view
Les créatures [The Creatures] (Agnès Varda, 1966)
Aug
14
Edgar (Michel Piccoli) and Mylène (Catherine Deneuve) all dressed up for a home-cooked meal. On the wall behind them a huge framed mounted crab. DPs: Willy Kurant, William Lubtchansky & Jean Orjollet.
view
Le fantôme de la liberté [The Phantom of Liberty] (Luis Buñuel, 1974)
Mar
9
World Kidney Day
Five adults and a child at a large table. They're all seated on toilets. One of the men is defecating. DP: Edmond Richard.
“Madrid was filled with the stench of – pardon my language – food. It was indecent.”
– le professeur des gendarmes
view
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.
