October 2008
I spent the month of April 2008 in Paris, and I went to a lot of movies. This journal is an account of them, given in the same haphazard, pragmatic order in which I saw them. Sometimes I chose a movie on sheer whim; sometimes the movie I wanted to see was showing only on Saturday morning at 11.30, or Monday at half an hour before midnight. There is no rhyme or reason to the sequence.
By and large, I did not go to recent French movies. This decision was primarily linguistic: I wasn’t confident in my ability to follow fast, colloquial French. Thus, I did not go to see 'Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis' (Dany Boon, 2007), which is by far the most commercially successful French film ever made. It’s a comedy that pitches French regions against each other, and I was sure that I wouldn’t be able to follow the local jokes. On the other hand, my ability to comprehend French subtitles opened up for me (as will be abundantly clear) a whole world of cinema. The films I saw covered a wide range, but two categories predominate. One was old classics, often of vintage American cinema. Paris is still the ideal cinémathèque, film library; here you can revisit old favourites, or catch up on obscure Westerns you might have missed forty years ago. Theatres like the Action Christine provide a continuous education in the definitive history of classical film.
The other was contemporary world cinema: the astonishing richness of film-making from Turkey to Uruguay, Iran to Algeria. It’s a body of work that scarcely ever shows up in North America, except in very rare showings at Festivals and specialty cinemas. Yet it treats the issues of the contemporary world with a depth and gravity, a skill and grace, that American cinema has almost entirely lost. I was left with a devastating sense of the isolation and sheer ignorance imposed upon North American audiences by the limited distribution networks.
I should also say that my film-watching activities of the month were presided over, as so often before, by the shadow of Jean-Luc Godard, the most important and provocative film-maker of all time. Though I saw only one Godard film this month, he was constantly in my thoughts. My landlady, Paule Muret, had worked with Godard as an actor in 'Sauve Qui Peut (La Vie)' (1980), and she had in the apartment I was renting a personally inscribed copy of Colin MacCabe’s biography of Godard, which I religiously read. I’d like to think that the jumble of heterogeneous films that I saw this month resembles in some fashion a Godardian montage, another of his Histoire(s) du Cinéma'. Madame Muret, this article is for you.
3.10 to Yuma (Delmore Daves, 1957).
There’s a recent Hollywood re-make, with Russell Crowe and Christian Bale, so of course there was a Parisian hole-in-the-wall cinema in the Latin Quarter showing the original. The print was ragged and scratchy, but the deep lustrous black-and-white photography of the original was still visible. Towards the end, the scenes of a hanging body (entirely omitted from the re-make) cast a powerful spell. The film brilliantly exploits the limitations of narrative space and time implied in the title: everything moves, inexorably, towards that time and place. The train at the station: ten past three. As the lights went up, an elderly lady next to me commented, in a low but clear voice: “ça, c’est du cinéma” (“Now, that is cinema”). I entirely agreed.
Two Rode Together (John Ford, 1961).
The first of several films I saw at the Action Christine, a splendid small cinema specializing in classic American movies. It’s situated on the historic rue Christine, a small street on the Left Bank, which has a distinguished history in 20th century literature. One of Guillaume Apollinaire’s most important poems – a collage of overheard scraps of conversation – is entitled “Lundi, rue Christine.” Years later, it became the address where Alice B. Toklas stayed on alone after Gertrude died. Two Rode Together is a John Ford film which I had somehow never seen before, and it is a thoroughly odd piece of work. Ford attempts a late-period blend of comedy and tragedy, and it just doesn’t work. Half of it is a bland, not to say lame, would-be comic buddy Western featuring James Stewart hamming it up and with the late Richard Widmark as straight man. The other half revisits the racial politics of The Searchers (five years earlier, and with much the same supporting cast), but in a cruder, more bloody-minded way. All the nuances of the earlier film’s greatness are here reduced to their most simplistic terms; yet conclusions that are glossed over in the earlier film are here left in their unmitigated cruelty and ugliness. The mixture doesn’t work at all, but the parts are fascinating.
