News

A Very Curious Girl. Courtesy of Lobster Films.Nelly Kaplan’s eloquent, vitriolic comedies are often social parables of vengeance, in which the weak rise up to serve the powerful their comeuppance. Joan Dupont recently described in Film Quarterly how the Argentine-born Kaplan had a modest start: She arrived in France, in 1953, at the age of 22, with mere 50 dollars and a letter of introduction to Cinémathèque française Director Henri Langois. She then worked as assistant director to film legend Abel Gance, with whom she had a romance, and launched her own career, making some fifteen films, among them vivacious comedies, documentary portraits of artists, and films for television—including a documentary, Abel Gance and His Napoléon (1984), about the filming of Gance’s epic, Napoléon (1927). And yet, despite her promising start and her having worked into the early 1990s, by the time Dupont wrote about her, Kaplan had been mostly forgotten.

Four late films by Luis Buñuel are showing from February 22 - March 28, 2018 in the United States in the retrospective Buñuel.“Chance governs all things.”—Luis Buñuel, My Last SighStriving for the surprising has always been a prevailing part of Luis Buñuel’s aesthetic practice. At first, this endeavor manifest itself in overtly incongruous visual terms, with the succession of shocking and often inexplicable images that dominate his earliest efforts, namely Un chien andalou (1929) and L'âge d'or (1930). After these two surrealist masterworks, though, both of which Buñuel made in collaboration with the movement’s eminent enforcer, Salvador Dalí, the director’s output went in a decidedly more systematic direction. The films Buñuel made in Mexico, twenty of them from the late 1940s into the early 1960s, could at times be just as provocative as anything else filling his filmography, but their formal and tonal constitution was comparatively tame and, dare one say it regarding Buñuel,...

Luis Buñuel movies on TCM tonight (photo: Catherine Deneuve in 'Belle de Jour') The city of Paris and iconoclastic writer-director Luis Buñuel are Turner Classic Movies' themes today and later this evening. TCM's focus on Luis Buñuel is particularly welcome, as he remains one of the most daring and most challenging filmmakers since the invention of film. Luis Buñuel is so remarkable, in fact, that you won't find any Hollywood hipster paying homage to him in his/her movies. Nor will you hear his name mentioned at the Academy Awards – no matter the Academy in question. And rest assured that most film critics working today have never even heard of him, let alone seen any of his movies. So, nowadays Luis Buñuel is un-hip, un-cool, and unfashionable. He's also unquestionably brilliant. These days everyone is worried about freedom of expression. The clash of civilizations. The West vs. The Other.

Benoit Jacquot's Diary of a Chambermaid (Le Journal d'une femme de chambre) which is based on Octave Mirbeau's classic novel, has Marion Cotillard of The Dark Knight Rises and Rust & Bone in negotiations. Variety reports that Cotillard would play Celestine in the film set in 1890 to 1900, playing an ambitious woman who works as a chambermaid. Viewers will see the condition of house servants and the perversions of France's upper-crust through Celestine's eyes. The property has had two adaptations, the first in 1946 with Jean Renoir at the wheel and Paulette Goddard, Burgess Meredith and Hurd Hatfield starring, followed by 1964's Luis Buñuel film starring Jeanne Moreau, Michel Piccoli, Georges Géret.

Benoit Jacquot's Diary of a Chambermaid (Le Journal d'une femme de chambre) which is based on Octave Mirbeau's classic novel, has Marion Cotillard of The Dark Knight Rises and Rust & Bone in negotiations. Variety reports that Cotillard would play Celestine in the film set in 1890 to 1900, playing an ambitious woman who works as a chambermaid. Viewers will see the condition of house servants and the perversions of France's upper-crust through Celestine's eyes. The property has had two adaptations, the first in 1946 with Jean Renoir at the wheel and Paulette Goddard, Burgess Meredith and Hurd Hatfield starring, followed by 1964's Luis Buñuel film starring Jeanne Moreau, Michel Piccoli, Georges Géret.