A Movie Buff’s Recommendations by Charlotte Garson
Four standout movies for Charlotte Garson, Deputy Editor-in-Chief of Cahiers du cinéma
ReadCahiers du cinéma n°662 - December 2010 (2010-12)Cahiers du cinéma
Charlotte Garson's top picks
Charlotte Garson has given us four instinctive recommendations for movies that made the cover of Cahiers du Cinéma and that touched her as a viewer. Here's her eclectic selection.
Cahiers du cinéma n°20 - February 1952 (1953-02)Cahiers du cinéma
The Golden Coach (1952)
Anna Magnani, icon of post-war Italian cinema, lends her face to this curious movie by the most French of filmmakers, Jean Renoir, set in an imaginary South American country: The Golden Coach (1952).
To explain this fanciful movie, which is more a continuation of commedia dell'arte than the realism of his cinema, Cahiers gives the floor to Jean Renoir: "The fact the movie was shot in Italy gave me the key to approaching my subject. I left Peru and the story of La Périchole behind to focus on Italy and an Italian stage. External reality plays no role. In my story, Peru does not matter, The Golden Coach symbolizes human vanity, which the actor reveals." (issue no. 21).
Cahiers du cinéma No. 158 - August/September 1964 (1964-09)Cahiers du cinéma
Ugetsu (1953)
In issue no. 158 of Cahiers du cinéma, Ariane Mnouchkine conducted at least six interviews on the cinema of Kenji Mizoguchi, whose work significantly contributed to bringing Japanese cinema to the European public.
One scene from Ugetsu was a particular milestone owing to the cruelty of its mise-en-scène, which Serge Daney discussed in issue no. 4 of the magazine Trafic (founded with Jean-Claude Biette in 1991). "Recalling the scene in the Japanese countryside, the travelers are attacked by hungry bandits, and one of them stabs Miyagi with a spear. But he does it almost inadvertently, staggering, as though driven by residual violence or a thoughtless reflex. This event is so subtle on camera that it could almost be missed, and I'm convinced that any viewer of Ugetsu gets the same crazy and almost superstitious idea that if the movement of the camera hadn't been so slow, the event could have occurred off-camera or — who knows ? — perhaps never happened at all." (Éditions P.O.L).
Cahiers du cinéma n°353 - November 1983 (1983-11)Cahiers du cinéma
To Our Loves (1983)
To Our Loves, by Maurice Pialat, was cited among the best movies of 1983 and for good reason. Its eruptive rhythm and the violence of its effects imprinted a new image in our minds, both free and strangely nostalgic, of youth in cinema.
But this freedom is also mainly due to the mise-en-scène and acting conditions, since Pialat gave actors a lot of room for improvisation. "The ambiguity between acted and not acted, the hysteria (acting that gets caught and taken for non-acting, for pure violence) seems to involve obligatory steps set in advance by the staging, but at these points in time, there is room for improvisation." (Pascal Bonitzer, issue no. 354).
Cahiers du cinéma n°792 - November 2022 (2022-11)Cahiers du cinéma
Pacifiction (2022)
Benoît Magimel's persona appears to have escaped from the cinema of paranoia typical of Alan J. Pakula. Albert Serra however evokes a fantasy and tranquility far from the United States, the metropolis, and from any hope of understanding what is really happening on these islands.
"In this sense, Pacifiction is a staggering movie, a great liner adrift on an ocean of obscure dreams, a magma of teeming fictions, which unfairly left Cannes empty-handed despite being the only movie to brave the unknown, this both real and fantasized territory of cinema that Chris Marker would have called disorientating." (Mathieu Macheret, issue no. 792).
Find out more
See the top picks of the two other Editors-in-Chief, Marcos Uzal and Fernando Ganzo.
