Happy Beach Movie Life
the beaches, the movies
Retrospective of Varda and Demi films
Varda & Demy
Opening
Opening
25（Tue.）-6-2019
Screening
Duration
28（Fri.）-6——7（Sun.）-7
◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆
"Happy Beach Movie Life: Varda and Demi Film Retrospective Exhibition" officially began to screen today, I hope that everyone will start today, enjoy the movie and feel the love.
In addition to the opening film, we arranged two post-screening exchanges, one for June 29 (Saturday) at 14:00 "The Fallen Woman of the End", which is Varda's early female theme work and Varda's sharpest film work.
"The Fallen Woman of the End of the World" exchanged after the screening
June 29 (Sat) 14:00
Location: Dolby Hall, Broadway Film Center, Shenzhen
The presenter flew
The other is "Lola", which is "Lola" at 19:00 on Monday, July 1, which is Jacques Demi's debut, the beginning of Demi's love, the mother of fairy tales, and paradise on earth.
"Lola" post-screening exchanges
19:00 on Monday, July 1
Speaker Sunflower
Jacques Demy has always had a unique place in the French film industry, and his masterpieces include two glamorous and colorful song and dance films, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) and The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967). In the decades since, however, Demi's films have been grossly neglected.
His early experiences witnessed his distance from being part of the French New Wave movement — partly due to his marriage to Agnès Varda — but the two were not much connected.
The history of the New Wave briefly acknowledged Demy's contribution, and then turned its attention to Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, and others.
Among them, Jean-Luc Godard expressed his admiration for Two of Demy's earliest feature-length films, Lola (1961) and Bay of Angels (1963). Later, as a wife, Varda made a biopic about him, Jacquot de Nantes (1991) and the documentary The World of Jacques Demy (1995), expending a lot of energy to repair, promote and re-promote Demi's films, and at the same time, books on the subject also appeared in large quantities, and in the end, Demi's achievements were duly recognized.
Looking back at Lola now, some people will wonder why it did not gain recognition earlier as a core film of the New Wave.
It has many characteristics that go beyond the films of the late fifties and early sixties, showing its own characteristics.
First, it was a low-budget film— less than Demi expected, produced by Georges de Beauregard, who also invested in Godard's Breathless and Varda's Cléo from 5 to 7 (in 1960 and 1962, respectively).
Secondly, another hallmark feature is Raoul Coutard's superb shooting skills for black-and-white widescreen (French widescreen format, 2.35:1 ratio), which mirrors the documentary and lyrical effects of the New Wave spirit in aesthetic pursuits, while also closing the flaws of the budget and using the limited budget to produce the best results. For example, Demi deliberately shot overexposed shots that look more poetic.
Furthermore, Lola is a representative film that was shot entirely on location, which is also one of the typical features of the New Wave. Although his Lola was unusually far from Paris, for the lola film, Demy approached the elegant Nantes (a port city in western France), located in the Loire Bay, full of New Wave atmosphere.
The city is not only used as a backdrop, it is also a participant in the story, a place that exudes personal memories (Demi's childhood homeland), is a cultural coordinate, a reservoir of emotions. As Jean-Marc Ayrault, mayor of Nantes/former Prime Minister of France, commented in commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of Lola (2011): "Everything that happened between Jacques Demi and Nantes is a true love story." ”
In the film, the romanticization of love is expressed to bring Demi closer to other New Wave directors, which also makes him so different.
Compared with Godard, Truffaut, Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol, Demi's narrative language is less lively and humorous, melancholy and low; most importantly, demi's attitude on how to view women is very different from theirs.
In all his films, women are not only revered as the sublime embodiment of the "angel mother" image as a mother full of distance, but also the ultimate fantasy of the unattainable romanticized into a strange, ethereal life form.
Interspersed with the development of two groups of characters, Lola weaves their paths through the streets of the city or between various iconic locations.
Bar dancer Lola (Anouk Aimée) is surrounded by three suitors: American sailor Frankie Frankie (Alan Scott Alan Scott), roland Cassard (Mark McC Michel), who is also infatuated with her old friend Roland Cassard (Mark McC Michel), and her oldest lover Michel (Jacques Harde), who is the stranger to her. The mysterious man in a white dress, Michelle, wearing a wide-brimmed tweed hat, is the father of Lola's seven-year-old son, Yvonne, who returned to Nantes in search of his former lover and children.
In contrast, Roland, a handsome poor man who laughs at himself as a mirror image, "I'm the typical loser," is the object of attention, subconsciously becoming the object of female desire, most of whom are older women, such as café owner Claire and her friend Jeanne, who happens to be Michel's mother; and who happens to be the elegant Madame Desnoyers. Laupotier Elina Labourdette) and her fourteen-year-old daughter Cécile (Annie Dupéroux).
On the surface, such character relationships seem to be arranged and designed haphazardly, but in fact, they are carefully designed in a very tight and meticulous structural way.
The first is to break through the limitations of time, and all the characters echo the people of another era, and the various characters echo each other across time - Lola used to be called Cécile, Madame Desnoyers was formerly a dancer, frankie made Lola think of Michel;
Spatially, this echo also spans space, and they all meet each other through "coincidences", such as Cecil's encounter with Frankie/Roland, and this coincidence occasionally occurs one after another and sometimes follows each other in the city.
If you mention the topic of sex in the film, especially between the Lola/Frankie couple, and the humorous bookstore scene that borrows from the Marquis of Sade: Justin, (because I don't understand if sex is evoked, so I don't understand later) Lola is more interested in romantic love, and almost unabashedly pessimistic about sex, this film is more romantic love, hiding a deep pessimistic theme expression (hence the use of "bittersweet" to describe the film).
First of all, "Lola" reflects the fragility of love through the transient behavior of the character's life trajectory, and almost everyone is in a state of non-stop running, recently arriving or about to leave. Any moment of happiness is ruthlessly blocked by a fleeting force.
Like Frankie and Cécile separated immediately after spending a wonderful time at the playground; in the closing part, Lola is obsessed with being kicked out of the door by Michelle, and at the same time that the love is over, the relationship is doomed to end, because she can only reluctantly catch a glimpse of Roland walking away from the other direction.
While other New Wave athletes tend to place their lovers in the present, Demi casts his protagonists into the shadows of the past— a theme that continues into Three Seats for the 26th (1988), in which the male protagonist (Yves Montand Yves Montdon) returns to his hometown of Marseille years in search of lovers and children he abandoned years ago.
Unlike Godard and Truffaut, Demi did not start his career as a film critic, but studied film by making documentary short films. In the words of Jean-Pierre Berthomé, the film screenwriter/also a member of du cinéma, Demi is a "like-minded partner" who is a "like-minded partner."
"Lola" shows his fascination with film, and the opening credits are typical of the "manual style". The film's tribute to director Max Ophul leads viewers to the master, who died in 1957, and Demi directly copied the name and status of the heroine of his 1955 work Lola Montès and the identity of the spoiled prostitute.
Lola's circular structure—the opening and ending shots of Mike driving a white Cadillac in and out of Nantes—and the fiery, choreographed choreography of the fiery, choreographed dances reminiscent of Orpheus's 1950 film La ronde.
There are many references and references in the film, in Robert Bresson's 1945 Les dames du Bois de Boulogne ,the young Elina Labourdette plays a bar dancer, which appears as the picture that Cecil showed Roland; and Exhausted. (Breathless), the name of the protagonist of the film, Michel Picard, is also partially quoted.
But the value of lola is not limited to the comparison of quotations. Demi's career tendencies stemmed from his childhood love of film, and he hoped that Lola would evoke "memories of Nantes, memories of skipping class and watching movies in college from college to giving up school to devote himself to film.".
The actor, Rolandka, as Demy's incarnation and another "him" in the film, plays an adult version of this experience – after being unemployed and fired, Roland comes to the Katerza Cinema (an iconic theater opened in 1920 and is still in business) to watch Return to Paradise (1953 film starring Gary Cooper) and then becomes a full-fledged "him".
The story of "Spring Dawn in Paradise" takes place on an exotic island, where the protagonist experiences an adventure, and a few years later, he returns to the island again to claim the illegitimate daughter he did not take away. As the "play-within-a-play" in Lola's story, the film is a refuge from harsh reality, and it also alludes to the fact that film is a source of inspiration and imagination.
"I'll leave too," Roland said to herself in the café, and then Jeanne told the truth of the vignette—"In the movie, everything is always good." "Like Truffaut, for Demi, cinema is better than life.
In a way that pays homage to american genre films and european film directors, Demi, like his fans, breaks with tradition and creates outrageous civilian heroes. Michel's knightly image in a wide-brimmed tweed hat and driving a shiny white Cadillac is likely a tribute to Jean-Pierre Melville, a French director who loves American culture. Melville usually dresses up like a samurai/knight, but in any case, michelle's character stands out from the postwar generation of fans to the film culture of the filmmakers' generation.
At the beginning of the fusion of high and low cultures——, Beethoven's seventh movement can be used as a cowboy accompaniment music——, American films cooperate with European actors, and in this context, the attractive image of Lola appears.
Lola's image first appears in the film, an image to be precise, a prominent photograph with a pushpin pasted on the door of the Eldorado bar, and this treatment lays the groundwork for the character's shaping, as if a person's body is forced into the city and falls into delusion.
In Nantes, Lola has close ties to two key places. A Philadelphia restaurant. The Eldorad bar scene was filmed; the other was Passage Pommeraye.
La Cigale, a luxury restaurant that has been in business since 1895 and is still famous today, has a high roof and inlaid walls with tiles used to decorate it. It is the equivalent of a mecca for dance troupe performances, of which Lola is a member. (We can also recognize Corinne Marchand and Dorothée Blanck, who starred the following year in Cleo from Five to Seven).) The exquisite and charming decoration style creates the dreamy atmosphere of the bar, which is far from the dirty place where there are women on the street who solicit prostitutes.
Built in 1843, this extraordinary shopping arcade is divided into three floors with a spectacular staircase in the middle, lavishly decorated with sculptures, models and cast-in-iron artwork. This bright and mysterious place has attracted many artists, including the Surrealist, and Demi has arranged two important encounters between Lola and Roland here, highlighting her identity as a charismatic muse.
Kutar's photography subtly weaves Lola into the architectural style and art deco of the gallery, especially the scene where the two meet for the second time, but it is also here that Roland receives an immoral task from the dirty Valentine to ruin his reputation, and he needs to complete something for the unclean man before Valentine is arrested for trading diamonds, and Later Valentine is dramatically imprisoned for selling diamonds.
For Roland and the onlooker, in a symbolic sense, the gallery bound Lola with the dangerous temptation of teasing eroticism, and the gallery symbolically associated Lola's seductive charm with danger.
As a multi-faceted female figure, Lola is not reduced to the image of a snake and scorpion beauty as a slut – but, despite her measured performance in the bar – "Lola, I am the only one!" The character lacks a coherent/coherent subjectivity, with different identity attributes constructed through the men around them, with the shy Roland being key.
As a girlfriend with a youthful presence (laughing wildly and uncertain) and also overlapping with the role of a sexual partner, she resembles the unruly heroines of the New Wave. But Demi's personal thoughts can still be glimpsed, and he portrays Lola as an ideal mother, an attractive and ethereal being, as the film historian Geneviève Sellier puts it, "a place that will produce both jealousy and anxiety at any time", and what Roland wants to experience most from this relationship Roland must exist in his relationship with Lola.
Lola's illusory identity is creatively expressed through costumes, which perfectly fits the narrative rhythm and scene scheduling.
For most of the film, she is dressed in a sexy, cinematic black dance dress reminiscent of "Lola" played by Marlene Dedre in The Blue Angel (1930) by Josef von Sternberg, followed by Bresson in Les dames du Bois de Boulogne (The Women of the Forest of Braune). Li continued the character's life—the picture of Madame De Nouye glimpsed in Lola when she was young.
It is worth noting that Lola did not change her mind and did not change her clothes before returning home to visit her son, but simply put on an overcoat on the outside, and the image of the binary opposition "prostitute mother" has a poetic film performance. Another time, Lola was dressed in a dance dress and paired with Frankie's sailor hat, suggesting that the two were equal in their sexual relationship.
But when she and Roland go out, she changes into an elegant white dress and small coat, maintaining the angelic impression that originally caused Roland to form an angelic impression of her, even if the long black scarf suggests that it is a symbol of her status as another dancer.
By the time of the filming of Lola, the actress Anouk Aimée had already achieved some success in French cinema, having played a major role in La dolce vita (1960) directed by Federico Fellini.
But Demi insisted that she interpret the nightclub singer. Aimé (the name was chosen for her by the French poet Jacques Prévert) put it this way: "The producers thought I wasn't sexy enough to be charming. Although La Dolce Vita was a success, I didn't meet their 'beauty' standards at the time. ”
Aimee's moving and clumsy performances are in line with the pursuit of the New Wave – the replacement of mainstream stars by simple and natural performers. Due to economic problems, for the film, the low cost also means that all the sounds must be completed through the post-production, including Aimee's slightly eccentric way of speaking, which was added later.
But not only that, but there are strong aesthetic elements implied in it, hoping that the actors are not professional, in order to appear more real and natural, so Aimee successfully interprets this fictional life so real and believable.
Lola's tall and slender figure, long black hair, recognizable black lace corset, black tights and plush long scarves, and high top hat became the hallmarks of Demi and the New Wave; in the film, she is also the product of pure and simple film as an ideal female illusion.
We can find traces of Lola in the mother/female figures in demi's later films, such as Bay of Angels, or rather, "meeting" her again in Model Shop (1969). Filmed in the United States, Lola reappears in Los Angeles, alone and abandoned by her husband — a testament to the transient nature of her relationship with Michelle——, of course she is still as beautiful as in the old movies.
Now, Demi is seen as a particularly critical part of the New Wave and a director of excellence.
He fictionalized a clear and bright world, a complexity that permeated Demi's fictional world from beginning to end, through all his films, until the final feature film, Three Seats for the 26th. In this world of cinema, melancholy, tragedy and allusions to unfriendly social relationships are able to be balanced with a fairytale atmosphere formed by poetry, music and fan culture.
The picture below is the later filming of "Cherbourg's Umbrella", the scene suddenly inserted in the film is really surprising, the camera follows the route in "Lola" around the empty corridor, Caesar is the Roland of the year.
Whether black and white (Bay of Angels) or color (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg), while all of Demi's works are as always homage to Hollywood films (The Young Girls of Rochefort) and fairy tales (Donkey Skin Princess), Lola was the mother of all illusions before she was born in these fascinating female tragic characters.
This article is reproduced from
“The Criterion Collection”
Written by Ginette Vincendeau
Translated by Novon
Proofread James
About the Author
Ginette Vincendeau is Professor of Film Studies at King's College London. He has published Stars and Stardom in French Cinema; Jean-Pierre Melville: An American in Paris; La haine; and The French New Wave: Critical Landmarks) (co-authored with Peter Graham); Brigitte Bardot and A Companion to Jean Renoir (co-authored with Alastair Phillips).
Film festival scheduling
All films from this festival will be screened at the Dolby Atmos Hall, so don't miss this audiovisual feast!!
fare
Membership price is 55 yuan / Zhang Broadway Studios APP 65 yuan / Zhang
Other ticket purchase platforms 80 yuan / ticket
Package rules
The price of the package ticket is 55 yuan per ticket
Purchase 4 or more different tickets for this festival to enjoy the package price.
(Package tickets must be purchased on site)
The specific film list of this film festival has been announced, and the details can be stamped
The list is coming! | Retrospective of Varda and Demi films
*In the film list, there are several films that require technical occlusion as follows:
1. "The Fallen Woman of the End of the World" will have three shots that need to be technically blocked;
2. "The Beach of Agnès" will have multiple shots that need to be technically blocked;
3. "Agnès on Varda" will have many lenses that need to be technically blocked;
4. Jacques Demi of Nantes will have two shots that need to be technically blocked.
*Please understand that the above technical treatment will cause inconvenience to you during the viewing process!
END
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