The genius of "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg" ending

by Cláudio Alves

Back in the 1960s, unlike now, a film could be recognized in the Best Foreign Language Film category one year and still compete for the other Oscars the next. Such a strange fate befell Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, an intoxicating love letter to the classic Hollywood musical by one of the most inventive auteurs of the Nouvelle Vague. In 1964, the picture was a nominee for Best Foreign Language Film and would go on to conquer four other nods in 1965, the year of our next Supporting Actress Smackdown.

While it's easy to resent the Academy for not fully embracing the flick (it won nothing), the citations it received, for Demy's script and Michel Legrand's music, were fully deserved...

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Jean Gabin: French Superstar

by Cláudio Alves

The 11th Academy Awards marked an important first in Oscar history. Jean Renoir's Grand Illusion, a French drama about class hierarchies and political strife in World War I, received a Best Picture nomination. It became the first non-English language film to ever do so. As we all know, it'd take 81 years for one such picture to win Hollywood's most coveted trophy, but we're not here to talk about Parasite's glorious victory as tempting as that is. Instead, our subject matter is one of French cinema's greatest stars, a brilliant actor that grew to be a cultural monument, the leading man of that historic '38 Best Picture nominee. Jean Gabin was a divinity of the Silver Screen, as magnetic as he was devastating…

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Alain Delon on Criterion

by Cláudio Alves

For some people, the word handsome isn't enough. Such beauty defies description and almost seems to bend reality, becoming uncanny in its perfection. French star Alain Delon is one such person. It's no wonder that many a master filmmaker has lost themselves looking at the actor, making devotional songs to his besotting allure in the shape of cinema. Antonioni, Clément, Godard, Malle, Melville, Visconti were some of those masters of cinema and their works have immortalized Alain Delon in poems of celluloid that are some of the best films ever made… 

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The elliptical cinema of Mia Hansen-Løve

by Cláudio Alves

Cinema is many things. An audiovisual art form, a dream, memories crystalized, ghosts of light. It's also a language, an idiom with rules and grammar of its own. Some cineastes film straightforward prose. Others prefer a lyrical approach and write poems with their cameras. There are those who make manifestos, compose diaries, some even do journalistic documentations. Whatever their uses of the language of cinema, the punctuation is usually the same, with norms judiciously followed to keep the clarity of intention, of information and tone. Still, sometimes the most interesting artist is the one that bends those rules to their will, reshaping, transforming, making them into something personal.

Mia Hansen-Løve is such a filmmaker. Instead of employing commas and periods, writing and cutting traditionally, she prefers to film in ellipsis. Constant, evocative, oft-mysterious and emotionally poignant, ellipsis…

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The curious case of "The Red Balloon"

by Cláudio Alves

Last time we explored the history of non-English speaking films at the Academy Awards, we looked at the success of Japanese cinema in the Best Costume Design category. In 1956, two years after the historical victory of Teinosuke Kinugasa's Gate of Hell, the Academy finally inaugurated the Best Foreign Language Oscar as a competitive category. Federico Fellini's La Strada was the first winner and, like Gate of Hell, it also scored a nomination in another category, Best Original Screenplay. This time around, though, the foreign film champion lost that additional statuette. However, it didn't lose to a Hollywood production or even an English-language one. Instead, that year's prize for Best Original Screenplay went to one of the weirdest Oscar winners of all time. 

We're talking about a nearly dialogue-free French short film about a magical balloon directed and written by the creator of the Risk board game… 

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