It’s the story of boy meets girl, but it’s all mixed up. He’s Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a married man with kids. She is Marianne (Anna Karina), the babysitter. But they are not strangers; they’ve known each other for years: Four … Continue reading PIERROT LE FOU
The cave of forgotten films has returned! Like a lot of things, 2020 was not kind to the website of curios, but 2021 seems to be loaded with reversals and the return of rarefilmm.com is certainly a pleasant one. There’s … Continue reading THE STRANGER
Movie theaters are closing back down, studios are rolling back release dates (or moving titles to streaming), and WarnerMedia is getting ready to cut thousands of jobs. Things do not look good. Thankfully, home viewing options remain robust, particularly this … Continue reading This week in Film — RAFIKI, THE GUNFIGHTER, and PIERROT LE FOU
While theatrical moviegoing in 2020 might be defunct, home viewing has seemingly gotten all the better. And not just in the breadth of streaming selections, but in the sheer amount of quality physical discs released. The Criterion Collection remains the … Continue reading LE PETIT SOLDAT
Anna Karina was a model, a muse, an actor, a director, a novelist, and, most of all, she was a collaborator. The eight movies she made with husband Jean-Luc Godard are among the greatest in the annals of cinema, and … Continue reading This week in Film — LE PETIT SOLDAT and THE MEDICINE
When Anna Karina died on December 14, so did the spirit of the French New Wave. Born Hanne Karin Bayer in Denmark, Karina (Sept. 22, 1940-Dec. 14, 2019) modeled, acted, directed, wrote, and danced. Her career spans nearly five decades, … Continue reading Anna Karina
French critic cum filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard famously said that all you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun, but he could have done it with less. As an artist, Godard vacillated back and forth between incendiary agitator and devoted cineaste, often colliding within the same movie. For his seventh feature, Godard wanted to make something cheap, something fast, something commercial. As Richard Brody writes in his seminal study of Godard, Everything is Cinema, “Godard took no chances with the material: he declared that he wanted ‘to make a simple, legible film.’” That film was to be … Continue reading BAND OF OUTSIDERS
“I don’t think you should FEEL about a movie. You should feel about a woman. You can’t kiss a movie.” “There is no point in having sharp images when you’ve fuzzy ideas.” “Tracking shots are a question of morality.” “You don’t make a movie, the movie makes you.” –Jean-Luc Godard Continue reading Born On This Day – December 3, 1930
“The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn’t.” -Jean-Luc Godard Continue reading In Their Words – December 3, 2012
