p.s. Hey. ** billy chainsaw, Hi, Billy! How sweet of you to enter this abode. Thanks, man. I so wish I was in London to see your show. I hope it goes spectacularly. <3 ** Karl Adler, Hi, Karl. Thanks for coming in. ** David Ehrenstein, Thank you, sir. Thank you too for your Karina wisdom. And, whoa, for the interview! Everyone, Big treat! Mr. Ehrenstein interviewed yesterday’s star Anna Karina in 2010, and you lucky folks (and I) can read it, and do consider that yesterday’s missing link. ** Bernard, Hi. Ah, you’re a bathroom quickie kind of guy. Or, wait, never mind. I think I like Karina’s face because its pleasantness requires some delving or something? I’ve never seen ‘The Truth About Charlie’, and, in fac,t hadn’t even heard of it before I made that post, so you were probably right. Oh, thanks for news-ette on Diarmuid’s book. Well, he can barge if he wants. And it wouldn’t be barging. But I hope he know that. Nice that you’ll get to see him. There must be loads of people here or looky-loos who can pre-sort out some Berlin stuff for you to do. I can probably even throw out a thing or two when the time comes. But Bill H. is good source, no doubt. Yes, excited on this end too about TIHYWD’s Theater Chatelet run. That piece is having a hell of a good life for something so cumbersome and pricey to set up. TC has a new director who’s a giant Gisele fan, so things look good re: us + them. Nice NYC trip you had there. Wow, you know a lot about Joey Grey and related. Well, ‘wow’ and yet not surprised, if that works. I’m trying to stay away from what’s going on over there while here, but fucking god, yes! ** KeatiB, I know at least one top who got it and died. There can’t be too many Emo girls and guys who feel like one, if you ask me. Ha, good luck with the coaching. I think I know how that feels. Try poppers? ** Steve Erickson, Hi. Everyone, Steve’s review today concerns Hong Sang-soo’s film GRASS, and it is right smack dab here. Oh, yeah, that scene’s realness is kind of legendary over here, I think, well, at least amongst the attentive. I hear you about the state of things over there. I’m still trying to keep this place a rare oasis from those voracious if very understandable worries. Me, I’m not ready to go full negative and hopeless about the future. America’s famous fluidity is facing a heavy test, but I don’t think the future can be solidified in advance. ** _Black_Acrylic, I retroactively admire that student body. ‘Blood Bath’ seems quite interesting from that squib. Cool, collaborating, yes! ** Julia Gloria, Hi, Julia! Welcome back! I think there are a lot of books about Burroughs written by people who knew him or hung around with him. I think so? I feel like there is. But not by someone who was his ‘boyfriend’, it’s true, I don’t think. I think, usually, when foreign publishers take on my books it’s a passion project, or it always seems like that, and of course I’m super honored by those passions. I wrote a note to my agent about Poland + ‘TMS’, so we’ll see. Thank you so much again. Ha ha, that is quite a blurb. Funny. Only one of my books has been published in China, and, again, it’s ‘Frisk’, which has always seemed like the weirdest thing to me. I want to go to Poland, Poznan especially. I’m going to figure it out. Maybe we can find a way to show ‘Permanent Green Light’ there or something. Visiting there is a bit of a dream. Yes, yes, don’t take that life sucking job if you possibly can. You’re studying in Poznan? Do you plan/hope to do your PhD studies there as well? Do you travel much? Have you been to Paris? ** liquoredgoat, Hey, pal. Thank you a lot about ‘MLT’. I think that’s one of my best novels, and it’s probably my most overlooked novel maybe. Dude, congrats about the poem acceptance! Definitely hit us up with a link when it’s time. Are you starting to enjoy your ‘new’ hometown more? ** Okay. This weekend I present you with my newest gif fiction, which is also the draft of a section or chapter of a new gif novel I’m working on. As always, any feedback or thoughts would be hugely welcome and heartening. But no pressure. As ever, do what you want. See you on Monday.
‘The sad-eyed, raven-haired Guinevere of the international art film’s belle epoque, Anna Karina will always possess a hallowed place in movie history: She was its first postmodern heroine, its first obscure object of cinephiliac desire. Godard’s ambiguous ardor for Karina, still visible to the naked eye in the seven features they made together between 1961 and 1966, had everything to do with his love for cinema. Karina’s unique relationship with Godard’s camera (an electric nexus of casual hunger and locked gazes that has eluded Godard with any other actress, and Karina with any other director) is unprecedented in its reverberating fascination. The era’s other iconicized women—Monica Vitti, Jeanne Moreau, Liv Ullmann, Stephane Audran, Machiko Kyo, etc.—all had their communicants, but Karina’s role in the slipstream defined Movieness by being all things to all witnesses: star, beauty, impulsive Every-waif, director’s inamorata, self-conscious movie image, genre spoofer, liberated gender-combat totem. Perhaps most thrillingly of all, she was the audacious, and always somewhat remote, heartthrob at the center of cinema’s bravest self-exploratory liaison.
‘So, meeting Karina today, at 60 and decidedly removed from the grainy, restless seventh heaven in which we’ve come to know her so well, is a shock. For one thing, she’s tall. “Oh, everybody is surprised by that,” she says in a bouncy, cigarette growl. “I just looked small because my eyes are so big. It’s the structure of the face—Sophia Loren and Ursula Andress always seemed enormous, but actually they’re quite petite.”
‘Celebrating Rialto’s refurbished re-release of Band of Outsiders, Karina is more than happy to revisit her Godardian odyssey, but unsurprisingly her portrait of filmmaking with the master offers up no secrets. For one thing, she never asked questions—as in, Why is the center of a heist film taken up with the three protagonists just hanging out and dancing in a bar? It seems impeccably spontaneous and lovely to us after the fact, but on the set it must’ve seemed, well, irregular, no? “I did as I was told. I had my character; we’d discuss it—what she’d wear, what she’d think. . . . C’mon, this was Jean-Luc! You didn’t interrogate him. People would always accuse us of improvising, but it’s absolutely not true. Jean-Luc’s scripts were always carefully revised, red pages, blue pages, yellow pages. Sure, often he’d make up dialogue on the spot, but everything was rehearsed, particularly the dance sequence in Bande à Part. When I hear about actors trying to control their movies—tsk, tsk. When I work with a director, he’s the director; what he wants me to do, I do. Especially with Jean-Luc: He’s such a genius; you must trust him completely. And I did. Anyway, every actor should once direct a film, so next time he’ll give less shit.”
‘Godard a workaday autocrat, Karina an obedient ingenue? While life couldn’t have been that ordinary, it adds a shine to the Godard-filmed Karina, an impulsive and stunning creature who inhabits the film sphere alone. Of course, for Karina that was merely the beginning: In the years since their collaboration, the Denmark-born ex-model has been fiercely active, having made dozens of films, and also performed in scores of TV movies, cabarets, and plays. (Next, she’s appearing as a chanteuse in Jonathan Demme’s The Truth About Charlie.) This last year has been spent mostly on the road, singing and promoting her new CD. But she’s still pestered and beloved for those intimate little experiments as new audiences continually discover them. “It’s a gift, an honor—these movies were made so long ago, and yet young people come up to me and thank me for making them. In Japan, the U.S., Europe, wherever, youngsters as young as 15, they don’t say, ‘I like that old movie,’ they say, ‘My God, that’s it, that’s life, that’s how I think.’ You know, back then Jean-Luc was criticized for being too new. Now it seems just right.”‘ — Michael Atkinson, Village Voice
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Anna Karina interview in the early 1960s
Anna Karina’s Closet Picks
Anna KARINA : “Gainsbourg voulait tourner avec moi avant de mourir” (2011)
________________________ Interview: Anna Karina on Godard from Projections 13: Women Film-makers on Film-making
How did you meet Jean-Luc Godard?
Anna Karina: I did a lot of commercials for soaps and things like that. Jean-Luc saw a couple and asked me to come and see him because he was preparing Breathless. He said, “There’s a little part in the film. You have to take your clothes off.” I said, “I don’t want to.” And he said, “In that case, you don’t do the film.” That was fine by me and I left. Three months later he sent me a telegram saying there might be a part for me in another film. I showed it to my friends and said, “This guy wants to go to bed with me or something. I don’t want to go there.” They said, “You must be crazy. He just did a picture called Breathless. It’s not out yet but everyone says it’s fantastic. You absolutely must go and see him.”
I went back to his office. He said he wanted me to do the part and that I should sign the contract the next day. I asked him what the picture was about and he told me it was political. I said, “I could never do that. My French is not good enough and I know nothing about politics.” He said, “It doesn’t matter – you just have to do what I tell you to do.” And I said, “But do I have to take my clothes off?” And he said, “Not at all.” I told him that I couldn’t sign because I was underage. He said I should come back with my mother and that the production would fly her down from Copenhagen. I phoned her and said, “Mother, I’m going to star in a picture in France, and it’s very important you come.” “In a picture – you?” she said. “Yes, and it’s a political picture, Mother.” She said, “You must be out of your mind. You have to go to the hospital to see if you’re ok.” And I said, “No, Mother, you have to take the plane tomorrow because if you don’t come they might change their mind!” She hung up because she didn’t believe it. I phoned back and swore on my grandad’s head it was for real – she knew he was the person I loved the most. So she took the plane and we signed the contract. That’s how I got into The Little Soldier.
How did you and Jean-Luc get together?
That happened while we were shooting the picture in Geneva. It was a strange love story from the beginning. I could see Jean-Luc was looking at me all the time, and I was looking at him too, all day long. We were like animals. One night we were at this dinner in Lausanne. My boyfriend, who was a painter, was there too. And suddenly I felt something under the table – it was Jean-Luc’s hand. He gave me a piece of paper and then left to drive back to Geneva. I went into another room to see what he’d written. It said, “I love you. Rendezvous at midnight at the Café de la Prez.” And then my boyfriend came into the room and demanded to see the piece of paper, and he took my arm and grabbed it and read it. He said, “You’re not going.” And I said, “I am.” And he said, “But you can’t do this to me.” I said, “But I’m in love too, so I’m going.” But he still didn’t believe me. We drove back to Geneva and I started to pack my tiny suitcase. He said, “Tell me you’re not going.” And I said, “I’ve been in love with him since I saw him the second time. And I can’t do anything about it.” It was like something electric. I walked there, and I remember my painter was running after me crying. I was, like, hypnotized – it never happened again to me in my life.
So I get to the Cafe de la Prez, and Jean-Luc was sitting there reading a paper, but I don’t think he was really reading it. I just stood there in front of him for what seemed like an hour but I guess was not more that thirty seconds. Suddenly he stopped reading and said,” Here you are. Shall we go?” So we went to his hotel. The next morning when I woke up he wasn’t there. I got very worried. I took a shower, and then he came back about an hour later with the dress I wore in the film – the white dress with flowers. And it was my size, perfect. It was like my wedding dress.
We carried on shooting the film, and, of course, my painter left. When the picture was finished, I went back to Paris with Jean-Luc, Michel Subor, who was the main actor, and Laszlo Szabo, who was also in the film, in Jean-Luc’s American car. We were all wearing dark glasses and we got stopped at the border – I guess they thought we were gangsters. When we arrived in Paris, Jean-Luc dropped the other two off and said to me, “Where are you going?” I said, “I have to stay with you. You’re the only person I have in the world now.” And he said, “Oh my God.” We took two rooms at the top of a hotel and he went to the cutting room every day.
Were you aware that he was reinventing cinema?
We knew we were doing something special. We’d take the films around Paris and out to the provinces and talk to the audiences after the screenings. And some people loved them and some people hated them. One day Jean-Luc and I were sitting in a cafe in Boulevard St Michel and we heard these two students talking about My Life to Live. One was screaming, “I love this picture!” and the other one, who had his back to us, was saying, “I hate spending money on this kind of shit.” And Jean-Luc tapped him on the back, gave him ten francs and said, “OK, you didn’t like my picture. Why don’t you go and see a picture you really like?” The guy was very red-faced and apologetic.
_____________________ 18 of Anna Karina’s 79 films
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Guy Debord On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Unity of Time(1959) ‘Karina’s first film appearance, although uncredited, dates from 1959, when a soap advertisement in which she appeared as a model was included near the end of Guy Debord’s On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Unity of Time. The image was accompanied by Debord’s voice-over: “The advertisements during intermissions are the truest reflection of an intermission from life.” Jean-Luc Godard, then a film critic for Cahiers du cinéma, first saw Karina in Debord’s film in a bathtub covered in soapsuds. He was casting his debut feature film, Breathless. He offered her a small part in the film, but she refused when he mentioned that there would be a nude scene. When Godard queried her refusal, referring to the supposed nudity in the Palmolive ads, she is said to have replied “Are you mad? I was wearing a bathing suit in those ads — the soapsuds went up to my neck. It was in your mind that I was undressed.”‘— collaged
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Jean-Luc Godard A Woman is a Woman(1961) ‘Nouvelle vague euphoria was at its height when Jean-Luc Godard made his enormously clever third feature, A Woman Is a Woman (1961). This big-budget, widescreen extravaganza appeared as the payoff for the unexpected success of Breathless (1959) and the follow-up political scandal of Le Petit soldat (1960), banned for its treatment of France’s Algerian War. A Franco-Italian co-production, shot in color and CinemaScope and starring Godard’s soon-to-be wife Anna Karina, A Woman Is a Woman was, he would say, his “first real film.” Although often described as a musical, A Woman Is a Woman is, despite its moments of singing and dancing, something else. The filmmaker called it “the idea of a musical,” “nostalgia for the musical,” and, most provocatively, a “neorealist musical.” For the first time, Godard was making a movie about its own making.’— J. Hoberman
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Agnes Varda Cleo From 5 to 7(1962) ‘There have been many films, from Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948) to Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark (2002), devoted to the challenge of capturing or reconstituting the experience of “real time.” Agnès Varda’s 1961 Cléo from 5 to 7—an account of an hour and a half in the life of a normally carefree young woman who is gravely awaiting a medical diagnosis—is one of them, but it dispenses with the single-camera-take concept that Hitchcock cleverly faked (and that Sokurov would heroically maintain); it is as jazzily photographed and busily edited as any more conventional narrative film. Rather, Varda seizes the kind of immediacy and tension associated, at the start of the sixties, with the cinema verité documentary movement and uses it to create a new form of fiction. Unlike traditional story films, which skip everywhere in both time and space, Varda gives us a gauntlet: every second piling up, every step traced out. And she picked the best possible site for this gauntlet walk: the Left Bank of Paris is preserved for us in all its early sixties vibrancy and diversity. Indeed, Varda once described the film as “the portrait of a woman painted onto a documentary about Paris.”’— Adrian Martin
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Jean Luc-Godard Vivre sa vie(1962) ‘Vivre sa vie presents 12 episodes in the life of a young woman who turns to prostitution to pay her rent. Each episode features a theatrical scene preceded by a title that lists the characters in the episode, its location, and a brief summary of the action. As he would throughout his career, director Jean-Luc Godard uses prostitution as a metaphor for both economic life in general and the position of the filmmaker under capitalism. Vivre sa vie stars Anna Karina, who was married to Godard at the time. Her performance was largely improvised as Godard refused to give Karina her lines until just before each scene was shot. In order to maintain the freshness of the performances, Godard rarely made more than one take of each shot. The film is shot in stunning black-and-white by Raoul Coutard. The improvised acting and fragmented story give the viewer the impression of watching a documentary about a woman’s life that is also a series of essays about aesthetics and economics. In addition, the film’s camera style presents a catalogue of alternatives to conventional shooting strategies.’— Rovi
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Jean-Luc Godard Bande à part(1964) ‘Bande à part is a movie with a main motion—not of a noir or a policier, but a love story. Like so many Godard films, it’s a love story with a bullet in it. And like the most fiercely involved romances, it’s a map of difficult frontiers: between big city and still-rustic suburbs, prewar singularity and the masses of mass culture, between natural light and the color of money. Characters meet, notes the director, “at the crossroads of the unusual and the ordinary.” An encyclopedic litterateur, Godard recalls the sublime phrase of proto-Surrealist Raymond Roussel, envisioning the art of the new century as “the marriage of the beautiful and the trivial.” That might describe all of Godard; certainly all the film’s characters. Still, beyond the vexed romance of Arthur, Odile, and Franz, there is a more encompassing love story. Shot by Raoul Coutard in a filtered black and white that renders the Bastille neighborhood flat and workaday, the suburban landscape charged and ghostly, Band of Outsiders is more than anything a melancholy love letter to Paris and to time.’— Joshua Clover
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Roger Vadim La Ronde(1964) ‘This uneven remake of the 1950 Max Ophuls feature from the play by Arthur Schnitzler takes place in Paris just before World War I instead of Vienna at the turn of the 20th century. A soldier (Claude Giraud) sleeps with a prostitute (Marie Dubois) before he seduces Rose (Anna Karina), and a willing but married Sophie (Jane Fonda). A night of drinking finds the soldier back with the prostitute again in this feature directed by Roger Vadim.’— Dan Pavlides, Rovi
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Jean-Luc Godard Alphaville(1965) ‘Alphaville is science fiction without special effects. Godard couldn’t afford them in 1965 or ever, but he probably wouldn’t have wanted them even if he’d had unlimited financing. His whole theme, imagination versus logic, is consistent with his deployment of Paris as it was in the ’60s—or at least, those portions of Paris which struck Godard as architectural nightmares of impersonality. Sub-Nabokovian jokes on brand names abound. There is much talk of societies in other galaxies, but their only manifestation is the Ford Galaxy that Eddie Constantine’s Lemmy Caution (a low-rent French version of Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe) moves about in. Most of Alphaville is nocturnal or claustrophobically indoors. Yet there is an exhilarating release in many of the images and camera movements because of Godard’s uncanny ability to evoke privileged moments from many movies of the past.’— Andrew Sarris
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Jean-Luc Godard Pierrot le fou(1965) ‘Pierrot le fou (1965) is Jean-Luc Godard’s sixth film staring Anna Karina, his first wife. It is the story of Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo) and Marianne (Karina). They meet when Ferdinand’s wife hires Marianne as a baby-sitter. As he drives Marianne home, Ferdinand decides to run away with her. The couple get caught up in a mysterious gun-running scheme involving Marianne’s brother (Dirk Sanders). With Pierrot le fou Godard returns to the story of A bout de souffle (Breathless): the tale of a couple on the run. But in the six years between the two films Godard developed a more complex and often difficult style. Pierrot le fou incorporates musical numbers, references to the history of cinema and painting, and quotations from literature. The film features Godard’s most extended use of color to that point, as the shots are filled with blocks of bright primary colors. Pierrot le fou is a catalogue of cinematic inventions and of gestures made by couples in love.’— Rovi
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Jacques Rivette La Religieuse(1966) ‘Jacques Rivette’s La Religieuse (The Nun), 1966 is the adaptation of Denis Diderot’s novel (1760). The movie tells a harrowing and simple story of 16 year old Suzanne Simonin (played by incredible Anna Karina), who is forced by her mother to enter a convent where she undergoes a lot of suffering including beatings, humiliations, semi-starvation, lesbian attentions from the Mother Superior (charming Liselotte Pulver of Das Wirtshaus im Spessart) and attempted rape by a priest. Made by the acclaimed New Wave director, The Nun feels more like a traditional (in the best meaning of this word) film, linear, poetic, moving, and very sad. Even before the film was completed and shown to the viewers, the association of former nuns and the parents of students in “free” schools demanded a banning order. This film was met with great controversy upon its release and was banned despite initial approval. Ironically, the scandal had benefited to the increased interest for the novel – many copies of Diderot’s book were sold following the banning of the movie. Despite its controversy, the movie is not so much a criticism of the Catholic Church but more a condemnation of the society in which a woman had only two choices allowed by her family – marriage or the convent.’— IMDb
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Pierre Koralnik Anna(1967) ‘The charismatic singer/songwriter Serge Gainsbourg was Karina’s next collaborator on a TV musical entitled Anna, which he wrote especially for her. The film, which included the hits, Sous le soleil exactement and Roller Girl, both sung by Karina, has since become a cult favourite.’ — newwavefilm.com
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Luchino Visconti The Stranger(1967) ‘In an atmosphere of political tension when the French still control Algiers, an Algerian is killed on the beach and a French man who has lived in Algiers all his life is arrested for the murder. A trial takes place. One of the witnesses was at the funeral of Arthur Meursault’s mother. It bothers other mourners and Mersault himself that he showed no emotion when his mother died. His eventful day at the beach takes place a short time after the funeral when he is examining what his life has been and what path should he take in the future.’— IMDb
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George Cukor Justine(1969) ‘Justine (1969) is a drama film directed by George Cukor and Joseph Strick. It was written by Lawrence B. Marcus and Andrew Sarris, based on the 1957 novel Justine by Lawrence Durrell. Set in Alexandria in 1938, a young British schoolmaster named Darley meets Pursewarden, a British consular officer. Pursewarden introduces him to Justine, the wife of an Egyptian banker. Darley befriends her, and discovers she is involved in a plot against the British, the goal of which is to arm the Jewish underground movement in Palestine. The plot fails, Justine is sent to jail, and Darley returns to England.’— Wiki
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Volker Schlöndorff Michael Kohlhaas – Der Rebell (1969) ‘This is another of those films from the 1960’s that have apparently disappeared into the black hole that ought to have been reserved for some of the big-budget trash being made nowadays. It harks back to an era when halfway intelligent scripting and depth of characterization were deemed more important than brain-curdling eye candy and mindless special effects. And although not exactly what I would call a classic, it is nonetheless worthy of remembrance, at least among those of us elderly enough to remember it. Although fairly faithful to its original sources, the film does have a tendency to portray the character as a revolutionary, and at times even as a bit of a patriot and folk hero, rather than as the mere vengeful victim of injustice and local rabble-rouser that the real Kohlhase probably was. Nonetheless, the essential point of the story is not lost.’— collaged
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André Delvaux Rendez-vous à Bray(1971) ‘Set in France in 1917, this film is about non-combatant pianist Julien (Mathieu Carriere) and the numerous efforts of his friend Jacques (Roger Van Hool), a military flier, to come to his aid, both in terms of finding concert opportunities and in arranging romantic assignations. At the film’s opening, Julien has received a telegram inviting him to visit Jacques at his country estate. When he arrives, Jacques is absent, but Julien manages to take the servant girl to bed with him. He leaves without ever seeing Jacques. On another occasion, Jacques arranges an opportunity for Julien to play at a rich man’s dinner party, an offer that Julien turns down.’— Clarke Fountain, Rovi
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Rainer Werner Fassbinder Chinese Roulette(1976) ‘Chinese Roulette was Fassbinder’s first international co-production and his most expensive film up to that point. It was shot during seven weeks between April and June 1976. The location for the country house where the story takes places was actually a small castle at Stockach in Unterfranken that belonged to Fassbinder’s cinematographer, Michael Ballhaus. The cast is formed by actors from Fassbinder’s regular troupe: Margit Carstensen, Brigitte Mira, Volker Spengler and Ulli Lommel. Being a French co-production Fassbinder used two French stars: Anna Karina and Macha Méril, both of whom had earlier appeared in the films of Jean-Luc Godard. Fassbinder added another German actor, Alexander Allerson. A sophisticated and stylish cinematic physiological game, Chinese Roulette was coldly received in West Germany. Criticism centered on the cold intellectualism of the film. American critic Andrew Sarris devoted an entire university course to the analysis of Chinese Roulette.’— collaged
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Raoul Ruiz Treasure Island(1985) ‘Pretty kooky meta-adaptation of Treasure Island from Ruiz. It’s a shame that this one suffered from production issues as there’s a probable masterpiece in the four hour version that Ruiz wanted to create; one can see even from the two hours at hand that there’s a hell of a lot of story to work with here, and with a cast this great (Martin Landau, Lou Castel, Anna Karina, Jean-Pierre Léaud!) it’s easy to see that we’re missing out on something big. But anyway, there are plenty of things to love in this: Ruiz’s penchant for split diopters and painting faces in frame as if they were landscapes and, of course, the usual oneiric use of space and dimension to turn each scene into some sort of formal abstraction. It’s certainly a good addition to the Ruiz canon even if this wild story of doubles is not what it could’ve been.’— Redfern
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Jacques Rivette Haut Bas Fragile(1995) ‘Jacques Rivette’s leisurely musical fantasy Up-Down-Fragile is not a movie to quicken the pulse of those who like their cinema taut and action-packed. This quirky semi-improvised homage to old-time MGM musicals sprawls over nearly three hours, and not much really happens. If Up-Down-Fragile captures the jaunty pie-in-the-sky spirit of American movie musicals, it steers clear of pat Hollywood formulas. Boy may meet girl, but little that happens afterward points the way to an ending that is either happy or unhappy. What Mr. Rivette has concocted might be described as a lighthearted existential romp in which life is a playful dialogue between reality and fantasy, between musical comedy and drama, and you never know when one will turn into the other.’— Stephen Holden, NYT
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Jonathan Demme The Truth about Charlie(2002) ‘The Truth About Charlie is a 2002 remake of the 1963 classic film Charade. It is also an homage to François Truffaut’s 1960 film Shoot the Piano Player complete with that film’s star, Charles Aznavour, making two surreal appearances singing his song “Quand tu m’aimes” (first in French, later in English). This version closely mirrors the plotline of the original film. It is once again set in Paris and features several famous French actors. Director Agnès Varda makes a cameo appearance. Actress/Chanteuse Anna Karina sings a Serge Gainsbourg song in one scene. The film received a mixed reception from critics and was a flop at the box office, bringing only $7 million worldwide.’— collaged
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p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. I don’t know who Mickey Katz is. But Sartre, I do know, and that linked piece looks interesting, thank you. ** Robert Siek, Hi, pal. Yeah, I know. There are so many ways to guess. Burroughs was being kind, i.e. the autograph requester told him her/his son was a prick. Or that her/his son hated Burroughs work or … ? Or, yeah, the signature was intended for the son and Burroughs was being funny/ironic in a knowing way? Or the autograph seeker’s son was standing next to the autograph seeker ad Burroughs wanted to screw him? I try not to imagine the inevitable explosive death of the earth because books will be the first things to burn up. Yes, do get the Ed Smith book. His work is wonderful, and David did a superb job with the book itself, and it’s a pleasure of thing in general. Nice to see you, and thanks for sparing a bit of your lunch break. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hey. Ha, nice, the Irvine Welsh signature. Is that legal? Yeah, man, The Call is looking awfully, awfully good! ** Bernard, Hi, B. Well, you could reassign the time you spend on one of your daily meals or bathroom usages to visiting? Perhaps not. Anyway, always a pleasure, duh. I did not see ‘Can You Ever Forgive Me?’ If it has opened here, which I don’t think it has, it undoubtedly had a radically different French title, so … But I will seek it out. I would say flashing red lights on that poetry effort, although there are those rare great poetry writers/thinkers who pooh-pooh John. Although they’re pretty tiresome too. Ha ha. I want to see that Disney documentary, cool, will do. Sounds like you’re spending your time wisely. Big up. ** Steve Erickson, Hi. Oh, no, another Godard film, whatever it may be, is better than Godard ending on the perfect note. I don’t believe whatever film he makes will be straightforward, although it’s not like he hasn’t been almost painfully straightforward at times. But I’m guessing a found footage reorganisation and technical distorting type of thing? Two reviews! Everyone, Mighty Steve Erickson has tackled two new things with his brain. The first thing is Penny Lane’s film ‘Hail Satan?’, and the second is that documentary about Steve Bannon aka ‘The Brink’. Please wed yourself to them. Oh, Bret and I aren’t best friends or anything. And I imagine he’s already gotten pretty used to people piling on his new book. So, fire away. ** PreareforKeato, Nice, head-scratcher, nice. I had sex one time with a boy who’d tattooed, in gigantic black letters, the name of his older brother who had died of AIDS on his stomach. That was quite the mood alterer. ** chris dankland, Hi, Chris! I’m loving those new image/text pieces you’ve been posting on FB. Beautiful work! Um, yeah, I do have some very prized autographed books. But I’m blanking. Robbe-Grillet signed/wrote a very cool, flattering thing in my copy of one of his tomes. As did Ashbery in another. And others that I’m blanking on because they’re in LA where my mind can’t astral project sadly. Thank for the Zac German links! I’m always excited to see whatever he’s up to. I’m very slowly reading Megan Boyle’s book too, and thoroughly enjoying it. Oh, well, that book about me is a ‘critical biography’, it’s called. I had mistakenly thought that it was going to be a biography of me, I guess because that word popped out, but it turns out it’s more of an analytical overview of my work from start to current finish, and it doesn’t seem as though my actual life is going to be covered or have much of anything to do with it. I think it’s being written right now. I think it’s supposed to be finished later this year, I’m not sure? I haven’t talked to Diarmuid, who’s writing it, in a while. Weirdly, I think I would be kind of excited if someone ever wanted to write an actual biography of me, maybe partly because I have zero interest in writing a memoir or autobiography or anything like that. Objectivity is interesting. Great seeing you, Chris! You have a molten great Friday! ** Kyler, Hi, K. Yes, I think you did tell me that about your brother-in-law. I remember being excited about that, and I still am. Yep, about Bresson. ‘A Man Escaped’ is one of (many) big faves! Cool, man. Enjoy your day. ** Okay. Today I ask you to devote your time to the work of the wonderful French actor Anna Karina. Pleasure awaits you, should you so choose. See you tomorrow.
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