Jacques Demy’s experimental musical in which the dialogue (all written by him) is sung, Les parapluies de Cherbourg invests the bittersweet with great power. The action itself, covering more than a decade, falls entirely within France’s delusional stand in defense of her colonialism in the Algerian War. Its constant singing expresses the lock that conventionalism […]
Daily Archives: March 23, 2007
Basing his script on the fifteenth-century trial transcripts and, as is his wont, casting nonprofessionals, including in the central role, Robert Bresson’s spare, stunning Le procès de Jeanne d’Arc is modern, intellectual, existential. Cinema’s original minimalist stresses Joan’s solitude; defiant in court but really at a loss, Joan prays privately for the best answers to […]
Predictably for an American boy, I was especially keen on three Hollywood genres: the western, the swashbuckler, and the horror film. In the last of these, for whatever reason, I was most drawn as a child to vampire films. One of these that I repeatedly viewed with enjoyment is The Return of the Vampire, a […]
Although I admire at least three of his films, especially Boomerang! (1947), Elia Kazan is, generally, the stagiest and most hysterical of filmmakers. Two cases in point are his two worst movies, On the Waterfront (1954), perhaps the most morally reprehensible film ever to come from Hollywood, and Splendor in the Grass (1961), an unintentionally […]
Jean-Pierre Melville’s (Grumbach’s) stunning debut is an adaptation of the short story by Vercors, “Le silence de la mer.” Static shots and short pans of a countryside village appear under a motionless, silent sky punctuated by cirrus clouds—on one level, the eternal “sea” of the title. It is 1941, and this is Occupied France. A […]
Dennis Grunes 