Alexandre Astruc

  • Alexandre Astruc – Le puits et le pendule AKA The Pit and the Pendulum (1964)

    1961-1970Alexandre AstrucFranceHorrorShort Film

    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 »

  • Alexandre Astruc, Michel Contat & Guy Séligmann – Sartre par lui-même AKA Sartre by Himself (1976)

    1971-1980Alexandre AstrucDocumentaryFranceGuy SéligmannMichel Contat

    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 »

  • Alexandre Astruc – Une vie AKA One Life (1958)

    1951-1960Alexandre AstrucArthouseClassicsFrance

    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 »

  • Alexandre Astruc – Albert Savarus (1993)

    1991-2000Alexandre AstrucDramaFrance


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    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 »

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