LIVE WATCH: ‘À bout de souffle’ on Criterion Channel
Vague Visages Live Watch: Jean-Luc Godard’s ‘À bout de souffle’ on Criterion Channel
‘A Woman Is a Woman’: Falling in Love with Karina, Godard and the Wave
“It is Karina who embodied the freedom, fascination and the unpredictability that would define the French New Wave. It is Karina who made so many fall in love — with her and with cinema as an extraordinary, exultant medium.”
Threatened Individualism: On François Truffaut’s ‘Fahrenheit 451’
“Throughout both the foreground and background of ‘Fahrenheit 451,’ Truffaut emphasizes the characters’ self-absorption via a hyper-sexual form of narcissism in a society lacking real love.”
Five Films to See at Rendez-Vous with French Cinema 2018
Marshall Shaffer’s Selections for Rendez-Vous with French Cinema (March 8-18, 2018)
The Anti-Romance of Agnès Varda’s ‘La Pointe Courte’
“The point is to look as closely as Varda herself, who watches every detail with curiosity, kindness and a relentless sense of wonder.”
Vague Visages Is FilmStruck: Jeremy Carr on Jacques Demy’s ‘Lola’
“Like his characters, Demy’s camera in ‘Lola’ moves everywhere but goes nowhere; it’s a paradoxically headlong hesitation.”
Political and Social Conventions in Jacques Demy’s ‘The Umbrellas of Cherbourg’
“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.”
Vague Visages Is FilmStruck: Jeremy Carr on François Truffaut’s ‘Shoot the Piano Player’
“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.”
Éric Rohmer’s Battle of the Sexes
“Rohmer cares more about posing questions than providing the comfort of a conclusion.”
The Aesthetic and Formal Challenges of Jean-Luc Godard’s ‘Contempt’
“‘Contempt’ is a daunting and formally labyrinthine work, calling its own fallibility to question even as it submits completely to the romance of cinema.”