Word: bressons
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Each fall the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center serves as a 2½-week primer on the state of world cinema. This year, as usual, there is a heavy emphasis on big-name European directors (Bertolucci, Buʼnuel, Pasolini, Bresson), a shortage of American movies, and a sprinkling of exotic entries from underdeveloped nations. Only a few of the festival films are immediately released elsewhere. Among them...
...Father Mouret. This Franju film begins like a color version of Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest. A fragile, handsome young priest just out of seminary has taken on the parish of a provincial town full of peasant atheists. He wants to believe that by the strength of his fervent faith alone he will convert even the most cynical, irreverent non-believers. His fasting, like that of the priest in Bresson's film, makes him weaker and weaker; but instead of succumbing to tuberculosis, he develops amnesia. There the parallels end. The rest of the movie carries him through...
...Bresson's Lancelot du Lac, with a D.W. Griffith short, Sunday...
Lancelot du Lac and Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Two very different treatments of the Arthurian legend, although both are concerned with deromanticizing the Once and Future King. Monty Python is funnier. Bresson's film, savaged by the critics, has some good moments and some scenes of positively unearthly beauty...
Dark Edges. Like Cartier-Bresson, Avedon gives us everything he and the lens record, including the dark edges of the film itself. This sharp edge forces the eye inward to the details effaces and nuances of expression. Avedon's pictures are lean, made with soft daylight and bouncelight against a white, seamless background. They are also stark because of the moment that Avedon tries to capture, as in the 1955 picture of a youthful Truman Capote. He reads the eyes of his subjects, waiting for that second when they reveal the facet of character he wants: he allows...