{"id":29798,"date":"2023-10-23T12:02:32","date_gmt":"2023-10-23T11:02:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gamefootballmobileanimeiphone.com\/?guid=b04f2a0036316d9703032bd224f0cdee"},"modified":"2023-10-23T12:02:32","modified_gmt":"2023-10-23T11:02:32","slug":"why-contemporary-filmmakers-cant-stop-copying-jacques-demy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gamefootballmobileanimeiphone.com\/index.php\/2023\/10\/23\/why-contemporary-filmmakers-cant-stop-copying-jacques-demy\/","title":{"rendered":"Why contemporary filmmakers can\u2019t stop copying Jacques Demy"},"content":{"rendered":"
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O<\/span>n a 1996 episode of Siskel and Ebert, Roger Ebert\u2019s praise of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is helmed by the film\u2019s refusal to provide a happy ending: it\u2019s a film about \u201cthe way things are\u201d. Watching the film, perhaps you\u2019d be surprised that this is what stood out for Ebert in a film that boasts a timeless look and sound \u2013 quite literally en musique, en coleurs, en chant\u00e9. So why is it that Ebert picked up on the film\u2019s surprisingly accepting ending \u2013 not an anticlimax, but a deliberate lack of romantic perseverance that counteracts the swells of the film\u2019s score and style?<\/p>\n

Demy\u2019s musicals \u2013 The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967) and Donkey Skin (1970) \u2013 all follow loose themes of connection (a relationship that never was, a story of constant narrowly-missed encounters by three pairs of lovers, and a fairytale about love conquering over medieval feudalism respectively), and all put music and cinematic style at the forefront of the narrative. This came at a time when cinema in France was dominated by the Cahiers filmmakers, who were using handheld, indie filmmaking to speak out against what they called \u2018tradition of quality\u2019 cinema; a cinema that relied on safe, superfluous narratives in lieu of addressing the reality of the Algerian War, the fault of the Nazi regime, and rife political dissent in general.<\/p>\n

In a Film Comment<\/a> interview between Demy and Graham Petrie in the early 1970s, Petrie prefaces the conversation with a short explanation of this auteur theory that Demy was trying to escape from: “the assumption that, once a satisfactory continuity has been established, the director\u2019s greatness can be taken as proved\u2026the obsession with establishing solid ‘content’ for the film.”<\/p>\n

Hotheads like Truffaut and Godard darted between feminist, anti-war and pro-youth sentiment to find this \u201ccontent\u201d, so that their films stood out as directly reflecting society back at itself \u2013 after all, they were pitting themselves against a cinema whose ideology came out in eliding depictions of real life. While this was necessary for post-war France (and even France today), it didn\u2019t approach the audiences as a friend, but rather a na\u00efve student. Jacques Demy\u2019s musicals, on the other hand, with their beauty and grace, treated the audience as a friend.<\/p>\n

Demy\u2019s films, having such a grand influence on film culture, have inevitably inspired filmmakers of late. Most notable is maybe Damien Chazelle with 2016\u2019s La La Land<\/a>. Chazelle himself admits that Umbrellas was a \u201cprincipal inspiration<\/a>\u201d for the film, which is easy to pick out not only in the twinned narratives but the way both the tones, colour and rhythms of jazz are used to drive the story. However, La La Land is purely practical inspiration.<\/p>\n

While it pulls this off well, elevating Demy\u2019s ability to demonstrate \u2013 according to Ginette Billard in Film Quarterly<\/a> \u2013 the “pure fluidity and dash of the medium”, it doesn\u2019t have the additional profundity of being in response to societal desperation, seen through the often dure filmmaking of Jean-Luc Godard, for example. This is where two films from this year come in, which draw similar, formal inspirations from Demy, however, being much more recent, operate in the same realm of escapism as the kaleidoscopic heaven of Demy\u2019s Cherbourg or Rochefort: Greta Gerwig\u2019s Barbie<\/a> and Celine Song\u2019s Past Lives<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Being two of this year\u2019s defining releases, both films have made headway for the modern female auteur. Barbie, for example, has been endlessly praised for how it leverages the brand, which has made millions off children\u2019s world-building imaginations, to approach pertinent issues of patriarchy and how feminism operates today. Many expected this, which is perhaps the focal point of its famous comparison to Nolan\u2019s Oppenheimer<\/a> when they shared the same release date.<\/p>\n

But perhaps this, much like in Demy\u2019s films, is the prescience of Greta Gerwig\u2019s auteurist style \u2013 Petrie may have also said of Gerwig, as he does of Demy, that her films “have suffered more than most” from the auteur prescience; “a critic searching for serious thematic substance can easily find them trivial and lightweight.” When you sit down and actually watch Barbie, you realise that its core themes are a lot more essential, pertaining to motherhood and a rarely-explored-in-the-mainstream look at girlhood in lieu of an all-out derision of the patriarchy.<\/p>\n

Indeed, what Petrie is actually arguing is that Demy\u2019s three musicals met the same fate. Umbrellas, for example, sets up the perfect romantic tragedy: two young lovers, torn apart by war, only to be reunited when it is too late. But Demy rejects this: he tells Petrie “I don\u2019t like labels that classify you and file you away as a little ‘romantic’…it\u2019s [actually] a very cruel film and a very realistic one”. This sentiment is very different from Roger Ebert soberingly admitting that the film is about “the way things are”.<\/p>\n

So why is it that this tragedy is still being picked up? This is where the film\u2019s style comes in; while the story is ostensibly \u2018cruel\u2019 and \u2018realistic\u2019, picked up from nouvelle vague tendencies, the over-the-top colours and musical concept come from the theatrics of preceding auteurs like Max Oph\u00fcls. It seems Roger Ebert\u2019s approach, the same which could be said about many of Demy\u2019s films, is created by the optimism of the set design and music in spite of the tragic story. The same again can be said for Barbie, though somewhat in the inverse: part of what protects the not-so-feminist story from being wrongly attacked by the men at whose expense the film operates is the colour scheme. Pink has cultural undertones relating to girlhood and thus to innocence, which is here being used to expose the toxicity behind these critical sentiments (who\u2019d be base enough to attack a depiction of inner childhood?).<\/p>\n

Another title being dubbed the \u2018film of the year<\/a>\u2019 is Celine Song\u2019s Past Lives. Following two childhood friends who move apart at a young age only to cross paths years later and ponder what might have been, the film is, again, a vague retelling of Umbrellas. Here, we see the other side of Ebert\u2019s comment \u2013 coming out in 2023, with culture wars raging on both sides of the Atlantic, Song\u2019s film provides the solace of a world where the only thing that matters is love; where people have the time to stop and ponder what might have been, in lieu of concentrating on what is. Yes, much like Umbrellas, the ending is sad; necessary, but sad.<\/p>\n

However, also like Umbrellas, Song\u2019s world-building (the power of technology to bring them together, for example, or the refusal to explore any backstory, allowing her audience to live vicariously through the characters with ease) means that her audience can indulge in being theatrically \u201csad\u201d, before stepping out of the cinema and back into the real world. Just as Demy\u2019s films and their colours and songs allow relief from the often dure grit of nouvelle vague, Song is providing shelter from the fast-paced modern world (which itself very much resembles a gritty Godard film), allowing us a safe space to be lost in love\u2019s philosophy.<\/p>\n

This seems to be the crossroad where both of these films meet in what they lift from Demy. It\u2019s the cinema that Ginette Billard claims “sacrifices banal plots and morals to the sheer delights of mise-en-sc\u00e8ne, without any compensating intellectualisation”. This sort of reminder of cinema as cinema, rather than cinema as a reflection of reality, is what allows these films to provide solace for their audiences \u2013 the true escapism promised is the masterpiece delivered. Looking at them this way, it\u2019s no surprise that Gerwig and Song were inspired by Jacques Demy, and it will come as no surprise when more directors will be inspired by his genius in years to come.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

The post Why contemporary filmmakers can’t stop copying Jacques Demy<\/a> appeared first on Little White Lies<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From La La Land to Past Lives, filmmakers are still drawing inspiration from the vivid emotional worlds of Jacques Demy. What is it about his films that continues to inspire directors?<\/p>\n

The post Why contemporary filmmakers can\u2019t stop copying Jacques Demy<\/a> appeared first on Little White Lies<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1170,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"site-container-style":"default","site-container-layout":"default","site-sidebar-layout":"default","disable-article-header":"default","disable-site-header":"default","disable-site-footer":"default","disable-content-area-spacing":"default","footnotes":""},"categories":[6166],"tags":[61,122,127,129,124,128,125,132,131,133,126,130,123,66,94,88,97,56,64,65,60,112,6188,6181,40,75,95,6191,6189,104,6196,6206,6183,6186,33,120,6185,105,101,6199,6190,6193,6202,6195,6204,98,115,30,29,41,86,70,69,68,72,71,26,118,108,87,46,55,48,52,54,51,50,83,6197,62,58,57,6177,109,6201,35,59,63,85,79,82,96,80,27,81,114,44,42,43,45,38,39,6205,6198,6187,6200,6192,6194,6203,110,117,6184,100,111,116,73,89,90,92,91,6180,93,84,78,37,6182,102,34,36,77,67,74,99,113,119,28,121,6179,6178,32,47,49,53,103,31,76],"class_list":["post-29798","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie","tag-airpods","tag-anime","tag-anime-characters","tag-anime-cosplay","tag-anime-edits","tag-anime-merchandise","tag-anime-movies","tag-anime-news","tag-anime-recommendations","tag-anime-reviews","tag-anime-series","tag-anime-streaming","tag-animes","tag-app-store","tag-app-store-samsung","tag-appgallery","tag-appgallery-oneplus","tag-apple","tag-apple-music","tag-apple-tv","tag-apple-watch","tag-bbc-sport","tag-behind-the-scenes-footage","tag-best-comedy-movies","tag-best-mobile-games","tag-bixby","tag-bixby-xiaomi","tag-box-office-hits","tag-celebrity-interviews","tag-champions-league","tag-cinema-history-and-evolution","tag-cinematic-virtual-reality-experiences","tag-classic-romance-movies","tag-critically-acclaimed-dramas","tag-cyberpunk","tag-cyberpunk-2077","tag-family-friendly-movies","tag-fantasy-football","tag-fifa","tag-film-director-profiles","tag-film-festival-highlights","tag-film-industry-news","tag-film-production-techniques","tag-film-soundtracks-and-scores","tag-film-inspired-travel-destinations","tag-football","tag-formula-1","tag-fortnite","tag-free-fire","tag-free-mobile-games","tag-freebuds-pro","tag-galaxy-a52","tag-galaxy-note-20","tag-galaxy-s21","tag-galaxy-watch-4","tag-galaxy-z-fold-3","tag-game","tag-games","tag-golf","tag-harmonyos","tag-how-to-backup-iphone","tag-how-to-factory-reset-iphone","tag-how-to-reset-iphone","tag-how-to-restore-iphone","tag-how-to-unlock-iphone","tag-how-to-unlock-iphone-5","tag-how-to-unlock-iphone-6","tag-huawei","tag-in-depth-film-analysis","tag-ios","tag-ipad","tag-iphone","tag-latest-movie-releases","tag-live-soccer","tag-local-cinema-listings-and-showtimes","tag-lol","tag-macbook","tag-macos","tag-mate-40-pro","tag-mi-11-lite","tag-mi-home-security-camera-basic-1080p","tag-mi-home-security-camera-basic-1080p-huawei","tag-mi-smart-band-6","tag-minecraft","tag-miui","tag-mlb-scores","tag-mobile-game-design","tag-mobile-game-development","tag-mobile-game-marketing","tag-mobile-game-monetization","tag-mobile-games","tag-mobile-gaming","tag-movie-adaptations-of-books","tag-movie-merchandise-and-collectibles","tag-movie-reviews-and-ratings","tag-movie-ticket-discounts-and-offers","tag-movie-trailers-and-teasers","tag-movie-trivia-and-facts","tag-movie-themed-quizzes-and-games","tag-nba-scores","tag-nba-standings","tag-newest-horror-films","tag-nfl","tag-nfl-scores","tag-nhl-scores","tag-one-ui","tag-oneplus","tag-oneplus-9-pro","tag-oneplus-buds-pro","tag-oneplus-nord-ce-5g","tag-oscar-nominated-films","tag-oxygenos","tag-p40-pro-plus","tag-poco-x3-pro","tag-pokemon","tag-popular-action-films","tag-premier-league","tag-pubg","tag-pubg-mobile","tag-redmi-note-10-pro","tag-samsung","tag-samsung-pay","tag-soccer","tag-sports","tag-steam","tag-steeam","tag-top-10-anime","tag-top-rated-movies-2023","tag-upcoming-hollywood-movies","tag-valorant","tag-when-do-the-iphone-7-come-out","tag-when-does-the-iphone-7-come-out","tag-when-is-the-iphone-7-coming-out","tag-world-cup","tag-xbox-series-x","tag-xiaomi"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gamefootballmobileanimeiphone.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29798","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gamefootballmobileanimeiphone.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gamefootballmobileanimeiphone.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gamefootballmobileanimeiphone.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1170"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gamefootballmobileanimeiphone.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29798"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gamefootballmobileanimeiphone.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29798\/revisions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