Jeannette feels in many ways made especially for me. It’s an off-kilter musical featuring live singing, it foregrounds a weird pseudo-Gnostic Catholicism that’s more mystic than dogmatic, and it takes seriously the idea that God may exist in a form we can’t approach. Really, this checks all of my boxes for a film of this subject matter.
It’s only fair, therefore, that I step back and acknowledge Dumont’s film as a seriously bizarre, alienating, and in many ways funamdentally flawed experience.…
I’m doing a series of rewatches this week, in part because Tuesday is my birthday and in part because I rarely let myself do rewatches.
This really is just one of the best films ever made, isn’t it? It’s brilliant from the first scene — Rivette tells us that Ninon spinning means she’s going to dance, and then reminds us of that connection for the next hour. Then he makes one of the most amazing cinematic moves I’ve ever witnessed: he…
Not the life-changing masterpiece word of mouth has knighted it — I suspect Coyote vs. ACME would (will?) be better — but a fun, heartfelt, gorgeously animated way to spend an afternoon. It’s not quite Looney enough, and the pacing’s a little weird, but when the factory theme kicks in…
My last remaining Seventh Doctor serial. This absolute batshit, but it’s way too much fun to really care. I honestly love the production design here, too — even on one-inch tape, it’s astonishing how good the era looks compared to the previous, and how much verve it has.
This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
Rivette insists in the interview on this film's DVD that it's a story about "revenants," not "phantoms." The latter, he says, is something not like us, a being from an entirely different plane. Revenants are, by contrast, somewhere between the living and the dead - they exist in liminal spaces, stagnant, unable to pass completely to a different realm.
Rivette is at least half-right. This is not a film about ghosts, or warnings from an afterlife about how to live…
Yes, it is very clearly a student film, and not a particularly coherent one at that; but with that caveat in mind it’s still pretty stunning how much of the New Wave’s style can already be seen here in 1949. For Rivette fans, it’s essential viewing.
