The Prurient Interests of the French

Last night was serious studying crunch time as I ploughed my way through my 407 page VES 72: Sound Cinema sourcebook. Actually, it's 914 pages because the readings all come from books and it's copied two book pages per sourcebook page. Plus I had to reread through a comprehensive 788 page film history textbook, plus Chion's Audio-Vision, plus a book on The Blue Angel, plus a book on Ivan the Terrible, plus lecture notes, plus section notes. Whew. I can't believe I made it through all that.

This passage from Crisp's analysis of 1960s French cinema really cracked me up. It talks about the emergence of the French New Wave as part of the phenomenon in cinema's search for new audiences:

If the art-film, its existence validated by the middle-class intelligentsia, is the most widely acclaimed of these phenomena, it was by no means the most significant, numerically--the rise of pornography dominates French production statistics of the sixties.

I've always thought that there should be a course on the cultural, social, and economics implications of pornography.

Paper Coincidences.

I've spent the past few days writing a torturous research paper on Hiroshima mon amour. I finally turned it today and quite frankly, I think it's horrible. Hopefully my TF will not agree.

On a related note, a strange thing happened at breakfast today. I had dragged myself up for a early breakfast (8 am!) and sat down at Annenberg with Didaph and a few of their friends. During the breakfast chit chat, Dianne asked me to guess what movie they had watched recently. I honestly had no idea where to start guessing, and the first movie that popped into my head was the one I had spent all night writing about -- Hiroshima mon amour. It struck me as obviously wrong -- no one watches that movie for fun -- so I guessed some sillier things instead.

But one of Didaph's friends guessed , in a half-joking manner, "Hiroshima mon amour." I don't know him. He's not in my film class. Yet for somerandom, coincidental reason, he guessed that film. He didn't even watch it recently. (I think.) Folle a Annenberg. What a strange cosmic coincidence.

Addendum: A few minutes later, someone else mentioned he was writing an expos paper on music downloading and copyright. I too wrote a paper on that. My conclusion from these twenty minutes of breakfast conversation: I've written too many papers this term.

reading period, period.

I have finals in 6 days. What am I stressing about? Summer plans.
In January.
Oh Harvard.

1234 Tell me that you love me more

...because I sure hate your music video. To my utmost horror, Feist's 1234 music video is not only playing nonstop in Apple's iPod nano ads but up for a Grammy.

In it's defense, someone called it, "Busby Berkeley gone indie."

Just because Busby Berkeley is taught in film classes doesn't mean he has good taste.

I'd call it Busby Berkeley gone 80s. Which is a superexplosion of tackiness.

Two wrongs don't make a right

...but three wrongs do.

three left turns = right turn