Über uns
As you've probably figured out, since theaters went dark in March, your Classic/Indie Movie Group and your International/Arthouse Movie Meetup Group have joined forces to bring you weekly virtual screenings to enjoy individually, followed by weekly Saturday night ZOOM group discussions. We, your organizers, John, Shirley and Carter are doing our best to make these virtual events happen, and we are thoroughly enjoying ourselves – we hope you can say that too!
Boston has many high-class, non-profit theaters such as the Museum of Fine Arts, the Coolidge Corner, the Harvard Film Archive and the Brattle. They offer movies on demand. Whenever it makes sense, we choose a movie from one of those local venues. In addition, on-demand viewing is increasingly available via on-line rental with Hulu, iTunes, YouTube, Amazon Prime and Google Play. Occasionally, other vendors are a source of good movies, as well.
How This Works
Carter, Shirley and John work together to post a Meetup, early in the week.Rental information is explained in the posting.Members screen the film on their own, during the week.There's typically a 48 hour viewing period, from the time you first hit PLAY. ZOOM discussions occur every Saturday night from 7:20-8:50. To everyone who RSVPs, a ZOOM link will appear in a box to the right of the event page, to be used the night of the discussion. That should cover it, for you. We expect this arrangement to last until the lights come back on in adequately coronavirus-free theaters, at which point we'll address the question of where we go from here. Please feel free to reply to this message with your comments, concerns and suggestions. In the meantime, this is fun! We're really pleased at the attendance we're getting and the thoughtful feedback. Let it continue! We hope to "see" you this Saturday night.
Yours,S, J, & C
Kommende Veranstaltungen
5
HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR, Alain Resnais (1959) / Love in the aftermath
·OnlineOnlineA French actress (Emmanuelle Riva) and a Japanese architect (Eiji Okada) share a night of passion in his bomb-scarred home city of Hiroshima, where she has come to perform in a film with the theme of peace. Their conversations recount previous romances and acknowledge their current marriages; though their attraction is powerful, they come to accept her intent to leave the next day. In this foundational contribution to the first months of the French New Wave, Resnais meditates on the ebb and flow of memory and forgetting in their grounding of who we are, through rapture and disaster.
HOW THIS WORKS
Once you've RSVPed, find out where to rent, stream, or buy Hiroshima Mon Amour at TV.Movie or JustWatch. View it on your own during the week, and then join our Zoom conversation this Saturday 8/1 at 7:20p. A Zoom link will appear on the upper right of this page. First-timers must RSVP by Friday 7/31 in order to attend.*** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** ***
Directed by Alain Resnais
Screenplay by Marguerite Duras
Produced by Samy Halfon and Anatole Dauman
Cinematography: Sacha Vierny and Michio Takahashi
Edited by Henri Colpi, Jasmine Chasney, and Anne Sarraute
Music: Georges Delarue and Giovanni Fusco
Countries: France and Japan
Release date: 8 May 1959 (Cannes)
Running time: 1h 30mResnais' first feature-length work was a co-production between France and Japan, and documents a series of intensely personal conversations (or one long conversation) over slightly more than a 24-hour period between an unnamed French actress and a Japanese architect. The film is notable for Resnais' innovative use of brief flashbacks to suggest flashes of memory, which create a nonlinear storyline.
Resnais was originally commissioned to make a short documentary about the atomic bomb, but spent several months confused about how to proceed because he did not want to recreate his 1956 Holocaust documentary Night and Fog. He later went to his producer and joked that the film could not be done unless the accomplished writer Marguerite Duras was involved in drafting the screenplay.
Explaining how she and Resnais sought to find something original to say about Hiroshima, about which much had by then already been said, Duras wrote in 1958: "[W]e tried to bring Hiroshima back as a love story ... We tried to make it so that between two people as geographically, philosophically, historically, economically, racially, etc. remote from each other as possible, Hiroshima was the common ground where the universal facts of eroticism, love, and misfortune appear in a less mendacious light than elsewhere."
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TRAILER, RATINGS, EXTRAS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLts830aLlwRotten Tomatoes Tomatometer: 96% based on 46 reviews
Internet Movie Database (iMDB): 7.8 / 10Hiroshima Mon Amour won the FIPRESCI International Critics' Prize at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival, where the film was excluded from the official competition because of its sensitive subject matter of nuclear arms and to avoid upsetting the U.S. government. Screenwriter Duras was nominated for Best Original Screenplay at the 33rd Academy Awards.
British critic Dilys Powell wrote that Resnais and Duras "used the flashback precisely as memory uses it: the mind recognising an association between an image in the present and an incident long ago, then swerving back to now; the past re-offering itself not in chronological order but higgledy-piggledy ... It is not only the past which in the film is shown in fragments. The present, too ... is a succession of scenes chronological, certainly, but without conventional links. The pair talk, their confidences are exchanged, in snatches, in dramatic bursts, against settings their movement between which is taken for granted."
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BLURBS & ATTITUDES
A delicately wrought drama ... a complex yet compelling tour de force—as a patent plea for peace and the abolition of atomic warfare; as a poetic evocation of love lost and momentarily found, and as a curiously intricate but intriguing montage of thinking on several planes in Proustian style ... As a director who set himself an extremely difficult task, Resnais expertly sustains the fragile moods of his theme most of the way." ∞ A.H. Weller, New York TimesHere, for the first time since Eisenstein, we have a cinematic intelligence so quick, so subtle, so original, so at once passionate and sophisticated that it can be compared with Joyce, with Picasso, with Berg and Bartók and Stravinsky. The audience was extraordinarily quiet—no coughing, whispering, rustling of paper; a hypnotic trance. We were absorbed in the human experience flickering across the screen, attentive lest we miss a clue to the mystery; as in Henry James, the answer is arrived at by numerous approximations, little scenes (often only a few frames long) which cumulatively reveal the reality. It was oddly like a religious service, and if someone had made a wisecrack, it would have seemed not an irritation but a blasphemy. ∞ Dwight Macdonald, Esquire
Suddenly, a new film. Really new, first-hand: a work which tells a story of its own in a style of its own. One is almost afraid to touch it. ∞ Dilys Powell, Sunday Times (UK)
The title alone is a reckless provocation. As is the backstory about Riva’s childhood in the pointedly named French village of Nevers. (Duras loves her wordplay, repeating key phrases as if they were incantations – never forget, but try not to remember Nevers.) Some viewers have winced at what they perceive as a false equivalency between a doomed schoolgirl romance with a German soldier and the wholesale slaughter of thousands. And yet, I think there’s something to how visceral her story feels when compared to the movie’s distanced backdrop of mass death. What’s that Josef Stalin quote about how one death is a tragedy and a million is a statistic? Hiroshima Mon Amour wrestles with it honestly, her feelings intensified by a new H-bomb reality in which mass death could be dropping from the skies at any moment. When the movie’s over, it may be true that we have seen nothing of Hiroshima, but there’s a chilling sense that we will someday soon. ∞ Sean Burns, Crooked Marquee
Hiroshima, Mon Amour is an impressive exercise of film techniques, mood embodying camera work, an almost intuitive kind of musical accompaniment, and verismo acting. ∞ John Beaufort, Christian Science Monitor
Roughly preceding the renowned debut of Jean-Luc Godard and released the same month as Francois Truffaut’sThe 400 Blows (they competed against one another at Cannes), Resnais’ contribution changed the way we regarded linear narrative and flashback sequences, and much like those iconic works of his peers, now bears several decades worth of critical acclaim on its shoulders. Tragic, moody and ultimately a poetic exchange of present interludes shattered by ghosts of the recent past, Resnais begins with motifs he would remain fascinated with throughout his career, the nature of remembrance and recollection, instances as shattered as the narrative chronologies in his films .... In the decades since it arrived, we are still operating with the paradigm Resnais and Duras formulate within the film. We’ve seen everything and yet, perhaps we’ve seen nothing, depending on what refracted platform we’ve glanced at. A stunning piece of cinema, Hiroshima Mon Amour is also one of Resnais’ most emotionally affecting pieces, for one cannot help but be moved by these lovelorn people, struggling hopelessly against the onslaught of time and the doom of being forgotten. ∞ Nicholas Bell, IonCinema
9 Teilnehmer
Vergangene Veranstaltungen
1753
