Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2000/11/21
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]>>This sunday evening on TV5 Europe (10.15 pm CET) you can see 2 films by >>Raymond Depardon : "La captive du Desert" and "Reporters" (maybe also on >TV5 >>Asia ?). >>Bernard > > >what luck! would you be willing to give a brief compte rendu for we >unfortunates here in the states, who don't get to see depardon on tv? > >guy So I do In fact 4 films were broadcast :-) 1) The Captive of the desert. From the true story of French sociologist Françoise Claustre who had been knidapped by armed rebels in Sahara desert. A lot of quietness : never ending shots and trackings - the sound of the desert. 2) New York. Three shots for a ten-minutes film. First a long tracking (from an elevated railway ?) and general landscape of a bridge and the streets of NY at dawn. Then a fix shot in the street with walkers. Then the the same tracking but in the opposite way at night (only the lights in the streets and the darkness of the Hudson River). At the beginning you can hear the voice of Raymond Depardon who expalins his difficulty to make a film in a city like this (too much intrusive or maybe threatening). 3) Reporters. Filmed alone with a Aaton 16 and a big unidirectionnal Schneider mike. The sound track is not very good so the whole film is originally subtitled in French. Depardon followed Gamma photographers in oct 1980 (an agency he co-founded the 01/01/1967) and he depicts the life of photojournalists. Many guys with F2, Eclair 16, Nagra, some with Leica M but even in this "action" film nobody runs. Only some guys walk faster. A great tribute to the profession. A lot of quietness too. 4) Ten minutes of silence for John Lennon. All is in the title : a (almost) one-shot-film of the crowd in a park in US (Central Park or somethin like that) in which he goes from people to other people. A second (and last) shot (about 1 minute) ends the film by the general view of the crowd. The sound track begins (and laaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaasts) with silence and ends with "Imagine". #3 and #4 are documentaries so some images are out of focus or unsteady. But the light and the frame of the formers are great. MUCH MUCH BETTER than Exterminator X Bernard bernard.degaute@village.uunet.be