Category: French Film
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Delicatessen (Marc Caro + Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 1991)
An aesthetic of stylized trash set in a dystopic, post-apocalyptic France overwhelmed with a warm red-orange-green color scheme. Terry Gilliam meets Time Burton, and then some. It’s a live-action cartoon, warped, overly filtered, highly stylized. Sounds function as the abnormal but regular heartbeat of a social space. The synchronized rhythms move toward a climax and…
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Hiroshima, mon amour (Alain Resnais, 1959)
See previous post on Deleuze and the crystal image as it applies to this film. The ashes in the first shot of the film shifts to sweat via dissolve. The memory and the present are not conflated but intimately related, blurred into one another. Similar to the museum scene shortly thereafter. Identities in the present…
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Pola X (Leo Carax, 1999)
“Time is out of joint,” the opening states, while bombing graveyards in black and white. After this abstract, violent prologue, a remarkable crane/dolly shot takes us from outside a chateau to the upstairs window, cracked, voyeuristically giving us a peek at a sleeping character we will subsequently think is minor. “Amour” is kissing someone whose…
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The Double Life of Veronique (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1991)
Called by Joe Kickasola, “Kieslowski’s great formal experiment,” this one features consistent shots of abstraction both at the levels of both form and content. The tilted and upside-down shots formally renew the spectator’s perspective, along with rich and ever-shifting color schemes. Parallel shots (from Weronika, then later from Veronique) of older women walking with difficulty…
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Le Bonheur (Agnès Varda, 1965)
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French Film: Texts and Contexts – Hayward and Vincendeau, 1990
Michele Lagny, “The feeling gaze: Jean Renoir’s La Bête humaine (1938)” – The essay traces some of the context of the film’s release, particularly the way it was somewhat ordained to be a “three-star” film, what with it being an adaptation of a Zola novel, directed by Renoir (hot off of La Grande Illusion), and starring Jean…
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Deleuze on the Crystal-Image
Wrote this a few months back for a seminar presentation. Using it now for studying purposes, posting it here for reference. If anyone who reads this could offer any support, advice, clarification, or correction, please do so. Note: I haven’t cited Deleuze specifically (in terms of page numbers), but this obviously all comes from Cinema 1 and Cinema 2,…
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Viewing Log: September 2013 (Vol. I)
Le Jour se lève (dir. Marcel Carné, 1939) – A nice little essay by Maureen Turim grounds aspects of the film in a theoretical and critical framework, although she doesn’t delve into psychoanalysis as much as she claims she will at the outset. Or if she uses psychoanalytic categories such as repetition, determinism, and something…
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Viewing Log: August 2013, Vol. II
The Rules of the Game (dir. Jean Renoir, 1939) – It was time to revisit the great work. Christopher Faulkner makes a great analysis of the film through an ethnographic mode. Instead of considering Renoir as the great auteur, the transcendent author of timeless films divorced from their social contexts, Faulkner historically, culturally, and socially situates…
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Viewing Log: August 2013, Vol. I
Pépé le Moko (dir. Julien Duvivier, 1937) – A masterpiece of setting and staging. It’s in Algiers, within the Casbah, and it treats its environs and those native to it as simply mise-en-scene, but this is to be expected from 1930s poetic realism. Everything about this is “classic,” exactly what defines the “golden age” of…
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Viewing Log: July 2013
Thérèse Raquin (dir. Marcel Carné, 1953) – A step back from the poetic realism of Carné’s big-budget, big production Children of Paradise and lower-budget Port of Shadows, this is a melodrama that zooms in on French domestic life during the postwar economic boom of the early 50s. Of course, these folks don’t see a lot of money in…
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Le Beau Serge (1958) & Les Cousins (1959), Claude Chabrol
At Le Beau Serge, we’re on the cusp of the nouvelle vague, so it’s natural for some to see it as the beginning and for others to insist that it’s something more like “a French neo-realist school” (Kline, 88). But Kline supports his “uncertainty as to exactly what the new wave was” by quoting Claude Chabrol himself:…
Precious Bodily Fluids 