg Hólm and Orri Páll Dýrason (who worked with Björk), Andrei Tarkovsky, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Leonardo DiCaprio, The Revenant, teaming with Lars von Trier's producer Marianne Slot (Melancholia, Antichrist, Breaking The Waves, Dancer In The Dark, Dogville, Nymphomaniac) came up, as Benedikt Erlingsson, director Of Horses And Men (Hross I Oss), spilled the beans on The Show Of Shows: 100 Years Of Vaudeville, Circuses And Carnivals (Storyville).
Frédéric Boyer with Anne-Katrin Titze: "It's what cinema did in the beginning - King Vidor and the Russians - it's exactly editing." Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze
Robert Bresson's Les Dames Du Bois De Boulogne, Christopher Walken on theatre and Michelangelo Frammartino's Alberi, Celia Rowlson-Hall's Ma, and Journey To The West by Tsai Ming-liang during earlier Tribeca Film Festivals inside PS1 MoMA's Vw Dome,...
- 8/21/2016
- by Anne-Katrin Titze
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
Benedikt Erlingsson shoots Anne-Katrin Titze: "I am very grateful to Frédéric Boyer and the festival to come up with this idea." Photo: Benedikt Erlingsson
In Of Horses And Men director Benedikt Erlingsson's The Show Of Shows: 100 Years Of Vaudeville, Circuses And Carnivals (Storyville), the tents go up, as he follows in the footprints of Michelangelo Frammartino's Alberi, Tsai Ming-liang's Journey To The West and Celia Rowlson-Hall's Ma into the MoMA PS1 Vw Dome.
Producers Margrét Jónasdóttir and Mark Atkins Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze
Björk collaborators Georg Hólm and Orri Páll Dýrason of Sigur Rós, Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson, Vincent Lindon in Stéphane Brizé's The Measure Of A Man, Leonardo DiCaprio in Alejandro González Iñárritu's The Revenant and Andrei Tarkovsky, Robert Bresson's Les Dames Du Bois De Boulogne, Christopher Walken on theatre, A Woman At War with Lars von Trier's Melancholia producer Marianne Slot, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd,...
In Of Horses And Men director Benedikt Erlingsson's The Show Of Shows: 100 Years Of Vaudeville, Circuses And Carnivals (Storyville), the tents go up, as he follows in the footprints of Michelangelo Frammartino's Alberi, Tsai Ming-liang's Journey To The West and Celia Rowlson-Hall's Ma into the MoMA PS1 Vw Dome.
Producers Margrét Jónasdóttir and Mark Atkins Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze
Björk collaborators Georg Hólm and Orri Páll Dýrason of Sigur Rós, Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson, Vincent Lindon in Stéphane Brizé's The Measure Of A Man, Leonardo DiCaprio in Alejandro González Iñárritu's The Revenant and Andrei Tarkovsky, Robert Bresson's Les Dames Du Bois De Boulogne, Christopher Walken on theatre, A Woman At War with Lars von Trier's Melancholia producer Marianne Slot, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd,...
- 5/2/2016
- by Anne-Katrin Titze
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
Since any New York City cinephile has a nearly suffocating wealth of theatrical options, we figured it’d be best to compile some of the more worthwhile repertory showings into one handy list. Displayed below are a few of the city’s most reliable theaters and links to screenings of their weekend offerings — films you’re not likely to see in a theater again anytime soon, and many of which are, also, on 35mm. If you have a chance to attend any of these, we’re of the mind that it’s time extremely well-spent.
BAMcinématek
This is the final weekend for marathon screenings of Out 1. We highly recommend taking the plunge.
Museum of the Moving Image
“Lonely Places: Film Noir and the American Landscape” highlights a different atmosphere of the noir picture, and it makes its case with some great films. Out of the Past shows on Friday; Saturday...
BAMcinématek
This is the final weekend for marathon screenings of Out 1. We highly recommend taking the plunge.
Museum of the Moving Image
“Lonely Places: Film Noir and the American Landscape” highlights a different atmosphere of the noir picture, and it makes its case with some great films. Out of the Past shows on Friday; Saturday...
- 11/13/2015
- by Nick Newman
- The Film Stage
"The enjoyment of a work of art, the acceptance of an irresistible illusion, constituting, to my sense, our highest experience of "luxury," the luxury is not greatest, by my consequent measure, when the work asks for as little attention as possible. It is greatest, it is delightfully, divinely great, when we feel the surface, like the thick ice of the skater's pond, bear without cracking the strongest pressure we throw on it. The sound of the crack one may recognise, but never surely to call it a luxury." —Henry James, from The Preface to The Wings of the Dove (1909) "[The critic’s] choice of best salami is a picture backed by studio build-up, agreement amongst his colleagues, a layout in Life mag (which makes it officially reasonable for an American award), and a list of ingredients that anyone’s unsophisticated aunt in Oakland can spot as comprising a distinguished film. This prize picture,...
- 7/27/2015
- by Greg Gerke
- MUBI
Translators introduction: This article by Mireille Latil Le Dantec, the first of two parts, was originally published in issue 40 of Cinématographe, September 1978. The previous issue of the magazine had included a dossier on "La qualité française" and a book of a never-shot script by Jean Grémillon (Le Printemps de la Liberté or The Spring of Freedom) had recently been published. The time was ripe for a re-evaluation of Grémillon's films and a resuscitation of his undervalued career. As this re-evaluation appears to still be happening nearly 40 years later—Grémillon's films have only recently seen DVD releases and a 35mm retrospective begins this week at Museum of the Moving Image in Queens—this article and its follow-up gives us an important view of a French perspective on Grémillon's work by a very perceptive critic doing the initial heavy-lifting in bringing the proper attention to the filmmaker's work.
Filmmaker maudit?...
Filmmaker maudit?...
- 11/30/2014
- by Ted Fendt
- MUBI
A review of "The Devil, Probably" by Mireille Latil-Le-Dantec. Originally published in Issue 77, July-August 1977, of Cinématographe. Translation by Ted Fendt. Thanks to Marie-Pierre Duhamel.
"I challenge you all now, all you atheists. With what will you save the world, and where have you found a normal line of progress for it, you men of science, of co-operation, of labour-wage, and all the rest of it?
With credit? What's credit? Where will credit take you? [...] Without recognizing any moral basis except the satisfaction of individual egoism and material necessity! [...] It's a law, that's true; but it's no more normal than the law of destruction, or even self-destruction. [...] Yes, sir, the law of self-destruction and the law of self-preservation are equally strong in humanity! The devil has equal dominion over humanity till the limit of time which we know not. You laugh? You don't believe in the devil? Disbelief in the devil is a French idea,...
"I challenge you all now, all you atheists. With what will you save the world, and where have you found a normal line of progress for it, you men of science, of co-operation, of labour-wage, and all the rest of it?
With credit? What's credit? Where will credit take you? [...] Without recognizing any moral basis except the satisfaction of individual egoism and material necessity! [...] It's a law, that's true; but it's no more normal than the law of destruction, or even self-destruction. [...] Yes, sir, the law of self-destruction and the law of self-preservation are equally strong in humanity! The devil has equal dominion over humanity till the limit of time which we know not. You laugh? You don't believe in the devil? Disbelief in the devil is a French idea,...
- 3/31/2014
- by Ted Fendt
- MUBI
Wheeler Winston Dixon’s Cinema at the Margins is an enlightening collection of essays and interviews. Wearing his encyclopedic knowledge lightly, Dixon shares his expert insights and research in an eloquent, eminently readable style. I chose to review his new book because its reference to the ‘margins’ held the enticing promise of new discoveries, and a brief survey of its table of contents confirmed that, alongside well-known and much-loved names, there were also unfamiliar ones. The volume covers an early film by Peter Bogdanovich, the horror movies of Lucio Fulci, American 1930s and 40s science fiction serials, the TV series Dragnet, the brief career of Argentine director Fabián Bielinsky and the long one of Hollywood director Sam Newfield, Robert Bresson’s Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945), U.S. 1960s experimental cinema, Dixon’s own meditation on the shift to digital, and interviews with music video director Dale “Rage” Resteghini,...
- 3/17/2014
- by Alison Frank
- The Moving Arts Journal
“We are still coming to terms with Robert Bresson, and the peculiar power and beauty of his films,” Martin Scorsese said in the 2010 book “A Passion For Film,” describing the often overlooked French filmmaker as “one of the cinema’s greatest artists.”
But while he may be revered by some as the finest French filmmaker bar Jean Renoir, outside hardcore cinephile circles he and his films are virtually unknown (perhaps regarded as too opaque or nebulous). Just consider the fact that almost every definitive book on the elusive director was published during the aughts to feel the full truth of Scorsese's statement about how we're still in the process of appreciating and understanding his life and work. Even Bresson’s actual birthdate is contested, adding further the ambiguities surrounding the director.
“Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen,” the meticulous Bresson once famously said, hinting at...
But while he may be revered by some as the finest French filmmaker bar Jean Renoir, outside hardcore cinephile circles he and his films are virtually unknown (perhaps regarded as too opaque or nebulous). Just consider the fact that almost every definitive book on the elusive director was published during the aughts to feel the full truth of Scorsese's statement about how we're still in the process of appreciating and understanding his life and work. Even Bresson’s actual birthdate is contested, adding further the ambiguities surrounding the director.
“Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen,” the meticulous Bresson once famously said, hinting at...
- 4/18/2012
- by The Playlist
- The Playlist
Right now is not a bad time for admirers of Robert Bresson. A traveling retrospective has made its way across numerous cities, and people who'd never gotten a chance to glimpse Four Nights of a Dreamer (1971) now get to watch it on the big screen in a proper print. Furthermore, the critical and cinephilic culture surrounding Bresson's work is probably more alive now than it has been in a long time. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than the wider interest in (and affection for) the director's late color films, earlier misunderstood and dismissed in some quarters as odd aberrations which lacked the spiritual clarity or asceticism of the black-and-white work. It's for this reason that film culture can welcome a second, revised edition of James Quandt's crucial anthology, Robert Bresson.
There is simply no more essential book of material on Bresson to be found in the English language, unless...
There is simply no more essential book of material on Bresson to be found in the English language, unless...
- 4/9/2012
- MUBI
There are multiple Fausts. Ever-multiplying, in fact, as if to outbreed all other fictional characters. The good doctor is unusual: Marlowe and Goethe's plays are both classics, and then there's Mann's novel; at least fifteen operas... In movies, Murnau rules supreme, but I like William Dieterle's The Devil and Daniel Webster just as much. René Clair's La beauté du diable is one of his best films, with Michel Simon and Gérard Philipe trading places as tempter and tempted, both utterly charming in their quite distinct ways. Sokurov just made another, well liked here at the Notebook. But for sheer visual rapture, Claude Autant-Lara's 1955 version Marguerite de la nuit takes the Technicolor cake and runs cackling all the way to perdition.
Based on a novel by author/songwriter Pierre Mac Orlan, who also provided source books for Le quai des brumes for Carné and La bandera for Duvivier,...
Based on a novel by author/songwriter Pierre Mac Orlan, who also provided source books for Le quai des brumes for Carné and La bandera for Duvivier,...
- 2/23/2012
- MUBI
Robert Bresson: The Over-Plenty of Life is a series we've been running in conjunction with the complete retrospective of Bresson's work that'll be touring North America through May. I thought I'd supplement Ignatiy Vishnevetsky's essays, Daniel Kasman's observations and Adrian Curry's collection of posters with a roundup of pointers to pieces on Bresson that have appeared over the past month or two. One of the occasions of the series, as I mentioned in the entry on the initial announcement (with its basic schedule of cities and dates) is the publication of an expanded and illustrated edition of series curator James Quandt's collection, Robert Bresson (Revised), so let's open this go round with notes on another book, Tony Pipolo's Robert Bresson: A Passion for Film. Jonathan Rosenbaum's posted his review for the Summer 2010 issue of Cineaste, in which he calls it…
one of the most careful and...
one of the most careful and...
- 2/7/2012
- MUBI
Asked by Sight & Sound to name the ten greatest films of all time, Robert Bresson submitted the following, somewhat notorious list:
1. City Lights
2. City Lights
3. The Gold Rush
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
There are two ways in which Robert Bresson is rarely spoken about: as a comic filmmaker (though, as the above demonstrates, he could be pretty damn funny) and as someone whose work displays the influence of other directors.
Let's begin with that second point. Going back to some of the earliest defenses—as well as the earliest dismissals—of his work, Bresson has largely been described as a filmmaker "without precedent;" his detractors from the 1940s to the 1960s complained that his films didn't work the way movies were supposed to, and his supporters were more than happy to praise his films for the exact same reasons (Jacques Becker, for one, took the pages of L'Écran français to defend the poorly-received Les dames du Bois de Boulogne...
1. City Lights
2. City Lights
3. The Gold Rush
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
There are two ways in which Robert Bresson is rarely spoken about: as a comic filmmaker (though, as the above demonstrates, he could be pretty damn funny) and as someone whose work displays the influence of other directors.
Let's begin with that second point. Going back to some of the earliest defenses—as well as the earliest dismissals—of his work, Bresson has largely been described as a filmmaker "without precedent;" his detractors from the 1940s to the 1960s complained that his films didn't work the way movies were supposed to, and his supporters were more than happy to praise his films for the exact same reasons (Jacques Becker, for one, took the pages of L'Écran français to defend the poorly-received Les dames du Bois de Boulogne...
- 1/13/2012
- MUBI
A tonic for the New Year: for the next two weeks Film Forum is running a near-complete retrospective of the films of Robert Bresson programmed by the Tiff Cinematheque. The posters for Bresson’s films are a fascinating grab-bag of styles, verging from melodrama to minimalism to symbolism to the wildly inappropriate (see the Italian Mouchette), as designers tried to express and occasionally subvert Bresson’s celebrated and increasing austerity. My favorite may well be this lovely, witty French grande for Pickpocket, illustrated by the great Christian Broutin (best known for his iconic Jules and Jim posters). But there are plenty of other standouts, most especially Raymond Savignac’s series of playful cartoons for Bresson’s final three films: Lancelot du Lac, The Devil, Probably and L’Argent, and the stunning Czech surrealism for Une femme douce.
I present my favorite Bresson posters, a couple per film if possible, in chronological order.
I present my favorite Bresson posters, a couple per film if possible, in chronological order.
- 1/6/2012
- MUBI
[Our thanks to Brecht Andersch for offering his notes on this revival screening.]
In 1949, a Parisian ciné-club named Objectif 49 held a festival in Biarritz dedicated to "Film Maudit", or "Accursed Cinema". A jury headed by Jean Cocteau led the proceedings with the express mission to reevaluate and redefine what was of value in cinematic art. A slate of ignored, unfairly maligned, and/or transgressive works were held up as representative of a new filmic vanguard. Films now long accepted as major works of world cinema such as Vigo's Zéro de conduite and L'Atalante, Bresson's Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, and Visconti's Ossessione were for the first time given their due. Cinematic and sexual radicalism were endorsed by Cocteau awarding the Poetic Film Prize to Kenneth Anger's Fireworks, the first serious acknowledgment of a budding genius.
Many of the great works of cinema spent their early years languishing in this uncherished category: Welles's The Lady from Shanghai and Touch of Evil,...
In 1949, a Parisian ciné-club named Objectif 49 held a festival in Biarritz dedicated to "Film Maudit", or "Accursed Cinema". A jury headed by Jean Cocteau led the proceedings with the express mission to reevaluate and redefine what was of value in cinematic art. A slate of ignored, unfairly maligned, and/or transgressive works were held up as representative of a new filmic vanguard. Films now long accepted as major works of world cinema such as Vigo's Zéro de conduite and L'Atalante, Bresson's Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, and Visconti's Ossessione were for the first time given their due. Cinematic and sexual radicalism were endorsed by Cocteau awarding the Poetic Film Prize to Kenneth Anger's Fireworks, the first serious acknowledgment of a budding genius.
Many of the great works of cinema spent their early years languishing in this uncherished category: Welles's The Lady from Shanghai and Touch of Evil,...
- 8/6/2010
- Screen Anarchy
First the history, then the list:
In 1969, Jerome Hill, P. Adams Sitney, Peter Kubelka, Stan Brakhage, and Jonas Mekas decided to open the world’s first museum devoted to film. Of course, a typical museum hangs its collections of artwork on the wall for visitors to walk up to and study. However, a film museum needs special considerations on how — and what, of course — to present its collection to the public.
Thus, for this film museum, first a film selection committee was formed that included James Broughton, Ken Kelman, Peter Kubelka, Jonas Mekas and P. Adams Sitney, plus, for a time, Stan Brakhage. This committee met over the course of several months to decide exactly what films would be collected and how they would be shown. The final selection of films would come to be called the The Essential Cinema Repertory.
The Essential Cinema Collection that the committee came up with consisted of about 330 films.
In 1969, Jerome Hill, P. Adams Sitney, Peter Kubelka, Stan Brakhage, and Jonas Mekas decided to open the world’s first museum devoted to film. Of course, a typical museum hangs its collections of artwork on the wall for visitors to walk up to and study. However, a film museum needs special considerations on how — and what, of course — to present its collection to the public.
Thus, for this film museum, first a film selection committee was formed that included James Broughton, Ken Kelman, Peter Kubelka, Jonas Mekas and P. Adams Sitney, plus, for a time, Stan Brakhage. This committee met over the course of several months to decide exactly what films would be collected and how they would be shown. The final selection of films would come to be called the The Essential Cinema Repertory.
The Essential Cinema Collection that the committee came up with consisted of about 330 films.
- 5/3/2010
- by Mike Everleth
- Underground Film Journal
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