Word: alaine
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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FROM THE BLUE underworld of guilty fantasy to the idyllic greens and pinks of Providence, where all is forgiven, through a series of stylized, surreal encounters between characters devoid of will and wracked by literary torment--this is where Alain Resnais guides us. In Providence,authorial control--both Resnais's and that of his novelist-narrator Clive Langham (John Gielgud)--is harnessed to the nightmare vision of the unconscious, whose repressed contents spill over with a force that blights efforts at artistic ordering...
...Pierrot Le Fou (Pierre's wife tells him "sometimes I think you're crazy") and to Chabrol ("are you frightened? Do you think I'll strangle you?") Goretta places himself in the tradition of modern French, not Swiss, filmmakers. He is certainly more subtle and less pretentious than Alain Tanner, though as yet he has not been as widely received in this country. Perhaps sufficient interest will be stirred by this film to prompt more screenings of his first two features, Le Fou (1970) and The Invitation...
Directed by ALAIN RESNAIS...
...from the very earliest essays she wrote at the Lycee for her intellectual mentor, the philosopher Alain, Weil had stressed the conviction that to make her life worthwhile--to not "waste death," as she once put it--she would have to exert her Will against the seemingly infinite limitations that life presented (her own frail body, her recurring headaches, the constraints on social and political change in her lifetime). This doctrine of Will seems to have provided a mission and to have met her psychological and emotional need for expectation, devotion and objective response...
...philosopher Alain, who had exerted such a formative influence on her ideas about life fifteen years earlier, might have answered her plea with this definition of truth (paraphrased from his informal "doctrine" by Petrement): "an idea is not true by itself, independent of the thinker: it is not right to speak of a true idea but rather of true thoughts, of true men and women." Simone Weil lived this definition. And it may be that in the end she feld that only letting herself die could she continue to live her truth