Tag Archive: Sight & Sound


PLAYING BY RENOIR’S RULES

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August 25, 2012

LA RÈGLE DU JEU (The Rules of the Game) directed by Jean Renoir (France, 1939)

Rules of the GameJean Renoir made over forty movies from the silent era to the talkies but I’m slightly ashamed to say that this is the first movie of his I’ve seen.

I was prompted to start plugging this huge gap in my movie knowledge by the fact that La Règle du Jeu  was voted number 4 in the latest BFI/Sight & Sound list of the greatest films of all time.

It’s always hard to evaluate movies that are so much of their age. For instance, it’s difficult to imagine why this combination of high farce and drama should have so offended the French audience when it was first shown.

The Parisians apparently derided it and the government banned it for being “demoralising” so it was only after the second world war that it started to be evaluated by a more open-minded public. It wasn’t until 1959 that it was restored and edited to the definitive  version. Continue reading →

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JEANNE DIELMAN : A TALE OF ORDINARY MADNESS

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August 21, 2012

JEANNE DIELMAN, 23 QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES directed by Chantal Akerman (Belgium/France 1975)

jeanneWhat pleasure can be derived, Mr. Everyman cinemagoer might ask, from a three-hour plus movie in which, save for the final ten minutes, the biggest drama comes when the protagonist overcooks some potatoes?

This is not an easy question to answer for a movie which is so particular it cannot be judged in conventional terms. An informative film essay by Ivone Marguiles describes it well as “a radical experiment with being undramatic, and paradoxically with the absolute necessity of drama”.

Pleasure is the very thing that is entirely absent from a middle-aged widow’s uneventful life which we see presented in meticulous detail over the course of a three-day period.

We watch her in real-time, washing up, preparing dinner, shopping, attending to her adolescent son and babysitting. From the tiny rituals that make up her daily routine, we come to understand how she makes sure everything is in its right place. For example, she is scrupulous about turning the lights off in a room she is not using and keeps the modest one bedroom flat clean to the point of dusting objects inside a glass cabinet. Continue reading →

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CINEPHILES PUT ART ABOVE ENTERTAINMENT

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August 18, 2012
Hitchcock

The BFI poll gets James Stewart in a spin.

Every ten years since 1962 the British Film Institute (BFI) via Sight & Sound magazine has published a list of the fifty greatest movies ever made. This is based on the votes of critics, programmers, academics and distributors.

This decade’s poll sees Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo in the top spot, the first time that Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane has not been number one.

When any list like this is published, the first thing I look for is how many of these films I have  seen.

As I write, this totals just 23 so I have set myself a personal goal of seeking out the other 27 over the next few months to see what I have been missing and be in a better position to criticise the critics.

Watch this space. Continue reading →

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