All Slights Deserved

Marcel Ophüls' Oscar-winning documentary is a sprawling epic that seeks answers to questions both factual and philosophical. Through a composite of dozens of interviews with subjects in France, Germany and the Americas he builds a portrait of the career of Barbie, the Nazi war criminal dubbed the Butcher of Lyon, perhaps most infamous for his capture and torture of the French Resistance leader Jean Moulin. The director's diligent efforts to get to the bottom of the Moulin affair, and who may or may not have exposed him to the Nazis, make up much of the first half of the four and half hours. Even forty years after the event the wounds and recriminations continue to fester in the survivors and the testimonies suggest that the matter of collaboration is not quite as clear as one might imagine. It also touches upon Barbie's formative years and the first-hand accounts of those who suffered from his sadistic interrogation techniques. Yet perhaps more astonishing are the disc...

Seven Beauties is a film I feel I ought to have liked, or at least appreciated, more than I did. It's an epic, picaresque satire that touches upon subject matter that was still sensitive at the time, but there's an ugliness to it which I found difficult to reconcile. After an introduction that soliloquises ironically about the rise and fall of Mussolini and the indignities of the Second World War over old wartime footage, the story begins in somewhere in Germany shortly after the collapse of Italian fascism. Pasqualino (Giancarlo Giannini) and Francesco are two Italian soldiers fleeing the Nazis. During conversation Pasqualino reveals that he killed a man before the war and the narrative shifts into flashback of his earlier life as a hustler and dandy in Naples, where his life revolved around protecting the honour of his seven sisters. After killing a man who attempted to pimp one of these 'beauties' (they're anything but beautiful) he evades execution by feign...

A few years back Matthew Sweet wrote an excellent article about the decline in general awareness of great world cinema in our multi-channel age. It inspired as-yet-unfulfilled fantasy to have a conversation in a chip shop with a girl I'd never met before (or had I?) about Last Year At Marienbad . Were such an encounter to take place I suspect I might fall in love there and then. The movement amorphously defined as European 'art cinema' - particularly its golden era from the mid-fifties to the early seventies - is unquestionably my favourite, so I'll make no apologies for the fact it's going to crop up frequently in this blog. Taken as a whole it's a nexus of ideas and philosophies, yet with a shared conviction that film can, maybe should, be more than vicarious escapism. These are films that challenge your preconceptions; an incitement to thought. Sure, there's plenty of pretension along the way, but pro rata it probably comes out less than the dross Ho...