Friday Music, Honey dripping Beehive Edition

Slow to get to this - Friday music time! I am happy to announce that Ringo and I have made it all the way through Out 1 - the cat might not have been quite as attentive as I was...



But here we are. And now? Randomly selected songs, listed for no particular reason except perhaps to remind me of things I like:

1. Son Volt - Cocaine and Ashes
2. John Coltrane - Greensleeves
3. Cibo Matto - Beef Jerky
4. Bob Dylan - Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues
5. Warlocks - Thursday's Radiation
6. Jesus and Mary Chain - Just Like Honey
7. Mission of Burma - Man in Decline
8. Jimi Hendrix - Little Miss Strange
9. Arcade Fire - Modern Man
10. Meat Puppets - Liquified

Video: it's so good, so good...



Maybe Cibo Matto - a horse's ass is better than yours!

Jacques Rivette

Jacques Rivette has died. He was 87, and apparently has been suffering from Alzheimers disease for the past few years - I had heard he was ill, and so am not surprised. Still; saddened. The news come the day after I finally finished paying my 88 pounds for the new Out 1 collection - unfortunately, before this object crossed the ocean to my front door, so I can't spend the next week watching it... But it is coming...

He is One of the Great Ones. I haven't posted any kind of list of favorite directors lately, but if I did, he would be up there - top 10 somewhere. I came to him late - most of my favorites I discovered in the mid and late 90s, when I started watching films obsessively. I saw some Rivette in that period, but didn't see enough until 2007, when I saw a whole series - that immediately elevated him to his place among the greats. I do remember when I first heard about him - when La Belle Noiseuse came out - that was before I was an obsessive filmgoer, and the main thing I remember about it is that it was a very French film about a painter that had some actress naked for 3 hours. Some time after that, probably around 1998 or 99, I finally saw a Rivette - Haut Bas Fragile - by that time I had become an obsessive filmgoer, I knew who Jacques Rivette was, in a general sense (historically), and had seen some films obviously influenced by him - Pascal Bonitzer's Encore, possibly, or some of the Assayas or Desplechins films that call Rivette to mind... I liked it - quite a bit in fact, though I don't know if I could have explained it at the time. Later, Va Savoir got a bit of an American release, and I saw that in the theaters. And I tried renting the Story of Marie and Julian, though the DVD copy I got was damaged and I missed the opening 15 minutes or so of the film - which made it even more incomprehensible... Though still enjoyable. I liked Va Savoir very much - liked The Story of Marie and Julian well enough. It meant that Rivette had gone into that pile of directors whose films are just too hard to see - so you have to wait for your chance and take it.

That's what happened: the HFA booked a whole run of his films, and I went to see them, starting with Paris Belongs to Us, the Nun and Celine and Julie Go Boating - and those three were enough to put him in the pantheon, and then I saw Out 1: Spectre and L'Amour Fou and Jeanne la Poucelle and La Belle Noiseuse - and that settled it. They all hit me hard - you can see the comments from back when I wrote about films I saw, at the Rivette link - his films, once I saw them clean like that, really hit the sweet spot. All those doubles and old houses and games and plays and lost manuscripts - that stuff fascinates me; the structural games - but also the sense of play, invention, imagination in his films. Their playful postmodernism - if I had been able to see Paris Belongs to Us in 1993 or so, I would have saved a lot of time. Back when I was reading Pynchon and Barth and Gaddis and McElroy and Queneau and DeLillo, and reading about them - it struck me when I saw the film how well it matched them. Like Lookout Cartridge or V, with its mystery plot, lack of resolution, the lost artists and artifacts, the shadiness of the whole thing, the way it comes apart and gels into something sinister at the same time. Seeing it, it felt like something I had been waiting to see - and then I saw Celine and Julie and the short Out 1, and those were even more perfect. They bring in the other great thread in his work - the making of art, of theater, or sometimes music, painting, etc. But especially theater, since it is art as collaboration, as invention and exploration, and as acting things out. Maybe most of all, he gave us a view of art as play. That convinced me. That series, and his films, changed how I saw films, and probably how I saw the world.

It is sad that there will be no more Rivette films - though given what I still haven't seen (the three titles in the Arrow set I just bought, mainly - Out 1: Noli Me Tangere, Duelle and Pont Du Nord), I have plenty to look forward to - and more, his films have a kind of inexhaustibility that makes rewatching them as surprising as watching them. The ones Ive managed to buy never disappoint, and I keep noticing more to them, more twists and ideas and details. And more - his films have been immensely satisfying, intellectually - but they are also, always, exceptionally entertaining. They are full of pleasures, like early Godard, as well as depth and thought. He was one of my favorites, and will be missed.

Work, pleasures and mysteries:

Happy Bastille Day!

Is there anything more French that women, bread and art?





Maybe the roofs of Paris?



Happy Bastille Day!

William Lubtchansky

William Lubtchansky has died. Perhaps not a household name, except for French movie fans. I'm mostly familiar with his work with Rivette - beautiful, elegant, understated and witty, as I think these shots, all from Va Savoir (a film that seems a little overlooked, even by Rivette's standards), should show...

Jeanne Balibar makes her escape...





...and one of the great drunk sequences in all film:











May he rest in peace...

Week in the Making

I've been lazy here lately - weird: three posts in three days last week, then... I've not been totally idle - poking around on another blog I started up with some of my old AOL cronies... setting up an RSS reader - as usual, years after everyone else started using them for all. It's an interesting way of reading blogs - I've been getting used to it. Thinking about how to make something of it: I like Harry Tuttle's Google shared page: maybe I should try something like that - here's a cut at it. I may experiment with that...

Somewhat more substantively, I have been following the discussion of auteurism at Girish's place. Reading along, composing replies and arguments, though I've only posted one so far. It's a vexed subject, as one of my english teachers used to say. It keeps coming up in film discussions, and when it does, I can never decide how much to dive in. There's a lot to be said about it - though most of it has been said somewhere already, and if I'm going to add my 2¢ I should do some due diligence and read up on the theorizing, and that fills me with dread... So, for now, I've stuck to offering generalities - Film is a Composite Art! Auteurism is best seen as a form of genre theory! I have not yet made the claim that auteurs don't make films, films make auteurs, but I might. While the auteur theory seems first to have been promoted to claim some of the prestige of literary authors for directors, I think it also served to undermine the idea of authorship - it made it more figurative; it conceived of authorship as something that emerges from the "text" as much as it precedes it. So - you might find a route from Truffaut to Barthes if you look for it....

Meanwhile, typing this, I'm listening to the recordings Charlie Parker made with the Dave Lambert singers: strange, strange stuff. Bird was certainly on top of his game, but the singing is almost surreal. Given the talent involved - Gil Evans arranging - boy... A quick google, though, comes up with this two part interview with Hal McKusick, a musician on the session.

And finally - I have seen films. Don't Touch the Axe - for some reason, renamed "The Duchess of Langeais" in English (probably to fool Americans into thinking it's a respectable literary adaptation and not a Jacques Rivette film.) Which is quite marvelous, if not up to the best Rivettes. It would have fit pretty well in the Oliveira series I've been attending - it is certainly a tale of doomed love. Though Rivette is a different kind of director than Oliveira: funnier, more knowing - the characters are older, and get into things willingly and consciously. Rivette certainly takes a different approach with his actors, giving Jeanne Balibar and Guillaume Depardieu a good deal of freedom to fill the screen - they do, especially Balibar, who is perfectly magical on screen. Though Rivette is certainly capable of being as strange as Oliveira when he wants to be. Though usually hilarious at the same time - a scene of two drunken fops turning over 19th century cliches - "stunning" - "it's a drama" - is perfectly priceless....

Rivette, meanwhile, having reached the age of 80 without discernibly slowing his filmmaking output, is stalking Olveira from that angle too. I also saw Abraham's Valley last week, another Oliveira, from 15 years ago, when he was a fairly young 85. This is another literary adaptation, the life of a woman, married young to an older doctor, and who lives, too beautiful, too smart, too alive for her world (provincial Portugal, latter half of the 20th century) - shades of Madame Bovary, though perhaps not controlling. It's less a tale of doomed love than a melodrama of an unknown woman - though one who manages to insist on and get a fair amount of her own way, however limited this might be. Beautiful film, though somewhat domecticated compared to the 70s films - muc more naturalistic, though there is some direct address to the camera, and an impertinent cat.

Meanwhile, stcking with octogenarian directors, on DVD, I finally got around to watching Seijun Suzuki's Princess Raccoon. A fairy tale of doomed lovers and magic and evil christians (the Virgen Hag!) enacted in eye popping color on every imaginable variety of set... Here's a picture, far more informative than anything I could write:



And finally - another screenshot, from another wonderful DVD I watched - Douglas Fairbanks (auteur!) in the Black Pirate. Here he is in all his much-imitated glory:

Rivette Wrap up (2)

So, once more with the Rivette, and building on yesterday's post, I want to write a bit about duality and collaboration.

Out One: Spectre makes a particularly good starting place. Even more than usual for Rivette, it is built around matched pairs of things. The two investigators (Leaud and Berto); the two theater groups; the two plays; all the pairs within and between the groups: Thomas and Lilly (leaders of the two groups); the two outsiders, Sarah and Renaud, brought in to invigorate the two groups, who end up destroying them both by leaving. People with 2 names, like Pauline/Emily, and all the names Leaud goes by. Pauline/Emily's 2 kids. The two men who never turn up in the film, Pierre and Igor. The 2 "Thirteen" - Balzac's and the film's. The two sources of the secret messages, Lewis Carroll and Balzac. And around the film - it is, first up, itself part of a matched pair: Out One: Noli Me Tangere and Out One: Spectre. And the name itself has two parts - Out One/Spectre.

Doubles are everywhere in Rivette's films: doubles, matched pairs, halves. Though sometimes, 2's becomes 4s, become a string of supplements. A pervasive organizing principal: in Paris Belongs to Us: Juan and Gerard? And various couples arranged around them: Anne and Juan's sister; Anne and Terry. In The Nun? it's more of a series of contrasting pairs: Suzanne's mother and her mother superior; the first, good mother superior and the second, cruel one - then the second one and the indulgent one, who tries to seduce her. Other characters are arranged in pairs - the mother superior trying to seduce her/the confessor trying to seduce her; Suzanne and Therese, her "rival". L'Amour Fou? the principal is there, in the split between play and home, in the split between the play shown directly and the play shown through the odcumentary crew. Celine and Julie? Yes - the two heroines, of course; the two rivals in the melo, Sophie and Camille - and Camille and her dead sister (who are presented literally as doubles.) With repeated and doubled events and scenes - two performances on stage; two conversations with Grigoire - and all of it coming around in the end, two boats passing, and then the whole story looping around to begin again.

These structural patterns are more diffuse in the later films, but still visible: Gang of Four, like L'Amour Fou, is structured around 2 locations, the theater and the house in the suburbs; most of the theater scenes involve two actors at a time; there are, as well, two men, Antoine and Thomas, one present, one absent. La Belle Noiseuse: 2 pairs of lovers, 2 main interlopers (the art dealer and the sister), 2 paintings, and of course the bulk of the film is a two hander between Michel Piccoli and Emmanuelle Beart. Jeanne la Pucelle? it's split in two, with a certain parallism between the parts - it probably doesn't fit so neatly as some. Haut Bas Fragile? I'd say with these later films, the parallels and repetitions, which are still present, and powerful, have become more serial than dual - rather than a pattern of matched pairs, you have a series of pairs: A does something to B - B does something to C - C does something to D, etc. So Nathalie Richard forms a connection to Andre Marcon, who forms a connection to Marianne Denicourt, who forms an alliance with Richard and so on. Situations are repeated - couples form and evolve - all of it structured around the metaphor of dancing... Secret Defense, though, does revolve around fairly strict parallels: 2 sets of 2 siblings each, looking for vengeance, repeating situations, coming to see themselves in each other. Va Savoir? like Haut Bas Fragile, it's more serial than dual, though the main unit for the action is the couple. And The Story of Marie and Julien offers another set of examples: 2 ghosts, Marie's 2 lovers, repetition of events (notably Marie's fate, and her cumpulsion to repeat it), and so on. (And the film itself is, I think, part of a series with other Rivette films - a point worth noting, as he definitely repeats himself - returning to situations, actors, ideas, settings, and so on, over the years.)

This post has two parts: having listed off a bunch of example, I ask - what does it mean? Or (since I'm too resolute a formalist to take "what does it mean" too seriously), what does it do? Why are they there? I am tempted to invoke the spectre of structuralism, with its binaries and parameters - not without some justification, I suspect. (See this article on Cahiers de Cinema in New Left Review, or Girish's summary - Rivette brought structuralism and similar ideas to Cahiers during his turn at the helm....) But it is also connected to his interest in theater, and in collaboration. Abstractly - everything in these films is realized - known, found, understood (as much as it is understood) - through reference to other things: through performance, through connections to another person, through the search for something missing, through repetition, repeating things differently, trying to get them right this time.

But more than this: the abstraction of doubled and repeated characters and images is related to the concrete importance of collaboration in Rivette's films. Many of these pairs collaborate explicitly - Celine and Julie, Frenhofer and Marianne, Ninon and Louise (Richard and Denicourt) in Haut Bas Fragile. And collaborating pairs recur through the films, even when they are not central to the plots: consider the theater exercises in Out One; the dancers in Haut Bas Fragile. And this spirit of collaboration, of making it up together, extends beyond the doubles that appear - theater and acting are fundamental to Rivette's work, but the type of theater is important as well - it is almost always highly collaborative, improvisational (even when working with great texts) and very tentative. Consider the constant repairing of characters and actors in Gang of Four; or the way the dancers change partners in Haut Bas Fragile, or integrate others into their dancing. All of which, finally, is a reflection of the films themselves - highly collaborative, with a loose, fluid style, an improvisational feel, and their emphasis on cooperation. The way, for instance, Rivette highlights the painter - the real painter, whose hands play Frenhofer's hands - in La Belle Noiseuse. He is always interested in how art is made, showing the process, say, of the development of that painting, or of the relationship between Frenhofer and Marianne (which itself moves toward collaboration over time), or showing the details, the starts and stops, of putting on a play in all the theatrical films.

Rivette Wrapup (1)

So now that the Rivette series at the HFA is over, I want to write up some of my thoughts on it. It's not easy - as Michael Kerpan said in the comments to one of my previous notes on the series, Rivette's films are hard to write about. They resist analysis - for, I suspect, some pretty good (and analyzable) reasons. They are very fluid - the look, the story telling style, the treatment of themes and character, the themes themselves. They are about fluidity - about theater and performance, about self-invention, about living, moving through a world, consciously, actively. That's how they look - with their mobile staging, the graceful moving camera, that constantly reshapes the space, creating deeper and shallower staging in the same shot. Rivette's style is hard to describe - he doesn't seem to have a characteristic look to his films - though they are, in the end, almost instantly recognizable. That flow and pulse of people and the camera, around, through, spaces....

His style also appears in the images and events that keep reappearing in his films. I do not list such repeating images, ideas, actions, situations, places, in vain. Rivette returns constantly to these things: pairs of things, twins, ghosts, old houses, theaters, theater, lost manuscripts (or tapes or keys or art works) - conspiracies, collaborations - cats, park benches, rooftops, stairways, people slipping, tripping, stumbling. He works variations on them - and creates formal patterns out of the variations. That’s my goal, here, by the way - the next post, taking a closer look at some of these repetitions, and their possible meaning - or at least function. But now I want to point to the sense of play in his films. They are organized around those recurring elements - not so much around the meanings of those elements, as using them to generate the fiction. Take a group of actors, plus the filmmaking crew, plus his customary set of devices, plus a book of play or work of art to work from - and see what you come up with. Literally? it seems close to it in some cases - the screenwriting credits for the casts of Celine and Julie Go Boating or Haut Bas Fragile might attest to it; the long attention to the theatrical troops in Out One and L'Amour Fou seem to work on some of the same principals.

But whether they are generative or not - the films' structures have a ludic quality: think about Va Savoir - the way the story starts with Jeanne Balibar and Sergio Castellito on stage, and slowly works outward, bringing in other characters, one or two at a time, establishing primary and secondary relationsships among them, until all of them are related to all the rest. Things are set in motion - plots are enacted and schemes hatched, people assume a series of roles, different roles with different characters - and it plays out - and comes back around to where it started, ending with everyone dancing with the one that brought them. It is heartfelt - there's never any doubt that Rivette can make you feel something with his characters - but it is explicitly a game, and usually (as here) with games inside the games.

These qualities make it hard, I say, to analyze Rivette - to define his style, his interests, the meaning of his work. It is devoted to a kind of freedom and experimentation - to exploring the possibilities of the ways we invent ourselves (if you have to have a large theme) - to ways we invent worlds. It is about secrets and mysteries, but about their contingency - and the exact nature of the conspiracies that turn up in his films varies from film to film. Maybe it's real - maybe it's a game - maybe it's someone's imagination - maybe it's Balzac. It changes, and can change every time he returns to it. And the result is, his films seem inexhaustable.

Tomorrow (or whenever I get it written): a closer look at one of the recurring patterns in his films - duality, doubles and pairs, and sometimes series' - with special attention to Out One: Spectre, which pushes the principal very far. And possibly some shameless Interpretation, or at least, an attempt to draw parallels between all those doubles and the theme of collaboration that runs through his work.

No Expectations

I'm still putting off writing some more about Jacques Rivette. It's a poser - whether to knock out quick impressions of the films, or try to work up an essay, or - I don't know - make a list of things: doubles, shadows and ghosts, artists and actors, old houses, the way women walk, conspiracies, cats, park benches, the rooftops of Paris, women who don't need men and men who are willing to live with that, bad fathers, desks and desk drawers, overnight bags - some of the things you will find in his films. We shall see.

In the meanwhile: a film: this, February, is, in film terms, the cruelest month - what you have in the theaters this time of year - man. Once you see the oscar bait, there ain't much left: that is my explanation for seeing Factory Girl. What else is there? Alas... Factory Girl is a sort of biopic about Edie Segdwick, starring Sienna Miller, directed by George Hickenlooper. Hayden Christenson turns up attempting to impersonate (Not) Bob Dylan - Guy Pearce appears in the less thankless role of Andy Warhol. The film as such isn't worth much, though it's harmless enough - a kind of haphazard style, lots of cheesy montage sequences, little tricks with the film stock, some gestures towards fake versions of Warhol's films... The story is ridiculous, with Warhol and crowd as dope fiend vampires, frittering their talents on soup cans and sucking poor Edie dry, while not-Dylan represents all that is pure and good and real, offering Edie a Way Out, but she doesn't take it, alas.... Miller does her best with this nonsense, but there's not much to do, and her best isn't anything special. Christenson is dreadful beyond compare, though whether that should be blamed on him or the script is an open question. (In either case, Dylan did well to stop them using his name - beyond being portrayed wretchedly, not-Dylan comes off not only as an insufferable prick [which Dylan proper might well have been - he certainly liked to take the piss, from what I've heard], but as a self-righteous, self-important tiresome prick. That seems less likely.) This leaves the film ripe pickings for Pearce to steal, and steal it he does.

He has an advantage: Warhol did a fine job of turning himself into one of his art works. He emptied himself of all the usual signs of emotion and personality, made himself blank and bland as his images. Because of this, when actors play him, they have to stick to his presentation of himself - the look, the mannerisms, the voice - the intentional blandness. Dylan, being gnomic and strange, mysterious and secretive, dropping hints and making references to be decoded and all, invites actors and writers to interpret him, to try to parse him out - at least that happens here: not-Dylan has all the signifiers of Dylan, but with all the hints and poses filled in with cliches. Godawful dreck results. But Warhol - and Pearce as Warhol - gets away from that. Even trying to slip the odd humanizing quality to the poor man has to pass through his persona, through his version of himself: whatever you do, you have to do in Warhol's terms, because he took away any other terms to do it with. And because of this - Pearce gives something completely different than the rest of the cast - he gives a kind of collaboration. (Hey! another item for my Rivette list!) With Warhol - his performance feels like a collaboration with Warhol, not with the script or the director of this film.

That's a bit of a lost opportunity: there's a chance, making a film about an artist (or group artists) to make the film collaborative, even if the artist isn't actually around for it. To work off the art, to incorporate it into the film. Hickenlooper tries to show us some of Warhol's art - a few iconic images, and a few recreated clips from the films. This could have been interesting - it isn't. Partly because he screws up the clips - mostly by abandoning their style - that impassive camera, the awkward zooms and focus shifts, and most of all, their duration. Some of it he screws up by shooting the act of shooting - thus freeing the camera to be pointless, and reducing the films to their silly behavior... Some of it he screws up by shooting the film being screened - and moving the camera around, zooming in to create closeups and such that Warhol (and Morrissey later on) stayed away from. It's anti-collaborative: it's trying to assert control over the image, over Warhol's art. (I'd say over not-Dylan's as well, except there isn't any actual Dylan (or not-Dylan) music in the film. There is some not-Velvet Underground music played over a portrayal of VU&N - complete with cymbals! in 1966!! - I mean - he has to know better than that!) The only element of the time that escapes this inanity is Pearce as Warhol.

Now - again I say - it's a missed opportunity. There are some odd moments where things creep in that might have been more interesting. Bits of dialogue - Warhol's remarks about just watching people, letting them be what they were... or the bits referring to his background as a coal miner's son, or his oft-remarked work ethic. That sort of direct, unpretentious work ethic is central to Warhol's value - his art gains power through repetition, through time, through the iteration of it. That, and again - the sense that art was collaborative: a gathering of people, working off one another - which runs through this period of Warhol's work. You get those hints - from scraps of dialogue, and from Pearce, I'd say - of the class dynamics under things: Warhol is strongly associated with work here (a notion common to accounts of the factory), and comes off as tougher, more subversive than the story wants to make him. There are hints - but the film doesn't really develop them. Instead, the words (sometimes), and Pearce, and Warhol himself - haunt it. The ghost of a better film...

2 War Films

I am way behind in my movie writing - way behind. I've been seeing films - just not writing about them. Unfortunately, they are films I want to write about: the Rivette series; the films I mentioned in my last contemplative cinema post (Honor de Cavelleria, Lights in the Dusk, etc.); the new Korean series I saw last week - more... They deserve attention - they aren't films I can list off with one-liners and stars. ("Time, **1/2 - Kim Ki-duk does Teshigahara." - no, not good enough.) And on top of that - I should try to work something up for the Talkingmoviezzz site - I made indications I would. Fortunately, most of the films I've been seeing aren't going to be making any appearances in the states any time soon. (The odd festival, maybe - not much more.) The Host is supposed to be released - maybe by the time it does, I'll write a review. In fact, I suppose that's the redemption of all of this - none of these films are in release: writing about them in a month is just as good as writing about them today - so better to do em up right.

Now - the exception to all that is the one new, broad release film I have seen recently: Letters From Iwo Jima. Another Oscar nominated film - like the others I have seen (Departed, Babel, Little Miss Sunshine), it seems to me a perfectly acceptable choice - competent, interesting enough, not an embarrassment, but nothing special. Like too many of Eastwood's films, this one has very little going for it beyond Clint - there is nothing in this film, not one second, not one line of dialogue, not one shot, that is not a cliche. Eastwood brings his usual economy and precision, but there's not much more to say for it. Perfectly generic war movie, built to spec, more or less flawlessly, but still, to spec.

Meanwhile: that was Saturday afternoon. Saturday night, I went by the HFA, thinking I was in for a 4 hour Rivette film: no! it was the 6 hour version of Jeanne La Pucelle! in two parts, starting at 7 pm.... Now: I have noticed a strange phenomenon, watching all these Rivette films. After a while - their length seems completely natural. I find myself wondering, how do other people make films that only last 2 hours? and why? This reflection takes another form - one I was particularly aware of after seeing th Eastwood earlier: how is it, I thought, that 6 hours of Rivette flows by without ever seeming padded or tiring, yet Letters, at a bit over 2 hours, dragged? And Eastwood keeps things moving - imagine some hack making that film!

Anyway - Rivette's take on Joan of Arc may be long, but it feels right. He lets scenes build - he lets things happen on screen. He gives you time to get to know his characters. He also keeps you thinking - about the story, about film, about storytelling. He tells the story by alternating between dramatization of the story, and having characters sit and address the camera directly, telling the story. This gives it a rhythm, breaking the story into pieces (which he also does by using long blackouts for transitions), breaking the illusion of the story - the anachronism of the characters telling the story to the camera, as if they were being interviewed - the strangeness of cutting away from moments in the story to someone narrating. It keeps pulling you in - and tells the story in a pretty complete and comprehensible way.

And the film itself - is quite a departure from his more characteristic modern films, but still remarkable. Its unromantic treatment of old spaces - old castles and churches, that look old - and were old, even in 1429. Its unromantic treatment of people - their shabby clothes, their unremarkable hair and faces, their unromantic behavior (people tripping, falling down, dropping things, breaking things; uncooperative horses, the unglamorous operation of machines), the matter of fact rendering of war. I was thinking, watching Letters From Iwo Jima, that I had seen it all before - when the shooting starts, the cameras turn hand held, the cutting gets disjunctive, the sound gets sharper, etc. That's how war movies all look these days. Then seeing Jeanne La Pucelle - you see war rendered in a completely different way. The first "action" sequence - starts with guns being fired - their smoke quickly fills the whole screen, the camera sort of meanders along, waiting for the smoke to clear. The fighting, when it appears, is not spectacular - sure sure, it's a budget constraint - but it still looks right: a lot of aimless dashing around, men (and one woman) laying about them with swords, shooting arrows off screen without aiming much, people ducking and dodging and sometimes falling... All of it, still, organized, as much as war can be, and shown so you can see what they are trying to do and whether they are succeeding. It was most certainly not what you see in every other war movie.

There's little doubt left: Jacques Rivette is one of the great filmmakers of the last 40 years - this series has been a magnificent experience. These films need to be on DVD - people need to see them. There are 4 more to come (and plenty of time tonight to get to part 2 of Jeanne La Pucelle, if you live within 2 hours of Boston and don't mind getting out of the film at 1 AM - they didn't schedule it planning on the 6 hour version), most of which I have seen, though only on DVD, so I am looking forward to it. I hope I can work up a few more notes on the series: there is plenty to say - he is extremely inspirational...