Word: fou
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...been severely limited by the vagaries of film distribution. Although Rashomon became an art-house staple after it won an Academy Award in 1951, most of Kurosawa's other films have not found their way to many American screens. Red Beard, like Pierrot Le Fou first shown in 1965 but just released in New York, is being presented at a special foreign-language theater with only a whisper of publicity. Thus, filmgoers across the country may once again miss a masterpiece by one of the world's great film makers...
...Festival; it also excludes films that arrived in Boston in 1968 but opened elsewhere in 1967 (Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers). To make things simpler, I eliminate European films made over two years ago but released during 1968 (Bunuel's Nazarin and, regrettably, Godard's masterpiece Pierrot le Fou...
...current films--reportedly staged cinema-verite, interview-oriented, documentary political essays--represent a completely new development in his work, then we can consider Made in USA, Deux ou Trois Choses que Je Sais D'Elle, La Chinoise, and Weekend transition pieces between the narrative power of Pierrot le Fou and the films to come. The first two are easily dismissable as films which fail to solve problems finally turned into assets in La Chinoise: audience alienation through revelations of the camera itself and of actors as actors; a growing feeling that truth must extend into the working method through improvisation...
...borrowed from all sorts of other apocalyptic visions (notably that of novelist Anthony Burgess). Godard attempts simultaneously to explode the basic esthetic of narrative cinema, but offers nothing in its place; here he is dishonest with himself because the first half-hour shows (as did Contempt and Pierrot le Fou) that the man can cut a narrative like nobody's business when he puts his mind to it. Mireille Darc's much-discussed monologue is, though a single shot, the purest kind of narrative cinema (combined with Coutard's carressing camera movement and Antoine Duhamel's brilliant score...
...shots much better than Demy's style is able to do and, as in his Lola and Baie des Anges, shines brightly through the entire film. Demy's style is a strange hybrid. The superb interiors owe much to Godard (Une Femme Est Une Femme, Le Mepris, Pierrot le Fou) and succeed in filling the cinemascope screen with inventive precision; on the other hand, the exteriors are derivative of American films (with shots lifted from Stanley Donen's Singing In The Rain and Nicholas Ray's Party Girl) and don't always work. Demy's Ray like tendency to pull...