godard Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Maybe you've seen them, maybe you haven't, but French thrillers are making a comeback in North America. That's good news for people uninterested in art houses solely for the sake of watching foreign films: You don't have to be a Francophile to appreciate smart, meticulously generated suspense, and that's exactly the appeal of several French movies hitting American theaters this year. A steady mixture of warm reviews and positive word-of-mouth appears to have helped Guillame Canet's breathlessly entertaining drama Tell No One land an impressive $240,858 at 18 locations. Earlier this year, veteran auteur Claude Lelouch, long known for his cinematic explorations of eroticism and lawbreaking, remained thematically consistent with a delightfully complex story of double-crossing novelists and dysfunctional families called Roman de Gare. The movie made over $25,000 on two New York screens when it opened in late April, and eventually pulled in more than $1.5 million after expanding to theaters around the country. It's not hard to argue that Tell No One and Roman de Gare put most recent American thrillers to shame. North America, once the haven of film noir, appears to be outsourcing.

As journalist Erica Abeel recently observed in an interview with Canet, "French filmmakers are currently making the best old-style Hollywood thrillers." It's not the first time for a country that has a long history of borrowing from American cinema, and often improving on it. At the beginning of the French New Wave in the early 1960s, former Cahiers du Cinema critics like Jean Luc-Godard discovered Hollywood genre films and decided to make their own loopy versions. The results were often strangely philosophical and experiment works, ranging from Godard's Breathless to François Truffaut's ambitious Shoot the Piano Player.

There have been many times that I wished I had taken French in high school, but the one time I remember well is when I heard about Les Cahiers du Cinema. The film magazine, which was home to Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut and Eric Rohmer when they were influential film critics before they were influential film makers, has never spawned an English-language version in its 56 years. But as of this Friday, the publication's new website (e-Cashiers -- nothing is there yet, but you should bookmark it) will offer us monolinguals a translation.

The online version of the magazine will not be free, though. There will be a $5 charge for individual issues and also a subscription option. The first edition available in English features an article on former Cahiers editor Jacques Rivette, one on the influence of American television and one on Armenian cinema. And each piece of writing is promised to be appropriately translated by a team of 18 individuals familiar with the magazine's way of thinking. This news comes one day after the ultra-mainstream, celebrity-friendly American film magazine Premiere announced an end to its publication run.

Oscar season is upon us and with it comes the discussion of film legends who never won an Academy Award. While on this topic, it is important to acknowledge how many great producers are ignored by Oscar due to the fact that foreign films are rarely nominated for Best Picture. Carlo Ponti was such a great producer, and with his death today, he misses the opportunity of ever receiving an Academy Award, even a lifetime achievement honor.

Ponti is not well known, but he should be. Aside from the fact that he discovered Sophia Loren, whose film career he jump-started and who he married (twice -- kind of), he also produced films for many of the masters of cinema, including Antonioni (Blow Up; Zabriskie Point; The Passenger), Fellini (La Strada), de Sica (basically any of his starring Loren), Demy (Lola), Godard (A Woman is a Woman; The Riflemen; Contempt), Polanski (What?), Melville (Le Doulos; The Forgiven Sinner), Forman (The Fireman's Ball), Varda (Cléo from 5 to 7) and Lean (Doctor Zhivago). Some of his films were nominated for the foreign language Oscar, and a couple won the award, but Ponti was only nominated once, for Zhivago, in the Best Picture category (which is oftentimes considered the Best Producer category). Of course, he did get to help his wife win an Oscar, at least -- for de Sica's Two Women.

WNYC's Brian Lehrer did a segment this morning with Joshua Horowitz, author of the new book, The Mind of the Modern Moviemaker: Twenty Conversations with the New Generation of Filmmakers, and Kerry Conran, creator of that strange hybrid of painterly geekery and celebrity charity, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. It's a good piece of radio, but Horowitz' book is an odd bag, comprised as it is with interviews with both card-carrying hipster aesthetes like Michel Gondry, and dude-movie heroes like Todd "Old School" Phillips. To many of us, a lot of the guys that Horowitz singles out for investigation are unremarkable hacks; to Horowitz, they're a new crop of auteurs, stamping a generation-specific brand of irony and self-referentiality and digital savvy on classical filmmaking.

I'm sure he's probably right, but I'm not sure this is cause for celebration. The segment reminded me of a coversation I had last week about the state of the jump cut, and other technical tactics that filmmakers employ to remind you that you're watching a film. The person I was speaking with praised a certain filmmaker's use of such tactics as "Godardian". In response, I said something along the lines of, "I think if Godard was dead, one would hope that the post-digital flurry of self-referentiality would have him rolling in his grave." (As it is, the old New Wave master seems to be too far afield of relevancy to cause much of a fuss about anything). 

The running theme of Horowitz's argument seems to be that it's easier now, for people who want to badly enough, to make films: Conran spends years developing virtual sets on his home computer and eventually finds himself directing Gwyneth Paltrow in front of a blue screen; Kevin Smith maxes out his credit card, feeds his friends lines about blow jobs and Yoda, and we get Clerks. Which all reminds me of a line from a little dino-film by Steven Speilberg, who probably deserves as much credit for the filmmaking foibles of this new generation as anyone: "You spent so much time worrying about whether you could do it, you didn't stop to think if you should."

Later today, you'll be able to listen to the interview here.