Speaker 1: M oh g is folks, it's showtime.
Speaker 2: People say good money to see this movie.
Speaker 3: When they go out to a theater, they are cold sodas,
Speaker 3: pop popcorn and no monsters.
Speaker 4: In the protection booth, everyone pretend podcasting isn't boring.
Speaker 5: Done at all?
Speaker 6: Said he's to had an empty tom Then remember the
Speaker 6: second the macro fun Street. It's apt Sancess Juicy, see
Speaker 6: Tobya Jusky, See to babya Husky, see to babya in
Speaker 6: a port palace street Sea Terry sash you.
Speaker 7: Yeah, Hello, didn't know.
Speaker 5: What Welcome to the projection booth. I'm your host, Mike White,
Speaker 5: join me once again. Is miss Judith.
Speaker 1: Maine, I'm Mike.
Speaker 5: Also back in the booth is Mixed Lou and Tienne.
Speaker 8: Hello, thank you for having me this This week.
Speaker 5: We were looking at Matthew Kissowitz's Laan. Released in nineteen
Speaker 5: ninety five, the film tells the story of three youths
Speaker 5: from the projects outside of Paris and their struggles to
Speaker 5: navigate their world, a world filled with violence, police brutality, drugs, poverty,
Speaker 5: and riots. The film takes place over a twenty four
Speaker 5: hour period of time and captures a point that is
Speaker 5: all too familiar today. We will be swalling this film
Speaker 5: as we discussed it, so if you don't anything ruined,
Speaker 5: please turn off the podcast and come on back after
Speaker 5: you've seen it. We will still be here. Solu. When
Speaker 5: was the first time you saw Laan and what did
Speaker 5: you think?
Speaker 8: The first time I saw it en was like maybe
Speaker 8: twenty ten and I was shown it by a friend
Speaker 8: I was so close to. He was like my brother,
Speaker 8: and he looked so much like Vincent Kassel in this film,
Speaker 8: but luckily he had none of Vince's like idiot, macho swagger.
Speaker 8: He was like gentle and loving and generous and sadly
Speaker 8: he was also killed really young. Yeah sorry, immediately lower
Speaker 8: the tone, but no, but I want. I wanted to
Speaker 8: come back to this film because I wanted to think
Speaker 8: about him and also to watch it as a full adult.
Speaker 8: And my first thought when I watched it for this
Speaker 8: episode was like, oh my god, do I have a type?
Speaker 8: Because this is a lot like Christallief My Car, the
Speaker 8: first film that I spoke to you Mike about on
Speaker 8: the projection booth, because they're both these like gorgeous black
Speaker 8: and white films that like plunge you into masculinist worlds
Speaker 8: of fatalism and chaos and decay, and I realized that
Speaker 8: Christaalioff premiered dot com like three years after Latin, so
Speaker 8: it'd be a really dark but a really interesting exercise
Speaker 8: to sort of program them together and.
Speaker 5: Jub how about yourself?
Speaker 1: Ever since I saw that question in your email, I've
Speaker 1: been thinking about when I first saw this film, and
Speaker 1: I can't remember. I'm sorry, but I think it was
Speaker 1: sometime not too long after it was released. But I
Speaker 1: also taught this film in my contemporary friends. Well it's
Speaker 1: contemporary then when I was still and I've loved the
Speaker 1: film since then. And one of the things I just
Speaker 1: watched it yesterday for the first time, probably in twenty
Speaker 1: some years, And what really astonished me about the film is,
Speaker 1: but you watch it as so have all the power
Speaker 1: and impact that it has when you first see it.
Speaker 1: But also it's a film that could have been made yesterday.
Speaker 1: It's just so relevant, so intense. Now I'm a big
Speaker 1: fan of Matya Kassovit's I think he's an amazing actor
Speaker 1: and director, and this film, I think is just so extraordinary.
Speaker 1: There are things about it that bother me. There are
Speaker 1: criticisms you could raise about it, as many people did
Speaker 1: when it came out, But I think it's a really amazing,
Speaker 1: a really amazing film.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I'm much more familiar with Kessovitz from his acting.
Speaker 5: We talked about The Fifth Element a few months ago.
Speaker 5: He's got a wonderful tiny role in there as a
Speaker 5: mugger who does some great dancing. I much more know
Speaker 5: him from his acting than from his directing. Of course,
Speaker 5: he was also in Amalae, which is one of my favorites,
Speaker 5: and he's great in that as well. I just watched
Speaker 5: this for the first time for this episode just because
Speaker 5: something about this movie, and I think what it was
Speaker 5: is Vinsic Cassal. I think there's something about him just
Speaker 5: because he's so angry and abusive and so many of
Speaker 5: the roles that he plays. I'm just like, I don't
Speaker 5: really want to see this guy do this again. It's
Speaker 5: like so unusual when I see him in a role
Speaker 5: where he's not being an asshole, like you know, I
Speaker 5: think of movies like Irreversible or Black Swan like those
Speaker 5: kind of things. But then he's perfectly fine in a
Speaker 5: movie like Underwater, And of course, you know, I've seen
Speaker 5: him in a bunch of things where I'm just like, oh, yeah, no,
Speaker 5: and he's just he's a fucking fantastic actor. And all
Speaker 5: three of these leads are wonderful, and I love the
Speaker 5: way that this film is put together. I feel pretty
Speaker 5: bad that I've avoided it for so long because this
Speaker 5: really nineteen ninety five. This would have been my jam
Speaker 5: probably in ninety five, and this is I know some
Speaker 5: people have made comparisons between this and things like Boys
Speaker 5: in the Hood or Menace to Society, and it's like, no,
Speaker 5: it's so different, And like you said, so many of
Speaker 5: these problems are still here with us today. I mean,
Speaker 5: they get interpreted in different ways, like I'm a you
Speaker 5: know you talked about and again I apologize for my French,
Speaker 5: but is it pronounced ben lews? The neighborhoods, the projects
Speaker 5: basically like I'm a huge fan of ben U thirteen,
Speaker 5: the science fiction slash Parkore film, which is very similar
Speaker 5: to Assault on Precinct thirteen meets Escape from New York,
Speaker 5: and it's like, I really like the idea of exploring
Speaker 5: these projects, but not as real, I guess because this one, man,
Speaker 5: oh man, what a what a wake up call this
Speaker 5: must have been for France or at least I would
Speaker 5: hope it would have been a wake up call. But really,
Speaker 5: when I hear about the riots and the pow and
Speaker 5: the things that are still there, I guess it didn't
Speaker 5: really shake them to the cores as much as I
Speaker 5: wished it had.
Speaker 8: The element of lahin that really prevents it from being
Speaker 8: politically viable, from preventing it from really making waves is
Speaker 8: its fatalism, And I think this is the most dangerous element.
Speaker 8: Like even when Ubert wants to get out, when he
Speaker 8: sees the harm and the uselessness of violence, he's inevitably
Speaker 8: pulled back into it. Right, You're doomed whether you fire
Speaker 8: the shot or not. Neither Vince nor Sai'd have any
Speaker 8: real power in the film. You know you're damned if
Speaker 8: you do, and you're damned if you don't. The film
Speaker 8: is driven by this impending tragedy, with the ticking countdown
Speaker 8: and this fall from the skyscraper. We know that our
Speaker 8: characters won't survive. Life is sort of unstructured and it's meaningless.
Speaker 8: It's this hopeless cycle and it ends badly in the end, right,
Speaker 8: And the threat of violence is always is always imminent.
Speaker 8: But I think this really naturalizes the site as this violent,
Speaker 8: anarchic space, just like biased media Ridge does, fueling fascination
Speaker 8: with or fear of its inhabitants. Right, And it's problematic
Speaker 8: because Kassovitz clearly wants to incite revolt, he wants to
Speaker 8: set people on fire, but he plays right into the
Speaker 8: dominant perception of Bandus as powder kegs Right as hot districts,
Speaker 8: And I think this film ultimately does very little to
Speaker 8: challenge the perception of life in the Bandu as like
Speaker 8: this lethal mixture of drugs and unemployment and brutality. And
Speaker 8: the difference between Kassovits and the government ministers watching this
Speaker 8: film as if it's real reporting is that Kassovitz finds
Speaker 8: these images exciting, whereas the people in power use these
Speaker 8: same perceptions to kind of justify the institutional violence that
Speaker 8: Kassovitz is depicting. It's just like the problem with fatalism.
Speaker 8: The problem with narratives that depict death and violence as
Speaker 8: inevitable is that fatalism is really numbing, it's really stultifying,
Speaker 8: and it makes us feel powerless. I think at best,
Speaker 8: this film raises consciousness about certain conditions, but without any
Speaker 8: viable solution. Any vision of change consciousness raising films, They
Speaker 8: just breed complacency, right these fatalism tells us that these
Speaker 8: areas are a lost cause. And then I think that
Speaker 8: it only really serves to excuse the failures of governments
Speaker 8: to address exclusion and social deprivation in effective ways. And
Speaker 8: fatalism can really play into the hands of the far right,
Speaker 8: like Lahan could easily promote fear mongering about the inevitability
Speaker 8: of violence, about rash, misogynistic youth over there, right, and
Speaker 8: the impending crisis if we let them in, right, And so,
Speaker 8: I don't know. I find it a really frustrating film
Speaker 8: because it's also very beautiful and very effective in other ways.
Speaker 1: The character that's the biggest disappointment, and that respect is
Speaker 1: either because here's somebody who's a successful boxer and he's
Speaker 1: different from the other two friends in that respect. He
Speaker 1: actually has path that he's following, he has a goal.
Speaker 1: He's also very much the peacemaker in relationship to the
Speaker 1: other two, and he's a wonderful character. But by the end,
Speaker 1: because he's a peacemaker, he becomes the one who is
Speaker 1: folded back into the life of the of the bonlieux
Speaker 1: and disappointing, you know what, At the same time, I
Speaker 1: see exactly what you're saying a little. But at the
Speaker 1: same time, I think there's a very utopian vision in
Speaker 1: this In this film, despite how it concludes to bite
Speaker 1: the kind of downward half, I think it's a very
Speaker 1: utopian vision of the power of friendship in the suburbs.
Speaker 1: And the fact that you have this close relationship not
Speaker 1: just between someone of African descent and someone of probably
Speaker 1: North African Arab descent, but also a Jewish French person
Speaker 1: is really that's not something that you see represented all
Speaker 1: that all. And I think that they're the fantasy in
Speaker 1: this film, that the three of them represent the possible
Speaker 1: coming together of disenfranchised groups, but of course that doesn't
Speaker 1: succeed at the end, But just the very fact of
Speaker 1: them coming together and the interactions between them, despite despite
Speaker 1: the context for them, the interactions between them are really wonderful.
Speaker 1: There's something really powerful about watching these innections between these
Speaker 1: three very very different people. But I do think Ubert
Speaker 1: is the one who's distinguished by what he wants and
Speaker 1: what he does, and the fact that he's folded back
Speaker 1: into the Bodia is is very much part of that
Speaker 1: downward spiral you know you mentioned, and of course it's
Speaker 1: mentioned throughout the film. The story that's told at the beginning,
Speaker 1: this guy falls off a roof and he watches everything's okay,
Speaker 1: everything's okay, everything's okay, and then he splats on the ground.
Speaker 1: I actually don't like that story very much, and maybe
Speaker 1: that's why, because it's so fatalistic. Because the thing that
Speaker 1: I think is more interesting, it's not the final destination.
Speaker 1: It's the process of how you come down. And in
Speaker 1: that process of falling down, of coming down, you see
Speaker 1: the interconnections between these people in ways that are really powerful,
Speaker 1: And as I said, I think it's somewhat utopian.
Speaker 8: I definitely agree that the film betrays Ubert by having
Speaker 8: him really resist this kind of racially coded masculinity that
Speaker 8: Vince really fetishizes in him, and the film, to an extent,
Speaker 8: really fetishizes in him. But in his death, I mean,
Speaker 8: in Vince's death and in Ubert's repossession of the gun
Speaker 8: and in him perhaps shooting it, it both affirms Vince's
Speaker 8: belonging as like a brother worthy of avenging, but it
Speaker 8: also reinscribes Hubert within this discourse of violence. And retaliation
Speaker 8: that he had denounced throughout the entire film, right, And
Speaker 8: I mean it also makes a racist move of naturalizing
Speaker 8: blackmail gun violence in a character who had spent the
Speaker 8: entire film rejecting it. There's a lot to commend in
Speaker 8: their friendship, but I think it's also a little bit
Speaker 8: problematic the way that the film really goes out of
Speaker 8: its way stylistically to embed us in the white character's
Speaker 8: imagination and in his fantasies and in his desires and
Speaker 8: not giving us that interiority, and that it's psychology for
Speaker 8: the black or the Arab characters. The film sort of
Speaker 8: follows Vince in his fetishizing of Ubert's body, in his
Speaker 8: blackness and his masculinity. For example, in the scene where
Speaker 8: they enter the boxing gym for the first time, Vince
Speaker 8: is sort of whispering to SAYID like, look at Ubert,
Speaker 8: but he's really mad, and the film, the camera really
Speaker 8: glides toward Ubert in this very fetishizing slow motion, and
Speaker 8: we see him spotlet under a single light bulb and
Speaker 8: he's boxing, and the Kioskuro factually, you know, shows his muscles,
Speaker 8: and I don't know, I wonder about the extent to
Speaker 8: which the film still reduces Ubert to his body. Even
Speaker 8: though he's the most philosophical character, he's always sort of
Speaker 8: reinscribed within discourses of the body. Evince will always say
Speaker 8: things like, oh, I'm not like you, mister black Hercules, right,
Speaker 8: whereas with Vince we get a lot of interiority, we
Speaker 8: get a lot of psychology. And so the film sort
Speaker 8: of does, in a way reinscribe the racist trope of
Speaker 8: like white man equals brain whereas black min equals body.
Speaker 8: It's a very ambivalent portrayal. I think of their friendship.
Speaker 1: Vincent is white, but he's also Jewish. He's also ethnicized,
Speaker 1: if not as strongly as the other two. And mostly
Speaker 1: that does happen through the home setting, because you see
Speaker 1: the Manora, you see the Jewish grandmother. Interesting on how
Speaker 1: aside from him, the only Jewish people represented in the
Speaker 1: film are old people, the grandmother and then the old
Speaker 1: man in the restroom who tells the story of Grimalfsky.
Speaker 1: It's a risky move on the part of Cassavitz, who
Speaker 1: is himself a French Jew. It's a risky move to
Speaker 1: try to establish these connections between Tree. You could say,
Speaker 1: an African French identity at something in common with Magreb
Speaker 1: a North African French identity, because they're both products of
Speaker 1: colonialism and post colonialism. You can't did the same thing
Speaker 1: about Vince's Jewish identity. But there's a connection, and that's
Speaker 1: what I think is part of the desire of this
Speaker 1: film is to establish that connection between Vince and the
Speaker 1: other two. I wonder how much that had to do
Speaker 1: with very controversial reception at this film. Had he was
Speaker 1: the fact that it's was criticized roundly because he's not
Speaker 1: a part of that culture. He came to it as
Speaker 1: very much as an outsider. Now, I think ultimately, you know,
Speaker 1: the film has to be judged not on who he is,
Speaker 1: but on what the film is and what the film
Speaker 1: brings to or understanding of identities in both colonial potolocoust
Speaker 1: we have to say to French culture, and in that respect,
Speaker 1: the story of Grvolski is very peculiar. It's a little
Speaker 1: bit like the seld Down. Everything's okay, everything's okay, Everything's okay.
Speaker 1: Everybody else goes out to I'm sorry, I can't say
Speaker 1: God to take a fit. Everyone goes outside the train car.
Speaker 1: Listen to me, I sound like a prude. Everyone goes
Speaker 1: outside to depcate, but Grinvolski is so preoccupied with not
Speaker 1: putting his body on display that he basically, you know,
Speaker 1: he basically misses the train. Evidently, one misunderstanding that many
Speaker 1: people had about the story about Grovolski and the old
Speaker 1: man in the in the bathroom is that he understood
Speaker 1: it to be a story about Jews being sent to
Speaker 1: concentration camps, to death camps during the during World War Two.
Speaker 1: He says very specifically, they were going to Siberia, and
Speaker 1: so Polish Jews found refuge temporarily in the Soviet Union
Speaker 1: in Russia, but they were then recruited, forced by Stalin
Speaker 1: to become part of these work squads in Siberia, and
Speaker 1: many of them didn't survive. But it was also a
Speaker 1: chance of survival that was not offered by death camps,
Speaker 1: and so in that sense, it was like it was
Speaker 1: a chance for Brinvolski to find the future, to find
Speaker 1: life instead of freezing in the gold as he did.
Speaker 1: He doesn't say, I don't think where they were when
Speaker 1: the train stopped and they all got off, but you
Speaker 1: do sort of wonder why didn't Brunowski walk around or
Speaker 1: find somebody. You can't do this with a film. You
Speaker 1: can't say, oh, why didn't he do this? And why
Speaker 1: didn't he do that? But there is that element of
Speaker 1: a kind of passive expectation of what is going to
Speaker 1: happen to him, both in terms of not being willing
Speaker 1: to get back on the train because he doesn't want
Speaker 1: to show himself and missing out on the chance to
Speaker 1: avoid the possibility of liberatia.
Speaker 5: It's funny that the movie starts off with the so far,
Speaker 5: so good joke. I think that's the first VEO that
Speaker 5: we hear on the film. We end with that. It
Speaker 5: also comes up in the middle. There's also the story
Speaker 5: that you're telling talking about. There's also the joke about
Speaker 5: Batman that comes up, where a person is beating up
Speaker 5: a nun and says, you know, you're not so tough Batman.
Speaker 5: It's interesting that that one and the flight the Falling
Speaker 5: story both of those. Vin says, I've heard that joke
Speaker 5: before but with a rabbi, and I'm like, oh, okay,
Speaker 5: but it's it is an interesting way to talk us
Speaker 5: through the you know, to lighten the air with these jokes.
Speaker 5: But the jokes are so depressing and the stories are
Speaker 5: so depressing, like the idea of the Grimalsky story that
Speaker 5: you're talking about, like, yeah, yeah, this is pretty funny.
Speaker 5: This guy was trying to run follow the train, but
Speaker 5: he kept dropping his pants and he kept pulling up
Speaker 5: his pants, and yeah, he froze to death. It's just
Speaker 5: this morbid punchline to it and no offense, but it
Speaker 5: felt the little Parantino asked. The idea of like popping
Speaker 5: in jokes and then using the jokes and the punchlines
Speaker 5: is kind of a punch in the face kind of
Speaker 5: thing to me. It speaks to the really stylized shooting
Speaker 5: of this film. I mean when Lahn is mostly known
Speaker 5: to me from looking at clips on Instagram where it's like,
Speaker 5: can you believe the shot? These shots are incredible, the
Speaker 5: whole thing with Cassel in front of the mirror and
Speaker 5: that it's actually a different person who is pretending to
Speaker 5: be Cassel, and that we moved through the frame and
Speaker 5: we end up in Cassell's world where he's re enacting
Speaker 5: the whole you're talking to me speech from taxi driver.
Speaker 5: I mean, that's a beautiful shot, but so many of
Speaker 5: these shots are gorgeous, and you know, you're talking about
Speaker 5: like the fetishization of Hubert's body. I mean, so much
Speaker 5: of this violence, so much of this world is fetishized,
Speaker 5: and I think that, you know, Casovitz really went out
Speaker 5: of his way to make the ben Lieuze very beautiful
Speaker 5: and to just really make those almost otherworldly. You know,
Speaker 5: you're talking about this utopian vision, and for me, it's
Speaker 5: like the once they're in the bean Leus, it is gorgeous.
Speaker 5: Everything looks really nice, and it's like you don't see
Speaker 5: the squalor nearly as much as you think that you would.
Speaker 5: It's not until they get to Paris where things shift.
Speaker 5: And I know that he specifically went from being stereo
Speaker 5: in Labanlieu's to mono once he gets outside and gets
Speaker 5: into Paris, and just makes it a much more grab
Speaker 5: world than we had in the projects. And it's an
Speaker 5: interesting way that he's contradicting those two things. And you
Speaker 5: were talking about the whole thing of him being this outsider,
Speaker 5: and I know it was a big deal for him
Speaker 5: to live with the actors in the projects before they
Speaker 5: started production and just to try to give himself some
Speaker 5: credibility because I think he knew he was very much
Speaker 5: an outsider all of these guys, and there's a behind
Speaker 5: the scenes clip where he's like, yeah, all of us
Speaker 5: are pretty bourgeois, but you know, we're trying to get
Speaker 5: some street cred here.
Speaker 8: And I mean it's really important to acknowledge as well that,
Speaker 8: like the Bandli cinema was a genre of cinema that
Speaker 8: really caught fire in the nineties. Right, Pasowtz isn't doing
Speaker 8: something new, And a lot of films about the Banlu
Speaker 8: are being made by people who live in Bondlus, especially
Speaker 8: people who are Arab French themselves. And Harry Tard read
Speaker 8: a really nice kind of critique about what white filmmakers
Speaker 8: are doing differently in their depictions of the Banlu compared
Speaker 8: with French Arab filmmakers. But it seems like white authored
Speaker 8: Bandlu films don't tend to represent family backgrounds or living
Speaker 8: spaces of Arab youth, just like we don't see inside
Speaker 8: says Home. They don't tend to demonstrate interest in first
Speaker 8: generation immigrants. They tend to express the anger and alienation
Speaker 8: of young men regardless of ethnic origins, and tend to
Speaker 8: focus on confrontations with police. They tend to sort of
Speaker 8: point to a shared experience of exclusion that mask the
Speaker 8: significance of ethnic difference and the difficulties that this difference presents.
Speaker 8: And in these ways, the white authored Banlu films tend
Speaker 8: to sort of reflect French universalism and resistance to multiculturalism,
Speaker 8: whereas films about the Bandlu made by Arabic or bare
Speaker 8: filmmakers tend to avoid or diffuse scenes of confrontation with
Speaker 8: the police and instead be more interested in problems of
Speaker 8: identification and integration and in addressing changes and values within
Speaker 8: Maghrebi communities, including women's places within it. They tend to
Speaker 8: look at gender roles more extensively, even if they also
Speaker 8: demonstrate masculinity in crisis, and rather than centering groups of
Speaker 8: unemployed youth, they tend to center kind of older people
Speaker 8: who have put any illegal activities behind them, and sort
Speaker 8: of look at interpersonal and intergenerational relationships more. Going back
Speaker 8: to the Grunwalski story, talking about intergenerational relationships, it's interesting
Speaker 8: that like a Vince is quoted as Jewish, but he
Speaker 8: doesn't have the same accent as his grandma or his auntie,
Speaker 8: and he doesn't seem to make any personal relationship. He
Speaker 8: doesn't seem to make any personal connection or any understanding
Speaker 8: of the Grunwalski story, and most people have read that
Speaker 8: story as sort of like a reminder of the suffering
Speaker 8: and the exclusion of Jewish people to sort of lend
Speaker 8: Vince's anger credibility. But Vince himself seems to really distance
Speaker 8: himself from Jewishness and instead appropriate kind of ghetto swag
Speaker 8: and black music and sort of he shadow boxes. He
Speaker 8: wants to be Ubert. He has the ring from Do
Speaker 8: the Right Thing, you know, the radio Rahim. It would
Speaker 8: be easy to read the film as a film about
Speaker 8: the instability of masculinity and sort of the instability of
Speaker 8: a gender that is always reflective and is always appropriative
Speaker 8: and is so unstable, Like it would be interesting to
Speaker 8: do a feminist oppositional reading of Latin, even though I
Speaker 8: think the film is not feminist. It really revels in misogyny.
Speaker 1: But also related to that, women are totally imaginary, and
Speaker 1: as I think, the only real women you see are
Speaker 1: the group of sisters sitting together, and I believe that
Speaker 1: Sayid's sister, and then the old grandmother and the mother.
Speaker 1: But they talk about women obsessively. They talk about sex
Speaker 1: with women, It's like women are completely imaginary creatures in
Speaker 1: this in this film, they have absolutely no, no blood
Speaker 1: and flash existence. And I find that interesting because I
Speaker 1: think the film does try to avoid what would be
Speaker 1: standard stereotypical representations of the sexism associated with Mania culture,
Speaker 1: and there's been so much attention brought to them through
Speaker 1: the work of women oh writers and tailmakers, and it's
Speaker 1: something that bothers me a little in this film, but
Speaker 1: I don't see any other way that it could have
Speaker 1: been done. This, to me is something else that's very utopian.
Speaker 1: Like it's Starrett, it's just fine for women to live
Speaker 1: in this imaginary realm and though in the minds of
Speaker 1: the main characters, but as long as there's no real
Speaker 1: grounding of women in any kind of substantial way except
Speaker 1: for typical motherly or grandmotherly rule like getting the vegetables
Speaker 1: for dinner and picking up the wrong one. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's just very purposely dissociated from any female fear that
Speaker 1: might exist in the Navalio, which I find disappointing. But
Speaker 1: at the same time, I do think it tries to
Speaker 1: This film is trying, and this may be a nipa
Speaker 1: of the film. It's trying to avoid the kind of
Speaker 1: typical sects of representations of men in Boleo culture. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I went for more. But there is, however, the one
Speaker 1: male character who does acquire a certain kind of I
Speaker 1: hate to use this word demin and present is infinite
Speaker 1: delf because you know, when it comes time to just
Speaker 1: show how tough he is, he can't do it. He can't.
Speaker 1: He not only can't kill the skinhead. And by the way,
Speaker 1: you know that is Casaves is playing the role of
Speaker 1: the of the skinhead. He can't do it, but he
Speaker 1: also throws up after he can't do it. I mean,
Speaker 1: this is someone who there's a real gap between these
Speaker 1: aspirations towards being a tough guy and the reality of
Speaker 1: what he is and how he lives in the in
Speaker 1: the world. He may talk a lot about violence, but
Speaker 1: he can't abide it.
Speaker 5: What doesn't he keep his gun in an oven to
Speaker 5: kind of a domestic sphere type of thing. Most of
Speaker 5: the time they're talking about fucking each other's sisters or mothers,
Speaker 5: and then the I think we see Vince's mother with
Speaker 5: a song machine that I want to say we see
Speaker 5: Sayid's mother or with a song machine as well. So
Speaker 5: they are so trapped in that domestic space that we, yeah,
Speaker 5: we don't see them, because so much of this movie
Speaker 5: is them wandering in the streets, the three men wandering
Speaker 5: the streets, and they run into a lot of people,
Speaker 5: but they sure don't run into women. They are very
Speaker 5: much hidden from view.
Speaker 1: Now, Yeah, and the women are very circumscribed obviously, the
Speaker 1: rare ones that you do see women, it's always cooking
Speaker 1: and so on.
Speaker 8: And there are films about the Bondlu that do things differently, right,
Speaker 8: You could look at films made by Arab Brench women
Speaker 8: about the experiences of women in the Bondlu, like zeide
Speaker 8: gorb Valta's film Remember Me, which was made a year
Speaker 8: after Let And you could, if you wanted to do
Speaker 8: a program of films that sort of look at white
Speaker 8: outsider's perspectives of the Bondlu and then complicate those perspectives.
Speaker 8: You could also show that and with Celine Siama's film
Speaker 8: Girlhood and sort of then have a conversation about the
Speaker 8: colonial dynamics at play when these directors come in and
Speaker 8: build their careers on stories of marginalization, but without arguably
Speaker 8: making any tangible benefits for the people being represented on screen.
Speaker 8: It's interesting to think about, like the ways that Latin
Speaker 8: sort of criticizes Vince's swaggering machismo bullshit because it always fails, right,
Speaker 8: and it always it creates conflicts with the only people
Speaker 8: who seem to really care about him. It tears apart
Speaker 8: his friend group. But it's also the same kind of
Speaker 8: swaggering muchismo bullshit that the cops are using. And the
Speaker 8: difference is that when you play the same game as
Speaker 8: the cops, when you use this kind of toxic masculinity,
Speaker 8: you're doomed to fail. You're doomed to be killed. Your
Speaker 8: friends are doomed to be killed because the state's power
Speaker 8: is legitimized, right, the power of the police is legitimized.
Speaker 8: When they do toxic shit, it's legitimate. And so that's
Speaker 8: like that, I guess that's like a more feminist oppositional
Speaker 8: reading of the film. But at the same time, the
Speaker 8: camera seems to really be really be reveling in Vince's machismo,
Speaker 8: like the way in the in the taxi driver sequence,
Speaker 8: the way we don't get critical distance, right, we don't
Speaker 8: see Vince from a distance, we don't get to critique
Speaker 8: his sort of like playful performativity of gender. The camera
Speaker 8: is directly in front of his face, giving his words
Speaker 8: like the maximal impact. Right, And when they go to
Speaker 8: the gallery, they treat women like currency, Like Said is like, yober, like,
Speaker 8: go talk to those girls for me. Remember when I
Speaker 8: brought you a taco last week, you know? And Vince
Speaker 8: is like, no, no, get to get to get one
Speaker 8: for me, right, and so and then Said goes up
Speaker 8: and he just like expects the women to like automatically
Speaker 8: give them their numbers for sex. Like it's just like
Speaker 8: it's so transactional, You're like, what planet are you from?
Speaker 8: Like the one of the women offers a really nice critique.
Speaker 8: It's like this nice line where she's like, we were fine,
Speaker 8: we wanted to talk to you, but when you get
Speaker 8: all aggressive, like how can we respect you? But the
Speaker 8: boys they don't have any answer for this that. They
Speaker 8: just get louder and work aggressive, like say it immediately
Speaker 8: raises his hand in a threatening gesture, and the soundtrack
Speaker 8: get like throughout the film, the soundtrack really aligns us
Speaker 8: with these men's experience. Right, it rises and it gets
Speaker 8: more aggressive in the gallery sequence as their aggression builds
Speaker 8: and it cuts off right when they leave. So the
Speaker 8: film is irrevocably, always, always, always, and often very beautifully
Speaker 8: on the side of these three boys, right, really implanting
Speaker 8: us in their brains, especially Vince's.
Speaker 1: But also showed us the frustration of those desires. I mean,
Speaker 1: we get inside their heads, yes, but they never can
Speaker 1: act on what they're doing. There's a kind of basic
Speaker 1: however strong and macho they act, there's a basic impotence
Speaker 1: on the part of all of them. And of course
Speaker 1: you could say that a real standard reading in some
Speaker 1: ways of men like them and how they act out.
Speaker 1: But it doesn't go anywhere on the film. I go
Speaker 1: back to the Tarantino reference. I don't want to dwell
Speaker 1: on it because people have awful lot, but there's something
Speaker 1: very performative about a Vincent saying, you know, it's like
Speaker 1: you talking to me, talking to me, you're talking to me.
Speaker 1: Kind of changes a little bit each time. I'm not
Speaker 1: sure it changes radically, but it reminds me very much
Speaker 1: of that story that drives me crazy. Of goes past
Speaker 1: one floor, Oh, everything's okay, next floor, everything's okay, and
Speaker 1: then splots on the ground. There's this attempt to render
Speaker 1: that that theme from taxi driver in a meaningful way.
Speaker 1: But it's nothing but an attempt at changing things that
Speaker 1: are never going to really change. No matter what differently
Speaker 1: you say, you talking to me, you're talking to me,
Speaker 1: you're talking to me, it always ends up in the
Speaker 1: same in the same place. And that goes back to
Speaker 1: lou what you said, of course, about the fatalism of
Speaker 1: the of the of the film. I don't want to
Speaker 1: insist though, on the difference in the film that's brought
Speaker 1: by Vinta's character being Jewish. It could be brought out
Speaker 1: in more detailed and interesting ways, I suppose, but I
Speaker 1: think that's something in this film that can't quite so
Speaker 1: easily be absorbed into Well, I don't know what narrative
Speaker 1: I'm talking about. Fatalism. Well, yeah, there is a fatalism
Speaker 1: associated with what it means to be Jewish and poor
Speaker 1: in contemporary and a post holocust in a post final
Speaker 1: solution way in France. But I do think there's this
Speaker 1: real attempt and that part of the reason why I
Speaker 1: call the film so utopian and a vision. There's a
Speaker 1: real attempt to try to trace a Jewish man's path
Speaker 1: along the line not identical to but along the lines
Speaker 1: kind of following some of the lines of the two
Speaker 1: other of the two other characters, and to me that
Speaker 1: the real distinction about the film. I'm not saying it's
Speaker 1: particularly well done necessarily, but it's a fact of difference
Speaker 1: in the film that I think makes them a little
Speaker 1: more interesting. Well, I shouldn't say a little more interesting.
Speaker 1: I think it's an interesting film or no matter how
Speaker 1: you look at it, but that particular difference I think
Speaker 1: really fanned out in the film as being significant in
Speaker 1: terms of how there's an attempt to kind of I
Speaker 1: don't want to use the word deconstruct, but redefine what
Speaker 1: it means to talk about friendships in the Balia too,
Speaker 1: reassess them in different in different ways. Because I think
Speaker 1: everyone knows what the basis of oppression is of North
Speaker 1: African and African men in the suburbs. It's colonialism and
Speaker 1: post colonialism. That's not hard to wrap your mind around.
Speaker 1: I think a lot of people would find it very
Speaker 1: difficult to see the connections between a post final solution
Speaker 1: French identity in France and colonialism and those colonialism. They're
Speaker 1: not the same, and any attempts to try to make
Speaker 1: them the same or even that similar are going to fail.
Speaker 1: But there is an attempt to create that connection in
Speaker 1: this film and that I find admirable. But even if
Speaker 1: it doesn't go anywhere, the insistence on Vince's vulnerability in
Speaker 1: those last scenes with the skinheads, I find that you
Speaker 1: could say that that's adopting one of the standard ways
Speaker 1: of looking at Jewish Men, especially in a post Holocaust era,
Speaker 1: that is as weak and insufficiently manly and et cetera.
Speaker 1: And the film doesn't do that much with it, because
Speaker 1: after all, its and dies, But I still think it's
Speaker 1: a really interesting attempt that problematizes somewhat the standard view
Speaker 1: of the ballieu. It's only having to do with Black
Speaker 1: African and North African Idanady. I think what's.
Speaker 8: Really important too is to think about what a utopian
Speaker 8: kind of version of Latin, and even more utopian if
Speaker 8: you think of it as utopian version of Lein, would
Speaker 8: look like. And I'm thinking about Jeanese Duret, which is
Speaker 8: by Zeida gorb Volta. I think it's two thousand and one,
Speaker 8: and what she does is she her protagonists are two women,
Speaker 8: and she shows the audience the demolition of Acte and
Speaker 8: then she shows different reactions to this demolition from the
Speaker 8: residents there.
Speaker 1: And it's it's.
Speaker 8: Interesting because if we understand the Banlieu as a spatial
Speaker 8: manifestation of a political problem, right and a racist, violent history,
Speaker 8: then if the Bandlu signifies state and social exclusion, then
Speaker 8: demolishing it on screen can be a really powerful symbol
Speaker 8: and that can be utopian perhaps. And there are other
Speaker 8: films like one hundred Percent Arabic which show the ban
Speaker 8: Lutu be like really rich with history and memory and
Speaker 8: community and a place that's often joyous and really effectively
Speaker 8: can combat religious fundamentalism. Unlike the French Government right and
Speaker 8: other films about the Banlou, they chose not to see
Speaker 8: the big city at all. They don't make any foray
Speaker 8: into Paris because they want to cut off the residents
Speaker 8: from the oppressive kind of spatial logistics of the city
Speaker 8: and instead focus on bonds within the bun Lu. So
Speaker 8: these are three different kind of ideas of what a
Speaker 8: utopian Bandu film could look like, and they're all sort
Speaker 8: of interesting productive alternatives to representations like lain. A film
Speaker 8: can be really utopian when it explores what equity could
Speaker 8: look like, what revolution and its results could look like,
Speaker 8: and what a world could look like without spatial and
Speaker 8: racial divisions. And there are oppositional films out there, There
Speaker 8: are utopian films out there, but the films that get
Speaker 8: awards like Lahen will keep showing people in power visions
Speaker 8: that they recognize.
Speaker 1: Right, Definitely problem with it. Yeah.
Speaker 5: The other very disheartening thing for me is just like
Speaker 5: I was saying, there's very few women present in this,
Speaker 5: but there are kids. They're younger men that hang out
Speaker 5: with the older men. Like we see them on the rooftops.
Speaker 5: We see the one kid telling a pretty bad story
Speaker 5: talking about stories again, telling that story to Vin's about
Speaker 5: this celebrity and he doesn't know who the celebrity was,
Speaker 5: and the story just really doesn't go anywhere. But it's
Speaker 5: like this whole bonding of the younger generation with the
Speaker 5: older generation and just seeing how they are still going
Speaker 5: to be stuck in this no matter what. It feels like.
Speaker 5: None of these kids that are hanging out with the
Speaker 5: three friends just here or there anywhere. And I do
Speaker 5: appreciate that the one the kid that's telling that story
Speaker 5: the way that he just kind of throws himself out
Speaker 5: of the trio when he thinks that there's going to
Speaker 5: be trouble and he's just like, oh, this doesn't look good.
Speaker 5: I'm out of here, and just beats himself out. But yeah,
Speaker 5: that whole idea of like this is so cyclical and
Speaker 5: we'll just continue to go. And there's only one good
Speaker 5: cop in the whole film that we see, who well barely. Yeah,
Speaker 5: And I know there was a real concern from Kasovits
Speaker 5: as far as I want to show that there's at
Speaker 5: least one decent cop so I can't be basically accused
Speaker 5: of saying all cops are bad, And same thing with
Speaker 5: when it comes to like, oh, well, I made sure
Speaker 5: that there was a good black character as well as
Speaker 5: a drug dealing black character, because I don't want there
Speaker 5: to be accusations that all black people are drug dealers.
Speaker 5: So I'm like, all right, I understand where you're coming from.
Speaker 5: But it's just it feels a little semi instancere as
Speaker 5: far as I have to do this so that I
Speaker 5: can't be accused of something else, it's like, stand by
Speaker 5: your guns and just have these characters be these characters.
Speaker 1: The one supposedly partially sympathetic cop I think is not
Speaker 1: really I mean, I do think the view of the
Speaker 1: cops in this is despite what and it's disturbing to
Speaker 1: me that says that, you know, oh they're a good
Speaker 1: cop and bad cops. No, there aren't in relationship to
Speaker 1: the ball of you. There's no such thing as a
Speaker 1: good cop. I mean, yeah, the one you're right, the
Speaker 1: one you're talking about. Mike does say, I'll get you
Speaker 1: more money. See you can. You can create your gym
Speaker 1: someplace else to you bear. Okay, that's sweet, but those
Speaker 1: are band aid they're not there's nothing deep about them
Speaker 1: at all.
Speaker 5: And that brings up the whole question too as far
Speaker 5: as these riots happen. And we see a lot of
Speaker 5: historical right footage, possibly some right footage that was manufactured
Speaker 5: for the film, But this whole idea of Hubert's gym
Speaker 5: has been burned down as part of one of these riots.
Speaker 5: And I know Kassovitch talks about people burn down their
Speaker 5: own stuff just to show that there's a problem. That's
Speaker 5: always the most difficult thing for me, and I think
Speaker 5: that's a really difficult thing for other people to understand.
Speaker 5: This is the whole idea of like burning down your
Speaker 5: own neighborhood. I mean, for me, it's just like, yeah,
Speaker 5: go to Paris and start burning down those buildings, why
Speaker 5: don't you?
Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, yeah, the gym has been we're told
Speaker 1: that it's been decimated. We don't see exactly what that
Speaker 1: means in the film. I think that those scenes of violence,
Speaker 1: in terms of the Bonia itself are ir relatively restrained.
Speaker 1: I mean there's a big boom, you know, at the
Speaker 1: at the beginning of the film a bit. I'm not
Speaker 1: sure why that is, because the demonstrations that led to
Speaker 1: the deaths of various individuals, including the one who's singled
Speaker 1: out in the film, those were pretty raw and pretty intense.
Speaker 8: Suspicion that Vince was involved in burning down his gym,
Speaker 8: I think it's just a symptom of like a greater
Speaker 8: theme in the film, which is that everything is breaking apart,
Speaker 8: everything is falling down, nothing, there's nothing you can depend
Speaker 8: on anymore. Right, identity becomes unstable, not just Vince's kind
Speaker 8: of exaggerating, exaggerated, like self defeating performance of masculinity, but
Speaker 8: also like the drunk man Vincent Linden, you can't express
Speaker 8: his own name. No one's ever really sure like which
Speaker 8: far or Mohammed people are talking about because there are
Speaker 8: like different ones in the cite, and our identity is
Speaker 8: also really unstable, like as viewers were sort of placed
Speaker 8: in mirrors or were figured as art exhibits. And there's
Speaker 8: this like uneasy reflective aspect of the film where it's
Speaker 8: sort of like structured like a mirror. It's split halfway
Speaker 8: through between the Sita and Paris, and it begins and
Speaker 8: ends with the same story. So there's that reflection. But
Speaker 8: like logic seems to be breaking down as well, right,
Speaker 8: like how did a car get into a gym? Why
Speaker 8: is there a cow in the cite?
Speaker 1: Language? Right?
Speaker 8: Like language is breaking down too, right, These interactions seem
Speaker 8: so meaningless. Jokes aren't funny because you've heard them before,
Speaker 8: stories have no point, and yet throughout there's this longing
Speaker 8: to connect, right in references to other films, there's so
Speaker 8: much intertextuality and references to American music. And the Greenwalski
Speaker 8: story is about two men, you know, trying to grab
Speaker 8: a hold of one another, and you sort of see
Speaker 8: that image reflected in the blow up of the two
Speaker 8: hens almost touching from this is teen Chapel. It's like
Speaker 8: blown up against the wall and it's right right when
Speaker 8: Vince is like, oh, like, go off without me. I
Speaker 8: don't need you guys. Anyway, he's sort of he's standing
Speaker 8: in front of a sculpture of two hens that look
Speaker 8: like they're about to cut him. So it's I can't
Speaker 8: tell if that's threatening or tender, but yeah, there's it's
Speaker 8: a real it's a world in disarray.
Speaker 1: Well that's just kid. It's always on the verge between
Speaker 1: the two. It's always there's never anything that is solidified
Speaker 1: into one single thing. It's always to be this could
Speaker 1: be that it's ambivalent, it's contradictory, but what happens with
Speaker 1: those ambivalence is in the film, and what happens with
Speaker 1: those contradictions is another another question entirely.
Speaker 5: I love what you're saying, Lou about the reflection, and
Speaker 5: especially that the movie really starts with the reflection. But
Speaker 5: it's so odd that it's the Earth instead of the
Speaker 5: Moon inside of the reflective. It's basically like a puddle
Speaker 5: that you see the Earth reflected, and then it gets
Speaker 5: hit with a Molotov cocktail because it looks almost like
Speaker 5: we're in space and we're talking about that story of
Speaker 5: the guy who's falling. You know, so good, so far
Speaker 5: that kind of thing, and then you see the Earth
Speaker 5: and you're just like, oh, he's it's almost as if
Speaker 5: he's falling towards the surface of our planet. And then
Speaker 5: instead what we see coming in At first it looks
Speaker 5: like it's some sort of a meteor or something that's
Speaker 5: going to crash into the planet, but then you realize
Speaker 5: it's a Molotov cocktail and it lights the entire screen
Speaker 5: on fire, and that's when we learned that the Earth
Speaker 5: was a reflection inside of the water. Gorgeous, gorgeous shot.
Speaker 5: But I love what you're saying as far as the
Speaker 5: reflective nature of things. Right there in the first major
Speaker 5: shot of the film, we have that reflective.
Speaker 8: Yeah, And I think this really speaks to the political
Speaker 8: inadequacy of the film too, because it's like, oh, I'm
Speaker 8: going to show you an image of revolution, right this
Speaker 8: Moolotov cocktail coming to the earth, But also like, what
Speaker 8: are we supposed to do with that? The Earth is
Speaker 8: blowing up? That doesn't inspire anything in me, right, it
Speaker 8: just tells me I'm about to die. I wanted to
Speaker 8: get back to the point that you made earlier, Mike,
Speaker 8: about the way that the film is divided into like
Speaker 8: pause of It's apparently wanted to shoot one episode in color,
Speaker 8: the other in black and white, one in thirty five millimeters,
Speaker 8: one in sixteen, but instead we just have the site
Speaker 8: by day and Paris by night. The CTE. In these
Speaker 8: long traveling shots which require an establishment in space, right,
Speaker 8: you need to lay down tracks, whereas the center the
Speaker 8: city Paris is shot on foot with a handheld camera.
Speaker 8: And then like you said, Mike, we have this mix
Speaker 8: between stereo and mono, and in the CTE we have
Speaker 8: like short focal distance, so the characters are really integrated
Speaker 8: into their wide surroundings in their long takes, whereas in
Speaker 8: Paris it's long focal distance to detach the figures from
Speaker 8: their backgrounds. The whole environment changes, and it really to me,
Speaker 8: it really naturalizes problematically this division between Paris and between
Speaker 8: the Banlieux, and it sort of really entrenches this division
Speaker 8: that I think is harmful because if we assume that
Speaker 8: this division is natural, if we make films in which
Speaker 8: this division is so palpable, then it makes it easier
Speaker 8: for people living in Paris to ignore the other side
Speaker 8: and to assume that it really is a foreign country
Speaker 8: and it really is not their problem. I think making
Speaker 8: films in which the division is so stark it rubs
Speaker 8: me the wrong way. It seems dangerous.
Speaker 1: It is dark. But at the same time, I feel
Speaker 1: like when we get into Paris, it's like we've been
Speaker 1: dropped in a completely different, well, a completely unfamiliar world.
Speaker 1: And that scene in the apartment building, I'm sorry, and
Speaker 1: if we're going to show my age and my formation,
Speaker 1: but I felt like I was in a good All film,
Speaker 1: that we were plopped right into the middle of something
Speaker 1: like masculine seminin in terms of the kind of ridiculously
Speaker 1: exaggerated antics of the guy he's staying in the apartment.
Speaker 1: And even the art gallery to me looks so much
Speaker 1: like a joke in a in a Godell film. There's
Speaker 1: nothing about that Paris that is recognizable. I don't think
Speaker 1: is recognizable unless it's in the most abstract sense of
Speaker 1: you now, oh, it's the filmic representation of Paris.
Speaker 5: Now.
Speaker 1: I don't know if other people get the get the
Speaker 1: feeling of go dab like I did, but the art gallery, certainly,
Speaker 1: it's like this, let's find a completely irrelevant, frankly irrel
Speaker 1: of the almost anybody's world space. Bought that into the
Speaker 1: into the film. It gives Paris kind of an unreal
Speaker 1: distance in the In the film, it defamiliarizes Paris in
Speaker 1: some ways, it makes it a strange entity. And frankly,
Speaker 1: I find Paris more threatening to them, the three of them,
Speaker 1: than the than the Volieu is because it's so unfamiliar
Speaker 1: and so it's freatening, it's very unsafe.
Speaker 8: Right, which emphasizes that these characters don't belong there, right.
Speaker 1: But that's not a bad thing, I think, but it's
Speaker 1: you know, as a critique of the of the Parisian environment. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they certainly don't belong there. But who does belong in
Speaker 1: Paris except for.
Speaker 8: A sixties filmmaker like Good or Peter Kassovitz, Right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 5: I mean you've got, of course, the stock shot of
Speaker 5: the Eiffel Tower, but I love that too, when Sayda
Speaker 5: is like, oh watch this and he snaps his finger
Speaker 5: like he's going to turn off the Eiffel Tower, and
Speaker 5: he does it a couple times and they're just like, oh,
Speaker 5: get the fuck out of here, and then they all
Speaker 5: walk away and then the tower goes and it's just like, yeah,
Speaker 5: you can't really capture that magic.
Speaker 1: Sorry, that's a good point, you know.
Speaker 8: Should we can we talk more about Asterix. You've brought
Speaker 8: him up in your discussion of the goodar like Elements.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, that's right, that's right.
Speaker 5: He reminded me a little too of speaking of Tarantino,
Speaker 5: of Paul Thomas Anderson and the character that Alfa Molina
Speaker 5: plays in Bookie Nights where they go into that strange
Speaker 5: space and this guy's just unhinged and you're just like, oh, man,
Speaker 5: get the fuck out of there. This guy is no good.
Speaker 5: And then when they find out that the weed that
Speaker 5: they sold them was shit anyway, it's like you came
Speaker 5: all this way to buy weed from this asshole. But yes,
Speaker 5: Astris is fascinating to me, and the whole them trying
Speaker 5: to even find his place. That's such an ordeal that
Speaker 5: they had to go through.
Speaker 4: It coded a gay, right, very very gay, and to
Speaker 4: me that's of course, like what hangs over the film
Speaker 4: is the possibility the very homosocial connection between the three men.
Speaker 1: But I think the possibility of a gay connection between
Speaker 1: them is always hint is hinted that but very very sadly,
Speaker 1: and it becomes solidified in the character of us and
Speaker 1: I wish that had been export a little bit more
Speaker 1: on that in a film. It's making them kind of
Speaker 1: a cartoon character who literally a cartoon character who just
Speaker 1: disappears in a film.
Speaker 8: I think there's a great opportunity to do like a
Speaker 8: nuanced sexy gala hen like I would love to see
Speaker 8: that personally. Asterix is like Kasovitz's Skinhead. I think they're
Speaker 8: kind of two reflective versions of Vince's identity. And what
Speaker 8: I went talking about the Skinheads, there's this we see
Speaker 8: Vince and the Skinhead from the back, and their heads
Speaker 8: look almost identical, and I think it's drawing a parody
Speaker 8: between Kassovitz's Skinhead and Vince. And they're also really mirrored
Speaker 8: when they're both coughing and vomiting at the end of
Speaker 8: that sequence. They're doing it in the same way on
Speaker 8: like opposite sides of the screen, but at the same height.
Speaker 8: But Asterix is sort of also an interesting, an interesting
Speaker 8: parallel of Vince, Like Strix is also doing this kind
Speaker 8: of goofy posturing of non white masculinity with his nunchucks, right,
Speaker 8: and he's reckless and he's out of control, and he's
Speaker 8: like a heightened version of the qualities that are driving
Speaker 8: Vince apart from his friends. But unlike Vince, Asterix is
Speaker 8: totally in charge. He's at ease with his surroundings, with
Speaker 8: his body, with his gun, and Vince is chastised and
Speaker 8: infantilized for touching Astrix's gun, and Astix then immediately like
Speaker 8: grabs Vince's gun and reveals complete mastery over it. Right,
Speaker 8: he fools Vince into thinking that he's so tough he
Speaker 8: can play Russian roulette, and it completely invalidates any power
Speaker 8: that Vince felt. And Vince is like trying to practice
Speaker 8: tough guy de Niro masculinity. But Asterix gets to his
Speaker 8: lines first. He's like, are you aiming at me? Are
Speaker 8: you aiming at me? And so, yeah, I think it totally.
Speaker 8: It just serves to totally undermine Vince's like already tenuous
Speaker 8: grasp on masculinity and also to exacerbate the tensions between
Speaker 8: the male friends.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and I forgot that Vince actually pulls a gun
Speaker 5: on a cop as well, so it's twice that he
Speaker 5: is kind of thwarted. And with that one, I know,
Speaker 5: Hubert like pushes his arm like, don't shoot a cop
Speaker 5: kind of thing, like you said, he's in that peacekeeper
Speaker 5: role and talking again about the masculinity and the kind
Speaker 5: of homosocial aspects of this. I forgot about the whole
Speaker 5: thing where he's trying to Vince is trying to give
Speaker 5: Sayit a haircut and ends up fucking it up so
Speaker 5: much that said has to wear a hat through the
Speaker 5: rest of the movie pretty much. It's just like, this
Speaker 5: could be a tender scene, and it is kind of tender,
Speaker 5: but at the same time, he screws it up. He
Speaker 5: doesn't know how to use those clippers whatsoever and can't
Speaker 5: fix it, and I wouldn't trust him to fix it either.
Speaker 8: Yeah, Sayd is such a great character. I mean, of
Speaker 8: course the awards went to like the professional actor who's
Speaker 8: also white and comes from a filmmaking family. Right, Pasel
Speaker 8: got all the awards, but t Saekta, Maui and uber
Speaker 8: Kunde like totally deserved them. They're brilliant.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they're totally great in this and I tricked a
Speaker 1: little bit about them. The accurate place Sight has been
Speaker 1: in other films, right, what about that?
Speaker 5: Hubert has been in quite a few things, not very
Speaker 5: much that I've seen, definitely much more in the French
Speaker 5: or African milieu. But yes, said, eventually crossed over into
Speaker 5: American films, and when I show saw him show up
Speaker 5: in things like I think John Wick four or John
Speaker 5: Wick three, he's like the elder. And then he is
Speaker 5: in things like even g I Joe Rise of Cobra.
Speaker 5: I think so, yeah, he's definitely in. I think his
Speaker 5: most famous role for most Americans would be the role
Speaker 5: that he plays as one of the fighters that is
Speaker 5: alongside Wonder Woman in the Wonder Woman film, the first one.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this film is well known for launching that's on
Speaker 1: Cassel into the starsphere. And I think he great, but
Speaker 1: the other two should. Yeah, they deserve their place in
Speaker 1: their place in the firmament as well.
Speaker 5: I know that Hubert was in and The Constant Gardener,
Speaker 5: which I haven't seen yet because I just I don't
Speaker 5: think I can take two hours of watching somebody garden.
Speaker 8: One thing that I think said I don't fully appreciate
Speaker 8: and I wish I did, is the way that he's
Speaker 8: speaking Tissi. The three protagonists are speaking the language of
Speaker 8: the site, which is called TESSI. Right, and it's this
Speaker 8: like product of and you've probably know more about this
Speaker 8: Judith than I do, so like jump in and correct me.
Speaker 8: But it's it's been called semiotic warfare.
Speaker 5: Oh wow, oh yeah, cass Of, it's talked about that
Speaker 5: on the commentary.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 8: This way of speaking that shortens and reverses words and
Speaker 8: it plays with grammar and it infuses French with words
Speaker 8: from other languages. Is this like rejection of normative French, right,
Speaker 8: And it's really creative and it's really figurative, and it's
Speaker 8: really poetic, and it's this shared form of communication, right,
Speaker 8: So it really reverses the exclusion of inequity and excluding
Speaker 8: normative French. It reverses the exclusion from normative French society
Speaker 8: to say, like we have our own language and you
Speaker 8: can't understand. But it keeps getting because it's so prevalent
Speaker 8: in rap like, it keeps getting absorbed by mainstream French
Speaker 8: culture and so it has to keep rapidly evolving in response.
Speaker 1: And so that gets hard, right, it's.
Speaker 8: Hegemony, right, It sucks, but it was The film was
Speaker 8: deemed like totally incomprehensible to speakers of correct French, and
Speaker 8: they wanted they were like, let's use subtitles, and Castovitz
Speaker 8: was like, no, no, no, that's exoticism. But so what
Speaker 8: they did instead was use post synchronization to like clarify
Speaker 8: different expressions that were really important. But maybe I'm missing
Speaker 8: out on more misogyny, like I can I can live
Speaker 8: with that, but I do wish that I understood the
Speaker 8: language better because it's so sad to see they're saying like, oh,
Speaker 8: those pigs, and I'm like, no one talks like that anymore,
Speaker 8: Like it just makes it cute instead of relevant. I
Speaker 8: don't know.
Speaker 5: Kassowitz talks about this on the commentary that at the
Speaker 5: beginning they're talking about How's lavash and he's like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 5: that's how. We were referring to cops and I was like, oh, okay,
Speaker 5: so a different animal, right, But then when the the
Speaker 5: how shows up later in the city center, I was
Speaker 5: just like, is this a reference to that perhaps every where?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Yeah, oh yeah, Well it's a common expression in France,
Speaker 1: like all the that's like you're frustrated with something, you say,
Speaker 1: oh you know, oh the cow. It doesn't the same,
Speaker 1: but but it's a it's an idiom in French. In
Speaker 1: French that use, you know, quite commonly, and so to
Speaker 1: give that concrete form is I think it's funny, but
Speaker 1: it's also a sign of, you know, something completely off,
Speaker 1: like this way of reading adiomatic expressions that takes them literally.
Speaker 1: And there's some interesting plays with what's literal and what's
Speaker 1: what's figured, as in the film lou I supposedly speak
Speaker 1: fulent French, I am lost, and much of the dialogue
Speaker 1: in this film like you.
Speaker 9: Gott to move to the project, you gotta get some
Speaker 9: to exactly listening to Verlanon, Yeah, like you can get
Speaker 9: the burg comes from like mostly a switching.
Speaker 1: Of a hob but it's not really it's never quite literal.
Speaker 1: That's the thing, or for fun, but you know, it's
Speaker 1: it's hard to follow. And when they when they really
Speaker 1: do it, like if they talk about things other than
Speaker 1: the then I'm really I tend to be really color
Speaker 1: a loss. It's it's tough to follow.
Speaker 5: Is it kind of like a like the Cockney slang
Speaker 5: where there's substituting like the apples some pears and yeah, I.
Speaker 1: Love that ship.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I mean with my stupid American accident, I can't,
Speaker 8: I can't, I shouldn't and I can't approximate it, but yeah,
Speaker 8: it's it's so much cooler than that though, you know.
Speaker 5: Go hang out at the pub and just start thrown
Speaker 5: out like oh with that one. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 8: Even my partner would like you'd be like, no, I.
Speaker 5: Have the All right, let's go ahead and take a break,
Speaker 5: and we're going to play an interview with Jeanette Vincendo,
Speaker 5: the author of La from two thousand and five. It
Speaker 5: is a fantastic book all about Matthew Kassowitz's movie. And
Speaker 5: we'll be back with that right after these brief messages.
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Speaker 5: So I was very surprised to learn that you had
Speaker 5: written about that and then fantastic book, by the way,
Speaker 5: because I usually associate your taste more with Melville, you know,
Speaker 5: Pepe La, Monco, Brigite Bardeaux, and then Land just seems
Speaker 5: to be an outlier. But so I'm so curious, why
Speaker 5: did you choose to write about that.
Speaker 7: I chose to write about Latin because two reasons really.
Speaker 7: One is in terms of the cinema and what I
Speaker 7: was teaching that this is a film that students loved,
Speaker 7: you know, from the moment it came out, and I've
Speaker 7: been teaching it almost not so, I mean i've stopped recently,
Speaker 7: but you know, for decades really, and I was always
Speaker 7: surprised at how relevant it seemed to students. But when
Speaker 7: I first decided to write about it, which was, you know,
Speaker 7: a few years after the film had come out, I
Speaker 7: first wrote an article in a collection in two thousand
Speaker 7: and then I turned it into then expanded it into
Speaker 7: a book which came out in two thousand and five.
Speaker 7: And the other, the other you know, the interest of
Speaker 7: film and the fact that it never ceased to interest
Speaker 7: what myself but also the students. I thought, there's something
Speaker 7: interesting in this film. The other reason was more to
Speaker 7: biographical is because I was myself brought up in the
Speaker 7: suburbs of Paris, and I was seeing this new phenomenon
Speaker 7: of what people call the film the Bonnieu, that Bonneu
Speaker 7: being the suburbs of Paris, and I thought, well, you know,
Speaker 7: I know about the Bonnieux myself, because that's where I
Speaker 7: come from. And I was interested to confront my own
Speaker 7: knowledge with the representation in the film, if you like.
Speaker 7: And then when I wrote the book, as you may know,
Speaker 7: if you there's an annex where I talk about visiting
Speaker 7: the place where it was shot, which was a bit traumatic.
Speaker 7: And I realized then that the kind of suburbs that
Speaker 7: I had known was very different from you know, because
Speaker 7: when I was a child, it was earlier, and the
Speaker 7: sociological makeup of the Parisian suburbs was different. So, and
Speaker 7: I have more recently I've written as about other films
Speaker 7: are set in the suburbs of Paris. So as I said,
Speaker 7: it's both, I suppose it's both a scholarly interest because
Speaker 7: of the films and especially Latin that's a particularly interesting film,
Speaker 7: and also in my own history, you know, with a
Speaker 7: way of kind of looking at it with that perspective.
Speaker 5: It's interesting. We recently spoke about Two Men in Manhattan,
Speaker 5: and that begins with that story kind of the United
Speaker 5: Nations and showing what it is it the Jewish boy,
Speaker 5: the Italian boy, and the Irish boy. And then you
Speaker 5: come over to l and you get the Arab man,
Speaker 5: the Jewish man, and the Black man, the African man,
Speaker 5: and they have that kind of mix again, is very interesting,
Speaker 5: but such a such a world away from where we
Speaker 5: were in eighteen fifty nine.
Speaker 7: Absolutely, yes, And until the nineteen sixties, the French suburbs
Speaker 7: were you know, more like villagers around the city and
Speaker 7: then they hugely expanded. It expanded in the nineteen sixties
Speaker 7: because of the modernization of France and the kind of
Speaker 7: economic boom of what is known as the Tone Glorieus.
Speaker 7: The thirty glorious years were you know, between basically the
Speaker 7: end of the war and the early nineteen seventies, and
Speaker 7: with General Dogaul and the fact that they needed to
Speaker 7: house all these these new population, so and my parents
Speaker 7: were sort of typical of an earlier immigration, if you like,
Speaker 7: which was they came from the country, and so there
Speaker 7: was what was called rural exodus after the war, where
Speaker 7: a lot of people left farming, which was the case
Speaker 7: of my father my father and moved to Paris so
Speaker 7: to and usually at beginning to the suburbs of Paris.
Speaker 7: So that's when they expanded it. And in the nineteen
Speaker 7: sixties and seventies, this kind of more brutalist architecture we
Speaker 7: associate with the suburbs of Paris now with sort of
Speaker 7: impoverished population living in the kind of places we see
Speaker 7: in Latin has become a sort of synonymous with the
Speaker 7: suburbs of Paris, with the Bolieu. But in the early
Speaker 7: earlier times it was it was, it was kind of
Speaker 7: very different. So so yeah, so when we see the
Speaker 7: in Latin, which was made in nineteen ninety five, there
Speaker 7: is this trio of young men as and white Jewish,
Speaker 7: North African BIRR and black and it corresponds partly to
Speaker 7: some extent. Although the film is very is tragic. Of course,
Speaker 7: there's a tragic ending and it depicts very difficult social background.
Speaker 7: It's also there's a kind of utopian aspect to it,
Speaker 7: in the sense that even though those three young men
Speaker 7: are from different ethnic backgrounds, it's not a film about racism.
Speaker 7: It isn't a film about them having difficulty with each
Speaker 7: other because they are Black, White, Jewish and North African.
Speaker 7: So and that is I think a French specificity, let's say,
Speaker 7: compared to American films that deal with you know, the projects,
Speaker 7: as you say, in American cinema, that tend to emphasize
Speaker 7: more racial conflict, the French films tend not to so
Speaker 7: with Latin, these three young men are more like a
Speaker 7: unified group fighting against the police, fighting against the adults,
Speaker 7: fighting against women. But they unify, they're not fighting against
Speaker 7: each other in not in terms of their racial and
Speaker 7: ethnic makeup. So and that is that's a very important
Speaker 7: aspect of the film, but one that is I think,
Speaker 7: very very specifically French.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it was an interesting time that there was Latin
Speaker 5: happening in France and just a few years prior we
Speaker 5: had Minister Society and Boys in the Hood In the US,
Speaker 5: were there more benleueu films? Was that kind of a
Speaker 5: subgenre for a little while in France?
Speaker 7: Yes, there were well, in fact, just before Latin, just
Speaker 7: before the nineteen nineties, in the nineteen eighties, there was
Speaker 7: the beginning of another subject on which is called the
Speaker 7: cinema bur sort of films made by filmmakers of North
Speaker 7: African origin and that are always sat in the in
Speaker 7: the suburbs and the and the cinema bur was is
Speaker 7: an important movement, and there's been a lot of attention
Speaker 7: about academics and people writing about those films. Nevertheless, they
Speaker 7: were not particularly popular with audiences, and so after that,
Speaker 7: with Latin, you begin to have more of a more
Speaker 7: popular filmmaking. But what is interesting is that I think
Speaker 7: Latin created a sub genre in which it is almost unique,
Speaker 7: because although there have been others that followed Liane, actually
Speaker 7: none of them has ever equalled its level of the
Speaker 7: combination of kind of sociological interest and popular success. And
Speaker 7: until possibly in twenty nineteen, there's a film called Limiserable
Speaker 7: by director called Largely, which is often seen as a
Speaker 7: kind of a new Lain, which, in extent, to some
Speaker 7: extent it is. But I think interestingly, Laine continues, sorry
Speaker 7: let me start it, Lane continues to be celebrated, and
Speaker 7: as you know, this year is the thirtieth anniversary of
Speaker 7: its making since it came out in May nineteen ninety five.
Speaker 7: In May of this year it will be the thirtieth anniversary,
Speaker 7: and the celebration has already begun, including there was a
Speaker 7: stage musical that Mattyo Kasovitch put together and which I
Speaker 7: saw in Paris at the end of twenty twenty four.
Speaker 7: So that film has been endlessly worshiped and celebrated and imitated,
Speaker 7: but somehow never quite equaled. So you have derivations if
Speaker 7: you like. There are comedies mostly and things like that,
Speaker 7: but not somehow, I think it really remains unique.
Speaker 5: I have to ask you about the musical. Can you
Speaker 5: tell me what a musical version of Land is like?
Speaker 7: Well, it was very interesting, I mean, and we had
Speaker 7: a little surprise because at the end of the show
Speaker 7: suddenly two or three people jumped on stage and there
Speaker 7: was Matyo Kasovic himself and his children. I think, well
Speaker 7: what they did was that there was a very it's
Speaker 7: quite interesting background with using projection and so on, and
Speaker 7: of the decor which looks like the environment in line
Speaker 7: and the buildings and so on. It's quite similar. And
Speaker 7: then a number of scenes are expanded if you like.
Speaker 7: And sung. So people are singing and dancing. The dancing
Speaker 7: is more as you can imagine, more like break dance,
Speaker 7: and the music, you know, it's along the lines of
Speaker 7: rap and hip hop music. It was actually rather interesting.
Speaker 7: Some of the scenes were really very much like lifted
Speaker 7: out of the film and very very similar. One difference,
Speaker 7: I think one thing they've tried to address is the
Speaker 7: recurrent criticism that Latin is again is very much a
Speaker 7: male orientation. So we have these three male heroes and
Speaker 7: then the women very marginal to the story. In that sense,
Speaker 7: it's quite similar to the Jean Pierre Melville film, and
Speaker 7: so there is for example, there was a very attractive
Speaker 7: scene with a female singer, which definitely was not in
Speaker 7: the film, so so, but again it remained marginal. It's
Speaker 7: quite so. The visuals is it's in the visual spectacle
Speaker 7: a vocla and through the decor. And then there were
Speaker 7: scenes with people acting out scenes from the film, you know,
Speaker 7: with three young men from you know, as you have
Speaker 7: them in the film. I think it was quite successful.
Speaker 7: It doesn't really add much to the film, but if
Speaker 7: you're interested in the film, it's it's worth seeing. I
Speaker 7: know that he was intending to take it to. It
Speaker 7: has a rather limited run in Paris, and it was
Speaker 7: intending to take it to provincial cities. I think it
Speaker 7: did quite well. I don't know if it's yeah, I
Speaker 7: had gone elsewhere, but it's it's certainly, you know, I
Speaker 7: think yet another manifestation to me of the fact that
Speaker 7: the film itself has become like a myth as well.
Speaker 7: It's sort of it's no longer just a film. And
Speaker 7: when it first came out in nineteen ninety five, it
Speaker 7: was called a phenomendo associatives social phenomenon because it went
Speaker 7: beyond being just a film.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 7: Politicians watched it in the Elizi Palace, it was shown
Speaker 7: in schools they you know, and and as I know
Speaker 7: from my own experience of having taught it at university
Speaker 7: where I was teaching, but also I was invited to
Speaker 7: many schools in the UK to talk about it because
Speaker 7: it was on the program first students doing French to
Speaker 7: go to university. So I went to a lot of
Speaker 7: schools and over the years I realized at one point
Speaker 7: that I was talking to students who were not were
Speaker 7: not born when the film came out, and yet they
Speaker 7: loved it. And one of the questions I always asked
Speaker 7: them is why is this film relevant to you? You know,
Speaker 7: what do you see in it? Because it's an old film.
Speaker 7: For them, it was like a very old film, black
Speaker 7: and white with no stars. Well, of course one of them,
Speaker 7: Van sant Castell, became a star thanks to it, and
Speaker 7: they all thought it was it spoke to them that
Speaker 7: it was still relevant to them. And these were people
Speaker 7: from you know, rather privileged schools in London in the UK,
Speaker 7: not at all from the same background as in the film,
Speaker 7: and yet they saw it as talking to them, these
Speaker 7: young people, their anxieties and the fact that the film
Speaker 7: is very thrilling, it creates this kind of urgency in
Speaker 7: a number of ways. They also thought that, of course
Speaker 7: the black and white images made it more timeless, which
Speaker 7: is true. So with my students we did experiments of
Speaker 7: looking on the DVD. You can find some scenes in
Speaker 7: color as it was originally shot. And when you say
Speaker 7: it in color, all the students said, oh, my god,
Speaker 7: it looks so dated, and partly because they thought, oh
Speaker 7: that the track suits look completely dated because they escaped me.
Speaker 7: But they could see that and they said, in black
Speaker 7: and white it makes it kind of yeah, timeless and
Speaker 7: so both socially relevant but also timeless. And I think
Speaker 7: that's one reason why the film is done so well.
Speaker 5: It's really got to be tough for anybody picking up
Speaker 5: those roles in the musical or anyplace else just to
Speaker 5: I mean, like you said, this movie made Vincent Cassal
Speaker 5: a star. I mean said and Hubert are no slouches either.
Speaker 5: All these performances are amazing and to try to hold
Speaker 5: the candle to those has to be very difficult.
Speaker 7: Well, of course why one reason I think it worked
Speaker 7: is that when you're seeing a musical on stage, your
Speaker 7: perspective is very different because you're seeing an ensemble, and
Speaker 7: they did try and have they were because they used
Speaker 7: video projection as well. There were a few moments when
Speaker 7: you had some close ups and you could see their faces,
Speaker 7: but most of the time it was in a place
Speaker 7: called Lassene Musical in Paris, which is an enormous concert
Speaker 7: hole which usually is used often for any kind of
Speaker 7: musical concert. It's enormous, so what you see is an
Speaker 7: enormous stage with a lot of people. So what the
Speaker 7: musical did was more emphasized the ensemble and the sort
Speaker 7: of crowd scenes and little groups in so in that sense,
Speaker 7: the actors were not trying to compete with the three
Speaker 7: actors in Lie because they were not individualized in the
Speaker 7: same way as they are in the film.
Speaker 5: You mentioned the movie actually being played at the palace
Speaker 5: and this kind of political I don't want to say
Speaker 5: political theater, but just this political interest in the movie.
Speaker 5: So I'm sure by in eighteen eighty six everything was
Speaker 5: good and by twenty twenty five everyone's happy in not
Speaker 5: ban Leu.
Speaker 7: Yes, when the film came out in ninety five, it
Speaker 7: was considered to be a revelation. Oh now finally we
Speaker 7: know what's wrong with the volo, which of course is ridiculous.
Speaker 7: But you have to understand that in Paris. Probably Paris
Speaker 7: is very unusual city in that sense of there is
Speaker 7: a very star division between the city, you know, the
Speaker 7: city of light and the beautiful tourist city with all
Speaker 7: the monuments and so on, and what the French called
Speaker 7: the city antra muros, you know, within the walls. Because
Speaker 7: the Peri film around the city, it's like the city
Speaker 7: is still medieval thought, which is separated from what's outside.
Speaker 7: And there's a real division culturally and especially between the
Speaker 7: center and the suburb, and recurrently, politicians since the nineteen
Speaker 7: sixties are saying, we're going to solve the problem of
Speaker 7: the volume, and then occasionally a film like that comes
Speaker 7: out which they use as an excuse in a way
Speaker 7: to say, oh my god, now we know what the
Speaker 7: problem is and we're going to solve it, and of
Speaker 7: course they don't. And when I was very both amused
Speaker 7: and depressed to see that when Lemishrab came out in
Speaker 7: twenty nineteen, exactly the same thing happened. So in nineteen
Speaker 7: ninety five was Jacques Chiracus president, and you know, he
Speaker 7: made his ministers watch the film, saying, you know, look
Speaker 7: at this, you're going to know what to do. And
Speaker 7: then in twenty nineteen when Le miss Arabs came out,
Speaker 7: Emandel Macran did the same. At the same time as
Speaker 7: he didn't do anything to solve it. And so there
Speaker 7: is a kind of recurrent failure if you like toss.
Speaker 7: Of course, the problems are addressed, but they are enormous.
Speaker 7: I mean, you also have to remember that the population
Speaker 7: of inner Paris is actually quite small compared to the
Speaker 7: massive population outside. Things are trying, the politicians are trying
Speaker 7: to change things, and in particular, there's a project now
Speaker 7: running for a few years and was actually boosted by
Speaker 7: the Olympics, which is called the Grand Paris, and the
Speaker 7: Grand Paris is trying to break down that division between
Speaker 7: inner Paris and the suburbs, but it's very difficult to do.
Speaker 7: So they're created a lot of new metro lines and
Speaker 7: of connections that are trying to to break that that fortification,
Speaker 7: if you like. Although the fortification around barriers technically have
Speaker 7: gone for you know, they've been gone for a long time,
Speaker 7: for a century, they still exist in a way culturally speaking.
Speaker 7: And what's quite interesting is when you watch films set
Speaker 7: in the bolieu which are not like La and We
Speaker 7: like more middle class volume people always characters always justifying
Speaker 7: why they are in the value. It's like, why would
Speaker 7: you not be in Paris, because that's obviously where everybody
Speaker 7: wants to be, And so it is a massive social
Speaker 7: and economic problem. And at the same time as a
Speaker 7: film like la And has become it's become a sort
Speaker 7: of shorthand to say this is the volue, but you
Speaker 7: also have to remember that it represents only part of it.
Speaker 7: It represents the more dysfunctional parts of it, which now
Speaker 7: tends to be have a higher immigrant population, poorer population,
Speaker 7: less good habitat and so on. And of course there
Speaker 7: are a lot of other suburbs that are not like that,
Speaker 7: or even within the same place, as I know, because
Speaker 7: some of my family still lives the suburbs of Paris.
Speaker 7: You might have some very nice areas with small houses
Speaker 7: and leafy areas, and then there will be a project,
Speaker 7: as in Latin, in another place in the same city.
Speaker 7: And so French politicians, especially if they work in the suburbs,
Speaker 7: they're often very fed up with the representation of the
Speaker 7: suburbs always violent as in Latin if you like, where
Speaker 7: there's going to be clashes with the police and violence
Speaker 7: and riots. So it's it's part is the reality of
Speaker 7: some of it, but it's not the entire reality, of course,
Speaker 7: But it's the power of that film to have become
Speaker 7: the sort of you know, when you talk about the Bonnieux,
Speaker 7: people think, oh Latin, yes.
Speaker 5: Peter Vinson, I'm curious, what are you working on these days?
Speaker 7: I think last time I told I spoke to you,
Speaker 7: I said the same, But I am truly finishing that.
Speaker 7: A book about a French filmmaker called Claude Tolara, who
Speaker 7: was made a lot of films in the classic very
Speaker 7: well made dramas and costume films in the nineteen forties
Speaker 7: and fifties and also the nineteen sixties less successfully, he
Speaker 7: made a lot of films. He made it more than
Speaker 7: forty films. So I'm kind of struggling to contain it,
Speaker 7: but I've almost finished, and funnily enough, in my research
Speaker 7: I came he made it. One of the films he
Speaker 7: made was called in the fifties, it's called The Bon
Speaker 7: Dieu san Confession, which is difficult that doesn't have an
Speaker 7: English title, but it takes place during the war, and
Speaker 7: it represents a Jewish character in a fairly racist way.
Speaker 7: And I discovered include to left massive archive at the
Speaker 7: Swiss Cinematic in Lauwsanne, where I did research for it,
Speaker 7: and I found a telegram from chan Pierre Melville which said,
Speaker 7: I admire your work, but I'm really disgusted by the
Speaker 7: way you represented that Jewish character in this film. And
Speaker 7: I mean his right, he was right, and I mean
Speaker 7: Jopiamdy was Jewish himself, and so but it was quite
Speaker 7: a nice bringing of the two together. But anyway, I've
Speaker 7: almost finished that, and then I'm writing a little book
Speaker 7: for the British Film Institute on Jolie Goda film called
Speaker 7: Le Mes prix Contempt, which is a film I like
Speaker 7: very much, and partly because of Go Down, partly because
Speaker 7: of Brigitbado. So I'm kind of be moving into a
Speaker 7: very different kind of territory.
Speaker 5: I have to tell you, I can't wait to read
Speaker 5: both of those. I'm very excited for both of those projects. So, man,
Speaker 5: do you have dates in mind or just sometime in
Speaker 5: twenty twenty, Yes.
Speaker 7: I would say certainly the nah with hoping to give
Speaker 7: them manuscript in in April, so that would be I'm
Speaker 7: really on the last on his last films, which is
Speaker 7: rather difficult because they're they're much less good than some
Speaker 7: of them than the ones he made in the forties
Speaker 7: and fifties. The great film So which he's known then incoding.
Speaker 7: One of them, which is one of my favorite terms,
Speaker 7: is called La traversee de Paris and sort of crossing Paris,
Speaker 7: but sometimes it was called it's nineteen fifty six film,
Speaker 7: and it was called Pig across Paris because two characters
Speaker 7: it's like two men in Paris and one of them
Speaker 7: is Jean Gappa and the other one is Bourville and
Speaker 7: they transport black market pork the city at night. So
Speaker 7: it's a very dark comedy. It's very very good, and
Speaker 7: that is one of Outla's best films. But so yeah,
Speaker 7: so he made some great films, but the end of
Speaker 7: his career is, you know, is not so good. So
Speaker 7: I still have to talk about every film.
Speaker 5: So well, I hope we can have you back next
Speaker 5: year and have you talk about both of those movies.
Speaker 5: We'll talk about the filmmaker and maybe talk about park
Speaker 5: Over Parents and then let me pre Yeah, I would
Speaker 5: love to and let you know.
Speaker 7: And it's thank you for very nice talking to you anyways.
Speaker 5: It is always such a pleasure. I really appreciate you.
Speaker 7: You're welcome. Thank you very much.
Speaker 5: Oh all right, we are back, and we were talking
Speaker 5: about l En going back to the Astrask character. The
Speaker 5: other thing I found interesting about that too, is that
Speaker 5: there's that screen in his apartment where it's the old
Speaker 5: lady who's yelling at him, and I can only assume
Speaker 5: that that's his mother yelling like what are you doing
Speaker 5: bringing all these strange people into the house kind of thing.
Speaker 8: The concierge, just another woman who's an obstacle, right.
Speaker 11: I know, yeah, and older woman really except for I
Speaker 11: don't think that his grandmother is though horrible, but.
Speaker 1: The women are you never see except for the sisters.
Speaker 1: You never see women of equivalent age to did the
Speaker 1: three main characters. I don't think.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And I screwed up before I said that we
Speaker 5: saw Sayed's house and his sister or mother Auntie Sewing,
Speaker 5: but that was Hubert's so I apologize for that. So yeah,
Speaker 5: to your point from earlier, Lou, I don't think we
Speaker 5: ever do get to see Said's place.
Speaker 8: We see thing going with his brother and sisters. His
Speaker 8: sister is like out with her friends and he's like,
Speaker 8: you need to go back home, and I'm like a great, yeah, Oh.
Speaker 1: Could we talk about the rooftop. There's something about it
Speaker 1: that's so powerful, and yet it becomes completely decimated as
Speaker 1: soon as the police show up. But it's very much
Speaker 1: like the point of turveillent on the entire neighborhood. To
Speaker 1: be able to look down and watch in a way
Speaker 1: that they at the power they never really have in
Speaker 1: their everyday experience. And at the same time, there are
Speaker 1: the Ubert is an insider because they say he lives
Speaker 1: in the building, but Sayid is screamed at for a
Speaker 1: for grabbing a hot dog and kicked out of the
Speaker 1: space basically, but that's also a very I'm sorry I
Speaker 1: keep going back to this word, but it's a very
Speaker 1: utopian space that has destroyed utopian because it gives them
Speaker 1: advantage point that they otherwise do not have on what
Speaker 1: surrounds them, not only in terms of their compatriots in
Speaker 1: the CTA, but also in terms of what the police
Speaker 1: are doing. Gives them a vantage point from which to
Speaker 1: anticipate what the police are going to going to do next.
Speaker 1: I found that scene very beautiful and very and very moving.
Speaker 1: It's the same at the same time.
Speaker 8: Right, Yeah, it's a heterotopia, right, because the rules of
Speaker 8: order are reversed, right. They're during the surveillance, like you say, yeah,
Speaker 8: we do get these brief moments of pleasure and bonding
Speaker 8: in the rooftop and on in the park when they're
Speaker 8: up high, and it's also a heterotopia because they can
Speaker 8: see the skinheads down below and yell at them. And
Speaker 8: also during the most famous scene for me is the
Speaker 8: Nicla police scene where the DJ is playing and the
Speaker 8: camera sort of its sores above the scene and it's
Speaker 8: really making the ct beautiful from this angle above the rooftops,
Speaker 8: and it's sort of briefly trying to gesture at there's
Speaker 8: longing for escape, but it never really fulfills that desire,
Speaker 8: and it also seems to be throughout the film we
Speaker 8: hear police helicopters over the city, but Lasovitz puts his
Speaker 8: camera on a helicopter and it's like he's trying to
Speaker 8: outline like a briff free or a perimeter of space,
Speaker 8: of protected space for this moment. But again, it doesn't
Speaker 8: last long. Nothing pleasurable, less long.
Speaker 1: I have to land. Yeah, the helicopic song.
Speaker 8: As well, Like it's just it's awesome.
Speaker 5: Yeah to mix, I don't remember who does boo that's
Speaker 5: the sound of the police, that one with Edith Piare.
Speaker 5: I mean, that's fantastic.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's amazing, that's fabulous, And I.
Speaker 5: Forgot about that. The scene too where the Said and
Speaker 5: Hubert are eventually captured by the cops after the whole
Speaker 5: Astis incident, and we don't I don't think we see
Speaker 5: Vin's run away, but we kind of cut back to
Speaker 5: them and it's just the two of them, and they're
Speaker 5: being basically tortured at the police station, meanings slapped around
Speaker 5: and threatened and just you know, kind of reminds me
Speaker 5: of any interaction I've had with police before. So I'm
Speaker 5: kind of in that at CAB school of thought myself.
Speaker 5: I'm not out hunting them like Vince is. Kind of
Speaker 5: again with that posturing, and what does he do. He
Speaker 5: goes hides out at the movies, you know. I mean,
Speaker 5: you could probably possibly say, because there is a somebody
Speaker 5: who is wearing a T shirt that says Elvis shot JFK,
Speaker 5: you could possibly say he's doing the Lee Harvey Oswald
Speaker 5: by hanging out at the movie theater while he's running away.
Speaker 5: But I think it's more of him just like fueling
Speaker 5: his his masculinity in this whole idea of like the
Speaker 5: posturing that we've been talking about, because it feels like
Speaker 5: he's fueled by movies. It feels like he would love
Speaker 5: to just pop in and go watch the Paulma's Scarface.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 5: It feels like he's one of those kids that just
Speaker 5: is like, oh yeah, I'm gonna take these monologues from
Speaker 5: the movies and make them my own and just you know,
Speaker 5: have the the Travis Pickle moment, have the say hello
Speaker 5: to my little friend moment, you know, just yeah, the
Speaker 5: Tony Montana type of things. That just feels like Vin's
Speaker 5: in a nutshell to me.
Speaker 1: It's very imaginary. Everything that appeals to him is it's
Speaker 1: never in terms of the grounded everyday life. It's always
Speaker 1: in it. He adopts it into his everyday life. That
Speaker 1: it's a total scam in some ways because he can
Speaker 1: never really deliver on it.
Speaker 8: The torture sequence, intercut with the movie watching sequence, is
Speaker 8: sort of interesting in that it really betrays, it really
Speaker 8: shows the Kassovitz's investment in in fact showing whiteness, and
Speaker 8: not in a critical way, but in privileging the perspectives
Speaker 8: of white men. Specifically because in both the sequences, in
Speaker 8: the torture sequence and in the cinema sequence, the camera
Speaker 8: remains so fixed on the eyes of white men, they
Speaker 8: receive the central framing of full human subjects Vince as
Speaker 8: he absorbs the film, and in the police station we
Speaker 8: hover around the face of a white rookie cop who's
Speaker 8: watching not a screen but the abuse of a bird
Speaker 8: and a black young man and the camera's fixed to
Speaker 8: just behind him as the cops demonstrate how to torture
Speaker 8: and humiliate Said with sexism and with racism and with
Speaker 8: real physical contact, And like, why do we never see
Speaker 8: from the perspective of Said or Ubert? Why is it
Speaker 8: important for us to remain locked in the rookie's perspective.
Speaker 8: I mean, we can ask this question and we can
Speaker 8: try to answer it, but regardless, the film really performs
Speaker 8: an active exclusion by denying as ubera INSIGHT's perspectives, and
Speaker 8: it just serves to align us with white men again
Speaker 8: as always.
Speaker 5: I'm really surprised we haven't talked about Abdel, who is
Speaker 5: the figure that we see throughout this entire film who
Speaker 5: was tortured by the cops and they try to visit
Speaker 5: him in the hospital. At one point we see a
Speaker 5: shot at the beginning of him. We see a shot
Speaker 5: when they go to visit that guy who's wearing that
Speaker 5: Elvis shot JFK T shirt. It looks like he's some
Speaker 5: sort of a fence because he's got all of these
Speaker 5: boxes in his apartment. I'm thinking that they're VCRs or
Speaker 5: whatever it is that would be good stolen goods. At
Speaker 5: the time, that we see that there as well. We
Speaker 5: see him. I mean that amazing shot when they were
Speaker 5: just waiting at the train station. It looks like they're
Speaker 5: waiting to go back to their home base. But we
Speaker 5: get that massive screen made of little screens and they're
Speaker 5: all watching that, and that's when they learned that Abdel
Speaker 5: has died. That's the thing that's hanging over this film
Speaker 5: so much. You and you mentioned do the right thing
Speaker 5: like that for me is the okay, you know, now,
Speaker 5: shit just got real after his death is kind of
Speaker 5: the Mookie throws the trash can type of moment. It's like, oh,
Speaker 5: we now are set on a new path. We have
Speaker 5: to get this vengeance of some sort. And of course
Speaker 5: it's empty. They don't do that at all, and if anything,
Speaker 5: Vince gets shot.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 8: But also like Abdel has never seen alive or heard from, right,
Speaker 8: He's a symbol, not a human. And Vince he really
Speaker 8: replaces Abdel in the narrative, right, it's Vince's death that
Speaker 8: needs revenging at the end. And I think Vince is
Speaker 8: really the Radio Rahem character. In another way, it's a
Speaker 8: way of asserting the primacy of the white Jewish male.
Speaker 5: That's really smart and especially like you're saying with the ring,
Speaker 5: and that really does tie him to that radio Raheem character,
Speaker 5: who is interesting that he's kind of that that that
Speaker 5: character from Knight of the Hunter. You know, he's got
Speaker 5: the love and hate rings instead of the tattoos on
Speaker 5: his hands. So yeah, it's funny how these are all
Speaker 5: speaking to each other.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 8: There is no original gender, right, there is no original
Speaker 8: masculine form. Right, It's just an imitation of an imitation.
Speaker 8: And the problem is like the more you want an
Speaker 8: authentic gender, the more you have to go looking for it,
Speaker 8: and the less you're the less authentic you feel. You know.
Speaker 8: It's it's interesting and.
Speaker 5: It is funny too that they're at the train station
Speaker 5: and they were trying to catch the train, and so
Speaker 5: suddenly it becomes they're the they're the guys who are
Speaker 5: running with their pants around their ankles, unable to hop
Speaker 5: on that.
Speaker 8: Train, right, and they don't have our character trying to
Speaker 8: grab anyone's hand right there exactly.
Speaker 5: Yeah, Yeah, they were on their own at that point.
Speaker 5: That's when they finally get reunited with Vin's.
Speaker 1: Lind magically reappeaters at the station. I mean, I don't
Speaker 1: think they ever said, all, let's meet up at the
Speaker 1: train station, And of course it's a logical place because
Speaker 1: that's where they would get the trend to go home.
Speaker 5: But and that whole scene where they're trying to hot
Speaker 5: wire the car and that that drunk is fantastic. I
Speaker 5: love that drunk.
Speaker 8: Yes, yeah, I am upset. Okay, side note, I'm obsessed
Speaker 8: with Titan, and his character in Titan is my favorite
Speaker 8: film dad of all time. And I was watching Latin
Speaker 8: and I was like Vincent Linden and I was like, no, no, no,
Speaker 8: he would have been too famous in ninety five. He
Speaker 8: wouldn't have done this film. And then we hear on
Speaker 8: the commentary that like he just really wanted to be
Speaker 8: in this film and drunk on this night in the street,
Speaker 8: and he was like, great, son, he's so good.
Speaker 1: I love him too, He's really he's great. Yeah.
Speaker 5: I mean it is just a comedy of errors, and
Speaker 5: I love when he's there just you know, taking the
Speaker 5: not necessarily taking a bullet, but you know, being that
Speaker 5: that stopper for the police to allow the three friends
Speaker 5: to escape from that.
Speaker 8: Earlier you mentioned Edith Piaff, and I came across this
Speaker 8: really interesting essay by David Peterson, who argued that Classivitz's
Speaker 8: very stylized approach to realism and his representation of social
Speaker 8: tension is best understood as a reference to thirties French
Speaker 8: poetic realism, so films like Pepello Moco and films that
Speaker 8: star Jean Gabba. And one of the ways that he
Speaker 8: argues this is that poetic realist films of the thirties
Speaker 8: often use chanson rists with these like working class ballads
Speaker 8: to convey emotion, and Peterson argues that the rap and
Speaker 8: the soul songs in Latin Like serve the same function
Speaker 8: to express experiences of like urban working class life and
Speaker 8: to create a sense of community. But of course Latin
Speaker 8: also incorporates one of the most famous chanson realists of
Speaker 8: all time, which is the Edith pf song used in
Speaker 8: the film. But that song was apparently once used to
Speaker 8: signify a lack of regret about the violence of the
Speaker 8: Algerian War and about the French colonial enterprise generally, and
Speaker 8: so it's really interesting that in Kassiwitz's film, the generations
Speaker 8: of French citizens descended from France's former colonies suggest that
Speaker 8: they have no regrets about violent street action, right. And
Speaker 8: I think it kind of points to the irony too
Speaker 8: of like France as a country that really brides itself
Speaker 8: on revolution, right, and the riots can be understood as
Speaker 8: a form of revolution, but of course it's not. It
Speaker 8: doesn't count. It can't be glorified if it's done by
Speaker 8: these racialized others in the margins, right. And yeah, it's
Speaker 8: it was really interesting. I loved this essay, was sid
Speaker 8: I just googled it. I think it was on JS store. Yeah,
Speaker 8: I can send you then.
Speaker 1: I'll find it. I know David Peterson, he does really
Speaker 1: good good things. Yeah, I mean, no one, It's not
Speaker 1: like I talk to him all the time, but I've
Speaker 1: met him.
Speaker 8: Well tell him, I'm a f if you do.
Speaker 5: Going back to all the way back to that reflective thing,
Speaker 5: and I was talking about the reflection of the earth.
Speaker 5: I think that's from that that billboard that they see.
Speaker 5: And I want to say it's a few times, but
Speaker 5: it's definitely towards the end when they're in Paris and
Speaker 5: they say, what does it The world belongs? The world
Speaker 5: is yours and yours and siety changes it to the
Speaker 5: world as ours. And I thought that was really nice.
Speaker 5: And I think that's where that that earth reflection comes from, right.
Speaker 8: And of course it's a scarface reference as well. But
Speaker 8: also in metis also known as cafeole Becass if it's
Speaker 8: his first feature. It also opens with the image of
Speaker 8: the world, and we hear sort of different like radio
Speaker 8: frequencies in different languages as the camera kind of traverses
Speaker 8: the globe. And I think, to me, that really speaks
Speaker 8: to the idea that class if it's really wants to
Speaker 8: be making a political message. But he just lacks any
Speaker 8: kind of real grasp of history, any kind of acknowledgment
Speaker 8: of his own misogyny. Maybe he just lacks contextualization that
Speaker 8: would give his films a real political punch.
Speaker 5: The only time that Vince is successful shooting someone is
Speaker 5: in his fantasies, when he's fantasizing at the train station
Speaker 5: about shooting those cops, holding his fingers up like guns
Speaker 5: and blasting that pop through the window. And again it's
Speaker 5: Hubert that comes up and smacks him in the back
Speaker 5: of the head. It's just like, don't do that.
Speaker 8: Yeah, the use of finger guns is it's an interesting
Speaker 8: way that the film talks about the way that these
Speaker 8: men are infantilized, right, they're excluded from the roof. When
Speaker 8: the cops come, they have to go down to the playground,
Speaker 8: and there's that excellent scene. Really one of the only
Speaker 8: moments in the film where the film critiques stereotyped, biased,
Speaker 8: sensationalized media representation of the Banlu is when these reporters
Speaker 8: drive by and they look down at the playground and
Speaker 8: they're asking these boys questions and Ubert is like, we're
Speaker 8: not TYOHI right, We're not a safari park. And it's
Speaker 8: the film really critiquing the way that these young men
Speaker 8: are presented as savages in mainstream media. And that was
Speaker 8: such a beautiful moment, and it's one of the only
Speaker 8: times I think there is real direct critique in the film.
Speaker 1: But yeah, the.
Speaker 8: Finger guns, it's a childlike gesture. But then in the
Speaker 8: cinema we also see a kid watching Vince watching Vonce
Speaker 8: do his finger guns. And it's so funny because it's
Speaker 8: a moment where the film feels really conservative. It's like, oh,
Speaker 8: these kids are watching each other. You know, they're going
Speaker 8: to grow up to be violent. But I mean that
Speaker 8: is kind of the message of the film, right, And
Speaker 8: it was an interesting inclusion.
Speaker 5: I thought, yeah, which again reminds me of Taxi Driver,
Speaker 5: the way that Travis is sitting there watching that movie
Speaker 5: and then that will start like doing the finger guns
Speaker 5: at the movie screen. I mean, that is so Squoressi
Speaker 5: as well.
Speaker 8: And to speak about Taxi Driver, we should talk about
Speaker 8: Jennie Foster right, who apparently saw La n Yes right
Speaker 8: and thought the Americans need to see this, and she
Speaker 8: got it distributed in the US and she was like
Speaker 8: this huge promoter of the film, which is just a
Speaker 8: nice touch.
Speaker 1: It is, yeah, a knife connection, that's for sure.
Speaker 8: I've been doing a little programming lately and I stumbled
Speaker 8: across this film that I would really love to show
Speaker 8: with Lain and it's Alistyap's short documentary Toward Tenderness. It
Speaker 8: swims in the same themes as Latin, but it takes
Speaker 8: a very different approach. And so she's sort of she
Speaker 8: and her sister, who's a social worker, sort of like
Speaker 8: go out into a bandu and they interview young men
Speaker 8: and they sort of build empathy with them, build the
Speaker 8: viewers empathy with these men by asking them very gently
Speaker 8: and without judgment, whether they have the relationships that they
Speaker 8: want and what's preventing them from having these relationships. And
Speaker 8: the film ends by showing examples of love and connection
Speaker 8: in the Banvu. And so I think it's it would
Speaker 8: be really important companion to let end because it asked these,
Speaker 8: it asks men directly, like why can't you communicate with women?
Speaker 8: Idn't want to show them together?
Speaker 1: That'd be very interesting. I haven't seen that a month.
Speaker 5: No, it sounds fascinating, and yeah, that's so much the
Speaker 5: problem here, you know. And also just no women to
Speaker 5: talk to. Like I said, they're not on the streets.
Speaker 5: They're just hiding out someplace, or they're either at art
Speaker 5: galleries or at home sewing and.
Speaker 1: Waiting for the damn green pepper you booms, red naughty bear.
Speaker 1: I think it's yeah.
Speaker 8: He's afraid of his grandma's wrath, you know.
Speaker 5: And gosh, what a bourgeois art show that they're going to.
Speaker 5: I mean, the all of the art that is on
Speaker 5: the wall, it's all stark white canvases with things basically
Speaker 5: nailed to it, so like it looks like a little
Speaker 5: puppy dog or something. And there's the three or four
Speaker 5: water bottles that are painted white that are nailed to
Speaker 5: the or glued onto this canvas. I'm just like, all right,
Speaker 5: this is your your showing your opinion of modern art.
Speaker 5: It's I understand.
Speaker 8: And to have your dad be the gallery owner who's
Speaker 8: who just like shrugs complacently and he's just like the
Speaker 8: Malleys of the.
Speaker 1: Bum I think I love it nice.
Speaker 8: Yeah, And it goes back to what you were saying
Speaker 8: about surreality in the in the city.
Speaker 5: All right, We're going to take a break and play
Speaker 5: a preview for next week's show. Right after these brief messages.
Speaker 1: Your ticket for the funniest movie of the year, Airplane Too,
Speaker 1: the sequel I got smoking, not smoking first place coach economy.
Speaker 8: Airplane Too give you more.
Speaker 5: More action and more romance.
Speaker 1: The word is out. Airplane To the sequel, rated PG.
Speaker 5: Now playing at these fine theaters. That's right. We are
Speaker 5: shifting gears quite a bit, and we'll be discussing Airplane
Speaker 5: to the sequel next week. Until then, I want to
Speaker 5: thank my co host Judith and Lou. So, Lou, what
Speaker 5: is the latest with you? Oh?
Speaker 8: I just wrote an essay on trans feminism and the
Speaker 8: new wave of feminist body horror, which was just published
Speaker 8: in Siney Access, which is an academic journal that you
Speaker 8: can access for free online, and I mostly focused on
Speaker 8: the finish the Finnish film Hatching, which I really recommend,
Speaker 8: So anyone who likes body horror that's of interest maybe.
Speaker 8: I've also just curated a program of shorts of short
Speaker 8: films about ghosts for the Queer East Festival, which celebrates
Speaker 8: queer films from East and Southeast Asia. So I'll get
Speaker 8: to present my program in London in May and it'll
Speaker 8: travel around the UK and autumn and after that. I'm
Speaker 8: really excited about doing two writing collaborations, one on Theo
Speaker 8: Montoya's film on Hill sixty nine and another on Jane
Speaker 8: Showen Brune's Instant Cult to Hit I saw the TV Glow,
Speaker 8: both of which I'm so excited about. So that's that's
Speaker 8: the rest of my year.
Speaker 5: I would love to hear what you have to say
Speaker 5: about I saw the TV Glow, because I will admit
Speaker 5: when I saw it the first time, the messages just
Speaker 5: right over my head. I just completely was not getting it.
Speaker 5: I would love to hear your interpretation of that.
Speaker 8: Have me and MAXI, my colleague on we've both written
Speaker 8: about the film. We're a delight. I don't know I
Speaker 8: don't know what to say, but like, yeah, we would
Speaker 8: love to talk to you about that. And Maxi's a
Speaker 8: real cheat.
Speaker 5: Yeah, no, let's let's definitely do it.
Speaker 8: No, I just feel like a projection booth audience film
Speaker 8: like it would make sense for this.
Speaker 5: Totally agree. Yeah, that's great. And Judith, what's going on
Speaker 5: with you?
Speaker 1: Well, I'm getting ready to go to the Society for
Speaker 1: Cinema Media Studies conference in Chicago in three weeks, two weeks,
Speaker 1: two and a half weeks, and I'm getting a paper
Speaker 1: on It's a panel on movie theaters, and I'm getting
Speaker 1: a paper on the cinema Normandhi, which was one of
Speaker 1: the well it literally just closed last year, which is
Speaker 1: really sad. But as you know, the period that I'm
Speaker 1: I've been focusing on for way too many years in
Speaker 1: my life is the occupation and Normandy was one of
Speaker 1: the major outlets for occupation films during the during the war,
Speaker 1: and it was in the central occupied down of the
Speaker 1: city on the Chanzel d And so I am talking
Speaker 1: about how the movie theater that was used as a
Speaker 1: kind of stage for a number of collaborationist fantasies during
Speaker 1: the during the war. Everything that happened at the Cinema
Speaker 1: normal Dy was covered in collaborationist movie magazines. That's an
Speaker 1: interesting It was one of the first. Oh no, it
Speaker 1: wasn't one of the first, but it was one of
Speaker 1: the big so called atmospheric movie theaters in the city
Speaker 1: where it was. It was called Thenonde after the famous boat,
Speaker 1: and it was meant to evoke the feeling of being
Speaker 1: on a vacation on a courseboat. And the main room,
Speaker 1: which I cannot believe I never saw because by the
Speaker 1: time I lived in Paris, which was many, many years ago,
Speaker 1: the Cinema Normandy had been divided into individual theaters. Than
Speaker 1: any film I went to see at the Normandy was
Speaker 1: when one of those postage samp sized theaters. We had
Speaker 1: to trod down a whole bunch of stuff. I never
Speaker 1: saw the main theater, which it would make me very sad,
Speaker 1: but anyhow so I'm talking about the Citema during the war.
Speaker 5: Thanks again, folks for being on the show. Thanks to
Speaker 5: everybody for listening. If you want to hear more of
Speaker 5: me shooting off my mouth, check out some of the
Speaker 5: other shows that I work on. They are all available
Speaker 5: at Readingwaymedia dot com. Thanks especially to our Patreon community.
Speaker 5: If you want to join the community, visit patreon dot
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Speaker 5: projection booth take over the world.
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Speaker 2: By companies