Thanks to Thelma Schoonmaker and La Cinémathèque française
The venerable and revered Cinémathèque française offered us what might be called love in the afternoon this saturday.
First of all, we got to watch an incredible high quality Technicolor copy of The Red Shoes (1948) during their Michael Powell retrospective. It was a treat to rewatch it like that, as beautiful and dark as always.
And then, we had a little more than an hour with the venerable, revered and fascinating Thelma Schoonmaker. There were a lot of insights about movies, Martin Scorsese and Michael Powell of course. It was a delight.
I came back home with two questions that I can barely hold back:
- when will the Michael Powell diaries she’s working on will be finished? I can’t wait to read that! (the only “diary” I read so far was from Charles Brackett’s “It’s the pictures that got small” and it was super exciting to live his exciting 9-to-5 job through his unexcited eyes)
- In the movie family, is the the Boris Lermontov character somehow like a director? Or more like a producer? On one side, it seems parts of Michael Powell’s personnality were used for Lermontov. On the other side, I couldn’t help thinking of him as the Kirk Douglas character in The Bad and The Beautiful. (same kind of “attractive brute” to me…)