This weekend's lineup:
Alphaville (David) & Fahrenheit 451 (Alan)
Contempt (Jahmile) & Day for Night (Swapnil)
Jules et Jim (Krystal) & Masculine/Feminine (Yuki)
Difficult, exhilarating, exasperating, challenging films: both directors want to enrapture and enrage us (sometimes both emotions arise at the same time). Try your best to decipher what these films are about, then juxtapose them; they both have had an immense influence on all filmmakers who have followed, up to the present day.
Oh yeah, addendum: someone asked me what my favorite films are by these directors. A terribly hard question, but here goes (as a provisional response):
Truffaut's Love on the Run (one of the Antoine Doinel films, and in my opinion, the most moving of them all)
Godard's Two or Three Things I Know About Her (which features a mesmerizing sequence where the camera observes the foam slowly vanishing on a cup of espresso in extreme close-up, while the narrator whispers his reflections on the erratic natures of love and the universe in voice-over). Alphaville runs a close second, though.
3 comments:
Random note on your favorite Godard film: Although I have never seen "Two or Three Things I Know About Her," I remember reading about the foam in a cup sequence in the introduction of "The Story of Film." It was pointing out how directors learn from one another and it used this particular sequence as an example. The first time this was seen was in Odd Man Out (1946) where a character sees his experiences in the bubbles of his drink. This scene was said to influence the scene that you mentioned in Godard's film, which later inspired a similar sequence in Taxi Driver (1976). Just a thought on the adaptation of stylistic ideas from page 10. ;)
But I'm sure you already knew that haha.
You could say that Godard and Welles have had so much influence on all the filmmakers who have followed, that I'd challenge anyone in the class to show a film that *doesn't* in some way reference their work. That's how powerfully these artists have changed their chosen medium!
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