I just saw ...And the Pursuit of Happiness, Malle's last documentary. Malle had made a documentary about Americans (God's country), in the heart of America, now his focus is on the immigrants. The _style_ is different from his other documentaries because Malle moves quicker from one location to another, and cuts faster. You don't get to know the people as well but you do get a better overview. I really enjoyed this documentary. Malle is a good interviewer and has a good eye for a story. I thought it was hilarious that a teacher at an English class would teach them about hamburgers and money. Like that was the most important thing in America. I went to a language class to learn Norwegian when I moved to Norway and here we learned about social issues. I don't remember ever reading about fast food in our text book, or about money

Thanks.  It's possible what I'm writing here is more for myself than anyone else. Am intrigued, inspired by Malle's simplicity and his manipulation of craft. Writing about it helps me come to grips with what he does. A brilliant movie: LOCOMBE, LUCIEN. History viewed in a grand sweep, as epic, bypasses the complexities of human nature that mold specific, individual actions. To generalize complex experience helps us understand certain things, broad as the generalization may be, about the past and ourselves. Hence, the good guy, bad guy formula - life as melodrama - fulfills its artistic function. It appeals to our need for order in the universe; it satisfies our sense of right and wrong, and can momentarily soothe a persistent fear that, from time immemorial, it's all really been up for grabs. Even before the United States entered the war in Europe, the National Socialist agenda was a controversial bit of business. After the war, our worst fears were made flesh; what was controversial in the thirties emerged as totally evil in the forties. Even now, almost eighty years later, the Nazi insignia represents, for most of us (but sadly not all) a violent, aggressive, racist icon, a symbol of evil so inclusive the sight of it holds a distinct and conclusive backstory. History has designated, without equivocation, the Nazis as bad guys. The distinction between the Nazis and the rest of the world is a black and white deal. Period. Search for an area of grey at your own peril. And yet, that's exactly what Malle has done in LACOMBE, LUCIEN. This film is nothing but grey. Malle's _title_ character confounds our customary notions of good and bad: Lucien does both, is both. We view this boy from many angles and, doing so, his essential humanity, even when his actions horrify us, disarm our expectations. Malle is curious, not dogmatic. His even handed generosity toward Lucien gives us a way of seeing the character that illuminates, among other things, many unfathomable facts about the war, the success of National Socialism, and it's ultimate downfall. Malle's approach is anti-epic, or if you will, naturalistic. The point of view is narrow, but the story Malle's telling looms large, telling us more about the nature of evil than just about any other film I know. We closely follow Lucien and therefore understand him; the nature of evil comes dissected, not broadly drawn, nor in any way predetermined. Indeed, bad guys roam throughout this movie, but Lucien - poised between his experience as a hunter in the country and his role of enforcer in town - is not one of them. He is a boy, a skillful hunter, not particularly well schooled, who becomes a man during a parlous, corrupt time. Political belief is not really an issue, for Lucien could give a shit about politics or the conditions imposed by the occupation. The film makes clear he escapes from a confusing home situation and a dead end job mopping floors, emptying bedpans in a hospital. The resistance doesn't want him, and his introduction to this group of National Socialist is a mere coincidence. To us, the world he enters appears lurid, tawdry, unscrupulous, but that's not the way an unsophisticated country boy sees it. His desire to be more than a janitor, make money, and fulfill an idea of manhood drives him; his presence and skill as Nazi muscle validates a sense of self worth the boy has never before known. Lucien would tell us that he's done nothing wrong. The film's major accomplishment is in how it invites us to understand this point of view. Nick Date: Sat, 19 Sep 2009 10:23:02 +0200 Subject: Re: More Malle. From: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it To: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it That's what I've tried to do here. And a great job you did too! I really enjoyed reading this and agree with you whole heatedly. Thorkell On Sat, Sep 19, 2009 at 6:09 AM, Nick Faust < This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it wrote: Along with the global friendships it creates, the film club gives structure to my viewing habits.  Training my usual chaotic viewing habits with a specific focus on a single director over a period of time does not limit my experience or my enjoyment, it broadens it. It makes me think directly about Film as language, even more so than Film as story; a language employed and coded with the same kind of grammar and form as the written word. Image juxtaposed against image communicates to us in the same way a sentence, with a subject, verb, and predicate, communicates. I learned this first hand when I first tried to edit my own film projects. Just like the process I go through writing a sentence like this, if, looking over my footage, my thoughts were not clear, the sequence before me would not make sense, even in a rough cut. I quickly learned that each shot in a sequence was like a word applied in a sentence; the progression of shots communicated an action or a thought; the sequence itself was like a short film that had to first stand alone in simple clarity before it could fulfill its function within the over all film. Lately, much of the film criticism I read (and to some extent, film biography) hinges on a more peripheral understanding of the form that seem to bypass, or misses altogether, the purely visual implications that exist outside the words spoken in dialogue or the story forms that we refer to as genres. There are only a few critics writing today that have an ingrown sense of this very important part of film making. Ebert is one, Joe Morgenstern is another. Peter Travers and Andrew Sarris each have their moments. Robin Woods, who is getting up there in years and has pretty much turned his back on film criticism, inevitably deconstructed the purely visual information in a film with an extraordinary insight and skill.  In a roundabout way, these thoughts about image, editing, and film grammar form a prelude to a few new thoughts about Louis Malle.   Over the last few days I've had the pleasure of watching ATLANTIC CITY, LACOMBE, LUCIEN, and AU REVIOR LES ENFANTS again. Thorkell's appreciation of the films, and our back and forth about them, put me in the mood to look even more closely. Malle's invisible use of film craft fascinates me. Susan Sarandon's business with the lemons, and later when she opens her shirt to Burt Lancaster, would alone recommend ATLANTIC CITY. Am convinced we are seeing Sarandon the way Malle saw her: they were in fact a couple at the time the film was made. In that regard, it's interesting to consider how the camera _frame_s her breasts. We don't see the character from the waist up, so a full view is denied us. What we do see, from the Lancaster character's point of view, is not an act of cinematic voyeurism, but rather (because the view is not total) an _expression_ of natural beauty. That we see Sarandon's breasts filtered through the eyes of the director, to express something essential about the Lancaster character, strikes me as a personal, vividly displayed visual non-sequitur that tells us without words or dialogue all we need to know about the Lancaster character and the crumbling, corrupt world of the film. When you think about it, the film opens with Lancaster secretly peeking at the woman across the way; as the film progresses, the distance between them eventually disappears and Lancaster is invited to actually touch the _object_ of his desire, and make love to the woman of his dreams. With simple clarity and true elegance, the film's dramatic progression can be defined by the way we see Sarandon's breasts, and in the emotional stake her nakedness represents to the Lancaster character.   But let's back up a little bit. The first thing we see in the film are the lemons.  We see them not from Lancaster's view, but in a close-up that I assume represents Sarandon's point of view.  Is Malle merely showing us the lemons so we know what is Sarandon is doing?  Or is there something else being expressed? Later in the film, after the old man and young woman end up together, Lancaster admits he watches her. Sarandon is not offended or taken aback; she in fact admits that she knows he watches her. He asks her about the lemons. She tells him she uses lemon juice to kill the fish smell from work. She then asks him: what do you do when you watch me?  And at this point, she offers herself to him. Lancaster's big, old hands removes her shirt off her shoulders and slowly touches her skin. A sublime, charged moment that, interestingly enough, stays in a single point of view shot. There's never a cut to Lancaster's reaction; we see what he sees and that's enough. What's happening there comes fully across in the way Sarandon approaches the old man and in the way she reacts to his touch. Malle knows that we don't need to see Lancaster's face to know what he's thinking or feeling. The dialogue in the above mentioned sequence tells us something:  the juxtaposition of images in the first five minutes of the movie represents not only Lancaster's point of view, but also Sarandon's. At the very top of the film, Malle's delicate application of film craft sets up just about all the thematic (and poetic) issues that will come into play as the story unfolds. Indeed, the lemon could be a _meta_phor for the city itself, and a visual _link_ that foreshadows the action that follows. We learn, for instance, that the young woman's choice of men does not reflect well upon her powers of judgement. We also learn that the opening bit of montage, centered around the lemon, sets up the fateful meeting between Lancaster and Sarandon; that their chance meeting is not strictly coincidence, but has been predetermined; and each lives in a hermetically sealed world of flagging hopes and dreams. (His nickname is Numb-nuts and she desperately needs to bathe the smell of fish from her skin.) The fact that the film opens on the lemons tells us that ATLANTIC CITY is as much a story about Sarandon as it is about Lancaster. It gives weight to what follows.
... read more »

Thanks.  It's possible what I'm writing here is more for myself than anyone else. Am intrigued, inspired by Malle's simplicity and his manipulation of craft. Writing about it helps me come to grips with what he does. A brilliant movie: LOCOMBE, LUCIEN. History viewed in a grand sweep, as epic, bypasses the complexities of human nature that mold specific, individual actions. To generalize complex experience helps us understand certain things, broad as the generalization may be, about the past and ourselves. Hence, the good guy, bad guy formula - life as melodrama - fulfills its artistic function. It appeals to our need for order in the universe; it satisfies our sense of right and wrong, and can momentarily soothe a persistent fear that, from time immemorial, it's all really been up for grabs. Even before the United States entered the war in Europe, the National Socialist agenda was a controversial bit of business. After the war, our worst fears were made flesh; what was controversial in the thirties emerged as totally evil in the forties. Even now, almost eighty years later, the Nazi insignia represents, for most of us (but sadly not all) a violent, aggressive, racist icon, a symbol of evil so inclusive the sight of it holds a distinct and conclusive backstory. History has designated, without equivocation, the Nazis as bad guys. The distinction between the Nazis and the rest of the world is a black and white deal. Period. Search for an area of grey at your own peril. And yet, that's exactly what Malle has done in LACOMBE, LUCIEN. This film is nothing but grey. Malle's _title_ character confounds our customary notions of good and bad: Lucien does both, is both. We view this boy from many angles and, doing so, his essential humanity, even when his actions horrify us, disarm our expectations. Malle is curious, not dogmatic. His even handed generosity toward Lucien gives us a way of seeing the character that illuminates, among other things, many unfathomable facts about the war, the success of National Socialism, and it's ultimate downfall. Malle's approach is anti-epic, or if you will, naturalistic. The point of view is narrow, but the story Malle's telling looms large, telling us more about the nature of evil than just about any other film I know. We closely follow Lucien and therefore understand him; the nature of evil comes dissected, not broadly drawn, nor in any way predetermined. Indeed, bad guys roam throughout this movie, but Lucien - poised between his experience as a hunter in the country and his role of enforcer in town - is not one of them. He is a boy, a skillful hunter, not particularly well schooled, who becomes a man during a parlous, corrupt time. Political belief is not really an issue, for Lucien could give a shit about politics or the conditions imposed by the occupation. The film makes clear he escapes from a confusing home situation and a dead end job mopping floors, emptying bedpans in a hospital. The resistance doesn't want him, and his introduction to this group of National Socialist is a mere coincidence. To us, the world he enters appears lurid, tawdry, unscrupulous, but that's not the way an unsophisticated country boy sees it. His desire to be more than a janitor, make money, and fulfill an idea of manhood drives him; his presence and skill as Nazi muscle validates a sense of self worth the boy has never before known. Lucien would tell us that he's done nothing wrong. The film's major accomplishment is in how it invites us to understand this point of view. Nick ________________________________ Date: Sat, 19 Sep 2009 10:23:02 +0200 Subject: Re: More Malle. From: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it To: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it That's what I've tried to do here. And a great job you did too! I really enjoyed reading this and agree with you whole heatedly. Thorkell On Sat, Sep 19, 2009 at 6:09 AM, Nick Faust < This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it wrote: Along with the global friendships it creates, the film club gives structure to my viewing habits.  Training my usual chaotic viewing habits with a specific focus on a single director over a period of time does not limit my experience or my enjoyment, it broadens it. It makes me think directly about Film as language, even more so than Film as story; a language employed and coded with the same kind of grammar and form as the written word. Image juxtaposed against image communicates to us in the same way a sentence, with a subject, verb, and predicate, communicates. I learned this first hand when I first tried to edit my own film projects. Just like the process I go through writing a sentence like this, if, looking over my footage, my thoughts were not clear, the sequence before me would not make sense, even in a rough cut. I quickly learned that each shot in a sequence was like a word applied in a sentence; the progression of shots communicated an action or a thought; the sequence itself was like a short film that had to first stand alone in simple clarity before it could fulfill its function within the over all film. Lately, much of the film criticism I read (and to some extent, film biography) hinges on a more peripheral understanding of the form that seem to bypass, or misses altogether, the purely visual implications that exist outside the words spoken in dialogue or the story forms that we refer to as genres. There are only a few critics writing today that have an ingrown sense of this very important part of film making. Ebert is one, Joe Morgenstern is another. Peter Travers and Andrew Sarris each have their moments. Robin Woods, who is getting up there in years and has pretty much turned his back on film criticism, inevitably deconstructed the purely visual information in a film with an extraordinary insight and skill. In a roundabout way, these thoughts about image, editing, and film grammar form a prelude to a few new thoughts about Louis Malle. Over the last few days I've had the pleasure of watching ATLANTIC CITY, LACOMBE, LUCIEN, and AU REVIOR LES ENFANTS again. Thorkell's appreciation of the films, and our back and forth about them, put me in the mood to look even more closely. Malle's invisible use of film craft fascinates me. Susan Sarandon's business with the lemons, and later when she opens her shirt to Burt Lancaster, would alone recommend ATLANTIC CITY. Am convinced we are seeing Sarandon the way Malle saw her: they were in fact a couple at the time the film was made. In that regard, it's interesting to consider how the camera _frame_s her breasts. We don't see the character from the waist up, so a full view is denied us. What we do see, from the Lancaster character's point of view, is not an act of cinematic voyeurism, but rather (because the view is not total) an _expression_ of natural beauty. That we see Sarandon's breasts filtered through the eyes of the director, to express something essential about the Lancaster character, strikes me as a personal, vividly displayed visual non-sequitur that tells us without words or dialogue all we need to know about the Lancaster character and the crumbling, corrupt world of the film. When you think about it, the film opens with Lancaster secretly peeking at the woman across the way; as the film progresses, the distance between them eventually disappears and Lancaster is invited to actually touch the _object_ of his desire, and make love to the woman of his dreams. With simple clarity and true elegance, the film's dramatic progression can be defined by the way we see Sarandon's breasts, and in the emotional stake her nakedness represents to the Lancaster character. But let's back up a little bit. The first thing we see in the film are the lemons.  We see them not from Lancaster's view, but in a close-up that I assume represents Sarandon's point of view.  Is Malle merely showing us the lemons so we know what is Sarandon is doing?  Or is there something else being expressed? Later in the film, after the old man and young woman end up together, Lancaster admits he watches her. Sarandon is not offended or taken aback; she in fact admits that she knows he watches her. He asks her about the lemons. She tells him she uses lemon juice to kill the fish smell from work. She then asks him: what do you do when you watch me?  And at this point, she offers herself to him. Lancaster's big, old hands removes her shirt off her shoulders and slowly touches her skin. A sublime, charged moment that, interestingly enough, stays in a single point of view shot. There's never a cut to Lancaster's reaction; we see what he sees and that's enough. What's happening there comes fully across in the way Sarandon approaches the old man and in the way she reacts to his touch. Malle knows that we don't need to see Lancaster's face to know what he's thinking or feeling. The dialogue in the above mentioned sequence tells us something:  the juxtaposition of images in the first five minutes of the movie represents not only Lancaster's point of view, but also Sarandon's. At the very top of the film, Malle's delicate application of film craft sets up just about all the thematic (and poetic) issues
... read more »