Last Watched

[nrh]

jose celestino campusano's lovely prison epic in 87 minutes el sacrificio de neuhen puyelli (2016). still processing this one but i think it's a very beautiful and harsh movie. glad to see a ton of his films surface on kg, some even with english subs.

[serri]

struggling to keep track of the smattering of things i watch :S

rio grande (1950, ford)

a bucket of blood (1959, corman)

ant-man (2015, reed)
thought this would be more fanciful and have some vulgar humor, disappointed.

raw deal (1948, mann)
dockside fight sequence was one of the most engrossing experiences of my week, very astonishing mixture of visual elements that give credibility and depth to emotional aspects of the film that had been weakly developed by the plotting.

my partner keeps the xfiles running in the background and i get sucked into the funnier one.

watched a few shorts on vimeo, i recommend this one by brigid mccaffrey

https://vimeo.com/177125403

[rischka]

:O serri!!

[nrh]

ok the great garrick owns

[rischka]

ok the great garrick owns

absofuckinglutely

[MrCarmady]

Claudia Weill's Girlfriends is as great as I've been hearing it is for years. This kind of Rohmer/Baumbach-y talky dramedy is one of my favourite genres of cinema when done well, and there's an absolutely superb mixture of cynicism and warmth here. It's also very funny.

[pabs]

Yeah, me too. And Baumbach's even grown on me in the past few months (despite myself).

Thanks for the rec. Love the majority of Rohmer's oeuvre.

[MrCarmady]

The Green Ray is one of my favourite movies of all time and there were moments here that strongly reminded me of it, so I hope/think that you will enjoy it.

[rischka]

watching some stuff for DtC like baal (1970), léon morin, prêtre (1961) and now i'm watching magic mike. how did this get into the list. edit: ok it was kinda sweet

up next cantando dietro i paraventi & gubben i stugan

[...]

I saw that Singh is Bliing is now on youtube with English subs, so I got me some veggie pakoras and navrattan korma and am making an evening of it.

[nrh]

I saw that Singh is Bliing is now on youtube with English subs, so I got me some veggie pakoras and navrattan korma and am making an evening of it.

[...]

Exactly! Which is why I'm so excited to finally have subs for it!

And, hey, spoilers! (heh)

[MrCarmady]

Bande à part is pleasant but forgettable barring the Madison and Karina's general presence. Legrand and Coutard make sure that it's easy on the eye and ear, but it's not really saying much and I didn't even buy into the general aura of coolness people seem to take away from it. Wish I'd seen it back when I first got into Godard at 16-17, now it may be time to venture into his 80s work instead.

[Umbugbene]

I don't buy into the aura of coolness either because it's a distraction from what's really going on. I can promise the movie isn't as shallow as it might seem. I wasn't a big fan until after 4 or 5 viewings, when I realized I was looking at it all wrong.

Here are a few hints:
- Madame Victoria's house is located in Joinville-le-Pont, which can hardly be accidental, because that's the location of Pathé, one of France's most important old film studios. It's a tiny suburb on the Marne River, and the studio is its primary claim to fame. So why choose it for the setting of the robbery?
- What does the title "Band of Outsiders" refer to? The answer is spelled out once in the background, but it's not necessary to notice that. The title alone gives it away when you put it in context.
- What does Arthur's name refer to?

[MrCarmady]

They explicitly say that Arthur is a reference to Rimbaud and I guess Franz is a reference to Kafka, but it just seems like Godard being cute than any deeper meaning than that to me. Thanks for pointing out the Joinville thing as I had no idea, but again, Godard's cinephilia was never in question, I juts think he builds on these allusions to classic cinema so much better in A Woman is a Woman which is one of my favourite films, as playful as Band of Outsiders and yet, for me, much more emotionally resonant. As for your second hint, is this in reference to the French New Wave on the whole? The whole love triangle reminded me of Jules and Jim and at some point during the English class scene someone says 'cahier' which obviously makes sense within the scene but did make me think of the magazine and how it all began.

[Umbugbene]

There's more to their names, but you're spot on with the New Wave identification. Like the main characters themselves, the French New Wave is also well described as a band of outsiders. The five core Nouvelle Vague directors were all young critics in their 20s writing for Cahiers du cinéma before they started making movies. And as you say, the characters too are first brought together in a place where they write in cahiers (notebooks).

Once you link this with Joinville, the movie starts to look different. Joinville is traditional French cinema, which the New Wave is robbing in a real sense because they're consciously trying to supplant the old school of filmmaking. Godard made Bande à part when his friendship with Truffaut was fraying. He always had a more synthetic approach to cinema than Truffaut had - Godard wants to incorporate tradition and build on it; the iconoclast Truffaut wants to tear it down.

If you're willing to overlook the offhand Rimbaud and Kafka allusions, you can see Franz as Godard (he's not shy about identifying himself with France), the more thuggish Arthur as Truffaut ("Arthur" sounds an awful lot like "auteur" doesn't it? - Truffaut being the originator of Auteur Theory), and Odile as the audience they're competing for. Odile is initially drawn to old-fashioned things; she's a shy girl boarding with Madame Victoria; but she's tentatively won over by the two young men. All the film references and fourth-wall transgressions, which might seem like attempts to look cool, are actually reminders that the movie is very much about cinema itself.

Ultimately the movie is Godard's argument against Truffaut. He predicts (rightly, I think) that his approach will triumph over Truffaut's oedipal rage against the older generation. He acknowledges his own complicity in the robbery, but Franz only gets away with a small amount, and Arthur meets a dead end.

Does that alter your estimation of the film?

[Umbugbene]

I forgot to mention one thing: when the schoolteacher says, “The director, Mr. Louis, is an advocate of modern methods. But we mustn't forget that classical = modern” she's also referring to Godard himself. ("Louis" is close to "Luc".) This stresses that Godard wishes to synthesize tradition and modernity.

Incidentally, there's a brilliant joke that I think goes over most people's heads. The teacher at one point asks the students to translate Shakespeare back into English, as if beginner students could possibly come anywhere close to doing it justice!

[MrCarmady]

Incidentally, there's a brilliant joke that I think goes over most people's heads. The teacher at one point asks the students to translate Shakespeare back into English, as if beginner students could possibly come anywhere close to doing it justice!

Ha, yeah, I enjoyed the pointlessness of that exercise. I like your reading and it all makes sense, though physically Arthur looks a lot more like Godard and the Franz/France/Godard connection seems a bit tenuous to me. Definitely stuff I'll pay attention to when/if I re-watch it.

I also much prefer Truffaut's work and I don't think of him as especially iconoclastic, he's more of a Paul McCartney to Godard's Lennon, content to soften and make 'granny films' like Stolen Kisses and Day for Night which are actually brilliant, while the one Vertov group JLG film I saw, British Sounds is more like Yoko Ono nonsense.

Anyway, gonna watch Every Man for Himself next before I go back to Godard's 60s work of which I still have to see everything from Une femme mariée onwards.

[Umbugbene]

The Franz/France connection is the least essential part of my reading. I should add though that "Arthur" and "auteur" sound a lot closer in French than they do in English.

In his critic years Truffaut was known as the enfant terrible among the Cahiers crowd, railing against established directors and labeling their work contemptuously as "tradition de qualité". He's sometimes associated with the phrase "cinéma du papa" although those weren't his words. You're right that he ended up making conservative films late in his career, but it's a common hallmark of oedipal rebellion that the boy becomes like the father he hates.

Not to disparage Truffaut completely. He wasn't entirely without talent, but I do think Band of Outsiders captures how Godard viewed his friend in 1964. Still the philosophical point about synthesizing tradition and modernity is more important than the personal element.

You're just beginning to enter Godard's best period in my opinion. Hope you enjoy the next few!

[thoxans]

*trufaux

[Lencho of the Apes]

It occurred to me this afternoon that if I had been around Paris in 1977, I would have urged F J Ossang to change his name to Georges Malaise. (That one's for Thoxans.)

[wba]

I juts think he builds on these allusions to classic cinema so much better in A Woman is a Woman which is one of my favourite films, as playful as Band of Outsiders and yet, for me, much more emotionally resonant.

I had exactly the reverse reaction. I love Bande a part, which I think is a grim and dark film (nothing cool and playful there for me), and dislike A Woman is A Woman, which is all so-called "cinephilia" and no substance to me (and also one of Godard's most grossly mysoginist films - a trait that bothers me in most of his (but especially in his early) work).

[rischka]

al pacino's bday on saturday and watching the safdie's heaven knows what prompted me to make a double feature with 1971's panic in needle park (al's first major role) and i gotta say, as tough as the safdie film is, this film is absolutely brutal. not much has changed for junkies in 50 years but a lot has changed in hollywood. h80thb al

[wba]

Yeah, that film is so good! I adore it.

[nrh]

schatzberg's run of puzzle of a downfall child/panic in needle park/scarecrow easily the most underrated by any of the '70s hollywood kids. should get to watching his later stuff one of these days...

[Roscoe]

AND THE SHIP SAILS ON which I know I haven't seen in more than 20 years, and I like it a lot more now than in original release. A much cooler vibe prevails over this picture of early 20th Century Europe. Some points seem to be made about Art and Politics (this being Fellini, guess who wins). Some good tasty artifice going on, blatant painted backdrops and model ships with cotton wool smoke coming from the smokestacks, and what I'll take as a straight up nod to Melies near film's end. I liked the silent movie opening sequence very much indeed, and the moments centering on a lovesick rhino. Not top drawer Fellini, but bits of it have stayed with me over the past few days.

The version running on the Criterion Channel is in dire need of a hi-def transfer, which I hope will be coming later this year in that long hinted-at Fellini Box that Criterion will be supposedly releasing.

[Joks Trois]

It is one of my favourite Fellini's. I would take it over many of his more acclaimed films. Light on its feet but also melancholic and resonant. Only the dubbing annoys, but most of Fellini's films suffer from this problem, which to some degree hinders their replay value for me.

And The Ship........came out in France on blu 10 years ago, but there are no English subs. Apparently the film was recorded in English as well, but the audio tracks are lost.

Re:Truffaut. He was always middlebrow. Overrated as hell too. Never saw the fuss. 400 Blows is good, but the rest of the Antoine films can go to hell!

[MrCarmady]

Your loss, both Stolen Kisses and Bed and Board are fantastic, and Antoine and Colette is great, too. I wish more directors were 'middlebrow' if they could make films of that quality.

[Roscoe]

Yeah, the dubbing in SHIP is a real distraction mainly when the great god Freddie Jones is onscreen. No mere dubber can do justice to Jones' way with a line of dialogue. I fell into the flow of the movie this time, and got a lot more out of it than I had in my vanished youth.

Interesting to read the Godard comments above. Godard's always been among the most firmly closed of cinematic books to middlebrow old me. As for Truffaut, well, no denying the ups (400 BLOWS, LAST METRO) and the downs (THE GREEN ROOM). I'm in the most minor of minorities with that insufferable JULES AND JIM thing.

[greennui]

I find Truffaut rather uninspiring as well. His style's probably the most rigid and least sensuous of all the New Wave clique. Godard's hit and miss but at least he'll always hit you with a few enthralling moments. I've also come to the conclusion lately that I prefer Godard's 80's work to his 60's work, Prénom Carmen being my personal highlight.