Screen Screed: Thoughts on Movies From a Lifelong Eater of Cinema

     Some might think I've delved into obscure territory.  Writing reviews of short Rohmer and Rivette films from the late 1940s and 1950s.  Movies like fetuses of their masterpieces to follow in the 1960s and after.      To be drawn to such films involves an interest on my part to fill out my knowledge of their work, just as I once watched an obscure Alfred Hitchcock short, Aventure malgache , made in 1944 in French, taking place in Madagascar with a collaborationist/Resistance theme.      Rohmer, I've discovered, works at the level of ordinary human affairs.  His images in his color films seem to glow, as if the screen has become a series of paintings.  So beautiful are some of his images, the outdoor ones especially, with sunlight, I have felt myself weeping looking at them.      In 1958, Rohmer made his third short film, Véronique et son cancre ( Veronica and Her Dunce ).  Alain Delrieu, acting in ...

      Nadja à Paris (1964), directed by Eric Rohmer, comes across as a documentary, about thirteen minutes long.  Nadja Tesich, part Yugoslav, part American, wrote the narration.  She attends the city university in Paris.  She offers viewpoints on the culture to be experienced, bookshops, open air cafes, a quiet park she frequents, her bare feet photographed by Nestor Almendros, walking in flowing water in a concrete channel.      Her light step resembles a rabbit moving with ease across a lawn.  She seems to weigh fifty pounds, or it seems gravity doesn't affect her like it does others.  She attracts a lot of attention from boys and men.  She gets hit on often.  She breezes through it all.      Her narration gives the impression of a true to life account, but is it?  I don't know.  Unfamiliar with the circumstances leading to the making of this film, I wonder if Rohmer treated the material fictio...

     Jacques Rivette's first film, Aux quatre coins ( At the Four Corners ), a short from 1949, has the air of mystery present in all of his work.  Here are two men, two women--two pairs of lovers--a beach, the sea, a house, gestures, repeated images of characters putting their heads back to be kissed but also in a submissive pose suggesting encroaching violence.        Violence, its threat mainly, carries throughout the twenty minute silent film.  In the first scene one of the men sits on a couch, a woman enters the room and slaps his face twice. He moves his head, facing the ceiling, the scene ending with his head bowing.      Heads in the foreground with activity in the background comprise many images.  The stylization recalls Sergei Eisenstein's habit of placing actors in positions, making them participate as compositional elements of a shot.  Eisenstein's unfinished Que viva Mexico! (1932) demonstrates th...

      Fifty Shades of Grey (2015) stars Jamie Dornan (Christian Grey) and Dakota Johnson (Anastasia Steele).  Pacific Northwest locations include a view of mammoth volcano Mt. Rainier, Seattle providing the film's setting.      A hardware store clerk who happens to be a very beautiful fresh-faced young woman, Anastasia, goes in the place of her college journalism major roommate to interview Christian Grey.  Millionaire, has his own corporation, has his own building.      She interviews Grey in his spacious coldly decorated office, floor to ceiling windows, view of the city from a significant height.  She asks a few cliche type questions, feeling uncomfortable, voice small.  He looks to be twenty-nine, has a long gaze and the muscles a rich guy gets because he has the time and trainer to get them.      I thought, If this man were poor he wouldn't be able to convince Anastasia to be handcuffed by him.   ...

      1950, Jacques Rivette's second short film, Le Quadrille , deals with three men and two women in a room in some house, maybe an annex off to the side of where a party happens.  It's impossible to know the context.  The sixteen millimeter black and white film is silent, no music either, running time forty minutes.      With this expansive time frame, considering that very little happens in the movie, we see an embryonic attempt of Rivette's unfathomable desire to explore something small or minimal at length; small in the sense of a spare plot, if plot can be applied here.      On a divan are a man and a woman.  Another chair holds a nineteen year old Jean-Luc Godard, who co-wrote the scenario with Rivette.  I didn't recognize Godard until halfway through the movie.  I've never seen him with so much hair, or looking so young.        Another young man sits near a pensive young woman seated alone....