Adieu au TNS response

For anyone who cares to read it, my response to Richard Brody's Twitter remarks on my article on Adieu au TNS are in the comments section to the article on Kino Slang:

http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=18252740&postID=4732437464503091820&isPopup=true

Two responses from filmmakers to a questionnaire from the January 2000 issue of Cahiers du cinéma.

1. In your opinion, what are the major events — films, filmmakers, actors, images, techniques, etc. — that have marked the 1990s?
2. How did your filmmaking evolve over the course of the decade and how do you see it evolving in the next one?

Pedro Costa
1, 2.
The death of Antonio Reis.
My four films, between 1989 and 1999.
Less and less money for making them.
I need less to make them.
JLG’s Nouvelle Vague (1990) and DH, JMS’ Sicilia!

Luc Moullet
1. A lot of events. Due to the lack of space, I’ll stick to the two main ones.

First, the eruption, throughout Iranian cinema, of the film within a film. Kiarostami, Mahmalbaf and the others continue (probably without being conscious of it) May 68 and the lesson of Vent d’Est, La Concentration, Faire la déménageuse, Rendez-vous d’Anna and La Vérité sur l’imaginaire d’un inconnu. May 68 and situationism in the country of the Ayatollahs - who would have believed it? As much as this direction (described as self-absorbed) was criticized in the French cinema of the time, it has been accepted without regrets in the framework of a third world cinema, presumed to be social above all else, that has become the best cinema in the world, in part thanks to this orientation.

The other, more recent, event is the release of Alan Rudolph’s Breakfast of Champions, from Vonnegut’s novel. It’s one of the best adaptations of literary work, a domain Americans are very strong in (The Magnificent Ambersons, Greed, The Grapes of Wrath, The Tarnished Angels, A Place in the Sun, A Farewell to Arms, The Group), and in which the French (except sometimes Bresson) always fail. It’s one of the rare films where the use of video is fully integrated, giving the film a fresh and very surprising dimension in its final part. It is a mind-blowing vision of the New America — a commercial city off a highway exit — where the excess of mush, dumps, and mud is becoming vomit-inducing. The film rediscovers, through an itinerary full of contradictions, the holocaustal value of the cinema of thirty years ago (Les Carabiniers, Jeanne Dielman). One also thinks of Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? It’s sometimes Fellini-esque, but without the Romagnol filmmaker’s complaisances. It’s also the unusual avant-garde film made with every available means and Hollywood actors.
Bruce Willis’ best film or, rather, his only film.
The full confirmation of an exemplary filmmaker, who is the only one in Hollywood that takes risks. 

2. No change in method for me. Recently, I tried to do something other than always make people laugh. Two films of a more dramatic character (an adaptation of Henry James and Au champ d’honneur) have often been welcomed with scepticism and rejected by festivals that were going easy on me. Does this mean that I’m only made for comedy? Or did I only transgress my trademark image and throw off my fans? Which of the two theories is correct? I’d like to know. To be safe, I decided to stick with comedy for the next one, assuming there is a next one: I always have the feeling that the film I’ve just done will be the last one. In any case, I know that I must absolutely avoid big budgets, for which I won’t find enough dough, and that I can’t go above 3 million francs for a feature and 200,000 francs for a short.

Adieu au TNS

My article on Godard's Adieu au TNS and refutation of Richard Brody's claims regarding it, as well as a translation of the full text Godard recites in the video, is now online at Kino Slang.

http://kinoslang.blogspot.com/2012/12/adieu-au-tns.html

Renoir on Bazin

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A tender winter sun yellows the old house that I see from my window. What a beautiful evening. André Bazin would have loved it. The pale gold of the luminous rays would have made him forget this famous “dry cold” that Musset preferred to call “a good head cold.”

I forget the script I’m in the middle of writing and I think of all the time I’ve lost. Life is spent wasting time, neglecting a good opportunity, turning one’s back on what is useful to rush towards what is useless.

André was part of the very small crowd of very useful people.

Of course, he was very busy and sick. It would have been indecent to abuse his tireless sociability. And now, I regret not having had this indecency. I miss him all the time. How many questions I still have to ask him, how many dark corners he could have shed light on, how many passionate discussions that will never be born!

In one of his studies, he draws the readers’ attention to the secondary role that scholars have played in the development of the cinematograph and insists upon all that we owe to the visionaries, the obsessives. Reading it, I was thinking of the “Bazins.”

In the simplistic language of our 20^th century, we would say “artists,” in opposition to scholars.

An artist’s mission is to precede the pack. He has to reveal hidden feelings, open the window on landscapes that, of course, already existed, but that we poorly discerned, hidden as they were by the fog of false traditions. The artist’s function is to tear away some of the veils covering every reality.

I’m looking at the last spot of sun on the roof of the old house. It reveals some stunning grey moss to me. Some pigeons stretch their wings towards the fleeting light, assuming positions revelatory of their pigeon spirit. The shade increases. I get up and, standing on my toes, I can catch a last ray of the setting sun.

I forget the old house and the pigeons. This light has erased them from my mind.

Certain directors of films, whose work André Bazin analyzed so scrupulously, will only remain in man’s memory because their names will be read in his books. Their worth is not in question. To tell the truth, it matters little to me. I’m grateful to them for having inspired a clear poet, an artist who, by dint of objective humility, made his work the moving expression of his generous personality.

-Jean Renoir (Cahiers du cinéma, no. 91, January 1959)

How the West Was Won

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From Epic to Entr’acte

Jean-André Fieschi

Cahiers du cinéma 148, October 1963

Everything happens as if it were a matter of the conscious destruction of realism, for the benefit of another reality, one whose essence is purely mythological. Not the mythology of the West, as we’re invited to believe, but that of the cinema itself. One thinks a little of The Longest Day where, like here, the face of History fades behind the faces of the actors who incarnate it, a Grand Parade of all Hollywood. There are no more characters, just a giant “show.” The viewer can only be the ‘conscience of the show.’ The two seams and the roundness of the Cinerama screen inevitably increase this feeling.

The first programs – eye-catching documentaries where the Fitzpatrick’s aesthetic was increased as much as possible – accommodated themselves somewhat poorly to a particularly heretical process. To narrate a story with this all-consuming tool, even one reduced to its simplest expression, bordered on being an impossible challenge. You can’t scorn the auteurs, then, for having tried. At least the dialectical linearity of the screenplay allows the imagery to assert itself, a point so elementary at heart as might have been feared. Or rather, a heroic naivety that joins the film, through an unexpected detour, to the spirit of the pioneers whose gesture it had been charged to sing. Hathaway – this honest illustrator who sometimes emerges from a sage-like sleep to suddenly become passionate about the rhythm of a fight – knew to conserve in his work the academic dignity expected from him. If he works in convention, he also allows the film to exist, a film that has, precisely, certain conventions of American cinema.

It is not, for all that, a revisionist western, but the sum of ideas that one generally can have of the western when it is imagined as an epic. It obviously is lacking the seed of madness with which the epic imposes itself, but Hathaway isn’t Vidor, and it’s Vidor who would have been needed. You think more or less about all this during the screening and your own ideas added to what is happening onscreen banish any boredom, all the more so as the awaited and thundering bravura sequences every ten minutes arrive just in time to avoid any hint of drowsiness. In short, all this sticks out disagreeably, a kind of cocktail of the mind, a circus, a rodeo, and comic strip.

After the entr’acte, a mother’s sudden farewell to her son who is leaving for the Civil War – on the family farm, with the patch of graves and blooming trees – instills the serenity of the old legends, a biblical, elegiac tone that is unable to prevent, in spite of everything, a certain emotion from arising. Then the red uniforms shine like stripes on the blue of the night, the canons boom, the dead are stiff with fear like in a painting by Gros, the blood on the table where the wounded are operated on is cleared off with big buckets of water, the door opens and Wayne appears as Sherman, muddy, unkempt and tired, like himself in his stubborn, catlike approach. It’s John Ford’s passage, an incredible anthology, with a superior, elegant form that one takes as either good-natured or routine.

In fifteen minutes, everything is said with a Griffithian sharpness; thenceforth the show fades and seems worn out. It’s a bad idea to mix cinema into this parade.