News

With a seemingly endless amount of streaming options — not only the titles at our disposal, but services themselves — we’ve taken it upon ourselves to highlight the titles that have recently hit platforms. Every week, one will be able to see the cream of the crop (or perhaps some simply interesting picks) of streaming titles (new and old) across platforms such as Netflix, iTunes, Amazon, and more (note: U.S. only). Check out our rundown for this week’s selections below.

Abacus: Small Enough to Jail (Steve James)

Steve James’ filmography has long been about finding entry into larger conversations through intimate portraits. The director’s landmark debut, Hoop Dreams, and latter-day efforts like 2014’s monument to critic Roger Ebert, Life Itself, don’t have much in common on the surface, but they both use their central characters to tell larger stories about big picture topics like structural dysfunction and the purpose of film criticism.

Welcome to the world of Jean Grémillon, where adult characters work through adult problems without benefit of melodramatic excess. The impressively directed experiences of Micheline Presle’s lady doctor on a storm-swept island opts for a progressive point of view, not sentimentality.

The Love of a Woman

Blu-ray + DVD

Arrow Video USA

1953 / B&W / 1:37 flat full frame / 104 min. / Street Date August 22, 2017 / L’amour d’une femme / Available from Arrow Video 39.95

Starring: Micheline Presle, Massimo Girotti, Gaby Morlay, Paolo Stoppa, Marc Cassot, Marius David, Yvette Etiévant, Roland Lesaffre, Robert Naly, Madeleine Geoffroy.

Cinematography: Louis Page

Film Editor: Louisette Hautecoeur, Marguerite Renoir

Production Design: Robert Clavel

Original Music: Elsa Barraine, Henrie Dutilleux

Written by René Fallet, Jean Grémillon, René Wheeler

Produced by Mario Gabrielli, Pierre Géin

Directed by Jean Grémillon

Film critics that pride themselves on rediscovering older directors haven’t done very well by France’s Jean Grémillon, at least not in this country.

Translators introduction: This article by Mireille Latil Le Dantec, the second of two parts, was originally published in issue 40 of Cinématographe, September 1978. The previous issue of the magazine had included a dossier on "La qualité française" and a book of a never-shot script by Jean Grémillon (Le Printemps de la Liberté or The Spring of Freedom) had recently been published. The time was ripe for a re-evaluation of Grémillon's films and a resuscitation of his undervalued career. As this re-evaluation appears to still be happening nearly 40 years later—Grémillon's films have only recently seen DVD releases and a 35mm retrospective begins this week at Museum of the Moving Image in Queens—this article and its follow-up gives us an important view of a French perspective on Grémillon's work by a very perceptive critic doing the initial heavy-lifting in bringing the proper attention to the filmmaker's work.

Passion...

Translators introduction: This article by Mireille Latil Le Dantec, the first of two parts, was originally published in issue 40 of Cinématographe, September 1978. The previous issue of the magazine had included a dossier on "La qualité française" and a book of a never-shot script by Jean Grémillon (Le Printemps de la Liberté or The Spring of Freedom) had recently been published. The time was ripe for a re-evaluation of Grémillon's films and a resuscitation of his undervalued career. As this re-evaluation appears to still be happening nearly 40 years later—Grémillon's films have only recently seen DVD releases and a 35mm retrospective begins this week at Museum of the Moving Image in Queens—this article and its follow-up gives us an important view of a French perspective on Grémillon's work by a very perceptive critic doing the initial heavy-lifting in bringing the proper attention to the filmmaker's work.

Filmmaker maudit?...

Publicity still of Remorques. Courtesy of Janus Films.

"Melodrama – 2. now, a drama with sensational, romantic, often violent action, extravagant emotions, and, generally, a happy ending" —1959 Webster's New World Dictionary

The “melo” of melodrama, a word from the French, takes its root from the Greek melos, meaning “song.” Originally, the two-pronged word was said to be a sensational or romantic stage play with songs or orchestral accompaniment. The recently departed Alain Resnais took the prefix for the title of his superb 1986 film Melo, about a love triangle involving a violinist and a pianist. Only one of the three Jean Grémillon’s films (Remorques, Lumière d'été, and Le Ciel est à vous) in the Museum of the Museum Image's major and rare retrospective, made during WWII and the French Occupation, carries the music or the happy ending, which Webster’s affixed to melodrama’s meaning in the year of the filmmaker’s death,...

Introduction

In Laissez-passer [Safe Conduct], the film that the French director Bertrand Tavernier made in 2002, we see the French film industry of the Occupation years as a ruined and almost shut-down institution that is highly dependent on the factor of chance. In his story, Tavernier exculpates one of the key figures of the occupation cinema, Henri-Georges Clouzot, from the accusation of collaborating with the Nazis. He pictures Clouzot as a man whose Jewish wife has been held hostage by the Nazis and, and against all odds, he finishes Le corbeau about the vicious and nasty people of a small town in France, where someone is sending poison pen letters to its "honourable" citizens. Le corbeau became a very popular box-office hit during the Occupation, and, at the same time, the underground press attacked it for showing France as a land of the degenerate and perverted people, a view that, according to accusers,...