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Title: Belle De Jour (Bfi Film Classics) by Michael Wood ISBN: 0-85170-823-4 Publisher: British Film Inst Pub. Date: April, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (1 review)
Rating: 5
Summary: Bunuel needs a mind as open as his - Michael Wood has it.
Comment: Michael Wood, the most elegant and enquiring literary critic of his generation, has also written widely on film. He is the author of books on Stendhal and Nabokov, and is currently writing a study of Proust. In other words, he is familiar and comfortable with Cultural Giants in a way most film critics and academics are not. This allows him to speculate and make seemingly random or wild connections on his subject with a confidence most film writers, slaves to theory and discipline, lack. This makes him the perfect interpreter of Bunuel, who needs such a suggestive approach, and whose critical star has fallen in the last two decades precisely because his work doesn't fit neat frameworks.
'Belle De Jour' - the story of frigid doctor's wife Severine, who loves her husband but can only find sexual fulfilment working by day in a brothel - inaugurates the period known as 'late Bunuel', when the old Surrealist had access to bigger budgets, big stars and glossy colour. Because these films lack the abrasive iconoclasm of his most characteristic work, they are usually described as 'serene', 'mellow', repentant; Pauline Kael suggests they attain the 'path to grace'. Wood argues 'both Severine and the film hide the world behind an image of the world. We only see what they see or show; but we know it's not all there is. There is a serenity in 'Belle De Jour' and in all of Bunuel's late films, but it is not his. It is the false and fragile serenity of the society he pictures'.
Wood suggests some of the ways Bunuel achieves this, in a gorgeously written study. He delineates the depth, subtleties and strategies of Bunuel's seemingly brusque and plain style. He discusses the brilliant actors - notably Catherine Deneuve, Michel Piccoli and Genevieve Page - and the importance of their screen personae to their roles. He shows how literally faithful Bunuel is to his source, Joseph Kessel's novel of the same name, and how radically he departs from its assumptions and form, transforming a traditionally psychological novel into an anti-character anti-narrative. The most brilliant section analyses the status of dreams, fantasies and memories in the film, and whether they displace the 'reality' of the film's fictional world, showing how Bunuel could claim to despise psychology (as a way of explaining the apparently accidental processes of the mind) and yet be devoted to Freud (as discoverer of the unconscious, 'one of the favourite playgrounds of accident'). He suggests that Bunuel replaces the reductive closure of a definitive resolution with a simultaneity of possible or alternative endings.
Readers will get the most out of the monograph if they have the film handy. Wood looks at the major sequences in some depth (the opening landau fantasy; the shoes-on-staircase hesitation outside the bordello; the burly Asian with the humming box; the central sequence in the Duc's chateau; all of Husson's scenes; the enigmatic concluding five minutes). He focuses on pertinent, missable details, attending to nuance, repetition and variation. Not only do you get a more profound understanding of the film, but Bunuel's method, as stubbornly withheld as his heroine's inner life, opens bit by bit. You become so focused on each scene, you notice things Wood left out, or didn't underline. It's a rare director or critic that empowers his audience with the tools to answer back. Bunuel and Wood are less interested in interpreting a world, a film, a book or a character, than the very act of interpretation itself.
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Title: L'Annee Derniere a Marienbad/Last Year in Marienbad (Bfi Film Classics) by Jean Louis Leutrat ISBN: 0851708218 Publisher: British Film Inst Pub. Date: April, 2001 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (Bfi Film Classics) by Lucy Fischer, Fisher Lucy, Lucy Fisher ISBN: 0851706681 Publisher: British Film Inst Pub. Date: September, 1998 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: Vertigo by Charles Barr ISBN: 0851709184 Publisher: British Film Inst Pub. Date: June, 2002 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: L.A. Confidential (BFI Modern Classics) by Manohla Dargis ISBN: 0851709443 Publisher: University of California Press Pub. Date: 05 May, 2003 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: Wild Strawberries: Smultronstallet (Bfi Film Classics) by Philip French, Kersti French ISBN: 0851704816 Publisher: British Film Inst Pub. Date: November, 1995 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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