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Was Melville gay or has there been a critical lens dissecting his work through a queer framework, or was he seeking to insert themes from his namesake because of their arbitrary superficial connection? I personally don't see that theme in his work regarding "coming out" and would be interested to hear more about that specific area of queer subtext you're alluding to- though I absolutely think there's a delicate interest in male bonding, hidden under a cloak of tough, aloof exteriors, which could broadly be recontextualized there I suppose. His work is a bit like an inverted, sterile version of Hawks with a frigid depiction of apparent interpersonal alienation hiding intimacy underneath. I think these films are a nice precursor to Miller's Crossing's restrained study of masculine compassion and how to safely express it, though that film really hits the sweet spot of observational comedy and cynical pathos as an uncomfortably-defined necessity for our cold defenses that I don't think Melville quite does. These films all seem much more interesting as a wider anthropological statement than a specifically queer one.

I can’t remember whether or not he was actually gay, though I believe he was bisexual, but queer readings of his work are incredibly. It’s how I got into him to begin with.

I can definitely see that, because I think queer theory often goes hand in hand with what I'm describing, but I guess I was more interested in the "coming out" specifically- though perhaps I answered my own question if you mean broadly grappling with the conflict of socially-normative exteriors and yearning interiors.

It's been forever since I've seen the reading, but in this film's specific case it was about how doing the robbery has an inevitable sense of being caught and the compulsion to gamble as a sort of safety mechanism against people getting to know you with Bob and the boy as lovers. I actually think Le Samurai works the most easily under this queer lens given its very erotic approach to Delon. I remember joking with friends that it was the hottest porno ever shot with the actor's clothes on.

I suppose that is why I'll have to differ with your, very traditional, conception of these movies as frigid or sterile. They're frigid and sterile under a sort of Francophone, heteronormative lens, but his sort of queer outsider approach like a Jewish Araki creates a warm energy of constant duplicity and the need to show the performance as real. Something like The Red Circle actually would go well with The Tenant or The Shop Around the Corner.

Apologies if I wasn't clear, but I don't see these films as "frigid" or "sterile" in any definitive sense- quite the opposite. As opposed to Hawks, who I prefer for many other reasons, Melville makes you work for it- presenting these interactions through this heteronormative, or just plain normative lens of detached observational objectivity, which helps pronounce the warmth of reciprocity and trust, like a light shining even more beautifully because it's accentuated against a grey sky.

I would have assumed Hawks as the more objective director. Melville paints his films in otherworldly tones and has the actors stylized in a way removed from accident. If anything he’s an impressionist which is one of the most subjective forces on an audience member, what I assume your statement on work is referring to, whereas Hawks’ relaxed form gives us a full range of the characters. Likewise Hawks shooting style fits more easily with the usual language of the objective camera. Hawks always has his films from the camera-human POV, while many Melville shots are too high and too low if they are not directly taken from a character. Melville’s camera is never afforded to be a kinoeye.

All fair points, I've definitely been reflecting on Melville's later work during this conversation which may color my reading, but essentially I see them both as auteurs who establish objective formalism and continually provide windows to let the audience in subjectively in their own unique ways. Melville's process affords less distinctive warmth and through the opportunities for subjectivity (i.e. the cigarette offering in Le Cercle Rouge) we get the same effect of Hawks' observational warmth that wears a different kind of shell in character.

Worth remembering that as with Rossellini, the Young Turks idolized the way Melville’s films were shot and the man himself. He was often called a stepfather of the New Wave, which he cheekily embraced and rebuffed with equal glee, but he was certainly willing to soak up their adulation

therewillbeblus wrote: or was he seeking to insert themes from his namesake because of their arbitrary superficial connection?

I’m pretty sure Melville was not his birth name and he deliberately took it from the writer. Tho’ I can’t say I’ve ever heard it used as evidence of queer themes in work before.

Grumbach was his birth name. But apparently he took the name Melville (during the war years) because of his particular fondness for Pierre, or the Ambiguities.

Rayon Vert wrote:Grumbach was his birth name. But apparently he took the name Melville (during the war years) because of his particular fondness for Pierre, or the Ambiguities.

Pierre? Really? That’s the worst novel ever written by a major novelist. Maybe it reads better in French.

So it says in the Antoine de Baeque biography. I wasn't aware it had such an awful reputation - isn't it an example of the late flowering of the Romantic hero? I remember liking it for such reasons at age 21 or so, but couldn't vouch for it now.

Rayon Vert wrote: Fri Jan 01, 2021 4:21 pm So it says in the Antoine de Baeque biography. I wasn't aware it had such an awful reputation - isn't it an example of the late flowering of the Romantic hero? I remember liking it for such reasons at age 21 or so, but couldn't vouch for it now.

Well there must be something in it to get Carax's attention.

I just saw Bunuel’s El; what a magnificent film, and a downright terrifying yet coyly well observed central performance by Arturo de Córdova. I also saw Los Olvidados and The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz this week, loved the former and liked the latter, but this is frankly perhaps my favorite of his narrative films I’ve seen thus far.

barryconvex wrote: Fri Jan 17, 2020 8:07 am Une Simple Histoire (Marcel Hanoun 1959)

Hanoun has pulled off a remarkable experiment in sound design here, overlapping the mother's third person narration onto her dialog as it's being spoken in the first person as well as with the street sounds and other background and ambient noises. It's a brilliant decision with Bezançon's flat, monotone delivery giving the effect the feeling of an out of body call from the outer reaches of limbo being placed to the corporeal realms- that is if the gray and crepuscular Paris that Hanoun shows here qualifies as such. Everyone in this film lives a meager existence with enough for the bare necessities and nothing more. There are no diversions and little comfort for any of the people who inhabit this cheerless vision of Paris and it's a key part of its greatness. This has a definite chance to make my list.

Well said. The soundtrack has a particular rhythm and layered design which is difficult to pull off, effectively combining the materialist stylization of Bresson and the voiceover mandate for films of this budget (I guess we could compare it to Duras in its short, simple sentences and the hypnotic lack of affect you mention).

I loved this film. It has the brute poetry of an illustrated ledger, as we watch exactly how time and money get chipped away while Bezançon looks for work, like water swirling slowly down a drain. It's a testament to Hanoun's visual precision and Bezançon's performance that the film comes alive as much as it does, when the artificiality of the shoestring production is far from hidden (the harsh, single light casting stark shadows on the wall behind the actor in her close-ups). Indeed, despite my awareness of Hanoun's resourceful craft, I found myself appreciating the "documentary" quality of the clearly-not-documentary everyday details and random encounters that crop up throughout the film! This is the movie that actually fits the hyperbolic descriptions of what's called Italian neo-realism, since instead of just grounding his melodrama in quotidian working-class life, Hanoun strips away all conventions of melodrama, characterization, and narrative structure, giving us nothing but the material details of someone struggling and sketching, obliquely, their mindset, as the film's repetitions and voiceover reveal her obsessive accounting and quiet responses to desperate circumstances. Despite comparisons, this is not Bresson or Straub-Huillet; the formal experiment doesn't come from a theory, and Hanoun could not conscientiously use this style for other films. Instead, it comes from a way of life. She has no time for narrative, she's looking for a job.

domino harvey wrote: Sun Jan 26, 2020 2:46 am I just pulled it off the shelf and he does (entry 76 in Godard on Godard). He calls it an amateur film but then lauds a lot of sideways praise on it in a way that could possibly be sarcastic depending on how one reads it (very "Brutus is an honorable man"-ish) -- as mizo says, Godard gave this one star in the Conseil, and if I didn't know that, I'd think his writeup was a rave. I might try to dig up the original French review later-- after doing a little translating of Godard myself, I've been pretty disappointed with Milne's highly literal translations that make Godard seem more obtuse than he already is (and Godard doesn't need any help in that department), and this may be a case of the translator missing the point... or Godard is really, really tough in his rating rubric!

Worth noting that no one really seemed into the Hanoun film at Cahiers: two stars from Doniol-Valcroze, Rivette, Rohmer, and Sadoul, and one star from Moullet (and Godard)

EDIT: Nevermind on my giving it a go, as it appeared in Arts, not Cahiers, so I don't have access to the original French. Milne's notes on the review make it clear he takes Godard's words at face value (ie as praise)

I just re-read Godard's piece in the original and I also take it as strong praise. I even think him calling it an amateur film has a positive rather than negative connotation, given that his tastes in those years were sympathetic to unorthodox, low-budget French films like this (Varda's shorts, Moi, un noir), which makes sense given what him and his peers were doing/about to do. The praise is a little defensive here and there—toward the end he says something like "you might not like this film and you might be right"—but I'd place my bets on someone or something changing his mind between the Arts review and the Cahiers rating.

Anatole Litvak's The Deep Blue Sea, starring Vivien Leigh and at present only available in a heavily cropped and heinous-looking VHS rip, will screen on UK television next month, specifically on Talking Pictures TV on Sunday, November 3rd, 6:05 PM

Never Cursed wrote: Tue Oct 22, 2024 11:09 pm Anatole Litvak's The Deep Blue Sea, starring Vivien Leigh and at present only available in a heavily cropped and heinous-looking VHS rip, will screen on UK television next month, specifically on Talking Pictures TV on Sunday, November 3rd, 6:05 PM

Nice! If you put in a request for someone to rip and share it on back channels, let me know and I’ll donate to a pot

Any sign of The Deep Blue Sea on backchannels?

Yep, it was captured and shared

The Long Memory (Robert Hamer, 1953)

Unknown to me before seeing, but this is one of Hamer's later films (he of King Hearts and Coronets): it's small scale, but memorable. John Mills is framed for a murder by the woman he loves and then, after languishing in prison for 12 years, is released and he heads back to the Kent marshes to settle some scores. The film looks phenomenal: high contrast black and white, shot by Harry Waxman, capturing the bleak poetry of the marshes, with an immense, lowering sky overhead. The film has the quality of some of Bill Brandt's photographs - grainy, detailed, harsh, but evocative. Unfortunately, the film doesn't really live up to its plastic qualities (as the Cahiers crew would say). Mills is not terribly convincing as a tough ex-lag, but he' still better than the stiff performances from everyone else, who all seem too proper to be dashing around the working class environs of London or Kent. The narrative is pretty predictable, with an ethical conundrum (should the woman who framed Mills to protect her aged father come clean?) too easily resolved. Indeed, while the final images of Mills writhing in the mud are tremendous, it ends up with a pat restoration of the bourgeoise order. So nothing terribly subversive in the end, but worth seeing for its sheer beauty.