Word: marcel
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Based on a film and book by Marcel Pagnol, a French film-maker and champion of the peasantry, this two-part tale of the decline of a powerful family combines the charm of Provence peasantry with the intrigue of a Greek tragedy...
...open, he could still make art from them. Seen from our distance, that of a pornocratic culture drenched in genital imagery, the skill with which he did this might seem almost quaint. But in Demuth's day, the public atmosphere was, of course, very different, and he, like Marcel Duchamp and other artists in the avant- garde circle that formed around the collectors Louise and Walter Arensberg, took a special delight in sowing his work with sexual hints. The handlebar of a vaudeville trick rider's bicycle turns into a penis aimed at his crotch; sailors dance with girls...
...their morality. But such works require time and space to grow properly. Compression is an invitation to contrivance, forced coincidence and melodrama. And Director-Adapter-Producer Berri (The Two of Us) refused to reduce this film to that level. Using L'Eau des Collines, a two-volume novel by Marcel Pagnol (which was itself a reworking of material the author used in a commercially failed film), Berri pursued the rights to a book he loved for six years before Pagnol's widow relented to him. Determined . to make a separate film of each portion of the novel simultaneously and equally...
...authors, he has his own flair as well. At the end of a show devoted to French collaboration with the Germans during World War II, Pivot suddenly pulled out a piece of paper and ( began to read. It was a letter from Albert Camus to fellow Novelist Marcel Ayme explaining why, despite a colleague's treasonous embrace of fascism, Camus was willing to plead for the condemned man's life. The unpublished letter had been sent to Pivot by a friend researching a Camus biography. As his guests sat in silence, awed by Camus's beautifully written and powerful denunciation...
...French have even more to fear from the revelations or digressions of their special prisoner. Ever since Marcel Ophuls's documentary The Sorrow and the Pity unreeled in Europe and America, people have stopped believing in the myth that France united to resist the occupying forces. On the contrary, France under Petain fully collaborated with Hitler's Germany. It handed its Jews over to the Nazi executioners -- 76,000 were deported, few came back. French militia competed with the Gestapo for efficiency. French police organized the roundups. Will the nation be forced to remember its sins? Or will its citizens...