Sniff, ache, repeat

At yesterday morning's press screening of the newly restored The Passenger (a treat beyond words), the sound of sniffling and nose blowing by many a film critic could be heard. Seems that there is a bug going round the festival, and spending several hours a day in a windowless, air-conditioned environment has just aggravated the matter. Though chills, body aches, and even a slight fever didn't deter Filmbrain from dining with The President's Last Bang director Im Sang-soo last night, his body refused to cooperate this morning -- he would simply have to miss the screening of Sokurov's The Sun (which, fortunately, he caught in Berlin earlier this year). After several aborted attempts at writing reviews of I Am, Tale of Cinema, Who's Camus Anyway, and The Squid and The Whale, Filmbrain realized the illness was winning, and sleep would have to be the priority. However, he did want to share with you this passage from Theodore Roszak's Flicker that made him chuckle -- a novel that is a must-read for any and all cineastes. A guilty pleasure that brilliantly blends true cinematic tidbits with false, and one that will have you checking IMDB every second page: Clare had lots of reservations about Breathless. They seemed to stem from insults she'd once traded with Jean-Luc Godard when they crossed paths at the Cinémathèque. His impish decision to dedicate his film to Monogram Studios, that epitome of gutter culture, was one of those gestures of reverse snobbery that Clare deplored in the French. [. . .] But Clare hadn't gone to Paris to hawk papers along the Champs-Elysées. She'd come on an intellectual pilgrimage in search of French cineastes who could discuss the films of Renoir, Cocteau, Bunuel. Much to her surprise, when she found the mentors she was seeking, they were as often as not more eager to talk about John Ford and Joseph Lewis and Raoul Walsh. Oh yes, the Americans were hopeless philistines, little better than savages actually. That went without saying. But when it came to film, that was a different matter. Hollywood, which was run by a collection of capitalist bandits, had nevertheless invented the western, the musical, Donald Duck. It had turned the rarefied art of cinema into the people's art of movies. And such good movies! To be sure, the Americans themselves had no idea what they were doing. Like true savages, they hadn't the ability to appropriate their own culture. That required the services of European, ideally French, intellect. It was all very dialectical -- how something of such charm and fascination could issue from such a debased source. Back tomorrow with the Round 5 Quiz results, and a review of something on Thursday.

Comments

[pixel]

Hey, I have that same cold! And here I was thinking it was that sick admin. asst. in the office who gave it to me. Maybe it was Alice Tully Hall!

[Aaron Hillis]

My memory's already shot. Remind me what food tastes like again?

*hack*

FYI, I was secretly and repeatedly jamming three inches of tissue up each nose hole during The Passenger. Amazing film, but not good for a Phlegm-brain (dot-com).

[James Russell]

Bit late chiming in with this comment but, anyway, much as I dearly wanted to like Flicker, the anachronisms irritated the hell out of me. They don't usually if they're small, but there seemed to be quite a few of them, of which I think the most egregious was a reference to MTV during a scene set in 1976, five years before that network came into being.

Mind you, it certainly was one of the most conceptually fascinating novels I've ever read for all that.