Serge Gainsbourg & Brigitte Bardot, Bonnie & Clyde (1968)
The editor of a new Critical Insights FILM volume on Arthur Penn’s 1967 film, Bonnie and Clyde, seeks contributors to write chapters on any topic on the film. Continue reading
Film
Mapping the Urban Landscape of a Cult Movie : Bullitt’s San-Francisco
Bullitt, the movie with Steve McQueen features a scene often seen as the mother of filmic car chases. Certainly, cars speeding at full force of their engines, as an ambivalent proxy for escape and death, industrial perfection and doomed individual freedom are a token of many classic film noirs. There are memorable ones in Fritz Lang, Becker, Jules Dassin, Melville, to name but a few. Among what sets Bullitt’s chase apart from the preceding ones and makes it so influential for subsequent directors (and striking for us), is certainly the sense of time and location it is embued with. It was filmed in San Francisco and close surroundings in the spring of 1968.
Covering so much space through its streets, the movie maps in effect San Francisco. But of course, and this is one of the sources for its fascination now, it is a San Francisco which does no longer exist. Mapping the film, in return, is akin…
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The Wicked go to Hell ! International Posters
(Collection Thierry Gautier)
The Film Les Salauds vont en enfer (1956) was damned by critics (Truffaut called it a pitiful caricature of Jean Genet’s play Haute Surveillance). This did not prevent the movie’s commercial success, nor hinder its international career. The Posters reproduced here testify of this fortune. They reveal as well how the movie was reinterpreted in the process. Its main elements are reordered. On the posters, the original Psychological Thriller about two men’s identity is removed in the background. The Jailbreak drama is not shown. The Men’s movie (Les Salauds) has become a Marina Vlady Movie. The fact that her performance visibly inspired Brigitte Bardot’s in Vadim’s And God Created Woman, shot in Saint Tropez only a few month later certainly did not hurt. Vadim’s movie would launch Bardot’s myth, and reach worldwide audiences. Ironically thus, the legacy of Les Salauds vont en enfer appears not o have been in the noir genre, but in the representation of sexual desire in mainstream cinema.
Mapping the Urban Landscape of a Cult Movie : Bullitt’s San-Francisco
Bullitt, the movie with Steve McQueen features a scene often seen as the mother of filmic car chases. Certainly, cars speeding at full force of their engines, as an ambivalent proxy for escape and death, industrial perfection and doomed individual freedom are a token of many classic film noirs. There are memorable ones in Fritz Lang, Becker, Jules Dassin, Melville, to name but a few. Among what sets Bullitt’s chase apart from the preceding ones and makes it so influential for subsequent directors (and striking for us), is certainly the sense of time and location it is embued with. It was filmed in San Francisco and close surroundings in the spring of 1968.
Covering so much space through its streets, the movie maps in effect San Francisco. But of course, and this is one of the sources for its fascination now, it is a San Francisco which does no longer exist. Mapping the film, in return, is akin to a cartography of myths, of places which are essentially, or have become mostly, imaginary.
The movie is based on Mute Witness, the 1963 novel by Crime Fiction author Robert L. Pike (Robert Lloyd Fish).
International Crime Fiction Research Group 