Senses of Cinema. 48.

"Utopian narratives often imply a before and an after, an Eden and après, so to speak," write editors Rolando Caputo and Scott Murray, introducing the new issue of Senses of Cinema. "We borrow from Bernardo Bertolucci's 1964 film its title, Before the Revolution (Prima della rivoluzione) - itself borrowed from Stendhal - to group together a number of texts centred on the years leading into May 1968 and its immediate aftermath.... [T]hese texts are imbued with the 'human factor' more so than the political - even if, by May 68, the personal had become political, and especially for a figure like Jean-Luc Godard, for whom, by then, an idea, an ideology, trampled over feelings and emotions."

Sally Shafto introduces two texts she's translated, the first from Antoine Bourseiller, "one of the best-known theatre directors in France," the second from his stepson, Christophe Bourseiller, an actor who has since become a widely admired "author of some thirty works, including an excellent biography of Guy Debord and a history of the French Maoists.... The styles of the two Bourseillers could not be more different: while Antoine's account is highly romantic, Christophe's tone is down-to-earth, bordering on the acerbic. Together they form not only a diptych of Jean-Luc Godard, revealing conflicting aspects of his personality, but also a portrait of a changing France in the 1960s."

From Roland-François Lack, "Vivre sa vie: An Introduction and A to Z."

Patrick Deval "came of age in the 60s as a devoted cinéphile," write Maximilian Le Cain and Fergus Daly, interview they find "timely for at least two reasons. First, there has been much recent interest in the Zanzibar phenomenon thanks largely to Sally Shafto's book, The Zanzibar Films and the Dandies of May 1968. More recent, Re:voir has released a number of these films on DVD, including an indispensible double bill of Acéphale and Héraclite l'obscur."

Lisa K Broad, too, looks back to the mid-20th century: "As theories of quantum mechanics were increasingly elaborated, disseminated and accepted, the classical story of the universe and what could be known about began to appear as no more than a compelling work of fiction." She argues "that the temporal scheme that [Alain] Robbe-Grillet employs in his film La Belle Captive is in many ways equivalent to the [new] 'Many Worlds Interpretation' in that the film seems to represent a number of distinct possible realities."

"The inherent flexibility of the grotesque is vital to an understanding of its role in Ford," argues Phil Wagner. "The director's 'grotesques' span diverse generic terrain: the animalistic anti-hero of the political thriller, The Informer (1935); the demonic prison-guard in the historical drama, The Prisoner of Shark Island (1936); the monstrous banker in Ford's immortal Western, Stagecoach (1939); and many more. The grotesque æsthetic is a window into many of the unresolved contradictions in Ford's work – especially, the uneasy juxtaposition of the tragic and the comic and mankind's perpetual battle with an unruly inner beast."

Combining "formal transparency" and "subjective interactivity," notes Derek Jenkins in a close reading of Backyard, Ross McElwee "discovered that he could simultaneously untangle his misgivings about both the South and autobiographical film by acknowledging those problems indirectly. His 'self-reflective complexity,' one that registers several layers of autobiographical and social meaning in every image and interaction, is confronted with humorous irony, a benign duplicity that gives way to the revelatory power of vérité while bypassing the posture of objectivity."

Richard Armstrong on the British Film Institute's DVD box set, Land of Promise: The British Documentary Movement 1930 - 1950: "In the post-war decades, the society addressed so earnestly and paternalistically by such documentarians as John Grierson, Humphrey Jennings, Paul Rotha and Basil Wright in the 1930s and 1940s was already breaking down into a political, racial and gendered multitude of individuals and interest groups, lending the promise enshrined in these films a faintly naïve, even forlorn air."

"I met Pierre Rissient on what I think was his first visit to Australia." Geoff Gardner looks back on a friendship and generally has good things to say about Todd McCarthy's Man of Cinema: Pierre Rissient, though he does feel that one spicy detail ought to have gone blipped out.

Another recollection: Scott Murray on Sydney Pollack.

I've mentioned the Ozploitation dossier in some earlier entry, but there you go; there are also, of course, new festival reports, book reviews and annotations on films - and two new names for the Great Directors database: Ralph Beliveau and Randolph Lewis induct Alex Cox; David Minnihan, Ang Lee.

Posted by dwhudson at September 6, 2008 4:08 AM