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Showing posts with label Louis Malle. Show all posts

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Louis Malle - Le Feu follet AKA The Fire Within (1963)

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Quote:
THE FIRE WITHIN: DAY OF THE DEAD
When he shot The Fire Within in the spring of 1963, Louis Malle had already established a strong reputation. Incredibly precocious, he won a Palme d’Or at the age of twenty-four, at the 1956 Cannes Film Festival, for the underwater documentary The Silent World, photographed and codirected with oceanographer Jacques Cousteau. One year later he anticipated the French New Wave with Elevator to the Gallows, scored by Miles Davis and starring a young Jeanne Moreau, who also starred in his next film, The Lovers, which won a Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1958 and created a scandal with its explicit eroticism. His follow-up, an audacious 1960 adaptation of Raymond Queneau’s farcical novel Zazie dans le métro, further proved his fondness for literary sources, and 1962’s Vie privée created a stir by featuring Brigitte Bardot in one of her more complex roles.

Yet despite his commercial and critical success, Malle felt dissatisfied with his career thus far. Probably his apprenticeship with Robert Bresson, for whom he was assistant director on A Man Escaped (1956), had instilled in him a high exigency for the practice of his art. He was also aware of the eclecticism of his style, as well as of his themes, while newcomers like Godard and Truffaut had imposed a stronger personality. Now thirty, Malle seemed to be hiding behind literary adaptations, which looked like aesthetic variations with no real focus. The son of a wealthy family of industrialists from the north of France, Malle felt ill at ease with his bourgeois upbringing, and unlike some of the directors coming from Cahiers du cinéma (Truffaut, Rohmer, et al.), with their right-wing inclinations, he was decidedly opposed to the war in Algeria and the Gaullist regime, even producing the overtly political first feature of his friend Alain Cavalier, Le combat dans l’île.

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NO PASS

Monday, September 6, 2010

Louis Malle - L'inde fantôme aka Phantom India (1969)

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Description: Widely regarded as the crowning achievement of his career, Louis Malle's 378-minute documentary Phantom India provides an epic-length portrait of life in India circa 1968. Biographically, it succeeded Malle's United Artists period movie Le Voleur and the production of the "William Wilson" segment in Spirits of the Dead, and arrived at a time of intense personal crisis for the director: 34-year-old Malle, terrified of falling back into the same bourgeois mindset that he had worked so aggressively to escape, felt it re-encroaching; he also fell into a nasty funk that reportedly drove him to the brink of suicide. With his marriage to Anne-Marie Deschodt in pieces, Malle thus decided to wipe the slate completely clean: he dropped out of western society and headed to India, with a two-man crew (sound man Jean-Claude Laureux and co-cinematographer Etienne Becker), traveling without maps and without a compass - destination and whereabouts unknown. The three shot documentary footage instinctively, flipping on their cameras each time something caught their attention. The journey itself lasted a little under four months, from January 5, 1968 through May 1, 1968; it generated over 30 hours of footage, which Malle and editor Suzanne Baron subdivided thematically and edited into seven segments of about 54 minutes each. The individual episodes are as follows:

Episode 1, "The Impossible Camera"

Largely a heightened meditation on the overarching theme of the epic - the impossibility of viewer understanding within the cinematic framework of a documentary - this episode opens with glimpses of "westernized" Indian residents who demonstrate extreme influence by modern philosophical and political concepts such as Communism. Dissatisfied, and determined to find the "real India," Malle and his crew plunge deeper, photographing such indigenous events as a Hindu wedding, the celebration of Shiva, a bizarre Indian Catholic ritual performed in full drag and a trip to the temple of Konarak. They also encounter and question two "hippie" Frenchmen who have dropped out of western society and moved to India as wanderers. The episode wraps with an argument between shore fishermen and a trader.

Episode 2, "Things Seen in Madras"

Per its title, this episode compiles much of the footage shot by Malle and his crew during their time in Madras. It opens with a temple celebration at Kapaleshvara, then explores the political climate of Madras, with a glimpse of a satire performed on the stage. Later, Malle and co. visit the Family Planning Ward at the Madras fair (where tour guides offer humorous illustrations of birth control procedures). The episode wraps with a trip to a Bollywood movie studio, with a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the production of the movie Thillana Mohanambal.

Episode 3, "The Indians and the Sacred"

This episode of Phantom India explores the contradictions and paradoxes of Indian religion. Opening with the most grotesque image in the entire epic - a yogi who has pierced his entire body (face, arms, legs, groin, tongue, etc.) with a cage bearing giant needles -"The Indians and the Sacred" segues into a trip to see a giant statue of Nandi the Bull, and then into southern India, for a glimpse of more idiosyncratic and tightly-knit Indian belief systems. Later, Malle and his team visit the temple of Madurai, tour a garbhagrilha, and greet the saddhus, strange, potentially dangerous shaman-like figures who mingle with, and are possessed by, powerful and occasionally malevolent spirits.

Episode 4, "Dreams and Reality"

This episode is grounded in the notion that time - in the western sense - does not exist for Indian men and women, and that Malle and his crew have become one on this level with their Indian subjects. Malle indicates that they are gaining an understanding of their subjects not on a conceptual level, but on rhythmic, sensorial and atemporal levels. The episode then moves into a series of events and spectacles, loosely connected by their surrealistic, hallucinatory nature and sheer inexplicability for a western viewer. These include: religious rites performed on a seashore by Indian priests; the sight of a man pushing a sewing machine on a cart down a blazing hot road; the vestiges of the dilapidated British rail system in India; and a horrifying glimpse of "enslaved" elephants in an animal sanctuary. The episode wraps with a tour of the political climate of Kerala.

Episode 5, "A Look at the Castes"

Per its title, this episode explores the rigid Indian caste system. It opens with a conversation vis-à-vis Thomas Howard, an American man in his twenties who moved to an Indian village to teach locals improved agrarian techniques. Later, Malle details the various levels of caste that actually - as he reminds his audience - break down into thousands of smaller subdivisions. The film visits women assigned different well functions based on their respective castes, social outcasts known as the Harijans (or untouchables) and a lower-rung caste of village washermen known as dhobis. As Malle details the history of the caste system on the soundtrack, he travels with his crew to the Red Fort fabric factory in Delhi, and then to a Bombay shantytown, where a group of mourners celebrate a death with choruses of "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow" (with Malle reminding the audience that such celebration is inveterately linked to a desire to break out of the cycle of reincarnation). The episode wraps with a depiction of a local village sport and a trip to the Panchayat.

Episode 6, "On the Fringes of Indian Society"

This episode charts the subcultural behaviors and customs of numerous Indian minority groups. It begins with an illustration of tribal culture: Malle, Becker and Laureux spend an extended period of time with the Bandos, a bellicose and semi-barbaric mountainous tribe that inhabits around 100 villages in the region of Orissa and teeters on the verge of extinction via complete assimilation into mainstream Indian society. Malle's cameras witness the Bandos constructing a cob house; in his narration, he discusses the "sexual dormitories" established for tribal adolescents, as well as the sun worship and fertility ceremonies that create an enduring sadness in the villagers' hearts. Following an illuminative trip to the Bando market, Malle and co. segue into discussions of more westernized subcultures in Indian society, including Indian Christians, Indian Jews, and an oddball religious cult run by Sri Aurobindo and administered by a figure known only as "The Mother." The episode then cuts back to tribal investigation for an exploration of the Todas tribe, a subcultural group that intrigues Malle thanks to its complete absence of war, hunger and societal injustice. Malle highlights many of the tribe's unusual beliefs, including the idea that man was created after being pulled out of a river by the tail of a bull, and the notion of "sexually initiating" all of the tribe's adolescent girls at the hands of one village "teacher."

Episode 7, "Bombay: The Future India."

In the concluding episode of Phantom India, Louis Malle, Jean-Claude Laureux and Etienne Becker reach one of India's most populous cities - that of Bombay - and chart the many colorful facets of this metropolis with their cameras. The episode opens with discussion of the city's geographic locale, moves in for a glimpse of Muslim craftsmen hard at work, visits the blind muezzin and witnesses the daily pilgrimage to the Haji Ali Mosque at low tide. A visit to Bombay's petrochemical plants and red-light district follows; Malle highlights the irony that alcohol is forbidden in this city, according to Muslim law, but prostitution widely encouraged. The film then segues into a glimpse of the Bombay stock exchange, with its striking resemblance to the floor of the NYSE in Manhattan; along these lines, Malle works in an interview with Pachavai Patel, an affluent Indian industrialist who made his money selling farm equipment. The episode then glimpses a Parsi wedding, and takes a trip to a school where the instructor of Yehudi Menuhin teaches his students various meditative positions. After an extended conversation with a wealthy, unidentified Indian socialist and a trip to one of Bombay's automated textile mills, Malle and co. visit a terrifying racist political sect led by local demagogue Bal Thackeray, who encourages systematic violence against immigrants in the southern regions of India. A discussion with the Oxford-educated Indian girl Rajani Desai follows; she predicts that most of the country will eventually industrialize. The episode - and Phantom India per se - wrap with a temple celebration, a trip to the salt marshes, and - finally - a glimpse of several Indian men straining to push a heavy cart through traffic and over a large hill.

~ Nathan Southern

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Language: French (hardcoded English subtitles)
no pass

Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Louis Malle - My Dinner with Andre (1981)

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From Ebert's 4 star review :

"The idea is astonishing in its audacity: a film of two friends talking, just simply talking—but with passion, wit, scandal, whimsy, vision, hope, and despair—for 110 minutes. It sounds at first like one of those underground films of the 1960s, in which great length and minimal content somehow interacted in the dope-addled brains of the audience to provide the impression of deep if somehow elusive profundity. 'My Dinner with Andre' is not like that. It doesn't use all of those words as a stunt.

They are alive on the screen, breathing, pulsing, reminding us of endless, impassioned conversations we've had with those few friends worth talking with for hours and hours. Underneath all the other fascinating things in this film beats the tide of friendship, of two people with a genuine interest in one another.

The two people are André Gregory and Wallace Shawn. Those are their real names, and also their names in the movie. I suppose they are playing themselves. As the film opens, Shawn travels across New York City to meet Gregory for dinner, and his thoughts provide us with background: His friend Gregory is a New York theater director, well-known into the 1970s, who dropped out for five years and traveled around the world. Now Gregory has returned, with wondrous tales of strange experiences. Shawn has spent the same years in New York, finding uncertain success as an author and playwright. They sit down for dinner in an elegant restaurant. We do not see the other customers. The bartender is a wraith in the background, the waiter is the sort of presence they were waiting for in "Waiting for Godot." The friends order dinner, and then, as it is served and they eat and drink, they talk.

What conversation! Gregory does most of the talking, and he is a spellbinding conversationalist, able to weave mental images not only out of his experiences, but also out of his ideas. He explains that he had become dissatisfied with life, restless, filled with anomie and discontent. He accepted an invitation to join an experimental theater group in Poland. It was very experimental, tending toward rituals in the woods under the full moon.

From Poland, he traveled around the world, meeting a series of people who were seriously and creatively exploring the ways in which they could experience the material world. They (and Gregory) literally believed in mind over matter, and as Gregory describes a monk who was able to stand his entire body weight on his fingertips, we visualize that man and in some strange way (so hypnotic is the tale) we share the experience.

One of the gifts of 'My Dinner with Andre' is that we share so many of the experiences. Although most of the movie literally consists of two men talking, here's a strange thing: We do not spend the movie just passively listening to them talk. At first, director Louis Malle's sedate series of images (close-ups, two-shots, reaction shots) calls attention to itself, but as Gregory continues to talk, the very simplicity of the visual style renders it invisible. And like the listeners at the feet of a master storyteller, we find ourselves visualizing what Gregory describes, until this film is as filled with visual images as a radio play—more filled, perhaps, than a conventional feature film.

What Gregory and Shawn talk about is, quite simply, many of the things on our minds these days. We've passed through Tom Wolfe's Me Decade and find ourselves in a decade during which there will apparently be less for everybody. The two friends talk about inner journeys—not in the mystical, vague terms of magazines you don't want to be seen reading on the bus, but in terms of trying to live better lives, of learning to listen to what others are really saying, of breaking the shackles of conventional ideas about our bodies and allowing them to more fully sense the outer world.

The movie is not ponderous, annoyingly profound, or abstract. It is about living, and Gregory seems to have lived fully in his five years of dropping out. Shawn is the character who seems more like us. He listens, he nods eagerly, he is willing to learn, but—something holds him back. Pragmatic questions keep asking themselves. He can't buy Gregory's vision, not all the way. He'd like to, but this is a real world we have to live in, after all, and if we all danced with the druids in the forests of Poland, what would happen to the market for fortune cookies?

The film's end is beautiful and inexplicably moving. Shawn returns home by taxi through the midnight streets of New York. Having spent hours with Gregory on a wild conversational flight, he is now reminded of scenes from his childhood. In that store, his father bought him shoes. In that one, he bought ice cream with a girl friend. The utter simplicity of his memories acts to dramatize the fragility and great preciousness of life. He has learned his friend's lesson."

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Password:moviesmammoth-v2.blogspot.com

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no pass

Saturday, August 14, 2010

Louis Malle - Damage (1992)

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Quote:

The fascination of watching Damage is similar to the fascination of watching a car crash in progress--you know something unpleasant is going to happen, but your attention is riveted to the scene of destruction. In the case of this acclaimed drama, adapted by playwright David Hare from the novel by Josephine Hart, the destruction results from a collision of sexual attraction between a British governmental official (Jeremy Irons) and his son's fiancée (Juliette Binoche). Blind to the damage they'll cause to others and themselves, they begin an obsessive affair based purely on impulsive attraction and the hidden emotions that feed into their immediate physical desires. As you could expect, this leads to emotional fallout for everyone concerned, lending multiple interpretations to the film's title and allowing Miranda Richardson (as Irons's wife) to give a brilliant performance drawn from raw anger and betrayal. Under the direction of Louis Malle, this forceful drama never resorts to sordid detail or gratuitous titillation. Rather, Malle and his esteemed cast have explored the ways in which the power of sexuality supercedes the rationality of logic, when mutual attraction is stronger than one's ability to resist temptation. Damage makes it clear that such an indulgence will always come at considerable cost. The DVD of this fine film includes a behind-the-scenes featurette and the original theatrical trailer.

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links are interchangeable
french hardsub
no pass

Thursday, August 12, 2010

Louis Malle - Zazie dans le métro AKA Zazie in the Underground (1960)

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Jonathan Rosenbaum point of view
Arguably Louis Malle's best work (1960). Based on Raymond Queneau's farcical novel about a little girl (Catherine Demongeot) left in Paris for a weekend with her decadent uncle (Philippe Noiret), this wild spree goes overboard reproducing Mack Sennett-style slapstick, parodying various films of the 1950s, and playing with editing and color effects (Henri Decae's cinematography is especially impressive), though gradually it becomes a rather disturbing nightmare about fascism. Forget the preposterous claim by a few critics that the movie's editing influenced Alain Resnais, but there's no doubt that Malle affected Richard Lester--and was clearly influenced himself by William Klein, whom he credited on the film as a visual consultant. A rather sharp, albeit soulless, film, packed with ideas and glitter and certainly worth a look

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English, Spanish subs .srt
no pass

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English, Spanish subs .srt
no pass

Thursday, June 17, 2010

Louis Malle - Humain, Trop Humain (1974)

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A classic of the documentary genre, HUMAIN, TROP HUMAIN is Malle's rigorously lyrical study of a Citroën factory in Rennes. Notwithstanding avant-garde films from the Twenties, no other factory film comes as close to capturing the aestheticized beauty of mechanical reproduction. Setting a playful and subversive tone, the film begins with Gregorian chants as a woman rises up a mechanized scaffold. Malle, cinematographer Étienne Becker and soundman Jean-Claude Laureux shot the film in fifteen days, with very little money and without a script, capturing a clanging chorus of repetitive movements and automatic actions meant to convey the exhausting experience of working an eight-hour-long shift on an assembly line. Despite the rapturous rhythms of the machines, Malle's camera cannot help but seek out the comely workers (male and female), revealing a factory of hyper-efficient, dolled-up employees. The film sparked outrage for its lack of polemics, for its silent observation in a charged post-'68 atmosphere when Citroën employees were known for striking. Thus, we see a fabricated factory (une fabrique fabriquée), a limitation which is to be expected given that Malle would have needed permission to shoot in this monitored environment. His choice to forego voice-over incited the intelligentsia, but his satirical treatment of the auto show says it all. The film was edited by Tati favourite Suzanne Baron who, together with Malle, infused the film with humour and irony, somehow missed by the critics. (from www.cinemathequeontario.ca)

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Language: French ( hardcoded English subtitles )
Rar Password: None, just join with hjSplit

Louis Malle - Milou en mai AKA May Fools (1990)

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Quote:The movie takes place in May of 1968, a month that has a special ring to the French ear. That was the month that the revolution seemed poised to overthrow bourgeois society - the month the radicals shut down the Cannes Film Festival, the students occupied the streets of Paris, and rumors flew that De Gaulle was going to flee the country.

Quote:
"Like Vanya, in Malle's last film, Milou never left the family estate. His mother dies during the May 1968 student uprising in Paris. The brother who is the London correspondent for Le Monde keeps turning up the volume of the radio for the latest news. A deceased sister's interest in the estate is represented by a niece who is an antique dealer, who is most interested in grandmother's emerald ring that Milou's daughter Camille has already slipped on her finger. A non-relative, a truck driver who can't deliver his load of tomatoes in Paris, brings a nephew who was part of the uprising. Everyone is on strike and the matriarch can't be buried." Written by Dale O'Connor

joNNi from Harrogate, England, wrote:

"Milou en Mai finds the aging Louis Malle at his most wickedly wistful, directing mischievous set pieces and ultimately expressing nervous laughter at his own mortality. Made more in the traditions of British farce than the traditional French 'sophistication', in being set to the background of the 60's union unrest and student riots, the film keeps a subtle check on the ridiculous. Examining death, family relationships, marital relationships, extra-marital relationships and the different ways people perceive their lot in life, Milou en Mai has something for everyone: farcical comedy, beautiful cinematography, perceptive commentary, delightful anecdotes (I'm thinking of the opening bee-keeper scene and crab-catching in the river) and fantastic 'Hot Club de France' bowing and strumming. This film is one of my all time favourites - gentle, intelligent, sensitive fun - highly recommended."

Friday, May 14, 2010

Louis Malle - Ascenseur pour l'échafaud aka Elevator to the Gallows (1958)

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[User Rating:8.0/10]

This is an excellent example of "theatre of the absurd", filmed as a "film noir" suspense thriller. "Theatre of the absurd" posits that the universe is a random entity where nothing is likely to happen as expected. I believe Camus and other French writers of his era were the principle exponents of this view of life. Well, here we have certainly an example.

A businessman (Julien Tavernier, played by Maurice Ronet), in love with his boss's wife (Florence Carala, played by Jeanne Moreau), plans a murder to look like suicide. This involves using a grappling hook and rope to enable him to climb up a floor without using the elevator. So far, so good. The boss is duly murdered, our "hero" climbs back down, takes the elevator down, and then realises he has left the rope dangling. Well, back up in the elevator, but alas, the building custodian shuts off the power, stopping the elevator between floors. Frantic (also an alternate title along with "Elevator to the Gallows"), our man tries to escape, but he is truly trapped.

Meanwhile, at street level, things are not going well for the man's inamorata. She is wandering around wondering what happened to her man, and is "vagged" by the gendarmes for not having her ID papers. There's more. A pair of wandering teenage lovers (Louis and Veronique, played by Georges Poujouly and Yori Bertin), decide to steal the man's car. They know who he is, and freely use his name while committing a few other crimes of their own. Such as stealing a Mercedes 300SL, and murdering the owner and his wife in the process. When the man finally does get out of the elevator after the power is restored in the morning, he discovers that.... But that would be telling, and you will want to find out for yourself. In any case, I have told enough to show that for the protagonist of this tale, the universe is truly a place not to be trusted at all!