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…
Unfinished before Bazin died, this is his incomplete last word on his favorite director. Truffaut offers notes throughout and gives an introduction, and Renoir himself offers a humble note of…
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.…
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…
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…
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…
It’s quite enigmatic, quite the quintessential art film, and yet once a window–or better yet, a lens–clarifies what it’s doing, it becomes more-or-less accessible. Also, a second viewing doesn’t hurt.…
In his book Screening the Text: Intertextuality in New Wave French Cinema, T. Jefferson Kline makes the case that The Lovers “constitutes a remarkably complex meditation on the relationship between cinema and…
Diary of a Country Priest (dir. Robert Bresson, 1951) – As a follow-up to Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, it stands as a rather significant shift in style and…
Les dames du Bois de Boulogne (dir. Robert Bresson, 1945) – So much to say about this, too little space/time. This is early Bresson, his second feature film. In many ways,…
Just some notes at the outset. It’s quite easy to see the influence of Dostoyevsky and Robinson Crusoe in this one. The latter has to do with the film’s narrative…
There are many and eclectic takes on Robert Bresson’s work, and only a little on which there is unanimity. The consensus is essentially that his films are marvelous, beautiful, formally…
Precious Bodily Fluids 