Un Homme (a Man)
Une Femme (a woman)
Une Femme (a woman)
Indeed, everyone wants to fall in love with cinema as much as everyone wants to fall in love with Claude Lelouch Un Homme et Une Femme. It is a rare case of paranoia, when, after watching Un Homme, i wanted to laugh all night because it is a sort of movie that i would not just give in to. I sense a displacement in all sorts of romance, because i believe, and thoroughly believe that romance is quite idealize and often results to false comfort. Another thing is, not everyone, not even you my dear reader, can afford to fall in love in a Shakespearean or Baudelairean sense. Charles Baudelaire's famous words:
"There is an invincible taste for prostitution in the heart of man, from which comes his horror of solitude. He wants to be 'two'. The man of genius wants to be 'one'... It is this horror of solitude, the need to lose oneself in the external flesh, that man nobly calls 'the need to love'."reflect a sort of avaricious and capricious form of love, which smells like a faint fart from a dog. Claude Lelouch presented a Shakespearean-Baudelairean love, the 'one' becoming a 'two', and he created one of the most amazing piece of film making yet the most excruciating form.
In cinema, there are three types of audiences:
(1) Technical/'Objective' - an audience who exemplifies somewhat a similar role as that of a scholar whose only reason for believing in cinema is its form.
(2) Impressionistic/Emotional - a type of audience whose judgments are based on what one feels about a particular filmic/cinematic effects.
(3) Non-Impressionistic-Non-Technical - A sort of audience who watch a film just for the sake of it.
Certainly, these categories prompt a certain genre of films to watch i.e. technical audiences usually watch art films. However, it should not be taken that this invented list may arise to a stratification of each. It should not be taken that each one exist in isolation with the other. An audience may comprise both Technical and Impressionistic type and even the third category, it highly depends on the concentration of his interest.
A complete and ideal audience should, i think, accommodate all the three modes of reception. What one makes an ideal audience is his immersion in cinema, of its rich history, of its evolution, of its social and economic influence. An ideal audience must possess a sheer amount of objectivity, and must transcends this objectivity by delving into the unknown i.e. to question the cosmic effect of an spiritual film, or to ask how such a film can generate a movement like any other art, whether political or social in nature.
Cinema is gifted with publicity that it becomes a constitution of the contemporary society and the contemporary human being like you and me.
Claude Lelouch's Un Homme caters to all types of audiences. Its constitution and formation comes from a very simple narrative, but its effects is transformational, unique and raw. Spontaneity, whatever it means, and the effect of spontaneity defines Un Homme. It is a sort of film that requires a belief in flux, or how things change, and a belief in destiny, or how things will come. This belief system is central to the undestanding of Un Homme, and with this framework the rest follows.
Un Homme reminds me of Wong Kar-Wai's Happy Together (1997), maybe because it uses the same technique: the coloration-discoloration method. However, i derive this analogy because the two of them comes from the Cinema of Feeling. A cinema whose filmic effect and style trancends normative filmmaking, and the primary function of its stylistic bravura is to define and transform the six basic emotions of a human being. The transformation is usually complex. In Un Homme, the transformation is as complex as that of Wong Kar-Wai. We suddenly feel this uncertainty. A smile does not directly indicate happiness, it often asks a question, what sort of happiness does it mean?
When Un Homme won Grand Prix (equivalent of Palme d' Or) in Cannes FF 1966 it welcomes France to the world.
Claude Lelouch shares his creative process
in making films.
From Beet TV:
"He has little use for the Internet as a means of discovery, preferring to witness life first-hand. He travels widely by himself with a small tape recorder to tape his thoughts. " (link)
Ciao!
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