8th Jeonju International Film Festival

Someone made a mistake, I think (not that I'm complaining). Apparently, I'm being invited as member of the jury judging the Indie Vision section of the Jeonju International Film Festival, from April 26 to May 4.

The films we're going to be judging include the following titles:

1. Aria Dir_Takushi TSUBOKAWA Japan 2006 105min 35mm Color Feature

2. Chrigu Dir_Jan GASSMANN, Christian ZIÖRJEN Switzerland 2007 87min DigiBeta Color+B&W Documentary

3. The Journals of Knud Rasmussen Dir_ Zacharias KUNUK, Norman COHN Canada 2006 112min 35mm Color+B&W Feature

4. The Other Half Dir_YING Liang China 2006 111min DV Color Feature

5. Potosi, the Journey Dir_Ron HAVILIO Israel, France 2007 246mm 35mm Color+B&W Documentary

6. Private Property Dir_Joachim LAFOSSE France/Belgium/Luxembourg 2006 95min 35mm Color Feature

7. Reprise Dir_Joachim TRIER Norway 2006 106min 35mm Color+B&W Feature

8. Salty Air Dir_Alessandro ANGELINI Italy 2006 87min 35mm Color Feature

9. Schroeder's Wonderful World Dir_Michael SCHORR Germany, Poland, Czech Republic 2006 114min 35mm Color Feature

10. WWW. What a Wonderful World Dir_Faouzi BENSAIDI France/Morocco/Germany 2006 99min 35mm Color Feature

11. A White Ballad Dir_Stefano ODOARI Italy/The Netherlands 2007 78min 35mm Color Feature

12. Look of Love Dir_Yoshiharu UEOKA Japan 2006 108min DV Color+B&W Feature

The films range all over Europe and Asia; use 35 mm, digital video, and betacam; and vary in length from a little over an hour to over five hours long (I viewed Lav Diaz's Heremias (2006) once--at least (I'm going through it a second time); I think it's safe for me to say five hours doesn't sound utterly intimidating). After over a year of thoroughly bland Hollywood pap (just sat through a DVD of Casino Royale--not impressed), this should be a blessed relief, if not a genuine treat; not to mention the chance to actually visit South Korea...

Kurt Vonnegut, 1922-2007

Was hardly his biggest fan. Can't help but think of how Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle in their novel Inferno (A tongue-in-cheek retelling of the first volume of Dante's The Divine Comedy), relegated him to the Circle of Heretics, trapped in a garishly enormous tomb with a gigantic neon sign blinking over and over again (guess what the sign said). I wouldn't wish such a fate on the man--I don't think anyone deserves to be the victim of that kind of bad taste--but I can't help but think that Niven's rant ("he knew better!") had a point. Vonnegut's writing did at times get lazy, and he did at times seem complacent in his legendary status.

Of his works, a sentimental favorite would be God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater--mainly because when I read it years ago I wished I had the guts to live life the same way (I'd hate to read it now; it mightn't survive the experience). Mother Night was fascinating for the way, as David Pringle pointed out, it sustained the ambiguity (hero or heel?). I liked maybe one or two of the stories in Welcome to the Monkey House--well, okay, I liked one mainly because of the TV movie made out of it, and not so much because of Vonnegut's story as for the opportunity to see Jonathan Demme work with Susan Sarandon and Christopher Walken (as a nebbish, yet!) together on a romantic comedy. Walken, incidentally, seems to me to be the most convincing Stanley Kowalski I've ever seen (and yes, I've seen Kazan's version).

Cat's Cradle is my unsurprising favorite, maybe the rare--or even one--time when Vonnegut's humor and despair were in perfect balance, sketching a portrait of a mad scientist and his dysfunctionally unhappy family, the birth of a cheerfully nihilistic religion, and the end of the world through crystallization (did this provide the germ for Ballard's hauntingly beautiful The Crystal World--my favorite end-of-the-world scenario--published three years later?). Vonnegut seemed to have said it all with this one (unfortunately he wrote for several more decades ("See the cat? See the cradle?")). But for this and a for a few others of his early work, I'm grateful for him.

Spielberg the new Riefenstahl?

Thanks to Jonathan Rosenbaum, for pointing out the above link.

"Leni Riefenstahl" of the Beijing games sounds a bit much--he's only staging the games, not making a documentary on them, and he displays nowhere near the massive sense of opportunism Riefenstahl did. Other than that specific basis of comparison, Rowan Farrow's piece seems sound.

I've little to add, save these few questions:

1) What does Spielberg have to lose, walking away from this deal?

2) Who does he hurt? Physically, not emotionally, I mean (I know we'll hear from the Chinese on this).

3) If he walks and the Chinese go ahead with their plans--with, say, Michael Bay replacing Spielberg--will he have done anything significant (Corollary questions: if Michael Bay stages the ceremonies, would the issue still be urgent?)?

No. 3 has an answer, I think. Yes--he has refused to participate in a massive whitewash.

The ball is in his court, I'd say; action, or even silence, would be an answer.

Eye of Welles, brain of Wood

Eye of Welles, brain of Wood

There are films that inspire passionate admiration thanks to their sublime beauty, or skilled construction, or honesty, courage, audaciousness at tackling difficult or taboo subjects; then there are films that are great not because they're beautiful or skillful or honest, but because they have this great something--not so much courage or audaciousness, but sheer cluelessness--that has led them to where, well, no filmmaker has ever trod before.

People misunderstand my intense regard for Carlos Siguion-Reyna's films. I don't think they're just bad (even if they are), and my articles aren't merely attacks on their artistic merits per se (even if they do). To be honest, I've actually grown to enjoy every new Siguion-Reyna film that came up, and am disappointed that he hasn't done anything (at least as far as I know) in the past seven years.

Filmmakers like Pedro Almodovar or John Waters earn critical praise for their shocking bad taste and outrageous comedy, but Almodovar and Waters are fully aware of what they're doing; they revel in bad taste and outrage. Siguion-Reyna belongs to a purer breed altogether: think Edward Wood, Jr., the legendary director of films like Bride of the Monster and Plan 9 From Outer Space. Wood's films are enjoyable because they're obviously labors of love, the same time they're excruciatingly bad; he thought he was destined for artistic immortality, and he was half right.

Siguion-Reyna is a Wood with real talent--he has huge resources at his disposal, he wields them with the confidence of a master, he's film literate and knows how to tell his story in visual terms. I remember a shot in Hihintayin kita sa langit (I'll Wait For You In Heaven, 1991), his version of Wuthering Heights, where Richard Gomez held the dying Dawn Zulueta in his arms, and a panoramic landscape unfolded below them--a deep-focus shot straight out of Welles' Lady From Shanghai. In Misis mo, misis ko (Your Wife, My Wife 1988) Edu Manzano attempts to seduce Dina Bonnevie in the background while Ricky Davao tries to do the same to Jackie Lou Blanco in the foreground--a scene that could have come out of Renoir's La regle du jeu. In Ikaw pa lang ang minahal, Siguion-Reyna's adaptation of William Wyler's The Heiress, Maricel Soriano is told by her father that she's an unattractive spinster; Soriano goes into her bedroom and in a single unbroken take trashes it, and you can't help but think of Welles trashing his wife's bedroom in Citizen Kane.

Ikaw pa lang ang minahal is his finest, most honest work in the conventional sense, possibly because Siguion-Reyna connects with Henry James' story of the insulated rich more than to anything else he's ever done, but for my money his outré masterpiece has to be Abot kamay ang pangarap (Elena's Redemption, 1996).

The film is based on the true story of a maid who was either seduced or raped and made pregnant by her Chinese employer; the baby was either killed by the employer's wife or by her own hand, depending on who you talk to.

The film begins with Michael de Mesa as the lawyer of the employer (now an upper class Filipino mestizo), urging the maid (again, Ms. Soriano) to sign a document releasing his client from all liability. Soriano signs; De Mesa grabs her round the waist, spins her about, rapes her on the coffee table she signed on, and spits on her face. Soriano goes back to her hometown, where her father (Pen Medina) slaps her face for bringing shame to the family; she starts bleeding between her legs and collapses. When she wakes, she's lost her memory; her mother (Daria Ramirez) begins reading all the letters she wrote from Manila, in an attempt to make her remember.

All this happens during the first ten minutes of the film.

The rest of the story takes its cue from the opening. We see Soriano (during the lengthy flashback that makes up the bulk of the picture) apply for the position; we see her throwing sidelong glances at her handsome employer (Tonton Guiterrez). When Gutierrez has a quiet dinner of shrimp and rice with his wife (Dina Bonnevie), Soriano suddenly picks up Gutierrez's shrimp and starts peeling it. Instead of staring at the maid with an expression of "Excuse me--why are you touching my food?" Gutierrez seems grateful; Bonnevie looks jealous. "That's enough," she snaps at Soriano, waving the maid away.

Soriano and Gutierrez have their affair; Soriano learns that she's pregnant by him. She goes to see an abortionist. She's sitting in the doctor's illegitimate home clinic when the doctor walks in and stumbles, dropping all his instruments on what looks like the world's stickiest floor. The doctor apologetically peels the tools off the floor, and asks Soriano if she will go through with the procedure; Soriano shakes her head in horror. The doctor snorts, calls in the next patient--a girl, head downcast, accompanied by her boyfriend. The girl looks up, exclaims: "Father?" The doctor exclaims: "Daughter?" and starts beating on the boyfriend "What have you done to my child? What have you done to her?" Soriano quietly lets herself out the door.

Heavy irony: Bonnevie learns she can't have a baby (Bonnevie is a fertility specialist). She starts stripping down her proposed baby room of its fixtures--mobiles, stuffed dolls--and Gutierrez is trying to talk her out of it when Soriano suddenly appears in the doorway, says "I'm pregnant. You can have my child if you want it," turns and walks away. Bonnevie, instead of asking the inevitable question ("Who's the father?") starts after her, is held back by Guiterrez, and shakes off his arm. "Don't you realize this is our only chance to have a child?" she tells him.

Soriano has the baby; since this is a Filipino melodrama, she delivers it on the living room floor. Bonnevie arrives, listens to Soriano and her husband talking, realizes just who the father really is, and does this (the action isn't as clear as I'd like; the image is drastically cropped).

I'd learned that there was an earlier edit of that scene which the producer had invited friends to watch: Guiterrez and Bonnevie struggled, the baby flew out of Bonnevie's arms, and bounced. The audience gasped--in laughter or horror, no one could tell. On subsequent edits, the bounce disappeared; when asked about it, the producer said, "Oh, I think it's understood what happened."

All this, of course, is faultlessly photographed, with lush production values and live sound recording (a luxury in Filipino productions). At one point Soriano tells Guiterrez "We have nothing else to discuss; the child is yours. But I fervently hope that every time you look at that child, your conscience pricks you; that is, if you still have a conscience left to prick!" I remember a filmmaker sitting next to me, listening, and whispering in my ear "The sound is so clear and crisp!" and me replying: "Apparently they want you to hear every word."

How to explain a film like this? I've often maintained that Siguion-Reyna's pictures look as if a band of aliens suddenly landed on Earth outside a film studio and started making films by applying their advanced techonological knowledge on available equipment and watching maybe three hours' worth of television soaps on the side. The film betrays no feel or understanding of common human interaction (the shrimp dinner), much less human psychology*, but that, for me, is the very source of their fascination--Siguion Reyna makes films like no one else on Earth; he is sui generis, and this, I submit is not a bad thing. Even the unusual to the point of grotesque has its value, I think, though I would probably feel differently if he had actually inspired a movement of like-minded filmmakers (which he hasn't to date--thank God--though filmmakers like Erik Matti and Yam Laranas, when writing their own scripts, seem to suffer from a similar cluelessness and disconnect from reality, albeit while wielding a lesser, MTV-derived style). I'm grateful we have him, the same time I'm equally grateful there's no one else who follows--or can follow, apparently--in his lead. Perhaps one of my dearest dreams--and greatest frustration--is to one day host a retrospective of his work that would tour the festivals, with me introducing each and every film, explaining why I think they're so special. Alas, it may never be...

*Take the ending of Ang lalaki sa buhay ni Selya (The Man in Her Life, 1997). Rosanna Roces is persuaded by her lover (Gardo Verzosa) to try blackmail her gay husband (Ricky Davao) into giving up the son she and Verzosa conceived under Davao's nose and that Davao is raising. They show up for tea at Davao's house one afternoon (Davao daintily pouring from a pot), demanding that Davao give up the boy; Davao refuses. Verzosa pulls out a gun, waves it in Davao's face; Davao again refuses. Verzosa mutters "we'll think of something else," gets up to leave; Davao suddenly stops them, declares "A boy must have his mother," and tells them they can have the child.

Davao goes upstairs to pack the boy's things. Verzosa, impatient, grabs the luggage and boy (now weeping), and heads out the door; Roces stops Verzosa: "You love my body, not my self," she accuses Verzosa, taking the boy away from him and shutting the door on his face. Verzosa is left glaring impotently, gun still in hand (everyone seems to treat the weapon like the movie prop it really is).

Motivations and convictions spinning three-hundred-and-sixty degrees at the least provocation, for maximum melodramatic effect, all breathlessly shot and edited, with magnificent sound design, a beautiful score, and a sumptuous large house of a setting--the very hallmarks of the Siguion-Reyna style of filmmaking.

(Parts of this post derived from articles first published Businessworld and reprinted in my book Critic After Dark: A Review of Philippine Cinema)

(This post written for the Trashy Movie blogathon at The Bleeding Tree)

Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone, 2006)

Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone, 2006)

Excerpt:

I was never a big fan of the "Rocky" movies. Built on the dreams of actor-writer Sylvester Stallone, wearing its big heart unabashedly on its sleeve, the first "Rocky" charmed audiences with the image of this big, gentle, slow-witted bruiser with the courtly manners and modest outlook in life who--as the boxing-movie cliché goes--"getsa shot adda tiddle." Stallone captured the way ordinary folk talked and acted in Philadelphia, and he had in particular a feel for how big palookas think--how they're constantly aware that the world looks at them as freakish and grotesque and not a little stupid, how Rocky basically doesn't mind, so long as he has this small space for himself--an apartment, a turtle, not much else. Stallone's able to convince us that this might actually be a reasonable way of living after all, no small achievement.

 

Then it turns into a huge fairy-tale, and suddenly we're in rah-rah mode: Rocky pummels a beef carcass (must be how Philly cheesesteaks got so tender), runs up the Art Museum's stairs, does a little victory jig to the tune of Bill Conti's "Gonna Fly Now" number (with tremulous violin strings suggesting the thrill of the moment), and we believe this nobody can beat the heavyweight champion of the world. To be fair, Stallone didn't pluck the idea for his screenplay out of thin air; he'd been inspired by the career of Chuck Wepner, a relative unknown who in 1975 had been given a chance to fight Muhammad Ali for the title. Wepner surprised everyone by lasting far longer than the expected three or four rounds, even knocking Ali down on the ninth (the only fighter to have knocked Ali down while he was the heavyweight champion); he lost to Ali on the fifteenth by a TKO. You can see the basis for the story here, though Stallone couldn't resist polishing and even whitewashing the facts a little--Wepner had been a longtime professional and had fought noted boxers such as George Foreman and Sonny Liston before being given his title shot, and he was no innocent (in 1986 he was arrested for cocaine possession).

 

Mouchette (Robert Bresson, 1967)

Girl, interrupted

In Frederic Bonnaud's essay on Journal d'un cure de campagne (Dary of a Country Priest, 1951), he calls the character of Seraphita (a young girl who torments the eponymous priest) "scary" and "a mistake," her conversion scene being "too literal and obvious" and I suppose she is; I don't mind taking Mr. Bonnaud's word for it. What I do see myself, however, is not so much an obviousness as a kind of inconclusiveness--we have some hint of a conversion of this "monster" (as she's described), but not the whys and wherefores of her transformation. The titular priest is cracked open and thoroughly examined, the other character are mostly types meant to give an unyieldingly hostile face to the town (for the Countess--the one notable exception--Bresson hands over to us a swiftly and masterfully executed sketch of her soul). Seraphita arouses our curiosity as an entity with intelligence and awareness enough not to buy the town's line of thinking; Bresson leaves her in a lurch, swaying towards the priest, but without anything conclusive coming out of her conversion. Could Bresson's taking on a second Bernanos novel be his way of returning to what he'd left unexplored the last time?

Bill Mousoulis in his Senses of Cinema essay considers Mouchette a "reworking of some aspects" of Bresson's arguably most highly regarded film, Au Hasard, Balthazar, and points out the many similarities. Granted, but considering the chronology, wouldn't it be just as plausible to say Bresson very possibly took inspiration from Bernanos' novel to make Balthazar, later deciding to adapt the source novel itself to the big screen as well? Either way, one might say Bresson was unsatisfied with his earlier incarnations of the girl, and felt he had to tackle the character full-on.

Watching the film, one can't help but be reminded of yet another film--Jean Renoir's La Regle du Jeu (Rules of the Game, 1939). The similarities are striking--a poacher and gamekeeper after the same girl; a rabbit hunt summing up the filmmaker's view of the world. More on this later.

Film critic Tony Rayns in his mostly excellent commentary for the Criterion DVD of the film tells us that the film is about the disappearance of a human being from human society--what's left when one is gone? He points out that absence is a recurring motif in the film, what with Mouchette's mother in the opening images crying out in despair about her coming death, Arsene the poacher describing his epileptic fits as like a kind of blanking out, and later the daughter herself deliberately walking away from human society. I'd add further that absence is a great theme or method in Bresson's filmmaking too--no melodrama, no acting in the conventional sense, all extraneous details wiped out. Rayns says he doesn't think Bresson is a minimalist but that his films feel minimalist, and I agree--Bresson pares away much if not everything that doesn't conform to his idea of "cinematography" (real filmmaking, according to Bresson, as opposed to "cinema" which he considers a mere reproduction of dramatic theater), instead packing his work with enough strange details (strange to you, not Bresson, for whom it presumably made perfect sense) to keep the viewer endlessly fascinated, if he knows how to look.

Mouchette is a sad little thing. Rayns mentions that in Bernanos' novel she's even more repulsive, with plain face and bad skin; he believes Bresson captured her attitude but otherwise cast one of his beautiful waifs in the role--something I can't quite agree with, because attitude (I think) goes a long way towards determining one's attractiveness or lack of (one of the documentaries on the film shows Nadine Nortier in between takes; she smiles often, and when she does she's radiant). Ms. Nortier's Mouchette is a peasant lump: a toad, practically, with pigtails, hand-me-down clothes, an awkward, almost amphibious gait (you can imagine she's more graceful in water; when someone shoves a table aside under which she's hiding, you expect reptilian legs to be folded under her, ready to leap). She has no friends, her mother is in bed, chronically sick, and her father and older brother are too busy smuggling liquor to pay her any attention. She jumps into mud puddles on the way to church, she tosses clods of dirt at her classmates; when someone calls out her name (at the film's beginning, in effect introducing her), she pointedly ignores the caller and continues plodding her way into school.

Before Mouchette takes her leave of the world, though, she needs to know just what she's leaving, and the film sets about this task with blunt efficiency. She's watching her classmates sit on a railing when they suddenly flip upside-down, flashing their underwear. She's passing a doorway when a boy inside calls out to her; when she stops to look he drops his pants. She's mute witness to a sexual farce played out between the aforementioned gamekeeper Mathieu (Jean Vimenet) and poacher Arsene (Jean-Claude Gilbert, perhaps the only actor to have appeared in two Bresson films (he never likes to repeat casting)) over Luisa, the barmaid (Marine Trichet). She even manages to have her own dalliance--at a fair she climbs into a dodgem and (perversely, as is her nature) zooms away backwards; a young man crashes into her from behind, the collisions (again, perversely), being his way of showing interest.

Like the priest in Bernanos' other novel she's shunned by much of the town or held in contempt; like the priest she has a crucial encounter with another soul that Bresson shoots in a style markedly different from the rest of the film.

The sequence starts off with Mouchette looking at the moon, a tiny orb surrounded by huge storm clouds--she's lost in the forest, apparently. Through the brush she sees Mathieu approach Arsene, confronting him about Luisa. One falls on top of the other and they struggle; Mathieu bites Arsene's hand, and blood gushes out (one can't help but think of the blood from a deflowering). Afterwards, they have a (post-coital?) drink together, become friends. If, as Rayns suggests, Bresson abandons the skewed but otherwise realist look he uses for most of the film to evoke a dreamlike quality in this passage (the moon and passing clouds, the unreal howl of wind), we may be looking at the fight through Mouchette's half-hysterical eyes, already primed by previous incidents to see everything and anything as vivid, suggestive, sexually charged.

Mouchette sees no more; she's found by Arsene and brought to a shelter. Arsene notes the shrieking wind (Bresson, who orchestrates sound effects much as if they were a music score, uses what I think is his single most memorable effect here) and calls the storm outside "a cyclone." He explains that he believes he's killed Mathieu and wants her to be his alibi; he outlines an elaborate story for her to follow, going so far as to scatter the ash in the shelter (to show that he hadn't been there), and start a fire in his own house (to show that he had been home all night).

Arsene is a proven playboy (I can't see the appeal myself--but I'm hardly an expert); it isn't his meager charms that capture Mouchette, though, but his helplessness--he has a grand mal seizure, and Mouchette (much like Seraphita when her priest collapses) has to watch over him, singing a song she willfully sang off-key at school, this time note-perfect. More than sexual attraction, I think tenderness is a dangerous emotion--it can inspire the kind of foolish actions and heedless decisions that can change a life, and Mouchette is irrevocably changed.

The rest of the film shows the town's reaction to this new Mouchette. She comes home to her mother in bed, her father and older brother out (smuggling, presumably), her baby sister crying; she offers the raging cyclone as an excuse, and her mother responds "what cyclone?"--putting Mouchette's experiences the previous night into doubt. Her mother asks her to warm some milk for the baby; Rayns points out that her futile gesture of warming a bottle of milk on her breast (her father had taken the matches with him and she can't start a fire) is a sign of her inability to take over the family as surrogate mother, but the way Bresson lights and frames her (in half-profile, half in shadow) she's also suddenly a beautiful Madonna lovingly (if ineffectively) nursing her child. Her sad experience has made her bloom into a woman, Bresson seems to be telling us--the corniest of notions, but Bresson presents this in such a straightforward manner it's easier to accept here than in almost any other film I can think of.

The mother dies that night; the father prays by her bed; Mouchette goes out to fetch more milk for the baby. The townspeople greet her in a kinder tone, offering condolence for her mother, but it's a hypocritical kindness--seeing a long scratch in her bosom, a shopkeeper calls Mouchette a 'slut;' an old woman offering Mouchette a muslin dress informs her that she has evil in her eyes; the boy who earlier flashed Mouchette calls to her again (this time she ignores him--possibly because she's seen bigger). People are more aware of her, ostensibly because of her mother's passing, but you can't help but wonder if it isn't also because Mouchette herself has changed. She has more presence now, more awareness of herself and of the world; she's made contact with another person--her conversation with Arsene is the longest, most intimate encounter she's had in the film, probably in her entire life--sworn loyalty to him, is bound to him beyond mere reason or social convention. She's a relatively stronger entity, not to be ignored or taken so lightly, and the townspeople have responded accordingly.

And then we come to the rabbit hunt. Rayns thinks Bresson stretches things a bit by asking us to believe that Mouchette, who grew up in a rural town, has never seen a hunt before, or at least acts as if she has never seen one. I submit that, in effect, she hasn't--not since her encounter with Arsene and her mother's death. These two tectonic changes may have created in her a sensitivity towards death, made her look at death with fresh eyes. It may seem odd that her mother's passing leaves her relatively unmoved while the rabbits' utterly shakes her up, but coming home from Arsene's the shock may not have completely worn off; the rabbits' deaths, on the other hand, may have been the straw that broke the already strained camel's back.

Renoir may have read the Bernanos book while making his 1939 film and borrowed details for his dark comedy, choosing to use the hunt as his defining image. Seeing Renoir's borrowings from Bernanos' novel echoed in Bresson's film of the same is a strange experience; one can't help but wonder if Bresson, remembering Renoir's and recognizing it for what it was, decided to reinforce the echo, to evoke Renoir's cutting patterns (as in Renoir, the scene contains some of the swiftest editing in the film) but magnify the horror (Bresson includes one painfully extended shot of a rabbit blasted in the rear, getting up, struggling feebly, collapsing, again and again). This is Mouchette's apocalypse, the film's--or God's, if you like--revelation to her of what this world is really about; surely any response she can have to this would be equally extreme.

In footage of the making of the film, Bresson talked of not having too many preconceived ideas, of wanting to be surprised, of taking advantage of the spontaneous; yet when we see him direct he worries over the smallest detail of an actor's movements, how the light would strike their hands or faces, how different objects--a table, a hanged coat--would reveal or obscure them. Presumably Bresson meant he needed to be at the place and time of making, to let the actual sets, occupied by his 'models' (what he calls his actors) determine how he's going to shoot a scene.

I wonder what on-the-spot stimulus, then, inspired him to create the film's final image. Rayns points out how stylized Mouchette's drop into the water is--the splash hardly seems loud enough, and you don't see a body. More, Bresson for some reason repeats the final image over and over again, an effect so subtle I only noticed it by accident. Bresson's films often show the mark of the Surrealists (I'm thinking of the arrows shot into the ground in Lancelot du Lac (1974), or the crowd staring into the café long after the arrested party has been escorted out in L'Argent (1983), or even the momentary frozen poses people sometimes struck in Pickpocket (1959)). Could this be that one odd touch he likes to put in his films? A suggestion--what with the waves moving out, freezing, moving backwards, freezing, then moving out again--that Mouchette's soul doesn't really end, that an eternity exists out there somewhere?

Bresson has insisted many times he's not interested in 'recording theater," in doing pictures that don't have qualities unique to film, that merely combine elements from other arts. If there's a medium that Bresson's films come closest to resembling--or, conversely, a medium that comes closest to approximating the spirit of his works--I submit it would be poetry. In his films images carry more than their weight of narrative meaning, sequences are spare, elegantly wrought, and connections are not always made through logic or linear thinking; in his films extensive use is made of repetition, rhythm, visual rhyme, even a kind of alliteration (Bresson seems able to link (or at least inspire one to link) the mud caking Mouchette's boots to the holy water at the church entrance to the rainstorm pounding on Mouchette's body to the liquor she drinks at Arsene's to the drops of cold milk hanging from the baby's lips to the tears on Mouchette's face (wiped away by the diaper she picks up to replace the baby's soiled ones) to the pool that ultimately receives Mouchette's body--moisture in its many forms, following, enabling, shaping, accepting the girl's direction in life and ultimate fate). A case can be made, I think, for Bresson being the poet of cinema, and Mouchette being his elegy for a young girl who suffered, rebelled, found peace. 

A quickie Groucho

From Richard Modiano in a_film by

In 1972 LACMA had a weekend marathon screening of the last several "100 Best American Movies" at the 4 Star Theater. There were a few personal appearances, and one of them was by Groucho after Duck Soup had been screened.

Groucho slowly walked down the aisle to a podium at the front of the theater while receiving a standing ovation from the audience. He began by listing all his recent honors starting with Duck Soup's selection as one of the 100 Best and continuing with his Legion of Honor ribbon, his honorary Academy Award, his Lifetime Achievement Award, etc.

The man appeared to be on a senile ego trip when he suddenly ended with "and you what? I'd trade them all for an erection" and left the podium.