News

Certain directors throughout film history have become known for their specific ability to adapt a certain writer, standing head and shoulders above any other adaptations. Laurence Olivier and Kenneth Branagh had this with Shakespeare, David Lean with Noel Coward and Charles Dickens, Robert Bresson with Georges Bernanos. Similarly, Mike Flanagan has become the preeminent adapter of Stephen King, bringing his work to the screen in faithful but also uniquely cinematic ways. Gerald's Game, Doctor Sleep, and The Life of Chuck his last three feature films, are all excellent King adaptations. Now he's taking King to TV, where Flanagan has had immense success with series like Midnight Mass and The Haunting of Hill House. This time, it's the classic and heartbreaking early King novel, Carrie.

"It initially started as a conversation that Amazon initiated, and they said, 'Hey, would you have any interest in Carrie?'" Flanagan told MovieWeb in a recent interview.

France’s Robert Bresson’s theory about a ‘pure’ cinema defies basic rules of the movie mainstream — like, ‘no acting allowed.’ But his movies remained faithful to his creed, even as they became increasingly pessimistic. This story of an unloved and abused young girl is considered one of Bresson’s masterpieces. The theme is human suffering in the void left by the absence of faith, and the tone is unrelentingly pitiless.

Mouchette

Blu-ray

The Criterion Collection 363

1967 / B&w / 1:66 widescreen / 81 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date December 8, 2020 / 39.95

Starring: Nadine Nortier, Jean-Claude Guilbert, Maria Cardinal, Paul Hebert, Jean Vimenet, Marie Susini, Suzanne Huguenin, Marine Trichet, Raymonde Chabrun.

Cinematography: Ghislain Cloquet

Film Editor: Raymond Lamy

Original Music: Jean Wiener

Written by Robert Bresson from the book Nouvelle histoire de Mouchette by Georges Bernanos

Produced by Anatole Dauman

Directed by Robert Bresson

The first time one sees Robert Bresson speak, we...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSChanges continue to ripple throughout the film industry: Following the cancellation of this year's SXSW, the festival has paired up with Amazon Prime and invited filmmakers of their lineup to take part in a 10-day "online festival," streaming on Prime for users in the U.S. Both Cannes and the Venice Film Festival have announced that neither will be moving forward with a digital festival, committing to plans for physical events for later this year. Recommended Viewingnhk World is offering its four part documentary, 10 Years with Hayao Miyazaki, on its website for free. The series offers an exclusive look at the animation auteur's production of Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea.A new short film by Jean-Marie Straub, France Against Robots, has premiered on the Kino Slang blog. The film's title is...

Before he wrote and directed movies, Paul Schrader was a film critic, best known for his book “Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer.” Director Robert Bresson’s “Diary of a Country Priest” has always been a key film for Schrader, with Bresson’s ascetic Catholicism mirroring Schrader’s fully-absorbed Calvinism. And now Schrader has made “First Reformed,” a film that even freshman film students will be able to easily connect to this influential earlier movie.

“First Reformed” is about a country priest, and he keeps a diary. And, like the hero of Bresson’s film (and the Georges Bernanos novel on which it is based), he’s got stomach cancer.

There’s more than homage going on here, though. As Schrader’s hero takes a bleaker look at life, and considers committing an extreme act as a desperate attempt to find resonance and morality in the world, he stands...

Before he wrote and directed movies, Paul Schrader was a film critic, best known for his book “Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer,” and Robert Bresson’s “Diary of a Country Priest” has always been a key film for Schrader, with Bresson’s ascetic Catholicism mirroring Schrader’s fully-absorbed Calvinism. And now Schrader has made “First Reformed,” a film that even freshman film students will be able to easily connect to this influential earlier movie. “First Reformed” is about a country priest, and he keeps a diary. And, like the hero of Bresson’s film (and the novel by Georges Bernanos on which.

Soak up the Sun: Pialat’s Palme d’Or Winning Spiritual Anguish

As part of Cohen Media Group’s Maurice Pialat retrospective, perhaps the most significant title showcased in the lineup is his infamous 1987 title, Under the Sun of Satan. Instantly reviled after winning the coveted Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival (with a jury made up of such heavy-hitters as Elem Klimov, Jerzy Skolimowski, Theo Angelopoulos, and Norman Mailer), where Pialat was jeered by a disapproving crowd, the title quickly lapsed into obscurity following a continually tepid critical reception.

Perhaps Pialat’s austere and increasingly deliberate examination of mental and spiritual anguish told through the perspective of a bumbling priest whose blasphemous predicament proves only the presence of Satan rather than God was as simultaneously too old fashioned as it was inconveniently provocative. Based on a 1927 novel by French author Georges Bernanos, Pialat’s treatment does seem...

And here we are. The day after Easter and we’ve reached the top of the mountain. While compiling this list, it’s become evident that true religious films just aren’t made anymore (and if they are, they are widely panned). That being said, religious themes exist in more mainstream movies than ever, despite there being no deliberate attempts to dub the films “religious.” Faith, God, whatever you want to call it – it’s influenced the history of nations, of politics, of culture, and of film. And these are the most important films in that wheelhouse. There are only two American films in the top 10, and only one of them is in English.

courtesy of hilobrow.com

10. Andrei Rublev (1966)

Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky

A brutally expansive biopic about the Russian iconographer divided into nine chapters. Andrei Rublev (Anatoly Solonitsyn) is portrayed not as a silent monk, but a motivated artist working against social ruin,...

(Maurice Pialat, 1991; Eureka!, 15)

One of the most prickly mavericks of French cinema, Maurice Pialat (1925-2003) was a painter, documentary film-maker and occasional actor before making his feature debut in his mid-40s with L'enfance nue, an intense realistic film about a disturbed child being passed from family to family.

In 1987 Pialat famously waved his fist at a hostile Cannes audience when receiving the Palme d'Or for Under Satan's Sun (a complex Catholic movie from a novel by Georges Bernanos starring Gérard Depardieu in one of his several Pialat films). Norman Mailer was a member of the jury. Four years later Pialat flourished his fist again at the bourgeoisie in this lengthy, characteristically unromantic and unsentimental contribution to the centenary anniversary of Vincent van Gogh's death. It's a far cry in tone from the Vincente Minnelli-directed biopic Lust for Life, starring Kirk Douglas, released in France as La Vie...

★★★★★ Rereleased on DVD by Artificial Eye come two of Robert Bresson's most remarkable achievements. Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) and Mouchette (1967) share many common themes, presenting us with a taut and distressingly bleak portrait of human frailty and a world where redemption is possible only through death. Jean-Luc Godard once wrote, "Robert Bresson is French cinema, as Dostoyevsky is the Russian novel and Mozart is German music." Bresson's uniquely spiritual aesthetic was ultimately his own personal response to the question' What is cinema?', challenging the impotence of post-war French cinema.

Bresson presents us with two incredibly theoretical studies of humanity, creating scenarios where the most ordinary and pedestrian of occurrences hold spiritual meaning. These moments acquire intense significance and delicately tune the unsolicited eyes and ears of the audience towards the gentle reverberations of sorrow and hopelessness which throb beneath the tainted veneer of modern life. In the first, Au Hasard Balthazar,...

A follower of Robert Bresson and admirer of the Catholic novelist Georges Bernanos, the maverick French film-maker Bruno Dumont is famous for religious fables that make no concessions to popular audiences and are performed by deliberately inexpressive non-professional actors. His last film, Hadewijch, centred on a novice so zealous that she was thrown out of her convent and fell in with an Islamic terrorist. Hors Satan, his sixth film and perhaps his most compelling, is set in a bleak, thinly populated, hauntingly beautiful corner of Pas de Calais near Boulogne, an area he's worked in several times before. A raggedly dressed ascetic figure, called simply "the guy" (le gars) in the cast list and resembling El Greco's Christ or the Spanish student Pasolini chose to play Christ in his St Matthew's Gospel film, drifts around the locality, saying little and living rough in the sand dunes. He's fed by local...

In this episode of They Shot Pictures, I am joined by my friend and Cinema on the Road co-host Jhon (@cruyffbedroom) to discuss the always distinctive and often devastating films of French filmmaker Maurice Pialat. We start with his 1972 film, We Won’t Grow Old Together, move on to his adaptation of the Georges Bernanos novel, Under the Sun of Satan and conclude with his penultimate feature Van Gogh.

Subscribe via iTunes...

“We are still coming to terms with Robert Bresson, and the peculiar power and beauty of his films,” Martin Scorsese said in the 2010 book “A Passion For Film,” describing the often overlooked French filmmaker as “one of the cinema’s greatest artists.”

But while he may be revered by some as the finest French filmmaker bar Jean Renoir, outside hardcore cinephile circles he and his films are virtually unknown (perhaps regarded as too opaque or nebulous). Just consider the fact that almost every definitive book on the elusive director was published during the aughts to feel the full truth of Scorsese's statement about how we're still in the process of appreciating and understanding his life and work. Even Bresson’s actual birthdate is contested, adding further the ambiguities surrounding the director.

“Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never have been seen,” the meticulous Bresson once famously said, hinting at...

Admired actor with an instinctive presence and austere looks

One of the greatest performances in the history of film was given by Claude Laydu, in the title role of Robert Bresson's Journal d'un Curé de Campagne (Diary of a Country Priest, 1951). As a young, sickly priest unable to resolve the problems of his small parish, and assailed by self-doubt, Laydu, who has died aged 84, brought his own spirituality, instinctive presence and intense ascetic looks to the role. His portrayal prompted Jean Tulard to write in his Dictionary of Film that "no other actor deserves to go to heaven as much as Laydu".

This is even more remarkable given that Bresson declared that "Art is transformation. Acting can only get in the way", and that he called his actors "models" whom he trained to remove all traces of theatricality and to speak in a monotonic manner. Bresson chose the 23-year-old from among many candidates,...

The Irish documentarist Ian Palmer worked intermittently from 1997 to 2009 on this curious film about the long-running feuds between various clans of Irish Travellers that regularly lead to extended bare-knuckle fights staged (sometimes for large purses) in country lanes and urban wastelands in Britain and Ireland. No one knows how they originated, no one really believes that they will ever end. They're quite efficiently managed, extremely bloody, and women are rarely if ever allowed to attend, though young boys, the next generation of battlers, are. The film is both a celebration of family solidarity and a criticism of the macho aggression, pointless pride and unreasoning partisanship that perpetuate bloody vendettas. It's thus a microcosmic view of the world at large and confirmation of Georges Bernanos's celebrated maxim: "La colère des imbéciles remplit le monde."

DocumentaryPhilip French

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to...

"The indie Texan filmmaker David Lowery receives a double bill at the reRun Gastropub Theater in Dumbo, Brooklyn, and while Pioneer, a 16-minute short, and St Nick, an 86-minute feature, don't provide hard answers to their mysteries, both are deeply intriguing," writes Andy Webster in the New York Times. Regarding St Nick, a "potentially stifling ambience is deflected by quiet suspense and the awe-inspiring compositions of the cinematographer, Clay Liford. Decaying rustic interiors evoke Andrew Wyeth still lifes; pastoral long shots suggest a Southwestern walkabout. And Mr Lowery seems ready for a bigger canvas."

"Obliquely charting the terror, loneliness, and liberation of navigating a cold, callous grown-up world, St Nick follows nameless brother and sister runaways (played by real-life siblings Tucker and Savanna Sears) who take up impermanent residence in an empty Texas house," writes Nick Schager in Slant. "David Lowery's debut feature is long on silence and laden...

Over a period of several years, Cambodian journalist Thet Sambath won the confidence of Nuon Chea, the notorious second-in-command to Pol Pot, who was closely involved in Khmer Rouge's genocidal activities of the late 1970s. He financed the film personally, even risking his wife and children's health in the process, and concealed the fact that his parents and other relatives had died in the killing fields. Gradually he gets Nuon Chea to describe the mad dedication to revolution and total reform that drove him on to commit his atrocities and the weird logic that continues in his old age to justify his deeds. Finally, Nuon Chea does get around to a sort of apology, before belatedly the helicopter arrives to take him to face a trial. A fascinating documentary that illustrates Georges Bernanos's famous dictum: "La colère des imbéciles remplit le monde."

DocumentaryPhilip French

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News...

(1983/1987, 15, Eureka!)

These two movies both find the great French maverick writer-director Maurice Pialat in characteristically uningratiating form, and he appears in both, as does his gifted discovery, Sandrine Bonnaire. A nos amours (To our Romance) is a raw slice of Parisian life in which Pialat plays a middle-aged tailor with a shrewish wife, an obese gay son and a teenage daughter (the stunning debut of Bonnaire) drifting into compulsive promiscuity. Sous le soleil de Satan (Under Satan's Sun), a Bressonian treatment of a novel by Georges Bernanos set in the1920s, has a performance of power and integrity from Gérard Depardieu as a self-flagellating country priest, who sees the Devil at work in a murderess played by Bonnaire, and encounters Satan in the guise of a horse dealer. When it won the Palme d'Or at Cannes from a jury that included Norman Mailer, Pialat shook his fist at a disapproving...