French crime films of the 1950s and ’60s often centered on professional criminals who followed codes of honor that put them on a more-or-less level moral playing field with the detectives tracking them down. Whether it was Jean Gabin’s aging gangster Max in Jacques Becker’s Touchez Pas au Grisbi or Alain Delon’s steely eyed assassin Jef in Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï, these men had a sophistication and moral grounding that minimized the violence and chaos they caused. They were dangerous, even deadly, but only when they needed to be and in a way the cops could wrap their heads’ around.
Fun City Editions’s new Blu-ray set, Seeing Red: 3 French Vigilante Thrillers, consists of a trio of films that play like French twists on the hyper-violent Italian poliziotteschi crime films that reached the height of their popularity in the ’70s. In Jean-Claude Missiaen’s Shot Pattern,...
Fun City Editions’s new Blu-ray set, Seeing Red: 3 French Vigilante Thrillers, consists of a trio of films that play like French twists on the hyper-violent Italian poliziotteschi crime films that reached the height of their popularity in the ’70s. In Jean-Claude Missiaen’s Shot Pattern,...
- 5/14/2024
- by Derek Smith
- Slant Magazine
Death Watch director Bertrand Tavernier on Harry Dean Stanton: "He also had social graces and immediately knew how to talk, to Romy Schneider who immediately liked him."
Bertrand Tavernier's Death Watch (La Mort En Direct), based on the novel by David Compton with original music by Antoine Duhamel (Fernando Trueba's favourite composer), shot by Pierre-William Glenn in Scotland, stars Romy Schneider and Harvey Keitel with Max von Sydow and Harry Dean Stanton. The My Journey Through French Cinema (Voyage à Travers Le Cinéma Français) director shared his memory of the time he spent with Harry Dean, talking about John Huston (Stanton fresh off filming Huston's Wise Blood with Brad Dourif and Amy Wright), Romy Schneider's reaction to the man with "social graces", and Jack Nicholson's admiration for the great talent that Harry Dean Stanton possessed.
Harry Dean Stanton in his last starring role in John Carroll Lynch...
Bertrand Tavernier's Death Watch (La Mort En Direct), based on the novel by David Compton with original music by Antoine Duhamel (Fernando Trueba's favourite composer), shot by Pierre-William Glenn in Scotland, stars Romy Schneider and Harvey Keitel with Max von Sydow and Harry Dean Stanton. The My Journey Through French Cinema (Voyage à Travers Le Cinéma Français) director shared his memory of the time he spent with Harry Dean, talking about John Huston (Stanton fresh off filming Huston's Wise Blood with Brad Dourif and Amy Wright), Romy Schneider's reaction to the man with "social graces", and Jack Nicholson's admiration for the great talent that Harry Dean Stanton possessed.
Harry Dean Stanton in his last starring role in John Carroll Lynch...
- 9/18/2017
- by Anne-Katrin Titze
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then there will never be a definitive list of the greatest cinematography, but for our money, one of the finest polls has been recently conducted on the matter. Our friend Scout Tafoya polled over 60 critics on Fandor, including some of us here, and the results can be found in a fantastic video essay below. Rather than the various wordless supercuts that crowd Vimeo, Tafoya wrestles with his thoughts on cinematography as we see the beautiful images overlaid from the top 12 choices.
“I’ve been thinking of the world cinematographically since high school,” Scout says. “Sometime around tenth grade I started looking out windows, at crowds of my peers, at the girls I had crushes on, and imagining the best way to film them. Lowlight, mini-dv or 35mm? Curious and washed out like the way Emmanuel Lubezki shot Y Tu Mamá También,...
“I’ve been thinking of the world cinematographically since high school,” Scout says. “Sometime around tenth grade I started looking out windows, at crowds of my peers, at the girls I had crushes on, and imagining the best way to film them. Lowlight, mini-dv or 35mm? Curious and washed out like the way Emmanuel Lubezki shot Y Tu Mamá También,...
- 4/28/2016
- by Jordan Raup
- The Film Stage
Mubi is showing Jacques Rivette's Out 1: noli me tangere (1971) in four parts in the UK and most other parts of the world, beginning April 25, 2016.“How strange, it’s like being in a cloak and dagger story.”—Frédérique, Out 1“Is this a game?”“It’s lots of things.”—Sarah and Thomas, Out 1The word is casual. The world, too. In Jacques Rivette’s seminally bizarre, alluringly demanding twelve-hour-plus opus Out 1 (1971), listless Parisians float into one another’s lives as if they live in an incestuously tiny village. They come, they go, they never quite collide. They drift: their stories, if they can be called that, don’t so much intertwine with dramatic intricacy as overlap prettily like translucent jellyfish. Outward, inward, engines in decline. Eventually, of course, drifting accumulates its own tensions, acquires its own charms. Little things begin to matter, take on revelatory qualities. Hopes for a bigger...
- 4/26/2016
- by Michael Pattison
- MUBI
The Eighth Annual Robert Classic French Film Festival — co-produced by Cinema St. Louis and the Webster University Film Series — celebrates St. Louis’ Gallic heritage and France’s cinematic legacy. The featured films span the decades from the 1920s through the early 1990s, offering a comprehensive overview of French cinema.
The fest is annually highlighted by significant restorations, and we’re especially pleased to present Jacques Rivette’s long-unavailable epic Out 1: Spectre Additional restoration highlights include Jean-Luc Godard’s A Married Woman and Max Ophüls’ too-little-seen From Mayerling To Sarajevo. Both Ophüls’ film and Louis Malle’s Elevator To The Gallows – with a jazz score by St. Louis-area native Miles Davis — screen from 35mm prints. All films will screen at Webster University’s Moore Auditorium (47- E. Lockwood)
Music fans will further delight in the Rats & People Motion Picture Orchestra’s accompaniment and original score for Carl Th. Dreyer’s...
The fest is annually highlighted by significant restorations, and we’re especially pleased to present Jacques Rivette’s long-unavailable epic Out 1: Spectre Additional restoration highlights include Jean-Luc Godard’s A Married Woman and Max Ophüls’ too-little-seen From Mayerling To Sarajevo. Both Ophüls’ film and Louis Malle’s Elevator To The Gallows – with a jazz score by St. Louis-area native Miles Davis — screen from 35mm prints. All films will screen at Webster University’s Moore Auditorium (47- E. Lockwood)
Music fans will further delight in the Rats & People Motion Picture Orchestra’s accompaniment and original score for Carl Th. Dreyer’s...
- 2/16/2016
- by Tom Stockman
- WeAreMovieGeeks.com
If there’s any truth to the old chestnut that great works of art teach you how to experience them, few films exemplify it quite so fully as Jacques Rivette‘s Out 1. Then again, when so few films akin to Out 1 in the first place, comparisons will only go so far before discourse hits a wall. Or so I, in the two weeks since seeing it, have been inclined to think of a conspiracy-filled, paranoia-fueled, melancholy-drenched 13-hour movie that’s no less indebted to Fritz Lang and classic melodrama than Aeschylus and Balzac. If this weren’t a particularly good film, its restoration and subsequent theatrical release, which begins at New York’s BAMcinématek this evening, would still be something to celebrate — mostly as a signal that people with a power to save rare films are placing their resources where it counts. But given what is, to my mind, the...
- 11/4/2015
- by Nick Newman
- The Film Stage
“The Movie For Movie Lovers”
By Raymond Benson
François Truffaut had an all too short but certainly brilliant career as a filmmaker. He began in the world of film criticism in France, but in the late 1950s he decided to make movies himself. Truffaut quickly shot to the forefront of the French New Wave in the late 1950s and early 60s, alongside the likes of Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer, Alain Resnais, and others. By the time the 70s rolled around, Truffaut was a national treasure in France and a mainstay in art house cinemas in the U.S. and Britain.
His 1973 masterpiece, Day for Night (in France La Nuit Américaine, or “American Night”), won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film of that year, the only time Truffaut picked up an Academy Award. Due to odd eligibility rules, the picture could be nominated for other categories the following year. For...
By Raymond Benson
François Truffaut had an all too short but certainly brilliant career as a filmmaker. He began in the world of film criticism in France, but in the late 1950s he decided to make movies himself. Truffaut quickly shot to the forefront of the French New Wave in the late 1950s and early 60s, alongside the likes of Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer, Alain Resnais, and others. By the time the 70s rolled around, Truffaut was a national treasure in France and a mainstay in art house cinemas in the U.S. and Britain.
His 1973 masterpiece, Day for Night (in France La Nuit Américaine, or “American Night”), won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film of that year, the only time Truffaut picked up an Academy Award. Due to odd eligibility rules, the picture could be nominated for other categories the following year. For...
- 8/14/2015
- by nospam@example.com (Cinema Retro)
- Cinemaretro.com
Just now catching up with the news at cinematographer Gerry Fisher passed away on December 2. He was 88 and, as the Telegraph notes, he "worked with some of the most renowned film directors of the second half of the 20th century, including Carol Reed, John Huston and Billy Wilder. However, he will be best remembered for his long collaboration with the cinematic auteur Joseph Losey, for whom he shot eight films, including Accident (1967) and The Go-Between (1971)." We've gathered remembrances from two cameramen he worked with, Richard Andry and Pierre-William Glenn as well as an assessment of his work by Verina Glaessner in Film Reference. » - David Hudson...
- 1/7/2015
- Fandor: Keyframe
Just now catching up with the news at cinematographer Gerry Fisher passed away on December 2. He was 88 and, as the Telegraph notes, he "worked with some of the most renowned film directors of the second half of the 20th century, including Carol Reed, John Huston and Billy Wilder. However, he will be best remembered for his long collaboration with the cinematic auteur Joseph Losey, for whom he shot eight films, including Accident (1967) and The Go-Between (1971)." We've gathered remembrances from two cameramen he worked with, Richard Andry and Pierre-William Glenn as well as an assessment of his work by Verina Glaessner in Film Reference. » - David Hudson...
- 1/7/2015
- Keyframe
After Cousin Jules took home the Special Prize of the Jury after it’s premiere at the 1973 Locarno Film Festival, Dominique Benicheti’s masterfully constructed observational documentary on the quiet life of his cousin Jules Guiteaux and his wife Félicie amongst the picturesque French countryside seemed to have vanished into the vastly overlooked void of cinema history. Forty years later, the film has returned triumphant, playing the likes of the New York, Berlin and Vienna Film Festivals in all its gorgeous CinemaScope glory. It was Benicheti himself who brought his dormant work out of storage to attempt a full restoration from the original negatives, but the process was stalled when the director suddenly passed on, leaving the project to be finished by his co-workers at the Arane-Gulliver film laboratories, where he was a leading consultant on 70mm and special format film projects.
Benicheti’s debut remains his only credited complete feature,...
Benicheti’s debut remains his only credited complete feature,...
- 6/17/2014
- by Jordan M. Smith
- IONCINEMA.com
Awarded the jury prize at the Locarno Film Festival in 1973, Dominique Benicheti's beloved documentary "Cousin Jules" has remained unreleased in the U.S. until now. Ahead of its first stateside theatrical run at New York's Film Forum, Indiewire is pleased to exclusively premiere the trailer for the unreleased film. The documentary is the result of five years of painstaking work by Benichetti and cinematographer Pierre-William Glenn, who over that period tracked the daily lives of Jules (the filmmaker's cousin) and his wife, French farmers living alone in the countryside. Watch the trailer below. "Cousin Jules" opens at Film Forum on November 27th.
- 10/8/2013
- by Indiewire
- Indiewire
Bertrand Tavernier, one of the finest, most versatile film-makers at work today as well as a generous critic and astute film historian, has never received the recognition he deserves in this country. Premiered in France in 1979, his thoughtful, humanistic Sf fable Death Watch (aka La mort en direct), a Franco-German production made in English, took two years to cross the Channel, received a patronising reception here and rapidly disappeared. It is an exceptional film that makes imaginative use of Scottish locations (both the austerely beautiful Highlands and the run-down grandeur of Glasgow) to tell the still urgent story of a group of people involved in a voyeuristic TV programme set in what was then a few years in the future.
Harvey Keitel gives a characteristically intense performance as a journalist whose Faustian compact with his technocrat bosses becomes complete when a device is built into his brain to serve Harry Dean Stanton's TV station.
Harvey Keitel gives a characteristically intense performance as a journalist whose Faustian compact with his technocrat bosses becomes complete when a device is built into his brain to serve Harry Dean Stanton's TV station.
- 6/2/2012
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
Update: Reader fasteddie writes: "The family has requested that in lieu of flowers, memorial contributions be made in Glenn’s name to the Theatre Department of the Alabama School of Fine Arts, 1800 8th Avenue, Birmingham, Al 35203. www.glennshadix.com has more information. Thanks, the family of William Glenn Scott (Glenn Shadix)"
Sad news for you today, movie fans. Glenn Shadix passed away after he fell and struck his head in his Birmingham, Al home yesterday. The 58-year-old actor worked primarily in theater through the '70s and '80s. Tim Burton attended one performance in particular and took a liking to Shadix, going on to cast him in the role that he is perhaps best known for: interior designer Otho in the classic comedy "Beetlejuice."
Shadix went on to appear in a number of other notable roles that fans of late-'80s/early-'90s film can immediately recognize: Father Ripper in "Heathers,...
Sad news for you today, movie fans. Glenn Shadix passed away after he fell and struck his head in his Birmingham, Al home yesterday. The 58-year-old actor worked primarily in theater through the '70s and '80s. Tim Burton attended one performance in particular and took a liking to Shadix, going on to cast him in the role that he is perhaps best known for: interior designer Otho in the classic comedy "Beetlejuice."
Shadix went on to appear in a number of other notable roles that fans of late-'80s/early-'90s film can immediately recognize: Father Ripper in "Heathers,...
- 9/8/2010
- by Adam Rosenberg
- MTV Movies Blog
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