The film’s austerity in camerawork, narration, pacing, and use of irises in and out hearken back to earlier, simpler modes of moviemaking, and indeed, of life. Clef. Livre. Ciseaux. The ordinary tools of an extraordinary filmmaker.
Truffaut—who directs and stars as Dr. Itard—dedicated L’ENFANT SAUVAGE (1969) to Jean-Perre Léaud, his very own wild child.
Patrick McGoohan as “Red.” He played “Number 6″ in The Prisoner.
And a baby Sean Connery, who played 007, of course.
= The number 13 truck in HELL DRIVERS (1957), which did incidentally bring a lot of bad luck.
And who’s this? A young David McCallum, of course. Whew!
Death by nitrate fire is too good a one for Hitler, methinks. Here, the projectionist eyes the funeral pyre behind the screen—one lit cigarette and whoosh!
How could I not love that Quentin got almost everything right about the film screening scenes in INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS (2009): from an omniscient narrator stepping in to explain the special qualities of a nitrate fire, to depicting the bell, the mark, the douser lever of a perfect reel changeover. So what didn’t he get right? The insurgent’s reel (#4) went straight from the shipping case (above) onto the projector. Not to get into technicalities, but that probably wouldn’t have happened. Oh, yeah, and each reel does NOT get its own shipping case, as is suggested above. Yes, I may be as geeky as Q.T.
Filmmaker Britta Sjogren was present at this screening of JO-JO AT THE GATE OF LIONS (1992), the culmination of the “Into the Vortex: Female Voice in Film” series at PFA. She gave an interesting talk about the different ways voice operates in this and the other films in the series; how voice is “slippery” and difficult to pin down, both in its origin and purpose; and how voice-over, diegetic, and mediated voices blur point of view, position, boundary, and subjectivity. A disembodied, omniscient voice, from a woman without a larynx, is associated with the crone’s hands on Jo-Jo’s face, above.
The female protagonist in this film—and most of the others in the series—waits: for the “right” man, the “right” time, an answer, her close-up.
In the middle of the film, in a bid to keep myself awake, I nipped out of the theater to get a drink of water. And there was a dog. Blocking the aisle. Not a service dog. A white, frizzy little thing—its owner dragged it under the seat so I wouldn’t step on it. That was the most interesting part about watching WE ALL LOVED EACH OTHER SO MUCH (1974). Oh, okay, there was another interesting tidbit around which a subplot revolves: that de Sica made the actor who played little Bruno Ricci in Bicycle Thieves cry by planting cigarette butts in his pocket and then calling him a “ragpicker.” Otherwise, the little boy couldn’t eke out any tears.