Binoche, Béart, Ledoyen, Deneuve, Adjani, Huppert ot Tautou?

http://perso.wanadoo.fr/gloria/images/i02huitfemmes.jpg

...who's missing? and who did it?

Binoche wins. Not only is she lovely, but her name reminds me of brioche which in tern reminds me of Nutella numnum.

i vote don ameche

Viva La Binoche

I reckon Binoche. She's a great actress (no other contemporary actress can beat her anywhere in the world) and she's a celebrity. Tautou is just a celeb heading toward over exposure

CD is always a cold brittle prescence. Binoche can be that ala Blue or Code. Or she can be warm and luminous ala Chocolat or Horseman on the Roof.

Binoche is pure cinematic gold!!

(I am interested though in the phrase 'the type of movie that become classics' so I'm starting a whole new threat on that.)

None of them did it! They all did it! Do you see. (If all the songs had been as good as the first one then it would have been a really good film, but 8 Women just showed how rubbish the French are at writing pop songs).

Imo Huppert comes second, although sometimes she seems to be very intellectual in her craft.

If you knock Binoche at least compare her to her nearest contemporaries Marceau, Béart and Dallé... they've all had their moments but have not sustained it...

(i like kieslowski's early un"sexy" films and TV stuff, but moving to france stripped his brain of judgment)

(haha at S&S we had one of the IT ppl create a special set of fake polish fonts, crossed out l's and such, so as to be ABSOLUTELY ACCURATE proofing all the names)

Mark, you should see Mauvais sang! (I am not terribly fond of Kieslowski's trilogy either.)

No the French are deffinately better thespians. they are also extremly different to work with as Marceau, Dallé, Béart, Adjani and especially Binoche have prooven over and over

But that really doesn't have anything to do with the question...

bad jk, but this whole thread is a bit dumb

Blue seemed to have a realistic aesthetic of "boring," as in the tedious repetition of the mundane activities of daily life (swim, eat ice cream in supersexy french way by spooning coffee over it, swim) that showed how she coped with depression. But you know me, I think looking at round stone walls is soothing.

*befuddled* It's like some Star Trek reference.

What are these things called 'movies' anyway? Strange creations, it seems!

What a comeback with La Repentie and Adolphe!!!

She wins straight out. Anyway Binoche has done nothing since Chocolat over 2 years ago!!

Mind you most French cinema has been in the doldrums for the last few years anyway.

Look in the right places...
Irreversible
Code Inconnu
Le Pianiste
Presque Rien
La Veuve de Saint-Pierre
L'emploi de Temps
C'est la Vie

to name only a few....

she did good english language in Amateur.

A favorite theme

(I agree with both of you, BTW).

Bardot of course trumps them all, excepting maybe Juliet Berto.

Anna Karina is Danish not French

She's a respected actress as well as a star. She's equally a talented risk taking actress and an icon of beauty, and she has turned Hollywood down umpteen times.

Class, elegance and beauty!!

She's Belgian, natch. Personally I prefer Elodie Bouchez (the other one in "Dream life...") tho'.

Success and intelligent. She has kept her career for nearly 20 years without any major lagging. Even when she goes international with Chocolat and the English patient she always returns to her roots in auteur cinema. Code Inconnu and Alice et Martin. She the Moreau of the millennium.

Anything that is written and directed by the same person is auteur. It does not refer to aesthtic as many people think. It is not a uniquely French type of film, although that is what it is asscoiated with.

the subsuqeent collapse of auteur theory into "all the work of one great person" — which oddly enough happened in america, in the way that andrew sallis and others took up up auteur theory — is a pity, bcz it's meant that critical discussion has mainly lapsed back into focus on writing and storytelling, spiced up by secondary discussion of compliant nicely proportioned acting

Firstly auteur cinema does not originate in America. It in fact originates, like cinema itself in France with the work of the likes of Abel Gance. To mention the lack of studio granted freedom is also incorrect, auteurism is nothing to do with stuios. It can exist within or outside of the studio system.

(cf pauline kael's attack on sarris, where she demolishes his version of auteurism by deploying an argument surprisingly like something godard might have written: the french version of auteurism and the american version are DIFFERENT, the french being fairly deliberately provocative and paradoxical, the american being much more like Great Man Theory — the director as novelist — and a justification of indies... )

hitchcock was considered an auteur by cahiers (indeed, THE auteur, by some): he *never* wrote his own screenplays, and *always* worked within the studio system, first in the uk then in the us

Indeed around the time Griffith began taking out ads in Photoplay claiming to have invented the close-up etc. (1913–14), Louis Feuillade was churning out beautiful films in France in relative anonymity.

But Mark is right, the "auteur theory" as such was developed in the 1950s in France. I wouldn't credit Bazin with the politiques des auteurs though, he actually balked at the excesses of his disciples in labeling directors "auteurs." Bazin thought the term had a more limited application.

Anyways, some people took the theory (which is more like a set of tools and less than a fully-formed theory I think)--and still take it--to mean that the director is necessarily the only important artistic personality involved in a film. Sarris was occasionally prone to this misapprehension, but not as often and not as clumsily as Kael would have it. Sarris was very important in calling attention to matters of style, as important as his French colleagues.

I think a key difference between Godard, Truffaut et al and Sarris in the US, is that Sarris did not generally valorize perceived "subversive" qualities in the Hollywood directors he elevated to our attention. He had a basic admiration for Hollywood and its tropes; thus at the beginning he underrrated the satirically-minded Billy Wilder, and his anaylsis of Sirk never included the "subversive smuggler" characterization that has since become film studies cant. On the other hand, especially by the 1960s the Cahiers bunch (and even moreso the Positif bunch) often expected their pet auteurs to include a kind of critique, even if said critique was more the product of Jean-Luc's overactive imagination than any intrinsic quality of the work. That's a massive oversimplification but I think it'll hold for now.

P.S. Fair enough to say Sirk made studio product "his" (this does not do justice to his collaborators, however) but Howard Hawks doesn't fit into that model. He produced his own films and solicited his own scripts. So he is an "auteur" in the Bazinian/Gance/Griffith sense as much as anybody.

i agree the tendency to consider the director as sole author was probably as old as film itself, but the problem here was that this meant shifting back to eg seeing movies as (for example) plays on screens, and downgrading the expressivity of the look or the editing or the lighting or whatever, as a mere spice to the centrally important thing

i think as theory it's a bad compromise either way, because the collectivity — ie the relationships and failures of relationship between the collaborators — is KEY to the entire enterprise, and i don't like that being glossed over (haha it's why i prefer rock writing...)

so i guess i'm saying that cahiers take on auteur theory was an ultimately botched attempt to reach towards a theory of collective creativity — where the collective also included the viewer, of course — but that this was compromised by i. the fact that writers and critics always thing like "auteurs", and ii. half of cahiers mob wanted to become little dictators directors themselves, with FULL control blah blah

and despite godard, you don't raise the money for a film production by saying, "well, i intend to make this a study of the dynamics of the colour red — what? story? no, we'll write that as we go along, it's not really that important"

in other words, the hierarachy within the collectivity ended up being maintained after all

(i agree about her over-simplification of sarris, though he became a better critic later than he was at that moment i think...)

Lauren Bacall/Jacqueline Bisset slash:
http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Realm/9566/bacall_bisset.html

Jacqueline knew she'd been had, "That rotten scoundrel!" Then thought, "Let's see how smug he is after I stomp her face into the rug."

Later some critics defended this practice by insisting the "author" they were discussing was not a real person (i.e., Nick Ray himself) but a critical construction that could include other people such as the cinematographer, etc. I can see the use of that argument to criticism, but I agree with Mark, it does impede an understanding of how films get made (which is of more interest to me, generally, than what they "mean").

just got my 'invite' for this but the cheap tix are, uh, $175.

http://www.filmlinc.com/blog/entry/first-presenters-announced-for-chaplin-award-gala-honoring-catherine-deneuv