Noticias

Above: Polish poster for The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, Italy/Algeria, 1965). Designer: Jerzy Flisak.As the 55th New York Film Festival winds down this weekend, I thought I’d look back half a century at the films of the 5th edition. That 1967 festival, programmed by Amos Vogel, Richard Roud, Arthur Knight, Andrew Sarris and Susan Sontag, featured 21 new films, all but three of which were from Europe (six of them from France, 2 and 1/7 of them directed by Godard), all of which showed at Lincoln Center’s Philharmonic Hall. (They also programmed Gance’s Napoleon, Mamoulian’s Applause and King Vidor’s Show People in the retrospective slots). The only director to have a film in both the 1967 festival and the 2017 edition is Agnès Varda, who was one of the directors of the omnibus Far From Vietnam and was then already 12 years into her filmmaking career.It will come as...

Former army documentary cameraman worked on Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless [pictured].

Legendary French cinematographer Raoul Coutard who worked with Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Pierre Schoendorffer, Jacques Demy and Costa-Gavras has died aged 92.

Coutard worked on more than 80 features in a career spanning from 1958 to 2001 but is best known for his work with New Wave pioneers Godard and Truffaut.

He got his big break working with Jean-Luc Godard on 1960 classic Breathless, which was credited with reinventing cinema at the time for its stripped-down, fast-paced aesthetic.

Godard — who wanted to shoot the film as much as possible with a handheld camera and natural lighting — had partly hired Coutard for his background as a documentary cameraman for the French army.

Coutard spent five years working with the army’s press service, mainly in French Indochina (today Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia) in the late 1940s and early 50s.

Prior to that, he worked in a Paris photography lab, having dropped...

Rushes collects news, articles, images, videos and more for a weekly roundup of essential items from the world of film.NEWSLiam Neeson in Martin Scorsese's SilenceWe're still waiting for Martin Scorsese's new film set in 17th century Japan, Silence (an adaptation of the same book Masahiro Shinoda's 1971 film is based on), but things may be moving quickly for his next project, the long-in-gestation The Irishman, set to star Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and Joe Pesci. We'll believe it when we see it, but we sure want to see it!Cannes begins! If this week's Rushes seems a bit threadbare, it's because we've arrive at the Cannes Film Festival and can't think of anything else. Stay tuned on the Notebook for our festival coverage.Recommended VIEWINGOur very favorite video essayist, Tag Gallagher, has made a new one for Sight & Sound on Raoul Walsh's classic noir western,...

I started writing this piece a little over two years ago when, wondering if this was a debate whose terms I wanted to propagate, I thought twice. After the recent Godard retro in New York, however, thinking thrice, I've decided not to think about it again. With very special thanks to Sam Engel, Matthew Flanagan, Danny Kasman, Andy Rector, Gina Telaroli, who provided so much of the source code for this piece. There's no greater fount of wisdom in the world for a guy to plagiarize.

And so:

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“Pauvres choses! Elles n’ont que le nom qu’on leur impose.”

“Poor things! They have nothing but the name imposed upon them.” — Film Socialisme

“You can stick your little pins in that voodoo doll.

Very sorry baby, doesn’t look like me at all.” — Leonard Cohen, “Tower of Song”

"Three Jewish characters, it's a lot for a single film. The fourth...

I'm always happy to hear news about an old classic coming back to theatres for one reason or another, and this year it looks like Jean-Luc Godard's first feature-length film Breathless is going to get a theatrical re-release in celebration of the film's 50th anniversary. According to Variety [1], Rialto Pictures has put together a newly restored version of the 1960 film that will debut at the first ever TCM Classic Film Festival [2] in Hollywood next month. A "national rollout" will follow in May, although the exact number of screens has yet to be specified. Breathless was one of the key films from the French New Wave, and was pretty controversial upon its initial release. The movie stars Jean-Paul Belmondo as a young man who steals a car and kills a policeman, then convinces his girlfriend to help him hide from the authorities. Rialto also picked up the U.S. theatrical...

New Wave legend Jean-Luc Godard is still going strong at the ripe old age of 78 and, judging by rumours linking him to a big screen adaptation of a bestselling Holocaust memoir, has no plans to stop his auteuring magic any time soon.Word is that Godard was taken by 'The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million', an account by NY Times writer Daniel Mendelsohn of his attempt to find out what happened to his Polish ancestors during the Holocaust. The French/Swiss filmmaker will turn his attention to The Lost when he wraps up current project Socialisme.Always a political filmmaker, Godard has never been afraid to tackle the tough stuff and his 2004 feature Notre Musique touches on similar themes - collective guilt and conflict - as does his anti-war pic Les Carabiniers (1963). Alphaville is about a futuristic city controlled by a giant computer, but it's very good...