CoMo No. 32: France (February, 2025)

[sally]

[greennui]

Rewatching Children of Paradise is a goal this month.

[sally]

my plan is to randomly watch some of the 100gb+ french films that have lurked with me for years (the actually brilliant IT guys at work retrieved the vast majority of films from my laptop that died, yay!)




la valse des médias - luc moullet (1987) #CoMoFrancePartDeux

[frisson]

Haven't really delved into French cinema all that much (bit contrarian, I know). I'm thinking of starting out with some of Vecchiali's selections, and there's quite a few interesting-looking lists on letterboxd for classic French cinema. I got a handful of Vecchiali's 4-heart films for this year's KG Freeleech!

the actually brilliant IT guys at work retrieved the vast majority of films from my laptop that died, yay!

That's awesome! I'm glad to hear it.

[Jürka]

my plan (this month) is to watch anything French that is not Zanzibar.
all Zanzibar I want to keep in the other thread...
→ https://scfzforum.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=632

so (finally), attuning my perceptive apparatus to the French perspective...

What Is Seen Through a Keyhole (Ferdinand Zecca, 1901) #CoMoFrance


Cook & Rilly's Trained Rooster (Alice Guy-Blaché) #CoMoFrance

[greennui]

[Jürka]

Vive la révolution Retrospective, Pt. 1

The Crab Revolution (Arthur de Pins, 2004) #CoMoFrance

[Jürka]

Vive la révolution Retrospective, Pt. 2



The fabulous Life of Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Portraitist of Marie-Antoinette (Arnaud Xainte, 2015) #CoMoFrance

docudrama dilogy based on the Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun’s (1755-1842) memoirs
→ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89lis ... 9e_Le_Brun


despite specializing in portrait painting, during times of political turmoil and personal loss (of the daughter) she learned to activate her parasympathetic nervous system via landscape painting.


her main (female) rival in portrait painting (in France) was Adélaïde Labille-Guiard
→ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad%C3%A9l ... lle-Guiard

the main international (female) painter star of her time (whom she befriended while in exile) was Angelica Kauffman
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angelica_Kauffman

Ep.1, The Portrait Of The Queen


Ep. 2, The Lady Traveler

[Jürka]

Vive la révolution Retrospective, Pt. 3

Mao by Mao (René Viénet, 1977) #CoMoFrance
→ https://www.ubu.com/film/vienet_mao.html

A film-détournement biography of Mao Tse-tung in which the life of the recently deceased Great Helmsman is told in his own words, using quotes culled from various Red Guard publications. The rise to power of the film’s namesake appears as the inevitable outcome of a dialectical logical. Or so the voice-over might lead one to believe. If the usual practice of détourned films is for the soundtrack to undermine the image, here the reverse occasionally takes place. The images critique Mao’s words. They show that which, even in the official visual record of the times, the narrative elides. The film is dedicated to Li Yhi Zhe, the nominal author of a famous Democracy Wall critique of the Maoist state.

Democracy Wall → https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Wall

https://pekinger-fruehling.univie.ac.at ... zhe-group/

In 1974 a Group of former red guards in Guangzhou (south China) draft a political pamphlet with the title "On Democracy and Legality under Socialism — dedicated to Chairman Mao and the Fourth People's Congress".



The text cites Marxist principles and Maoist phrases to take on the excesses of the Cultural Revolution and the hollow rituals of the personality cult around Mao, and it also tries to outline some essentials of "socialist democracy" and the rule of law to replace unbridled party rule.




The pseudonym "Li Yizhe" has been formed from the names of three main authors Li Zhengtian, Chen Yiyang and Wang Xizhe, but there have been a number of others who contributed to the manifesto, and even more (several dozens) in the informal group where the debates took place, and who assisted in writing the dazibao and distributing and mimeographing the text.



The group at first received some sympathy and tacit support from party cadres, but during 1974 most of the members were arrested or otherwise reprimanded. In December 1974 the Propaganda Department of the CCP in Guangdong province drafted a lengthy official document to criticize the Li Yizhe dazibao, calling it a "malicious attack on the Great Leader Chairman Mao, Mao Zedong Thought and the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee under the leadership of Chairman Mao".

From 1963 to 1971, René Viénet (*1944) was a leading member of the Situationist International, a significant revolutionary organization at the time. Two of his first films were selected years later to be presented at the 1977 Cannes Film Festival, Mao par lui-même (Mao by Mao) and Chinois, encore un effort pour être révolutionnaires (Peking Duck Soup).

[Jürka]

Vive la révolution Retrospective, Pt. 4











Peking Duck Soup AKA One More Effort, Chinamen, If You Want to Be Revolutionaries! (René Viénet, Francis Deron, 1977) #CoMoFrance

first of all, i have to echo the legendary French film critic Georges Charensol’s opinion that this film is a MASTERPIECE!

In CHINAMEN, ONE MORE EFFORT IF YOU WANT TO BE REVOLUTIONARIES!, Vienet uses subverted archival footage and a sardonic voiceover to denounce Mao’s deformed socialist state machine as a grotesque caricature of a revolutionary society. Whereas his previous two détournements spoofed kung-fu movies and pinku flicks, this one attacks the political documentary and disassembles it into its constituent tropes. Legendary French literary and film critic Georges Charensol called it “in my opinion the best film in the history of cinema.”

Reading the Thought of Chairman Mao during the operation gives the patient moral strength.
For example, the quotation he is reading right now may be translated:
“After the rain comes the sunshine.”

already the initial credits of the film are truly memorable...

A Shakespearian story full of noise and fury, but that means something. In the role of the "Grand Helmsman", Mao ZeDong himself, in the role of Madame Mao, famous actress Lan Ping, aka Jian Qing, as closest comrade in arms, traitor Lin Piao. Co-star-ring the vanished glories of the "Gang of Four". In the role of the proletariat, the Worker XXX. The costumes, the make-up, the gala dinners were kindly provided by the Maoist bureaucracy. Historical tricks: Third International, American imperialism, Jean Chesneaux, the Maoist bureaucracy, etc. The directors thank the People's Liberation Army for its invaluable assistance in eliminating the traitor Lin Piao. As writer Simon Leyes said: "The film gives us back the hysterical liturgies and medieval thaumaturgies of the cult of Mao".

Lin Biao → https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lin_Biao

these intro credits are concluded with a dedication (viz “The Li Yizhe Group” mentioned in the previous post)...


the dedication to the Li Yizhe Group and strong détournement spirit of the film (both of these absent in “Mao by Mao”) make it clear that the following synopsis — supposedly of “Mao by Mao” — is mildly deceptive...

A film-détournement biography of Mao Tse-tung in which the life of the recently deceased Great Helmsman is told in his own words, using quotes culled from various Red Guard publications. The rise to power of the film’s namesake appears as the inevitable outcome of a dialectical logical. Or so the voice-over might lead one to believe. If the usual practice of détourned films is for the soundtrack to undermine the image, here the reverse occasionally takes place. The images critique Mao’s words. They show that which, even in the official visual record of the times, the narrative elides. The film is dedicated to Li Yhi Zhe, the nominal author of a famous Democracy Wall critique of the Maoist state.

no wonder someone writes on lbox (related to “Mao by Mao”):

Watched this twice and still don’t really see how “the images critique Mao’s words”

only after watching ”Peking Duck Soup”, one can get out of this synopse confusion.
while in “Mao by Mao” there is truly hardly any détournement, in ”Peking Duck Soup” détournement is present in abundance.
like f.e. the sequence, dealing with disfavored comrades being forced to indulge in self-criticism, being accompanied by a promo for a self-cleaning oven.

→ https://chinaheritage.net/journal/peking-duck-soup/

‘To be right too soon is the worst way of being wrong.’ (Simon Leys)

The film shares much in common with the observations, and temper, of Simon Leys (Pierre Ryckmans). In fact, some years earlier René Viénet, one of the film’s directors, introduced a few draft chapters of Leys’ Les habits neufs du président Mao: chronique de la Révolution culturelle (The Chairman’s New Clothes) to the publisher Editions Champs libre in Paris.



As Leys later wrote of this controversial book, which appeared in 1971 at a time when the miasma of China’s Cultural Revolution still beclouded the French intelligentsia:

What other publisher could have envisaged a publication like that at that particular moment? The Chairman’s New Clothes denounced Mao from a left-wing point of view, exposing his regressive-feudal character: that view was obviously unacceptable to the orthodox French left, and incomprehensible on the right.

1976: Mao par lui-même / Mao by Mao
This biographical TV-length film was based on extensive archival research and had a voice-over composed entirely of Mao's own words. Fortuitously, the film was completed just as Mao died, on 9 September 1976, and it was immediately picked up by French TV. It was later the French entry in the short film competition at the 1977 Cannes Film Festival.

1977: Chinois, encore un effort pour être révolutionnaires / Peking Duck Soup
Again based on archival research and composed largely of found footage, this feature-length film competed in the Cannes Directors Fortnight in 1977.

[sally]

love at sea - guy gilles (1965) #CoMoFrancePartDeux

this was totally infuriating, everything i despise (sad penis hero, obsession with travails of youth) but also a sumptuous feast for the eyes, fantastic use of colour vs b&w, and a cameo by the emissary of the cinema-gods, léaud, which always hits me in the guts

[Jürka]

ibid.

i like Proustian objects too

[Jürka]

The Romance of Astrea and Celadon (Éric Rohmer, 2007) #CoMoFrance rewatch (the more i watch it, the more i like it)

Rohmer gives us a philosophical conversation that is basically about the Trinity (Druid-style, to be sure) and the oneness of the multiple gods, and another conversation about the oneness of lovers. And then the resolution has Celadon becoming Astrea and then Astrea and Celadon becoming one, so the shallow story becomes a reflection of divinity.

[sally]

barrabas - feuillade (1919)

the problem with watching feuillade serials is that afterwards you have one less feuillade serial to watch

also got mildly less interested after laugier shaved off his mustache

[Jürka]

Vive la révolution Retrospective, Pt. 5



Chinese in Paris (Jean Yanne, 1974) #CoMoFrance

adaptation of Robert Beauvais‘ book “Quand les Chinois...” (1966)

The Chinese have invaded Europe! In the ensuing panic, the French President flees to America, leaving the citizens of France, who are forced to manufacture pipes, to rediscover the joys of denunciation and hypocrisy.

While the Chinese are restructuring the French political-economic systems and everyday life according to the Maoist ideal, many French people are busy with secretly finding ways back to the decadent bourgeois life and pursuing their own petty individual interests. Dissatisfied with the sabotaging bourgeois mentality of the French, the Chinese authorities decide to use model plays to reform the “French psyche,” including a revolutionary ballet explicitly quoting “The Red Detachment”. However, the model play is consumed by French audiences as pure entertainment, further releasing their repressed bourgeois vices, which also infect and corrupt the Chinese occupiers. In the meantime, the French extremist-saboteurs previously sent to China to receive “thought reform” return to Paris as rigid Maoists, only to disappointedly find out that the Chinese occupiers had become decadent Frenchmen. These newly converted French hard-line “Maoists” take up arms and become the “Résistance.” Seeing the situation spiraling out of control, the Chinese authorities have to order a full retreat, and the French have their triumph of “resistance.”

Worth seeing just for the wonderful ballet performance where you get to witness a six-minute-long amalgamation of The Red Detachment of Women and Carmen.

The French film The Chinese in Paris has a six-minute-long "play-within-a-play", that hybridizes the ballet The Red Detachment of Women with the French opera Carmen, calling the production "Carmeng".

The Red Detachment of Women → https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Detac ... n_(ballet)

Les Chinois à Paris: The Red Detachment of Women and French Maoism in the Mid-1970s
(by Nan Ma, 2020)

By triangulating the relationship among The Chinese in Paris, The Red Detachment, and the Telquelians’ China experiences, this essay casts new light on a particular facet of the connection between Maoist Cultural Revolutionary China and the French intellectual and artistic field in the early to mid-1970s. This intertextual analysis demonstrates that The Chinese in Paris is not simply a “gaudy” and “vulgar” comedy that offers a cynical revisionist allegory of the French Resistance and Vichy Collaboration during the Second World War. The other side of the story is a serious, though comic in tone, critique of “French Maoism” in the Cold War as represented by the Telquelians. Just like Kristeva, the film uses the imagined Chinese (invaders) as a distorting mirror of the “other” to reveal to the audience the repressed otherness/strangeness within the French “self.” Yet the film goes further to deconstruct the “mirror of the other” itself by showing that the imagined Chinese Maoist “other” is not fundamentally different from the French bourgeois “self.” In so doing, it challenges the China/West binary that underlies the Telquelians’ theoretical imagination.

Tel Quel → https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tel_Quel

In 1971 the journal broke with the French Communist Party and declared its support for Maoism.
In the autumn of 1976, the journal explicitly distanced itself from Maoism.

→ https://www.causeur.fr/rene-vienet-debo ... -mao-34005

The book that really launched the "Asian Library" and its fifty titles was Simon Leys's Les Habits neufs du président Mao (1971), which revolutionized our view of the "cultural revolution". Before that, many were unaware of the murderous toll of Maoism.

René Viénet: Not really. We must not believe the fable of ignorance of totalitarian crimes. Previously, all pro-Nazis were indeed anti-Semitic, then adored the gas chambers without ignoring what the "final solution" was. All Stalinists adored the Moscow and Prague trials and Stalin's crimes. And they asked for more. Romer, Monatte, Souvarine, Koestler, Kravchenko, Rousset and others had already said it all. In the same way, all Maoists rejoiced in the crimes of Mao and his wife. For China, we did not yet have the figures, but we knew that it was monstrous. The Maoists, moreover, do not deny the number of victims (the Catholic-Maoist Jean-Luc Domenach is always lyrical about them, but by changing sidewalks he did not change his profession, as Souvarine said): they were not Maoists despite the crimes of Maoism but because of these crimes that they were not unaware of. I never tire of repeating that the French Maoists, like one of their mentors, the ineffable Badiou, were rich kids who had a taste for blood without having worked in a slaughterhouse.

If many were not unaware of the massacres, what did Simon Leys contribute to the understanding of Maoist China?

An early, timely and illuminating explanation of the cultural revolution. In 1971, that is to say halfway through, five years before Mao's death. The expression "cultural revolution" comes from a pamphlet by the East German Stalinist Alfred Kurella, which went unnoticed in 1931, and which Mao and his supporters took up for ten insane and bloody years, between 1966 and 1976. Shortly after the "Great Leap Forward" and its forty million deaths from starvation, Mao used the remote-controlled violence of the Red Guards to take revenge on his deputies who had marginalized him. This is what I recalled, after Simon Leys, "in sound, images and lights", in the film Chinese, still an effort to be revolutionaries! (1977). For ten years, school and university courses were stopped. Nearly four million Chinese died during the cultural revolution. Tens of thousands of teachers, writers and artists were killed, many more tortured. Mao, his wife and their clique pushed kids to kill each other before having them eliminated by the army. Simon Leys explained it perfectly, and he was the first in the West.

How was New Clothes… received?

As soon as the book was published, the "sinologists", especially the Catholic-Maoists, like Jean Chesneaux, Jean-Luc Domenach and Léon Vandermeersch, pursued us with their vindictiveness. They lobbied effectively to prevent Leys from teaching in France, got me fired twice from the CNRS. They even wrote to the Chinese embassy, ​​in a way that is funny today, to denounce me as an "accomplice of Deng Xiaoping". These larvae are characters from Jean Yanne's film The Chinese in Paris. You can recognize Jean-Luc Domenach, and even more so Léon Vandermeersch, in the priest recycled into a political commissar, masterfully played by the brilliant Paul Préboist. 

Jean-Luc Domenach → https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Luc_Domenach
Léon Vandermeersch → https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A9on_Vandermeersch

[Jürka]

Lancelot of the Lake (Robert Bresson, 1974) #CoMoFrance

[Jürka]

Vive la révolution Retrospective, Pt. 6

The Camisards AKA The French Calvinists (René Allio, 1972) #CoMoFrance

French counterpart to Winstanley (1975).
War of the Camisards → https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Camisards

A costume film, but not a traditional one. René Allio uses his background as a painter and theatre-maker (he was primarily familiar with the work of Bertolt Brecht) in devising this original historic narrative. The film is set in the period when Louis XIV abolished the edict of Nantes (1598-1685) and declared French Protestants to be outcasts. Many Huguenots fled abroad, but especially in the Cevennes region in the South of France some Protestant rebels headed for the hills. Known as ‘Camisards’ they fought a stubborn guerrilla war for years against the royal troops.



The film is set up as a chronicle and provides pictures of the aristocratic army generals and of the simple rebels. An off-screen text by Camisard Jacques Combassous, based on an authentic journal, links the different episodes.

[sally]

souris d'hôtel - adelqui migliar (1929) #CoMoFrancePartDeux

terrible film

[Jürka]

Cesarée (Marguerite Duras, 1978) #CoMoFrance

On images of the Tuileries Gardens, Marguerite Duras recalls Césarée, an ancient destroyed city.

The name Caesarea or Kaisareia refers to a now-defunct ancient city, probably named in honor of Gaius Iulius Caesar. It is an exploited metaphor for a forgotten place. It is similarly used by Racine or Louis Aragon.

→ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuileries_Garden



The Negative Hands (Marguerite Duras, 1978) #CoMoFrance

The image presents a travelling made from a car. Still night, but at daybreak, we go from the Bastille Square (where the French Revolution was born in 1789) to the Arch of Triumph, passing through the Rivoli Street and its stone archways. The sound presents Duras’s voice producing another image: the portrait of the artist who painted his negative hands, affixing his fingerprints on the walls of pre-historic caves. Duras talks about him, makes up his reasons, reproduces his foolishness. Two phantoms conversing, two beginnings intertwining.

“Both films (Cesarea and The Negative Hands) are made from unused footage for The Ship Night. The statues in Place de la Concorde and Maillol were too ostentatious for the empty shots of the intended film. Also, the shots are too figurative and, in the case of The Negative Hands, unsuccessful. I don't know what the technical problem was, but the red light looks more like a bloodstain.” – Marguerite Duras

[Jürka]

Vive la révolution Retrospective, Pt. 7







The Comintern Brahmin (Vladimir Léon, 2006) #CoMoFrance

From Mexico to Russia, from Germany to India, director Vladimir Léon goes in search of a revolutionary adventurer from Bengal: M. N. Roy. Founder of a communist party in Zapata's Mexico, leader of the Communist International in Soviet Russia alongside Lenin, anti-Stalinist and anti-Nazi activist in pre-war Germany, politician, and atheist philosopher in post-independence India, Roy embodies the struggles of a century that he crossed on three continents. However, the official histories of these countries have preferred to erase the trace. By meeting with direct and indirect witnesses, Léon patiently reconstructs the chaotic existence of a free spirit.

M. N. Roy → https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M._N._Roy

point of departure for this film was a snapshot (a group portrait) taken during the event of the 2nd World Congress of the Communist International
→ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2nd_World ... ernational

author of the film started to wonder who is the tall guy in the middle (“beside Lenin, Gorky, Bukharin, Zinoviev”)


however, M. N. Roy isn’t the only interesting character in the snapshot.
most of these comrades were later either expelled from the Party (a better option) or executed by Baal (Stalin).


→ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev_Karakhan

Karakhan was known for his dandyish appearance; Karl Radek is quoted as having "maliciously described" him as "the Ass of Classical Beauty"

The British diplomat Robert Bruce Lockhart, who met Karakhan in 1918, described him as: “An Armenian with dark, waving hair and a well-trimmed beard, he was the adonis of the Bolshevik Party.”

→ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Radek

He was reportedly killed in a labor camp on Stalin's orders following a fight with a fellow Left Opposition inmate named Varezhnikov. According to an investigation of the Central Committee of the CPSU and the KGB after the Khrushchev Thaw, his murder was organized under the Supervision of the senior NKVD operative Pyotr Kubatkin.

Radek has been credited with originating a number of political jokes about Joseph Stalin.

→ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Bukharin

A prominent Bolshevik described by Vladimir Lenin as a "most valuable and major theorist" of the Communist Party

Among other intercessors, the French author and Nobel laureate Romain Rolland wrote to Stalin seeking clemency, arguing that "an intellect like that of Bukharin is a treasure for his country". He compared Bukharin's situation to that of the great chemist Antoine Lavoisier who was guillotined during the French Revolution: "We in France, the most ardent revolutionaries ... still profoundly grieve and regret what we did. ... I beg you to show clemency."

→ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Lashevich


→ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigory_Zinoviev


every cinephile should give Berzin credit for including cinemas in labor camps!
→ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eduard_Berzin

In 1926, Joseph Stalin gave Berzin the task of setting up the Vishera complex of labor camps in the Urals known as Vishlag where cellulose and paper were to be produced. This he did with great enthusiasm and success. The 70,000 prisoners there were in most cases treated surprisingly well, even receiving wages and benefitting from cinemas, libraries, discussion clubs, and dining halls.

no clue who this person is?!?! maybe some American comrades can tell???


the missing link between communism and fascism.
→ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicola_Bombacci

In 1921 Bombacci became one of the founding fathers of the Communist Party of Italy (PCdI). Despite this, due to his days in the PSI as a fellow Massimalista, he remained a friend of Mussolini even after the latter had eschewed socialism in favor of fascism. Bombacci was eventually expelled from the PCdI in 1927 for embracing a pro-fascist position. From that year onwards, he became an open fascist, although he never officially joined the National Fascist Party.

Nicknamed "the Red Pope" by the bourgeoisie, Bombacci told a crowd in Genoa in 1945 that "Stalin will never make socialism; rather Mussolini will."

Bombacci was shot on 28 April 1945 at Dongo (province of Como) where he had been captured, along with Mussolini, by Italian communist partisans. He was summarily shot alongside Mussolini. Before his execution, Bombacci shouted out "Long live Mussolini! Long live socialism!"

not mentioned in the film but also present in the picture, Zorin (eleventh with the hat) & Belenky (completely right with a hat) — both (not hard to guess) later shot.
→ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Zorin
→ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abram_Belenky

so, obviously, plenty of films could be made based on this single snapshot!

btw., M. N. Roy kept the closest ties with Borodin (who later died in a prison camp) in those times.
→ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Borodin

last but not least, i saw something mindblowing (& very revolutionary) in the film!
till the very end, my architecture-sensitive eye noticed & cherished very cool post-modern (i quickly estimated) structures.


what a shock getting to know that this “post-modern gem” is coming from the 18th century!
→ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jantar_Mantar,_New_Delhi

Jantar Mantar is located in the modern city of New Delhi. "Jantar Mantar" means "instruments for measuring the harmony of the heavens". It consists of 13 architectural astronomy instruments. The site is one of five built by Maharaja Jai Singh II of Jaipur, from 1723 onwards, revising the calendar and astronomical tables.

Jantar Mantar is located in New Delhi and built by Maharaja Jai Singh II of Jaipur in the year 1724. The maharaja built five observatories during his rule in the 18th century. Among these five, the one in Delhi was the first to be built. The other four observatories are located in Ujjain, Mathura, Varanasi, and Jaipur.

The objective behind the construction of these observatories was to assemble astronomical data and to accurately predict the movement of the planets, moon, sun, etc. in the solar system. It was a one of a kind in its time when it was built.

[Jürka]

Vive la révolution Retrospective, Pt. 8







Imagine Robinson Crusoe (Jean-Daniel Pollet, 1968) #CoMoFrance

despite i intended to stay away (this month) from Zanzibar and didn’t intend to watch this film as a part of this “Retrospective”, this post-apo (point zero) tale is certainly in the Zanzibar gravity field and fits in the “Long Live the Revolution!” series.

As is well known, in 1968, France was full of hopes for a new world. The May events were reflected in cinema: members of the Zanzibar group, for example, were radically searching for a point from which humanity should start all over again, and Jean-Daniel Pollet turned to a related, but still more independent and tenacious theme.

Antoine de Baecque: You played a role in 68, in the mobilization of filmmakers.

Jean-Daniel Pollet: It was the only time I had the impression that something could move. My apartment served as a base for the Estates General of Cinema. With Malle, Kast, Varda, and Resnais, we drafted one of the motions. This impression that everything could start again… it didn’t last, I left for Greece to shoot Can You Imagine Robinson, my favorite film. Greece is my second homeland. I have always oscillated between the extreme margin and the center. I call it the extreme center.

[Jürka]

Vive la révolution Retrospective, Pt. 9

if it wasn’t my intention to watch the previous film as a part of the “Long Live the Revolution Retrospective”, then, in this case, it was even less intended. i just wanted to watch one more (yet unseen) Rivette and even in the wildest dreams i wouldn’t guess it’s so “revolutionary”. despite we are not paranoid anymore these days (fascism is making the loudest possible coming out in the primetime news which makes the situation crystal clear) watching this film (playing with the looming paranoia) was still (maybe even more so) rewarding.

Paris Belongs to Us (Jacques Rivette, 1961) #CoMoFrance

Production having begun in 1957, Jacques Rivette’s Paris Belongs to Us (Paris Nous Appartient) was on track to be the first film of the French New Wave to screen in theatres. But prob­lems with finance and distribution delayed its release until 1961, after Claude Chabrol’s Le Beau Serge (1958), François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959) and Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960).
When Paris Belongs to Us finally appear­ed, the genre had been radically altered by those groundbreaking releases, and the film looked a little staid by comparison. The movie met with mixed reviews in France, although Rivette’s New Wave compatriots gave it their whole­hearted support.
The film fares better a half-century later. It unspools as a provocative, precisely photographed and carefully edited movie that succeeds in expressing the political and personal paranoia of its opinionated cast.

The film mentions creeping fascism in the forms of McCarthyism in the US and the Franco regime in Spain. But is it all just paranoia?

The film opens with a sentence written by Peguy: "Paris n'appartient à personne" (Paris belongs to no one), witnessing the reception of the city and its cosmopolitan being. The opposite word game of the title mirrors the revolutionary circle that is created around the characters, even if their actions do not often lead to a continuation of the plot or a clarification of the events, deliberately concealed behind a network of small details, basically unnecessary. It is, therefore, a plot similar to the mystery or detective genre (although at times romantic, thriller, and drama) but differs considerably from the canons that characterize the genre, also because it is only deluded to the spectator the possibility of interacting as a detective, like the illusion chased by Anne. Rivette exhibits the elusiveness of reality through these McGuffin, making the film volatile and playing with the spectator; actions often take a short time while unnecessary dialogues and acts are dilated at length (varying the speed of the detach between sequences). A film that can irritate in its subversion: as a revolutionary rebellion, it imposes a careful vision, but not an analysis regulated by specific narrative parameters. At times cryptically dreamlike, an aura of mystery, a sort of anarchist esotericism, constitutes a veritable manifesto of the Nouvelle Vague. Less romantic but similar in concept to "L'Amour fou", it is a very thoughtful film, especially at the political and existential level: Probably Rivette's masterpiece, it exhibits in a refined way its idea of elusiveness, really hard to decipher. A conceptually violent and subversive work from the title; ironic that being invisible to the "main public" at the same time supports and, in a certain way, confirms, the deepest cinematographic essence.

Godard took Fuller and Bogart; Rivette brings Hitchcock and Welles (and perhaps a little Ulmer) to this debut film. Like other Rivettes I’ve seen, there’s excess abound and the narrative meanders through scenes, where location is way more important than plot (the director standing on the roof overlooking Paris feels like the great shot of Burt Lancaster in Sweet Smell of Success). But this is an apocalyptic conspiracy film through and through, led by a naïve girl navigating a very dangerous space. Opening scene sets the stage with the Hitchcock-styled camera movements and the neighbor screaming about how everyone is doomed. Anne’s interest in running down these mysterious tapes is classic MacGuffin, as she finds herself literally transforming into an actress before her eyes. But more than anything, it feels like Touch of Evil, a surreal space in which anything and everything can happen, where you can’t trust anyone, and the city consumes the innocent (except Janet Leigh would be leading the action). It’s a stage for a performance that never happens on an actual stage, except in the very humorous diversion we see Gerard’s production consumed by producers (“We need to cast dwarves. None over four feet tall”). Love many of the details, especially the multiple eyes of the drawings in Philip Kauffman’s apartment. That the paranoia conspiracy is confirmed by the end of the film is also smartly upended by the fact that who killed who and what was the goal makes it all the more anxious (compare that to the 1970s paranoia films, where the protagonists might fail, but at least they know who and what is out there).

While more famous nouvelle vague works seem to aspire to zeitgeist-rendering, painting portraits of turn-of-the-decade Paris that are full of hopeful energy, partly achieved via a then-fresh hybrid of modernist experimentation and pop culture referencing, Rivette’s film is shot through with thick pessimism, alienation and late-50s paranoia (a mood which, as many have pointed out, now looks politically, morally and psychologically prescient in the wake of paranoid 70s cinema).

Rivette is, however, a deceptively complex filmmaker, and his interest in paranoia, alienation and nihilism is paired, to some extent at least, with subtle irony and a sense of play. So while a brooding, seemingly unresolvable sense of conspiracy drives the film’s is-it-or-isn’t-it narrative – the “problem” at first seeming political in the form of a broadly resurgent fascist power (McCarthy-era United States, Franco’s Spain and Europe’s fascist legacy are all vaguely referenced) – the viewer is also able to see the anguished on-screen behaviour as humorously deluded, hermetically “existential” or primarily a social performance. These layers are all equally viable as interpretive strands that co-exist despite their apparent contradictions, revealing Rivette as a truly “democratic” filmmaker. The more one engages with this cinema, the more multi-layered (hence hermeneutically rewarding) and elusive it becomes.

Through the fragmentary and increasingly risible attempts of a ramshackle amateur theatre group to stage Shakespeare’s fragmented and “un-stageable” play Pericles, we are shown the onscreen struggle to mount an “independent” production. For instance, the director and his unpaid actors must use a different rehearsal space every day, chosen from the diverse corners of the city. The film we’re watching is the end result of a very similar process. More broadly, this peculiar focus on the theatre – to which the director will return repeatedly in later films – allows us, in true Shakespearean tradition, to see “the world” itself as “a stage”. Once this element of the film’s reflexivity is felt, the apparent oppositions or tensions between belief and scepticism, the material and metaphysical, the political and psychological, realism and expressionism, become further complicated by their subtle framing (or staging) as performance. Yet while Godard and countless other 60s filmmakers introduce “Brechtian” reflexive incursions to overthrow narrative illusion in the name of critique, Rivette’s more submerged radicalism lingers longer in the mind of the viewer, and is perhaps more affectively unnerving. This emphasis on theatrical performance means that the film’s insidious reflexivity effectively incorporates any purported meta-filmic or social real, including our own.

[Jürka]

A Writer's Century, Ep. 97
Pierre Klossowski, un écrivain en images (Alain Fleischer, 1996) #CoMoFrance





while intending to stay out of Zanzibar, stumbling upon the Zanzibar again

Marxist poet and art critic Alain Jouffroy, a mentor for several members of the Zanzibar group

[Jürka]

Twilight: A Quarantine AKA Duelle (Jacques Rivette, 1976) #CoMoFrance

a little bit of information...

The main title is a neologistic feminine form for the noun "duel".

The director-assigned English title is Twhylight, a combination of "twilight" and "why".

This is part one of what was to be Jacques Rivette's four-part project "Scenes de la Vie Parallelle".



The idea was to create four different films with a running sub-plot involving a mythical war between goddesses of the Sun and the Moon, fighting for possession of a mysterious jewel.



This one was a "film noir" modeled after "The Seventh Victim" (which Rivette screened for the cast before the shooting began) with bits of "Kiss Me Deadly", "Lady From Shanghai" and "Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne" thrown in for good measure.



An uncanny mood piece it takes place in a weirdly unpopulated Paris.



Jean Weiner (who used to play piano at "Le Bouef sur le Toit") supplies live piano improvisations here, much in the manner of an accompanist for a silent movie.



"Noroit" the second film in this series was a pirate adventure movie inspired by "Moonfleet" utilizing Tourneur's "The Revenger's Tragedy" as a frequently recited text — much in the way that Cocteau's "The Knights of the Roundtable" is quoted here.



After these two, Rivette began "Marie et Julien" with Albert Finney and Leslie Caron, but suffered a nervous breakdown three days into the shooting.



This brought the project to an end.



This year (2003) however, he's gone back to "Marie et Julien" again with Emmanuelle Beart and Jerzy Radzilowitz.



Maybe the four-part project will be completed after all.

last but not least...

[sally]

loin de manhattan - jean-claude biette (1982)

why do i get the feeling he agonised over every shot

[rischka]

I'm literally in France, does that count :p

I feel silly, moved nearly to tears by little kids and old people w their dogs

[Jürka]

I'm literally in France, does that count :p

without pictures it half-counts!
posts adorned with snapshots gonna be full-counted.

[rischka]

ok that took me like 20 mins you'll have to wait til the weekend for more

at least I was told the hillside sign was originally for a film what film idk

[rischka]

I'm in the town from la pointe courte will manage to upload a pic soon. the town is called sète



no one on the tour knew about this film except the guide

i'm about ready to punch one rich bitch who goes on and on about elon's alleged genius. these are not my people

I hope they all get norovirus. two more days

[Jürka]

loin de manhattan - jean-claude biette (1982)

Christian, an art critic, must write a study on the painter René Dimanche in order to understand why he did not produce anything for eight years.

this satire on art criticism was reviewed (on lbox) by a true art critic, so let’s let him speak...

as an art critic i was excited to see this, but it’s a tragically unfocused exercise.



there’s the cynical working critics, the pretentious academics, the pure-hearted woman who falls for the curmudgeonly artist, and drama, but it’s all so strained and lacking in wit that biette fails to say anything on art beyond the presentation of those conventional character tropes. i doubt he had any experience with the art world itself, or if he did he didn’t seem to have any particular thoughts about it.




if you think a magazine called “shapes and colors” is a witty title then you might enjoy this,



it’s never much more clever than that.



every scene is outdoors, for no apparent reason,



which underscores the persistent aimlessness of the whole production.



tragique!

i must admit that i was pretty bemused by “Shapes and Colors”.
tho, the title “The Flux of Influences, Back and Forth” is (without dispute) wittier!