A Movie Buff’s Recommendations by Fernando Ganzo
Four standout movies for Fernando Ganzo, Deputy Editor-in-Chief of Cahiers du cinéma
ReadCahiers du cinéma n°662 - December 2010 (2010-12)Cahiers du cinéma
Fernando Ganzo's top picks
Fernando Ganzo has given us four instinctive recommendations for movies that made the cover of Cahiers du cinéma when released, and that touched him as a movie-lover. Here's his eclectic selection.
Cahiers du cinéma No. 154 - April 1964 (1964-04)Cahiers du cinéma
The Silence (1963)
Less revered than The Seventh Seal (1957) or Persona (1966) but just as popular with moviegoers, the 25th(!) movie by Swedish director Ingmar Bergman featured on the cover of Cahiers du cinéma in April 1964 (issue no. 154).
What the face of Gunnel Lindblom—who played Anna—doesn't say, is that when it was released in France, the movie was heavily censored, in particular several sex scenes. This gave the editorial team at the time a chance to recall how the obscene is a matter of mise-en-scène. "We mustn't forget that what would be considered pornographic, in the literal sense, in a general shot or from certain knowing angles, is not present here. The initial framing of the shot does not change, and what is shown is not directed at the voyeur. On the contrary, it is the introduction, through these cuts, of suspense that is reprehensible."
Cahiers du cinéma No. 277 - June 1977 (1977-06)Cahiers du cinéma
Le Théâtre des Matières (The Theater of Matters, 1977)
A collaborator with Cahiers du cinéma since 1964, Jean-Claude Biette was one of the many moviemakers who pushed the boundary between critiquing and production. Cahiers dedicated a cover to his first feature film as well as an interview.
Jean-Claude Biette discussed the difficulties of producing his first movie, and the clever strategy he devised with Paul Vecchiali, another director favored by the Cahiers, who was shooting his movie La Machine (The Machine) at the same time. "We made the two movies, one after the other, using the same assistants to prepare the two movies and using the same technical team. We decided to push this principle of identical elements to the extreme, since we practically had the same actors, the same camera roll, the same camera. … I really like working economically. It was to save time and travel that I came up with a key idea in the movie; for Hermann to live in his theater and bring his own four-poster bed down on stage to save on rent."
Cahiers du cinéma No. 287 - April 1978 (1978-04)Cahiers du cinéma
The Green Room (1978)
It's here through a single window of granite glass that Julien Davenne (François Truffaut himself) realizes the solitude his uninterrupted mourning confines him to.
It's a simple and effective mise-en-scène, typical of Truffaut's cinematic style, as Pascal Bonitzer points out in issue no. 288: "This story is so unique, so seemingly close to current concerns, so similar to its solitary hero—of course, there are some movies that resemble the characters who appear in them! … it is a true manifesto of cinema, and Truffaut is not only an auteur, actor, and character, he is also a critic; all his roles are knotted, so tightly braided, they're impossible to untangle."
Cahiers du cinéma n°330 - December 1981 (1981-12)Cahiers du cinéma
Francisca (1981)
Francisca, by Manoel de Oliveira, was adapted from the 1979 novel Fanny Owen by Agustina Bessa-Luìs who was a friend of and worked closely with the Portuguese director.
On this great movie about alienation, power plays, and love triangles, Serge Daney writes: "Oliveira, though he deals with Portuguese Romanticism, is a romantic moviemaker. He knows that if one is always wrong and the truth begins with two, it takes three to share a crime, and express desire and passion."
Find out more
See the top picks of two other Editors-in-Chief: Marcos Uzal and Charlotte Garson.
