Showing posts with label Nouvelle Vague. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nouvelle Vague. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 7, 2021

Jean-Paul Belmondo, R.I.P. Without Jean-Paul Belmondo, The French New Wave film revolution -la Nouvelle Vague- never reaches so far around the globe. Never touches every single part of 1960's Popular Culture. In Belmondo, an actor with enormous magnetism, savoir-faire, and a particularly Gallic strand of studied nonchalance, he becomes the de facto New Wave Ambassador, and the very face of what was (and was not) cool, dark, and even slightly threatening.

photo via The British Film Institute

Without Jean-Paul Belmondo, The French New Wave film revolution -la Nouvelle Vague- never reaches so far around the globe. Never touches every single part of 1960's Popular Culture. In Belmondo, an actor with enormous magnetism, savoir-faire, and a particularly Gallic strand of studied nonchalance, he becomes the de facto New Wave Ambassador, and the very face of what was (and was not) cool, dark, and even slightly threatening. 

And always, in every film, he is eminently watchable! 

Belmondo becomes that most magical of all entertainers: he is #sublime.

Belmondo becomes both his very own brand, as well as representing a certain style of dramatic acting, AND in the process, becomes a representation of a certain way of thinking, living, and of film-making. 

And he is always, for both good and bad, France personified.

A cool France that has ideas and feelings uniquely its own, not American or British.


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It wasn't until I was living and working in Washington, #DC in the 1990's and could actually see great prints of French 🇫🇷 and Italian 🇮🇹 #NewWave films at the National Gallery of Art main building on weekends when I wasn't up in Baltimore for an Orioles ballgame or at home or sports bar watching a football or basketball game.

The NGA was one of my favorite social haunts, and there, I could watch and absorb films I'd never been able to see in a theatre while growing up in #SoFL.

It was in those moments when one of Belmondo's films was being shown in a packed theatre that all the dozens of New Wave articles and books I'd read over the years while in Bloomington, Chicago, Evanston and DC -and learning French!- all made sense when #Belmondo entered a scene.

Then, all of the dots were connected! 😊

British Film Institute: https://www.bfi.org.uk/
Cahiers du cinéma: https://www.cahiersducinema.com/

A tribute will be paid to Belmondo in the next issue of Cahiers du cinema magazine.


Sans Jean-Paul Belmondo, la révolution cinématographique française de la Nouvelle Vague -la Nouvelle Vague- n'atteindrait jamais aussi loin le globe. Ne touche jamais à chaque partie de la culture populaire des années 1960. Dans Belmondo, acteur au magnétisme énorme, au savoir-faire et au brin particulièrement gaulois d'une nonchalance étudiée, il devient de facto l'ambassadeur de la Nouvelle Vague, et le visage même de ce qui était (et n'était pas) cool, sombre, et même légèrement menaçant. Et toujours, dans chaque film, il est éminemment regardable !

Belmondo devient le plus magique de tous les artistes : il est #sublime.

Belmondo devient à la fois sa propre marque, tout en représentant un certain style de jeu dramatique, ET dans le processus, devient une représentation d'une certaine façon de penser, de vivre et de faire des films.

Et il est toujours, en bien comme en mal, la France incarnée.

Une France cool qui a des idées et des sentiments qui lui sont propres, pas américains ou britanniques.

Monday, January 11, 2010

C'est vrai! France 24 reports Eric Rohmer dead at 89, influential French New Wave film director

Heard the sad news around Noon.

See http://www.france24.com/en/ 
or watch LIVE in English at
http://www.france24.com/en/aef_player_popup/france24_player#

New York Times put something up around 1:13 p.m. this afternoon.
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/11/eric-rohmer-new-wave-film-director-has-died/

I saw many of his films, like most of the French New Wave films I've seen, at film art houses while living in Chicago and Washington, D.C., as well as the National Gallery of Art, and while he was certainly an acquired taste for some American film-goers, I was a person who found his films
very... quoi, interesting and idiosyncratic?

When they were good, they were very good, indeed, and gave you a lot to talk about with your friends and significant others afterwards, before you went home.
Lots of nights walking on cold Chicago sidewalks talking about morality and ambiguity in the modern
world.

So much more enlightening than rehashing for the 1,001st time whether The Tribune Company
was ruining the Cubs!


On the front of the videotape of his 1971 film Claire's Knee, the distributors run excerpts of New York Times film critic Vincent Canby's review, creating perhaps the most perfect blurb you could ever hope for on a film:
"Original, complete, mysterious... practically perfect."


That it was.



Great view of original poster:
http://www.starandshadow.org.uk/on/film/435

"One of the most extraordinary directorial careers in the history of cinema"
- SIGHT AND SOUND

In their DVD review of the box-set, 
Eric Rohmer's Six Moral Tales
in the BFI's Sight and Sound,
http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/ Tim Lewis got to the very heart of what animated Eric Rohmer:
http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/review/3493
The six films comprising this series offer different sketches of the same dilemma. A man falls in love with a woman, thereby forming a commitment, either in fact or in principle, and then must navigate safe passage through sexual temptation by relying on (and sometimes discovering) his moral code, proving himself worthy of that love. Rohmer's brand of morality is subjective and non-judgmental; his characters include students and petits bourgeois and the idle rich, Catholics and atheists, singles and marrieds-with-children, and their standards vary. The point is "to thine own self be true" as the series depicts the ways in which thoughtful people can meet themselves in the mazes of their own stratagems, and how their true selves are sometimes at odds with the people they think they are or aspire to be.