Melville on Nouvelle

Jean Pierre Melville's relationship with the young turks that became the French New Wave started well but then became a bit frosty. Even though he had a bit part in Godard's À bout de souffle he was always an outsider and more of a paternal figure to the movement. But by the time Cahiers du cinéma magazine savaged Le Samouraï and L' Armée des ombres [which is amazing when you think about it because it is so outrageously political] he had turned on them as much as they had on him.

The Cinema One book Melville on Melville by Rui Nogueira has this exchange:

Q: What do you think of the Nouvelle Vague style?
A: There's no such thing. The Nouvelle Vague was an inexpensive way of making films. That's all.

You have to admit that - as influential as the movement was to world cinema - in France it was indeed a series of lower budget films made by a wave of new directors that managed for a while to get more attention than the directors of the bigger budgeted films.  But eventually some of the Nouvelle Vague directors came into the fold.

It's too bad they had a falling out because in retrospect the cinema of Melville is as good and significant in its own way as the cinema of Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol and Rivette.

Godard tweets

So I did a Twitter search for Godard as in Jean Luc Godard.
And it's interesting because in a matter of a few hours there were two famous quotes by Godard that were going around and mentioned by a good number of people who I am guessing were not connected to one another.

To be or not to be. That's not really a question. showed up 8 times in 40 tweets.

A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end... but not necessarily in that order showed up 4 times in 40 tweets.

The first quote is one I had never heard from Godard and I am not sure where everyone else heard it. I am guessing a meme is going around.

Fox Wilde

"I could see myself in a relationship with a girl -- Olivia Wilde is so sexy she makes me want to strangle a mountain ox with my bare hands. She's mesmerizing."
- Megan Fox

Obama quote

It has become increasingly clear in my travel, the campaign, that the crowds, the enthusiasm, 200,000 people in Berlin, is not about me at all. It's about America. I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions.

Obama quote in context.

PR truth

Show me a PR person who is "accurate" and "truthful," and I'll show you a PR person who is unemployed.

[thanks to Mefi]

Snort

"He was cremated and I couldn't resist grinding him up with a little bit of blow."
Keith Richards [joking?] about his father's ashes.

Lance runs marathon

"For the level of conditioning I have now, that was without a doubt the hardest physical thing I ever did, from triathlons to cycling. Even the worst days on the Tours (de France), nothing was as hard as that and nothing left me feeling like that in terms of fatigue and soreness."
- Lance Armstrong

Obscene Sistine?

"If you look closely at the angels who attend the scary prophetess on the Sistine ceiling known as the Cumaean Sibyl, you will see that one of them has stuck his thumb between his fingers in that mysteriously obscene gesture that visiting fans are still treated to today at Italian football matches. It means something along the lines of: how would you like this inserted into your rectum, ragazzo?" - From the Sunday Times Online

Shared Experience

"We all now live in a more insular, distanced society. And though our communication capability has never been faster or more inclusive, it does not have the ability to let us experience the silent interrelating that happens in a live theater, at church or at a movie house." - Peter Bogdanovich

Scientific Principles

"Show me a cultural relativist at thirty thousand feet and I'll show you a hypocrite. Airplanes are built according to scientific principles and they work. They stay aloft and they get you to a chosen destination. Airplanes built to tribal or mythological specifications such as the dummy planes of the Cargo cults in jungle clearings or the bees-waxed wings of Icarus don't." - Richard Dawkins