Agnes Varda’s Vagabond is an excoriating, subtly disturbing portrait of alienation and lost direction. The discolored body of a drifter is found in a ditch, frozen to death. Her name is Mona Bergeron (Sandrine Bonnaire), an inscrutable young woman who comes from a good home and possesses employable skills, but has dropped out of society […]
Category: Directors
Le Bonheur, 1965
Even with the landscape bathed in warm hues and verdant fields on a summer day, accompanied by the lushness of a textured Mozart adagio, clad with airy wispiness of draped muslin, and emphatically punctuated by a picture-perfect sunflower in full bloom that suggests an aesthetic symbiosis with the vibrant, saccharine images of husband and fellow […]
Torero, 1956
Refining the theme of documented reality and reconstructed history introduced in his earlier film, Moroccan Romance, Carlos Velo’s reflective and ecstatic Torero is equally an autobiography on charismatic Mexican bullfighter, Luis Procuna, and an unvarnished examination of bullfighting culture. Presented as an extended interior monologue as an anxious Procuna prepares to return to the ring […]
Almadrabas, 1934
Carlos Velo and Fernando G. Mantilla’s quietly observed documentary, Almadrabas loosely prefigures Agnès Varda’s La Pointe courte in capturing the rhythm and rituals of a small fishing village. Ostensibly titled after the Moorish word describing the structure of nets, the film follows the product cycle of canned tuna – from the fishermen who go out […]
Moroccan Romance, 1939
Filmed during the Spanish Civil War, Carlos Velo and Enrique Domínguez Rodiño’s Moroccan Romance (Romancero marroquí) bears the imprint of Robert Flaherty’s ethnographic documentaries in its distilled (if manipulated) images of a distant, exotic – and exoticized – culture. Part colonialist travelogue on aspects of life in contemporary Morocco (and implicitly, the benefits of imposed […]
Rocco and His Brothers, 1960
Rocco and His Brothers chronicles the life of the Parondi family from the perspective of the five brothers as they seek a better life in the industrial city of Milan: Vincenzo (Spiros Focas), Simone (Renato Salvatoi), Rocco (Alain Delon), Ciro (Max Cartier), and Luca (Rocco Vidolazzi). Rosaria Parondi (Katina Paxinou), a proud, possessive widow, has […]