Betty Blue: The Director's Cut

I recently reviewed the outstanding 1986 film Betty Blue by Jean-Jacques Beineix (known best for his post-French New Wave bellewether Diva). More epic than that work, Betty Blue (which I reviewed in its 3-hour director's cut) is both a curious product of the 80s and a fairly timeless love epic with all manner of classical tragic theme and Quixotic digressions. Beautifully composed, packed full of striking colors and elegant compositions, Beineix never loses our attention and interest during frequent asides about French essentialism and unexpected slapstick. Click here to read the whole review.

Reading Response 4 (Week 6)

While Sergei Eisenstein and Siegfried Kracauer lay impressive theoretical groundwork for an understanding of how our experiences of architecture and film inform one another in this week's readings, I found Giuliana Bruno and Joan Ockman's work more constructive. They offered useful critical terms for suggesting how the exploration of architecture within and around cinema could offer solutions to the oppressive lived realities of urban design and corporate architecture. In a manner perhaps more satisfying or convincing than the digital environments we discussed earlier in the semester, film allows us to experience existing architectures from new perspectives (as in Bruno) and offers the possibility of exploring unbuilt spaces created for film sets (as in Ockman).


I especially enjoyed Bruno's suggestion that within the private-public place of the darkened movie theater, mobility within the coded-male city is opened up to female viewers ("voyageuses" rather than "voyeurs"). Although the point is less valid now, as modes of film viewership and urban travel have evolved (I'd argue) along less starkly gendered paths, it is interesting to apply this concept to the work of filmmakers working at Jacques Tati's time. I'm especially thinking of Jean-Luc Godard, whose films demonstrate a keen and adventurous attitude towards urban spaces and architecture and invest spaces with particularly strong symbolic values. His attitude towards gendered spaces, I'd say, carries from the same ambiguity his films do in general: it's never clear to what degree the misogyny he depicts is being criticized and indulged. Similarly, Paris (and other locales to a lesser extent) figures in Godard films as a male space by definition.


As one of the first members of the French New Wave to use location shooting for films from Breathless (top image) onward, it's hard to determine to what extent Paris was gendered male before the cameras started rolling and what amount of this masculine urbanism is the result of Godard's particular cinematic gaze. From Jean Seberg walking down the Champs-Elysées in Breathless (1960) to Anna Karina forced into prostitution by the city's phallocentric urban economy of My Life to Live (1962, pictured above) to Karina's entrapment in a dangerous love triangle in Band of Outsiders (1964), and several others, Godard's female leads are often depicted as women trapped in Paris's male gaze. And yet Godard's point of view isn't completely complicit in this objectification, and he shows women negotiating the coded-male city by stopping in cafes (My Life to Live), relaxing in the privacy of their apartments (Breathless, Band of Outsiders) and, fittingly, escaping into cinemas (Breathless). This productive ambiguity in Godard's gendered treatment of space – between the organizing male gaze of the city and its buildings and the folds, cracks and blind spots it affords his female characters – echoes some of the ways of reading urban forms opened up by Bruno, and offers the added lens of auteuristic intent and evolution. Certainly, by the time he made Pierrot le Fou (1964), Alphaville (1964) and La Chinoise (1967), Godard's visions of space and architecture had already evolved radically.

Paris vu par... (1965)

Directed by Jean Douchet, Jean Rouch, Jean-Daniel Pollet, Eric Rohmer, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol

As a kind of meta-cinematic calling card for one of the most varied and disjointed film movements to straddle mainstream and art cinema, Paris vu par... is appropriately fun and disorienting. Like a banal conversation chopped up by jump cuts and ending off-screen as the camera pans right for no reason, these six New Wavers turn everyday Parisians into portentous vessels of quirks, tragedy and love.

The six vignettes are named for the neighborhoods they're set in (an organizational mode recently refurbished for Paris, je t'aime) and alternate between typical, whimsical and self-referential. Jean Douchet's opening short, for instance, is pure Godard. The aftermath of a one-night stand is presented by an omniscient narrator, references to Picasso and Sartre are tossed around like stale croissants and half-smoked cigarettes, intense reds and yellows seem as important as the familiar story.

That said, Godard's own segment (filmed by Albert Maysles!) is itself a heightened version of his features, the story of a romantic young woman and intensely hypocritical older men that happens so fast it reads like a thesis proposal for his next few films. Going against that choppy New Wave style, Jean Rouch's claustrophobic apartment argument might be the film's most engaging for its immersive style. Filmed in long takes and contorted handheld movements that recall the cramped submarine of Das Boot, it walks briskly from cramped neo-realism into sidewalk philosophy without missing a beat.

In fact, eruptions of the unexpected in urban routines might be the closest thing Paris vu par... has to a unifying thread (aside from small apartments, of course). Eric Rohmer studies Parisians' walking patterns around the city's largest traffic circle as if presenting a parody of everyday ethnography, and anticipating Christopher Guest's deadpan mockumentary style. Claude Chabrol's bourgeois family farce veers into tragedy when its ignored son takes to always wearing ear plugs. Pollet's super-saturated bachelor pad short inverses familiar power dynamics between a sex worker and her John.

Throughout, snappy tirades on sexual relations and the intersection of Frenchness and Americanness – which marks the style and content of so many New Wave films – present a pleasantly varied mix of the movement's familiar fare. If these director's features are often referred to disparagingly as laborious cine-essays, Paris vu par's quick clip reads like exceptionally stylish Cliffs Notes.

A similar version of this review appears in The L Magazine, and can be read here.

Pierre Rissient: Man of Cinema

Directed by Todd McCarthy

A film lover's tribute to a film lover that will likely only keep the interest of film lovers, Variety critic Todd McCarthy's documentary Pierre Rissient: Man of Cinema is particularly memorable for the amazing lineup of directors who weigh in on the titular movie buff's career. It's also a kind of wet dream for devout film fans everywhere: What movie buff wouldn't want to go from critic to art house programer to new director champion to Cannes emperor and Asian New Wave patron?

For all the stylish cinema its subject facilitated, there's not much style to recommend McCarthy's film, unless one counts the jumpy editing rhythms during its interviews as a nod to the French New Wave. After all, the first of Rissient's many contributions to film history was as assistant director on Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless. Rissient's subsequent achievements are related by beneficiaries of his eye for talent like Sydney Pollack, Jerry Schatzberg, Quentin Tarantino, Clint Eastwood, Jane Campion and Hou Hsiao-hsien. Meanwhile, McCarthy accompanies Rissient to his small hometown in the French countryside, where the globetrotting movie industry chameleon discusses regional history with picture-perfect little old French ladies.

Rissient's charm and passion for film are self-evident, particularly when he tells industry anecdotes. One story about trying to keep an aging, boozing John Ford dry during a visit to Paris is especially memorable. It speaks to his many close relationships with film legends and the friendly, personal way he could still interact with them, all the while stoking his fan-boy adoration.

Rissient emerges as a benevolent patron of cinema. First as a discoverer of overlooked classical Hollywood gems, then as a promoter of American independent cinema in the 60s and 70s, and thereafter dedicated to the development of Asian art cinema. At moments, the absence of counter-arguments looms large. Did Rissient ever pull strings against a director he didn't like? Also, fairly late in McCarthy's film several friends chuckle that film and women are Rissient's two great passions, "especially young Asian women." It's an uneasy, potentially creepy moment the film quickly speeds along from, on to the opening of a cinema named for the aging Frenchman.

Old but far from retired, Rissient tries to offer McCarthy some closing remarks, only to be interrupted by his interminably ringing cell phone. He takes the call, and we're left having discovered one of the most independent cogs in the international movie machine, one that's still turning out of sheer passion.

A similar version of this review appears on The L Magazine's website, and can be read here.

Contempt (1963)

Directed by Jean-Luc Godard
Brigitte Bardot, Fritz Lang

Godard’s masterpiece pays homage to many things. Art films: it’s an expensive New Wave movie about making a studio-funded art movie. Tracking shots: the opening credits show one being filmed, and thereafter most shots track. Frenchness: brilliant reds and blues fill the mise-en-scene – especially in Film Forum’s new print. Brigitte Bardot: her beauty and presence bewitch the director, his cast and the audience.

This review appears in the March 12 issue of The L Magazine.

In with the new: eighties Paris hipsters outdo the old and the new

The re-release of Jean-Jacques Beineix’s postmodern classic Diva at Film Forum this week may come as a surprise. Not because it doesn’t deserve it – that is, assuming that re-releases are based on desert rather than commercial viability, an idealistic proposition in the first place – but because it has aged so well. Beineix’s re-printed and re-translated directorial debut looks and sounds superb, with a hybrid score of pop and opera, bold and colorful costume and set design, and entrancing cinematography. It also flows between its romance, drama, and thriller plots more smoothly than today’s best genre-blenders.

Diva begins with Jules (Frédéric Andréi), a moped-riding delivery boy, clandestinely recording a performance by opera singer Cynthia Hawkins (the title’s diva, played by Wilhelmenia Fernandez). This recording is confused with another Jules receives accidentally, inculpating a Parisian police chief in drug and sex worker trafficking. Multiple parties come after Jules’s tapes while he falls in love with Hawkins, and befriends an intriguing couple (played by Thuy An Luu and Richard Bohringer). Throughout, Diva borrows from surveillance and stake-out movies like Blowup and The Conversation, and early blockbusters like The French Connection – whose canonic chase sequence Beineix shames when Jules rides his motorcycle through the Paris metro. But as much as Diva looks like it’s coming out for the first time, its story and style are rooted in a specific cultural situation.

Diva’s release in 1981 marked the second turning point in French cinema, the first being the emergence of the French New Wave between 1958 and 1960. This movement reanimated a stagnant French film industry – and has influenced every filmmaker since – with its self-reflexive modernist style and myriad high- and low-culture references. Once the New Wave’s disjointed style became the norm, however, the movement lost steam. Then came Diva, the second turning point, directly responding to the first. After alienating film essays by polemical directors, Beineix introduced a trendy, cool aesthetic that favored plot development. Diva sparked is own movement, dubbed “Cinéma du look,” rooted in the disenfranchised youth subcultures of Paris in the eighties, as opposed to the pedantic projects of the previous generation of filmmakers.

In its cultural moment, Diva’s crime plot pitting stylish Paris hipsters against corrupt old French men anticipated the young filmmakers of the “Cinéma du look,” reacting against the entrenched older directors of the New Wave. Beineix makes this analogy explicit by having Diva’s most brutish thug behave like a pastiche of the character played by Jean-Paul Belmondo in so many Jean-Luc Godard movies. The sense of relief when he finally falls to his death, then, is simultaneous relief for the liberation of French cinema from the self-serious airs of films from Godard’s generation. This is not to reduce Diva to an opposition between young and old, just to show that there’s a lot going on under its surface cool.

A slightly different version of this review appears in the October 31 issue of the New York Press and can be found here.