Friday, January 29, 2016

Céline et Julie vont en Bateau

Jacques Rivette, Paris 1974





Given that he died this morning I figured the best representative for his work would be his most beloved film, though primarily because it is of course a kind of ghost story; and one which serves as a grand metaphor for the art to which he devoted so much of his life.















Sunday, January 24, 2016

Detour

Edgar G Ulmer, Los Angeles, 1945, with Tom Neal and Ann Savage


Ulmer’s masterpiece is just a little over an hour long, but it packs quite a lot into that relatively short running time.  It shows and tells of an itinerant Jazz musician, from New York City, who inadvertently kills two people on his way to see his girlfriend in Los Angeles: a bookie who picks him up hitchhiking and a consumptive young woman, whom he in turn picks up.  Through a chain of coincidence and ill luck this musician keeps making the wrong moves and can only end up dreaming of being shoved in the back of a police car, charged with a murder that was really a freak accident.