Dearest ILFs, help me choose a topic for my paper for French Cinema

More specifically, it's a film course focusing on French documentary, animation, and avant-garde. I have noooo idea what to write about (I was considering representations of homosexuality in avant-garde cinema but it would end up being a paper solely about Jean Genet).

HALP

^uh, Jean Cocteau also?

Eric is on a plane, or he could advise... do you have any interest in Chris Marker?

Agnes Varda? Marcel Ophuls?

then there's this guy, but you wdn't have DVDs to refer to:

http://filmlinc.com/wrt/onsale/fcs09/ingirumimusnocteetconsumimurigni.html

er..

my favorite french short anime

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x56k2h_antebios_creation

^uh, Jean Cocteau also?

more like jean cock two amirite???

two of the most impressive/intense films of the last....say, 20 years were made by Gaspar Noé:

first, watch

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0157016/
http://ia.media-imdb.com/images/M/MV5BMjE3ODQ4MTM0Ml5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTYwMjIxNDU5._V1._SX230_SY400_.jpg

and THEN

irreversible (2002)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0290673/

though its for sure avantgarde, you'll won't make a lot friends in your class with this one.
if you should dare to contrentate on this one, watch it alone in a dark room. at least for the first time. don't use the fastforward button. please. drink a little wine before.

forget the wine.

oh

http://www.dvdtalk.com/dvdsavant/images/2557red.jpg

Le Ballon Rouge (Albert Lamorisse 1965)

Noe is rather awful.

I've already seen Irreversible. It's effective, no doubt, and quite good, but I wouldn't rate it with, say, Marienbad or Blue.

Oh, Guy Debord! My prof keeps namedropping him like it's going out of style. Debord, Bretton, 'dada', etc. etc.

Note that he also keeps telling us he has a huuuuge budget from the French dept that he has to spend, and that he'll order anything we need DVD-wise if we let him know

you're lucky!

Okay, so I was thinking about doing something on Jacques Rivette, primarily to give me an excuse to watch "Celine and Julie Go Boating", but I'd have to watch several films to write a paper, and they're all really long, and I have no idea how I'd write a paper so vague (A paper about Jacques Rivette), unless I talked about early French surreal/avant-garde cinema's influence on his works.

But I'm also thinking about doing a study of feminism/women filmmakers in French cinema, notably French avant-garde and nouvelle vague (Germaine Dulac, Agnes Varda, Chantal Ackerman, etc.).

What do you guys think?

Oh, Guy Debord! My prof keeps namedropping him like it's going out of style. Debord, Bretton, 'dada', etc. etc.

― Jomanda Lepore (Stevie D), Tuesday, February 24, 2009 3:41 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

oh god. he really IS going out of style. fuck all of that stuff, imo, it isn't good cinema; it's a pretext for expounding on debord and breton's rubbish but art student-friendly politics.

real talk: do something about feuillade, surrealism, and the post-surrealist rediscovery of feuillade.

I was actually considering doing something around Les Vampires, too. We've briefly discussed Feuillade in class as an early filmmaker; I didn't realize there were elements of surrealism.

this is the thing. there aren't!

but the surrealists repped for him, and then post-surrealists (clunky term but) like resnais rediscovered him and made him a Serious Canonical Filmmaker. which he had not been in the 1910s... because there wasn't really a canon at that point.

and then resnais's mate franju remade judex, in the 1960s. and then assayas borrowed from les vampires, in the 1990s.

cd be a project about appropriation and recuperation.

Have you heard of Jean Rollin? A mixture of grindhouse exploitation and (knowingly) Surrealist dream-imagery that could only have happened in France. Very much influenced by Feuillade, too. Some way off becoming a Serious Canonical Filmmaker, though!

By a quirk of fate, Rollin's "La Viol Du Vampire" was the only domestic French production anyone could see during the '68 riots, and got a very strong reaction due to its general incoherence. Rollin was good friends with noted Surrealist film crit Ado Kyrou, and has acknowledged Surrealist painter Ado Kyrou as a major influence. You could make a pretty good case for an ongoing link Feuillade - Franju - Rollin - Assyas, and show people some damn entertaining movies.

^^ do that. id not heard of rollin, sounds dece.

Sorry, Ado Kyrou was not a painter, meant to say Clovis Trouille. Nice blog on Rollin at requiemforjeanrollin.com

i'm allergic to Rivette except for his Joan of Arc.

def gonna catch some Debord this weekend after nrq's condemnation.

has anyone really ever said "appropriation" outside of a classroom?

that was the joke, cloth-ears. no-one says 'appropriation' either.

yr academic injoeks are too impenetrable for me, Apateau.

jean rouch?

Eh, we've already watched Le Maitre Fous and parts of Chronique d'un Ete ; I don't have a desire to write an entire paper on him.

But Les Maitres Fous blew me away.

Noe is rather awful.

Noe is rather fashionable.

rouch has some complicated relationship w/ surrealism iirc

I sort of like Chronicle of a Summer more than any New Wave film I've ever seen.

like him a lot, though i think maitre fous and chronicle are the only two i've seen. narrowly missed la pyramide humaine on more than one occasion.

I think the only other Rouch I've seen is Moi un noir, which is also very good.

OK, I saw 3-1/2 hrs of Debord yesterday and admittedly his "rubbish politics" are better than his cinema, but I like lots on aerial Paris photos in my philippics.

"But I'm also thinking about doing a study of feminism/women filmmakers in French cinema, notably French avant-garde and nouvelle vague (Germaine Dulac, Agnes Varda, Chantal Ackerman, etc.)."

Of course there's also Claire Denis, check out "Chocolat" for starters.

Also, in general, for kicks check out Jean-Jacques Beineix's "Diva", it's sure to entertain.

i left the Debord marathon before this screening:

Hurlements capped a day-long marathon of Debord films organized by the editors of Film Comment magazine and presented, per the wishes of Debord's estate, in reverse chronological order. About 20 minutes into the screening, two people seated close to the screen started to audibly chatter (about what I'm not sure) during one of the film's silent passages. This prompted a patron seated near the back to loudly reprimand the talkers for disrespecting Debord's film. The talkers responded in kind by uttering a profane imperative and insisting that the blank screen wasn't really part of the movie. This was followed by another 30 minutes or so of relative quiet (during which several viewers filed into the lobby to report a projection problem), before more voices -- speaking in a fascinating babel of American, British, Indian and South African accents -- made themselves heard. "We could try holding our breath to see who lasts the longest," said one. "The whole point of this movie is to provoke discussion," reasoned another, in response to a second attempt to restore calm and order. Then, during the sustained final stretch of darkness, a voice from the middle of the theater endeavored to lead the audience in a group sing-a-long to Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the USA," followed by the 1915 union anthem "Solidarity Forever" (at which point the staunchly anti-union Debord may have gone from nodding in agreement to roiling in his grave).

http://blogs.laweekly.com/foundas/uncategorized/reflections-on-a-darkened-scre/

hahahaha Apateau

Rollin Rollin Rollin we ain't slept in weeks

what I've seen of rollin has been terrible stuff... maybe I haven't seen the right things tho

franju is genius

debord is great in an art stunt way, not in a sumptuous cinema experience way