421 Pierrot le fou

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Lowry_Sam
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Re: 421 Pierrot le fou

#326 Post by Lowry_Sam » Fri Jan 22, 2016 2:03 am

Graphist wrote:Is the Blu-Ray back in print? It looks like it is available for purchase on Barnes & Noble for $38.68 (not through the marketplace sellers).

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/dvd-pie ... 5515050111" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
People are probably trying to unload their unsold & unopened copies (or perhaps some unopened copies found in an Alabama B&N storage room) before Criterion announces a new edition with the new 4K restoration (currently showing in LA coutesy of Rialto Pictures).

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tenia
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Re: 421 Pierrot le fou

#327 Post by tenia » Fri Jan 22, 2016 4:27 am

Lowry_Sam wrote:before Criterion announces a new edition with the new 4K restoration
That'd be the first BD-to-BD upgrade because of a new restoration being available.
EDIT : my bad, there was indeed Playtime, though it was a previously OOP title released as part of a boxset.
Last edited by tenia on Fri Jan 22, 2016 6:17 am, edited 2 times in total.

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andyli
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421 Pierrot le fou

#328 Post by andyli » Fri Jan 22, 2016 5:03 am

Play Time.

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MichaelB
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Re: 421 Pierrot le fou

#329 Post by MichaelB » Fri Jan 22, 2016 7:52 am

Lowry_Sam wrote:People are probably trying to unload their unsold & unopened copies (or perhaps some unopened copies found in an Alabama B&N storage room) before Criterion announces a new edition with the new 4K restoration (currently showing in LA coutesy of Rialto Pictures).
But would they be able to get hold of the rights? The Jacques Tati titles were a special case to do with the Tati estate.

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Manny Karp
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Re: 421 Pierrot le fou

#330 Post by Manny Karp » Fri Jan 22, 2016 4:12 pm

PfR73 wrote:While there was a lot of discussion about the green tint in the Sam Fuller shot, another large color timing difference between the Criterion & Studio Canal Blu-Rays, both of which I own, is the shot of Ferdinand & Marianne sleeping on the beach about 42 minutes in. The dialogue over the previous shot talks about "seeing it through to the end of the night" & the shot of the sun darkens visibly. During the scene, Ferdinand & Marianne talk about seeing the moon. However, on the Criterion disc, it looks like sunlight. The Studio Canal disc is darker & more blue, looking like day-for-night. This can be seen in the 4th set of caps in the DVDBeaver comparison. The Canal disc seems like it could be more correct for the scene, but the Criterion disc is approved by Coutard & the consensus seemed to be that Studio Canal was wrong about the Fuller shot. Criterion looks like it could be dawn, is the scene supposed to be dawn instead of night? I'm curious if anyone has any information about how this shot is supposed to look.
For God's sake, so they both have errors? Was going to grab the Studio Canal (despite the lack of green tint, which I distinctly remember being there from my previous viewings) but now I don't know.

rrenault
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Re: 421 Pierrot le fou

#331 Post by rrenault » Sat Jan 23, 2016 7:31 am

Even if Criterion is poised to release the 4K restoration of Pierrot Le Fou, who knows how long they may sit on it before announcing. Look what happened with La Peau Douce, so I personally don't plan on getting too hasty about parting with my 2009 copy just yet. That's just me though

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TMDaines
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Re: 421 Pierrot le fou

#332 Post by TMDaines » Tue Nov 15, 2016 7:30 pm

Was researching the green tint issue and some people over at Blu-ray.com linked to a contemporary Roger Ebert review that states that the green tint was not present back in the day: link.

Think I may pick up the Studio Canal set after all.

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Re: 421 Pierrot le fou

#333 Post by rrenault » Wed Nov 16, 2016 9:54 am

Yes, when I saw it on the big screen it was sans green tint.

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domino harvey
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Re: 421 Pierrot le fou

#334 Post by domino harvey » Thu Jul 19, 2018 2:41 pm

I never knew until doing some research that Pierrot le fou was France's submission to the Academy Awards for Best Foreign Film for 1965. This is the only Godard film to ever be submitted, and was of course not nominated. What did they submit in 1960 instead of Breathless, you might be wondering? Clouzot's La Vérité of all things-- and it was nominated!

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Re: 421 Pierrot le fou

#335 Post by domino harvey » Mon Jul 23, 2018 3:03 pm

Discussion of Selena Gomez' music video homage moved here

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TMDaines
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Re: 421 Pierrot le fou

#336 Post by TMDaines » Mon Feb 04, 2019 11:44 am

domino harvey wrote:
Thu Jul 19, 2018 2:41 pm
I never knew until doing some research that Pierrot le fou was France's submission to the Academy Awards for Best Foreign Film for 1965. This is the only Godard film to ever be submitted, and was of course not nominated. What did they submit in 1960 instead of Breathless, you might be wondering? Clouzot's La Vérité of all things-- and it was nominated!
Sauve qui peut (la vie), For Ever Mozart, and Éloge de l'amour were all submitted by Switzerland though. None were nominated unsurprisingly.

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dda1996a
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Re: 421 Pierrot le fou

#337 Post by dda1996a » Mon Feb 04, 2019 12:41 pm

I'm interested in theorizing wether Godard in that period would have shown up if he was nominated and what he would have said had he won

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domino harvey
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Re: 421 Pierrot le fou

#338 Post by domino harvey » Mon Feb 04, 2019 1:49 pm

TMDaines wrote:
Mon Feb 04, 2019 11:44 am
domino harvey wrote:
Thu Jul 19, 2018 2:41 pm
I never knew until doing some research that Pierrot le fou was France's submission to the Academy Awards for Best Foreign Film for 1965. This is the only Godard film to ever be submitted, and was of course not nominated. What did they submit in 1960 instead of Breathless, you might be wondering? Clouzot's La Vérité of all things-- and it was nominated!
Sauve qui peut (la vie), For Ever Mozart, and Éloge de l'amour were all submitted by Switzerland though. None were nominated unsurprisingly.
Very interesting, thanks for that!

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domino harvey
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Re: 421 Pierrot le fou

#339 Post by domino harvey » Mon Nov 25, 2019 6:56 pm

User therewillbeblus took me up on my offer to write ~500 words on a film of a member’s choosing if they donated to the board, only he (and the other member who took me up on my “incentive”— your’s is still coming!) threw me a curveball by not picking a film new to me but a film extremely well-known to me, this one. I kept thinking about Christian Metz’ eternally relevant summation of why film semiotics is so complicated: “Films are hard to explain because they’re easy to understand.” Is my love of Godard, and this film, hard to explain because it’s so easy for me to understand? Peut-être.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Godard lately, namely trying to reexamine my own closely-held feelings of his work. Certainly when I was in college (which seems like the prime time to discover him, like the cinematic equivalent of recreational drugs), Godard blew my mind. I’ve already recounted elsewhere on the forum about how A bout de souffle literally changed my life, and I’ve long valued the work of Godard in a way I really don’t for any other director, even ones I love like Chabrol or Hitchcock or Deville, &c. But after a lot of recent reading of reactions from the period from a variety of critics and contemporary audience members, the thing I value so much about Godard is the bonafide many of his detractors refuse to grant him: his playful intellectual engagement. I find it fascinating how many otherwise smart, creative people whose work and opinions I deeply respect (from Ingmar Bergman to my fellow board-member zedz) seem to regard Godard as something of a sloppy charlatan. This isn’t new (hello, Raymond Borde, who in his blind hatred practiced fidelity to a degree that most happy marriages lack) and hasn’t grown old (goodbye, Letterboxd reviews from 20-somethings who’ve seen two Godards and then write off his entire output as though they've experienced it), but it’s still hard for me to grasp.

I’m not sure I have anything new to say about Pierrot le fou, but I do have new questions about old habits: What repels the detractors? Is it Godard’s arms-length distancing from his subjects? Certainly the old would-be canard is accurate: one does not turn to Godard for emotional resonance. And yet, there are moments of universal (and recognizably human) emotion present in Pierrot le fou that are not, I’d say, found in a work like Weekend or La chinoise. I don’t think this is a great film because there are hints at characterization, as that’s a terrible and meaningless metric. But I do think Pierrot le fou is a movie that complicates the typical responses to a “first period Godard film.”

The film is elegiac in a vague way, though about what is anyone’s guess. I’ve always thought of it, tied with the deterioration of his marriage to Karina, as a failed suicide note (though I wasn’t the first, as the idea comes from MacCabe’s bio). Failed because the power of images and words, a dual focus Godard returns to repeatedly in the years following this, is too strong. Someone who loved movies as much as Godard did, Bogdanovich, didn’t survive his own personal trauma and all his work after deeply suffered. Godard just pivoted increasingly towards obscurism and the diminishing audiences that followed him became the fervent chorus of a cult. Perhaps this is part of the objection of detractors, too, the cult of personality built around an entertaining font of quotations and cryptic statements?

I don’t have answers. But I was quite struck recently by a response Godard gave in 1968 to an question posed by Caleb Deschanel, seeking to “explain” Godard’s willful contradictions:
“I think you are looking for too many explanation for things, too many comments about things, but they are just there. There is nothing to explain. […] It’s very difficult for me to answer these questions because they’re not really questions. How can it help you if I answer these questions?”
I think that’s kind of the key to what Godard does, and why he stimulates me and so many others, to the confused chagrin of maybe just as many others on the opposite side: he prompts me to thought, to intellectual engagement and conscious detachment from the film, while still being a wildly unpredictable, playful, and engaging host of the large sweeping armfuls of various notions he throws down into each of this films. I once proclaimed somewhere in the prehistory of the forum that Pierrot le fou was the greatest of all films. Without checking, I’m sure I was in college at the time. As I near middle age, do I still think it is? Probably not. But only because some other Godard film is. In another ten, twenty, thirty years, I will no doubt cycle through a couple more. But it seems like differentiation, valuation, ranking and so on is beside the point: I love Godard, I love this film, and I’m sorry for those who don’t feel likewise. But I’m sure the h8rs have their own directors and works they feel likewise on. And we can all sing “Kumbaya” around the fire, sure, why not

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Re: 421 Pierrot le fou

#340 Post by therewillbeblus » Mon Nov 25, 2019 9:35 pm

Thanks domino for that lovely appreciation of Godard! It’s funny because I used to hate this film with a capital H until I was in my mid20s well out of college and something clicked. Now, about ten years out of school it’s still my favorite film, for reasons that as you say, are pretty indescribable. For me this is a film of conflict, between a reserved position of skeptic logic and an explosion of emotional release, which results in some extremes of each but mostly a collage of everything in Godard’s mind and heart, including politics, pain, knowledge and love of film, love of life and human connection, color, ennui, philosophy, hopelessness, and joy. In the way that La Flor takes 14 hours to make “all the films” focused around four actresses, Godard takes under two hours to make all the films into one, while also pulling himself back to make none of them fully, by focusing on himself. This is why all the moments of beauty, emotions, and playful genre in-jokes are abrasively cut with Brechtian distancing in technique and linguistic analyses, and feels cold and restrained to many, including my younger self, because it is; but only because of this conflict between feeling and thought, not because of a lack of either. Life is ephemeral, as are Godard’s own internal states, scattered between intelligence and emotion (here arguably represented by Belmondo and Karina, respectively), and he projects the fragmented parts of his existential crisis together with his passion for cinema to create a work of art that is as summative of his self as humanly possible, and as a result we can feel overwhelmed, cherry pick references to film, or relate to our own internal struggles between the cognitive, emotional, and philosophical; or all of these at once, like Godard did. I appreciate that viewing of this as a suicide note, as there is something especially emotional seeping through the cracks here not present in his other works and I’ll consent that to say it’s the greatest film ever made, as I do, wholly relies on subjective interpretation, probably more than most films.

I think of Pynchon’s V. often, with the characters representative of two polar sides of a personality: a ‘human yo-yo’ living in the present coasting through life on fleeting experience, and the scholar devoting his life to dissecting meaning out of anything and everything to uncover futile ‘truth.’ Eventually they merge (in the shape of a V...), briefly forming and influencing one another for the better; but for Godard this film was the most cohesive blending of his parts into a dense cocktail that meets at the focal point in the V in frantic kinetic rhythm throughout until he, and the film, just can’t take it anymore. I don’t see how one makes this without turning it into an elegy, intentionally or not.

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Re: 421 Pierrot le fou

#341 Post by nitin » Mon Nov 25, 2019 10:45 pm

To add to the ‘I can’t really explain it’ posts above, I think the first hour of Pierrot Le Fou is close to the best cinema I have ever seen. I am not really sure I can explain why. I am less convinced about that second hour but it’s due for a rewatch.

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Re: 421 Pierrot le fou

#342 Post by domino harvey » Mon Nov 25, 2019 11:24 pm

I first saw Pierrot le fou near the end of my French New Wave class, on a letterboxed VHS my professor lent me (My prof was a Godard scholar but he didn't schedule it for our class, though he had some odd outliers in general-- surely we were the only New Wave class in college history to not schedule Les quatre cents coups but find room to slot in Comment ça va?!), and it immediately became my favorite for how it seemed to sum up all of Godard's work up to that point. Plus, as a lover of road movies, I enjoyed how it toyed with the self-furthering conventions of those journeys. But now, those reasons seem to only scratch the surface of what makes the film so memorable and yet elusive...

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Re: 421 Pierrot le fou

#343 Post by nitin » Tue Nov 26, 2019 12:52 am

Well in contrast I saw it via Criterion DVD probably towards the start of my discovery of the French new wave stuff, after Breathless, The 400 Blows, Band Of Outsiders and Hiroshima Mon Amour but before Vivre Sa Vie, Day for Night, Elevator to the Gallows and Claire’s Knee. I was in my early 20s and not at all into cinema academically. I probably didn’t even understand a lot of the self reflexive stuff that was happening.

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Re: 421 Pierrot le fou

#344 Post by barryconvex » Wed Nov 27, 2019 3:15 am

I’ve already recounted elsewhere on the forum about how A bout de souffle literally changed my life...
Do you have a link for this?

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Re: 421 Pierrot le fou

#345 Post by Ribs » Wed Jul 15, 2020 11:58 am


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Re: 421 Pierrot le fou

#346 Post by therewillbeblus » Wed Jul 15, 2020 12:16 pm

Interesting, I think the original transfer is excellent and one of Criterion's best, but I won't complain about further attention paid to my favorite film

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domino harvey
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Re: 421 Pierrot le fou

#347 Post by domino harvey » Wed Jul 15, 2020 12:39 pm

I am more worried they're about to serve us some yellowed version like all the other recent French disasters. I wanna see the receipts before I pick this up again!

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therewillbeblus
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Re: 421 Pierrot le fou

#348 Post by therewillbeblus » Wed Jul 15, 2020 12:44 pm

domino harvey wrote:
Wed Jul 15, 2020 12:39 pm
I am more worried they're about to serve us some yellowed version like all the other recent French disasters. I wanna see the receipts before I pick this up again!
Yeah I'm skeptical too, luckily there's no rush to pre-order and the side-by-side comparison will be easy

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Re: 421 Pierrot le fou

#349 Post by mfunk9786 » Wed Jul 15, 2020 12:46 pm

Are any of the features new?

When I saw this and Parasite this month I thought UHD had arrived, now I'm just scratching my head.

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domino harvey
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Re: 421 Pierrot le fou

#350 Post by domino harvey » Wed Jul 15, 2020 12:46 pm

Nope, they're identical

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