“On the knees of your soul? Might as well be useful. Scrub the floor.”
The personal modernist filmmakers. Bergman’s world was a theatre, Bresson’s was a prison, Tati’s an intricate jigsaw of scenes and moments and Federico Fellini’s was a circus.
Sirk has said: you can’t make films about things, you can only make films with things, with people, with light, with flowers, with mirrors, with blood, in fact with all the fantastic things which make life worth living. Sirk has also said: a director’s philosophy is lighting and camera angles.
If it is a standard of Hollywood, in other words, to show us that superheroes, cowboys and hard-bitten police detectives are all, “at the end of the day”, just like the rest of us, then the Gallic aspiration is to uncover the remarkable nature of “the rest of us”.
“τὸν κρατοῦντα μαλθακῶς
θεὸς πρόσωθεν εὐμενῶς προσδέρκεται.”
“God from afar looks graciously upon a gentle master.”
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And on a naif blissfully unaware of his teacher’s desolate spirit. Or is the naif grace manifest. More likely, just a minor kindness, the hinge upon which a world turns.
“East of Eden is more personal to me; it is more my own story. One hates one’s father; one rebels against him; finally one cares for him, one recovers oneself, one understands him, one forgives him, and one says to oneself, ‘Yes, he is like that’… one is no longer afraid of him, one has accepted him.” - Elia Kazan
A clumsy, gauche film, just like it’s star; but he’s like some big cat, a bruised moping feline presence on screen. Difficult to look away.
“Is it a dream? I don’t think it’s a dream. I don’t know these people. But they’ve come to me and they’ve spoken to me. They’ve made me bleed. I am almost sure they exist. That means this isn’t a dream. If this is a dream, what a dream.”
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“What do you see out there?”
“Hard to say.”
“No there’s no saying, is there?”
“Do you think he’s trustworthy?”
“The Indian? I can’t… say as I do. I trust you is all.”
“But you’re putting your trust in him.”
“You’re doubtful.”
“I have my doubts.”
“What are you thinking, Solomon?”
“I- I was just hoping Meek hasn’t twisted you up, is all.”
Sandro—intelligent, timid, static figure, small jaw, unassertive, unstable feet.
From Interpreting Children’s Drawings by Joseph H. DiLeo, M.D., Brunner/Mazel Publishers, New York, 1983.
The director opts for the real rather than the realistic. Being “realistic” always implies having a point of view on what is real, an interpretation of the facts. Here, an attempt has been made, thanks to the special machines used, to establish a material point of view rather than a human judgment. The microphone is capturing what it picks up, just as the camera is, and the artist avoids intervening at this level of the creation.
Godard refused to cheat with the rules he had set for himself, even in the scenes where this kind of cheating would have seemed indispensable, such as the café sequence in which Nana plays the jukebox. Normally, the record in question would simply be recorded directly onto the soundtrack. If one wants to be “true to life,” one usually settles, during the recording, for distorting the fidelity of a jukebox record by boosting the bass. Here, however, the sound was actually recorded in a café, with a great amount of care. And it is thus the jukebox we are really hearing. The same goes for the twist, during which we continue to hear the noises of the billiard game.
Jean Collet
