73-74, 418-420 4 by Agnès Varda

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LQ
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#151 Post by LQ » Fri Aug 08, 2008 2:21 pm

domino harvey wrote:Compare Varda to another filmmaker who makes the viewer work, Godard, and you get the full contrast: his films are so dense with ideas that every examination yields limitless treasures; Varda's films pound one idea past the point of recognition and then sit back and relax.
Well, you got me there :) I certainly can't argue with that.

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tartarlamb
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#152 Post by tartarlamb » Fri Aug 08, 2008 2:32 pm

I suppose its a matter of opinion. I find Godard to be an arrogant bore whose films are somewhat clever mockup genre pictures with adolescent personae and incessant name-dropping. The color pictures are pretty to look at, and he uses music well. Varda is more interesting to me, as are Malle and Chabrol. Hell, even Truffaut.

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LQ
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#153 Post by LQ » Fri Aug 08, 2008 2:37 pm

btw tartarlamb, your comment was very interesting.
tartarlamb wrote:And the point, too, was that a male's infidelity is either intellectually explored, validated, or even celebrated in French film, while a woman's almost invariably results in tragedy (Contempt, An Unfaithful Wife, Jules and Jim, etc. etc.)
Last edited by LQ on Tue Jul 21, 2009 10:28 am, edited 1 time in total.

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#154 Post by mfunk9786 » Fri Aug 08, 2008 4:01 pm

tartarlamb wrote:And the point, too, was that a male's infidelity is either intellectually explored, validated, or even celebrated in French film, while a woman's almost invariably results in tragedy (Contempt, An Unfaithful Wife, Jules and Jim, etc. etc.)
Interesting and correct. Women who are unfaithful in a lot of French cinema from that era are painted as batshit crazy and unable to control their sexual freedom.

And that misogynistic justification of male adultery that runs through the new wave conditions the viewer to look at a film like Le Bonheur and immediately try to justify the husband's actions, regardless of how awful they are. Because that's what they're used to doing.

But someone like Godard can present male and female characters who are equally aware, sexually liberated, and cynical towards one another, which makes for more realistic viewing. Watching Breathless or Cleo from 5 to 7, for example, I get the impression that these are living, breathing, interesting people; watching Le Bonheur or Jules and Jim, for example, the characters are so cardboard-thin that they never ring true.
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LQ
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#155 Post by LQ » Fri Aug 08, 2008 4:04 pm

mfunk9786 wrote:And that misogynistic justification of male adultery that runs through the new wave conditions the viewer to look at a film like Le Bonheur and immediately try to justify the husband's actions, regardless of how awful they are. Because that's what they're used to doing.
psst. careful before you say justify

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#156 Post by mfunk9786 » Fri Aug 08, 2008 4:08 pm

LQ wrote:psst. careful before you say justify
Okay, romanticize

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#157 Post by tartarlamb » Sat Aug 09, 2008 2:38 am

mfunk9786 wrote:But someone like Godard can present male and female characters who are equally aware, sexually liberated, and cynical towards one another, which makes for more realistic viewing. Watching Breathless or Cleo from 5 to 7, for example, I get the impression that these are living, breathing, interesting people; watching Le Bonheur or Jules and Jim, for example, the characters are so cardboard-thin that they never ring true.
I agree with most of what you're saying, but I'm a bit surprised that you found the characters in Jules and Jim to be cardboard-thin! Its hard for me to accept the notion that Godard presented liberated, sexually aware women -- his films, for the most part, seem to address women only from a male perspective: they represent ideals, like life and sensuality, but are essentially vacant in terms of character. Half the time the poor doe-eyed creatures run around looking pretty while a smart, sophisticated young man chases them, reading quotations from a book and no doubt trying to educate her (see: Pierrot le fou). My favorite Godard is Contempt, because the chauvinism seems so frank and aberrant to me that, like a Hitchcock movie, it ceases to be offensive and becomes fascinating.

There are a few admirable New Wave films that address women: Malle's The Lovers, for instance.

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#158 Post by Michael » Sat Aug 09, 2008 9:05 pm

mfunk9786 wrote:But someone like Godard can present male and female characters who are equally aware, sexually liberated, and cynical towards one another, which makes for more realistic viewing.
I absolutely don't agree at all. All what Godard's films (at least some of the 60s ones to me) show me is the personal frustrations Godard has with women, at least Anna Karina - pretty much the heart of most of his 60s period. To this day, Godard still has not created a humane, complex and real woman to match Cleo.

For me, Godard is "appreciation". I appreciate some of his films ,especially Vivre sa vie and Pierrot le fou but I don't love him the way I love Chabrol, Varda and Demy. Cleo From 5 to 7 is the most sublime masterpiece to come out of the 60s France - it breathes so many ideas and transcendental moments (very subtle unlike the show-off Godard).

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#159 Post by domino harvey » Sat Aug 09, 2008 9:16 pm

Well Michael, we may disagree about almost everything else, but I'm with you on Chabrol: He certainly does Hitchcock one better by consistently showcasing strong female characters in his films. I don't deny the charges of misogyny labeled against most New Wave filmmakers, though a lot of it is more harmless idolatry than hatred really-- women as seen from far away and with (too) many imagined binary traits. Most of the Cahiers filmmakers were little boys who never grew up emotionally, and it shows. Thankfully I don't have to cosign on a film's ideology to find it fascinating.

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#160 Post by TheDoman » Thu Sep 04, 2008 2:58 pm

Vagabond is one of my favourite films ever. I'm wondering if there is anywhere I might be able to buy the DVD that was released with the boxset on its own? I know you can purchase the earlier version, but I would like the remastered version, and I'm not really interested in the other films of the set.

Would be great if I could find a way! Thanks

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#161 Post by kaujot » Thu Sep 04, 2008 3:16 pm

TheDoman wrote:Vagabond is one of my favourite films ever. I'm wondering if there is anywhere I might be able to buy the DVD that was released with the boxset on its own? I know you can purchase the earlier version, but I would like the remastered version, and I'm not really interested in the other films of the set.
Not through any online retailer, and I doubt that you'll find it selling separately on eBay.

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#162 Post by Matango » Fri Sep 05, 2008 10:29 am

TheDoman wrote:Vagabond is one of my favourite films ever. I'm wondering if there is anywhere I might be able to buy the DVD that was released with the boxset on its own? I know you can purchase the earlier version, but I would like the remastered version, and I'm not really interested in the other films of the set.
You want the remastered Vagabond, one of your favourite films ever, but have no interest in the others? That's an interesting statement. I'm not criticizing by any means, but would be interested to learn more about the rationale behind your comment. Have you seen the other films?

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#163 Post by psufootball07 » Fri Sep 05, 2008 10:38 am

The Varda box is "on sale" in the amazon Criterion discount right now, but it is still priced fairly high compared at $64.

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#164 Post by pianocrash » Mon Sep 08, 2008 1:47 am

After thumbing through the recent posts regarding Vagabond, it seems that most of the people who find it lackluster find less to say about Bresson's similarly themed Au Hasard Balthazar, which may seem a stretch for some (Varda ditches the overt spirituality, for a reason), but I'd like to believe that without one you probably wouldn't have the other. And in both films lies the fascination in simply bearing witness to the events onscreen, be they seemingly infinitesimal as they either pass by or lurch onward, which is certainly less engaging on the surface level. I know that definition slides closer to documentaries (ding ding ding), but it could still beat Irma Vep in the Department of Ideas any day. I can't say that Le Bonheur isn't worth the limitless suggestion regarding the back-to-front hypotheses of the filo dough thinness, but one glance back at even Cleo would point right back where you started with Varda.
domino harvey wrote:Compare Varda to another filmmaker who makes the viewer work, Godard, and you get the full contrast: his films are so dense with ideas that every examination yields limitless treasures; Varda's films pound one idea past the point of recognition and then sit back and relax.
It's Opposite Day! \:D/

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Re: 73-74, 418-420 4 by Agnès Varda

#165 Post by reaky » Fri Dec 19, 2008 5:31 am

I wonder if there's any chance of Cleo coming out individually, perhaps as one of the Essential Arthouse line. I'm sure I'm not the only one who would like the new edition without having to spring for the box.

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Re: 73-74, 418-420 4 by Agnès Varda

#166 Post by zedz » Mon Jul 20, 2009 8:25 pm

I saw Cleo on 35mm for the first time last night, and it was a beautiful experience, but it came with one colossal surprise. This nice new print was identical to the version I’d seen on DVD with the single huge exception that it omitted all of the chapter headings. Stripping out that heavily structural aspect (and obscuring the ‘real time’ conceit – in fact, given the film’s title, you’d assume that the film did not adhere to ‘real time’ in this version, were it not for the dialogue time check at 6.15) changes the film far more radically than I’d have expected, but it also allows it to breathe more. There’s a more naturalistic, less deterministic flow to the action (which is significant in a film which dances with fate), and ‘empty’ transitional shots that otherwise serve as a backdrop for the chapter titles now act as buffers and breathing space.

A very different viewing experience, but it reinforced for me how great a film it is, since it worked brilliantly even without what I had always assumed was one of its central elements. Does anybody know the provenance of the two versions, and why this new print favours this version?

Thanks to benny profane’s recent comment about the mirrors in the film, I paid particular attention to this visual patterning. Varda’s play with symbols in the film is very sly and sophisticated, and from that first wonderful scene she toys with in-built ambiguities (knowing how the film will unfold, and knowing a little about the Tarot, it’s possible to read her actual story into the cards she uncovers with greater accuracy than the cartomancienne). From that first scene, the film’s mirrors are explicitly aligned with Cleo’s vanity, her identity and her mortality (beauty being a way of asserting identity and dodging death), but as the film progresses, her reflections in them become increasingly obscured. When she leaves her apartment to meet her friend she looks at herself in a restaurant mirror covered in writing; at the café her reflection becomes fractured in the mirror mosaic on an adjacent post; after visiting the cinema, her reflection is completely fragmented in the broken hand mirror (an image soon replicated when we see her through a shattered window). Although this increasingly fragmented reflection seems to represent doom and despair – the destruction of Cleo – at the end of the film its also possible to read it as auguring the death of her egoism: her overcoming of hypochondriac self-obsession and fear of death, her conquest of shallow vanity. Many of the film’s other symbols and signifiers are similarly double-edged (e.g. the advent of summer and the mistaken identification of Cleo with Flora, goddess of fertility, when it should have been Ceres, goddess of motherly love, which ties in disturbingly with the cancer she fears is growing in her stomach). It’s such a rich film, but it’s also so darn playful. Varda was always a much better punster than Godard, and the dialogue here uses wordplay like rhyme, to set up bantering rhythms and create internal echoes; and she uses reflexive effects (voiceovers, gazes addressed to camera) much more strategically, in my opinion, than Truffaut did in Shoot the Piano Player and Jules and Jim.

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Re: 73-74, 418-420 4 by Agnès Varda

#167 Post by Michael » Mon Jul 20, 2009 8:54 pm

Very nice, zedz. Now without the chapter headings, that means people would quit questioning or worrying about those 30 minutes that were not counted for. I really hope to have the opportunity to see this film on 35 mm, if it ever comes to the US, then please give a holler.

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Re: 73-74, 418-420 4 by Agnès Varda

#168 Post by zedz » Mon Jul 20, 2009 10:02 pm

Michael wrote:Very nice, zedz. Now without the chapter headings, that means people would quit questioning or worrying about those 30 minutes that were not counted for.
Possibly, but Cleo does ask Antoine the time a quarter-hour from the end, and he tells her it's quarter past six. In the chapterized version there's no ambiguity about the real time aspect, so the only discrepancy is between the title and the film, but without those markers, you might assume that some crucial episode (a quickie in the park?) has been elided at the very end of the film, which could be even more contentious (sex with a stranger in the bushes would put a very different spin on Cleo's transformation!). I don't think that this issue will ever be satisfactorily resolved!

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Re: 73-74, 418-420 4 by Agnès Varda

#169 Post by Michael » Tue Jul 21, 2009 9:50 am

After pondering about this, I think I'd prefer the chapter headings only because in a way they reflect Cleo's state of mind, she worries about time as she walks toward the reveal of her biopsy result. If I was to find out the result of my HIV test tonight, then I'd be looking at my watch every second, time would seem to run faster as I focused on the clock needles moving forward more than usual. But soon after Cleo meets Antoine, the chapter headings start to disappear. Antoine helps to take Cleo's mind off the clock.

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Re: 73-74, 418-420 4 by Agnès Varda

#170 Post by colinr0380 » Tue Jul 21, 2009 2:08 pm

Interesting - as I mentioned on the first page the recording I have from its last UK television showing in 1996 is one which also omits the time headings. I've not yet reached the Varda set in my 'to watch' pile yet but wonder whether this discrepancy is mentioned at all in there?

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Re: 73-74, 418-420 4 by Agnès Varda

#171 Post by Dadapass » Mon Oct 05, 2009 5:39 pm

Cléo From Screen to Stage
From the Criterion website.

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Re: 73-74, 418-420 4 by Agnès Varda

#172 Post by dad1153 » Tue Oct 13, 2009 1:54 am

Caught "Vagabond" on Sundance Channel for the first time over the weekend. My first Varda movie, and a damn good one that makes me want to see more of the woman's work. What instantly appealed to me (and made me want to see the flick when scanning the cable listings): what if Suzanne (Sandrine Bonnaire) from Maurice Pialat's "À nos amours" became a runaway French teenager cut from the same fabric as 'the girl' from "Two-Lane Blacktop"? In Varda's fictitious docudrama the pathos comes from seeing the re-enactments/reactions of those that ran into Mona for a few days during a cold winter in rural France. Some of these short-term relationships are surprisingly revealing about those that meet the teen (that college professor that has a thing for trees) but only toward the movie's last third do we realize how connected these characters are with each other (besides their encounters with Mona), giving "Vagabond" a poignancy one wouldn't expect given the movie opens with the fate of the protagonist already revealed. Some of Varna's attempts at staging breaking-the-fourth-wall confessionals fall flat (the goat-herding couple, etc.) but, mixed with a handful of well-acted moments (Yahiaoui Assouna's wordless stare at the camera being the most potent... made me choke) along with some genuinely moving scenes (Mona's drunk laughter with the old woman, etc.), collectively add-up to the incomplete portrait of a life you find yourself thinking about long after the sabotaged-by-default conclusion fades to black.

I personally knew a girl like Mona many years ago (from HS and community college, both of which she dropped out of). She was middle-class and educated, yet chose to live as a squatter in abandoned NYC apartment buildings doing menial jobs to sustain herself. We spent hours talking, drinking and smoking (she did the last two, I ate Doritos :wink: ) about life, philosophy, music, politics, religion... the world. Turned down all my advances or offers to help her (school, job, money, etc.). Lost touch with her in 1997 and don't know where she went or what became of her. "Vagabond" offers a tragic idea of what became of my homeless-by-choice friend. :cry:

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Re: 73-74, 418-420 4 by Agnès Varda

#173 Post by dad1153 » Mon Jan 25, 2010 1:06 pm

Caught a DVR'ed recording of "Cléo from 5 to 7" from Sundance Channel over the weekend. My second Varda movie (after "Vagabond") and I loved it so much I saw it twice in three days. I wasn't expecting to care so much about the inner feelings of Corinne Marchand's spoiled pretty girl but I could relate to her inner turmoil. I mean, who hasn't walked around feeling lonely in a crowd of people when bad news hits (particularly in these times) and one's feeling sorry for oneself? Unlike other French New Wave movies in which civilians gawking at the actors/camera crews are distracting here it felt natural given the subject matter (self-centered personality letting her guard down) and lead character (a woman like Cléo would stand out in the streets of Paris). Agnès also comes up with some great camera movements that feel cinematic without attempting to show off the city (which it does anyway since it's freaking Paris in 1961). I wasn't crazy when Cléo hooked up with Antoine in the park (Antoine Bourseiller doesn't have any on-screen chemistry with Marchand, IMHO) but, since it's the only human connection our leading lady has in the movie that feels genuine (unlike the hilariously aloof scenes with her suitor and composers at Corinne's place), I guess I have to accept it. Like Melville's prodigious output during this same period Agnès Varda shows here that she was a one-woman New Frech Wave before, during and after that term became synonimous with Truffaut and Godard (who actually has a very good reason to take off his dark sunglasses in the film-within-a-film Harold Lloyd-inspired silent short). It'll be fun over the next few days to make-up in my mind what happens between Cléo and Antoine during the 'missing' 6:30-7:00PM time the movie's title alludes to.

I see, I see... (closes eyes and sees Tarot cards in color)... more Varda movies in my future. "Le bonheur" is next (if I can find it).

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#174 Post by nostalghic » Thu Apr 22, 2010 12:27 am

A question on the 4 from Agnes Varda box set. I read that Cléo de 5 à 7 is getting discontinued because of the Studio Canal licensing being deal broken. Does anyone know if/when this set will be discontinued? Thanks.

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Re: 73-74, 418-420 4 by Agnès Varda

#175 Post by CSM126 » Thu Apr 22, 2010 7:26 am

According to the box itself, Cleo is owned/licensed from some company called 87 Productions. To my recollection, Canal is mentioned nowhere in this set at all.

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