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3 items from 2011

27 May 2011 4:06 PM, PDT | The Guardian - Film News | See recent The Guardian - Film News news »

Mammuth star is the honourable descendent of Parisian pugs from Lino Ventura to Vincent Cassel

We can all agree that this has been a terrible few weeks for French masculinity – thanks not only to the off-duty actions of former Imf chief and alleged "rutting chimpanzee" Dominique Strauss-Kahn, but also to the moronic, insulting rationalisations offered de haut en bas by highly placed apologists such as Bernard-Henri Lévy and Jack Lang, who've sounded like scheming bourgeois misogynists from some mid-period Claude Chabrol movie.

Before this grotesque episode, Dsk had always reminded me of the great burly, barrel-chested, ugly-beautiful stars of French gangster movies; you could just imagine him blackmailing Lino Ventura, whom he strongly resembles (all the more so in handcuffs) or beating up Yves Montand in some Pigalle pissoir.

Luckily, we can still turn to Gérard Depardieu to redeem this fine tradition of Gallic movie sex symbols resembling bison who've »

- John Patterson

20 May 2011 4:05 PM, PDT | The Guardian - Film News | See recent The Guardian - Film News news »

Although the French screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière has collaborated with Tati, Buñuel and Schlöndorff, he is the invisible man of film

To read the newly published This Is Not the End of the Book, a conversation between Umberto Eco and Jean-Claude Carrière, is to eavesdrop on two highly erudite minds. Digressive, anecdotal and humorous, they reflect on their love of the printed word and where the destiny of the book might lie, ranging from neglected French poetry of the 16th century to a forthcoming first edition of Waiting for Godot in the revived Nahuatl language of the Aztecs. But while Eco is internationally famous for his bestselling historical novels, Carrière has a relatively low profile even in his native France. Low, that is, for someone whose career as a dramatist has encompassed collaborations with an unparalleled array of directorial talent from film and theatre, and 50 books, in addition to the 80 screenplays, »

6 April 2011 6:41 AM, PDT | The Guardian - Film News | See recent The Guardian - Film News news »

Polish film was an early frontrunner, before occupation forced wave after wave of talent abroad. Its fortitude is embodied by Andrzej Wajda – still going strong 50 years after his first feature

There aren't many traces on the internet of the early Polish pioneers: people such as Kazimierz Prószyński and Bolesław Matuszewski who were operating at the turn of the century, turning out silent short docos called things like Ślizgawka w Łazienkach (Skating-rink in the Royal Baths). (Prószyński was also a pioneering camera inventor, developing a model called a pleograph in 1894, and a handheld effort called an aeroscope in 1909.) Nor is there any link for Anton in Warsaw for the First Time, Poland's legendary first feature film, directed by and starring Antoni Fertner in 1908.

Fertner, though, went on to a respectable career as an actor in the interwar period – you can see him as an old man in Książątko (1937, above) and Gehenna »

- Andrew Pulver

3 items from 2011