Even in the underworld of professional gangsters and organized crime, there exists an implicit social structure. At the top of this criminal hierarchy is Bob (Roger Duchesne), an impeccably dressed, well-mannered reformed bank robber with a penchant for, or rather an addiction to, gambling. In fact, so well regarded is he that even the police […]
Tag: French Cinema
The Silence of the Sea, 1947
In an idyllic provincial town of occupied France, two German soldiers come upon the secluded home of an old man (Jean-Marie Robian) and his niece (Nicole Stephane), in search of a boarding house. One evening, a German officer named Werner von Ebrennac (Howard Vernon) introduces himself as the new household tenant. Despite their deliberate silence […]
Remembrance of Things to Come, 2001
A visual essay into – or more appropriately, a thoughtful process of signification for – a montage of photographs from Denise Bellon’s photo-reportage from the period between the two world wars (as the “grand illusion” of a lasting peace during the mid 1930s after the Great War gradually unraveled to reveal an inexorable path towards […]
Level Five, 1997
Exploring similar territory as Russian filmmaker Aleksandr Sokurov on the continuity of collective history, spiritual desolation, and immanence, Level Five also serves as a thoughtful and reverent homage to Alain Resnais’ films on the interpenetration of memory and the subconscious. Presented as a series of video feed confessionals by a woman (Catherine Belkhodja) to her […]
The Last Bolshevik, 1993
The Last Bolshevik opens to an insightful and relevant excerpted passage from author and critical thinker George Steiner’s book, In Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture: “It is not the literal past that rules us [save, possibly, in a biological sense]. It is images of the past.” Composed in the structure of […]
Sans soleil, 1983
An early episode in Sans soleil shows a series of porcelain cats – some intact while others, weather worn or cracked with missing appendages – curiously lining a shrine in a Japanese temple that, as the unseen narrator (Alexandra Stewart) reveals, has been consecrated in memory of these benevolent creatures. In a subsequent, unrelated musing […]