Agenda

EN

Where troubles melt like lemon drops

Away above the chimney tops

That’s where you'll find me

Somewhere, over the rainbow

“I thought it was real.”

Derek Jarman

“Ever since The Wizard of Oz I’ve been accused of being twelve years old. You should see some of the disappointed looks I get, when people lay eyes on me in person. They expect someone in gingham, with braids, to come out singing ‘Over the Rainbow’. And out I come, instead. I think some of them are pretty angry with me, too, for not wearing braids, and not dressing like Dorothy, and not being eleven or twelve. They’ve written in about it.”

Judy Garland

“If The Wizard of Oz began in one way and continued in another, that was also the history of the production. Richard Thorpe, the original director, was fired after 12 days. George Cukor filled in for three days, long enough to tell Judy Garland to lose the wig and the makeup, and then Victor Fleming took over. When Fleming went to Gone With the Wind (1939), King Vidor did some of the Munchkin sequences, and the Kansas scenes. There were cast changes, too; after Buddy Ebsen, as the Tin Man, had an allergic reaction to the silvery makeup, he was replaced by Jack Haley. Musical numbers were recorded and never used. Margaret Hamilton (the Wicked Witch of the West) was seriously burned when she went up in a puff of smoke. Even Toto was out of commission for two weeks after being stepped on by a crewmember.

We study all of these details, I think, because The Wizard of Oz fills such a large space in our imagination. It somehow seems real and important in a way most movies don't. Is that because we see it first when we’re young? Or simply because it is a wonderful movie? Or because it sounds some buried universal note, some archetype or deeply felt myth? I lean toward the third possibility, that the elements in The Wizard of Oz powerfully fill a void that exists inside many children. For kids of a certain age, home is everything, the center of the world. But over the rainbow, dimly guessed at, is the wide earth, fascinating and terrifying. There is a deep fundamental fear that events might conspire to transport the child from the safety of home and strand him far away in a strange land. And what would he hope to find there? Why, new friends, to advise and protect him. And Toto, of course, because children have such a strong symbiotic relationship with their pets that they assume they would get lost together.”

Roger Ebert1

“The film begins. We are in the monochrome, ‘real’ world of Kansas. A girl and her dog run down a country lane. ‘She isn’t coming yet, Toto. Did she hurt you? She tried to, didn’t she?’ A real girl, a real dog, and the beginning, with the very first line of dialogue, of real drama. Kansas, however, is not real–no more real than Oz. Kansas is a pastel. Dorothy and Toto have been running down a short stretch of ‘road’ in the M-G-M studios, and this shot has been matted into a picture of emptiness. ‘Real’ emptiness would probably not be empty enough. This Kansas is as close as makes no difference to the universal gray of Frank Baum’s story, the void broken only by a couple of fences and the vertical lines of telegraph poles. If Oz is nowhere, then the studio setting of the Kansas scenes suggests that so is Kansas. [...] Anybody who has swallowed the scriptwriters’ notion that this is a film about the superiority of ‘home’ over ‘away’, that the ‘moral’ of The Wizard of Oz is as sentimental as an embroidered sampler – ‘East, West, Home’s Best’–would do well to listen to the yearning in Judy Garland’s voice as her face tilts up toward the skies. What she expresses here, what she embodies with the purity of an archetype, is the human dream of leaving – a dream at least as powerful as its countervailing dream of roots. At the heart of The Wizard of Oz is a great tension between these two dreams; but, as the music swells and that big, clean voice flies into the anguished longings of the song, can anyone doubt which message is the stronger? In its most potent emotional moment, this is inarguably a film about the joys of going away, of leaving the grayness and entering the color, of making a new life in the ‘place where you won’t get into any trouble.’ ‘Over the Rainbow’ is, or ought to be, the anthem of all the world’s migrants, all those who go in search of the place where ‘the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true.’ It is a celebration of Escape, a grand paean to the Uprooted Self, a hymn – the hymn – to Elsewhere.”

Salman Rushdie2

• 1Roger Ebert, “The Wizard of Oz,” 22 December 1996.
• 2Salman Rushdie, “Out of Kansas,” The New Yorker, 4 May 1992.

EN

“The film moves confidently through its opening sequences, establishing its characters and locale with energy and zest. Coppola frequently frames moments as if taking a still photograph, aiding the film’s air of suffocating memory: a mother washing dishes, the assorted clutter of a young girl’s bedroom, or a boy locked in the lonely late-night world inside his headphones. Explosions of energy – the dance, Trip’s stoner-elegant swagger to the spacy wail of ‘Magic Man’ – and a sly, off-balance sense of humour keep the film feeling brisk even as it delves deeper into a world of silent hysteria.”

Mark Olsen1

“The Lisbon girls function as the catalyst for these dreams and come to represent a lost, halcyon past. While the film abounds with entrancing and mesmeric images, a careful reading of these sequences reveals their predication on a host of clichés and acts of wilful reinterpretation. At its most beguiling, the film betrays its own narrative. As the boys/men desperately attempt to relive, recapture, retell and make sense of the Lisbon girls’ tragedy (to render it meaningful), Coppola’s lyrical and metaphorical images exceed the immediate function of representation and elude the grasp of understanding. In other words, the film works on a formal level to unravel the task of making meaning that is set in place by its narrative. Here, the image is used and revealed precisely as a cliché, as Gilles Deleuze (2005) characterises it.”

Anna Rogers2

"At the outset of the film, the boys are seen sitting on the pavement opposite the Lisbons’ home watching the girls get out of the family car; in this sequence, they are akin to the cinematic viewer who is placed in front of a phantasmagorical projection and whose movement is limited. The analogy with a shifting, virtual world is made stronger when the girls’ figures are freeze-framed with their names superimposed onto the frame in an adolescent scrawl. Whilst this short sequence promotes the idea that the girls are merely fantastic images of the boys’ imaginations (images that they create and control and are thus, inherently erroneous), it also is representative of Laura Mulvey’s famous characterisation of the passive female on film who stultifies narrative continuity: ‘(t)he presence of a woman is an indispensable element of spectacle in normal narrative film, yet her visual presence tends to work against the development of the story-line, to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation.’ Interestingly, although it is the female figure who is described as passive by Mulvey, in The Virgin Suicides it is the boys who feel the effect of this incapacitation."

Anna Rogers3

“‘Paramount Classics didn’t really know what to do with it,’ Coppola explained, reflecting on the film in 2018. ‘They were afraid that girls were going to commit suicide if they saw it.’ It’s interesting that this was the studio’s big takeaway – that young women might mimic what they saw, rather than feel understood by it – and hints at the same moral panic within the film.”

Hannah Strong4

• 1Mark Olsen, “The Virgin Suicides reviewed in 2000,” BFI, 20 July 2023. Originally published in the June 2000 issue of Sight and Sound.
• 2Anna Rogers, “Imaging Absence as Abjection: The Female Body in Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides,” Screening the Past, 19 February 2018.
• 3Anna Rogers, “Coppola, Sofia,” Senses of Cinema, Issue 45, 2007.
• 4Hannah Strong, Sofia Coppola: Forever Young (Abrams, 2022), 54.

EN

“Allowing a victimised child to be less than wholly sympathetic – in ways that only a real-life child could ever be – Truffaut consolidates The 400 Blows as an act of rebellion. It is not just Antoine who is a rebel, or Truffaut on whose early life the film is based. The film, in its conception and mise en scène, constituted an all-out rebellion against the established tenets of French cinema. As a young critic for Arts and Cahiers du cinéma, Truffaut had railed savagely against films in the ‘Tradition of Quality’ – those glacially elegant literary adaptations that dominated French production in the ’40s and ’50s. His most brutal and notorious review had been of Chiens perdus sans collier (Jean Delannoy, 1955), which had tackled the problem of delinquent minors: ‘Chiens perdus sans collier is not a failure. It is a crime, perpetrated according to certain rules… [and] set to images by a man who lacks the intelligence to be a cynic, who is too corrupt to be sincere, too pretentious and solemn to be simple, Jean Delannoy.’ This particular piece of journalism had earned Truffaut a solicitor’s letter from the director – one of the most prominent and successful figures in the French cinema of the day. Never a man to grovel or eat his words, Truffaut further ridiculed the film in his 1957 short Les Mistons. Spotting a poster that advertises Chiens perdus sans collier, the anarchic and half-wild urchins of the title gleefully tear it from the wall.”

David Melville1

Anne Gillain and Dudley Andrew: The consensus about Truffaut is that he makes films of the past in the present because of his autobiographical inspirations. It starts with Les 400 coups, of course.

Arnaud Desplechin: Autobiography is certainly part of it, but the film mixes in Hitchcock’s life as well! The famous story of Hitchcock’s father bringing his son to the police ­station when Hitch was five. … That’s what strikes me at the beginning of the scene in Les 400 coups, when the father takes his own son to jail. We see angels rotating in two large store windows because it’s Christmas time. It’s like a sort of odd fairy tale, because of these department store windows. So is it a fairy tale or not? I love the father’s character, how nice he is. There’s nothing really mean about him. Truffaut must have asked himself: so how can I tell this story without being judgmental about my characters? If there’s something awful, it’s just because of the plot, because what’s happening to the young boy is awful; but there is no general evil, certainly not in this man who is really lost, though he’s sure he is doing the right thing. So it’s not just a mean father putting his son in jail. Sure there is Truffaut’s personal involvement since he is using part of his life, but there is also a strong cinephilic commitment because he’s doing it à la Hitchcock. After that opening the jail scene becomes so simple, just a documentary … plus.

Dudley Andrew and Anne Gillain in conversation with Arnaud Desplechin2

“François Truffaut’s life has always been a fertile source for his cinema, an original material, a sort of fictional treasure, the common thread that linked the high points of his life. From Les quatre cents coups, the filmmaker is undeniably the child of his oeuvre, inventing the story of his origin through the character of Antoine Doinel, who is both himself and already another, since this child of cinema belonged to everyone from the outset. And his work was also the product of his childhood, not to say the child of his childhood. In this regard, Claude Chabrol states a simple truth: “François’s youth was more interesting than that of others. If I had told the story of my youth, I wouldn’t have made more than two films!””

Antoine de Baecque and Serge Toubiana3

Jean-Pierre Léaud's Audition for Les quatre cents coups

Jean-Pierre Léaud at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival for Les quatre cents coups

• 1David Melville, “Children of the Revolution – Truffaut and Les quatre cents coups,” Senses of Cinema, July 2014.
• 2Dudley Andrew and Anne Gillain, A Companion to François Truffaut (Chichester: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2013).
• 3Antoine de Baecque et Serge Toubiana, François Truffaut (Paris: Gallimard, 1996) [translation by  Sabzian].

EN

“It gives us brutally candid images of operations on the eye, the brain and the penis, and takes us into the surreal, microsurgical inner-space of the body: you might find yourself thinking of the 60s sci-fi classic Fantastic Voyage with Raquel Welch and other miniaturised adventurers journeying through the body’s macrocosmos. The title is taken from Andreas Vesalius’s classic anatomical study of 1543, revolutionary in its day for its fiercely rationalist, materialist emphasis on examining what the body really is, but with bizarre, nonrational illustrations of animated corpses appearing to open themselves up, like Jesus and the sacred heart.”

Peter Bradshaw1

“The film needs some breathing moments. But we understood that the hospital works as a body too: it has its own arteries that patients go through and where doctors walk, and a kind of circulatory system made of those sci-fi-looking tubes that transport organs, biopsies, and blood tests around the hospital. So at some point it made sense to include other aspects of the hospital – there are so many inhabitants in and around hospitals that contribute to this movement: homeless people, drug dealers, prostitutes, security guards, people just passing through.”

Véréna Paravel2

• 1Peter Bradshaw, “De Humani Corporis Fabrica review – gruesome surgery film gets under the skin,” The Guardian, May 2023.
• 2Jordan Cronk, “Under the Skin: Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel Discuss ‘De Humani Corporis Fabrica’,” Notebook, July 2022.

EN

“There was arguably no greater aspect of Chinese society where these shifting perspectives were more pronounced than concerning the role of women. Historically, Chinese society had operated on a conservative model of gender roles in which a woman’s ostensible purpose was to strive to be a “virtuous wife and good mother” (贤妻良母) – A model that was effectively continued under China’s Nationalist government which promoted the virtues of marital monogamy and child rearing while cracking down on vices like prostitution and gambling.

Many of the creative voices working within China’s film industry, however, saw another story: One in which education and moral character were more important to good citizenship than tradition for tradition’s sake. Filmmakers like Sun Yu, Wu Yonggang, and Cai Chusheng began to incorporate these ideas directly into their work, crafting female-centric stories that expanded beyond archetypal gender roles and instead focused on the woman workers, artists, farmers, athletes, soldiers, warriors, wives, and mothers who were as integral to modern society as their male counterparts. China’s leftist cinema movement ultimately helped revolutionize the role of women in Chinese society, reinforcing the government’s obligations towards gender equality that, within a few short decades, would culminate in Mao Zedong’s famous 1968 pronouncement that, ‘Women hold up half the sky.’”

Spectacle Collective1

“It is impossible to discuss the film without reference to Ruan Lingyu’s suicide, a horrific case of life imitating art which occurred shortly after the release of the film. (Ruan’s final film, 國風  [National Customs or National Style], was released posthumously). Already a target of the Chinese gossip press and under a great deal of strain in her personal life, Ruan Lingyu was harrassed relentlessly by media in the wake of the film’s release, who were extremely displeased with their negative portrayal therein (and had in fact already forced extensive cuts to the film). These mounting burdens led her to take an overdose of barbiturates; like her fictional counterpart Wei Ming, the pressures around Ruan Lingyu consumed her. Even then, she might have survived, had her partner not stalled for hours before taking her to hospital, for fear of bad publicity.  One of her suicide notes reportedly contained a line that read, ‘Gossip is a fearful thing’. She was only 24.”

Silents, Please!2

• 1Spectacle Collective, “Half the Sky: Modern Women in Classic Chinese Cinemas,” Spectacle Theater, Brooklyn.
• 2Silents, Please!, “‘Gossip is a fearful thing’: Ruan Lingyu’s 新女性 | New Women (CN 1935),” August 2015.