Zéro de Conduite

Koyaanisqati - The Existence of a Past Everyday

On the premise that facebook hinders honourable graduation, during my MA I refused to get an internet connection. Consequently most of my free home time was animated by a UCL library video collection binge. An eclectic - very francophile, Scandinavian savvy and sound oriented - but nonetheless impressive collection.

Among the Bergmans, Vilgot Sjöman and Éric Rohmer, I rented all of the Qatsi trilogy after a Post-Colonial Visual Culture class during which the last film, Naqoyqatsi (2002), was torn apart for its condescending universalism. Still I got really obsessed with Koyaanisqati (1982) - the first in the trilogy - and watched it twenty times over a weekend (London can be very rainy). Sometimes as background (a Philip Glass soundtrack) music, sometimes as a whole, sometimes as extracts, sometimes as loops, sometimes to observe what the 1980s everyday looked like: what were the colours of billboards or on planes? What forms were cars and trucks taking? What were lighting systems like? What was makeup like? Technology like? Outfits like? Hairstyles? Glasses? Traffic systems? Smoking habits?

While aspects this 'experimental' documentary are sometimes condescending (the title of the film does translate as Life Out of Balance) and underneath its 'objective' looking images has a clunky and at times desperately unsubtle social comment, my curiosity for the everyday overruled all of it....

Yesterday I was in nyc's midtown eating soap in a front window - it felt like television. And watching people on their cellphones bustling around reminded of my obsession for this 'experimental' documentary by Godfrey Reggio with music by Philip Glass:

How did people look when they lived without cellphones?

Slips instead of Bras, a Frank Capra passage into the 1930s: It Happened One Night

I saw It Happened One Night last night. I saw it on the premise that this was Hitler's favorite movie and that Claudette Colbert was French. 

Both arguments are true but slippery ones, and yet the movie is frankly quite great. It has the populist love affair mixed with the glitz and glamour of the contrived rich girl escaping rich life falls in love with handsome honest poor man, but it works. The scenario is witty, the acting actually believable. But the strongest point is the exterior settings which make the film a great medium to access the everyday (somewhat) of times past - 1930s roads, bus stops, stores, motels, farms - as well as customs - smoking, pressing clothes, hairdos and mustaches, slips instead of bras, manly high-waisted pants, print culture etc... 

Two extra details are the cherries on top: a flying machine worth Leonardo da Vinci's drawings of a half helicopter half plane makes it's entrance for the wedding scene and an actor playing a thief driver is 99% certain Doctor Phil's grandfather.

Here's an extract (with Doctor Phil's grandfather in the last second): 

The nonsensical advertisements before a Dicaprio Blockbuster and French McDonalds is said to have Macaroons

I saw Inception last night at the MK2 Odéon. The plot-line - a dream within a dream within another dream - was a genius marketing move broadening the range of the flick's target audience exponentially (from Matrix lovers to chick flick freaks) and the characters were as flat (a wannabe James Bond stud and a miserable Japanese version of the evil turn good guy) as much as their relations improbable (Juno as therapist?).

If that could have been expected, if not calculated, it's actually the advertisement and preview period before the movie that was the best and most disconcerting experience of my time in front of the screen. It reminded me I was paying to be sold things, and gave me the shitty feeling that either I should have downloaded it or that I was suppose to be a sexually open-minded 13 year old geek with a love for green-conscious fast food.

Demonstration:

Targeted towards teens, preferably geeks, the first ads are by SFR and promote their phones' games with animated Princess Peach and her other forgotten gameboy friends. Check here. I might be totally out of the loop but what in the world is it promoting? good friendships? SFR's lack of cool? Nostalgia for Mario World? Not sure? Me neither. After seeing three versions of that same concept, McDonalds kicked in with their new bio friendly image: lush tomatoes collected meticulously by a McDo employer and brought in every morning fresh in a wooden box merged with happy meal boxes entering a miserable city filled with miserable black puffy things who, by the mere presence of happy meals, change into colorful dancing puffy things:  



What's going on? Is it really that straightforward: buy a happy meal and you will be happy? Is it for parents? Rare McDo eaters? Rare to never McDo eaters (I didn't leave convinced)? Kids? Sad people? After that and my neighbor telling me McDo menus have now salads, biological yogurts and also macaroons (which by shape is just like a hamburger), this soft porn artsy indie Mexican preview played. If most likely American censors would have banned it from the eyes of any adult under 21, what is weirder is that someone must have thought that placing it after Princess Peach animations selling games on cellphones and happy meals' happiness was a good move.


 
and then bam Dicap was in a dream.

La Peau Douce de Truffaut and Shoes

In competition at Cannes in 1964 and at the time severely criticized as an antipoetic idea of love, François Truffaut's La Peau Douce is often neglected although the rawness of the characters, the compelling desperation of the plot and patience of the director's frames make it certainly more poetic than the often tedious romanesque of Jules and Jim. 

Either way like most Nouvelle Vague productions La Peau Douce remains a beautiful window into the everyday of a time past. Among witnessing defunct activities like smoking in airplanes, waiting for public phone-booths to be freed, dancehall restaurants and the rare times Françoise Dorléac's (Catherine Deneuve's older sister who died in a car crash at 25) character is allowed to wear jeans, there is a wonderful shot of shoes aligned in front of hotel bedrooms. If this scene is an undisclosed tribute to feet fetishists, for anthropologists in love with things it is surprising how pointy the toes and how low the heels are on 1960s shoes.

La Peau Douce - bande annonce (2005) from Julio on Vimeo.