Marcel Carné's Masterpiece Children of Paradise and the Redemptive Power of Art by LOUIS PROYECT
Recently Jeffrey St. Clair polled a group of CounterPunch contributors on what they considered to be the greatest 100 films ever made (coming soon). My list omitted “Children of Paradise”, a 1945 French film that was sitting on my shelf for a couple of months incarnated as two Netflix DVD’s (the film runs for 195 minutes). Let me make amends for that now after having seen it for the first time—where have I been all these years? Although I didn’t rate my top 100 in order of greatness, Marcel Carné’s masterpiece, about which Francois Truffaut once said “I would give up all my films to have directed Children of Paradise”, would certainly be among the top ten. When you enter the world of “Children of Paradise” that is set in the 1830s, you recognize immediately an air of artifice that begins with the opening scene, an image of a curtain that upon lifting reveals hundreds of Parisians milling about a street filled with acrobats, clowns, magicians, jugglers and other artists performing in the open air. The street was known as the Boulevard of Crime, not so much for assaults on the citizens who flocked there but for the theaters that specialized in policiers. full: http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/06/20/children-of-paradise-and-the-redemptive-power-of-art/ _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
