Entries associated with the tag "Celine and Julie Go Boating":

Sometimes it helps not to know anything . . .

Coming to Celine and Julie Go Boating at the Film Center two weeks ago with "fresh eyes," so to speak (see post and comments for May 15), I wondered what I could possibly find there that hadn't already been analyzed to death—written about, pontificated on, etc. Obviously not a lot, since if someone like yours truly can come up with an idea, then somebody else already has.

So surprise, surprise, from the very first frame: that art nouveau lettering in the titles and credits. Where's it coming from, what's it all about? Nothing I'd read gave even the slightest clue. Lots of literary speculations on antecedents and influences (Henry James, Lewis Carroll, etc). But right up front there's an actual visual motif—it's a MOOOVIE, after all—and nobody's ever bothered to notice, as far as I can check on the Internet. (Though if we're back to rummaging through paper-based archives, musty old libraries of forgotten information, then all bets are off.)

But that art nouveau thing: it saturates the film, or at least the "contemporary" half of it—which is arguably less contemporary than the chamber drama it surrounds, the Jamesian story within a story (30s period in my view, from the deco stylizations, though per Jonathan Rosenbaum, with corroboration from Rivette himself, it actually references 50s Hollywood). It almost seems an homage, if not to Parisian nouveau exactly, then to the Montmartrean belle epoque, which in practice amounts to the same thing: curvilinear fonts and letterings, period streetscapes captured in the verite tracks and pans (including an incredible "ghost" house where the 30s/50s tale unwinds: all that variegated brick, like something out of Raimondo D'Aronco), ornamental graphics in a kid's picture book. Everything is of a piece, inflected by default-styling nouveau. What's odd to me, though, is Rivette's choice of typeface for the intertitles et al: apparently Boecklin standard, a Swiss-German font rather than a specifically French one. You have to wonder why an ostensible period homagist didn't opt for, let's say, Metropolitain, typographic brainchild of axiomatic French nouveau designer Hector Guimard, whose architectural masterwork was—well, of course!—the Paris Metro.

On the other hand, it's possible Rivette didn't consider any of these things—possible but not very likely, since the styling's too consistent to be accidental or haphazard. Or try out this idea (per Jonathan R. again): that the lettering, like C&J's subtitle "Phantom Ladies Over Paris," is essentially an homage to Feuillade—specifically to Les Vampires. Not a bad argument, and it might even have convinced me—if not for the evidence of the serial's own credits! The Gaumont production rubric above the title: it's closer to Benguiat gothic, a deco-style font, than Boecklin standard . . . which, to beat a dead horse, was already a decade out of fashion when Les Vampires was made.

None of which necessarily proves anything—or if it does, then only that, as putative Feuillade homagist, Rivette could be both sloppy and inattentive in his choice of period lettering. Can't have any of that now, can we? But I think there's a better alternative . . .

One final question: does anyone know the fate of the mystery mansion, playfully identified as "7 bis, Rue du Nadir aux Pommes"? Haven't been able to track it down myself, and the address seems mainly a referential jeu d'esprit. Preserved? Restored? Demolished? Or has it simply vanished like a ghost?

Almost 30 years have passed since Jacques Rivette's Celine and Julie Go Boating—which screens Thursday at the Gene Siskel Film Center as part of an ongoing Rivette retrospective—made its Chicago premiere at Facets Multimedia (now Facets Cinematheque) in February '78, a full three and a half years after its initial French release. I still recall the bewilderment and controversy that greeted it, not least in the Reader, which, in one of its more eccentric displays of editorial gamesmanship (or was it just covering its bets?), ran diametrically opposed reviews in the space of a year and half.

First out of the gate and at the bullet end of the argument (zero stars— "worthless" per the everlasting rubric) was Virginia Wright Wexman, film studies prof at UIC (then Circle campus), who spared no pejorative in letting it all hang out ("Rivette Runs Dry," February 17, 1978—not available online, so I'm quoting here directly):

"Jacques Rivette calls Celine & Julie Go Boating a fun picture. But fun for whom? Not the audience. Rivette, one of the most talented of the original New Wave group in France, has degenerated in his recent work from disciplined, relevant statements of genuine humanistic interest to self-indulgent exercises that are intended solely to please himself and the people he works with. The rest of us can join the party only at the cost of being monumentally bored."

And further: "Critic James Monaco has constructed a tortured argument to the effect that Rivette's elongated narratives are necessary to get us into the artificiality of it all. But we don't need over three hours to realize that Rivette is talking about fantasy here. . . . Rivette could provide his audiences with footnotes to his text, as Eliot did for The Wasteland. But Eliot had important things to say, and that makes the struggle to understand his arcane references worth something. . . . Rivette, by contrast, prides himself on his obscurity."

Not to mention: "It shocks me that some critics have praised Celine & Julie as a charming, accessible experience, because the movie assumes so little responsibility for the needs of its audience. . . . If Rivette is really interested in the dynamics of creativity, he should take a moment to consider Freud's idea that art is the product of a sublimated sex drive. Considered as a finished piece of filmmaking, Celine & Julie may have been cheap, but it's a pretty expensive way to beat off."

Eliot, Robbe-Grillet, Freud, all that rarefied heavy artillery—more than enough to scare at least one fledgling enthusiast right out of the theater! Which still begged the question of those conspiratorial "insiders." Were they all just polishing the avant silverware, performing to each other's looking-glass specifications? Or was there really something to get authentically turned on about? And if there was, might not the rest of us—including knuckle draggers like yours truly—reach out and grab a little of that magic too? Which was pretty much how the Film Center's B. Ruby Rich decided to go at it ("Fun With Subversion, August 17, '79—not available online), with an elaborate four-star smooch, plus an alternative selection of high-end critical underwriters:

"Celine and Julie Go Boating is an extraordinary French film that continues to attract a cult audience despite the utter absence of critical support on this side of the Atlantic. . . . [U.S. critics] objected to the film's insistent silliness and broad slapstick style of acting, to the 'indulgent' improvisation by its main actresses, to its running time . . . and to the absence of any payoff in its shaggy-dog ending. These are exactly the qualities I prize, for in combination with the film's central theme and strategy, they make for a work of truly subversive humor. Celine and Julie is funny, entertaining, and the ultimate comment not only on the illusionism of cinema but also on the power of women banded together. . . . Celine and Julie Go Boating effects an unprecedented overthrowing of cinema's function as spectacle (and, in so doing, explodes woman's function within that spectacle). In turn, Celine and Julie become surrogates for the real-life cinematic audience: their laughter and refusal to obey the rules is a model for us to assume more active roles in our cultural life, to cease being passive consumers. . . . I can think of no film in recent years that so lavishly repays a viewer's tolerance of its minor flaws."

Season liberally with Proust, Henry James, Louis Feuillade, Helene Cixous, and voila!: the mind staggers . . . though arguably both reviews have begun to date, albeit for different reasons: Rich's for its "morning of the world" feminism (which probably can't speak to our own jaded times . . . but who knows?), Wexman's for being on what seems to be the losing side of history. Since Celine and Julie's a certified classic, right? But for a close-in look at what goes on in the critical trenches, before the consensus forms and the imprimaturs are officially dispensed, the spectacle of battling ancientes can hardly be improved on—or more calculated to unsettle. Since aren't these things obvious by now? Or is it always back to the future and forward to the past? Hard to believe we're in constant revision, as if "history" could never definitively define. There's always the fresher view . . .