DVD OF "NATHALIE GRANGER"

This is my comment in Girish Shambu’s blog:
http://www.girishshambu.com/blog/2007/09/toronto-overview.html

Thank you very much, Girish.

Girish, since you wrote in August that Lucia Bose is an arresting presence in STORY OF A LOVE AFFAIR (1950, Michelangelo Antonioni), I would like to tell you that Blaq Out has released a DVD of NATHALIE GRANGER (1972, Marguerite Duras), starring Lucia Bose, Jeanne Moreau, and Gerard Depardieu. I don’t know if you’ve known it already or not. But this news makes me feel very glad. The website of Blaq Out says it has English subtitles, and the special features include the interviews with Benoit Jacquot and Luc Moullet.

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--Vespertine, my friend, told me this news about the DVD of NATHALIE GRANGER. I have to thank him a lot for this news.
http://www.blaqout.com/site2/catalog/profile.php?movie_id=59

--For those who love Lucia Bose, you can read the reviews of her films in the following links:

1.STORY OF A LOVE AFFAIR, reviewed by Jesse Ataide
http://www.dvdverdict.com/reviews/storyloveaffair.php

2.DEATH OF A CYCLIST (1955, Juan Antonio Bardem, Spain), reviewed by Peter Nellhaus
http://www.coffeecoffeeandmorecoffee.com/archives/2007/08/death_of_a_cycl.html

--I also commented on NATHALIE GRANGER in imdb.com in 2000.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068991/usercomments


--For those who have seen NATHALIE GRANGER, and want to read a great review of this film, I recommend you read the book NEW NOVEL, NEW WAVE, NEW POLITICS: FICTION AND THE REPRESENTATION OF HISTORY IN POSTWAR FRANCE (1998), written by Lynn A. Higgins. You can buy the book from amazon.com
http://www.amazon.com/New-Novel-Wave-Politics-Representation/dp/0803273096/ref=sr_1_7/104-0496657-8291933?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1190733752&sr=1-7

This is an excerpt from the book NEW NOVEL, NEW WAVE, NEW POLITICS. The writer compared the film NATHALIE GRANGER with TOUT VA BIEN (1972, Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Gorin). The full article also talks about the aftermath of May 1968 :

“This is where NATHALIE GRANGER comes into the picture. While the two films share the project of constructing counterdiscourses that might prolong the contestation of May without necessarily recounting it, in many ways they move in opposing directions. TOUT VA BIEN and NATHALIE GRANGER can be contrasted according to a distinction between proliferation and erasure. Everywhere that Godard’s contestation takes a dialectical form that brings into play more elements—more discourses, more (and more contradictory) points of view, more color and noise, and a surfeit of meanings—Duras proceeds to reduce, to minimize, to evacuate meaning. The two films contrast as active struggle and passive resistance can both disarm an attack; as direct address and no address at all can both frustrate cinematic voyeurism and specular identification; as noise and silence (or music) both repel the imposition of a dominant language. Both films systematically disorient the spectator by avoiding subjective shots and the spatial logic of shot-countershot alternation, but while Godard achieves this through multiple and split points of view, Duras tries to eliminate points of view entirely; her camera wanders through the house like an anonymous intruder. Both are exquisitely self-conscious filmmakers as well, but where Godard subverts narrative and visual conventions from within, making the evidents of their construction evident, Duras evacuates narrative altogether. Both deny the pleasures afforded by mainstream spectacle, but where Godard conceives of revolution as an act of murder and challenges the identification offered in commercial cinema by showing the reality of class struggle, Duras undermines the pleasure principle by going beyond it, to suicide and extinction of narrative, point of view, and speech itself. In short, where Godard disrupts by means of explosion, Duras proceeds implosively. Or perhaps it is the difference between Mao and Zen.”



--I learned from the website of Blaq Out that this company also released the DVDs of 8 films of Jean-Paul Civeyrac with English subtitles. I hope one day all these DVDs of Jean-Paul Civeyrac will become available in Bangkok.

http://www.blaqout.com/site2/catalog/profile.php?movie_id=46

Some images from the films by Jean-Paul Civeyrac
http://www.allocine.fr/personne/fichepersonne_gen_cpersonne=14102.html

Images from THROUGH THE FOREST (2005):
http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1245/1437863567_8b2169bdb4_o.jpg
http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1182/1437863565_a3ee80c5a2_o.jpg
http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1412/1437863563_0022a121c1_o.jpg


Images from NEITHER EVE NOR ADAM (1996):
http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1213/1437863557_6459c72cd1_o.jpg
http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1145/1437863553_4820d4422a_o.jpg
http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1435/1437863547_910b1baeba_o.jpg