Word: film
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Dates: during 1970-1970
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PART OF THE brilliance of Le Boucher, Claude Chabrol's newest film, is the complexity which glides beneath the surface of a clean, moving, and beautifully liquid story. We know a man is guilty of murder, we know he loves a woman, and we know the woman loves him. Those discoveries are usually the fruit of stories, not their premises. But Chabrol uses evil, and love, and sexual repression as building blocks. He explores the concepts of emotional isolation and delayed gratification with a maturity rarely seen in conventional murder mysteries...
...Boucher is also part documentary. The movie was shot in a French town near the site of the Lascaux caves, and many scenes include glimpses of locals whose faces are ingratiating. Kes, a British film directed by Ken Loach, is also part documentary, and the delicate way in which it mixes overt fiction with pure reportage is admirable. Kes is a kestrel hawk; the bird is caught and trained by a 15-year-old boy, and the movie is as much about freedom and repression than anything else. The boy is the no-good-nick of his class at school...
DOCUMENTARIES can also be embarrassing, and Street Scenes 1970 was the stickiest red herring at the Festival. The film is a record of what occurred in New York after last May's strike (including some footage of the celebrated hard-hat incidents), and it also covers the march on Washington. That the photography and sound are of markedly poor quality, that the editing resorts to tricks (unspeakable in documentaries) like pixillation, and that the whole affair is packaged like a landmark of cinema verite, all pale before the movie's ugliest flaw: its politics are asinine. The interviewers are boorish...
...making the documentary, and it has assembled in a Washington, D. C. hotel room to discuss ( a la Godard and a la God knows who else) the ethics of having made a movie instead of responding to the crisis with political action. As they speak, and as the film's audience squirms in unbearable embarrassment, the moviemakers proceed to be mind-bogglingly male chauvinistic, grossly misguided about aesthetics, and ultimately personally ugly. Street Scenes 1970 was one of the most depressing items at the Festival, especially because it revealed a student consciousness passing as radical and progressive to be dishearteningly...
...Hiroshima, Mon Amour and L'Annee Derniere a Marienbad, Alain Resnais began his explorations of time and space dislocation. His newest film, Je T'Aime, Je T'Aime, is precisely about that dislocation. A man enters a time-machine which looks like a high-school biology model of the human brain: scientists have told him that he will re-live exactly one minute of his life, at a point exactly a year ago. The machine goes berserk, and what follows is a visual montage of the man's past. Time barriers are simply not observed, and jumps from one sequence...