criterionforum.org

domino harvey wrote:Holy smokes, the shot of the couple in the tall grass looks like a VHS rip!

ellipsis7 wrote:2/. The French section caused huge controversy and its ban in France due to the illegal portrayal of actual characters on screen. As a result, wary Producers would ensure that Truffaut's treatment of a similar real life crime in his initial outline for BREATHLESS would not see the light of day till Godard got to make it in 1960...

In September, 1952, a man identified only as Monsieur I. brought a suit to demand that the French government seize a film then in production. The movie was called “Sans Amour” (“Without Love”), comprising three parts, all based on true stories, one of which was the notorious “affair of the J-3 of Melun,” a 1948 case in which a sixteen-year-old boy shot a classmate to death, ostensibly over a girl. Monsieur I. was the father of the girl, Nicole I. She had been convicted of complicity in the crime, but, because she was a minor, neither her name nor her “identity or personality” could legally be published. Monsieur I. accused the filmmaker, Michelangelo Antonioni, and his assistant director, Alain Cuny, of filming a story in which the girl would be identifiable.

The episode was shot and the three-part film was completed under the title “I Vinti” (“The Vanquished”). But Monsieur I. needn’t have worried: the French government soon took its own stringent measures against the episode. First, the export of the negative to Italy (where Antonioni was based) was banned; then, the export of the negative was permitted, but the episode itself was banned within France, because—as the critic Jean de Baroncelli wrote in Le Monde in 1963—“The Ministry of Justice opposes the realization of any screenplay that evokes a judicial affair that implicates people who are still living.” At the time, a decade after the movie’s completion, the ban was still in place.

~~~~~

In the mid-fifties, a Parisian critic in his early twenties, François Truffaut, was fascinated by a true-crime case from late 1952: a small-time criminal, Michel Portail, who was driving a stolen diplomatic car, shot and killed a motorcycle policeman who pulled him over, and became the object of a massive manhunt. He was captured in Paris. Truffaut witnessed the police roundups in the city, and his attention was piqued by a detail involving Portail’s American girlfriend. Truffaut was enthusiastic about turning the story into his first feature film, and worked it out with the help of his friend Jean-Luc Godard, but the censorship of the French episode of “I Vinti” made French producers worry about making another movie based on a recognizably familiar true-crime story. When, several years later, Truffaut got his chance with a producer, he turned his attention to another story, the quasi-autobiographical “The 400 Blows,” and after its successful screening at Cannes, in 1959, he passed the crime story along to Godard, who turned it into “Breathless.”

Le père d'un des condamnés de " l'affaire des J 3 " va demander la saisie d'un film qui doit mettre en scène le meurtre d'Alain Guyader

LE MONDE | 23.09.1952 à 00h00 • Mis à jour le 23.09.1952 à 00h00

Le père de Nicole I., qui fut condamnée à trois ans de prison par le tribunal pour enfants de Melun pour complicité dans l'assassinat d'Alain Guyader, vient de demander à Me Jean-Louis Aujol d'introduire une instance en référé afin d'obtenir la saisie d'un film en cours de réalisation, dont une partie du scénario s'inspire directement de " l'affaire des J 3 ". Cette œuvre cinématographique, intitulée Sans amour, est en effet composée de trois sketches, dont l'un retrace les circonstances du crime commis dans le bois de Malnoue. Une actrice doit y tenir le rôle de Nicole I., et la photographie de cette interprète a été publiée a plusieurs reprises dans différents journaux. M. I. a estimé inadmissible une telle publicité, sa fille ayant été jugée à huis clos, ainsi que l'exige la loi quand il s'agit d'accusés âgés de moins de dix-huit ans au moment des faits.

We're very excited to be working on this new restoration with RaroVideo!

This is based on the most recent restoration by the Cineteca Bologna.

Calvin wrote:Robert Harris fails The Conformist

Drucker wrote:Now I really wish I'd gone to the restoration at Film Forum...he's saying the restoration and not just the disc sounds like a flub?

captveg wrote:Yeah, he just confirmed my assumption that it's a frame jitter / stretching issue and not a picture quality (colors, grain structure, etc.) issue. Did the Cineteca di Bologna, rather that Raro, screw up here?