Cleo de 5 a 7

TIFF's last installment from the French New Wave on the Essential 100. It has been described as the most original and complex film from that period so I was expecting good but not blown away. Took the doors right off. Nothing could have prepared me for Corinne Marchand. In 1962 she was 25 and was nothing less than Belmondo and Seberg in 'Breathless'. My notes "beauty in close up" and Varda a director I had never heard of, a shame on my soul. Varda is extraordinary, her trained eye as a photographer the gateway to her command of art. The French New Wave is something I can finally get my mind around beyond the moving experience and now explains why venue ranks so high in my own writing. Paris, specifically The Left Bank, is the true character and the alternating light and dark is startling in it's literalism as well as it's value as a symbol.

Without the wig Marchand reminded me of Kim Novak and the transformation is an important turning point. Music, painting and sculpture are the art forms in the background and in the subtext and while exposure to French language on a fairly regular and consistent basis yields it's own type of familiarity just short of literal understanding, the English subtitles while useful at points were also a distraction and nuisance. The movement and landscape were the images you would hope all film could be where the sound of a voice in any language was all you needed to know and to truly understand the story and appreciate the grandeur of the spectacle on the screen. For 89 minutes all that mattered was that I was here and forgiven for having taken so long to find 1962 through French eyes.

That the French had pulled out of Vietnam in 1957 and were on to the issue of Algeria and the student unrest in the streets pulled at me to remind once again that we as in North America are never first. We make more noise but even with history to guide us we often lack originality. Thank you TIFF.

Hathaway not Mailer

Ann got lost in this rather quickly and to some extent that still bothers me. You can't rewrite history and there is nothing I can do to bring her back. The story line as it unfolded was forgiving only in so far as this was Karen. I am not convinced that a Hathaway blood line would have allowed us to continue past Europe. It was only in the absence of authority that we stood a chance as a couple. The only judgment that mattered was that imposed on ourselves by our selves. That I think is the key to any successful run especially one that appears as outrageous and absurd from the start. However time and again this has proven my strength; out there and I mean really out there I can flourish but it must be sustained by more than raw courage and adrenaline. It requires passion and money and my problem is that the money always runs out first. The downtime that seems to accompany each of these episodes is something I considered inevitable, a period to heal and readjust not to mount new guises for funding. In truth there was no healing and no strategizing I was indulging myself in a controlled self destruction that ultimately my sub conscious would reject. If I was to fail it would not be by own hand. Self determination of the species type stuff is my guess but it is just that a guess. I don't know and that I have chosen not to know says more to me than I care for. I was born to go forward and not just as we all are according to Freud's 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle'. To go forward as in advance and be something with particular emphasis on 'SOME THING'. Why just the other day I was telling the doctor "when I was important and famous" and after listening for a few minutes not because it mattered he was interested and then on his own concluded investment banker. I wasn't in investment banking anymore than Stone was into oil. For Stone it was commercial real estate but there is nothing sexy in that and goes over much better with a bunch of dots after it denoting a lingering image and the promise that is some unexpressed hope that in itself reaches beyond moral right and wrong. There is something in this conquering ideal a romantic notion perhaps that maybe was more easily said then than now but there are still traces of it around us. The ones that are held up for applause seem all related to the technology advance but since we are no longer builders in the traditional sense it has to be considered as equal measure in the standard of the day. The difficulty if there is one would be in my estimation that the present victories are far more shallow, hollow a better word, in that these are not monuments to admire for longer than a fleeting instant. 'My god man I can communicate' a testament to Alexander Graham Bell not Apple or Microsoft. In this digital age what will be our Gutenberg Press? It is in this seam, a crack if you will, that the romantic dream can exist. It is one in which people are the story where lives are incomplete and messy. The complications and hurdles permit confusion and in the chaos solutions that ring a bell of universal truth. In the end though still incomplete it is the transcendental experience that offers the greatest return on investment. It is here where Karen holds the most value and it is precisely what I must skirt while carefully underlining the path that led in twists and turns from Dee and Magick, days on the beach, too much sun now too much rain back to Europe and now standing firmly in the present, recreating the past. The headline in my head was "Quinn Dead at 46". So the period is fixed.


Low Spark