Rhoda
Adaptation of an avant-garde play about Rhoda, a hysterical heroine who feels oppressed by the people around her. She suffers through her birthday party, goes to see a doctor, plans a vacation, argues a lot and even breaks the fourth wall.
The film is about looking. I bet that slight variations of few recurrent elements would encourage the viewer to free associate and to fantasize a kind of narrative. - BM
Described (rather cheekily) by director Michael Snow as a musical comedy, this deft probing of sound/image relationships is one of his wittiest, most entertaining and philosophically stimulating films. In his words, the film “derives its form and the nature of its possible effects from its being built from the inside, as it were, with the actual units of such a film, i.e. the frame and the recorded syllable. Thus its ‘dramatic’ element derives not only from a representation of what may involve us generally in life but from considerations of the nature of recorded speech in relation to moving light-images of people.’”
Paul (Jean-Pierre Leaud) leaves his wealthy parents behind to go on a spiritual quest. He meets up with Yvan (Jean-Pierre Kalfon), leader of a vegetarian cult whose members survive by begging for food in uncomfortable robes. The religious fanatics draw the ire of local peasants when they are arrested for stealing eggs. Yvan butchers a goat and has a carnivore carnival orgy on the meat. Marianne (Bernadette Lafont) is one of the followers, and she and Paul go to a remote island to live off seaweed and vegetation, but a development company moves in to wreck the paradise. Paul is brokenhearted when Mariane goes off with one of the greedy developers in this symbolic film that decries the allure of the material world.
