Commissioned by the Belgian web site Cinetek and posted in December 2022.
Displacement in relation to language stands at thecenter of André Delvaux’s troubling and troubled Unsoir, un train (1968) — so precisely and so relentlesslythat even the disquiet created by the collision ofdisparate nouns in the poetic title (a time and aplace/ thing/vehicle, improbably yoked together like achance meeting between a sewing machine and anumbrella on a dissecting table) arguably becomes lost orat least diluted in its English translation. One Night… ATrain, by contrast, feels like the opening phrase in a familiar-sounding narrative, a prosaic flow of wordsthat accounts for the three- period ellipsis, continuance replacing collision. And somewhere in between this collision and this continuance is the sort of stasis or uncertainty of both time and place evoked by the Flemish title of the Johan Daisne novella that the film is loosely based on, De trein der traagheid, which my Google translation engine, recognizing it as Dutch, translates as “The Train of Indolence”.
In the film, a conflict is being played out between Mathias (Yves Montand), a Flemish linguist and literature professor, and a theatrical stage designer named Anne (Anouk Aimée) who left France to live with him in Belgium and feels both excluded and scorned by the Flemish members of Mathias’ circle.Read more
Written for the Mexican magazine La Tempestad (No. 85), which published it in Spanish translation in late 2012, before Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa completed her feature-length film about my family house, A House is Not a Home. It was published online in February 2013. — J.R.
I’m very fortunate in having had a prolonged and comprehensive exposure to cinema both as mainstream entertainment and as an art form. But my experience has been somewhat atypical insofar as these two forms of exposure have been in different places and at different stages in my life, with relatively little interaction between them.
Born in Alabama in 1943, I grew up as the son and grandson of small-town film exhibitors, giving me a virtually unlimited access to popular cinema for practically all of the 1950s. This was followed by my discovery of film as an art form during much of the 1960s and 1970s, chiefly in New York, Paris, and London, and even though this entailed in certain cases some rediscoveries and reassessments of films I had seen earlier in Alabama, the discontinuities were usually more striking than the continuities because my family, although very much interested and invested in the arts in general (especially music, literature, and architecture), saw cinema almost exclusively in terms of business and light entertainment — which of course was and is the way most people everywhere in the world tend to see it. Read more
Mark Rappaport takes us on a fictional tour through an actor’s career, albeit one supported by a great deal of research andcareful film-watching, that proposes some enlightening ways of reinventing how we watch movies, teaching and hugely entertaining us at the same time. Mark’s own accurate synopsis of what he’s doing, reproduced below, is taken from the web site of a film festival held in the Canary Islands — one of the many festivals where the film was shown. — J.R. [4/26/15]
Synopsis
Are you defined by other people and their perceptions of who you are? Or can you exist outside of the arbitrary boundaries which are placed on you? The great French actor Marcel Dalio starred in Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game and Grand Illusion. In both films he plays a character who is Jewish, as Dalio was in real life. In most of his French films of the 30s, he was always “The Jew.” When the Nazis invaded France, he fled to America and appeared in Casablanca and To Have and Have Not. In America, he was no longer “the Jew” but “The Frenchman”…
