Autumn glow

Like Tickytocky, I am really struggling for blips at the moment. All the photos I took yesterday were dismissed as not being blipworthy. We had a good day though: visiting the archaeological site at the Clos de la Lombarde in Narbonne, before heading to the theatre for some films being shown as part of les Rencontres Cinématographiques, a local film festival. It was a Jacques Demy themed evening, starting with his first feature film Lola, followed by Jacquot de Nantes, a film about his childhood made by his wife Agnès Varda after his death. Both films were introduced by a man from the local cinema club, Michel Le Hérissé (wonderful name!) who was very impressive: he spoke about Demy without notes for a good twenty minutes and obviously had detailed knowledge of Nantes (where both films are set) and Demy himself.

I was fascinated by Demy's background: his father was a mechanic, owned a garage, and expected Jacques to follow in his footsteps. But from a very young age Jacques was fascinated by the cinema. He begged, borrowed, and traded projector, camera, and film -- even finding used 16 mm film in a scrapyard, scraping off the images, and then drawing individual frames directly onto the film to make an animation of a 1943 air raid on Nantes. Lacking any other resources, he created miniature cardboard marionettes in the attic and laboriously created frame-by-frame animations of them. Nothing could distract him from his desire to create, and he eventually convinced his parents to let him go to cinema school.

Lola was his first feature film, made in 1961. It was intended to be a technicolour musical, but the budget was so limited that it ended up in black and white, shot with a crew of just five, and filmed silently, the sound being added afterwards. He could afford Anouk Aimée for the role of Lola though and, importantly, Raoul Coutard, a star of the New Wave, for the cinematography. The black and white images are just superb -- a shock for someone who became known above all for his use of colour. Not only that, but when Quincy Jones, who had been booked for the music, had to leave France at short notice, Demy hired an unknown called Michel Legrand to write the music (the score was actually a strange mixture of Legrand, Beethoven, Bach, Vivaldi, a spot of jazz, and many popular songs).

And the rest is history. Except it isn't. Lola is a delightful -- and surprisingly louche -- film, and was critically acclaimed; he went on to make Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, which made him a global star and won the Palme d'Or in Cannes, and les Demoiselles de Rochefort. But then 1968 happened. Cinema in the 1970s was all about eroticism and violence, neither of which was Demy's style. He fell completely out of fashion, was unable to raise money for any of his projects, and even ended up directing a film of a popular Japanese comic strip about the French Revolution, which was never even released in France. I found it very sad to think of all that stifled potential; he lived for the cinema, and despite his talent and the critical acclaim for his films, he could not fulfill his visions. It must have been doubly frustrating to see his wife continuing to make films.

Anyway ... I'm glad we got to see Lola -- we really enjoyed it. Today was almost another blip-free day, but I liked the glow of this leaf ... it will do!