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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.
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.
