1961-1970ArthouseDramaMichel SoutterSwitzerland

Michel Soutter – La lune avec les dents AKA The Moon with Teeth (1967)

The international cinematic new wave came bursting into the Swiss cinema through the work of Michel Soutter, whose La lune avec les dents (The Moon with Teeth) became practically a manifesto of the movement. Michel Soutter was one of the first directors of New Swiss Cinema who has made fiction films and he cofounded the Groupe 5 with Tanner and Goretta. The film follows William, thirty-ish, out of work and looking for a new life after apparently having been thrown out of his previous one. He meets up with Noelle, who seems intrigued by his restlessness – until her economist boyfriend shows up. Yet plot details do little to convey the power of the film, which lay in its capturing the anarchic texture of William’s life – a life whose lack of direction was read as a rebuke of the Swiss myth of orderliness and self-satisfaction. With his roots in documentary, Soutter excelled at creating a loose, vibrant cinema, full of quick zooms and dynamic hand-held shots, with dialogue that often alternated between outright quotations and stylized interviews. Almost completely rejected in its era, La lune avec les dents is now widely seen as a milestone for Swiss cinema.

From one to another of the films of Michel Soutter we are unfailingly reimmersed in the same atmosphere and the same haunting quality of existence. As a film-maker, he pays scant attention to the telling of a story; he prefers to tie in several tags of unifinisher tales he has picked out, a will-o’-the-wisp of random intrigues answering to one solitary principle: that of the meeting between two solitaries. These are men and women at the intersection of everywhere and nowhere, revealing no parallels of taste or of appetites in life. The characters thus drawn together by Michel Soutter are socially patterned juxtapositions of divergent temperaments and contrasting backgrounds. In their dealings with the world of the living, they embody disparate moral, mental or sentimental conceptions which, rather th an facilitating, actually hinder the emergence of elective affinities. But just the same, they are brought together in unexpected situations by chance, and they have to unmask or mask themselves, become believable or make-believe, speak to each other and, intentionally or not, confess to being what they are, ln the way they act toward each other, there is a constant play of lightminded inconstancy. This enables them ta provoke reactions, to ravel the false to get the true unravelled, to cast an initial veil over their own shyness, despair of human frailty. As a film director, Soutter gives proof of real sensitivity in organizing the narration along the lines of a game of hide-and-seek or perch-tag. The protagonists play at cops-and-robbers and often swap roles, which allows the author to show us something more of their and our personae. For there is a bit of ourselves in them, and at the same time they half-way remind us of people we pass day by day in the streets, without knowing how to see them or hear them.
Soutter has a feeling for the little commonplacidities of life which take on a new twist through some uneventfui happening: the passer-by who stops you to ask for a light, or the time, or the way to a place, and who excuses the interruption by rambling on about some little worry of his ; the person who thinks he’s in a private world and does a tap-dance every third step, then smiles with conspiratorial embarrassment when he suddenly sees someone staring at him; the man with his head in the clouds, who drops in free-fall when you tell him his coat-belt is trailing on the ground and might trip him up, and who then explains it all away by telling you about some fiddling infidelity of whiëh he is the victim … Certain strange complicities may evolve out of this brief encounter, a provocative indifference, an assuagement of some hunger. In this way, the scenarios of Soutter’s films engender a thousand pretexts for the build-up of this sort of relationship between those not marked at the start for a meaningful exchange.



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Language(s):French
Subtitles:English srt,English-German (both optional)

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