Superfluities Redux
A Theatre Surrounds a City:
Vienna's Burgtheater
Superfluities Redux |
A Theatre Surrounds a City: |
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Home > Film Wednesday, 24 February 2010 The last reel: Rules of the GameA complete failure when first released in 1939, Jean Renoir's Rules of the Game has triumphantly emerged as one of the classics of cinema. Set sometime between two European wars, it chronicles the decline of a class system that Renoir defines as a game of masquerade and mistaken identity — but a game with fatal consequences. The plot is not easy to summarize, and I won't try here. It is enough
to know that the farce and romantic comedy of the first reels is brought
to a disturbing halt in the last. In these final few minutes, Octave
(Renoir himself) and Christine (Nora Gregor), childhood friends, are
making plans to run away together, Christine from her husband Robert de la
Cheyniest (Marcel Dalio, who 30 years later would appear as the Old Man
in Catch-22; see him in the clip at the bottom of this post). At the last moment, Octave bows out to
allow the
passionate transatlantic aviator André Jurieu (Roland Toutain) to
take his place, leading
to a murder hard to describe as either accidental or deliberate. In the
aftermath, Octave, a self- This is the final entry in this series. I'd been hoping to include the conclusion of L'Avventura, but the clips available are of such low quality that it would be a crime (especially for a film as visually stunning as Antonioni's) to include them here. And somewhat ironic that this is the case. Certainly YouTube and the Internet have permitted the mass distribution of these clips to thousands of people who might otherwise never see them. But it comes at a cost. Each of the films I've discussed in this series was designed and photographed for the big screen; since their premieres, the screens have gotten smaller, until one is left with the standardized 425x344 pixels of the embedded YouTube player. What's more, despite the restoration efforts that have led to these films being released on DVD (all of them are available from Criterion in excellent editions), the quality of the films on the Internet is bleak: sound drops out, grays are poorly rendered. Perhaps this is what happens to our cultural inheritance in the Internet age. Posted in /Film Home > Film Tuesday, 23 February 2010 The last reel: MFritz Lang's 1931 M is one of the great films of the early
sound era. It tells the story of a hunt for a child- Posted in /Film Home > Film Monday, 22 February 2010 The last reel: FacesJohn Cassavetes' grueling 1968 masterpiece Faces takes place
over about 18 hours in the life of an upper- The final reel takes place during a morning after a night in which both husband and wife have pursued adulterous affairs and the wife, in the immediate aftermath of hers, has taken an overdose of sleeping pills, only to be revived by the male prostitute who serviced her the night before. The film ends in the silence of recognition. In this last reel, Seymour Cassel is Chet, the gigolo; Lynn Carlin plays Maria Forst; and John Marley (who a few years later would play the film producer Jack Woltz in The Godfather) is Richard Forst: Posted in /Film
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