Eugène Green

  • Eugène Green – Le monde vivant AKA The Living World (2003)

    2001-2010ArthouseEugène GreenFrance

    Quote:
    Rare is a film like Eugène Green’s Le Monde Vivant (The Living World), one of such humor, wit, whimsy, and spirit told in a mode so strict, formal, and minimal. It is a fable, or a fairy tale, or a certain way of looking at reality if you like, but it is impossible not to suggest a child-friendly and cheerful homage to Robert Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac. The Bresson comparison is inevitable, what with Green’s frank simplicity in framing, his deliberating speaking and minimally performing actors (resembling Bresson’s “models”), and most importantly his respect not just for each individual shot, movement, and line of dialog, but in the accumulation of these things.Read More »

  • Eugène Green – Toutes les nuits AKA Every Night (2001)

    2001-2010ArthouseEugène GreenFrance

    Quote:
    At age 50, Eugene Green — who left the U.S. in 1969 to settle in France — proves himself to be the mutant offspring of Robert Bresson and Manoel De Oliveira. First-time scripter-helmer’s exquisite oddity, “Every Night,” shows complete mastery of the austere, formal tradition perfected by his elders, but he makes it his own with bursts of satire and an insistence on crispy anachronistic diction that solemnly honors every last consonant. Pic has been holding its own at the oldest functioning arthouse in Paris since its publicity-free March 28 release, which was announced only via give-away postcards.Read More »

  • Eugène Green – Atarrabi & Mikelats (2020)

    2011-2020ArthouseEugène GreenFantasyFrance

    Adapts the Basque legend of Atarrabi and Mikelats, the tragic story of the sons of goddess Mari-Mother Earth- who are given to the devil for him to raise them.Read More »

  • Eugène Green – Correspondances (2009)

    Arthouse2001-2010Eugène GreenFranceRomance

    Quote:
    In Correspondences, Eugene Green returns to his familiar themes of interconnectedness, communion, and transcendent love (most recently illustrated in Green’s sublime feature Le Pont des arts) to create a tale of young love in the digital age. Presented as a series of emails read offscreen that are juxtaposed against isolated frontal shots of the anonymous lovers and the (interior) spaces they inhabit, the film also subtly evokes Alain Resnais’s baroque, nouveau roman puzzle film Last Year at Marienbad in its interplay of memory and seduction (or more appropriately, memory as seduction).Read More »

  • Eugène Green – Les Signes (2006)

    Eugène Green2001-2010ArthouseFranceRomance

    Quote:
    Some filmmakers have difficulty traveling between the short format and feature films, the former more often than not feeling like exercises, excerpts, or condensations, or the latter, in rarer cases (given the relative death of the short format some 60-odd years ago) seeming simply like brief ideas outstaying their welcome. The aesthetic of writer/director Eugène Green is so clean and simple in this age of image saturation and hyper-abundant kinetics that his “mini-film” Les Signes feels as natural and fluid as his fascinating longer features like 2004’s Le Pont des Arts and 2003’s miniature knight’s tale, Le Monde Vivant. Read More »

  • Eugène Green – Faire la parole (2015)

    2011-2020DocumentaryEugène GreenFrance

    Synopsis
    Documentary about the mysteries of the idiosyncratic Basque world shaped by words. “Making the word” speaks of how one lives according to the language spoken, a language that traces an invisible community between a group of young Basques (Spanish and French) who choose to live in Basque, with special emphasis on three teenagers who embark on a journey by the mountains, and by the identity itself.Read More »

  • Eugène Green – En attendant les barbares AKA Waiting for the Barbarians (2017)

    2011-2020DramaEugène GreenFrance

    29f7c043f76a2bde437fd0d52a185152

    Quote:
    On the night of the world loom the barbarians, and six refugees of modern time appear at the castle in search of king’s protection.

    Quote:
    Six strangers—fleeing hordes of much-feared, but never-glimpsed barbarians—seek refuge in the ancient home of a sorcerer and sorceress. After being promptly asked to surrender their smartphones, the guests are treated to an alternately deadpan and philosophical odyssey involving magic, ghosts, painting, and an extended reenactment of an Arthurian romance as they confront their uniquely 21st-century insecurities and anxieties. Part playful performance art piece, part metaphysical consciousness-bender, Eugène Green’s entrancing, oddly life-affirming fable is a thought-provoking and slyly humorous exploration of the filmmaker’s ongoing concerns with Baroque traditions and the search for meaning in the age of social media. Produced as part of the Les Chantiers Nomades Spring 2017 “Waiting for the Barbarians” workshop.Read More »

  • Eugène Green – Le fils de Joseph AKA Son of Joseph (2016)

    2011-2020DramaEugène GreenFrance

    29f7c043f76a2bde437fd0d52a185152

    A nativity story reboot that gently skewers French cultural pretensions, it features newcomer Victor Ezenfis as a discontented Parisian teenager in search of a father, Mathieu Amalric and Fabrizio Rongione as his, respectively, callous and gentle alternative paternal options, and Natacha Régnier as his single mother.
    The American-born expatriate filmmaker Eugène Green exists in his own special artistic orbit. All Green’s films share a formal rigor and an increasingly refined modulation between the playfully comic, the urgently human, and the transcendent, and they are each as exquisitely balanced as the baroque music and architecture that he cherishes.
    Eugène Green drops biblical motifs – Abraham and Isaac, Mary and Joseph – into this genuinely contemporary setting as if it were the most natural thing in the world, augmenting them with nods to crime films, Italian Baroque music, a Doisneau photograph, three 17th century paintings and an artificial way of speaking that is anything but current.
    The characters are positioned within the visual compositions and look directly into the camera, their diction flawless. Whatever needs saying – and that’s a lot – they recite impassively, in declamatory fashion. Along the way, there are jabs at the literature milieu and trendy yuppies.
    A film where divine seriousness rubs against bizarre comedy, where theology meets caricature, an intriguing film, anachronistic and innovative in equal measure.Read More »

  • Eugène Green – Le fils de Joseph AKA Son of Joseph (2016)

    2011-2020DramaEugène GreenFrance

    29f7c043f76a2bde437fd0d52a185152

    Synopsis:
    A young man who lives with his mother and has never known his father, heads off to look for him. He finds a cynical and Machiavellian man who works as a publisher in Paris. After he attempts to kill him, he finds filial love thanks to his uncle.Read More »

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