This sentence conjures up a whirlwind of images in my head. No, that isn’t right. It conjures up a whirlwind of scenes and sequences. Noise and music. Bits of dialogue. Stretches of silence. Titles like The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, Brazil, Eye Myth, Vivre sa vie, Zerkalo and a litany of others come instantly to mind.
I am not quite sure where I would hang my hat on this one, but I like hearing other people kick it around. So, all thanks to the Guardian, which decided it would make a nice periodical feature. Among others, they have had:
Bertolucci talk about La Règle du jeu: It was shot in 1938, just before the second world war. There is a scene where a group of people, gathered together for a long weekend at a villa near Alsace, go hunting. They start killing these birds and rabbits, and it becomes like a massacre. You cannot avoid thinking this was some kind of prophecy, about the massacre that would soon sweep over Europe.
Renoir is like a junction between the France of impressionism (the France of his father, Auguste Renoir) and the France of the 20th century. Sometimes it’s as if he were making films about characters from his father’s paintings. But what is really extraordinary about Renoir, particularly in La Règle, is that he loves all his characters. He loves the goodies and baddies, the ones who make terrible mistakes. He loves the ones who are on screen for just two minutes. This is something I have always tried to do. When I made my first film, at 21, I hadn’t seen La Règle again. But it was always in the back of my head. Later, when I made an Italian epic called Novecento (released in the UK as 1900), I was filming a wedding scene, a long sequence, and I was feeling very influenced by Renoir. So at the end of it, Bob De Niro says: “It’s late, it’s going to rain soon, let’s go back inside the house all together.” There are the words from the end of La Règle.
Linklater talking about Some Came Running: Have I taken things from it for my films? I wish! They don’t make ’em like that any more. I would love to, but I don’t think people would buy that kind of 50s melodrama. There are sequences that are intimate, one-room scenes, but then there are beautiful crescendos, like the one at the end – he can deliver that too. Minnelli’s sensibilities were perfect for it – the sensitivity and the bravado. It hits all the notes.
Shelton talking about Hunger: The film reminded me of a book that I read a couple of decades ago called Sculpting in Time by the great Russian film-maker Andrei Tarkovsky. In the book, he talks about how sad he is that when cinema was born it adopted the model of theatre for its form. He thought that cinema had more kinship with poetry and called it the most truthful of art forms.
Loach talking about The Bicycle Thieves (both of them…): But The Bicycle Thieves was the one that did it for me first. The story is just of a man and his son, looking for work on a bicycle and what the consequences are for their family. It only tells the story of this one family and doesn’t go beyond, but in doing that it tells you everything you want to know. I love this idea of telling a story in microcosm; if you get the story right and the characters right, the film will say everything about the wider picture without having to generalise. Of course, that’s how I rationalised it later. At the time, I just thought: wow.
All in all, this is a great little series that I hope they continue to work on. I like how it tackles the implicit question about the difference between our favorite films, and those films we would rank if asked to make a list of the 10 or 20 best films. If asked to write up an installment for this feature, what would I talk about? Probably Mad Max. No, maybe… Beau travail. Oh wait, 2001!
See how tough this gets?