#lumiere-brothers

#lumiere-brothers

Film is like that. It developed from [the silent era] into Fellini and Bergman, Buñuel and David Lynch. [They] took these ideas and created a film that was really like a dream.

Eugène Atget's images of the city reminded me of when I first came across the turn-of-the-century French photographer's work in a book called 'A Vision of Paris' (1963), which paired more than a hundred of Atget's photographs with passages from Marcel Proust's 'In Search of Lost Time,' and I couldn't quite see them for what they were. There was something about the preciousness of juxtaposing Atget's gorgeous golden prints with Proust's gorgeous language that made me feel as if I were suffocating under all those foulards, drapes, and aesthetics.

Films seen long ago but unavailable for rewatching often loom large, like myths shadowed by fear: Will a second viewing confirm or dispel the initial impression? I first saw "Caught in the Acts" ("Délits flagrants"), a documentary by the French director Raymond Depardon, in Paris, a few months after it opened there, in 1994, and it struck me as one of the greatest documentaries I'd ever seen.