Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Film Rosenbaum! Chuck Stephens! Lancelot du Lac! Belcourt Details Bresson Retro
Posted by Jim Ridley on Tue, Feb 21, 2012 at 5:08 AM
The 21st century's first touring retrospective of Robert Bresson's films is coming to Nashville, and The Belcourt just posted details at its website. Country Life passed along a few of these when word of the retrospective broke last month — but there's more to report.
Apart from the movies, the best news is an accompanying four-part symposium at Belmont United Methodist Church led by critics and scholars in conjunction with the screenings. Returning to Nashville and The Belcourt is Essential Cinema author and esteemed critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, who addressed a full house for the opening weekend of The Belcourt's "Visions of the South" series last year. He'll speak Sunday, April 8 on one of Bresson's masterworks, 1966's Au hasard Balthazar.
Discussing Bresson's last film, the cut-to-the-bone 1981 Tolstoy adaptation L'Argent, will be Chuck Stephens, the widely anthologized Film Comment/Cinema Scope critic who lives in Nashville and now teaches film at Watkins. (His syllabus each semester looks like the marquee in heaven's multiplex.) He'll appear March 25, with March 11's A Man Escaped discussed by Jennifer Fay, director of the film studies program at Vanderbilt; and March 20's Lancelot du Lac analyzed by Lynn Ramey, Vanderbilt associate professor of French and chair of the department of French and Italian.
Lancelot, Bresson's rigorously anti-romantic 1974 depiction of the Arthurian legend, may be the film I'm most excited to see on the big screen. The director peels away the gauzy trappings of courtly love, reducing the rituals of jousting and fighting to bone-jarring, robotic collisions of clanking metal: the participants are dehumanized, until their blood starts to flow. (It's said to have been a direct inspiration for Monty Python and the Holy Grail.) It's one of several films in the series that haven't been shown in Nashville in decades.
A list of all nine films can be found here, with a schedule and symposium details. A pass that includes all nine films and the four symposium lectures is $85. And a round of applause, please, for Belcourt benefactors Scott and Mimi Manzler, who made the series possible.
Comments (12)
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This announcement is third in my Belcourt dream retrospective list. So excited! Now all we need are retrospectives for Frederick Wiseman and Eric Rohmer. What do you say, Toby?
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Did someone say "dream retrospectives" ...
De Palma, Josef von Sternberg, Douglas Sirk, Robert Aldrich, Minnelli, Miyazaki, Ophuls, Preminger, John Alton, Miklos Jancso, Kihachi Okamoto, Claude Chabrol, Robert Mitchum, Valerio Zurlini, "The Gangster as Tragic Hero," Joseph H. Lewis, Robert Siodmak, John Huston, Ray Harryhausen, Arthur Freed, Jack Fisk, Tatsuya Nakadai, John Carpenter, Mitchell Leisen, Murnau ...
I'm just as psyched for Chuck Stephens and L'ARGENT, a movie that makes film noir look like "Hooray for Everything."
@Tony: They're giving you a taste, anyway — this weekend the theater's starting Wiseman's CRAZY HORSE. We'll have the trailer up tomorrow with a link to the Scene review. From what we hear, nobody's complaining about Wiseman's contemplative style now that his subject is naked Parisian showgirls.
The Belcourt has already shown most of my "dream retrospectives", but to your list I'll add: Alec Guinness, Val Lewton, Burt Lancaster, Alexander Mackendrick, Buster Keaton, Peter Weir, Powell/Pressburger, and the Marx Brothers. I promised I wouldn't mention Bill Forsyth this time, so I won't.
I'd be disappointed if you didn't mention Forsyth. In a just world, the guy'd have a 20-film career by now. Instead, for people born after 1985, it's like, "Who?"
I was thinking the other day of movies whose scores are so evocative I can picture the specific scenes and shots they accompany. Right up there with THE THIRD MAN and VERTIGO, for me, is Mark Knopfler's for LOCAL HERO — music I revisit as wistfully as Peter Riegert waiting for someone to pick up that endless ringing phone.
Over the years I've become enamored by Forsyth's other films as well. I think HOUSEKEEPING is brilliant, but most people have never heard of it. I noticed Jonathan Rosenbaum listed it in his "Top 100 American Films" - that was a pleasant surprise. I love COMFORT AND JOY - perhaps my favorite movie to watch around Christmas. And although I don't like using the word "charming", I'm not sure if there has ever been a more charming film than GREGORY'S GIRL. THAT SINKING FEELING and BREAKING IN are pretty darn good, too. Sometimes I wonder how BEING HUMAN would have turned out if Forsyth had been allowed to do it his way. (I would love to see a true "director's cut" of this.)
Yeah, Knopfler's soundtrack to LOCAL HERO gets to me every time. The way he captures the mood, the spirit, the landscape... even if Knopfler had never done anything else, I'd consider him a genius just for this.
By the way, I wonder if we would be discussing LOCAL HERO today if it had been Henry Winkler rather than Peter Riegert?
HOUSEKEEPING is the one ripest for discovery: it wasn't at all what people expected from him — a much more disturbing take on the perils of nonconformity — but extremely haunting, a movie that affects your mood for days. BREAKING IN I should revisit — at the time I thought Forsyth's loose-limbed character sketching and Sayles in semi-genre mode were a bad fit, but I'd like to give it another try. Still haven't seen BEING HUMAN.
Winkler would have been different — a little less melancholy — but quite good, I think. The only one you really couldn't mess with is Lancaster.
And yeah, I don't know why COMFORT AND JOY hasn't become a Yuletide tradition. Maybe the Belcourt could show it at Christmas with the Maggie Moo's ice-cream truck outside.
Jim,
I did go check out Crazy Horse. Thanks for the tip! Perhaps there's a better thread to place this comment, but did anyone else feel that cinema verite is not always the best approach to a subject? Case in point: chic nude theatre. It felt the equivalent of Wiseman documenting a John Ford film festival in which he filmed the screen for 90 percent of the documentary.
