Céline & Julie go through the looking glass

The Brooklyn Academy of Music recently began a 2 week retrospective of Quinzaine des Réalisateurs (aka the Director’s Fortnight) to celebrate that festival’s 40th anniversary, and to kick it off, they’ve presented one of the most challenging and impressive films likely to have ever played in that festival.

Jacques Rivette’s CÉLINE AND JULIE GO BOATING is a brash slice of French New Wave innovation from 1974 that’s remarkable, not only in the confidence with which it plays with conventions, but also in the ripple effect it has had in cinema since. I can confidently say that the Spike Jonze/Charlie Kauffman collaborations, David Lynch’s work (notably MULHOLLAND DRIVE), even Guillermo Del Toro’s fantasy/horror creations are all deeply indebted to this film, whether they know it or not.

I’m not going to write a lengthy synopsis, in part because I’d hate to deprive anyone of the delightful surprises that lurk inside but also because no synopsis could adequately capture this film’s spirit, much less the loopy story that unfolds. (However if a synopsis is what you want, one with spoilers can be found here.)

What I can tell you without hesitation is that this film should be just as highly regarded as an innovative cinematic breakthrough as is BREATHLESS, 2001 and even CITIZEN KANE and METROPOLIS. But how many other films feel so fresh and completely new 30 years later? Rivette ignores all expectations of narrative logic, story continuity, and character development, yet produces a film that engages, thrills and entertains as few others.

The film is long—almost 3 1/2 hours. This is usually a turn off for me, not because of short attention span issues but because I usually find films that run excessively over 2 hours to be bloated; filled with unnecessary exposition, or more often, weighed down by material that the director didn’t have the confidence to cut out. This is definitely (and defiantly) not the case here. I’m embarrassingly unfamiliar with Rivette’s work but I do know it’s almost always long (the prime example being his 12.5 hour opus OUT 1). I think this is what has turned me off from exploring him but after this experience I will be rectifying that soon.

I have to wonder: why has CÉLINE AND JULIE… remained largely unseen and unknown? It’s an injustice to film history, but thankfully an injustice that will be partially undone thanks to BAM and Director’s Fortnight. Not only are they kicking off the retrospective with CÉLINE AND JULIE…, they are running it for a full week. That means that New Yorkers have plenty of opportunities to get familiar with this undersung masterpiece, so if you have any interest in film at all and you’re in NYC, do yourself a favor and make the time to see it while you can. It’s out of print on VHS and has never been on DVD in the US (BFI, who provided the beautiful new print playing at BAM, has a recently released 2-disc PAL DVD for you lucky Europeans.)

So with that, I’ll add something that’s been said many times but has never been more true—if any film deserves the Criterion treatment, this is it. Fingers are crossed.

Earlier this year, the Museum of the Moving Image out in Astoria, Queens shut its doors for a major renovation and expansion.

For me this museum’s main value has been its screening series—almost always interesting and valuable. A recent retrospective, a career-spanning Frank Borzage series, offered an large number of rarely seen films that were great to watch on a big screen. The museum’s chief curator, David Schwartz, is an excellent programmer that is always on the lookout for overlooked gems, old and new, deserving to be seen.

As for the museum itself, it was fairly lacking. A permanent exhibit on the various ways the moving image has been created over the years was mildly interesting but never worth more than one visit. Beyond that, the museum’s focus seemed to be on a revolving exhibition of classic video games—good for a little diversion while waiting for a screening but hardly worth the focus the museum gave it.

So hearing of the closing, which will go until early 2010 or so, was bittersweet. Perhaps a refresh of the facility, which is due to get much larger, will inject some innovative life into the exhibitions, but I’m saddened to go without the aforementioned programs for well over a year (although some of their event programming is continuing at alternative venues).

Perhaps as a sign of the reinvigorated museum to come, this past week saw the launch of a fantastic new online resource. The Moving Image Source is an interesting site that gathers new critical and scholarly writings, an international calendar of film-related events, and a research guide on other online resources.

The lineup of people involved with the site is particularly encouraging: Former Village Voice critic Dennis Lim is editor-in-chief, with contributions from such notable names as Melissa Anderson, Michael Atkinson and Jonathan Rosenbaum, among others. It feels like the site is redeeming the sins of newspaper and magazine editors who have been implying lately that critical writing on film is no longer relevant. Every article in the first edition is an excellent read, and portends great things to come.

Lest there be any doubt how much Europe loves Obama: BBC News trumpets his clinching of the nomination.

Bicycle liberation thrives in Paris

One of the most fascinating things I saw in my recent visit to Paris were these bicycle rental stations. They are literally everywhere you go, in every neighborhood, and everyone uses them. They are rented through an electronic kiosk (at the top of the pic, looking similar to the public parking kiosks that are largely replacing meters here in New York.) Since I don’t read French I wasn’t sure how it worked, but doing a quick search I’ve found several articles on them and how they are storming Paris. (Best overview is from IHT here.)

I’ve long wanted to have a bicycle since I’ve lived in New York. The streets are mostly flat, it’s a small area, and it just seems perfectly suited to bicycle travel. However, a few things have deterred me: 1) the car traffic, which on these crowded, sometimes narrow streets is very hostile to bicycle traffic. 2) my closet-sized living space allows me no storage for a bicycle and 3) theft—on any block here there’s a corpse of a bicycle that has been stripped clean.

So would something like Paris’ Velib’ system work here? It would solve 2 of my 3 issues (storage and theft), and my sense is a system like this, if it could survive the inevitable vandalism it would face, would get used by MANY New Yorkers. And the new influx of bicyclists would then force the city to make the streets more bicycle friendly (something they are already trying to do, albeit in a rather half-assed manner).

Velib’ is a public run enterprise in Paris, although the stations and bicycle maintenance has been outsourced to the outdoor advertiser JC Decaux in a scheme that sounds similar to the newstand and bus stop rejuvenation scheme New York gave to Cemusa. That gives hope that something like Velib’ could be introduced here, but sadly I don’t see it happening any time soon.

Photo credit: Rcsmit/Wikipedia