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Un soir, un train [One Night, a Train] (André Delvaux, 1968)
Mar
20
French Language Day
Mathias (Montand) and Anne (Aimée) walk through a round archway. Both have a different focus and are on opposite sides of the arch as a foreshadowing of their parting. DP: Ghislain Cloquet.
A Walloon language professor and his French set designer fiancée are at an impasse. While his Flemish students vocally protest against more Walloon influence at their uni, the couple – who superficially speak the same #language, #French – struggles to find the right words. They meet, part ways, then find each other again on a train that at morning turns out to be standing still in the middle of nowhere. The man, now without her, disembarks and with two acquaintances who also were on that train tries to find out where he and she are.
André Delvaux's Un soir, un train is a masterpiece about finding the right language in a fractured world.
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The Damned [These Are the Damned] (Joseph Losey, 1962)
Mar
19
National Automatic Door Day
An 11-year old boy, Henry (Kit Williams), opens a featureless door in a rock surface for a drenched King (Oliver Reed). DP: Arthur Grant.
An American tourist visiting Dorset is tricked by a prostitute, then falls victim to a youth gang controlled by volatile con King – a still very green Oliver Reed at his meanest. The trickster is King's sister, who confides in the American hoping to escape her brother's incestuous advances.
“I'm strange, all right! I'll show you just how strange I am!”
– King
The couple elopes to a nearby island, closely followed by King and his gang, where they find a group of #children, all contently living in an underground lab, with #AutomaticDoors only they can control.
They are the damned.
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Une femme douce [A Gentle Woman / A Gentle Creature] (Robert Bresson, 1969)
Mar
14
National Write Your Story Day
Dominique Sanda as “elle” – “she” – a nameless woman. She peers out of a window, her face partially obscured by the muntin. DP: Ghislain Cloquet.
A young woman jumps out of a window, leaving behind her husband, an #antiques dealer. Sitting in their bedroom with the body lying in state, the widower remembers her. In his memory, she is nameless, abstract, a state not a life..
Robert #Bresson's Une femme douce is closely adapted from Fyodor #Dostoyevsky Кроткая [Krotkaya / A Gentle Creature] (1876).
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The General (Clyde Bruckman + Buster Keaton, 1926)
Mar
8
National Oregon Day
Johnnie Gray (Keaton) stands on the roof of The General's locomotive while Oregon passes along. DPs: Bert Haines & Devereaux Jennings.
For authenticity reasons, The General was – for the most part – filmed on location in Oregon. Set during the #AmericanCivilWar, it's a comedic retelling of a popular war memoir about the #GreatLocomotiveChase.
“This girl was in the baggage car when we stole the train, so I thought it best to hold her.”
– Captain Anderson
Sadly it was a box office #flop, resulting in Keaton losing his independence and his movie entering the #PublicDomain as early as 1954. Luckily for us that means we too can enjoy Oregon beautiful 1920s vistas.
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Les sorcières de Salem [The Witches of Salem / The Crucible] (Raymond Rouleau, 1957)
Mar
7
National Town Meeting Day
The townspeople meet in the barn to judge the accused. DP: Claude Renoir.
Raymond Rouleau's Les sorcières de Salem – with a screenplay by Marxist philosopher Jean-Paul #Sartre – is a very early film adaptation of Arthur Miller's 1953 #TheatrePlay The Crucible. An allegory of #McCarthyism, the play is a (partially dramatised) retelling of the #SalemWitchTrials, a dramatic episode in early US-American history. During several court and town meetings, 200 people were falsely accused of meddling with the Devil; 19 of them were eventually executed.
“If she is innocent! Why do you never wonder if Parris be innocent, or Abigail? Is the accuser always holy now? Were they born this morning as clean as God's fingers? I'll tell you what's walking Salem — vengeance is walking Salem. We are what we always were in Salem, but now the little crazy children are jangling the keys of the kingdom, and common vengeance writes the law!”
– Arthur Miller, The Crucible (1953)
Miller himself was accused of un-American activities in 1956 and convicted of contempt of Congress for refusing to identify others present at meetings he had attended. Which doesn't mean that #WitchTrials are a thing of the past. As easily one can transplant Puritan religious mass hysteria to 1950s McCarthy anti-socialism, as easy is it applicable to the state of the world today.
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The Incredible Shrinking Man (Jack Arnold, 1957)
Mar
5
National Scott Day
Scott Carey (Grant Williams) standing in a palm of someone's hand, his arms outstretched as if pleading. DP: Ellis W. Carter.
Despite its sensationalist pulpy title and #ColdWar premise, Jack Arnold's adaptation of the Richard Matheson's The Shrinking Man (1956) is an existentialist treatise.
“A strange calm possessed me. I thought more clearly than I had ever thought before – as if my mind were bathed in a brilliant light.”
– Scott Carey
The Incredible Shrinking Man plays with the understanding of what it means to be acknowledged as a human, and one's place in the world. The story is told through the eyes of the titular Shrinking Man – Scott Carey – who after being exposed to strange fog, finds himself increasingly lost in this world.
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Malá morská víla [The Little Mermaid] (Karel Kachyňa, 1976)
Mar
3
National Dress In Blue Day
The little mermaid (Miroslava Safránková) in her wonderful sea-blue dress, puts a coral-red rose in her blue hair. DP: Jaroslav Kučera.
Miroslava Safránková plays Hans Christian Andersen's doomed little mermaid – Malá morská víla in Czech – who falls in love with a mortal and gives up her beautiful voice to be with him. Sadly, the mortal, a prince, doesn't recognize his mute saviour and doesn't return his love.
“The other day I got caught in some fishermen's net. Of course, I had to drown them. I couldn't allow them to touch me, could I?”
– the little mermaid
The wonderful soundtrack is by Zdeněk Liška who also composed music for Ikarie XB 1 (Jindřich Polák, 1963) and Spalovač mrtvol (Juraj Herz, 1969).
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The Queen of Spades (Thorold Dickinson, 1949)
Feb
22
Play More Cards Day
Someone's playing cards.
“Why, you might end up by gaining a fortune… or losing your precious soul.”
– bookseller
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Vivre sa vie: Film en douze tableaux (Jean-Luc Godard, 1962)
Feb
11
Global Movie Day
Nana (Anna Karina) crying in a dark movie theatre while watching Carl Theodor Dreyer's La passion de Jeanne d'Arc (1928). DP: Raoul Coutard.
A fascinating overlap with The Savage Eye (1959), a film #Godard must have been familiar with in 1962.
“Maybe I'll get into the movies.”
– Nana
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飼育 [Shiiku / The Catch] (Nagisa Ōshima, 1961)
Feb
2
National Catchers Day
The nameless soldier (Hugh Hurd) in the barn. Another person is with him. The soldier looks away, at something offscreen. DP: Yoshitsugu Tonegawa.
In the summer of 1945, the people of a small Japanese village find a Black American helicopter pilot in one of their traps and lock him in the communal storeroom. While the war continues and the villagers wait for orders from above, the man – for the townspeople, his presence, this allegory – becomes something else.
“Your keeping this animal has meant all of us suffer!”
飼育 shares more than a few themes with Đorđe Kadijević's Празник from 1967. The war's the same, any war is, and the Chetniks too capture a Black American pilot. Again, the villagers seem to share a folie, a madness, rooted in an unshaken belief – call it tradition or shared illusions foolishness or hope.