Image of the day, 3/9/11

No Comments

• Jaime says:

  March 9, 2011 at 6:11 pm

  Glenn, your second mas­ter­piece in as many posts, although between LA NUIT DU CARREFOUR and CERTIFIED COPY, it’s hard to decide which film is mad­der. Love them both.
  Not unre­lated, I just saw Hitchcock’s NUMBER 17 the oth­er day, and was unpre­pared for how good it was – not in the carefully-orchestrated, every-nail-cleanly-driven-into-place man­ner of canon­ic­al Hitch, but – in the same gen­er­al neigh­bor­hood of Renoir’s film (or the same bor­ough, any­way) – its dream­like power, which is enhanced rather than mit­ig­ated by what looks to be shoddy con­struc­tion and jour­ney­man tech­nic­al prowess. And it’s just nuts.

• haice says:

  March 9, 2011 at 6:34 pm

  This Renoir film is one hell of a wet dream on so many levels. Granted Becker lost a reel—but those were the days when film nar­rat­ive leaped about in vapors and the con­nect­ive tis­sue did­n’t mean a damn. Today it’s all con­nect­ive tis­sue and most films are boring.
  I love that scene where Maigret fin­gers the inside of Else’s wall safe while she reclines seduct­ively on a sofa.

• Jaime says:

  March 9, 2011 at 6:58 pm

  I’m giv­en to under­stand the “lost reel” busi­ness may be greatly exaggerated.

• haice says:

  March 9, 2011 at 7:26 pm

  @Jaime, I would­n’t be sur­prised if it were an exaggeration.
  In some places Jean Mitry is hin­ted as the guilty party.
  But I do find it rather adds to the mys­tique of this strange magic­al film.

• david hare says:

  March 9, 2011 at 8:10 pm

  Bazin ascribes the miss­ing reel to Mitry. Frankly I don’t think it makes an iota of dif­fer­ence to the film if a reel were miss­ing or not. It defines its own perfection.

• edo says:

  March 9, 2011 at 8:51 pm

  Is there a legit release of this on DVD? Been want­ing to see it for years…

• jwarthen says:

  March 9, 2011 at 8:55 pm

  The secret soci­ety of devotees who cel­eb­rate this Renoir need to share their access-secret: how does someone in the hin­ter­lands arrange to see LA NUIT.…?

• Glenn Kenny says:

  March 9, 2011 at 10:24 pm

  @ Edo and jwharthen: A semi-legit release, at least—mine is a reas­on­ably pro­fes­sion­al qual­ity DVD‑R (the screen cap above it from it)—that I ordered off of Movies Unlimited, not exactly a fly-by-night out­fit. At pop­u­lar price, even; check it out:
  http://shop.tcm.com/product.asp?sku=D12211

• nrh says:

  March 9, 2011 at 11:00 pm

  Simenon has a pretty fas­cin­at­ing adapt­a­tion his­tory. Renoir, Chabrol, Bela Tarr, Marcel Carne, Serge Gainsbourg…

• david hare says:

  March 10, 2011 at 5:50 pm

  And Duvivier whose amaz­ing la Tete d’un Homme was released with­in a month of the Renoir in 1932.
  Glenn the disc you and oth­ers bought was in fact “stolen” from a cer­tain file­share site where it was free, if only to the mem­bers of course. My prob­lem with the people who nabbed it was apart from a good qual­ity pvr feed to Video.TS they also nabbed some heavy duty labor of love on cus­tom English subs. The same people also nabbed a cus­tom subbed ver­sion of Sirk’s Zu Neuen Ufern from the same place, and no doubt they’ll strike again.
  This stuff is a real horn of a dilemma. They have the file­share people over a bar­rel in a leg­ally gray area, but they are able to exploit the efforts of those people to make a profit for them­selves when that was nev­er the inten­tion of the ori­gin­al suppliers.
  Whatever!