Screening Log

This new site feature is a collective effort to summarize our viewing habits. Occasionally, you will find titles here that are coming to a theater near you, in addition to films viewed on television, and even films viewed in piecemeal. The screening log is archived each month; to view past entries select a month in the menu below.

November 2006 activity

Total Log Entries: 86

Total Comments: 48

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Liberte, la nuit / France / 1983

In his 1988 documentary on post-New Wave filmmakers (Eustache, Akerman, Doillon, Jacquot, Techine, Carax, Werner Schroeter) Les ministeres de l’art Garrel singles out Doillon’s 1979 La femme qui pleure for particular praise. So it’s interesting that Liberte, la nuit, coming between the two, has a central section of precisely that: a crying woman. Mouche, separated from political activist Jean (he’s involved in a clandestine Algerian group during the Algerian struggle for independence), is shown weeping as she sews in an otherwise empty theatre; then again breaking down as she sits in the car with Jean. But in this later scene Garrel privileges Mouche (a magnificent Emanuelle Riva), immediately cutting to another shot in the car, this time not weeping, with an overlaid piano score cutting out Jean’s voice.

Mouche is also the focus of a central scene in the middle of the film, when she’s assassinated by the OAS for supplying guns to the Algerians. The film stock suddenly changes, and the otherwise grey-toned black-and-white shifts into a over-grainy impressionism.

But Liberte, la nuit is a mixed success. The subsequent romance bewteen Jean and a much younger pied noir seems pretty unconvincing to me, and the sequence of their idyll by the sea, keyed to a piano score, is in some shots terribly banal. Fortunately it’s balanced by some magnificent filmmaking, when the camera holds on Christine Boisson’s face at length, as she sits there, simply being.

by Ian Johnston | Source: 35mm print
20 Nov 2006 1:53 PM | Submit Comment

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