Skip to main content

L'Atalante

Director: Jean Vigo
Year: 1934
Run-time: 1 hr 29 min
Source: Criterion Channel Streaming

- This is one of those eternally influential films that doesn't resonate with me as much as it does many others, ranking as high as 12th on the latest Sight and Sound poll.  I don't dislike it, it just seems a bit slight to me.  There are some beautiful shots, and the romance is sweet although clearly doomed.

- Along with Marius, it's another reminder that if you were middle-class and wanted to see the world before mid-century, then you needed to become a sailor.  What a hard life that would have been, and the rootlessness really infects this film and its poor heroine.

- The film was heavily erotic for the time - the shots of the man and his wife longing for each other in different beds is pretty genius - the dotted shading is strangely evocative.

- Michel Simon stars as the clown Pere Simon, a slight evolution of his character in Boudo Saved From Drowning (which Renoir built around the person of Simon).  What an icon - there's not really anyone like him in modern cinema, although many actors have aspired to that level of id.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

簪 (Ornamental Hairpin)

Director: Hiroshi Shimizu Year: 1941 Run-time: 1 hr 15 min - Like The Masseurs And A Woman , this takes place in a mountain spa, and is centered on the characters' drive for escapism. From hindsight, this would seem to be the director's desire to escape the war - one of the characters is apparently a soldier (who is injured by the titular object and kept from returning), although it's barely mentioned. It probably isn't far to read too much historicity into this film. Like its predecessor, it's a short and light glimpse into a few lives meeting in this setting defined by transience. It's less than 80 minutes, but takes a glacial pace in which our thoughts will naturally wander. That's not a criticism - in a way, it helps us relate to the characters, whose thoughts are also returning to the "real world", no matter how much they may wish otherwise.
Post a Comment
Read more

Fétiche Mascotte (The Mascot)

Director: Ladislas Starevich Year: 1933 Run-time: 26 min Source: Youtube Notable For : The second animated short on the list from 1933 is this stop-motion piece from the Polish-Russian film-maker Ladislas Starevich.  Stop-motion is almost as old as cinema itself (Starevich had been innovating since 1912).  The craft here is as good as any modern film, and Starevich's twisted imagination is on full display, with dolls and household objects coming to life in a dark version of Toy Story.  For animation fans, it almost goes without saying that Starevich was an influence on Jan Svankmajer's work much later. Verdict :  Every frame is a bizarre delight. There didn't seem to be an overarching plan to this work (indeed, it's possible that The Mascot  is an amalgamation of several shorter films featuring the same dog character), and so the film veers from one strange scene to the next, with much of the second half taking place in some kind of tchotchke hell governe...
Post a Comment
Read more

Le Quai des brumes (Port Of Shadows)

Director: Marcel Carné Year: 1938 Run-time: 1 hr 31 min - This is the first of two Carné films on the list from 1938.  We haven't talked much about French poetic realism, the style pioneered by Pepe le Moko  (also starring Jean Gabin), but this is where that style heavily overlaps with what would become film noir (Wikipedia claims this was one of the first films to be called as such).  The tropes of noir are so heavily associated with post-war depression and malaise that it's pretty shocking to see these same tropes show up before the war - the French government agreed, and even banned this film for a time as not representative of the French spirit.  It's an excellent film, though. From my perspective, both of these early Carné works show clear ties to the Marseilles trilogy - this one, because of the persistent theme of the sea as a place for escape and loss of identity. - I am much more in love with the French acting style of the 30's than I am...
Post a Comment
Read more