Jules et jim
‘Jules and Jim" is really Catherine's film. This is Jeanne Moreau's first great performance, all the greater because of the art with which she presents Catherine's discontent. A lesser actress might have made Catherine mad or hysterical, but although madness and hysteria are uncoiling beneath the surface, Catherine depends mostly on unpredictability -- on a fundamental unwillingness to behave as expected. She shocks her friends as a way of testing them.’
Truffaut: "I begin a film believing it will be amusing -- and along the way I notice that only sadness can save it."
directed by François Truffaut based on Henri-Pierre Roché's 1953 semi-autobiographical novel about his relationship with writer Franz Hessel and his wife, Helen Grund. One of the seminal products of the French New Wave, Jules and Jim is an inventive encyclopedia of the language of cinema that incorporates newsreel footage, photographic stills, freeze frames, panning shots, wipes, masking, dolly shots, and voiceover narration (by Michel Subor). Truffaut's cinematographer was Raoul Coutard, a frequent collaborator with Jean-Luc Godard, who employed the latest lightweight cameras to create an extremely fluid film style. For example, some of the postwar scenes were shot using cameras mounted on bicycles.
A Bout de souffle
A Bout de Souffle (1960) starring Jean Belmondo and Jean Seberg is Godard’s first feature film and considered to be the most influential/most defining film to come out of the Nouvelle Vague. Many of the French New Wave directors were inspired by Hollywood mainstream cinema directors such as Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles and this was something that Godard certainly adopted for A Bout de Souffle; his own take on the classic film noir.
The opening of A Bout de Souffle is composed of an extreme close-up of a man reading a newspaper “wearing a baggy, crumpled suit with hat cocked and fag in mouth, Michel Poiccard seems almost American”.
Le Mepris
The movie is adapted from Alberto Moravia’s 1954 novel of the same name. Jack Palance plays Prokosch, an American producer who hires Paul (Michel Piccoli) to write a screen adaptation of The Odyssey. Paul is pressured to commercialise the project, taking away from the purely artistic values envisioned by the director (Fritz Lang, playing himself). This brings troubles to his relationship with his wife, Camille (Brigitte Bardot). It’s a self-referential movie, a film whose deconstructive gaze is turned on itself, especially on the mechanics of sexual allure (Bardots speech). Contempt was the film that Bardot used to return back to screen as she had previously taken a break from acting to escape the medias attention. As we can see in the film Goddard exploits her looks, finding multiple opportunities for her to bathe or lie ariund naked he also takes the advanatge and draws out a theme of sexual objectification in the process . The most obvious example being at the start of the film in Bardot’s first appearance. She lies, again, nude on the bed, while talking to her onscreen husband- she asks him about various parts of her of her body, verbalising the fetishistic, cataloguing of body parts that the camera performs as it glides, in an unbroken take, up then down her back. The scene was added as Joseph e. levine insisted on a certain amount of Bardot nude scenes. Goddards response was a scene that resists easy eroticisation: instead of allowing the viewer unalloyed voyeuristic pleasure, Bardot’s commentary on her own attributes reminds us that she knows she’s being looked over, and that our inspecting gaze is not innocent, invisible or unnoticed. This sequence is a good example of Godard allowing form to speak over, or through the content: The colour filter on the shot begins red, changes to white, then turns blue. There is nothing in the scene to suggest that it needs a tricolour imposed upon it, and the lights are not changing in Paul and Camille’s bedroom; that’s the artistic stamp that Goddard lives.
No comments:
Post a Comment