[The Miscarried Might-Have-Been] on Truffaut's [Two English Girls, 1971]

by Dontrell Lovet't
from, [PsychoNeuroFilmography]







In the stylism so akin to the French New Wave Film revolution, Truffaut's 1971 romantic drama, [Two English Girls] is a film adaptation of Henri-Pierre Roche's 1956 novel of the same title.

The film sets in Paris around the turn of the 20th century, when Claude, the male lead portrayed by Truffaut's "artist fetish" Jean-Pierre Leaud, is invited by Anne (Kiki Markham), an old family friend to spend the summer with her family on the coast of Wales. But in quick succession and turn of events, Anne is not interested in Claud as a lover for herself, rather one for her introverted, bashful sister Muriel (Stacey Tendeter). The match becomes a fit, Claud and Muriel becomes closer, begins to grow on one another and with hopes of being married, both Muriel and Claud's mother agree that the couple should spend a year apart, Claud returning to Paris and Muriel remaining in Wales.

Now this is where Truffaut takes shape with his adaptation, do due-in-proper justice to Henri-Pierre Roche. Claud begins to meet very attractive women and begins to stray, which eventually led him to the bed of Muriel's older sister Anne, who came to Paris to study art. Claud then becomes hopeful of a relationship with Anne, until she leaves him for a publisher, going on a vacation with him to Persia. Muriel then learns about the betrayal of her fiance and her older sister (the responsible party which introduced the two initially), which whom Muriel forgives, once Anne is returned home by the publisher, as she dies in Wales.

Muriel, who had since accepted a job in Belgium, spends a night with Claud and upon waking, revealing to him that now they must part forever, only to later write of her pregnancy. Claud, believing now the door for a happy life with Muriel again open, is shocked and despondent when a second letter arrives from Muriel, confessing of the miscarried fetus and that she would not be returning to him again.

The film leaves Claud, just Claud, no wife, no child, a writer with only dreams, shattered ideals, scuttled hopes and fanciful fantasies never to have bore fruit. He, Claud, is a representation of all of humanity, of most who have lost and wondered on the "What ifs."

For Claud, as is for most today, the sunken dream is one swallowed by irreversible timescapes, scientifically improbable revivals. A single mistake by Claud set off the chain reaction, a rattle of senses to once and for all set in stone Muriel's aforementioned disposition of introverted aloneness, untrusting of anyone other than her own interior.

Truffaut, together with Roche, are two artist brought together by novel and by film, by sentiments and by personal experience, the Auteur Theory in full measure as the pen of the writer in full, broad stroke. What cannot be taken from the experience, the love triangle and deception between Claud, Anne and Muriel? One thing we can truly count on is that our actions tend to inflict upon us consequences we are seldom ready for and most of which we spend the entirety of our lives yet trying to endure.

[Composites] on the Documentary & Documentarian

by Dontrell Lovet't
from, [PsychoNeuroFilmography]






 Nothing in history escapes memory; misadventure, happenstance, mirrored-images, bliss- this is the stain upon memory in which we want to escape, or savor. But the human brain, as effective as it is in its 10% functional capacity, it is fragile, plagued by degenerative disease, fractured by communicable disease, compromised by retrograde amnesia. So we photograph every inch or moments that are memorable to us, those we know we may never forget and those we know we may and in someday, be in need of a reminder. The Documentarian is the photographer evolved....and their art,doomed star-crossed lovers, destined to wonder for eternity.


....this evolved artist has gone from the still images formed in our minds far before the camera has capture an instance and transmogrified the stillness into motion, transgressed the black and white to color and regressed once again to black and white. As an adult in stress of their lives, regression is pertinent to the origin as the origin is the axis of the celestial sphere of art itself.

Subtle art demands only subtle attention; art must become radical if its demands is to be the same. With the documentarian, everything exists around memory, around what happens in our human history that needs to be remembered and brought to light. Figurative or abstract, it painstakes its claim to the documentarian in a haunting manner, until no longer they can ignore that the dream demands to be born from idea, from ideal.

 We confront time as we do the object, and the independent , intervening distances flowing from event into lens is not missed; every moment capture is captured intentionally, as in the dream, nothing is a mishap. If the documentary is to capture what the dream has, then both the composition and the documentarian must become a double of it, the devout agent who carries out a task and analyzes and asks not why it must be undertaken. In one form or another, silence comes over the auteur, a disquieted spell that removes them from actual time. The dream then is no longer the dream, there is no more dream. It has now become, stained itself in motion for the next thousands years. If it is not dreamed then it is no recorded, if it happens in the dream, then it is from an authentic, aesthetic stance that it must become, upright past the crawl, an embryo develops without chromosomes. The documentarian who lives in art is privy to the beginning and end of a dream, a specific dream, as one who lives in art becomes aware of their own demise.

 It is not clear whether the documentarian can explain the dream or the documentary can fully capture the dream as it becomes reality; what is clear is that the documentary is savors the integrity lost upon the major motions film. And slowly, a cult audience is eroding the mainstream zealous, bringing limelight
to a truth that some embrace while most deny and prefer their complacency in denial.

[Ciao Manhattan, 1972] film review

[Ciao Manhattan, 1972]




by Dontrell Lovet't
from, [PsychoNeuroFilmography]








Director John Palmer & David Weisman







Perhaps the most chilling account of a downfall, told in the voice of Edie Sedgwick herself, the 1972 short film "Ciao Manhattan" is a haunting prologue just before a fatal addiction would take the life of perhaps the greatest underground actress of the 60's and 70's. With accounts of a unadvised pregnancy, inhibitions from the time of losing her virginity, to hospitalization in psychiatric treatments, falling love and giving energy to what led to a mere insanity.

 Sedgwick, who derived from a prestigious family, desired to live, live the pulse of the people, the cause of the time. Her black and white portrait given in Ciao Manhattan, partial documentary, partial interview, known sieges laid to her during many of her films with Andy Warhol, notably, [Poor Little Rich Girl, ]. A beautiful girl who never knew she was beautiful, she hid herself under addiction and club dim lights and the subculture of homosexuality to feel the beauty she yearned for. Footage of her displays a woman alive during the days, radical in the nights, vague sleep and the days return in their monotonous, viral ways. Amongst her liveliness, was the haunts of the suicide of two of her brothers which gave over to Sedgwick's eventual self-destruction. Her quote about blossoming into the scene, into a "healthy young drug addict," gives the account of a woman who wasn't interested in her own self-destruction though it was the scene and she who imposed it on herself.

 Sporadically, the interviews return, followed by silent moments of her responses muted out, only her body language and lips telling the tale as that of the orient theatre. Darkness of the reel also is used to tell the tale of Sedgwick, her discussions with photographers and filmmakers reveals Edie's very versed knowledge of filmography and had she lived on, she could have made more of what her family believed was a terrifying ideal. Though she mentioned that her family would "endorse modeling 100 times over before entertaining the idea of her in films," Edie loved the Warhol idea of people buying her life in motion. There was no need for scripts, no need for ideas, nor need for scenes; Edie had grown out of what most actresses would need to appeal to the public- her life within itself was an unrehearsed script given over to the desires, the curiosities of the movement, of the public's rendering at the time. It was Warhol who gave her the true notion that if her life was interesting enough, people would go on and believe in her, that very life and continue to be influence and magnetized to her condition. That very idea came with a drastic price, an exact price that Edie would have to pay and many stars before and after her had also been in debt to.

 If the relationship with Warhol went sour, severed on bad terms, it was because Warhol took advantage of her love to make art with her life, with her body and her blossoming day's over. It was from Warhol that she grew out of as well as she did scripts (that she still felt she needed.) Warhol experimented, and as he did, Sedgwick continued to reach and grasp. Her use of drugs gave her the notion to trip out of many life and begin to live another after the binge ended its distortion. "You live alone, creating your life as you go. You only contend with two things; yourself and other people."

Sedgwick's life was a tiresome, fanciful one, living in a dream can be an exhausting plight for the dream world isn't our world- there is a cost to live there. Drugs were the channels to reach the nirvana she believe would take her from one life to the other, from one day to the next. If any fault lied in the life of Edie Sedgwick, it was her mishap of overdose, forfeiting the world of her beauty and brilliance.

[Ana, 2014] film review

[Ana, 2014]

by Dontrell Lovet't

from, [PscyhoNeuroFilmography]

Based on "Autopsicografia" by the portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa


As one would expect from any film or production based on a poem, [Ana] opens with a profound depth- a woman confessing her love of another, to what is seemingly a therapist. She confesses that she cannot live without the "perfect" love of her life nor she could without her. In a devil's avocation, her therapist tells her that humans love perfection because we can't have it and to describe her lover as "perfect" is an idealizing standard; all relationships have problems and as such, it is all in her imagination. In a turn of events, the film turns to see from the therapist point-of-view- she understands her perfectly, even goes so far as to live vicariously through her words about her lover. But even so, this woman who she loves is truly only a figment of her imagination, a being so frail yet holds so much significance in not only her life and mind but the life and mind of the therapist.

In an effort to free this woman from her figmented, perfect lover (and perhaps himself as well), he wants her to think of her as someone she once had who has left her life. This then leads the film to see the woman's lonesome and destructive life without her feminine figment, a treacherous trial where one is set free by their peers and convicted by the judge's render alone. Though with an unvarying endeavor, the woman, though she knows her figment is just that, she has declared her life empty without her, that if her life has any worth, it would be better to live with the figment than without it, that she would prefer "to continue insane but keep her by my side." 

It is in her refusal to relinquish her figment that in her sincerity, the therapist begin to be endeared by her "inhumane devotion," which his identification with her leads him to believe he may be insane as well. He feels envious of a woman created "in delirium," envying her madness, contemplating if we in our human imperfection are capable of creating such a perfect design if we ourselves have never known it. 

It is then that we see the therapist return home alone, grab a bottle of wine and two glasses, sits in chair, across from the figment in his patient's mind and tells her that he loves her.

[Ana] is a film under the influence of perfection so much so it itself is perfection, its poetics mirrors the poetry of Pessoa, where one "insane" patient deliriums are so robust, so fruitful in their dream life as to be taken in by someone who is "sane" and of this world.