Toronto Film Fest, Day Eight
Sep. 18th, 2004 12:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
przedMon jour francais. Three films, all French, and a very mixed bag they were.
Title: L'Intrus
Director: Claire Denis
Country: France
P's Rating: Words Escape Me
Here's my three word review of Denis' latest: What the fuck? Some people have been able to tease a narrative out of Denis' latest film, but I found it frustrating in the extreme. Still, being Denis, it's gorgeous and fascinating, with moments of terror and horror and beauty.
Title: Cinevardaphoto
Director: Agnes Varda
Country: France
P's Rating: Highly Recommended
An omnibus film of three shorts inspired in some way by photography. Ydessa, les ours et etc. is a portrait of Toronto gallery owner and curator, Ydessa Hendeles and her colleciton of thousands of photographs of people with teddy bears. What seems at first a trivial obsession becomes a fascinating exploration of the history of the 20th century, including the Holocaust that killed much of Hendeles' family and destroyed any possibility of her having access to the sort of photographs of her own family that she now avidly collects. In Ulysse Varda investigates a photograph she took twenty years before of a man, a young boy and a dead goat. The photo itself is strangely beautiful and the stories it provokes are interesting. The final film, Salut les Cubains is a celebration of the political and artistic life of Cuba in the 60s. Varda used many of the thousands of photos that she took when visiting the island and created both a history of the revolution and a paean to the musicians and filmmakers she found there.
Title: Writer of O
Director: Pola Rapaport
Country: France/U.S.
P's Rating: Recommended
A documentary about Dominique Aury, the respected French editor and essayist who also secretly wrote the sado-masochistic classic, The Story of O. The film is an intriguing essay on feminism, censorship and the sexual imagination.
Title: L'Intrus
Director: Claire Denis
Country: France
P's Rating: Words Escape Me
Here's my three word review of Denis' latest: What the fuck? Some people have been able to tease a narrative out of Denis' latest film, but I found it frustrating in the extreme. Still, being Denis, it's gorgeous and fascinating, with moments of terror and horror and beauty.
Title: Cinevardaphoto
Director: Agnes Varda
Country: France
P's Rating: Highly Recommended
An omnibus film of three shorts inspired in some way by photography. Ydessa, les ours et etc. is a portrait of Toronto gallery owner and curator, Ydessa Hendeles and her colleciton of thousands of photographs of people with teddy bears. What seems at first a trivial obsession becomes a fascinating exploration of the history of the 20th century, including the Holocaust that killed much of Hendeles' family and destroyed any possibility of her having access to the sort of photographs of her own family that she now avidly collects. In Ulysse Varda investigates a photograph she took twenty years before of a man, a young boy and a dead goat. The photo itself is strangely beautiful and the stories it provokes are interesting. The final film, Salut les Cubains is a celebration of the political and artistic life of Cuba in the 60s. Varda used many of the thousands of photos that she took when visiting the island and created both a history of the revolution and a paean to the musicians and filmmakers she found there.
Title: Writer of O
Director: Pola Rapaport
Country: France/U.S.
P's Rating: Recommended
A documentary about Dominique Aury, the respected French editor and essayist who also secretly wrote the sado-masochistic classic, The Story of O. The film is an intriguing essay on feminism, censorship and the sexual imagination.
