From France.

"Eric Rohmer has become my favorite filmmaker in just the way that Eric Rohmer would prefer - without my even noticing," writes Stephen Metcalf in Slate. "Apprehensive over its status as a new art form, film had generated its own vocabulary, inward and semi-mystical, of mise en scene, a vocabulary that cut itself off from other cultural antecedents. Rohmer re-sutured it to Pascal and Balzac and Melville and Kant and Moliére, to the writers from the literary and philosophical past he cared for, on the one hand, and to conversation, to simple human speech, on the other."

For the Guardian, Hannah Westley meets Agnès Varda to talk about a bit about the past ("They called me 'The Ancestor of the New Wave' when I was only 30") and about her current exhibition, L'Ile et Elle, at the Fondation Cartier in Paris through October 8: "[I]n many ways Varda's exhibition is a return to the very beginnings of her career, when she started out as photographer-in-residence for the Théâtre National Populaire."

"For those who (perhaps wrongly) measure Chabrol to Hitchcock, however, one comparison seemed obvious: if La Cérémonie was Chabrol's Frenzy, then The Swindle was his Family Plot," writes Ray Young at Flickhead, where he points us to The Claude Chabrol Project and to My Gleanings' collection of "Chabrol's thumbnail critiques of Robert Aldrich, John Brahm, Edward Dmytryk, Philip Dunne, Martin Ritt and William Wyler from the Dec63/Jan64 special 'American Cinema' issue of Cahiers du Cinema."

Marc Caro, who co-directed Delicatessen and City of Lost Children with Jean-Pierre Jeunet, will be coming back with Dante 01; Brendon Connelly tells us what's known so far about this dark sci-fi thriller.

Michael Guillén talks dream theory and The Science of Sleep with Michel Gondry. Related: The Reeler's report on Gondry's SoHo appearance last night. Eugene Hernandez has a clip.

"Dumas amuck..." in the thoughts of David Jeffers at the Siffblog.

"Playtime has been likened to Joyce's Ulysses; in the sense of the cityscape and its noise and mutterings, are as essential to the picture as the lost figures wandering on it," writes Richard von Busack at Cinematical. "Lately, in films as different as Magnolia, Amores Perros and Crash, there were attempts to link city dwellers through mutual suffering, Tati suggests mutual pleasure might be just as valid a way depicting our connection."

Posted by dwhudson at August 30, 2006 2:27 PM