It’s that light-bulb again.
(Warning — contains the human body.)
Just wanted to share this opening sequence with you.
Jules Dassin and Marguerite Duras’ 10.30PM SUMMER is available to rent or buy in the U.S. It contains passages of incredible Pure Cinema and the whole thing is pitched at a level too shrill and hysterical even to be called Camp. It’s just Something Else.
Apart from the heightened looniness of Melina Mercouri’s diva performance, there’s a sense that the film looks both back to the intensity of silent cinema melodrama and forward to the more delirious aspects of ’60s art-house. There’s a night drive through narrow streets, lit only by car headlights, that directly prefigures Terence Stamp’s Ferrari jaunt in Fellini’s episode of SPIRITS OF THE DEAD. Almost identical! And there’s the rather surprising nudity and sexual frankness. And this wild opening, which has Giallo tendencies, plus that mysterious symphony of sounds. Watch it, then watch it again with your eyes closed. I mean, LISTEN to it.
The editing is superb, even when it goes into paroxysms of anti-continuity to control the amount of Nudity Level. I love the three quick shots of thunderous sky which make the heavens alive and menacing.
And Gabor Pogany’s lighting is something I can only describe using beatnik parlance (dons beret): he “blows my mind,” “flips my lid,” is “real gone,” etc.
February 20, 2008 at 12:09 pm
Cor, that looks good. It looks like a cross between Amarcord and Rashomon.
February 20, 2008 at 5:38 pm
That’s pretty bang-on! There’s a vague hint of Mario Bava and Borzage’s Moonrise and maybe the shade of Ken Russell to come.
It all comes from a blacklisted US director with a background in classic noir pitching up in Europe and attempting to make art films with literary sources/collaborators and bringing a kind of American overstatement to bear on it all.
Despite the wild and trippy sound design it also has something of silent cinema about it, and it’s v. operatic too. And bits of it even feel like Tony Scott, only not shit.
February 20, 2008 at 6:57 pm
Lovely wacko 60’s stuff but not at all like what Duras herself would get into later on.
February 20, 2008 at 8:13 pm
Yes, it’s a peculiar meeting of minds. I can imagine the script being entirely different if somebody else directed it. The film is mostly wordless and quite hyper-intense and ecstatic.