Bulle Ogier Gets Into Taxis
Conventionality in films seems to be desired by movie audiences and home viewers. Could it be that this need to see only movies with traditional narrative frameworks stems from a conditioned response going back to the essentials of Western European/American storytelling? If audiences, from cinema's beginnings in the 1890s, had only seen abstract artistic movies, or plotless presentations, would today's viewers find what we regard as a Hollywood narrative film "bizarre, unwatchable"? I recall a viewing, when I was about sixteen or seventeen, of Eric Rohmer's Perceval le Gallois ( Perceval the Welsh ), a stripped-down retelling of the Arthurian knight Perceval's Grail Quest. My father took my friend Paul and myself to a screening, part of the university's international film series, something put on each semester--the showing of twelve or thirteen films, around twenty-five per year. In college I went to these sc...