Christopher > Recent Status Updates

Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945): Even less recognizable as a Bresson film than his debut, but I’m fond of that witty Jean Cocteau-penned dialogue (the internal references of which become clearer on a rewatch).

Les Anges du péché (1943): Bresson is one of those auteurs whose first film is mediocre, and also so very maudlin. Still, Pipolo identifies some aspects that transcend the French tradition de la qualité and look ahead to Bresson’s mature style

Nothing like Camaj’s literary Northern Geg to make me feel like I don’t actually speak this language.

Have read the Introduction. Now looking forward to rewatching all thirteen of Bresson’s films in chronological order as I read through the rest of this book.

This summer’s Prishtina bookshop trawl.

I picked this up because I mistakenly thought it was the source of the story-within-the-story in Rivette’s Celine et Julie vont en bateau (because it’s a James novel with a child and sinister intrigue). In fact, that turns out to have come from James’ The Other House, but I’m already too deep into this one to give up.

Finally reached the end of the first short story in this collection; still in the phase where I have to look most words up in the dictionary. But this late twentieth-century literary Erzya is basically word-by-word translation of Russian idiom, more than any other language I know in the Volga region. Fela’s “Colonial Mentality” always playing in my head as I read it.

Κρ. ὦ πρέσβυ, πάντες ὥστε τοξόται σκοποῦ / τοξεύετ’ ἀνδρὸς τοῦδε, κοὐδὲ μαντικῆς / ἄπρακτος ὑμῖν εἰμι.