There is a light that never goes out

Cinematography is something really essential, in movies.
A certain light can shape an entire world. There are movies that can almost be silent: the atmosphere created by the photography is speaking for them. A crispy black and white, a lavish colour, a mysterious dark, a dazzling light, and the magic of cinema immediately operate on screen.
I personally can’t imagine Ingmar Bergman without Sven Nykvist, Wong Kar-Wai without Christopher Doyle, Aki Käurismaki without Timo Salminen, the Coen Brothers without Roger Deakins, the Nouvelle Vague without Raoul Coutard.
Few days ago, one of those magicians, the American Gordon Willis, sadly passed away.
His name will always be linked to the film-maker he has collaborated most during his career: Woody Allen. The Brooklyn Bridge in the distance, a man and a woman seated on a bench, the night falling on the city…. Does this ring a bell? Well, the man behind one of the most famous cinema scene, it’s him.
And this is Zazie’s tribute to Gordon Willis in 5 movies: 

KLUTE by Alan Pakula (1971)

One day I’m going to write a post about this movie, which I adore.
New York in the 70’s, when the city was dirty and dangerous: a young Jane Fonda as a sensitive prostitute, a young Donald Sutherland as a shy detective. One of the best couples ever seen on screen, and the scruffy light of Willis on top of it. Unmissable.

ANNIE HALL by Woody Allen (1977)

I am absolutely sure that there is not a single woman in this world who didn’t dream of being like Diane Keaton in this movie: the way she dresses, the way she speaks, the way she drives. Simply to die for. Exactly as the cinematography of this masterpiece.  

INTERIORS by Woody Allen (1978)

First “serious” movie for Allen and the most bergmanian one of all. Willis pays homage to Nykvist's work filming both the interiors and the exteriors as if the movie was set in Sweden instead of Long Island. The result is outstanding.
 
ZELIG by Woody Allen (1983)

Woody Allen slides into other peoples bodies while Willis finds a way to slide into different time and frame. One of the craziest, amazing ideas of modern cinema. A real joy to look at.
 
BROADWAY DANNY ROSE by Woody Allen (1984)

There is something about the sadness of this movie that can't be explained.
Maybe it is the story, maybe it is Willis magnificent black and white, but you constantly feel something has been lost for ever. And you are suddenly overwhelmed by the nostalgia for this kind of world, this kind of people.
This kind of pictures too.

Frances Ha

I am crazy about movies quoting other movies.
Because I feel the joy of having found soul mates, people who go through their lives constantly thinking about cinema, talking about cinema, making cinema referring to other cinema. Basically, cinema freaks like me, who can’t conceive life without the filter of movies.
When I watch films made by people like this, I feel like they’re telling me: Hey you, welcome home!
It doesn’t happen every day, but it does happen.
It is something I have constantly felt looking at the last Noah Baumbach’s movie, Frances Ha, written by him and by the main actress of the film, Greta Gerwig. 

The two, who already worked together in the previous Baumbach's movie, Greenberg,

are now a couple à la ville.

Sophie (Mickey Sumner) and Frances (Greta Gerwig)

Frances Ha tells the story of Frances, a 27 years old girl who lives in Brooklyn together with her best friend, Sophie. While Sophie works for a publishing house, Frances has a precarious job: she is an apprentice dancer who dreams to integrate a dancing company but always fails at it. When Sophie announces to her that she is moving to Manhattan with another friend, Frances's world starts progressively to collapse. She looses the apartment, the job and, after a monumental fight, also her best friend. It will take time, to Frances, to put together all the pieces that will bring her to become Frances Ha.

New York filmed in black and white: it is so Manhattanesque that you almost believe to have heard a Gershwin music somewhere, but instead, quite surprisingly, what you really hear is a piece called “L’école Buissonière” by Jean Constantin, taken from Les 400 Coups by François Truffaut. The whole music, as a matter of fact, is taken from Nouvelle Vague films, with a prominent presence of Georges Delerue and a hint of Antoine Duhamel. 
I have prevented you: this is home.
It is home to the point that, when Frances starts walking/dancing on the streets of New York on Modern Love by David Bowie, the image of Denis Lavant in Mauvais Sang by Leos Carax naturally arises, overlapping the one on the screen. 

Modern Love - Baumbach Version

Modern Love - Carax Version

And how is it possible not to think about Samy Frey, Claude Brasseur and Anna Karina in Bande à Part by Jean-Luc Godard when Frances is sharing the apartment together with Lev and Benji? Nobody will be surprised if these three would start running together in the corridors of the MET…

Bande à part - Baumbach Version

Bande à part - Godard Version

... and, of course, during her short trip to Paris, somebody wants to invite Frances to a party where there is a guy "Who looks like Jean-Pierre Léaud!"

Thus said, Frances Ha is not a good movie because of its hommages to the Nouvelle Vague universe. You can (of course!) see the movie completely unaware of them and enjoy it immensely. Frances character is super interesting: captured in one of those weird moments of life where adulthood should be installed but in fact is not already there, this young woman invades the screen with her clumsy gestures, her free-flowing monologues, her disarming need to be loved and to find her place in the world. Slightly irritating at first, gripping while struggling to survive among many difficulties, absolutely charming in her candid attempts to assert herself. The moment where, completely drunk, she explains what a relationship should be for her, is a little masterpiece, and Gerwig is astonishing in this made-to-measure role.
But be careful: this is not a rom com or a chick flick, this is a modern movie about a young woman whose first need is not to find a man but to find herself. 
Undatable, as her friend Benji keeps describing her? 
Maybe, but also very irresistible!

Audrey For Ever!

There is a scene in Manhattan by Woody Allen, where the main character (played by Allen himself) is having a discussion with a friend, and this friend accused him: "Who do you think you are? God?" 

And Woody replied: "Well, I've got to model myself on someone". 

Today, it is the 20th death anniversary of the woman I always wanted to model myself on: Audrey Hepburn. 

Since she became an icon in all these years, we are used to see her face everywhere, on posters, pictures, book covers, advertisements, mugs, bags, and other silly objects, but we don’t have to forget what she really was: a beautiful, inspiring, talented, smart, witty, classy, good hearted, adorable person.

It is very rare to read something nasty about her. 
Apparently, she didn’t just look lovely, she was entirely lovely, outside and inside.
Audrey Hepburn didn’t have an easy childhood: she was raised in Holland during the Second World War, she suffered hunger, she was abandoned by her father, but all this didn’t prevent her to embrace life as it was, to do the things that she really wanted to do.
She was special, this is undeniable. I loved everything about her and I think she was the most beautiful and most elegant woman who ever walked on planet earth. 
Even when she was aging, her class, her smile, her style, kept being incomparable:

There are so many amazing pictures of her that it is impossible to choose just few, as I had to do for this post, but I especially like the ones taken the night she received an Oscar for her role in Roman Holidays by William Wyler in 1953.
Her slim silhouette, her magnificent but simple dress, her tears of joy:

I will always miss you, Audrey!