Word: franju
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...Movies should have a beginning, a middle and an end," harrumphed French Film Maker Georges Franju at a symposium some years back. "Certainly," replied Jean-Luc Godard. "But not necessarily in that order." In the past two decades, movies have gone Godard's way: end up. Even in Hollywood, structure is now a word you are apt to hear only from Bel Air real estate agents. Adventurous directors snapped the straight spine of traditional drama into a series of vertebral vignettes. The standard comedy structure, which had kept stage and screen humming from Labiche to Lubitsch, gave...
...whatever, but that attitude has always struck me as priggish and unimaginative. At least until I sat through 12 torturous, claustrophobic hours at the Orson Welles and realized that even I--a horror buff since age six--had my limits. (The marathon did, incidentally, feature three superb films: Georges Franju's Eyes Without a Face, Peter Bogdanovitch's Targets, and Terence Fisher's Frankenstein Created Women, the latter boasting a marvelous performance by the superlative Peter Cushing.) I haven't lost faith in the form: horror has traditionally brought kids through adolescence with reduced turmoil, providing them with a safe...
...whatever, but that attitude has always struck me as priggish and unimaginative. At least until I sat through 12 torturous, claustrophobic hours at the Orson Welles and realized that even I--a horror buff since age six--had my limits. (The marathon did, incidentally, feature three superb films: Georges Franju's Eyes Without a Face, Peter Bogdanovitch's Targets, and Terence Fisher's Frankenstein Created Women, the latter boasting a marvelous performance by the superlative Peter Cushing.) I haven't lost faith in the form: horror has traditionally brought kids through adolescence with reduced turmoil, providing them with a safe...
...whatever, but that attitude has always struck me as priggish and unimaginative. At least until I sat through 12 torturous, claustrophobic hours at the Orson Welles and realized that even I--a horror buff since age six--had my limits. (The marathon did, incidentally, feature three superb films: Georges Franju's Eyes Without a Face, Peter Bogdanovitch's Targets, and Terence Fisher's Frankenstein Created Women, the latter boasting a marvelous performance by the superlative Peter Cushing.) I haven't lost faith in the form: horror has traditionally brought kids through adolescence with reduced turmoil, providing them with a safe...
...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...