Restored, maybe revived, but what does The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) have to say to us ?
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
Restored, maybe revived, but what does The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) have to say to us ?
Prelude :
It wasn't to-day (or even this week) - The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Screen 2 to-night, c. 6.10) might well make up for the non-Italianate snack...
— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 9, 2019
Not so much rage over a lost penny as 'a rant during an interrupted bed-time' ? :
The theme's recurrence is, in itself, insufficient to give the film the coherence that it otherwise lacks, when it spends so much of 91 mins just being about time's passing, and not The Algerian War, the effects of military service, Madame Emery's story, or even who Madeleine is.— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 21, 2019
We pan up, and it's as close as we get to dance or real movement, or Umbrellas of Cherbourg except as implausible boutique (whose Mme Emery expresses angst in violent wallpaper) :— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 21, 2019
Nothing much suggests, say, that she really deals dope, or that Roland Cassard will shaft them all.
* Whatever the initial ('mystical') appeal when he set it, it seems that, according to Peter Gutmann's 'Classical Notes', Schoenberg may later have come to see the sentimentality of Richard Dehmel's text as 'repulsive' [https://t.co/j7Kq7D81bV].— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 21, 2019
Postlude / reflections :
Singin' in the Rain (1952) was aptly and succinctly introduced at @camfilmfest 2019 by @NeilKBrand [Day 2], so is one really 'saying as one found it' that it seems a worthier object of restoration'n'revival - or did Neil make a case that then informed / transformed our viewing ?— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 21, 2019
¹ Excepting being aware (from decades earlier, on t.v.) of the sequences with Gene Kelly² and Cyd Charisse, or Michael Parkinson's much-referenced avowal ? [So, not the whole film, watched as / in a cinema.]— THE AGENT APSLEY #ScrapUniversalCredit #JC4PM2019 (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) December 21, 2019
² Neil certainly asked us to regard Donald O'Connor as Kelly's equal.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
