I love the cover design for this UK Tarkovsky box set.
The self-destructive romanticism, the artistic self-consciousness, the frenetically unhinged form, the blend of emotional extravagance and cool self-mocking, the vanished boundaries between irony and sincerity and between symbol and reality, the overt cinematic breakdown and breakup, were all of their moment. Pierrot le fou was the last of Godard’s first films, the herald of even more radical rejections and reconstructions to come—for Godard and for the world around him.
Pierrot le fou: Self-Portrait in a Shattered Lens - From the Current - Buy it while you can. I did.
Kino has released a DVD boxset of early French Gaumont films, Gaumont Treasures (1897–1913).
As extreme as the plotting may be, “The Child of Paris” achieves an openness and airiness (most strikingly, when the action moves to Nice from Paris) that anticipates the expansive humanism of Renoir and Truffaut. Perret did not invent the feature form (which began to appear in 1912), but it could be said that the feature form invented him, giving his talent the time and space it needed to prosper.
Somewhat related to the previous entry, but historically interesting in its own right.
