Tradition of Quality Cinema

[jdcopp]

There have been two major biographies of Julien Duvivier that have come out in the last ten or so years. Unfortunately, As far as I can find neither has yet been translated into English.

Eric Bonnefille produced a two volume biography entitled "Julien Duvivier Le Mal Aimant Du Cinema Francais". I can not tell you about Australia but in the USA there are about only about seven or eight libraries -all university libraries- that have copies and as I have found out none of them will lend these books through ILL -- inter-library loan.

Pierre Billard who wrote "Le Mystere Clair" and who in February 1958 -almost a year before Truffaut began to shoot "The 400 Blows" - as editor for "Cinema" was one of the first, if not the first to use the term "nouvelle vague" in writing of young filmmakers also has written a biography of Duvivier. Billard collaborated with a writer named Hubert Niogret and was published in 1996. Strangely though this book seems to have been published only in Italian.

[jdcopp]

I have previous placed these posts on Julien Duvivier and his relationship -especially Truffaut - to the young critics at Cahiers du Cinema in the 1950s and 1960s:

Cahiers' young turks take on Julien Duvivier

Cahiers and Julien Duviver -- an accounting

Julien Duviver's dream.

[Macintosh]

Godard, for his part, practically hasn't done an interview in the last two years where he hasn't praised Gallo's 'The Brown Bunny.' (A film I'm really looking forward to finally seeing, as I haven't yet.) For all we know, were Godard still writing printed criticism regularly, the new 'Artists and Models,' 'The Quiet American,' and 'The Wrong Man' -- all canonized in part by their Godard reviews -- could well be (based on recent and frequent praises) 'The Brown Bunny,' 'The Apple' by S. Makhmalbaf, 'Demi-Tarif' by Le Besco, 'Les Passagers' by Guiguet, and, um, the part where 'American Beauty' "for ten seconds, becomes 'Faces'."

Do you have any links where Godard praises The Brown Bunny? It's one of my favorite films, and i would like to hear what he has to say about it. And that comment about American Beauty is highly intriguing.

[Oedipax]

Do you have any links where Godard praises The Brown Bunny? It's one of my favorite films, and i would like to hear what he has to say about it. And that comment about American Beauty is highly intriguing.

The only reference I've found on the web, outside a list of films Godard chose to program which included The Brown Bunny, is in this article.

Godard's enduring passion in American cinema is for John Cassavetes, and for a few experimenters and avant-gardists, but the old underground is dead, he says. 'These days, advertising does all that, and technically a lot better.' There is, however, one recent American film which Godard really admires " as good, he says, as the great French ethnographic film- maker Jean Rouch in his day. It's Vincent Gallo's The Brown Bunny. Am I hearing this right? Jean-Luc Godard likes The Brown Bunny? The universally reviled vanity project that was practically laughed off screen in Cannes two years ago? 'Ah oui. Everyone hated it, it was magnifique. So what if it's narcissistic? So much the better if a narcissist makes a good film.'

It was extremely gratifying to me as a Godard fan to read that, as The Brown Bunny is one of my all-time favorites as well.

[jdcopp]

I would like to invite the reader's of this forum to view a long blog post which I have just published. In this post, I revisit the question how François Truffaut collected his source materials to write his article "A Certain Tendency of French Cinema", considering one document which those who have previously examined this issue have ignored. That document is a letter which Georges Beranos wrote to the weekly Samedi-Soir giving his reasons for refusing the Aurenche-Bost film-script for his novel Diary of a Country Priest.

My report can be found here.

Thank you.

[domino harvey]

It looks like you've done a lot of research, and the blog post(s) seem very in-depth. I've bookmarked it to look at later when I have enough time, but it looks interesting!