moving pictures
I've been busying myself with a long-overdue foray into the New Wave; and by that I mean Truffaut and Godard, not Duran Duran. Les Quatre Cent Coups was excellent—not so sure about À Bout de Souffle. Sure, the editing was interesting, and Jean Seberg is never more endearing than when she's speaking French with an atrocious accent, but after a while those meandering naturalistic speeches start to look like a thin cover for indifference. The French can't just make a gangster movie; they have to get existential about it, and everyone's so damned detached from his or her fate that you have to suspect Godard of being supremely detached from his characters. I don't know if the director playing a novelist who gets interviewed in one scene was supposed to be a stand-in for Godard or what, but after listening to a few of his insufferable pronouncements ("Eroticism is a form of love, and love is a form of eroticism") I wanted to hit him.
Anyway, I'm driving to Seattle today. Last summer Aimee and Matt clued me in that the same nasty bit of Guatemalan history I'm writing about was the subject of an hourlong documentary on PBS, but not having a television and not wanting to pay $250 for a video copy, I was stymied. Turns out they're showing it this afternoon at the University of Washington. Wait long enough and yea, an academy will provide.
