| Author | Message | ||
     Tony (Tony) Username: Tony Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 81.157.23.22 |
Eric Rohmer has died. A free dvd with an interesting title and a passing mention by Ramsey made me notice this director (the sound of certain names call out to me sometimes). Recently I bought a box set by him and have to say how lovely his films were - are, I suppose. Most of his work was made while he was old - he lived to almost a hundred - but you would never have told it. Hang on, though, maybe you might, because his work was so seemingly unfussy or forced, had a just-rightness about them. So it seems, anyway, on my admittedly scant evidence. I must admit to being quite taken with the French approach to film of late; they make our work look so heavy and unreal, gimmicky. Some I've seen recently have felt like other lives taken part in. Anyone seen The Dream Worlds of Angels, for instance? It felt like the sort of thing we got used to in the seventies on telly, a sense of reality that when we leave it rings on inside us. (Rohmer did not believe in music in film, unless heard on the radio or whatever; he did not believe in close-ups; if a character had to meet someone we would accompany them on their walk or bus ride to wherever they were. These are things I have not seen often but have been looking for, it feels like, for perhaps a long while.) | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 06-2008 Posted From: 86.169.220.102 |
I loved Claire's Knee. | ||
| Mick Curtis (Mick) Username: Mick Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.179.38.83 |
That's sad news - as I recall the BBC had a Rohmer season many (many) years back and I enjoyed all his films they showed. | ||
| Stephen Walsh (Stephenw) Username: Stephenw Registered: 03-2009 Posted From: 82.17.252.126 |
This is terrible news... I'm a great fan of Eric Rohmer. He's up there with Bergman & Kurosawa as a candidate for my favourite "non-English language" writer/director. When trying to describe how good he is to anyone unfamiliar with his work I always say 'try to imagine a French Catholic Woody Allen with the intellectual and emotional range of a modern day Shakespeare'. He explored all the big issues: love vs sex, ambition vs happiness, faith vs reason, dreams vs practicalities and all the other absurdities of the human condition with remarkable wit and insight. Rohmer made deceptively light simple movies (with apparent effortlessness) that explored the deepest and darkest corners of the human psyche without ever appearing preachy or over-earnest. Favourite film... there are so many but probably 'My Night At Maud's' (1969). There have been few better or more moving films made about the choice a man has to make between "lust and adventure" or "love and stability" and the lengths women will go to to make their minds up for them. It also nails the old Catholic "crisis of faith" theme better than any other film I have seen - his scripts are the equal of anything Graham Greene wrote for the cinema. He was one of cinema's great philosophers as well as uniquely entertaining and a genuinely lovely man! We've lost one of the good people...  | ||
| Mark West (Mark_west) Username: Mark_west Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 217.39.177.173 |
I think I probably watched the same season as Mick - I first saw "Pauline a la plage" late night on BBC2 and instantly fell in love with it. | ||
| Tony (Tony) Username: Tony Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 81.157.23.22 |
Was just thinking of the Avatar getting that golden globe and thinking of this. Doesn't sit right, does it? | ||
| Stephen Walsh (Stephenw) Username: Stephenw Registered: 03-2009 Posted From: 194.32.31.1 |
Couldn't agree more, Tony. The only awards 'Avatar' deserves are for technical achievement. Spectacular entertainment and nothing more. To call it the 'Best Film' in any serious sense is a mockery of Cinema as Art. Another favourite Rohmer movie was his 1959 debut 'The Sign Of Leo' - an intensely haunting riches to rags story that makes sublime use of the scenery and backstreets of old Paris in glowing black and white. For me he was the best director to come out of the whole 'nouvelle vague' movement - and the most unflashy. | ||
| Tony (Tony) Username: Tony Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 81.157.23.22 |
Tell me about it. I've just been saying to Albie how I have grown to love it when a passer by looks at us - the viewers - from a film. We are being looked at by a person from almost half a century ago. Nothing, I say NOTHING, can capture how that feels - no monsters or robots (and I speak as one who likes my monsters and robots). To see actors surrounded by real people - well, there's nothing more magic than that. You feel part of it, watching a real life and time. I think my view of film and what it can do has changed this week, it really has. A film shot as is, feels so true - anything else feels like a sort of confinement. It's affecting my writing, too. Thank you so very much, Eric. | ||
| Stephen Walsh (Stephenw) Username: Stephenw Registered: 03-2009 Posted From: 194.32.31.1 |
I first watched 'The Sign Of Leo' with an old girlfriend who lived in Paris for a while and still visits regularly - at one point she cried with genuine anguish "Oh my God, there's a McDonald's on that corner now" - I could see the tears welling in her eyes and suddenly was struck by the tragedy, not just of the story, but of what the world had lost when that most organic of cities sold out to "progress". Another favourite Rohmer movie is the deceptively playful Allenesque romantic comedy 'My Girlfriend's Boyfriend' (1987) set in the architectural abomination that is the Parisian suburb of Cergy-Pontoise. The man had a knack for fitting story and characters to setting like no other filmmaker. The thrown together nature of their surroundings perfectly matches the chaotic jumble of their self-consciously modern love lives. The man was a genius! | ||
| Tony (Tony) Username: Tony Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 81.157.23.22 |
Has a film been made of the effects of films on us? | ||
| Weber_gregston (Weber_gregston) Username: Weber_gregston Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 212.121.214.114 |
To a certain degree, Funny Games is definitely about the effects of films on us. about the positive effects on the other hand... I can't think of any examples that spring easily to mind. | ||
| Stephen Walsh (Stephenw) Username: Stephenw Registered: 03-2009 Posted From: 194.32.31.1 |
Everything Haneke ever made is about the effect cinema has on the viewer... but Hitchcock got there first and a lot more stylishly! | ||
| Tony (Tony) Username: Tony Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 81.157.23.22 |
I suppose I meant other than the violent effects. Anyone here have a film that obsessed them a bit? You know, to the point that they tried reaching actors/directors, went looking for locations? Nearest I came was emailing the director of Let's Scare Jessica to Death, though I was hardly obsessed, just very interested indeed. | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 06-2008 Posted From: 81.155.23.15 |
Death In Venice I went down to the beach dressed as Dirk Bogarde and slumped in a Clacton council deckchair for hours in the hot sun, mascara running... | ||
| Tony (Tony) Username: Tony Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 81.157.23.22 |
Lucky you didn't bump into someone doing the same. | ||
| Des (Des) Username: Des Registered: 06-2008 Posted From: 81.155.23.15 |
LOL!!!!!!!! (Sorry, this is a sad thread) | ||
| Tony (Tony) Username: Tony Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 81.157.23.22 |
It's ok - Eric wouldn't have minded I bet! At least it wasn't Picnic at Hanging Rock - you went off and actually vanished. | ||
| Stephen Walsh (Stephenw) Username: Stephenw Registered: 03-2009 Posted From: 194.32.31.1 |
Tony, the first (non-violent) films about Cinema (and the effect it has on the viewer) that spring to mind for me are; Woody Allen's 'The Purple Rose Of Cairo', 'The Last Picture Show' by Peter Bogdanovich (cinema critic) and of course 'Cinema Paradiso'. There are bound to be loads more... Actually Allen did the same for radio in 'Radio Days' and the theatre in 'Bullets Over Broadway'. |