The great French filmmaker Alain Resnais died March 1st at the age of 91, leaving behind a remarkable body of emotionally and intellectually resonant work.
Alain Resnais 1922-2014
Tag: French Film
Notes on Recent Viewing, part two
Continuing a review of the past month’s disk viewing; contemporary and classic thrillers, Czech animation, British cult TV, and a French dream of New York.
Year End 2013
Looking back over 2013, the most significant titles in my disk viewing have been imported from England or released by Criterion.
Damned Treason
My friend Howard and I get together fairly regularly for an evening of conversation and movie viewing. The conversation often revolves around what he goes through teaching film courses to first-year university students … something I’m glad not to be involved with! The viewing more often than not focuses on older movies (we’re both pretty […]
Late Summer Viewing, part 1
Falling behind again! Things have been hectic lately – working on a documentary which has turned out to be bigger than expected and is now way overdue, plus starting a new project with a tight deadline, I haven’t had a lot of time to write down notes on what I’ve been watching the past couple […]
Jean Rouch, Edgar Morin, cinema verite and the problem of “actuality”
The late ’50s saw the biggest technology-based shift in movies since the coming of sound (the next big shift would be the arrival of digital technology several decades later). New highly portable equipment not only altered the way movies were made, it also altered creative choices and even content. New lightweight cameras and sync sound […]
Compulsive Viewing: A Personal Pathology Part 2
Continuing my survey of one month’s movie viewing: Red Dawn (Dan Bradley, 2012): As dumb as John Milius’ original about small town American kids fighting against vicious invaders. Milius had Nicaragua(!) taking over the States; here it’s North Korea backed by, for some reason, the Russians (aware of how much U.S. debt is held by […]
Compulsive Viewing: A Personal Pathology Part 1
I usually only have time to write once a week for this blog, and my occasional obligations to Blogcritics (i.e. the free review copies I get through them) have pushed me into the habit of doing reviews more often than more general posts about broader topics (which was what I actually anticipated when I started […]
Recent Viewing: the New Wave
I recently dipped into the French New Wave to watch a few films I’d previously missed – Claude Chabrol’s first two features, Le Beau Serge (1958) and Les Cousins (1959), and Agnes Varda’s Le Bonheur (1965).
DVD Review: Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend (1967)
Jean-Luc Godard wasn’t the first of the Cahiers du Cinema critics to start making movies, but his debut feature, A bout de souffle (Breathless, 1960), was the one which most clearly announced the arrival of the nouvelle vague. Where Francois Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Louis Malle and others were stretching the possibilities of conventional narrative form, […]
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