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THIS IS THE STORY OF HOW ANNA KARINA & JEAN-LUC GODARD FIRST “GOT TOGETHER”
Anna Karina: That happened while we were shooting the picture in Geneva. It was a strange love story from the beginning. I could see Jean-Luc was looking at me all the time, and I was looking at him too, all day long. We were like animals. One night we were at this dinner in Lausanne. My boyfriend, who was a painter, was there too. And suddenly I felt something under the table – it was Jean-Luc’s hand. He gave me a piece of paper and then left to drive back to Geneva. I went into another room to see what he’d written. It said, “I love you. Rendezvous at midnight at the Café de la Prez.” And then my boyfriend came into the room and demanded to see the piece of paper, and he took my arm and grabbed it and read it. He said, “You’re not going.” And I said, “I am.” And he said, “But you can’t do this to me.” I said, “But I’m in love too, so I’m going.” But he still didn’t believe me. We drove back to Geneva and I started to pack my tiny suitcase. He said, “Tell me you’re not going.” And I said, “I’ve been in love with him since I saw him the second time. And I can’t do anything about it.” It was like something electric. I walked there, and I remember my painter was running after me crying. I was, like, hypnotized – it never happened again to me in my life.
So I get to the Cafe de la Prez, and Jean-Luc was sitting there reading a paper, but I don’t think he was really reading it. I just stood there in front of him for what seemed like an hour but I guess was not more than thirty seconds. Suddenly he stopped reading and said,” Here you are. Shall we go?” So we went to his hotel. The next morning when I woke up he wasn’t there. I got very worried. I took a shower, and then he came back about an hour later with the dress I wore in the film - the white dress with flowers. And it was my size, perfect. It was like my wedding dress.
We carried on shooting the film, and, of course, my painter left. When the picture was finished, I went back to Paris with Jean-Luc, Michel Subor, who was the main actor, and Laszlo Szabo, who was also in the film, in Jean-Luc’s American car. We were all wearing dark glasses and we got stopped at the border – I guess they thought we were gangsters. When we arrived in Paris, Jean-Luc dropped the other two off and said to me, “Where are you going?” I said, “I have to stay with you. You’re the only person I have in the world now.” And he said, “Oh my God.”
Extract taken from an interview with Anna Karina conducted by Graham Fuller in Projections 13: Women Film-makers on Film-making, edited by Isabella Weibrecht, John Boorman and Walter Donohue (Faber & Faber, 2004)
(via Focus Features)
“When we understand each other, love ends. So in a sense, yes, love is the result of a misunderstanding. When we don’t understand someone, we fall in love with them. When we realize that individual’s truth, we say they weren’t who we thought. So love is nothing but an illusion. Fortunately we have this capacity, otherwise there’d only be one original, and everyone would fall in love with him or her.”
Abbas Kiarostami, explaining his interpretation of CERTIFIED COPY.
You can find this quote along with a mess of other fun soundbites in the 15-minute Kiarostami interview that’s included as a supplement on Criterion’s Certified Copy dvd / blu-ray, which hits stores tomorrow. spoiler alert: the man rocks his dark sunglasses across the entire disc, even at night.
Update: Criterion posted a video clip of Kiarostami saying this stuff.
“
For me, making films and not making films are not two different ways of life. Filming should be a part of living, something normal and natural…
Whoever one films is growing older and will die. So one is filming a moment of death at work. Painting is static: The cinema is interesting because it seizes life and the mortal side of life.
”“I think in the whole world things are going very badly. People are becoming more materialist and cruel … Cruel by laziness, by indifference, egotism, because they only think about themselves and not at all about what is happening around them, so they let everything grow ugly and stupid. They are all interested in money only. Money is becoming their God. God doesn’t exist for many. Money is becoming something you must live for. You know, even your astronauts, the first one who put his foot on the moon, said that when he first saw our earth, he said it was something so miraculous, so marvelous, don’t spoil it, don’t touch it. More deeply I feel the rotten way they are spoiling the earth. All the countries. Silence doesn’t exist anymore; you can’t find it. That, for me, would make it impossible to live.”
Robert Bresson
and so i have 75 hours to churn out a 15-page paper on the limits of human understanding as they’re illustrated in Au Hasard Balthazar.
pray for mojo.
“
Dramatic stories should be thrown out. They have nothing whatsoever to do with cinema.
It seems to me that when one tries to do something dramatic with film, one is like a man who tries to hammer with a saw. Film would have been marvelous if there hadn’t been dramatic art to get in the way.
Robert Bresson.
(excerpted from “The Question: Interview with Robert Bresson by Jean-Luc Godard and Michael Delahaye,” Cashiers du Cinéma in English, No. 8 p.12).
“To be or not to be. That’s not really a question.”
Jean-Luc Godard.
and the week begins.
i got yelled at by the woman next to me because i was watching Contempt on the subway, and — leering over me — she accused me of watching porn the moment she saw bardot’s ass. and i was like, “listen lady, it’s just a butt. and second of all, when was the last time you saw porn in cinemascope?” i was hoping for an actual answer, but she just sort of shuffled off. the end.
“My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected on to a screen, come to life again like flowers in water.”
Robert Bresson
whenever i’m beginning production on a new piece of nonsense, i do my best to ensure that i’ve got some Bresson fresh in my mind. no one (and i mean no one) was more concise with his camera — Bresson’s shots are at once impossibly dense but also barely there. Watching A Man Escaped, which is likely going to be released by Criterion at some point in the next year, makes the cinema seem capable of absolutely anything.
“I really think films started going bad around 1942.”
Whit Stillman. Duh.
while i can’t say that i necessarily agree with mr. Stillman’s take on things, i can say with some certainty that i’m excited for DAMSELS IN DISTRESS tomorrow (midnight screenings!? i’m cos-playing as greta gerwig!). i mean… if you’re gonna take 14 years between features, you damn well better make the sony pictures classic logo pink when you return.
the quote up top comes from a really great BlackBook Magazine interview with Stillman. they also have a Tumblr, which you can find here.
“…David Lean’s BRIEF ENCOUNTER with its streams of tears and its amorously awkward couple — the least sensual and most sentimental film ever wept over. Some people even weep thinking about it — inexhaustible tears from English crocodiles!”
Francois Truffaut.
apparently, he did *not* care for Brief Encounter.
Brief Encounter (and the other three films David Lean directed from Noel Coward scripts) are included in Criterion’s wonderful new David Lean Directs Noel Coward box set. my review.
“As if Japan weren’t small enough to begin with, I fail to understand why it is necessary to think of it in even smaller units. No matter where I go in the world, although I can’t speak any foreign language, I don’t feel out of place. I think of the earth as my home. If everyone thought this way, people might notice how foolish international friction is, and they would put an end to it. We are, after all, at a point where it is almost narrow-minded to think merely in geocentric terms. Human beings have launched satellites into outer space, and yet they still grovel on earth looking at their own feet like wild dogs. What is to become of our planet?”
- Akira Kurosawa
