Friday, March 27, 2009

Cahiers du cinéma

At the time it erupted, eight major directors were working simultaneously: Truffaut, Godard, Varda, Resnais, Eric Rohmer, Jacques Demy, Jacques Rivette and Claude Chabrol. To their numbers can be added Chris Marker, whose haunting sci-fi film La Jetée, which consists almost entirely of still photography, makes the infantile philosophising of Watchmen seem ... well ... infantile. At the same time, Jean-Pierre Melville, a mentor to the new wave directors, was making superb films such as Le Samouraï, and Louis Malle, who was never really part of the new wave, was turning out intriguing motion pictures like Ascenseur pour l'Echafaud (Lift to the Scaffold). This was an awful lot of talent to have working in one place in one art form at one time. It never happened anywhere else. And it never happened again.
Elsewhere this week, I have been baiting the Geeks, who doubtless will not want to hear from Joe Queenan.

8 comments:

Giovanni Tiso said...

Oh, it erupted all right. And yet Truffatu's Fahrenheit 451 is one of the worst films I've seen, science fiction or otherwise.

(Baited the geeks... sheesh. Or, as the word verification would put it, "skinc"...)

Giovanni Tiso said...

Mmmhhh... Truffatu? I was concentrating to hard on the spelling of Fahrenheit it seems.

Paul said...

Skinc?

Giovanni Tiso said...

I don't know, it sounded like a plausible alternative to sheesh or jeez. I think I'm going to try it for a while, see what people think.

Paul said...

It might be easier if you made your point clear.

Giovanni Tiso said...

My point is that your characterisation of what you did in the PAS thread is sheesh-worthy.

Paul said...

What I did was object to the interruption of an interesting discussion about an important issue by someone who instead wanted to talk about a Sci-Fi programme. My objection seemed to annoy several people in the PAS community. I was called all sorts of names and accused of all sorts of motives.

My only regret is that I did not leave the thread after my first comment. Next time someone wants to trivialise a thread, I shall find something else to read.

Giovanni Tiso said...

Whilst in the process of denouncing the derailing of the thread you also made some peculiar observations about the hierarchy of culture, shall we say. At any rate it hardly amounted to baiting the geeks, is my point.