François Jost

Comments

Last Year at Marienbad

The story of a man who thinks words are acts and that they can constrain reality. Don Juan perhaps.

Citizen Kane

The laboratory of narrative.

Le Mépris

The schematic beauty of the colours, the detached performances of the actors in contrast to the lyricism of the music make Le Mépris an obsessive story.

L' HOMME QUI MENT

An opera-film in which image, dialogue and sounds are conceived as the different parts of an orchestra.

Rashomon

A key film in the history of cinema for the way it deals with the question of point of view.

The Pillow Book

In this film, where handwriting is constantly superimposed on the actions shown, the piling up of images is close to the accumulation of layers of parchment, where flatness is only a fugitive illusion.

Calendar

How the apparent coldness of the photographic image and the documentary image, combined with the voice of a woman on an answering-machine, makes us feel the jealousy of a character absent from the image.

2046

Too blurry or too close, objects and actions are riddled with mystery. A film where every shot is a work of art.

Mulholland Dr.

The open work pushed to its limit

Un soir, un train

The beauty of magical realism.

Further remarks

I think I could have said the same thing about each of these ten films. They are films that suggest more than they show. Films that express strong feelings but without pathos. Films based on contrasts or contradictions between the different constituent parts of cinema: images, sounds, writing, music.