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

      Divertimento (1992)--I saw it maybe twenty years ago--is Jacques Rivette's two hour re-edit of his four hour long La Belle Noiseuse ( The Beautiful Troublemaker ) from 1991.      According to IMDB (I haven't seen the movie in so long I don't remember) Divertimento is from the model's, Marianne's (Emanuelle Béart), point of view.      Edouard Frenhofer (Michel Piccoli) hasn't painted in ten years.  His friend, an art dealer, introduces him to a young couple, Marianne and Nicolas (David Bursztein, playing one of the most contemptible weak men I've ever seen).  Nicolas, a photographer, admires Frenhofer's work, foists his girlfriend on the genius to be the model for his abandoned masterpiece, La Belle Noiseuse , noiseuse a slang term, apparently, used in Quebec, where Marianne evidently has lived, meaning "troublemaker" or "pain in the ass."      Frenhofer says he got the inspiration for the painting by reading ...

      I've seen Muriel (1963) thrice.  As with many, the first viewing left me baffled but interested in the film's editing style.  The second time I saw it, the plot stood out for me, I began to grasp the story.  The third time, I watched with a friend who, seeing it for the first time, was baffled, although she enjoyed it.      The clothes, the objects, the look of Boulogne-sur-mer, a film shot on location in a city most viewers hadn't seen, with modern buildings amid the war's ruins.   Muriel glows with crisp imagery, rich color photography muted, not like a glossy Technicolor.  The images of the seaside city look immediate, the world of 1962 or 1963, the French-Algerian War just concluded, Godard's Le Petit Soldat , dealing with that war, finally released after being held back three years, censorship of subjects pertaining to France's terrible war in North Africa prevalent.      War and lies, war and memory. ...

     L'aigle à deux têtes ( The Two-Headed Eagle ) (1948) is not as famous a Jean Cocteau film as La belle et la bête ( The Beauty and the Beast ) (1946) or Orphée ( Orpheus ) (1950), although all three star Jean Marais in the lead roles.  Marais's features gave him an eldritch cast.  His eyes seem pulled upwards.  He resembles already, without makeup, an elf king or some elf warrior.  I've seen Marais, too, in Luchino Visconti's Le notti bianche ( The White Nights ) (1957); Marais plays a relatively ordinary role, though he can't help being dashing.      Marais would have been a major star in Hollywood,      BUT, Jean Gabin was (if I'm wrong, comment) in one Hollywood film, Moontide (1942).  Did he come across like Bogart, making Casablanca at the same time?  Actors fascinate me, especially those who play a variety of roles yet manage to be fresh and interesting.      Marais is like that. ...

      Candy , based on a novel by Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg, works well as a 1968 vision of reality upset and jumbled by the era's drug taking.      The movie is LSD, is grass, is Ecstasy.  Beautifully colored, shaded, filmed with whimsical set pieces and surprise guest appearances by major stars, the film follows a Blonde young woman, Candy, through a series of strange episodes each centered around a famous (fictional) person.      First we see a poetry reading by a poet superstar played by a frizzy-haired Richard Burton, his voice uttering absurd megalomaniacal words, commanding the attention of a roomful of college students, the women fainting and, no doubt, dampening their panties.  Candy watches, he sees her and from that moment on he can think only of fucking her.      He gives her a ride home in his limo, driver separated by glass as the Poet intones the word "need" over and over again, insisting on t...

     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...