No Clouzot or Fuller in episode 7, though Tati does get addressed. I'm getting a little frustrated by this unofficial 'two films to a director' rule that this episode reverts back to (though Bergman is the exception - he gets
four!) It is very difficult to get the impression of the development of the French New Wave directors through just a couple of their films...and I'd argue that Cousins picks many of the wrong ones anyway! (Paul Schrader takes over from Stanley Donen as the 'voice of sanity and Hollywood muse figure/safety blanket for Cousins' in this section)
Anyway, I thought I would do something different from just recounting the episode and post my notes taken during my viewing. As well as showing my laziness it also perhaps better captures the bittiness on display here:
Context: The Berlin Wall and nuclear fears
Four directors: Bergman, Bresson, Tati, Fellini
Visit to Swedish Film Archive looking at Bergman sketches
Cousins: “Touch and death – the touchstones of Bergman”
Bergman – Life As Theatre
Summer With Monika – the direct gaze of Harriet Anderson, the background darkening
The Seventh Seal – the senses are used to question God
Winter Light – the amazing scene in the classroom where the preacher rejects the teacher
Persona – a self aware medium – Cousins: “film didn’t only tell the story, it was the story”
Bresson – Life As Prison
Stripping out the gloss. Blank expressions in Pickpocket and Au hazard Balthazar. Individuals imprisonsed both physically and inside their own bodies. All the better to show eventual grace and transcendence. Schrader about the influence of Bresson on Taxi Driver: "If you can hold the audience long enough (about 45 minutes) you can get them to empathise with someone they shouldn’t". Tracing the influence of Bresson to Mani Kaul, Kieslowski and Lynne Ramsey(!?!?!?)
Tati – Life As a Series of Moments
“Making cinema laugh at modernity”
Incidents over ‘strong’ storytelling. Bill Forsyth interview “We spend our lives inventing stories, but stories don’t exist – we exist and invent stories to explain our lives”
Mon Oncle – revisiting the locations. The cinema Tati ran in Paris.
No Playtime!!!!
Fellini - Life As A Circus
Cinecitta
Fellini’s Casanova
Nights of Cabiria – Guilietta Masina – Cousins: "In Bergman God is missing, in Fellini God is long gone and Kitsch remains"
Claudia Cardinale interview on 8 ½
The influence of Fellini: opening of Stardust Memories
Cousins: “These filmmakers opened up the form but then it was carpet bombed by French filmmakers”
Schrader on “The Film School generation” in the US feeling inspired by the French New Wave
Cleo From 5 to 7 and Last Year In Marienbad: The portrayal of thought on film and the questioning of thought processes
Truffaut – a celebration of the medium: The 400 Blows
Godard: Close ups isolating people from the world compared to wide shots allowing the audience’s eyes to roam
Breathless – jump cuts
Cuts to show different action had always been used but what was new was that the cuts seen as beautiful in themselves
A shot wasn’t entirely part of a story, but a ‘true’ moment
Baz Luhrmann on the way Breathless is not reality but another cinematic device. Film language is a living thing, that continually evolves
A Married Woman’s influence on American Gigolo - isolated body parts.
Italy
Pasolini – Accatone. Classical music over earthy images. Interview with Bertolucci
The Gospel According to St Matthew: the down to earth portrayal of a saint. Suggested influence from Dreyer's Joan of Arc.
Leone – the influence of Kurosawa but the visual style the innovation (More from Bertolucci)
Once Upon A Time In The West - the sweeping shot over the train station roof. (Cardinale's back!)
Visconti – Senso and Rocco and His Brothers
Antonioni - L'Eclisse (the ending, ruined by edits and cutting away from the final shot. No talk of the nuclear fears when this would have been the perfect film with which to do so) and The Passenger (ditto with the edits to the final shot, maybe Cousins needs more time!!!!). Antonioni's widespread influence - Angelopoulous
Spain, for some reason
Marco Ferreri (The Wheelchair)
Almodovar (What Have I Done To Deserve This)
Viridiana (Bunuel)
I am curious (Yellow) – Politics as fantasy
The Mother and the Whore (Leaud reappearing from The 400 Blows – a discussion of his 'new' direct gaze).
New Wave is dead! Cousins seems relieved that it is in his final summing up of the period.
There were a couple of nice ideas to be found in the episode but I'm not sure the programme really captured what was special about the French New Wave and strangely did not stray much beyond a few canonical titles for most of the programme.
Lots of missed opportunities:
How you can talk about Tati, including a long sequence about the modern house from Mon Oncle, and then not push things through to his masterpiece, Playtime, is beyond me (maybe there will be something in a future episode about the 'downfall of the masters' taking in Playtime, Trafic and Parade, perhaps).
There was a perfect opportunity to bookend Bergman with Vilgot Sjöman's I Am Curious (Yellow) by showing a clip from Sjöman's Making of Winter Light documentary, yet that does not appear in the opening Bergman section.
How can someone talk about Leone's Kurosawa influence without noting that A Fistful of Dollars is
literally a remake of Yojimbo!
How can someone discuss Godard without mention of Contempt at all? Especially after the Bardot tease at the end of the previous episode! Or the end of the French New Wave without mention of the apocalyptic Weekend? Or contrast the way that Jean-Pierre Leaud is used in The 400 Blows and The Mother and the Whore without talking of Leaud's important through-line performance in Godard's
Masculin Feminin, a film which comes almost exactly between those films.
Can Antonioni's long, fluid shots or intricately built sequences be truly understood when cut up?
Where were Chabrol and Rohmer?!?! (Not to mention Rivette)
Couldn't the section on Visconti have included a small bit about The Leopard (the filmmakers had Claudia Cardinale right there for commentary! That could only have strengthened an argument that she was an Italian art cinema muse figure during that period)
Fellini - no La Dolce Vita? Really?!?
Bresson - no A Man Escaped? (his best film!)
Resnais - no Night and Fog (which could beautifully illustrate the way that the French New Wave directors were all approaching cinema from different angles) or Hiroshima Mon, Amour?
No Spirit of the Beehive in the otherwise strangely placed Spanish film section? Perhaps Erice is being saved for later?