Masculin Feminin is a film about the culture of youth, the sincere, foolish, self-absorbed search for meaning and identity. Godard, who was thirty-five when the film was shot, approaches the subject as an outsider, a documentarian, at once fascinated, amused, and dismayed by all that he sees.
We tend to make everything hold meaning for us as humans, but what the sheep and the donkey know feels deeper than allegories and metaphors and stories humans need to tell ourselves. It feels fundamental and honest and beautiful, and the movie ends the way it began, with the ringing of warm bells.
It all just clicks, softly and almost imperceptibly. And then you don’t want your time with it to end, you want to spend more time with it, and you think about it after it’s gone, and realize that it’s much more complicated than you realize.
He doesn’t sound bitter. And he says, I have written films since, I have dreamed films, and maybe someday another little miracle will happen, and I will make another film.
Vigo has been called one of the early advocates of poetic realism. And it’s true that his films are a delightful combination of near-documentary prosody with beautiful flights of fancy and dream-like forays into characters’ imaginations. But he shows imagination and poetry as an essential part of reality, not a departure from it.
Tati is a sort of magpie of human (and canine) foibles; a collector of gestures and moments of absurdity.
Ostensibly Desk Set is about the fear of a new world in which machines will replace human connection and take human jobs. But there’s really something more elementally beautiful about the friendships in this film, something that staves off the fundamental loneliness of being alive, being human.
Know your place: Some thoughts on three beautiful “kitchen sink” films.
A collection of all the articles we published last month for those who like their magpies’ tidings as an issue.
Most of my videos are of lost and forgotten places, and while visiting these places I have often pondered the people that once inhabited them. Who were they…where are they? To a large extent they are here. These are the inhabitants of my “drowned worlds.”
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