When I wrote in my last post that I put a new French documentary in my Netflix queue after reading about it in the New York Times, I implied that French documentaries aren't typically the sorts of things that find their way into movie theaters in Knoxville, Tennessee. Actually, that was more than a little unfair. Some years ago the Regal Cinemas chain, headquartered right here in K-Town, converted one of its older multiplexes, Downtown West, into an art house showing mainly indies and foreign films. It's got eight—yes, count 'em, eight—screens, and I think that's pretty impressive for a southern city of this size. (Before the Downtown West conversion, we had an independent art house with just two screens, and my wife and I were enormously grateful for that.)
Because of Downtown West, there actually is a chance that Two in the Wave (that French documentary I was blogging about) will make it to Knoxville. Of course, even eight screens don't guarantee that every offbeat or subtitled film in current release will arrive here—far from it. For example, I kept waiting and waiting for Richard Linklater's Me and Orson Welles to show up, but no luck, so now that one is in my Netflix queue.
Yet, even if we don't get everything of outside-the-mainstream interest, I did want to set the record straight about my current city of residence. This very afternoon I saw the Swedish thriller The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo at Downtown West, and in the neighboring auditoriums such films as The Ghost Writer, The Mother, and The Square were playing—none of them exactly standard fare for the "hinterlands." I don't usually tip my hat to large corporations, but in this case, I'll say, "Thanks, Regal."
Sunday, May 30, 2010
Friday, May 21, 2010
A Tale of Two Directors
Appearing in Wednesday's New York Times, A. O. Scott's review of a new documentary from France sent me immediately to the "save" button on the Netflix site. Two in the Wave, directed by Emmanuel Laurent and written by Antoine de Baecque, focuses on the early, intertwined careers of the two directors, François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, who best exemplified what came to be called La Nouvelle Vague, or the "New Wave," of French filmmaking. I can't wait to see it.
Truffaut, Godard, and several of their friends (notably Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, and Claude Chabrol) were devout movie lovers who started out as critics for the journal Cahiers du Cinéma. Their readiness to champion such Hollywood directors as Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks transformed film criticism on these shores as well as in Europe, and the group had an even more profound effect on film production when they became directors themselves. Truffaut's The 400 Blows (1959) and Godard's Breathless (1960) were landmark works that inspired filmmakers around the world. America produced its own generation of "movie brats"—Scorsese, Coppola, Spielberg, et al—a decade later, and it's impossible to imagine that phenomenon occurring in quite the way it did without the French New Wave that preceded it.
According to Scott's review, Two in the Wave follows Truffaut and Godard up to their infamous falling-out in 1973. "As Mr. Godard’s work became increasingly politicized, and as his always uncompromising and prickly personality grew even more so," writes Scott, "a schism emerged that would become irreparable." Apparently that's where Laurent's documentary ends. I'm not sure whether it includes this postscript: Truffaut died of a brain tumor in 1984—he was just fifty-two—and Godard publicly lamented their stormy split, and his own role in it, in an introduction he wrote for a collection of Truffaut's letters that was published some years later. It was a rather sad turn in one of film history's most remarkable chapters.
Truffaut, Godard, and several of their friends (notably Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, and Claude Chabrol) were devout movie lovers who started out as critics for the journal Cahiers du Cinéma. Their readiness to champion such Hollywood directors as Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks transformed film criticism on these shores as well as in Europe, and the group had an even more profound effect on film production when they became directors themselves. Truffaut's The 400 Blows (1959) and Godard's Breathless (1960) were landmark works that inspired filmmakers around the world. America produced its own generation of "movie brats"—Scorsese, Coppola, Spielberg, et al—a decade later, and it's impossible to imagine that phenomenon occurring in quite the way it did without the French New Wave that preceded it.
According to Scott's review, Two in the Wave follows Truffaut and Godard up to their infamous falling-out in 1973. "As Mr. Godard’s work became increasingly politicized, and as his always uncompromising and prickly personality grew even more so," writes Scott, "a schism emerged that would become irreparable." Apparently that's where Laurent's documentary ends. I'm not sure whether it includes this postscript: Truffaut died of a brain tumor in 1984—he was just fifty-two—and Godard publicly lamented their stormy split, and his own role in it, in an introduction he wrote for a collection of Truffaut's letters that was published some years later. It was a rather sad turn in one of film history's most remarkable chapters.
Truffaut's grave in Montmartre Cemetery, Paris.
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