Tag Archives: French cinema

RIP Jean-Claude Romer (1933 – 2021)

Jean-Claude Romer was a French actor, film critic and film historian.

Midi Minuit Fantastique (1962 – 1971)

He was editor-in-chief of French film magazine Midi Minuit Fantastique (1962 – 1971), the first magazine dedicated to genre cinema and cinema fantastique.

It has come to my attention that the first issue of Midi Minuit Fantastique is online in full at Archive.org[1].

That issue is dedicated to Terence Fisher, who still seems to be a bit underrated and of whose film The Stranglers of Bombay it is said:

“More clearly than any other Hammer effort, The Stranglers of Bombay lays bare the foundation of voyeurism, scopophilia, misogyny, castration anxiety, repression, sadomasochism, and “the male gaze” which informs the construction of Hammer’s output.”

The Charm of Evil: The Life and Films of Terence Fisher (1991) by Wheeler W. Dixon

One thing leading to another as they say, I stop here, because it is leading me too far.

RIP Jean-Claude Carrière (1931 – 2021)

The Phantom of Liberty, the toilet scene

Jean-Claude Carrière was a French novelist and screenwriter famous for scripting The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, The Phantom of Liberty and The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

I give you the toilet scene from The Phantom of Liberty, it makes you wonder if Buñuel scripted it alone or he asked Carrièret to assist him.

RIP François Leterrier (1929 – 2020)

François Leterrier was a French film director and actor. He entered the film industry when he was cast in Robert Bresson’s film A Man Escaped (1956).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Buiohe3wXLs&ab_channel=MisonRemplat
Slices of Life (1985), full film
Goodbye Emmanuelle (1977), side one of the album

Goodbye Emmanuelle (1977) features a reggae-inspired soundtrack by Serge Gainsbourg.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hxnfBJ5Hbk&ab_channel=RichardTissot
“Paris sera toujours Paris” segment from  Slices of Life (1985)

His sketch film Slices of Life (1985) is a bit silly but features the prescient and good-hearted “Paris sera toujours Paris” which is an illustration of the Great Replacement theory.

RIP Michel Robin (1930 – 2020)

In France, the actor Michel Robin died. He turned 90. He played in more than 120 films. Always bit parts. You can recognize him by his bald head and the banal characters he usually had to portray.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=961gPGA8b-M&t=3724s&ab_channel=EduCaribe
Mais ne nous délivrez pas du mal (1971)

Favorites are Mais ne nous délivrez pas du mal (1971), a film about two beautiful adolescent girls who start indulging in a satanic love for evil. Robin plays the simple gardener whose parakeet is killed by the diabolic duo.

There is L’Invitation (1973) in which Robin plays a simple and clumsy office worker who, after inheriting a fortune, invites his colleagues to his new estate. There, those good bourgeois men and women are intoxicated by a spiked drink at the hands of a rogue bartender. The situation escalates. Cult movie.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTB5_eNhOZw&ab_channel=MalcolmTeodoro
 Marquis (1989)

And then there is the genius animal head puppet film Marquis (1989) in which Robin voices a certain Ambert, a rat prison guard who is eager to be sodomized by the Marquis de Sade, something Colin, the living and talking phallus of the Marquis does not wish to indulge in.

“Paris sleeps in the arms of the Seine”

Following the death of Juliette Gréco, I watched the 1951 French film Sous le ciel de Paris by Julien Duvivier.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sh_WUKD6lYs&ab_channel=ClassicMoviesMemoriesFrench
 Sous le ciel de Paris 

It’s undervalued film. It begins with an exhilarating fly-over of Paris by night, topped with a voice-over mentioning all these souls in the city for which fate has a thing or two in store.

The ensuing action takes place over a period of 24 hours while many of the participants lives intermingle, making it an early example of hyperlink cinema.

RIP Juliette Gréco (1927 – 2020)

Juliette Gréco was a French actress and singer. 

She first appeared on my radar in 2010 in the Gainsbourg movie Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life where she is played by Anna Mouglalis.

The scene from Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life in which Gainsbourg meets Gréco and plays for her “La Javanaise”.

Below the song “L’Accordéon” (1962) in which she plays her own black-clad body as an instrument. Very French and sensual.

While cycling to work, it dawned upon me that “L’Accordéon” reminded me of the Mary Poppins song “Chim Chim Cher-ee” (1964).

RIP Michael Lonsdale (1931 – 2020)

Michael Lonsdale was a British-French actor who mainly worked in France, one of my favorite actors. He played in many films, though rarely as the protagonist. He turned 89.

Final scene from the French 1976 ‘Bartleby’ adaptation

In the English-speaking world, he was known for his role as the villain Hugo Drax in the James Bond film Moonraker, and for his appearances in The Day of the Jackal and The Remains of the Day.

As a character actor with a penetrating gaze, he can be admired in auteur films such as Le fantôme de la liberté (1974) by Luis Buñuel, Glissements progressifs du plaisir (1974) by Alain Robbe-Grillet and the unforgettable 5×2 (2004) by François Ozon.

I would like to take this rather sinister opportunity to highlight the story “Bartleby” (1853) by Herman “Moby Dick” Melville. That short story was adapted for film four times, and in the 1976 French version, Lonsdale plays the bailiff.

The hero in “Bartleby” is called Bartleby. He is a clerk who is recruited at a law firm to copy documents, but soon after his arrival at the firm refuses an assignment with the legendary words “I would prefer not to”. From then on, Bartleby the clerk basically refuses everything, which means that he refuses to live.

This hero is reminiscent of other impossible, frustrated novel characters such as the nameless hero in Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground (1864) and Julien Sorel in Stendhal’s The Red and the Black (1830).

In the clip, Lonsdale visits Bartleby in prison where he urges the latter to make a last effort to live. In vain. We see Bartleby die while standing up.