Avenging the Destruction of True Love: François Truffaut’s ‘The Bride Wore Black’
“In ‘The Bride Wore Black,’ cruel fate rips true love away from the innocent, suggesting that Truffaut believed pure happiness is only found in fairy tales.”
“In ‘The Bride Wore Black,’ cruel fate rips true love away from the innocent, suggesting that Truffaut believed pure happiness is only found in fairy tales.”
“Despite being an uneven grouping hardly representative of the best these filmmakers had to offer, ‘Six in Paris’ is an interesting capsule of moments in time and space.”
Marshall Shaffer’s Selections for Rendez-Vous with French Cinema (March 8-18, 2018)
“The point is to look as closely as Varda herself, who watches every detail with curiosity, kindness and a relentless sense of wonder.”
“Like his characters, Demy’s camera in ‘Lola’ moves everywhere but goes nowhere; it’s a paradoxically headlong hesitation.”
“Fifty-three years after initial release, ‘The Umbrellas of Cherbourg’ continues to be a formally and contextually innovative French New Wave production; a film that has influenced contemporary directors such as Barry Jenkins, Damien Chazelle and Joachim Trier.”
“While Truffaut’s ‘Day for Night’ (1973) is his most pronounced and profound love letter to the moviemaking process, ‘Shoot the Piano Player’ is an exuberant tribute to the end result.”
“Rohmer cares more about posing questions than providing the comfort of a conclusion.”
“‘Contempt’ is a daunting and formally labyrinthine work, calling its own fallibility to question even as it submits completely to the romance of cinema.”
Alejandra Rosenberg Interviews J. Hoberman
A Weekly Column on Film Criticism by Justine A. Smith
“People often fear or misrepresent what they don’t understand.”
“An uncompromising visionary, Agnès Varda seems unable to acknowledge precedent or standard practice when becoming involved with creative works.”
“Varda’s sense of play, fun, silliness and humor comes from a collected bricolage of incident, travel and people.”
“Happiness for someone, then, is only achievable at the expense of someone else’s full experience?”
“How unusual to see a woman’s perspective on love presented so plainly as Varda does in ‘La Pointe Courte.'”
“Cocteau’s magical realism, with flight and cursed beasts side-by-side with the economic woes of an importer-exporter, gives his fantastic elements gravity while letting the humanist tale of greed lilt like music.”
“Although it contains very little new material, Hitchcock/Truffaut will undoubtedly find a home within the film education community and could become an important tool in introducing Hitchcock’s immense body of work to hoards of “uninitiated” cinema devotees.”
“Throughout much of his 60s work, Imamura often examined the balance between ordinary and unordinary people, and in The Profound Desire of the Gods, he finds an exceptional way of highlighting the extremity of this concept.”
“Les biches remains one of the more elusive and symbolic films of Chabrol’s career, as the narrative adopts a dreamlike structure that often obscures reality and truth.”