On filmmaking and the moving image

Reflections on independent film practices. Read on EXTERMINATING ANGLES

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Portmanteau.

This is the word I found in three successive reviews about The French Dispatch: ‘a portmanteau movie’. I had to google this beautiful faux-ami. All of you American-born know its two meanings: either ‘a word blending the sounds and combining the meanings of two others’ or ‘a large trunk or suitcase, typically made of stiff leather and opening into two equal parts’. Wes Anderson’s movie opens in three parts though and I’m not sure how a suitcase can do that but it’s not the point. The point is that for me, as for any French, a Porte manteau is the object in the picture below: a coat hanger. To be exact, this one is called a Porte manteau Perroquet (a coat hanger parrot) which gives it a befitting Surrealist tinge.

It is most particularly interesting for me to watch a film related to my birth country through the eyes of an American director living in Paris. We simply are in mirror positions. This brings me to the notion of authenticity. There is nothing authentic in Anderson’s movie. It is all about his style, his reverence toward Jacques Tati, his very American clichés about France and French history, in short, his own world. Notice in passing that no one in France screamed ‘Cultural appropriation!’ or ‘Cultural colonialism!’ maybe because we know that there is something revealing and true in any appropriation that creates something new: a coat hanger becomes a stiff leather suitcase and can now travel to another country.

I do believe that a foreign eye can be as acute if not more so than a native one for it is able to see through the heavy historical and cultural layers what makes a society’s heart and bones. Take Alexis de Tocqueville, he saw and wrote about the shape of the American stiff leather suitcase when Americans were too busy pilling their clothes inside. So does Anderson. If there is one thing that struck me in The French Dispatch, it is the heavy presence of police. In the first segment, there is a prison and its ‘gardienne’, in the second the May 68 riots and police repressions, and the last segment takes place in a commissariat. Prison-Riots-Police and here you have a macaron movie being the most politically relevant film about France today… unless it’s about America.

October 28, 2021.



If I taught film I would challenge my students to make a 90-minute narrative feature set in mostly one room with only three characters, two of whom never speak. Then show them Melville’s The Silence of the Sea.

October 23, 2021.



There are all kinds of filmmaker-thieves. Some are picking easy shots, things we saw a million times: someone coughing after smoking a first joint, low angle shot from a grave with earth thrown from above, youths standing or seated on top of a car, high angle shots of women in bathtubs, and the laziest shot of all: hands floating from a car’s open window.

Then there are master burglars and expert pickpockets: Tarantino and Schrader stole from Cassavetes’ The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, James Cameron plundered Borzage’s History Is Made at Night for his Titanic, Iñárritu looted Tarkovsky’s shop for The Revenant, Chloé Zhao cleaned Terrence Malick’s vault.

Sometimes it’s a character: Elle Driver has a big sister who also likes to play the lethal nurse in A Cop by Melville. Sometimes it’s an actress’s move: a woman swirling from Kurosawa’s Stray Dog is stolen by Kantemir Balagov’s for his Beanpole: same dress, same moves, same shot.

Sometimes it’s only a color: the green trench coat passing from Monica Vitti’s shoulders in Red Desert to Catherine Deneuve’s ones in Hôtel des Ameriques, and again to Saoirse Ronan in Brooklyn, before landing on Nicole Kidman’s shoulders in a forgettable series.

I always liked heist films by the way. I rewatched Dog Day Afternoon yesterday, Heat the day before, and noticed that both films end up on an airport tarmac… with an almost identical soundtrack. Michael Mann, Sidney Lumet, it takes a thief to catch a thief.

May 18, 2021.



In the midst of movie theaters’ bankruptcies, there is no mention of what they bring to the urban space. Movie theaters are dark places where strangers gather together, a form of unconscious space in the fabric of the city and an erotic one too. In the 50s, they used to be ‘the’ place to kiss for young lovers without a room. From the start, there was an obvious link between movies and sex but it is the brick-and-mortar theater that brought this alchemy into the public space. In its most crude form, starting in the 70s, we find porn theaters in plain sight, whether in Times Square New York or Clichy Paris.
In the 60s, regular theaters had “intermissions” consisting of on-stage stripteases as Bertrand Tavernier recalls in My Journey Through French Cinema.
The closure of theaters due to covid took away one of the three urban public spaces with an “erotic aura”. The other two are club and bars but these open much later at night hence shutting out whole segments of the population. In fact for families and under 18 (or 21 in the USA), movie theaters were the only place for experiencing a form of shared eroticism.

April 22, 2021.



The best cinematography I have seen recently is by Claire Mathon who made the sober yet velvety picture of Portrait of a Lady on Fire.

Claire Mathon managed to transmit something that I thought was dead in French movies: a Jansenist image. Jansenism is an ascetic form of Catholicism that stresses predestination and grace, much like the theology of the Protestant reformer, John Calvin. When people think about French movies they often think “New Wave’s smart coolness” or “Caro & Jeunet’s baroque quirkiness”, but there is another tradition, one of sobriety, clean lines, and classical beauty. Think Bresson.

February 17, 2020.



I love both the location of the Anthology Film Archive and its old building.

The location because it stands diagonally to the Marble Cemetery which is always a comforting sight, and the building because it reminds me of a massive Florentine palazzo which would have forgotten to be Italian. In fact, it’s an ex-courthouse so don’t expect entertainment and organic popcorn. I could give a 5/5 to its facility which will seem totally irrational to anyone who went to their bathrooms.

Anthology is dedicated to ‘the study of the medium’s masterworks as works of art’ as is written on their website. This week they screen a ‘cryptic, largely dialogue-free work that both approaches and resists narrative’ (I want the job of the person describing films there).

It’s also the only theater boasting a manifesto. Push the heavy grey door, walk in the mournful lobby, take the bauhaus-style staircases leading to their austere 187-seat theater, and you’ll find cinema ghouls – I mean goers. They don’t talk, they whisper indeed cryptically, and they all know each others.

I tend to think of Anthology as the AA of filmmakers. The crowd is very nice, especially at four-walled screenings where it’s all friends and relatives and you get free wine. But there is more to it. I remember watching Aleksei German’s Hard to be a God and at the end, the dozens of people in the public gathered in the lobby around Jed Rapfogel, the programmer (I think Joe Neumaier was there too). They all formed a small circle and started whispering among themselves, and I was sorry I wasn’t part of this brotherhood. Maybe there is an initiation to pass or something… Let me know.

April 12, 2018.



Reading Roberto Bolaño.
Let’s create an indie film group just as a pretext to drink and talk about films without walking on eggshells. In homage to Bolaño’s Visceral Realists (mocking his own group of poets initially named the ‘Infra-realists’), we should call ourselves either the ‘Visceral Filmists’, the ‘Ruthless Flickists’, the ‘Irresponsible Screenists’, or whatever name you could come up that sounds like a serious disease. We should crash every institutional seminar that teaches you ‘how to make a no-budget film’ while charging a steep fee, every forum about ‘VR reinventing the world’, every condescending ‘women filmmaker’s lab’, every workshop titled ‘find your audience and learn how to make the most of it’. We will not handle leaflets, write a manifesto, or take ourselves too seriously. We will answer like Brigitte Bardot in Contempt when Piccoli tells her that swearing doesn’t befit her. We will feel great not being beggars anymore. We will have a good laugh.

December 30, 2017.



Watch the Hidden Fortress to learn how a charismatic character such as Toshiro Mifune playing the noble hero is outshined by two rowdy, greedy, and ridiculous peasants. It’s a lesson on the importance of having likable characters. Watch Seven Samourai to learn movement and rhythm within the frame. Nothing is more beautiful than the waves of soldiers breaking against the fortified village. The best about Kurosawa is that his films are full of flaws, literally part of the film’s fabric, and these flaws are also why his movies are likable. One feels the struggles, the hesitations, and every pain is a pleasure.

September 17, 2017.



3 reasons to watch 3 Women by Robert Altman
– a film all yellow and purple
– an all-yellow decorated apartment
– Shelley Duvall outfits

October 22, 2016.

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Every immigrant should watch Medea (Maria Callas), crying after she abandoned her land to follow her lover. Once in Greece, the foreign country where she now has to live, she screams: ‘I see the sun but I don’t recognize the sun, I see the moon but it’s not the moon I know, the land has lost its center!’
Pasolini’s Medea is not about the cruel revenge of a mother, it’s about being uprooted and unable to create new roots, it’s about the old not succeeding to survive in the new. It’s about not recognizing the sun.

September 1, 2015.