Flanked by UniFrance president Serge Toubiana and the National Orchestra of France, filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier stood before a rapt crowd at Paris’ Maison de la Radio this past Saturday to introduce an evening dedicated to French film scores called “May the Music Begin!”
That moniker – a reference to the original French title of his 1975 César winner “Let The Joy Reign Supreme” – highlighted Tavernier’s personal connection to this project.
“There are many unsung heroes of French cinema,” he explained, “but none more so than our composers.”
Working on a film and subsequent eight-part series, both titled “My Journey Through French Cinema,” the filmmaker became struck by the degree to which French composers had been overlooked in the official accounts of French film history – and spent many lonely years trying to rectify that.
“For five years I felt like I was wandering in the desert,” he reflected, “and then in one...
That moniker – a reference to the original French title of his 1975 César winner “Let The Joy Reign Supreme” – highlighted Tavernier’s personal connection to this project.
“There are many unsung heroes of French cinema,” he explained, “but none more so than our composers.”
Working on a film and subsequent eight-part series, both titled “My Journey Through French Cinema,” the filmmaker became struck by the degree to which French composers had been overlooked in the official accounts of French film history – and spent many lonely years trying to rectify that.
“For five years I felt like I was wandering in the desert,” he reflected, “and then in one...
- 1/21/2019
- by Ben Croll
- Variety Film + TV
Bruce Baillie. Courtesy of Lux. The first time he saw Bruce Baillie, a fiery Peter Kubelka recounted in front of an amused audience at the Austrian Film Museum, the American filmmaker was pulling off a headstand in a classroom before taking his students out on the campus to collect garbage. In the filmmaking of Baillie and his organization Canyon Cinema, which was showcased from January 30 to February 3 in five programs curated by Garbiñe Ortega, ideas of life and community are transformed into sounds, colors and film. Sometimes those ideas exceed the films. As Mr. Baillie has put it himself in an interview with Richard Corliss in 1971, “I always felt that I brought as much truth out of the environment as I could, but I’m tired of coming out of. . . . I want everybody really lost, and I want us all to be at home there. Something like that. Actually I am not interested in that,...
- 3/21/2017
- MUBI
Ravel: Concerto for Piano & Orchestra in G major; Concerto in D major for the Left Hand; Fauré: Ballade in F-sharp minor, Op. 19 Yuja Wang/Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra/Lionel Bringuier (Deutsche Grammophon) Complete Piano Works of Ravel: Sérénade grotesque; Menuet antique; Pavane pour une Infante défunte; Jeux d'eau; Sonatine; Miroirs; Gaspard de la nuit; Menuet sur le nom de Haydn; Valses Nobles et Sentimentales; Prélude; À la manière de…Borodine; À la manière de…Chabrier; Le Tombeau de Couperin; Menuet in C-sharp minor; La Valse; Casella: À la manière de…Ravel; Honegger: Hommage à Ravel; Briggs: Encore avec Ravel; Plate: Erinnerung au Maurice Ravel; Mason: Galoches en d'aoút Hinrich Alpers (Honens) Ravel: Miroirs; Pavane pour une infante defunte; Gaspard de la nuit Carlo Grante (Music & Arts)
The promo mailings have recently yielded a new crop of Ravel recordings. None displace my favorites, but all are interesting and worth discussing.
The promo mailings have recently yielded a new crop of Ravel recordings. None displace my favorites, but all are interesting and worth discussing.
- 11/27/2015
- by SteveHoltje
- www.culturecatch.com
The sheer luminosity of Marion Cotillard's face nearly overwhelms the beautiful music of Joan of Arc at the Stake, Arthur Honegger's 1935 oratorio being presented for an all-too-limited run by the New York Philharmonic. Playing the French peasant girl whose martyrdom eventually led to her beatification, the Oscar-winning actress is the emotional anchor of an imaginatively staged production that brings the musical piece to thrilling life. Clad in a simple white dress, Cotillard makes her entrance from the rear of the stage, walking down to the front and across the length of it before assuming her position
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- 6/12/2015
- by Frank Scheck
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
In the real world, this may not be the perfect time to glorify a fanatically religious teenage warlord, or to wonder sympathetically what goes through her mind as she’s being burned alive. Yet time elides the difference between terrorists and saints, and Joan of Arc is better known as an equestrian statue than as a bloodthirsty young girl. Arthur Honegger’s oratorio Joan of Arc at the Stake gives us the child behind the icon, a frightened and naïve peasant who swings, in the manner of adolescents everywhere, between stubborn swagger and total confusion. In the brutally satiric and colorfully composed 80-minute piece, her life and fantasies unfurl as a series of spasmodic flashbacks, making it the perfect finale for the New York Philharmonic’s season. The work’s natural habitat is an ordinary hall, with performers in concert dress stiffly arrayed before the violins, but here the orchestra...
- 6/11/2015
- by Justin Davidson
- Vulture
Simone Simon: Remembering the 'Cat People' and 'La Bête Humaine' star (photo: Simone Simon 'Cat People' publicity) Pert, pretty, pouty, and fiery-tempered Simone Simon – who died at age 94 ten years ago, on Feb. 22, 2005 – is best known for her starring role in Jacques Tourneur's cult horror movie classic Cat People (1942). Those aware of the existence of film industries outside Hollywood will also remember Simon for her button-nosed femme fatale in Jean Renoir's French film noir La Bête Humaine (1938).[1] In fact, long before Brigitte Bardot, Annette Stroyberg, Mamie Van Doren, Tuesday Weld, Ann-Margret, and Barbarella's Jane Fonda became known as cinema's Sex Kittens, Simone Simon exuded feline charm – with a tad of puppy dog wistfulness – in a film career that spanned two continents and a quarter of a century. From the early '30s to the mid-'50s, she seduced men young and old on both...
- 2/20/2015
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
A few days ago at Les Journées de Soleure (a festival dedicated to Swiss cinema), Suisa Foundation unveiled an important anthology that fills a huge gap in the panorama of Swiss artistic achievements. Collaborating with the Swiss Film Archive and the University of Lausanne, musicologist Mathias Spohr took the responsibility for directing this impressive publication. This Swiss Film Music Anthology covers almost a century of Helvetian compositions by recouping them in a glorious box consisting of three CDs, a DVD of musical short films and a book, which offers a glimpse at the history and evolution of Swiss film music. The anthology starts with the impressive Pacific 231 by legendary musician Arthur Honegger. The composer somehow dominates the first CD (1923-1959), as many of his...
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- 1/27/2015
- Screen Anarchy
When did a film last blow you away? The pair behind the restoration of an old silent classic about Napoleon say it's a reminder of how magnificent pure cinema can be
Napoleon is a silent film directed by Abel Gance, dramatising the youth and early career of Napoleon Bonaparte. Its most complete screening, said to be nine hours long, took place in Paris in 1927 – but this version was subsequently lost. British film-maker Kevin Brownlow saw a version as a schoolboy and subsequently restored the film to close to its original length from various prints. His restoration was first shown in London in 1980 with a score by Carl Davis. It will screen again on 30 November at the city's Royal Festival Hall.
Kevin Brownlow, restorer
It was 1953 and I was still at school. I'd borrowed a silent French film from the library for my 9.5mm projector. It was by Jean Epstein and it was awful.
Napoleon is a silent film directed by Abel Gance, dramatising the youth and early career of Napoleon Bonaparte. Its most complete screening, said to be nine hours long, took place in Paris in 1927 – but this version was subsequently lost. British film-maker Kevin Brownlow saw a version as a schoolboy and subsequently restored the film to close to its original length from various prints. His restoration was first shown in London in 1980 with a score by Carl Davis. It will screen again on 30 November at the city's Royal Festival Hall.
Kevin Brownlow, restorer
It was 1953 and I was still at school. I'd borrowed a silent French film from the library for my 9.5mm projector. It was by Jean Epstein and it was awful.
- 11/29/2013
- by Pamela Hutchinson
- The Guardian - Film News
French actor best known for her role in Jean Renoir's 1939 masterpiece The Rules of the Game
Although Paulette Dubost, who has died aged 100, appeared in far more films than the number of years she lived, most cinemagoers know her best as Lisette, the coquettish chambermaid in Jean Renoir's La Règle du Jeu (The Rules of the Game, 1939), one of cinema's masterpieces. Lisette, who attends the Marquis de la Chesnaye during a lavish weekend party at a country chateau, flirts dangerously with a poacher turned servant (Julian Carette), while her overly jealous gamekeeper husband (Gaston Modot) tries to catch them at it.
Dubost and Carette play a deliciously sly and comic cat-and-mouse game with the absurdly rigid Modot, especially during the after-dinner entertainment, a breathtaking sequence, described by the critic Richard Roud as something from "a Marx brothers film scripted by a Feydeau who suddenly acquired a tragic sense...
Although Paulette Dubost, who has died aged 100, appeared in far more films than the number of years she lived, most cinemagoers know her best as Lisette, the coquettish chambermaid in Jean Renoir's La Règle du Jeu (The Rules of the Game, 1939), one of cinema's masterpieces. Lisette, who attends the Marquis de la Chesnaye during a lavish weekend party at a country chateau, flirts dangerously with a poacher turned servant (Julian Carette), while her overly jealous gamekeeper husband (Gaston Modot) tries to catch them at it.
Dubost and Carette play a deliciously sly and comic cat-and-mouse game with the absurdly rigid Modot, especially during the after-dinner entertainment, a breathtaking sequence, described by the critic Richard Roud as something from "a Marx brothers film scripted by a Feydeau who suddenly acquired a tragic sense...
- 9/30/2011
- by Ronald Bergan
- The Guardian - Film News
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