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DVD L'Argent
Robert Bresson always claimed his films are about hope and redemption, but so many end in death or suicide that it's a struggle to reconcile the statement with his films. His final film, based on Leo Tolstoy's story The Counterfeit Note, is no different. It's the harrowing tale of an innocent man, Yvon (Christian Patey), whose victimization at the hands of an arrogant upper-class delinquent and a greedy shop owner sends him on a downward spiral into a life of crime. The once-happy husband and father turns bitter, angry, self-pitying, and ultimately coldly brutal in the chilling conclusion. It's Bresson's most expansive film and biggest canvas, weaving the paths of numerous characters across Yvon's journey, but he edits with jackrabbit jumps, running headlong through the story with a painful feeling of inevitability. On its simplest level, Yvon's story is an elaborate chain of cause and effect, the ripples of a selfish act resulting in the fall of a proud man and the destruction of his soul, and Bresson presents every link in that chain with precise, cold clarity. There is little hope evidenced in L'Argent, but there is powerful sense of loss and sadness in this portrait of a society so obsessed with money that it loses its humanity. --Sean Axmaker
Bresson has made some unparallelled films over a great part of the twentieth century. 'Balthasar' and 'Diary of A Country Priest', are right up there with my all time favourites. Friends try to convince me that 'Lancelot'(his excurison into colour) and,'L'Argent' are classics too. I can't agree. The narrative here is quite simple and the morality, so stripped back that it it feels like a Sunday School lesson.Even in 'Lancelot', where the acting was bereft of emoting, there was some degree of intimacy, that facilitated connections for me. Here, the characters are rendered as automatons, which is clearly part of Bresson's intention, but makes for some unreal, de-animated cause and effect. Interersting tale, artful photography, a bleak and discomforting fable. I wouldn't race out to catch this one, nor judge his contributions to cinema on the strength of it. He is undoubtedly in the Bunuel,Bergman, Dreyer, Tarkovsky,Kurosowa league.
Bresson's return to greatness
L'argent is not only the last film of Robert Bresson, it is also one of his greatest achievements. Especially when compared to some of his efforts of the 70's (like 'Lancelot of the Lake) this film shows a return to the genius that one associates with the director of 'Diary of a Country Priest', 'a man escaped', 'Au Hazard Balthazar', etc. The film brilliantly illustrates how one negative event leads to a succession of other events, gradually leading to the greatest of human folly. This pescimistic look at human nature, while it turns some people off, shows a realistic and yet stylized view of life - it is the cycle of Karma (one could say). Bresson emphasizes the smallest details in his films - and turns us on to the very essence of experience.
The last Opus of the greatest director of the Century!
A Dostoievskian fable that show us the inexorable moral degradation of a man condemned despite he is innocent. A resonant triumph a film that demands from us all the attention. A rue slap in the face and the soul of the mankind. A movie who invites to think and rethink about the short stature we have grown up in which ethic conscious concerns and the notable abyss between our technological advances and spiritual achievements
The handicap -pitifully- is negative.
Jean-Luc Godard and Luis Buñuel enjoyed an ardent misanthropic duel in the '60s and '70s, but who won is anyone's call. Godard's Weekend lays down the trump in a harrowing and darkly funny allegory in which social mores fray along political lines. Played out in a metafilm in which characters question their own reality, a morally bankrupt Parisian couple tries to leave the city on a much-loathed country holiday with the wife's parents. Along the way, endless traffic jams, sudden violence, and vistas of gory car crashes underscore their corrupted values. Their lethal encounter with the in-laws and kidnap by an anarchic band of radical cannibals finds the couple--and presumably "decent" society with them--reverting to a nasty primitivism. The idea is of course that the bored,... More Info about this DVD Director(s): Jean-Luc Godard DVD Release Date: Released the 23 August 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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"This story is true," reads the opening statement of A Man Escaped. "I give it as it is, without embellishment." Based on the memoir by Andre Devigny, a member of the French Resistance imprisoned and sentenced to death by the Gestapo during the German occupation, Bresson (himself at one time a German POW) transforms Devigny's daring escape into an ascetic film of documentary detail. Kept in a tiny stone cell with a high window and a thick wooden door, the prisoner (renamed Fontaine in the film) makes himself intimate with his world--every surface of his room, every sound reverberating through the hall, and every detail of the prison's layout that he can absorb in brief sojourns from his cell. Bresson magnifies every detail with insistent close-ups and detailed examinations of... More Info about this DVD Director(s): Robert Bresson DVD Release Date: Released the 25 May 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Un Chien Andalou remains a startling artifact suggesting ways in which film can express the subconscious. The result of Luis Bunuel's collaboration with Salvador Dali, the 17-minute, 1929 film was designed expressly to shock and provoke. Opening with the canonical eyeball-slashing sequence and divided into baffling "chapters", this is a work of art obsessed with religion, lust, decay, violence, and death. Un Chien Andalou isn't simply one of the great works of the surrealist movement, but a segment of cinematic DNA that irrevocably altered the aesthetics of film. In its tangled corridors you find the seeds to the disappearing-mouth bit in The Matrix, the carcasses strewn through Peter Greenaway's A Zed and Two Noughts and pretty much the entire oeuvre of David... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Simone Mareuil - Pierre Batcheff Director(s): Luis Buñuel DVD Release Date: Released the 28 December 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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This silky smooth film noir pits gruff police detective Dana Andrews, stiff and blunt in his street-bred manners, against a cultured columnist and acidic wit (Clifton Webb at his prissiest) in a battle of wits during a murder investigation. The cop is a romantic hiding under a hard-boiled exterior who falls in love with the beautiful victim through the portrait that hangs in her apartment. Gene Tierney, whose heart-shaped face mixes the exotic with the girl next door, brings the poise and calm of a model to her role as the object of every man's gaze and the target of a killer. Laura, handsomely shot in dreamy black and white, is the first and best of Otto Preminger's cool, controlled murder mysteries. In the gritty world of film noir it remains the most refined and elegant example... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Gene Tierney - Dana Andrews Director(s): Rouben Mamoulian - Otto Preminger DVD Release Date: Released the 15 March 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Before becoming the poster child for the extreme arty, slow paced foreign films of the '60s, Michealanglo Antonioni actually developed his craft on very straightforward, neo-realistic films. Story of a Love Affair (1950) was Antonioni's first feature-length dramatic film, and much to his critics' chagrin, it is extremely linear, it has limited drawn out, "real time" shots, and his actors actually project more emotion than the typical "Antonioni apathy." Enrico (Ferdinando Sarmi) is an extremely wealthy and jealous husband who suspects his young, beautiful bride, Paola (Lucia Bosé), is unfaithful. Instead of confronting her directly, he hires a private detective (Gino Rossi) to investigate her past. While checking up on the mysterious death of Paola's friend, the private... More Info about this DVD Director(s): Michelangelo Antonioni DVD Release Date: Released the 28 June 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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