As part of a program of films that influenced Paul Thomas Anderson, De Cinema screens Jean-Pierre Melville’s Bob le flambeur. From the immediate postwar period to the early 1970s, Melville created a body of work with extraordinary cerebral cohesion and formal inventiveness, in which solitary men wander in dark worlds. Melville’s first polar (crime thriller) would help mark the transition from classical French cinema to the Nouvelle Vague. Éric Rohmer wrote: “I stand by it and sign it: it is an exceptional film that must be studied at length to see the mystery of cinema.”
In March 1969, Michael Snow proposed a new film to the Canadian Film Development Corporation: “I would like to make a three-hour film ‘orchestrating’ all the possibilities of camera movement and the various relationships between it and what is being photographed. The movement can be an imperceptible part of the activity, can accent it, can counterpoint or contradict it and be independent from it.” The result, La région centrale, is regarded today as one of the most radical works in the history of experimental cinema; a film that dismantles cinematic certainties such as the human perspective, narrative, montage, and even the very idea of “looking.” Snow designed a computer-controlled apparatus that allowed the camera to move autonomously in all directions. Lasting approximately three hours, the films consists of a single location: a remote, rocky landscape in Québec, with no human presence ever appearing on screen. Part of Michelangelo Frammartino’s carte blanche, the film screens this Thursday at CINEMATEK.
Also part of a carte blanche – this time by Spanish filmmaker Albert Serra – Luis Buñuel’s landmark work Los olvidados will be screened on Saturday afternoon at Bozar. Made in Mexico, where Buñuel was living in exile after the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War, the film marked a radical departure from his earlier commercial work. Initially harshly criticized for its “anti-Mexican” depiction of poverty and juvenile delinquency, Los olvidados follows street children in the slums of Mexico City. It portrays a vicious cycle of violence and exclusion without romanticization or redemption, refusing clear moral judgments. As André Bazin wrote, “these children are beautiful not because they do good or evil, but because they are children even in crime and even in death.”
