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Showing posts with label Jacques Rivette. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jacques Rivette. Show all posts
During the past months of unending craziness, I haven’t been
able to produce as many blog posts as I would’ve liked. I particularly hope to
celebrate living icons of “high” and “low” culture, and not simply have this
blog turn exclusively into a haven for deeply felt obits.
In that direction, I offer some self-promotion, consisting
of links to 29 reviews I’ve written over the past year-plus. Each of them was a
labor of love, in which I discussed the supplements on the DVD/Blu-ray, in
addition to reviewing the film itself. All of them are located at the Disc Dish
site, but I thought I’d spotlight them, as the range covered here is also the
range I love to talk about on the Funhouse TV show and write about on this
blog. And so...
Barbara Loden’s Wanda (below) got the Criterion treatment, and we
find out in the supplements that the obnoxious leading male character was based
on… her husband, Elia Kazan!
Rivette’s The Nun (1965) was a major subject of controversy
upon its release in France. Today, its “blasphemy” is tame indeed, but it still
offers Anna Karina’s finest performance outside of her work with Godard.
And speaking of Uncle Jean, his latest feature, The Image
Book (below), is a montage of sights and sounds that, as always with his work, combines
the fine arts with sheer pictorial beauty.
Godard’s second feature, Le Petit Soldat, was another
subject of controversy, which (when it was finally released, a few years after
its production) offered international viewers their first glimpses of Anna
Karina.
Buster Keaton’s last feature where he was given full rein,
The Cameraman, is a wonderful episodic time capsule with location sequences show
in NYC and LA.
One of the odder “angry young man” films, Morgan, A Suitable Case for Treatment (below) is one of the earlier Sixties/Seventies “the insane are the
only truly sane ones” allegories.
“Norman Mailer takes on the feminists” in the stunning and
endlessly entertaining Pennebaker & Hegedus documentary about a debate
among intellectuals (who at times behave like pro-wrestlers) titled Town Bloody Hall (below).
A showcase for its lead trio of actors, The Hit is one of
those superb crime films that includes elements from another genre (in this
case, the road movie) and reinvigorates the standard tale of the hitman at the
end of the line.
With Michael Lonsdale’s death, it’s like three performers have died — the Lonsdale that appeared in mainstream, commercial films (usually international coproductions), the one that always made time to act in experimental films where the directors trusted him to develop his character (and sometimes improvise or alter his dialogue), and the Lonsdale that forged a stunning list of appearances on the French stage (performing in works by Beckett, Ionesco, Pirandello, Stoppard, Albee, Anouilh, Handke, and his good friend Marguerite Duras).
The film is one of the most important pictures of the Seventies for several reasons. Among them the fact that the notion of documentary offers the “truth” of a situation, that the film offers a sleazy but entirely valid metaphor for moviegoing (or theatergoing, for that matter), and that it explores sexism in its purest state — men who view women solely as a set of genitals.
The later, hairier Lonsdale.
I’ve discussed the film with people who were entranced by it and others who were disturbed by it, although it should be noted that nothing graphic is ever seen. It’s simply a film about a man telling a story.
In fact, the film shows two men telling the same story. Une Sale Histoire is comprised of two shorts Eustache made from the same material. The first features the great Lonsdale — as suave as he could be — telling a group of people at a party in an apartment a story about a weird “ritual” he took part in.
A group of men in a Paris cafe are aware that there is a hole in the ladies’ room door in that cafe’s basement. If one kneels on the floor in front of the door (curiously like the Muslim prayer ritual), one can see the women using the toilet — not the woman herself, just her vagina. Lonsdale’s character tells the story with an odd sort of reverence and a philosophical bent, describing how this ritualistic act of voyeurism became a habit for him that took the place of having sex.
Once he finishes his story, we see the second short film, a 16mm documentary chronicle of another man (Jean-Noël Picq) telling the same story. He is sleazier-looking than Lonsdale (with a front row of quite awful teeth), and one quickly realizes that this is the man who ultimately went through this experience.
Picq’s telling of the story goes quicker. The 16mm film is six minutes shorter because it is told more quickly (although both Picq and Lonsdale say the exact same words), contains no introduction, and the questions asked of the storyteller at the end are fired at Picq, while the actresses quizzing Lonsdale ask their queries in a slower way.
The ideal way to read this piece would be to now watch the film if you haven’t seen it already. It is currently available on YouTube, with English subtitles in the Closed Captions.
The Lonsdale version:
The Picq original:
Going back to the three themes mentioned above, it can now be revealed that Eustache’s decision to contrast “fiction” (an actor telling a story) against documentary (a real-life individual, with the bad teeth to prove it) is a brilliant one, but is not as clear-cut as it seems.
The signs of the two modes of filmmaking are there: the Lonsdale film was shot in 35mm, is most clearly an acted piece, and is more elegantly made. The Picq version is on 16mm, it has the spontaneity of a documentary (esp. in the brisk way it moves), and is more raggedly shot (one of the women listening to Picq is left out of camera range, even when she’s asking him a question).
So, Eustache’s purpose in making the Lonsdale film appears to have been to contrast the “real” telling of a story with a staged “fiction” version containing the exact same dialogue (including the same questions and answers at the end). It’s a brilliant conceit and one of the reasons Histoire is indeed a landmark of Seventies cinema.
“First, the distance came from the fact that [Eustache] invented half of things. It’s physically impossible for a man to put his head on the ground in the hall outside the toilets, especially in La Motte Piquet, where it’s very busy. In reality, it wouldn’t be very clean if one knelt on the floor to look through a hole at the genitals of women who are urinating! One would have to be pretty crazy… People asked me, ‘How could you have done that?’ And I responded, ‘Listen, this stuff exists, there are people like that! They have the right to be heard.’
“As I had never worked with Jean Eustache, who was for me one of the great filmmakers, I accepted the role. Before that, with no budget, he had already filmed with his friend the ‘dirty story,’ where Jean-Noel Picq had the lead role. But he wanted to make a “cleaner” version (if I can put it that way) in 25 minutes, with a good camera and good film.
“As for the characterization, he let me do what I wanted. He filmed three reels, in three shots, so we didn’t need to stop to load the film. I thus recounted my story calmly, without interruptions or direction. When he asked me, ‘Do you want to see what Jean-Noel Picq did?’ I answered ‘No, certainly not!’ I noticed later that we had the same inflection on certain words, curiously….
“Because showing it meant projecting the two films, it was a novelty: the program was made up of the old version with Jean-Noel Picq, then the new version with me. For distribution, it was interesting, because each film was too short for a normal screening at a movie theater.” [pp. 48-49]
The oddly assembled but also invaluable book le dictionnaire Eustache, edited by Antoine de Baecque, (Editions Leo Scheer, 2011), includes a statement from Picq written to journalist Jean-Luc Douin. Picq wrote to Douin in 1993 that the original short was “autobiographical because it was fictitious.” To double-down on his wonderfully Gallic wordplay he also claimed the short was “an imaginary autobiography, like all true autobiographies.” He added:
“This autobiographical fiction is perhaps about voyeurism, but it is also about the insurmountable differences between the sexes, which don’t allow … either gender to have a discourse about sex that transcends differences and reaches an agreement. Except to stammer something that is not readily understandable, as it goes down to the gutter and lowers the debate.” [pp. 298-299]
The juxtaposition between fiction and reality bleeds into the second theme of the film — the notion that Picq’s story is a metaphor for the act of moviegoing. The “ritual” described has a religious aspect to it (with the reference to praying in the Muslim style), but there is clearly also a peep-show, fetishistic element, as the voyeur sees only one body part. And the act of storytelling itself, which always encompasses embroidering a tale, is akin to seeing a performance onstage or screen. The storyteller in both versions in fact mentions his desired audience — he notes that he prefers to tell his story to women to get their reactions, since men will “understand” what he’s saying from the first.
The odd prologue to American Boy.
The Picq short in fact prefigured Scorsese’s American Boy (made one year later, in 1978), in which Scorsese’s friend Steven Prince tells a series of stories that are immaculate — but seem too honed to be entirely true. Scorsese takes much more time to set the stage than Eustache does (one gets the impression that Prince’s storytelling session was augmented by, um…. a certain powder). But the two filmmakers allow their seedy friends to take center stage, and they and other friends assume the role of onscreen audience and interlocutors. Eustache let himself be seen as a listener in the Picq version of the material, but he is only seen briefly on camera and never asks Picq a question. Scorsese, on the other hand, is an active participant in American Boy. (The presence of both filmmakers on-camera serves to make their friends’ stories seem more “real.”)
Picq’s tale also contains unknowing “performers” (the women being “peeped,” who are being victimized without even knowing it — until the storyteller lets the last woman in on the “act”) and an "audience" (the sleazy men at the cafe). Thus, we as viewers watch an onscreen audience hearing a story from a man who declares that he ended up preferring seeing unknown women’s genitals (read: being a spectator) rather than having sex with a partner (being an active participant in a performance).
… Which leads us to the third and most overpowering theme: sexism. Une Sale Histoire would never have been made in the U.S., even during the “maverick” period of the Seventies (when a film like John Byrum’s Inserts could indeed be made but had to be shot in England). The current state of American film finds sex completely missing from mainstream films of any kind, as dealing with it bring up topics that are (that most abrasive and prevalent of phrases) “problematic.”
Jean Eustache (in a Rocky shirt!) and Lonsdale.
Here Eustache tackles the male libido at its most base and crude. The storytellers in both short films are quite matter-of-fact about the story they tell, while the women who hear it are very receptive, to the point of asking a bunch of questions. These questions are fired off in the Picq version, which makes them seem like real subjects of curiosity. The slightly slower pace of the Lonsdale version makes the questions seem more like a part of a certain storytelling ritual.
The most important element of this exploration of sexism is indeed the fact that the storyteller states he got to the point where he preferred “peeping” to sex. (Thus foreshadowing Internet cam-culture?) He says, quite pointedly, “… the desire wasn’t to fuck her afterwards, not at all. It was only in the pleasure of seeing. Just seeing. That’s all.”
From the Picq version.
Picq’s story includes the fact that the forbidden thrill he got from the act of voyeurism was that it gave him “direct access” to the woman’s private parts — he didn’t have to go on dates, go to the movies or dinner, find common points of interest, or otherwise relate to the woman in question. He could just cut to his desired chase and see what he wanted to see.
He laments that women will now (in the late Seventies) discuss their orgasms and that the vaginas of the woman he’s involved with on a romantic or sexual level are “domesticated.” This part of the story synchs up quite nicely with Eustache’s 1973 masterpiece, The Mother and the Whore, where the male protagonist (Jean-Pierre Leaud) talks and talks until the moment where the quieter female lead (Françoise Lebrun, who conspicuously appears in the Picq film as a listener/questioner) finally delivers a monologue, which changes the whole focus of the piece and makes it more of a film about relationships (and the need to listen rather than talk), whereas up to that point it is an account of the adventures of a cool young man who never stops talking.
Picq and Eustache.
Our storyteller pines for the Victorian era at one point, saying the sexuality of the Seventies is “disillusioned.” This goes back to the theme of worship in Picq’s dirty story. He knows that what he is doing is unhealthy (and quite ugly, as he is essentially bent over, kneeling on a piss-laden floor). But he is able to justify what he did because of that same aspect of sleazy idolatry.
The film’s best dialogue in fact comes when he discusses how the world changed for him when he got addicted to his peeping ritual. He began, he says, to believe “the hole came first!” and that a defect in a door (which he acknowledges must’ve been created on purpose when the door was designed) became the center of his universe. The door, the cafe, the streets, the city — all of it existed because of that sacred hole.
And the grace note of this look inside the mind of a voyeur is when he declares that his peeping was a kind of “work” that consumed him for a period of time. The last line, delivered differently but emphatically by both Lonsdale and Picq, is “I had my dignity while doing this!”
Jean Seberg in Godard's segment of The World's Greatest Swindlers
Every nook and cranny on the
Internet exists for one thing. No, not porn – relentless self-promotion! Thus,
I herewith offer a number of the reviews I’ve done for the Disc Dish site. The
reviews are in-depth, filled with information gleaned in the watching and
reading of supplemental materials, and (I hope) entertaining.
I haven’t done an entry on my work
for DD since 2015, so this piece will be broken into two parts. Screw streaming
– support the little silver disc industry!
The anthology film The World’s Most Beautiful Swindlers has been very hard to see over the
last few decades. It includes two good episodes from Japanese and Italian
directors, but is most notable for having a characteristically amoral entry
from Claude Chabrol and Godard’s only reunion with Jean Seberg – a short in
which she plays a journalist in Marrakesh.
Fassbinder’s Fox and His Friends remains one of the filmmaker’s most important statements
about the exploitation of a minority by people in that minority.
The seminal caper film,
The Asphalt Jungle, joins the ranks of Criterion’s releases.
One of the finest black comedies
of all time, Dr. Strangelove, comes ready with new
supplements and a host of the older ones.
Olivier Assayas has been
showcasing the talents of Kristen Stewart in the last few years. In
Clouds of Sils Maria, she joins Juliette Binoche for a
character study concerning friendship between women of different ages.
Wim Wenders: The Road Trilogy groups together three of his best early films, including the
epic-length but still small in scope classic Kings of the
Road.
Out 1 is one of
the late Jacques Rivette’s masterworks, a 13-hour film that reflects the
post-’68 mindset in France and offers one of the filmmaker’s best paranoid
fantasies.
An underrated comic portrait of an
era, Serial skewers self-help and new-age philosophies and
movements.
Wim Wenders’ The American Friend is a masterful character study, allegory, and crime picture
with two great lead performances by Bruno Ganz and Dennis Hopper.
A never-before-seen Frank Zappa
concert film, Roxy: The Movie, finally saw a release nearly
40 years after it was shot.
The American Dreamer
is a portrait of Dennis Hopper in the period after Easy
Rider, when he was one of the most sought-after filmmakers in America
(and one of the craziest).
To commemorate Labor Day, I offer up a
montage I featured on the episode of the Funhouse TV show that aired
this weekend. For the past 21 years I have done a Jerry Lewis episode
for Labor Day weekend and, since the end of the telethon, I've been
looking for new angles from which to approach Jerry (there are about twenty jokes that could follow that sentence, but I'm not going for any of 'em).
Since I frequently feature “arthouse”
cinema on the Funhouse, it was only natural to edit together a
montage of scenes in which arthouse auteurs (not all of whom are
French, mind you) either talked about Jerry in interviews or evoked
him in their films. I came up with seven instances that I think make
a very entertaining montage, while also exploring Jerry from pro,
con, and “wtf?” aspects.
The contents are (since I don't intend
on posting the list on YT; the sequences are already titled in the
video):
– Martin Scorsese in Bonjour
Monsieur Lewis, 1985 – a scene from Jacques Rivette's
“missing” (at least in the U.S.) L'Amour Fou,
1969 – Louis Malle in Bonjour
Monsieur Lewis, 1985 – a scene from Luc Moullet's
Brigitte et Brigitte, 1966 – Orson Welles on The Dick
Cavett Show, 1970 – a scene from Rainer Werner
Fassbinder's In a Year with Thirteen Moons, 1978 – Jean-Luc Godard on The
Dick Cavett Show, 1980
For those others keeping score, there
are a few other filmmakers featured in Bonjour Monsieur
Lewis (Bogdanovich, Mel Brooks, Spielberg) whom I didn't
include for purposes of time and/or salience of the discussion.
Those who loathe Jerry will
particularly enjoy Welles' remarks. Those who love him will dig
Malle's unmitigated praise. For those who want an insightful
discussion, we always turn to Uncle Jean, who says about le cinema
du Jer: “I think it's very funny – even when it's not funny, it's
more funny....”
In this part of my tribute to Bernadette Lafont I turn to the traces of her films that can be found "hidden in plain sight" online. As noted in the
first part of this piece, I found out in my interview with Mme.
Lafont that she didn’t particularly enjoy working on the Truffaut
short Les mistons (1957) because it didn’t fit in with
her idea of “Hollywood” moviemaking (and also because her
husband, the actor Gerard Blain, was opposed to her having an acting
career). Here is the short, which is very enjoyable (and Lafont is a
vision, at the tender age of 18):
The Truffaut short
was far from the world of movies that she enjoyed, so the next
obvious step was starring in a feature. When I asked Lafont about her
first meeting with Chabrol, I was interested to hear that she had a
different story than is told in the French TV documentary that is on
the Le Beau Serge (1958) Criterion disc.
There it is noted by
Chabrol that his wife (whose inheritance allowed her to finance
Serge) loved Bernadette in Mistons
and suggested her for the female lead in Serge.
Lafont herself said she had met Chabrol when she went to Cannes with
her husband, and so she and Blain were cast in both the Truffaut
short and the Chabrol film at the same time.
The YT poster was turned on the
“femdom” aspect, but for the minute let’s set the fetish aspect
aside (in researching the clips with Lafont online I also discovered
that various YT posters have uploaded clips of European actresses
strictly because their armpit hair is briefly visible in the scenes
in question).
Serge
is considered the first true New Wave feature film (unless you want
to count Varda’s La Pointe Courte (1955), which
wasn’t a hit). It impresses to this day, thanks to strong acting by
the three leads (Blain, Lafont, and New wave mainstay Jean-Claude
Brialy) and its harsh but authentic portrait of a small working-class
town.
The next landmark in
her career is another film by Chabrol, the ensemble piece Les
Bonnes Femmes (1960), which is not only one of its
director’s finest, but one of the best French films ever made (I
wrote about it in my obit for Chabrol). The whole film can be found here with English subtitles:
Watching the film is
an incredibly emotional experience, as it moves back and forth
between extremely light moments and very dark ones. This is an
in-between one, and one of the best-ever depictions of boredom at
work on film:
I also asked Mme.
Lafont about Chabrol’s strange and wonderful failure Les
Godelureaux (1961), in which she plays a seductress
summoned by a dandy (Brialy again) to destroy a young man who has
pissed him off.
The film is now available in its entirety on YT with English subs, and it is quite a
“discovery” from this period of Chabrol’s work: Lafont is red
hot as the seductress, but the fact that her character is a fantasy
figure (a red-hot female Tyler Durden, without the brawling) was
something she emphasized to me in my interview; this of course (as
with Fight Club) begs the question of all the
times she is seen in public by people other than the lead character
and Brialy. Whatever the case may be, it’s a fascinating Sixties
pic.
There were a number
of films I would’ve liked to ask Lafont about, including the comedy
L’amour c’est gai, l’amour c’est triste (1971), a
charming effort by the director Jean-Daniel Pollet. Pollet’s work
is split into two categories: gorgeously non-linear film “poems”
and narrative comedies and drama (L’amour fits in
the latter category).
Claude Melki (a
favorite of Pollet) plays a schlemiel who doesn’t quite understand
that his sister (Lafont) is a hooker. He finally finds a girlfriend —
the adorable Chantal Goya from Masculin-Feminin —
and the farce gets cuter and siller. This clip has no English subs, unfortunately.
One of the most
intricate and important films Lafont was involved in was Rivette’s
13-hour masterpiece Out 1 (1971). You can see her
response to my question about improvisation in the creation of the film below, in the first part of this blog entry, but I thought at least one clip from the film
featuring Bernadette should be included online.
Thus, this excerpt of
a scene where Michael Lonsdale tries to get her to return to Paris to
join his theater troupe (and reveals that she is one of the mysterious "Thirteen" that Jean-Pierre Leaud has stumbled onto):
Lafont was
constantly working during her 56-year film career. So while she was
making deadly serious countercultural masterpieces, she also was
appearing in charming farces like Trop
Jolies Pour Etre Honnetes (1972), an all-female comedy caper that
also featured Funhouse interview subject Jane Birkin and Serge
Gainsbourg. The trailer is here.
My final question to
her concerned her reunion with Truffaut, Such a Gorgeous Kid
Like (1972), based on a novel by Henry Farrell (What
Ever Happened to Baby Jane?). The film is a rather odd item for
Truffaut, a broad farce about an amoral woman that has some wonderful
moments. Lafont couldn’t sing but turned that into a comedic advantage,
as when she belts the film’s title song. Here is the trailer:
One of Lafont’s
“greatest hits” as an actress was her starring role in Jean
Eustache’s minimalist masterwork The Mother and the Whore
(1973), which qualifies as perhaps the last great French New Wave
film (although Eustache was younger than the original crew and the
film was made a decade after they stopped making films like this).
Lafont plays the
“mother” part of the equation, the woman who lives with
Jean-Pierre Leaud and tolerates his affair with a young nurse.
Eustache’s film needs to be out on DVD in America (when it was last
heard of, it was on VHS from New Yorker Films, the firm that had very erratic VHS/DVD release practices).
At the moment this is being
written, the film can only be obtained in America with English subs via the old
New Yorker 2-VHS set and the UK DVD (or off of the infamous
Torrents). The film can be found in its entirety with Spanish subs here and in French with no English subs.
Here is a quiet,
contemplative sequence in which Lafont listens to a Piaf song. The
brilliance of Eustache's film lies in his dialogue and also in
interludes like this one:
Jumping ahead to the
Eighties, one see Bernadette turning into a character person, camping
it up in pictures like Just Jaeckin's The Perils of Gwendoline (1984) and winning a Cesar as Best Supporting
Actress (she also received a Lifetime Achievement Cesar in 2003) for
playing a nanny to the very sassy Charlotte Gainsbourg in
L’Effrontee (1985), directed by Funhouse guest
Claude Miller. Here is the trailer for the film.
Bernadette worked
with Chabrol again in the late Seventies and Eighties (appearing in
Violette, Inspecteur Lavardin,
and Masques). Her daughter Pauline also became a
popular movie star in the Eighties, appearing in Chabrol's Poulet
Au Vinegre (the sequel to Lavardin) and
Godard's Keep Your Right Up. Pauline sadly died in
1988 (at the age of 25) while on a camping trip. A tribute to her can be seen here.
A film I have not
seen, but which some helpful poster has put up in several shards
(Bernadette's scenes only), is Olivier Peyon's Les Petites
Vacances (2006). In the film Lafont plays a grandmother who
takes her grandkids on a road trip without telling their parents.
There is a wonderful scene with Claude Brasseur and a very taut scene toward the end of the film, but this particular sequence explains the
dilemma that is behind the film.
One of Lafont's
final starring roles was in the comedy-drama Paulette
(2012), where she played an old woman who becomes a pot dealer to
earn money. (The trailer is here.) A very affectionate TV documentary
about her can be found here (no English subtitles).
*****
Lafont was fearless
as a performer, and nowhere was this more apparent than when she
sang. She was off-key, but amiable and sexy enough to still please
the viewer. The first musical clip I found is from Les
Idoles (1968), a broad comedy in which she appears as
“Soeur Hilarite” (a play on the name of the Singing Nun,
Soeur Sourire [Sister Smile]). The rock band
accompanying her definitely tag this as the late Sixties:
Truffaut said he
felt that the character in the book Such a Gorgeous Kid Like
Me was just like Bernadette (this becomes a rather odd observation when you consider that the character is not just a clever sexpot, she's also a liar and a
crook....). To promote the film, she sang the theme song on a French
TV show. Again, waaaay out of key, but still adorable:
And for the piece de
resistance, an incredibly silly musical number that seems to have
first appeared in a children's TV show, "La sieste de
papa." Listen to that synthesizer, and remember that the
Eighties truly were a “lost” decade for everyone.
A showcase for its lead trio of actors, The Hit is one of
those superb crime films that includes elements from another genre (in this
case, the road movie) and reinvigorates the standard tale of the hitman at the
end of the line.
