The New Yorker Theater and Other Scenes from a Life at the Movies by Toby Talbot

Author:Toby Talbot
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography and Autobiography/Personal Memoirs
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2012-03-11T05:00:00+00:00

Phantom India was shown, section by section, as a second feature in a 1972 series of new films. Some of the sequences capture fantastic sights. One of the strongest belongs to an early passage of unflinching natural history—dogs and vultures gathering to feed off a dead water buffalo while a farmer plows his fields in the distance. Malle lingers over the feeding, bringing the camera gradually closer to the corpse and the dogs and the birds, until they are individualized and memorialized in a strange, affecting way.

From time to time, Malle confided with Dan over his intended projects. In 1982 he asked him to read the script of My Dinner with Andre, unsure of whether he wanted to make the film. Dan read it in one sitting with great excitement, urged him to make the film, and even got the French film company Gaumont to invest $50,000. When he showed Dan a rough cut, Dan had no suggestions to make; the film was perfect, he thought. It covered areas of malaise and doubt that would touch many people. After a slow opening at the Lincoln Plaza, twelve weeks into the run the film took off. Word-of-mouth rocketed it into orbit. It played for fifty-four weeks and went on to another hundred cities.

Wealthy as Louis was, black beans and rice were not beneath him. But when we visited him at his large manor on the outskirts of Cahors, his brother Bernard, an erudite bibliophile, descended to the wine cellar to fetch a 1982 Bordeaux to accompany the truffle omelette made by their brother Vincent. Louis and Dan had a harmonious relationship. They enjoyed bumping into each other, at a Dreyer screening for example at the Museum of Modern Art. He often sought Dan’s opinion of certain films playing in town, and was pleased when their tastes coincided. Never complacent in his career, Malle alternated between documentary and fiction, ever anxious as if each film were the first.

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