Word: filming
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...else could he tolerate La Grande?). Phillippe Noiret has that sense of humor. He achieves that cliched, but still rare, level of acting, where you find it totally impossible to believe that he is an actor and not simply an extraordinary character that the director found and built a film around...
...stand in line for twenty minutes to half an hour in order to get in. The lines aren't quite as long now, and if you haven't seen it already, you should. In fact, even if you have seen it, see it again; on this film, there's no diminishing marginal utility...
...Wonderland ("Will you--won't you--will you--won't you/ Will you join the dance?"), Franju cuts to a masguerage ball. The measured actions and fantastic costumes of the dancers establish a fairytale quality, into which is integrated strong tension in the relations between figures. Later in the film a child stands staring at the villainess, who is disguised as a nun. Discomfited, she gets up and moves out of his view. In both sequences a child's clear view of good and bad coexists with, and is even diverted by, the marvelous beauty of people and settings...
Judex is designed to let all the characters look at what is going on. Its slow pacing frequently pauses while we and the characters savor the beauty of the world. This quality of leisure gives the film the true feeling of its period, as does the quality of its images: less recorded action than set-pieces, tableaux. Characters are presented behind windowpanes and in portraits, shown as individuals first and only later as figures related to other people. Each character is complex and complete, composed of light and dark...
...this constant combination of white and black that makes the film so rich and beautiful. The slowness of its pacing, odd for a thriller, allows a great complexity of events within each shot. Instead of making points, imposing judgments by cutting between one action and another, Franju juxtaposes them within the same space, allows them to coexist without making a moral judgement. Refusing to simplify, he implies wilder and wilder combinations of good and evil in single figures and single scenes. The world of 1914 is complex, but also very ordered, within his frames. One feels that one is seeing...