Alexandre Astruc

Normandy, second half of the nineteenth century. Jeanne Dandieu lives in a manor house with her parents and their servant Rosalie. She gets to know Julien, a handsome man, whom she soon marries. Her happiness is short-lived as she finds out that not only has Julien married her for her money but he cheats on her as well, with Rosalie to crown it all. The latter gives birth to a baby girl before leaving the house. Six years later, Julien has a new mistress, Gilberte de Fourcheville. Jeanne puts up with this new ordeal bravely. However Gilbert’s husband surprises the two lovers in a caravan and, in a rage, hurls them over the edge of a cliff.Read More »

In his landmark 1948 essay Birth of a New Avant-Garde, filmmaker Alexandre Astruc advanced the notion of le caméra-stylo (camera pen) which imagined the cinema eventually breaking free of the concrete demands of narrative, where images become a means of writing just as flexible and subtle as written language. Greatly influenced by Astruc’s theory, it was only a few years later that in 1954 Francois Truffaut spoke of the director as an auteur, the cinematic equivalent of a novelist, cap able of expressing themselves through recurring thematic elements, distinctive ways of building characters, and, above all, through the deployment and movement of actors and objects within the time and space of the shot.Read More »

Galois is practicing shooting in preparation for a duel the very next day. His last night.

Quote:
Champ de Galois… où l’on retrouve les mouvements d’appareil “premingeriens” dont parle Douchet à propos d’Astruc – de même qu’on y retrouve, à travers le destin d’Evariste Galois, ce qu’il décrit comme “la tragédie lyrique et romantique de l’adolescent à la recherche de l’absolu” – des mouvements d’autant plus appropriés que, dans la séquence du duel, ils font du pré un espace purement géométrique, pour ne pas dire galoisien.Read More »

A haunting short version of Edgar Allan Poe’s famous story about a cruel and unusual punishment inflicted on a victim of the Spanish Inquisition…Read More »

from imdb review:
In 1972, Sartre sat in his apartment in the Montparnasse section of Paris for a film documentary: archive footage (including clips from the 1967 Vietnam War Crimes Tribunal, convened in London by Bertrand Russell; that’s U.S. antiwar activist Dave Dellinger to Sartre’s right) and Sartre being interviewed by old friends, including Simone de Beauvoir. A real historical find, particularly with the endless talking-head revisionism conducted nightly on CNN & its broadcast progeny.Read More »

Not much one can say other than providing Godard’s review of the film:

I don’t give a damn about the merry-go-round decorated by Walt Disney, he lunch on the grass with imitation plastic clothes, the chewing-gum green of a ball of wool. I don’t give a damn about any of the lapses in taste piled up by Astruc, Claude Renoir and Mayo.Or about Roman Vlad’s saxophone either. Actually it isn’t bad. But anyhow, the real beauty of Une Vie lies elsewhere.
In Pascale Petit’s yellow dress shimmering amid the Velazquez grey dunes of Normandy. That’s wrong! Not Velasquez grey? Not even Delacroix grey, howl the connoisseurs.Read More »

Based on the 1836 novel by Balzac (wiki)

Quote:
Script-writers who adapt Balzac or Dostoievsky excuse the idiotic transformations they impose on the works from which they construct their scenarios by pleading that the cinema is incapable of rendering every psychological or metaphysical overtone. In their hands, Balzac becomes a collection of engravings in which fashion has the most important place, and Dostoievsky suddenly begins to resemble the novels of Joseph Kessel, with Russian-style drinking-bouts in night-clubs and troika races in the snow. Well, the only cause of these compressions is laziness and lack of imagination. The cinema of today is capable of expressing any kind of reality. What interests us is the creation of this new language. (…) The fundamental problem of the cinema is how to express thought.
Alexandre Astruc, The Birth of a New Avant-Barde: La Camera-Stylo (1948)Read More »