Foreplays is a column that explores under-known short films by renowned directors. Jean Rouch's Gare du Nord (1965) is free to watch below. From December 2018 through February 2019, Mubi is showing the retrospective The Groundbreaking Ethnography of Jean Rouch in the United States.Jean Rouch's Gare du Nord is my favorite episode of Paris vu par… (1965)—a portmanteau film composed of six stories, each set in a different part of Paris. Rouch blends a fully fictional framework—a narrative about the crisis of a couple, Odile (Nadine Ballot) and Jean-Pierre (Barbet Schroeder)—with the kind of documentary techniques embraced by cinéma-vérité: the story unfolds in real time, across only four shots, in everyday locations, with the characters followed by a shaky handheld camera. This approach is stunning not just for its bravura, but also for the ways in which it contributes to telling and structuring a story full of mood changes,...
- 12/16/2018
- MUBI
By Michael Atkinson
One of the loveliest freeform ideas to find patronage and popularity in the New Wavey 1960s was the omnibus film, a rarely cohesive but always tempting quasi-genre defined as a collection of exclusively commissioned short films. These projects usually began with a general theme but were always most interested in gathering the generation's coolest hotshot filmmakers and encouraging them to whack off and make their special kind of havoc, but in compressed form. The aesthetics of the genre are questionable -- never is the entirety of an omnibus very satisfying -- but its smash-up ranginess of conflicting styles and potpourri perspectives make the movies irresistible. (Favorites of any connoisseur would include 1962's "The Seven Deadly Sins," 1963's "RoGoPaG," and 1969's "Love and Anger," all of which feature the era's most promiscuous omnibus-er, Jean-Luc Godard.) They're still being made: the Korean New Wave collection "If You Were Me" (2003) is a knockout,...
One of the loveliest freeform ideas to find patronage and popularity in the New Wavey 1960s was the omnibus film, a rarely cohesive but always tempting quasi-genre defined as a collection of exclusively commissioned short films. These projects usually began with a general theme but were always most interested in gathering the generation's coolest hotshot filmmakers and encouraging them to whack off and make their special kind of havoc, but in compressed form. The aesthetics of the genre are questionable -- never is the entirety of an omnibus very satisfying -- but its smash-up ranginess of conflicting styles and potpourri perspectives make the movies irresistible. (Favorites of any connoisseur would include 1962's "The Seven Deadly Sins," 1963's "RoGoPaG," and 1969's "Love and Anger," all of which feature the era's most promiscuous omnibus-er, Jean-Luc Godard.) They're still being made: the Korean New Wave collection "If You Were Me" (2003) is a knockout,...
- 10/21/2008
- by Michael Atkinson
- ifc.com
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