On October 14, 2012 I received the sad news from Pierre Bayle d’Autrange that his longtime partner Eduardo de Gregorio, also a longtime friend of mine (since 1973), died Saturday night at the St. Louis Hospital in Paris, not long after his 70th birthday.
I wrote the following for the festival catalogue of the Buenos Aires Festival of Independent Film in 2004, to accompany a retrospective of Eduardo’s films — as far as I know, the only such retrospective that was ever held. It is also reprinted — along with a short essay of the same length on Sara Driver (also the subject of a BAFICI retrospective that year)– in “Two Neglected Filmmakers,” a piece included in my most recent collection, Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia as well as here. — J.R.
Eduardo de Gregorio’s Dream Door
It must be a bummer to be an Argentinian writer and/or filmmaker and constantly get linked to Jorge Luis Borges. It must be especially hard if you’re Eduardo de Gregorio, whose first major screen credit is on an adaptation of “Theme of the Traitor and Hero” for Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1970 feature The Spider’s Strategm.
I don’t mean to question the credentials of de Gregorio as a onetime student of Borges — just the appropriateness of a too-narrow understanding to impose on a singular body of work that owes as much to cinematic references as to literary ones, and one that indeed juxtaposes the two almost as freely as it juxtaposes different languages and historical periods (while including all the cultural baggage that comes with each of them). Read more
I can’t remember precisely when it was that I first met Elliott in Paris, but I’m sure it was in the early 70s, and I suspect it was the late Carlos Clarens, another Cinematheque regular, who introduced us, most likely after some Palais de Chaillot screening. It wasn’t much later when I discovered we were neighbors living a few blocks apart — me in a small, sunless flat on Rue Mazarine, Elliott in a large room stuffed with all sorts of arcane memorabilia at the Hotel de Verneuil on Rue de Verneuil. He was already a pack-rat then, especially when it came to his collection of clippings, and he continued to live that way years later when he eventually moved back to New York — first to a hotel on lower 5th Avenue, then to a roomy loft in Soho on West Broadway. It was a tragic moment for him when he had to move out of the latter place, leaving behind or giving up many of his treasured possessions (including, as I recall, a table once owned by Robert Ryan). And only a few days ago, at the Viennale, hearing about the ravages of Sandy on New York and environs, my friends and I were concerned about whether or not Elliott was okay. Read more
Chicago Reader, 2005:
The World (Jia Zhang-ke)
Not on the Lips (Alain Resnais)
A History of Violence (David Cronenberg)
Ten Skies (James Benning)
Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
Howl’s Moving Castle (Hayao Miyazaki) & Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Tim Burton)
Yes (Sally Potter) & Capote (Bennett Miller)
Michelangelo Eye to Eye (Michelangelo Antonioni) & Saraband (Ingmar Bergman)
Broken Flowers (Jim Jarmusch) & Me and You and Everyone We Know (Miranda July)
The Girl from Monday (Hal Hartley) & 2046 (Wong Kar-wai)
Chicago Reader, 2006:
Cafe Lumiere (Hou Hsiao-hsien) & Three Times (Hou Hsiao-hsien)
Army of Shadows (1969, Jean-Pierre Melville) & Statues Also Die (1953, Resnais/Marker/Cloquet)
The War Tapes (Deborah Scranton) & Iraq in Fragments (James Longley)
Cuadecuc-Vampir (1970, Pere Portabelle) & Warsaw Bridge (1990, Portabella)
Find Me Guilty (Sidney Lumet) & Half Nelson (Ryan Fleck)
Citadel (Atom Egoyan) & The Power of Nightmares (Adam Curtis)
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (Tommy Lee Jones) & The Illusionist (Neil Burger)
Ask the Dust (Robert Towne) & Hollywoodland (Allen Coulter)
Moments Choisis des Histoire(s) du Cinéma (Godard) & My Dad Is 100 Years Old (Maddin)
Fast Food Nation (Richard Linklater) & Bobby (Emilio Estevez)
DVD Beaver, 2006:
1. 6 Films de Luc Moullet (Luc Moullet, 2006), Blaq Out; multizone NTSC
2. Read more
From the December 1981 issue of American Film. I was quite unhappy with the way this article was edited at the time, but having discovered my original submitted draft quite recently (in mid-November 2011, 30 years later), I’ve decided to resurrect it here, including my own title. (Theirs was “Looking for Nicholas Ray”.)
My working assumption in restoring original drafts on this site, or some approximation thereof, isn’t that my editors were always or invariably wrong, or that my editorial decisions today are necessarily superior, but, rather, an attempt to historicize and bear witness to my original intentions. It was a similar impulse that led me to undo some of the editorial changes made in the submitted manuscript of my first book, Moving Places: A Life at the Movies (1980), when I was afforded the opportunity to reconsider them for the book’s second edition 15 years later (available online here) — not to revise or rethink my decisions in relation to my subsequent taste but to bring the book closer to what I originally had in mind in 1980. — J.R.
By and large, the last three decades in the life of film director Nicholas Ray can be divided fairly evenly into three distinct parts. Read more
