Luc Moullet’s Day

 

‘Many of you, perhaps most, have never heard of Luc Moullet. So much the better. Not all news gets into newspapers, and not all movies get into theaters. The sculptor Paul Thek once proposed an interesting solution to the newspaper problem to me: Get rid of all of them, except for one edition of one daily paper (any would do), and pass this precious object from hand to hand for the next hundred years –- then the news might mean something.

‘Living, as we do, in a time and culture where cinema is becoming an increasingly occupied and colonized country — a state of affairs in which a few privileged marshmallows get saturation bookings all over creation while a host of challenging alternative choices languish in obscurity –- the need for legends has seldom been quite so pressing. Such are the established channels nowadays that even avant-garde films come to the viewer, if at all, in a form that is almost invariably pre-selected and pre-defined, with all the price tags and catalogue descriptions neatly in place. Given the need for legends that might gnaw at the superstructures of these official edifices, the adventurous filmgoer has few places to turn. Even in specialized magazines, one is most often prone to find duplications of the choices available elsewhere; and unless one lives in a megalopolis, the mere existence of most interesting films today is bound to seem almost fanciful and irrelevant.

‘Within this impossible setup, one is obliged to construct a pantheon largely out of rumor and hearsay: at one big state university, stories still circulate about the one time that a few students got to see half an hour of Rivette’s 252-minute Out 1: Spectre.

‘Needing an emblem, agent provocateur, and exemplary scapegoat for a legendary cinema that by all rights should be infinite and expanding, I nominate the figure of Luc Moullet, patron saint of the avant-garde B film. Whether or not anyone chooses to second the motion is beside the point. …

‘“Our Jarry,” Rivette calls him. And when I asked Straub in Edinburgh two years ago which contemporary filmmakers he admired, he cited Mizoguchi, Ford, Renoir, Lang, Godard … and then Luc Moullet: “I am willing to defend him until next year — things can change — even against all those who accuse him of being a fascist, which he is not. He’s the most important filmmaker of the French post-Godard generation…especially for Les contrebandières more than for the other two.” …

‘Manny Farber — whose termite category could have been invented for LM — asked me a couple of months ago how formal analysis could account for the tenderness Straub displays towards the young waiter in Not Reconciled; I asked in turn how a proper formal analysis could avoid it. It would seem, from the available evidence, that LM has shown a comparable tenderness towards everyone he’s ever filmed, and yes, Virginia, this is “work on the signifier”. It’s the signified of commercial cinema that gets short-changed in The Smugglers — not its production of meaning, which is indicated in virtually every shot. This makes some people angry because they want to forget they’re at the movies. LM starts with the assumption that you want to be there.

‘Nevertheless, at one time or another, LM’s films have defeated distributors, exhibitors, spectators, even projectors. At Filmex in Los Angeles last March, people who arrived to see Anatomie d’un rapport — not very many — were essentially informed that the 16 mm projector refused to contend with the film, and those who wanted to see it had to come back the following day. When I returned, along with an even smaller group of people, the projector grudgingly complied this time, but not without a couple of spiteful breakdowns. Every time I’ve seen Les contrebandières, the projector has obstinately refused to keep all of the image in focus at the same time; the gate usually seems to shudder and flinch at the very prospect.

‘Maybe cameras rebel against LM’s cinema too; consider the awfulness of that still I cited from Les contrebandières. I wonder if the breakdown in representation implied by it may, after all, be a fair indication of what his films are all about: not a breakdown of the people and things represented, but of the sort of guff that money and idealism dress them up with. All I know is that the longer I look at that still, the more it inspires me. Like the best of LM’s cinema, it is priceless — language that isn’t theft, because it takes nothing from anyone, but offers, rather, a gift that anyone can have. If anyone will let us have it.’ — Jonathan Rosenbaum

 

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Stills

 

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Further

Luc Moullet @ IMDb
Luc Mouleet @ New Wave Film
‘LUC MOULLET CINÉASTE CRITIQUE DE LA RAISON COMIQUE’
‘Filmmaker, Film Critic, Enfant Terrible. Luc Moullet offers his thoughts on cinema past and present.’
Luc Moullet @ Senses of Cinema
‘Luc Moullet and Parpaillon’s Pataphysical Theatre’
‘Luc Moullet : “J’aime la manière dont mon frère, assez primitif de nature, découpe son steak”’
Interview with Luc Moullet by John Hughes and Bill Krohn
Luc Moullet @ France Culture
‘Luc Moullet tracks the Origins of a Meal’
Video: Tracks: Luc Moullet – Poulidor du cinéma français’
‘Est-ce que ta grand mère fait du vélo?’
‘Seven Comedies: The Films of Luc Moullet’
Luc Moullet interviewed @ VICE (France)
‘Luc Moullet’s 10 favorite films 1957-1968’
‘L’HISTOIRE DU CINÉMA D’ANIMATION VU PAR LUC MOULLET’
‘Portrait(s) de Luc Moullet’

 

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Rockefeller’s Melancholy
Luc Moullet on Michelangelo Antonioni

 

Drifting is the fundamental subject of Antonioni’s films. They are about beings who don’t know where they are going, who constantly contradict themselves, and are guided by their momentary impulses. We don’t understand what they feel or why they act as they do.

Psychological cinema could be defined in this way: it is psychological when you don’t understand the motivation of emotions and behaviors. If you understand, it means it’s easy, immediately, at a very superficial level… The filmmaker must therefore let it be supposed that there are a pile of mysterious, secret, deep, and unlimited motivations, as much in the characters as in the filmmaker (who maybe doesn’t exist). You can ramble on at your leisure about them (cf. the bottle of spilled ink in L’avventura, the tennis game in Blow Up). It’s a way of bluffing the viewer, particularly noticeable throughout L’avventura and La notte, which is very National Enquirer (or Us Weekly, or Star, or People), dignified by an Edward Hopper emulator.

Drifting reveals two facets, one that is positive, one that is negative. First, the positive: it directs the film towards an unusual and surprising elsewhere. It’s the road movie (Zabriskie Point, The Passenger, L’avventura). The beginning of that last film is centered on the couple of Léa Massari/Ferzetti, and then on the disappearance of Massari who will be looked for in vain, very slowly and boringly, by the new—rather disappointing—couple of Ferzetti/Monica Vitti, and then on a semi-documentary and off-topic (but is there even a topic?) stroll through Sicily that, after an hour and a half of yawns, gives us the best (or the least bad) part of the film: the piercing gazes of the men on Monica Vitta alone in a small village square, the flirtation with the maid on the train, the prostitute’s press conference, Vitti imitating the bellboy, suddenly singing and dancing, passages that I am maybe overestimating because they happen after 100 very monotonous minutes. This kind of drifting film – a backpacker’s, a wanderer’s cinema – will come back later in Two Lane Blacktop (Hellman), The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (Cassavetes) and Wenders’ Kings of the Road, with the frequent submission to chance – natural and organized—that is equally present in Blow Up. This path will also be found in The Passenger, Identification of a Woman, and L’eclisse, objects in that film definitively replacing the protagonists in a revolutionary ending that happily gives a new twist to a film until then filled with drunks and common places (especially about the stock exchange).

The other facet is more negative. Since drifting is a way of fighting against boredom, it leads to a new form of boredom, inevitably found as soon as the center of the film is lost. Films about boredom are inevitably annoying. An inherent problem in filmmakers’ activities, one that is a vicious circle, is that, in order to make films, you have to be rich or, if not, you have to very quickly become rich. So, filmmakers only know the problems of the well-off, cutting them off from the reality of the masses and diminishing the reach of their oeuvre. But, after all, Rockefeller’s melancholy is a human reality to which it is only normal to bring attention. It’s something. It brings us back to an ancestral conception of art, one that was fundamental until around 1850. It is the expression of noble souls, men of noble births, excluding the mediocre spiritual life of the proletariat. Going back to it (Il grido) seems like a displacement of very artificial problems.

And when one is rich, one has everything—money, work (if one still needs to work in order to live), and love. What more can one hope for? From this comes the boredom, depression, and melancholy that one looks to fill in by looking at other things, left and right. A cinema that is foreign to me, that aggravates me—me, who, like the majority of people, had to fight for decades to reach a summit similar to the one that Antonioni’s characters want to forget. Maybe the height of happiness is to realise one’s ambitions as late as possible, or never, in order to avoid the agony of an earthly beyond.

(cont.)

 

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Extras

LUC MOULLET: The cinema according to Luc

Essai d’ouverture: Luc Moullet

Luc Moullet, enfin cinématonné?

Questions de cinéma Luc Moullet

Le Cinéma selon Luc Moullet (1979) by Gérard Courant

 

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Interview
from mubi

 

You mentioned in your introduction at Cannes that Land of Madness was initially suggested to you by Edgar Ulmer.

LUC MOULLET: Ulmer wanted to produce films by young people, and when I saw him he asked me to write something, but Ulmer had great difficulties getting his own movies produced, so this ended up not being made.

Was it originally a documentary?

MOULLET: No, it was a fiction. It was too long and too expensive. Ulmer spoke a lot without really having the power to supervise this film made by young people. I took a little part of it—10% or 5%, all about madness, this little part—and came back to the documentary way of filming, which was easier and more interesting in this case. And less costly. That gave me the idea of the title.

Did you know other directors from that era? I know you interviewed many, and Fuller you worked with.

MOULLET: Yes of course, because I was writing text for Cahiers du cinéma, and I was just beginning so I couldn’t write about great, great directors; Truffaut and Rivette spoke about them, wrote about them, so I had to concentrate on other directors who were a little forgotten or not yet known, such as Ulmer and Fuller.

And now they are associated with the New Wave and Cahiers.

MOULLET: I remember when Truffaut came to New York there was a question, “who are the best American directors?” And he said Edgar Ulmer and Samuel Fuller! Which in ’59 was rather provocative since the critic who asked the question may not have known Ulmer and saw very little of Fuller. At the time, people said Kazan, or Stevens, or Zinnemann.

That’s our cinema of quality. Now not very many people of our generation watch those films any more. They are underappreciated, almost, because of their reputation for being overblown. I was very startled to see this area of France on film. The landscapes here look like many of the landscapes I see in your movies, and it occurs to me that A Girl is a Gun could have been shot in your backyard. It was interesting to see the land that exists in your fiction films take such a vivid place in your documentary.

MOULLET: There are certain landscapes for fantasies like a western film and for a true story for murder and madness, which we can see here.

There’s something really romantic about your films, which I like. They have a reputation for being austere in a way, because they deliver facts, but there’s something really romantic about the landscapes.

MOULLET: It certainly is a romantic landscape, and these are ugly stories in a romantic landscape—it’s an interesting contradiction. You could say the same about Wuthering Heights, a very beautiful landscape and a certain kind of madness. I think it might be the same as in West Virginia!

Do you look for inspiration in films that you love?

MOULLET: Yes, of course. I wrote many films about American movies, I made a book about Vidor’s The Fountainhead, and there are some influences, some borrowings from The Fountainhead in A Girl is a Gun, from Hitchcock in Brigitte and Brigitte. In Brigitte and Brigitte there’s a girl who has some difficulties finding a secret dictionary in her closet during an exam, and this was made after the end of Strangers on a Train, looking for his lighter—things like that. There’s a borrowing from The Whispering Chorus by DeMille in Le prestige de la mort; it’s a bit of a similar story. There are many things I borrow from American cinema, always in a different context because Brigitte and Brigitte is a comedy and Strangers on a Train is a suspense film. It’s always better to take things from other genres because then nobody sees them…unless I speak to you about them! There are some borrowings from Moonfleet in my short, The Milky Way.

You wrote a book in 1995 called Politique des acteurs—Gary Cooper, John Wayne, Cary Grant, James Stewart, which unfortunately, like much of your criticism, has not yet been translated into English. Could you talk a little bit about why you wrote the book, and what you say in it?

MOULLET: Actors are very important to good authorship, especially in the comical field (Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, Raymond Griffith, Linder, Tati, Fields, Marx Brothers). Who remembers the official directors of their films, Clyde Bruckman, James Horne, Donald Crisp? I chose to write a book about actors because Truffaut always told me it was the most difficult thing to do, to write about actors. I liked this challenge. Before, almost nobody wrote seriously about actors.

Speaking of material unavailable in English, it is quite dismaying to see your work receive so little attention in the United States in terms of distribution. For someone unable to see most of your films, what have you been up to since the early 1970s?

MOULLET: I can tell you that I worked in many of the usual genres, comedy, western, erotic film, murder film, sociologic documentary, copying (or try to copy) the career of Hawks.

How do you see your filmmaking changing over this period?

MOULLET: I don’t know what difference one can find between a film I made in 1960 and a film I directed in 2006. Maybe there are less puns.

In the U.S. the French New Wave is almost exclusively associated with a very small group of Cahiers du cinéma critic-filmmakers—Godard, Rivette, Truffaut, Rohmer, and Chabrol. Again, due mostly to issues of distribution, access, and translation, we have seen little from other contemporaneous filmmakers and Cahiers writers such as yourself, Jacques Donoil-Valcroze, and Fereydoun Hoveyda.

MOULLET: My films have less success than those of Godard and Truffaut because I do not have their genius. I was a follower to them, a groupie, a fan. And all those who came after the Big Five of the New Wave had great difficulties during their—I mean Hanoun, Pollet, me, Eustache, Vecchiali, Straub, Rozier, Garrel. The audience had enough with the Big Five. We came too late, some months after, but it was too late.

To my knowledge, unlike many of your Cahiers critic-filmmaker colleagues you still remain active as a critic. How do you see your criticism changing since your earlier days? Do you see a difference between the way you worked as a critic-filmmaker during the first years of your career as a moviemaker and now?

MOULLET: To write an article about a film and to do a documentary, that’s the same work—we show a reality that does exist, a film, a factory, a town. I took the same pleasure in writing the book about Vidor’s The Fountainhead and in shooting a film about Des Moiners, The Belly of America. What difference between my film criticism of 1956 and that of today? Difficult to say. I saw more films during those years. I am less interested in giving a shock to my audience. My analysis is more precise—I presume—and I am more fair with the films. Now I try to find the truth while writing my texts, and I no more try to impose a truth, a message before writing an article. The first years in criticism, we often to tried to impose aggressive judgments. After, all that is over.

 

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16 of Luc Moullet’s 39 films

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Brigitte et Brigitte (1966)
‘Brigitte et Brigitte is a 1966 French feature-length film written and directed by Cahiers du cinéma film critic Luc Moullet. Two girls meet accidentally at the station as they come from their oppositely remote small villages. It seems they have patterned themselves against the same model as they are identical in every respect that they can be. They become roommates and go to collage, eventually studying film because it is easy. What follows are episodes, all reflective in some way on the nature of film, either explicitly or as a matter of how life is patterned by film. Eric Rohmer plays a role. What sets this apart from other new wave projects of the era is that it sits in its deep selfreference without taking itself seriously. As it happens, the identities of these girls drift apart in terms of appearance, manner, values and place in film. Its no less consequential than others of its ilk, but seems more fun in being consciously trivial. One episode, for instance has our girls doing a survey of the three best filmmakers. One Frenchman answers: Welles, Hitchcock and Jerry Lewis. Another querent gives the same answer for who are the three worst filmmakers. The joke is that he is a ten year old boy. Worse, pulls out a list with ALL filmmakers ranked in order and he tells precisely that those three are numbers 281, 282, and 283! Moullet’s debut film, Brigitte et Brigitte was praised upon release by one-time colleague Jean-Luc Godard as being a “revolutionary film.”‘ — collaged

Excerpt

 

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Les Contrebandières (1968)
‘In his follow-up to his debut feature Brigitte et Brigitte (1966), Luc Moullet further distanced himself from his Nouvelle Vague contemporaries by cocking a snook at anyone who sees revolution as an effective driver for social and political change. Moullet’s cynical view that nothing ever changes ran contrary to the thinking of other New Wave directors who, in common with a vast swathe of bourgeois intellectuals, saw revolution as not only necessary but inevitable. Jean-Luc Godard’s Week-End (1967) and Moullet’s Les Contrebandières (1968) are both wildly anarchic but their premises are diametrically opposed. Like Godard, Moullet evokes the thirst for rebellion that was rife in France in 1967/8, but his conclusion is that all that revolution achieves is to move people from one miserable, unsatisfying groove to another miserable, unsatisfying groove. Moulet’s minority view proved to be the most realistic. Ten years on from the events of May ’68, you’d be hard pressed to notice any significant change in France.’ — French Film Site

Excerpt

 

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A Girl is a Gun (1971)
‘Jean-Pierre Léaud and Rachel Kesterber star in the greatest French western ever made. Never released in France but distributed in South America in an English-language version dubbed by Moullet himself, Billy’s dark tale of lust and revenge swings wildly between a slapstick insanity and a delirious experimentation that are kith and kin with Wellman’s Yellow Sky, Vidor’s Duel in the Sun, Godard’s Week-end, and Garrel’s La cicatrice interieure. In rewriting an old saw (cinema and a girl is a gun, indeed), Moullet tackles favorite themes—time, landscape, exhaustion—with relish.’ — Harvard Film Archive

Excerpt

 

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Anatomie d’un rapport (1975)
‘”For me,” Luc Moullet wrote, “there isn’t intelligence and stupidity, but intelligence-stupidity.” A Cahiers critic who championed Samuel Fuller as an “intelligent primitive,” Moullet turned to directing well after his comrades (Godard, Truffaut, et al.), and has been playing catch-up ever since. With one exception, the movies in International House’s “5 Comic Films” showcase are emphatically unserious, teetering concatenations of moth-eaten gags splintered with Dadaist verve. Moullet has said his “main aim is to make people laugh,” but he lacks the killer instinct of a natural comedian. Even though his features typically run less than 90 minutes, they’re never rushed; for all their frenetic dislocations, they’re somehow restful. Fond of barren landscapes, blackout gags and Sisyphean slopes, Moullet is, like the Parisian rebels of May 1968, “Marxiste, tendence Groucho,” a slapstick anarchist who expresses his hostility to the modern world by refusing to take it seriously. The series’ most atypical entry is Anatomy of a Relationship (1975), co-directed with Moullet’s wife Antonietta Pizzorno. With Moullet as himself and Christine Hébert as an obvious Pizzorno stand-in, Anatomy dissects in painful detail the sexual dysfunction in its makers’ marriage.’ — Arsenevich

Excerpt

Excerpt

 

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Ma premiere brasse (1981)
‘Luc Moullet turns the camera on himself as he attempts to overcome his fear of large bodies of water and learn to swim.’ — MUBI

Excerpt

the entire film

 

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Les Havres (1983)
‘Watching Moullets “Les Havres” is a lot like flipping through photographer Robert Doisneaus book “La banlieu en couleur”. Doisneau is no Cartier-Bresson: he doesn’t show explicit beauty, but makes pictures of places that look messy. Nevertheless there is plenty of stuff in those messy places that is worthwile. Just like in “Les Havres”: for example a bus stop that is called “Socrate”.’ — Karel

the entire film

 

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Barres (1984)
‘Funny little short film about fare dodging in Paris with a touch of magical realism, a testament to human ingenuity and imagination used to get out of paying those couple of Francs. “My main aim is to make people laugh. For me, that’s very easy: lost between the rustic peasant world whose rituals I have forgotten and the chic Parisian world into which I have never really assimilated, I am a character who is out of place; everybody finds me comical. I only need to show up for people to laugh. So it’s not because I’ve got any great skills: I take full advantage of my situation. And this comedy factor goes beyond my personal self, stretching into whatever I care to imagine.”‘ — Luc Moullet



the entire film

 

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La comédie du travail (1987)
‘From the very beginning, film comedy focused on the world of work. From exploitation to unemployment, from adaptation to resistance, directors multiplied their points of view on survival in the modern world, especially from Chaplin on. With a humor superceding certain conventions and steering towards an eminently political dimension, Moullet follows three characters in order to build one of the blackest satires about the conflict arising from our everyday relation with work. Nobody but Luc Moullet, former witty critic of the Cahiers du Cinema, would have dared to make such a film on unemployment.’ — IMDb

Excerpt

 

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Essai d’ouverture (1988)
‘Twenty-one attempts to open a bottle…. Luc Moullet systematically confronts the recalcitrant caps of Coca-Cola bottles, moving towards increasingly unusual opening methods. Oulipo in the greatest way possible. You have a bottle full of soda, it’s hot and you want a sip of that liquid. And then something goes wrong. Things going wrong are the perfect recipe for comedy. This “Essai d’ouverture” is the living proof. Hurray for failure!’ — MUBI

the entire film

 

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Les sièges de l’Alcazar (1989)
‘Guy, film critic of the Cahiers du Cinéma and terminal cinephile, plans to write about the Vittorio Cottafavi retrospective at the Alcazar, his local cinema. One day he notices that Jeanne, film critic of Postif, the rival magazine, seems to be following him. He is intrigued– is she interested in him, or planning to poach his praise for Cottafavi in her own article? The greatest film about pathetic cinephilia ever made.’ — Letterboxd

the entire film

 

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Parpaillon ou à la recherche de l’homme à la pompe Ursus d’après Alfred Jarry (1993)
‘To understand Moullet’s contribution in Parpaillon, it is perhaps not pointless to ask a question at the outset that is finally quite difficult to answer: what is a gag? Jacques Aumont and Michel Marie suggest a practical definition: ‘More narrative and often more abstract than a sketch, the gag is short in form and relatively autonomous, and in itself does not necessarily belong to film (there are theatrical, and even musical or pictorial gags). In its most general form, it is characterised by the incongruous and surprising resolution of a situation that may or may not be realistic in its premises … The gag, in most cases, is less inclined to mobilise cinematic language than body language.’ The gags created by Moullet in Parpaillon seem in perfect agreement with this definition. The fragmentary nature of the film, resulting more from a narrative aesthetic than an ‘aesthetic of attractions’ – to borrow an expression devised to explain the specificity of early cinema – favours self-sufficiency in the situations being shown, emphasising their intrinsic value as gags. Similarly, all the situations in Parpaillon, however realistic most of them might be at the outset, are pushed to their most incongruous extrapolations.’ — Rouge

Excerpt

Excerpt

 

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Toujours plus (1994)
‘Aujourd’hui les supermarchés se construisent sur l’emplacement des cinémas ou des églises. Évolution normale puisque le consumérisme est la religion du XXème siècle ; les supermarchés sont les cathédrales du futur.’ — Cinematheque Grenoble

the entire film

 

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Foix (1994)
‘Showing the many idiosyncrasies of a small town (a school you can only enter by using the hospital entry, a culture center which is also used as a busstop), Moullet shows the different, rich layers of the so-called “ordinary” life.’ — MUBI

the entire film

 

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Le prestige de la mort (2006)
‘Whilst seeking out locations in the South of France for his next film, director Luc Moullet comes across a male corpse. He immediately decides to use this to his advantage. By swapping his passport with that of the dead man, Moullet hopes that the world will believe he is dead, thereby ensuring a renewed interest in his work. Unfortunately, the scheme backfires, since the dead man was someone rather important. The film stars Luc Moullet, Antonietta Pizzorno, Claire Bouanich, Iliana Lolitch and Gilles Guillain. It has also been released under the title: Death’s Glamour.‘ — French Film Site

the entire film

 

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La Terre de la folie (2010)
‘Originating from the southern Alps, Luc Moullet has been struck by the abnormally high incidence of mental disorder in the area. Accounts of murder, suicide and self-immolation are plentiful. In this documentary, Moullet examines the causes and consequences of these extreme psychiatric phenomena and arrives at some disturbing conclusions. The film stars Luc Moullet, Antonietta Pizzorno and Jacques Zimmer. It has also been released under the title: Land of Madness.’ — French Film Site

Trailer

Excerpt

Excerpt

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Assemblée Générale (2014)
‘The annual general assembly of the co-owners : quarrels about nothing, the collapse of the management agency, that turns becomes absurd.’ — Letterboxd

Excerpt

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Misanthrope, Hi. I think it could easily argued that Lady Gaga has a done a shit ton since her halftime gig. But who cares, really? I obviously never listen to any stars who play at that level anyway. Enjoy any free time you have this week. I have zero, so I’ll be rooting yours on. ** _Black_Acrylic, Kinkel has always been the most interesting to me of the school shooters. So much there, or at least so much available. Ah, it’s an arrogant move. Nice. I guess that’s where the extra thrill comes from. What a strange thing to think. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Yeah, the gym show window thing is really strange. But it must alluring to gym users since it’s so de rigeur. Maybe some sex club should try doing that. Krispy Kreme isn’t too far from the studio where I’m working this week. Maybe I can talk Zac and our technician into a sugary lunch break. Probably not. I feel for your love of yesterday. There were some really cool, now defunct old posts that relied on bizarre personal youtube videos that kids and weirdos put up that are now dead imbeds, which put those poor posts in my blog’s eternal graveyard. Love making the four hours we spent yesterday trying to create an effective visual effect for when the ghost in our film passes magically through walls result very quickly in success this morning, G. ** Justin, Hi I have to watch ‘American Fiction’ in the next few days because it’s assigned viewing for a Zoom thing this weekend, and I don’t know how I’m going to find the couple of hours to do that. I should try that Capote show, yeah, I’m curious, but it’ll be a couple weeks til I can. Good to hear it’s worth the look. Thanks, pal. ** Dom Lyne, Hi, Dom! Great to see you! Yeah, I mean, his confession birthed a whole novel of mine. Okay, about ‘Zone of Interest’. I know I should see it. It just hasn’t quite given me the necessary boner yet. Wow, you sound really good and productive in a most interesting fashion. Nice, man. Right, it’s Valentines Day tomorrow. I haven’t seen a peep of related merch or candies here. Weird. I think I’ll skip it. I think I’ve always skipped it actually, except when I was in elementary school, and they made you give every kid in your class a Valentine. That’s where kids would secretly reveal their true feeling for each other, like ‘I like you’, or ‘You’re horrible’ and things like that. Maybe it should become a law that everyone has to give everyone they know a Valentine on Valentines Day. That might be interesting. I’m in the process of finishing the film, all day every day for the next two weeks. It’s really good, but I’m already pretty burnt. Hugs back! ** Darby🐍, Snake! I’ll check out that person’s take on Kinkel when I get a chance, thanks. Oh, you know Puff. Wild. I’m all in on the car = freedom = life itself idea. But, like I said, I’ve been driving since I was pimply. Oh, gosh, amazing luck if you go that kill-the-conservatorship route. Wow. Sure, I’ve been to tons of aquariums. I like them. The Paris one is actually pretty good. ** oliver jude, Well, ixnay on the Mardi Gras finale then for sure. Yes, Steven Hall is a wonderful poet. I actually don’t know if he still writes poetry. I was going to publish a book of his poems through Little Caesar, but then the financial plug got pulled, killing the press dead in its tracks. Steven is the leader of a band that performs and records Arthur Russell’s music. They’re called Arthur’s Landing. Here’s their bandcamp. I hope that helps. ** Uday, Me too, on the growing up and later disenchantment. No, I was very not sporty. Because I’m tall, I wasn’t bad at volleyball and running track when I was forced to do them in high school. I hope you can sort out a way to de-annoy that guy. Shame is super ugly, but I guess it works? I think the problem is less the lack of knowledge than people’s mental laziness, not just when it comes to the mind but when it comes to anything that’s even remotely complex. Well, I don’t know form you’re writing in, but the easiest trick to creating distance is to write in the third person rather than the first. The third person has distance built into it, and then you can modulate that distance much more easily than trying to upfront or backpedal perspective with first person. But what style/form are you working in? ** Steve Erickson, Hi. Thanks. We need to get a first pass of the whole film done today. We only have the color grader until Friday, and there an immense amount detailing and subtle things we need to do. I think it’ll get done. She’s very swift and good. These days those problems are acknowledged, but with attached hopes and prayers only for the most part. Your friend’s film sounds most exciting. The Maddin and Baldwin comparisons are very riveting. ** Okay. Today is being given over to the very cool and most attention worthy French director Luc Moullet. Have a scan or a feast or something. See you tomorrow.