To get myself more disciplined and return back in the rhythm of watching and writing about films I came up with an idea for Short Film Sunday. So, from now on every Sunday I will shortly discuss one short film. All in all, Sunday's are lazy days, so what can be more delightful than watching a short film while having a lovely cup of afternoon tea and then taking a nap.
La luna (2011).
As an opening short film for my Short Film Sunday I chose La luna (2011). It is one of my absolute favourite short films and Pixar films. It is directed and written by Enrico Casarosa (now working on the upcoming Pixar feature The Good Dinosaur).
When I went to see the new hit from Pixar Brave (2012) last autumn, beforehand they showed a sweet little animation La luna (The Moon), which, in my opinion, was the highlight of the whole screening. It is a story about 3 generations, a grandfather, a father and a son, about their different ways of perceiving life and doing things, about one family's very special and most unusual line of work.
It is a captivating piece of animation, food for grown ups imagination and a marvellous little tale for kids to tell about the making of the crescent moon. Hope you all enjoyed it as much as I did!
It might be because soon enough I am moving and I am looking at all the lasts I will do and see, last time when I walk down the prom, last time when I will have a cup of coffee in this coffee shop, last time when I will go for a swim here, last... And on and on... However I am trying to look at all the firsts that await me as it awaited Alfred Hitchcock with his FIRST Technicolor film Rope (read my previous blog post on it here) and Breathless is Jean-Luc Godard's phenomenally successful FIRST feature.
Breathless (1960)
Breathless is directed by Jean-Luc Godard who established the French New Wave, it is a jazzy story set in Paris, there is a femme fatale played by Jean Seberg (for which Godard spent a quarter of the film's total budget) and there is a perfect gangster played by Jean-Paul Belmondo, and behind all the crime and games there is a French New Wave kind of love story. It is a mix of truth and beauty, and yet it leaves a feeling that you have just set your foot in Wonderland, where the border between real and unreal has vanished, that is full of unhappiness and ends in madness and tragedy. Yet Breathless is a moment of hope and joy. Breathless brought a breeze of energy and inventiveness into the industry of cinema, with its jagged and unpredictable style the film gaining worldwide acclaim even to this day.
The trailer for À bout de souffle gives us and idea of what a good classical trailer essentially is: a cinematic list poem about a film.
Please, take your time and before you continue to read, watch Godard's poem about Breathlesshere.
It is not unusual that a director make trailers for his own films, as Hediger marks, it is more unusual that most of Godard's trailers have been actually used to introduce his films. Making a good film trailer asks for a detachment from the film, which director's usually lack, but as a former film critic for Cahiers du cinéma and an alumnus of Fox's publicity department in Paris, Godard was well aware of what a good film trailer needs. In the trailer for Breathless, a female's voice simply names the things we see, also indicating protagonists and their characteristics ("The pretty girl, The bad boy ... The nice man, The bad woman"), while a man's voice, which is Godard's voice, steps in to inform us, the viewers, that the author of the screenplay is François Truffaut, then names the technical advisor, before going on to name the director and who is starring in the film. Godard's trailers then aren't as much an advertisement for the film, but more serves as an introduction to the film, as Hediger writes, "Trailers, then, let the film begin before it actually begins." In comparison to mainstream trailers, Hediger argues that:
While mainstream trailers often contain all the best scenes from the movie, Godard's films contain all the best scenes that make up the trailer, because in them, as in so many cinematic realisations of Novali's infinite novel, the film never entirely begins, and the trailer certainly never ends.
So it should be, a trailer should introduce the film to the viewer without revealing what is going to happen. The trailer for Breathless portrays the film being in the film noir style, it even pays homage to Howard Hawks' classic Scarface. However, after watching the film, although there are film noir elements - a stolen car, a shooting, a murder - it still somehow feels too light and airy for film noir, though it still leaves a taste of sadness. Godard himself after releasing the film realised, that it is not as realistic as he intended it to be, as David Serrit writes:
[Godard] intended the seminal Breathless to be realistic, but realized soon afterward that it was closer to Alice in Wonderland than to the hard-boiled film noir tradition that he wanted to emulate.
Breathless (1960)
Although the characters are as real as the film allows, the film itself seems somehow unreal, an almost surrealistic world. The protagonists, Patricia and Michel, are both care free, casual, young and beautiful, and full of dreams. That is the lightness that Breathless leaves, that hope for change and blithe life. Breathless is regarded as the seminal film of the French New Wave, nevertheless it still, after more than 50 years, seems revolutionary and innovative, fresh and new, seductively dangerous. It is the camera work, that brings the film to a new level, it is the camera that innovates. Godard valued his own personal expression in cinema, significantly Godard used caméra-stylo or "camera pen", embracing that a film should be an intimate act. As Godard marks "In my early days I never asked myself whether the audience would understand what I was doing", for him the importance of the film was hidden in his relationship with the film. In Breathless, Godard enjoyed doing things for the first time, being innovative, trying something that no one has done before, something that would be more interesting, because the first time is fascinating, when it is done a second time it is less interesting, as Godard puts it "Pictures are made to make seen the unseen."
Godard sees that all three moments in making a film are equally important: before, during and after. In contrast, Godard notes about Hitchcock, "With somebody like Hitchcock everything is calculated down to the last second, so editing is less important. À bout de souffle owes a great deal to the montage. It is a film in three movements, the first half-hour fast, the second moderato and the third allegro vivace again".
"Films are the only things by which to look inside of people,
and that's why people are so fond of movies and why they'll never die."
/Jean-Luc Godard/
P.S. After his successful debut and screening of Breathless at the Cannes film festival (it didn't take a part in the competition) in 1960, Godard gave a somehow sad interview, which leaves us with a feeling that he has lost something, because his first film was so successful.
Alfred Hitchcock's Rope (1948) is often regarded as a mistake, not only by audiences and critics, as David Thomson claims, Rope is "flawed by unwieldy or wrongheaded situations", but also by the master of suspense himself, as Hitchcock puts it: "As an experiment, Rope may be forgiven." However, I personally loved the film, whether this is because of my love of the stage and the reality that mistakes are more apparent on the stage, I don't know, however I enjoyed it immensely.
Rope, which originally was a play staged in London in 1929, provided Hitchcock with many technical challenges, it was his first Technicolor film, the first film where he was also a producer, moreover Hitchcock also wanted to see whether it was possible to make a film without cutting and editing, he wanted to create a film with a continuous action, designed to take place in real time. Hitchcock showed that it is possible, that film can be just like a play - a curtain opens and a play starts, a curtain closes and a play ends. Hitchcock wanted to make it as a stage production, only for the cinema:
I undertook Rope as a stunt ... The stage drama was played out in the actual time of the story; the action is continuous from the moment the curtain goes up until it comes down again. I asked myself whether it was technically possible to film it in the same way. The only way to achieve that, I found, would be to handle the shooting in the same continuous action, with no break in the telling of a story that begins at seven-thirty and ends at nine-fifteen. And I got this crazy idea to do it in a single shot. (Hitchcock by Truffaut)
A film sequence is divided into five to fifteen seconds long shots, therefore the film that runs one hour and thirty minutes will have around six hundred shots. In some Hitchcock films there might be as many as a thousand shots, for example, "there were thirteen hundred and sixty shots in The Birds." Whereas in Rope each shot runs from four to ten minutes, that is, "the entire film roll in the camera magazine, and is referred to as a ten-minute take. In the history of cinema this is the only instance in which an entire film has been shot with no interruption for the different camera setups." Therefore, Rope only has as many as eleven shots. That is an admirable achievement and Hitchcock went through a great trouble to achieve this continuous action.
A representation in LOOK magazine of the shot sequences in Rope. http://www.fulltable.com/vts/s/si/r.htm
Rope was Hitchcock's first Technicolor film. In 1948 if you filmed a Technicolor film, that meant less mobile camera movements, thus lighting couldn't be adjusted to each scene as it was done by the Americans in 1920. Hitchcock used a dolly for the camera and every single movement was mapped out well beforehand, plus the set of the film was the one that moved, "Walls are being moved and lights are being raised and lowered", everything was set on silent rails and furniture was mounted on rollers, so it could be moved around. Even clouds outside the window were moved slowly to indicate time passing. I can imagine that the whole set of Rope resembled a massive doll's house, where Hitchcock was the master of the house and dolls.
It took ten days of rehearsals with the cameras, the actors and the lighting, after that there were eighteen days of shooting, nine days of which were for the retakes, because of 'the too orange sunset', so the last five reels were done all over again. One mistake meant re-taking of the whole reel, re-shooting roughly ten minutes of the film.
Besides the continuous action, the moving set and all the problems with color, on top of that Hitchcock managed to create a direct soundtrack for the film, which is remarkable, and it was never done before neither in Europe nor in Hollywood. As Truffaut puts it, Hitchcock reached "the painstaking quest for realism. The sound track of that picture is fantastically realistic ... toward the end ... one hears the noises gradually rising from the street." Which really was the case! Hitchcock gathered a group of people who would talk about the shots, the scene which appeared at the end of the film, and the microphone was put six stories high, so it would coincide with the apartment in the film. Moreover, in order to create the sound of police sirens coming towards the apartment Hitchcock "made them to get an ambulance with a siren. ... placed a microphone at the studio gate and sent the ambulance two miles away...". That's how Hitchcock created the soundtrack for Rope.
Doubtless, Rope was technically a remarkable and admirable achievement, it might imply that Hitchcock sometimes was more interested in technique and filming process than the meaning of the film and importance of the story. Rope mightn't be Hitchcock's most suspense building film, but nevertheless it still 'brutalizes our nerves' with its story about two young homosexual men, who Hitchcock wanted initially to be played by Cary Grant and Montgomery Clift, who murder their college friend as an intellectual challenge in order to commit the perfect crime.
P.S. As many of you might know Hitchcock enjoyed making brief cameos in his films. So, where can you find Hitchcock's cameo in Rope?
He appears in the opening credits, however his profile also appears on the red neon sign outside the window. Quite a colourful appearance for his first Technicolor production. Hitchcock said: "My cameo appearances were ... reminding the audience, it's only a movie." All together the master appeared in 39 films. Which reminds me of 39 Steps to Hitchcock, if you want to delve deeper into Hitchcock's wit and are spellbound by his work as I am, then take this BFI created step-by-step journey through his life and work, that made Hitchcock the cinema's master of suspense.
