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p.s. Hey. Merry Xmas! Here I am on the day itself for some strange reason and the p.s. is under a Xmas tree. ** Thomas Moronic, Hi, T! Happy happy! And so happy to read those words about Braithwaite. What’s going on with you? Is your new novel still percolating and/or gaining ground? Love, me. ** Bill, Hi, B. Yes, the Buche looks swell in the refrigerator, and it will be disappearing into me ere long at all. Enjoy whatever Xmas means where you are. Wait, it’s probably over or almost by now, I guess? ** Steve Erickson, Hi, K&D seem to be doing very well. They certainly took the literate, English (semi-)speaking portion of Paris by storm. Yes, I dipped into Alvear Courtis Jones, and you are absolutely right. Thank you for the excellent turn on. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi, Mr. E. What are you and Bill doing on this oh so potentially festive day? ** Bernard, Xmas greeting galore, B! Thank you for loving Hyemin’s movie marathon! Excellent about round one’s successful conclusion, and, yes, please spurt out some poetry and fiction before the next other thing arises. Although some blog postage would be welcome if that doesn’t slice up the real stuff. Busby Berkeley, let me check. No, the coast is totally clear. And I can tell you without even a nod in the archive’s direction that Eartha Kitt is completely available, blog-wise. I would cherish those. You guys doing anything in which Santa has an active presence today? ** H, Hi! Thank you! It seems that your show was very beloved, and no surprise! I hope that, whatever Xmas is in your world, it will fulfil its generous duties. ** Dóra Grőber, Merry Xmas, Dóra! Oh, wait, yours is over already. Yes, here in France the giant majority of the French did theirs last night too. It’s still weird to me. But then I think of Xmas like a kid, i.e. you open all your gifts in the morning and then you spend the whole day playing with them without sleep’s interruption. But I think the morning Xmas version we do in the States is the anomaly. Anyway, you’re off today, so that’s pretty Xmas-like. Enjoy your next three days of family and fun and cheer to the absolute max. And tell me about the highlights when you get back, please. The meeting with Gisele turned out to be super easy. She agreed completely with Zac and me about the script changes, so we’re good to go. And then we three devoured our Buche, which was awfully, awfully good. Oh, I picked it up at Hotel Ritz, and there was another person picking up a Buche too, and it was Lars von Trier. I felt self-conscious going into the super high-end Hotel Ritz dressed like I always dress, but Lars von Trier looked like a homeless person, so I felt better. Anyway, I famously can not stand Lars von Trier’s movies, so it was weird to stand next to him for 15 minutes while our Buches were retrieved, but luckily he didn’t seem to recognise me from Adam, and I kept my cool. Today, Xmas, should be pretty nothing much for me other than eating the second Buche because everyone else in the world here will be home recovering from Xmas Eve. Again, enjoy your days off and your family and just everything! ** Alistair, Hi, Alistair, a very, very merry Xmas to you and to Tim! No snow. Not even close. It’s 50 degrees F here today. So sad. Enjoy the Ventura sojourn! Take care! ** Count Reeshard, Happy Xmas, Count! Thank you for the fantastic words about Hyemin’s fantastic film program. That’s totally amazing that your wife and daughter were in those Kuchar films. Wow! That’s giddy-making. Cool. You have a Luxuria show! I’m guessing or at least hoping it’s archived for the time change-impaired like me. Oh, wait, I just saw your archive note/location. Great! I’ll go have a Xmas day listen. Luxuria is really happening, at least in my world. I’m a regular listener and big fan of two other Luxuria shows: The Michael Quercio Paisley Underground Consortium and Kristian Hoffman’s Pepperland Spicerack. Thanks a lot! Have a super swell big day today! ** _Black_Acrylic, Joyful Xmas to you, Ben! Whoa, nice sunset. LA has great sunsets, but I cannot even remember seeing a more than rote sunset over here. ** Misanthrope, Hi, it’s Xmas, George! Do it the fuck up! It was so, so, so not romantic. Yeah, I agree that 2018 will be a sweetie, artistically. For me, 2017 was too. I’m so glad I live in France. Enjoy the worldly shebang today whatever that entails. You get any cool gifts? ** Chris dankland, Hi, Chris! Merry merry Xmas! My Buche experience is a two-parter this year. Ate the first one on Saturday, Will eat the second and final one today. Should be good. Yes, I decided that your Lil B post really needed to be alive again. It seemed to have been a wise decision. Oh, wow, Chris! That’s such great, sweet, exciting news about your being in love! And I can definitely tell you are! It’s beautiful! The soulmate thing: yeah, how does one know? I really think a huge ton of it is beyond explanation and is just a feeling of certainty. Like a weird, great combination of fascination, excitement, and comfort. Belonging and kind of disbelief at belonging. I mean, you can analyse it and reason out all the commonalities you guys have and the way your and her emotional makeup and temperaments are ideally matched and so on, but I think it is basically inexplicable, and I do think it’s a matter of fate and destiny, as romantic and illogical as those concepts are. I’m so, so happy for you, my friend! Trust it. Totally trust it. Not that you really have a choice, I guess, ha ha. Cool that she likes my books. I mean, that’s really heartening. I will for absolutely sure go read those works of hers that you linked to. I just bookmarked them. Her name seems kind of familiar. Maybe I’ll seen her work around? Thank for clueing me in to Zac German’s Twitter. I’ll hang out there. Oh, this is cool. Kevin Killian and Dodie Bellamy were just here doing events, and at one of them I met Lucy K Shaw who lives in Paris now, and I didn’t know that. She’s great, and now I have a new local writer pal. Stay high and happy, my friend! You so deserve it! ** Jeff J, Happy Xmas, Jeff! I loved your Fanzine article. Kudos! Have a really swell and, I hope, Santa-enhanced day! ** Okay. If anybody has stuff they want to say in the comments today, I’ll be here tomorrow and will read and respond as best I can. See you then.

‘The French film director Jean-Gabriel Albicocco died, aged 65, on April 30, 2001 in Rio de Janeiro, where he was living, forgotten and destitute. It was a tragic end to a career that started so promisingly – by the age of 30 he had made one of the French cinema’s greatest successes.

‘Of Italian ancestry, Albicocco was born in Cannes, the son of the cinematographer Quinto Albicocco. By the age of 10, he was already proficient in the use of a ciné camera, shooting his own 8mm movies around the town. While still in his teens, he worked on documentaries for the cinématograph service of the French army. By 1957, the 21-year-old was assistant director on Jules Dassin’s ambitious adaptation of the Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis’s novel Christ Recrucified, retitled He Who Must Die.

‘After directing a number of well-received shorts, Albicocco made his first feature. Following in the wake of the French new wave, it was The Girl With The Golden Eyes (La Fille Aux Yeux d’Or, 1961), about a fashion designer who falls for a young woman, whom he discovers is the lover of a female colleague. It would be hard to guess that this chic, stylish and stylised lesbian tale, excellently photographed by Albicocco’s father and set in the Paris fashion houses of the early 1960s, was based on a Balzac story.

‘The film was a great success for the director, and for 20-year-old Marie Lafort in the title role, whom Albicocco was soon to marry. He followed it up with Le Rat d’Amérique, starring Lafort and Charles Aznavour, and it was selected for the 1963 Cannes film festival.

‘Then came his biggest hit of all, Le Grand Meaulnes (The Wanderer, 1966), based on Alain Fournier’s popular young people’s classic. In fact, Albicocco was the first person in 30 years to persuade Isabelle Rivière, who co-wrote the screenplay with him, to allow her brother’s work to be filmed.

‘Again working with his father as cinematographer, Albicocco attempted to recreate the fairy-tale atmosphere of the poignant story of the young Augustin Meaulnes in search of a beautiful and mysterious girl and his lost adolescence. Though it was often too frenetic and flashy for its own good, the film was, nevertheless, visually impressive, and became one of France’s biggest box-office successes of the year, as well as making an impact abroad.

‘But his extravagant style – it was noted that Albicocco rhymes with rococo – and rather sentimental approach seemed to lose favour with critics and the public, and his next two films, Le Coeur Fou (1969) and Le Petit Matin (1970), were flops. The latter was a roseate view of the occupation, and featured the celebrated stage director and actor Jean Vilar in his last role.

‘Thereafter, Albicocco decided to give up film-making and work behind the scenes of the industry. He founded the French Film Directors Union in 1968, and organised the directors’ fortnight at Cannes. But in the early 1980s, with a certain amount of regret and bitterness, and now divorced, he suddenly went to live in Brazil.

‘”I no longer belong in France,” he announced, although he was instrumental in forging links between the French and Brazilian cinemas. But his investment in a chain of cinemas, to counteract the influence of the torrent of Hollywood movies, led only to penury.

‘A few days before his death, when it was reported that he was gravely ill, a call went out in France to fellow cinéastes to help Albicocco. Sadly, it was too late.’ — Ronald Bergan

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Stills

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Further

Jean-Gabriel Albicocco @ IMDb
MORT DU RÉALISATEUR JEAN-GABRIEL ALBICOCCO
La mort de Jean-Gabriel Albicocco
Jean-Gabriel Albicocco @ Cine Artistes
#265. LE CŒUR FOU. Jean Gabriel Albicocco, 1969
JEAN-GABRIEL ALBICOCCO @ MUBI
Jean-Gabriel Albicocco @ UNIFRANCE
[Be Kind Rewind] LE CŒUR FOU de Jean-Gabriel Albicocco
Refracted Light: The Films of Quinto and Jean-Gabriel Albicocco

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Extra

Jean Gabriel Albicocco et Marie Laforêt

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Posters

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5 of Jean-Gabriel Albicocco’s 15 films

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Rat Trap (1963)
‘This South American adventure drama finds Charles (Charles Aznavour), a youthful Frenchman traveling to Paraguay to start a new life. Seeking out a rich uncle, the idealistic nephew is rejected by his miserly relation, and he goes on to get involved with a shady woman and a band of gun runners who supply arms for the revolution of the week. Charles and his new girlfriend head for the border after a shootout with federal troops, and a kindly railroad worker hides the couple in an abandoned copper mine. Charles is later thrown in prison while the girl becomes a concubine, but her violator is killed when Charles escapes to rescue her and exact revenge. A pretty harrowing composition could be written by the young couple on “How I Spent My Summer Vacation.”’ — letterboxd

Excerpt

Excerpt

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The Girl with the Golden Eyes (1961)
‘Henri Marsay, a rakish lothario, enjoys sex as something of a gamble and a sport. While participating alongside his friends in elaborate scenarios of erotic gamesmanship, he becomes increasingly preoccupied with his latest conquest, and grows distraught upon discovering a rival in her lesbian paramour. Though now relatively obscure, The Girl with the Golden Eyes was not without enthusiasts upon its initial release. Amos Vogel even arranged a special presentation of the work at his influential film society Cinema 16, situating it as an alternative to the Nouvelle Vague offerings of the era. “A mysterious, perverse Gothic tale, derived from Balzac and transposed to a deceptively contemporary Paris, probes the secret of a bizarre love in an atmosphere of sophisticated decadence,” wrote Vogel in his program notes. “Opulent in its artificiality, the film is especially noteworthy for its visual pyrotechnics, luxuriant imagination and unexpected continuity.”’ — Film Society Lincoln Center

Excerpt

Excerpt (dubbed intro Russian)

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Le Grand Meaulnes (1967)
‘A film made with vaseline and railway tracks, which takes some adjusting to; but you soon forget to read the subtitles, because you can understand all you need without them. It’s based on the book Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier, and explores a strange adolescence in provincial France at the end of the last century. In the film, Roger Corman meets Proust, Elvira Madigan rides again, and Renoir takes acid.’ — Time Out (London)

Trailer

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Le coeur fou (1970)
‘What strikes at first in Le coeur fou, it is timely it seems ahead of its time, with its chiseled image, its whirling camera movements and its feverish characters, announcing some great Mannerist films of the following decade signed Argento or even Zulawski (which we think a lot), a whole pan of cinema 70’s under LSD, totally screwed up and totally paroxysmal. Everything seems drugged, everything gives the tournis. What disconcerts in a second, is why such a strong work remains unknown. Jean-Pierre Dionnet has the answer: it would be the hangover of the day after May 1968 and Le coeur fou is one of those films sacrificed by economic censorship like Jean-Denis Bonan’s La Femme Executioner , exhumed recently and released in 2015 on our screens. Le coeur fou marks Albicocco’s first public failure, critical but not artistic. Plasiquement, the film is of a new beauty, sumptuous, limit too much, until the indigestion with his travellings and its sequences of barge, almost inciting us to disregard the plot, to let us contaminate by the love sickness violently experienced by both lovers. He is also very beautiful in what he says about these destinies.’ — Chaos Reigns

Excerpt

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Le Petit Matin (1970)
‘A coyly maudlin romance set in Occupied France during WWII, all about an adolescent girl, much given to riding dreamily around on a white horse, and her love affairs – of varying degrees of intensity and fulfilment – with said horse, a childhood playmate who turns out to be gay (Baltauss), and a handsome young German soldier (Carrière), also much addicted to galloping about. Always a prettifier, Albicocco drenches the whole thing in a pale green tint, so that even shots of Jewish deportees look like chocolate-box tops. There’s a fulsome Francis Lai score to match the decoratively swirling mists prevailing in the area, and despite a would-be tragic ending, the whole thing is marshmallow through and through.’ — Time Out (London)

Trailer

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p.s. Hey. ** Jim Pedersen, Jim! Aw, how lovely to see you! I would love to have the opportunity to catch up. Truly needed. I’ll be in NYC for a few weeks in June, maybe then? Take care, my friend. ** Chaim Hender, Hi, Chaim. Thanks, pal. ** David Ehrenstein, Morning, maestro. ** Steve Erickson, I know Ladislas Starewitch by name, but I’m not sure if I’ve seen the work or much of it. I’ll look into for it for general interest and, yes, possibly a post, thank you. Yes, a bit different to do the Disneyland experience sober, but its psychedelia is still plenty effective without a booster shot. Maybe music critics have finally realised people who listen to music have ears and minds of their own and don’t need critics acting as though the world of music lovers would be a dangerous place without their finger wagging and trigger warnings. Hope so. ** Amphibiouspeter, Hi, AP. Glad you liked the Reininger work. I agree, obvs. If it was a reminder of ‘Life Aquatic’ that is a huge compliment to me, cool. Ha ha, thanks about my omniference or thereabouts. Yeah, I don’t know. I’ve just always been voraciously curious about a lot of things, and the blog gives me an excuse to indulge that side of me for a ‘good cause’ or something. There was a time quite some time ago when Orlando Bloom could have theoretically been featured in that list, I think? If memory serves. Didn’t get a shot of me and Goofy, sadly. The only time I saw him he was onstage dancing to a Hi-NRG Xmas carol. ** James Nulick, Hi, James. Glad you dug. I liked the ‘God Jr.’ length too. But, yeah, no clue what the length was exactly. Interesting. I too read fewer, much fewer, long novels than I used to, but it seems like most people I know who are older are almost all reading really long novels and seem to think that’s one of those things one does when they’re older. ** Dóra Grőber, Hi! That does sound chaotic. I’m assuming the unsold versus sold ratio must weight heavily in ‘favor’ of the unsold. After consultation, this is the Buche that Zac and I will eat with Gisele and Stephen on Saturday. Today I must decide which Buche will be my Xmas day Buche. Big decision. Your brother has arrived! That must help a lot. Just a handful more work days, right? Disneyland Paris was a lot of fun. It’s was very foggy and misty all day so the park looked like food. Here are the rides we rode (I think in order): Studio Tram Tour: Behind the Magic: The Calm and the Storm, Ratatouille: The Adventure, The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror, Phantom Manor, Hyperspace Mountain, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Peril, Big Thunder Mountain, ‘it’s a small world’, Star Tours: The Adventures Continue, and Les Mystères du Nautilus. How did Thursday treat you? ** Misanthrope, Hi. Okay, I’ll check out that Lambert thing today. I don’t know who Blake Mitchell is. I’m way behind on the Helix superstars. When I think Helix, I still think Kyler Moss and Kyle Ross. ** Bill, Hi. The Disneyland outing did whatever trick it was intended to do, thank you. Thanks a lot for the late breaking 2017 faves. Noted and noted. ** Fratolish Hiang-Perpeshki, Hello again. Okay, I’m happy to share your poster. Very best of luck in your search. Everyone, Fratolish Hiang-Perpeshki needs your help if you can help him. Here he is to ask you himself: ‘i made to find My adobted alien father. i believe he NOT return to Pleiades,or is on Earth unknown location ((goverment captured)). i am to make my UFO to travel to his place soon. poster here.’ Take care. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. It sounds like Xmas is treating you pretty well so far. I’m curious to see that Grace Jones doc, of course. Have a fine Thursday! ** Right. I think that trusty suggester of blog post ideas Jeff Jackson is the guy who nudged me into doing a Day about the very interesting and quite obscure French filmmaker Jean-Gabriel Albicocco. May you find interest of some degree therein. See you tomorrow.