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L'eclisse [The Eclipse] (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1962)
Mar
20
natural phenomena
Vitti's blond hair shifts in front of Delon's dark coupe, quietly mimicking the eclipse. DP: Gianni Di Venanzo.
“There was a silence different from all other silences, an ashen light, and then darkness – total stillness. I thought that during an eclipse even our feelings stop. Out of this came part of the idea for L'eclisse.”
During several moments in the film, the main characters' mannerisms foreshadow the looming solar eclipse.
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Un soir, un train [One Night, a Train] (André Delvaux, 1968)
Mar
18
André Delvaux
Anouk Aimée and Yves Montand in character on a leaf-strewn floor, his head resting on her chest, with director André Delvaux and others surrounding them. DP: Ghislain Cloquet.
A favourite film, director, or producer for Luc Besson's birthday (1959).
Having only seen three of Delvaux's films, I feel I can safely say his work is hypnotic, but not in the common sense. We see a world through both Delvaux's and his protagonists eyes, and experience their duality as one. This displacement is a recurring theme in Delvaux's work, the work of a man raised in one world and speaking the language of another, both worlds bearing the same name, Belgium.
This slow tear is also the theme is his best known film, De man die zijn haar kort liet knippen [The Man Who Had His Hair Cut Short] (1965), in which a schoolteacher loses himself after a pupil graduates. When we think we are firmly seated in Delvaux's universe, we fall back, like that moment just before sleep sets in. And again, in his tragically under-seen Belle from 1973. Now it's a poet who finds a woman living in a ramshackle hut in Belgium's peatland, her language an unknown. With only one main speaker, the duality forms in the poet's words, in his attempts to give her root.
And so do we, the viewers. We hang on to that root, Delvaux's, only to sink back into our own loss of words.
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花樣年華 [Fa yeung nin wah / In the Mood for Love] (Wong Kar-Wai, 2000)
Mar
17
Irish-American Heritage Month
A close-up of a pea-green phone with Mrs. Chan's (Maggie Cheung) hands resting on the receiver. Her dress is a bright green, with an abstract graphic in white. DPs: Christopher Doyle, Pun Leung Kwan & Ping Bin Lee.
“He remembers those vanished years. As though looking through a dusty window pane, the past is something he could see, but not touch. And everything he sees is blurred and indistinct.”
– caption
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La Chambre verte [The Green Room / The Vanishing Fiancée] (François Truffaut, 1978)
Mar
17
Julien Davenne (Truffaut). DP: Néstor Almendros.
“Our past doesn't belong to us.”
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Cockfighter (Monte Hellman, 1974)
Mar
15
Frank Mansfield (Warren Oates) holding up a reluctant, wildly flapping white rooster. DP: Néstor Almendros.
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Hell Bound (William J. Hole Jr., 1957)
Mar
12
Saturday
A man writes a name in the 9:30 a.m. time slot of the calendar page for Saturday March 21. DP: Carl E. Guthrie.
“Three days ago, at exactly 0600 – because that is really not the time – on February 5 – because that is really not the date – this freighter, which shall be nameless, sailed from a certain Far Eastern port. Its destination: The Port of Los Angeles, Wilmington, California. This is fact.”
– narrator
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憂國 [Yūkoku / Patriotism or the Rite of Love and Death] (Yukio Mishima, 1966)
Feb
26
1936
Reiko (Yoshiko Tsuruoka) walking through her lover's blood, her kimono drenched. DP: Kimio Watanabe.
Covers February 26–28, 1936.
”'I know how you feel,' Reiko says quietly. 'And I will follow you wherever you go.'”
– intertitles
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猫と庄造と二人のをんな [Neko to Shōzō to futari no onna / A Cat, Shozo, and Two Women] (Shirō Toyoda, 1956)
Feb
20
Love Your Pet Day
Shōzō (Hisaya Morishige) on the beach with his beloved cat Lily. DP: Mitsuo Miura.
“I'm sharing my husband with a cat. This is humiliating!”
– Nakajima
Shōzō is torn between his ex-wife and his current spouse, but really just wants to spend time with Lily, his cat.
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Il mare [The Sea] (Giuseppe Patroni Griffi, 1962)
Feb
17
1962
The actor (Umberto Orsini) approaches a hotel lobby. A blackboard notes the date: February 17, 1962. DP: Ennio Guarnieri.
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Some Like It Hot (Billy Wilder, 1959)
Feb
14
St. Valentine's Day
Sugar, Josephine, Daphne, and Sweet Sue and Her Society Syncopators rehearse Runnin’ Wild on the sleeper train to sunny Florida. DP: Charles Lang.
A movie about romance, of the Mafia, for St. Valentine's Day.
“Real diamonds! They must be worth their weight in gold!”
– Sugar Kane Kowalczyk
The opening shootout was directly inspired by the February 14 1929 Saint Valentine's Day Massacre (graphic), and shares an actor from one of its most famous adaptations, Scarface (1932); George Raft as the wonderfully named Spats Colombo.