Mona, the vagabond

Vagabond (Sans toi ni loit), is a 1985 film by the Belgian director Agnès Varda. Varda was part of the French New Wave (with Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer, Chabrol, and Rivette), although her first film predates that movement; some critics regard as belonging more specifically to the simultaneous Rive Gauche (Left Bank) movement (alongside Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, Marguerite Duras, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and others). Like all of those directors, Varda’s career outlasted the end of the Nouvelle Vague (c1967); her most recent film is The Beaches of Agnès (2008) (which I think the world of).

Since Beaches there’s been a growing consensus among film critics that Varda is one of our greatest directors, and that she’s been until now too overlooked, too overshadowed. The Criterion Collection recently released four of her major features (as well as a few shorts); that set includes Sans toit ni loi, Varda’s most successful and arguably greatest film.

I haven’t seen all of Varda’s films, and I’m no authority on her work, but I’ve been watching her movies since the late 1990s, and I’m now steadily (re-)making my way through what’s available. At the moment, Sans toit ni loi is my favorite film of the 1980s, so I thought I’d share a few thoughts on it. (But beware of the spoilers after the jump!)

First, a brief synopsis.

The film opens with the discovery of a young woman’s body (Sandrine Bonnaire) in a ditch; she froze to death overnight (it’s wintertime). Curiously, her clothes have been soaked through with wine. From there, Varda proceeds to recount what events led to the woman’s passing. She addresses us directly in voiceover:

No one claimed the body… She had died a natural death without leaving a trace… But people she had met recently remembered her. Those witnesses helped me tell of the last weeks of her last winter. She left her mark on them… I know little about her myself, but it seems to me that she came from the sea.

The remainder of the film is a mixture of drama (the woman’s encounters) and interview (brief statements made about her by the people she encountered). We learn that her name was Mona, and that she was a vagabond. [The French title, Sans toit ni loi, literally means "without roof or rule," and is a pun based on the idiom "sans foi ni loi" ("without faith or law"). I don't know if that also means "vagabond" in French, but I doubt it.]

Kane's nurse rushes in to check on him.

Like in Citizen Kane (which this film is indebted to), we begin with a death that launches an investigation. (Several characters address the camera directly, and we can imagine that they are answering not only Varda’s questions, but a police inspector’s.) The investigation leads us full circle, and by the end we know more than any single character does, but we might still wonder if anything has really been revealed. (Also, in this case there’s no Rosebud—just no trespassing.)

Another difference between the two films is that while Varda shows us the circumstances that led Mona to her death, she refuses to show us that actual death. (Mona lived alone, and she could only ever die alone.)

What, then, do we learn?

Mona is also much dirtier than Wendy.

Mona is a very self-absorbed character. She fends primarily for herself. (Unlike her fellow traveler Wendy, she doesn’t have a dog.) When she meets new people, her first impulse is to see what she can get from them. When she’s shown kindness, she usually abuses that trust: she abandons her boyfriend of the moment when he’s attacked, and she repays a generous family of goat herders by loafing and stealing from them. She’s also suspicious and rude (although in real life she’d have to be: later in the film, she’s not wary enough, and she ends up getting raped).

At the same time, we quickly realize that Mona is perceived too unfairly by those around her. The people she meets have oversimple (and usually negative) impressions of her. Despite being filthy and abrasive, Mona is at times very kind and gentle. In my favorite scene, she spends a few hours getting drunk with an elderly woman (Marthe Jarnias) whom no one else has time or patience for:

Unlike Mona, this woman has an elaborate house and great wealth. But like Mona, she exists on the outskirts of society. She can ring her bell, but her servant answers only out of duty, exasperated. And her relatives visit only to patronize her, all the while waiting for her to die. (Later in the film, having grown too impatient, they fire the servant, send the old woman to a nursing home, and take over the house.)

In scenes like this one, we see Mona at her most sympathetic. She has no tolerance for the falsities by which society regularly operates. (See William Gass for more on this. Or Holden Caulfield.)

The film’s meditative and measured form provides Varda with a corrective for assumption and easy impression. Her camera remains fairly objective, favoring long shots that observe Mona, neither romanticizing her nor criticizing her. And as this perceptive analysis points out:

In Cléo from 5 to 7, Agnès Varda made frequent use of tracking shots to follow Cléo along Parisian streets, and she does a lot of the same kind of camerawork in Vagabond. But while the narcissistic Cléo is nearly always in the center of the frame, Vagabond’s protagonist [...] can barely stay in the picture. Again and again, she either walks into the frame of an already-in-motion tracking shot, or falls behind, or walks out of frame as the camera keeps moving. It’s as though she is on the periphery of her own movie.

Cléo:

Mona:

Nor does Varda romanticize or criticize the other characters; she holds, I think, a mixture of criticism and sympathy toward everyone involved (herself included). (One of the strongest aspects of Varda’s work has long been her willingness to self-criticize, and to turn her camera back on herself. See for instance Beaches, or the end of this clip from The Gleaners and I, 2000.)

In certain ways, Vagabond is a realist film. The characters and events are verisimilar, and Varda’s method is at times documentary-like (a style she’s favored since the beginning of her career).

Varda, however, is unwilling to claim any privileged knowledge of Mona; as she told us at the outset, “I know little about her myself.” And indeed, the entire film is a fiction, although one based on fact: Varda was inspired to write and direct it after encountering a vagabond young woman (who has a cameo).

In other words, despite her film’s apparent objectivity, Varda is well aware that hers is just another opinion—and a fictional opinion at that. And Varda is very aware that she’s making a film. Like all of her work, the style is self-conscious: characters address the camera, the narrative is epsodic and sporadic, and the whole film is rather elegantly photographed and composed. Here as elsewhere, Varda is never afraid to draw classical allusions to other works—she’s clearly modeled her film on Kane, one of the best-known movies ever made. And the early image of Mona emerging from the sea begs for (ironic) comparison to Botticelli. (Gleaners is an extended meditation on how the poor are depicted in painting.)

Existing somewhere between realism and a self-conscious formalism, Vagabond is extremely cathartic. (Thinking about this film always makes me cry, and you should see how I bawl when I watch it.) And yet you can’t claim, by the end, as some realist might, that anything’s been proven, or even demonstrated. Varda has no interest in psychologizing Mona, or in explaining why she lives her life the way she does. The work as a whole rejects moralizing, and simple summary. (If you want to boil it all down to a single message, then it might be that Mona doesn’t deserve her fate. But who does?)

Varda’s invitation that we compare Vagabond with Citizen Kane is illuminating in many ways. Is Kane a realist film? A formalist film? Illuminating? Opaque? …It’s a mixture of all of those things (as well as tragic, and deeply entertaining). Kane is extremely stylized and episodic, but it also achieved significant breakthroughs in makeup and deep focus, two tools of verisimilitude. (Welles wanted to show ceilings because films never showed ceilings.) And Kane channels its considerable energy into a very serious attempt to tell the story of a man’s life, from many different perspectives, even as it acknowledges that such an attempt must (being artifice) always fail.

Agnès Varda herself, while remaining her own remarkable director, reminds me a lot of Orson Welles. Like Welles, Varda started out working in one field (here photography), then switched while still young to directing, then proceeded to direct films her entire life. She has worked with whatever funding and materials she’s had at hand. Her career has gone up and down. She’s won awards, but her work has also been ignored.

She’s made art using a wide variety of media (photography, performance, installation). And like Welles, her career can’t be easily summarized. Varda has made dozens of films (the IMDb lists forty-six, a mixture of features and shorts), but what is the quintessential Varda film? (One reason why critics have had difficulty recognizing her greatness is that she defies category.)

Also like Welles, Varda makes deeply earnest films that move us, but that also reserve space for criticism—as well as entertainment, even frivolity. Consider how she interrupts Cléo to show us an absurd short film, Les Fiances du Pont Mac Donald (starring Jean-Luc Godard, Ana Karina, and Eddie Constantine):

And Vagabond, despite its weighty subject matter and tragic ending, is hardly a depressing film.

Finally, like Welles, Varda’s vast erudition, energy, formal playfulness, and open-mindedness allow her to synthesize many styles and traditions—including realism and self-conscious artificiality—to continually reexamine and refresh her art.

Which is great art. Vagabond offers an excellent place to begin watching her.

P.S. Be sure to check out this wonderfully terrible trailer for the film:

Cleo From 5 To 7 (1962)

Dir. Agnes Varda

From the incomparable Agnes Varda’s arguably greatest achievement, Cleo From 5 To 7, a French New Wave groundbreaker that somehow seems to feel just as fresh today as it ever was.  This scene is Varda’s mini-love letter to silent cinema, with friends Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina hamming it up for her camera.  Enjoy.

BIG DANCE THEATRE’s production of ‘COMMES TOUJOURS Here I Stand’ intrigued me not for its dance or theatrical components but solely because they were using Agnes Varda’s 1961 film ‘Cleo from 5 to 7′ as a found object. I was really interested in how that would work.

Agnes Varda’s film ‘Cleo from 5 to 7′ follows through the streets of Paris a young chanteuse who fears she has cancer and is awaiting a biopsy result at 7pm. From the beginning of the film where she has her Tarot cards read, the only part shot in color, through to the end she encounters friends, colleagues and strangers and reflects on fate, mortality and herself.

Performed at New York’s THE KITCHEN, ‘COMMES TOUJOURS Here I Stand’ takes Varda’s film and uses a set of three swirling screens to catch and reflect video (some being recorded and projected live, other recorded before) while the actors bob and weave throughout their interpretation of the film. The set’s constant re-invention reflects the varying scenes from the film not in real time (as the film constructs itself) but abridged and adapted to fit in multiple costume changes, character switches, side stories and dance.

The choreography was demanding and exact; the actors flexible and fluid. The re-invention climaxed into a massive video screen of falls leaves with an almost empty stage, save for the heroine and the stranger walking towards her destiny.

Comme Toujours Here I Stand at The Kitchen from Big Dance Theater on Vimeo.

I look forward to future BIG DANCE THEATRE performances.

Posted by: Autumn.

Separation City - because it wouldn't be 'Kiwi' without a sheep joke?

The Film

Separation City unfortunately looks like an average romantic comedy. But I will reserve judgement until I see it. Or rent it on DVD. Or catch it on TV…

The Trailer

The Vintner’s Luck is Niki Caro’s latest – a not very New Zealand tale of a peasant’s quest for the perfect wine vintage in 19^th century France. The kiwi element, though not in the story is all over the film: it stars Keisha Castle-Hughes (Whale Rider), it is based on regarded New Zealand writer Elizabeth Knox’s novel and is in part funded by the New Zealand Film Commission. I’m going to see this film just for the wings…

The Talent

New Zealand film talent – this article is a short rundown of some of the Kiwis showing films at the NZFF. Though it only covers short films. To see some feature length filmmaking talent at work check out the team behind The Strength of Water: Armagan Ballantyne (director) and Briar Grace-Smith (writer).

And in a case of ‘Hey! I went to school with her!’ – Zoe McIntosh’s documentary Lost in Wonderland made its (film commission funding free) debut at the NZFF as well.

Lost in Wonderland with Rob... aka Miss Alice

The Peter Jackson Empire

Peter Jackson is furthering his empire – though this time through fostering other filmmaker’s talents. His latest project is Neill Blomkamp’s feature debut – a Sci-Fi film about alien apartheid. It has a viral marketing campaign already in full swing, and Jackson is taking the buzz to San Diego’s Comic Con for maximum ‘geek exposure’. Having been made for a relatively modest US $30 million, I predict this to be a decent success.

The Festival

I’ll leave you with an interview with Bill Gosden, director of the New Zealand Film Festival – he’s been with the festival longer than I’ve been alive. He also seems to know what he’s doing, and rumour has it ticket sales this year at the Auckland Film Fest have been really positive. I helped and saw 5. I would have seen more films but for the work/schedule/bank balance conflicts and it’s the first time in 5 years I haven’t worked for a film festival. Anyway, I managed to catch:

Adventureland – Awesome soundtrack, but perhaps best viewed as a night-in DVD rental?

The Strength of Water – a surprising kiwi film about loss and grief. But with little pockets of humour which really made it for me.  Beautifully shot.

Cleo from 5 to 7 – new print of an Agnes Varda classic. A fun and thoughtful ride around 1960s Paris.

We Live in Public – an incredible documentary about a mad millionaire who spent his fortune on art/surveillance projects and ends up broke in Ethiopia. Director Ondi Timoner said she couldn’t write this stuff if she tried.

Antichrist – Hmm. I’m yet to find a point. The conversation post-film went something like this:

A: So basically Charlotte Gainsbourg’s character had PMS?

B: No, it was about Lars Von Trier’s hatred of women. I wonder what happened to him?

C: Maybe he just needs a hug?

B: I wouldn’t go near the guy. Every actress in his ‘USA’ films hates him.

A: And he’s never been to the States. He’s like Hitler in that regard – he had an obsession with cowboys.

B: did you just compare Lars von Trier to Hitler?

A: um. Apparently.

B: Hitler had lady issues too.

A: Yup.

B: Oh Lars, women aren’t the antichrist!

C: yeah, he probably just needs a hug…

Until next time!

- Morgan Stewart

The first film I saw of Agnes Varda’s was Cleo from 5 to 7. It was her first film too. I was immersed headily into my film analysis classes and anything French and black and white was my fancy.

There was something clear about Agnes Varda after that first screening: I really dug what she did.

Years later, I came across another of her films, a documentary called The Gleaners and I, as I was attending another set of film analysis classes, these geared toward the documentary. Her story telling vehicle had changed from fiction to fact, the black and white to color, from film to video and many more years had passed in her life than mine.

Yet, I recognized a pacing, some movement and gestures that reminded me of Varda’s 1962 Cleo. I was fascinated by the film, telling everyone that they must see it and determined that The Gleaners and I would portend the structure, mood and style of my upcoming master’s thesis film. My professors denied me the attempt to create something that they called ‘too sophisticated’ for a graduate student. I pouted, I protested, and I made a film their way to ensure graduation. And I pined for another Varda film. A few years later, in fact just last night, I got to see one.

How funny that so much of The Beaches of Agnes has to do with aging, with memory, with walking backwards through your life and looking at it in pictures (some moving, some not) and as paintings, as visions and fantasies, as fiction and fake versions of reality. I can remember myself through the viewing of each of these films: at 20, at 26, at 32. Varda, at 80, was the sole female cohort in the French Nouvelle Vague movement of the 1960s and married a co-member, the director Jacques Demy. She honors the traditions of that movement while she continues to bombard the senses with colorful, mind-tripping loops straight through her life and she fully digresses, she admits to the audience, only once. Her other ‘digressions’ are minor and make for astonishing story arcs that weave their way throughout decades of her dance with le cinema. She weaves footage shot specifically for The Beaches with footage from all her old films, photographs she took decades before, home videos, art installations, and archival historical footage. She is bright: a wordsmith as much as a photographer, a conceptual artist as much as a documentarian, a mother as much as a wife. She is compelling in her dedication to capturing the nuance of life and she shares my love of beaches. And at 80, we listen to her, because she knows. She remembers.

Posted by: Autumn.

The summer heat is officially upon us, and one of the best remedies we can think of is the air-conditioned chill of a movie theatre. The Museum of Art & Design thinks so to, and to make it even more of an escape, they’ve dedicated their summer series to the impossibly cool chic of the French New Wave. If the breezy, dreamy vibe of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless can’t relax you, nothing can. We’re most excited for Agnès Varda’s Cleo from 5 to 7 and Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, if for no other reason than the visual splender of watching Catherine Deneuve bounce through the cooling rain.

I’m afraid of everything – birds, storms, lifts, needles – and now, this great fear of death…

– Cléo

Based on the recommendation of Jimmy, one of the co-hosts of the Scene Unseen podcast, I watched writer/director Agnès Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7 on The Auteurs. This is a Criterion presentation. At first, the way the action flowed in real time bothered me, but the ending is some wonderful that I could forgive it.

Florence (Corinne Marchand) is a famous singer living in France by the stage name of Cléo Victoire. In the beginning of the film, she visits a psychic, Madame Irma (Loye Payen) to tell her about the results of a biopsy she had done two days prior. Cléo wants to know if she has cancer.

The whole movie is about the time that the audience follows Cléo wherever she goes after visiting the psychic and before she gets the results from Dr. Valineau (Robert Postec).

She goes on with her day, trying push her looming fate out of her mind, but she can’t. Her friends cannot keep her busy. She is preoccupied with pending results.

The movie is not everyone’s cup of tea. There tinges of melodrama that is understandable with a star diva-ing out. Other than that, this is a charming, romantic and ultimately optimistic perspective.

Judgment: If you wants to slice of Paris life, watch this film.

Rating: ****1/2

The Film and Video Center (FVC) had a beautiful collection of films for the 2007/2008 school year. I jumped at nearly every chance to review the films that came through and did my best to see all of them, whether I reviewed them or not. Professor Lauren Steimer put together one of the greatest collection of films I could have ever experienced. One thing I do miss from UCI would definitely be the FVC.

New University Newspaper: Keepin’ It ‘Real-Time’ In ‘Cleo from 5-7′

Keepin’ It ‘Real-Time’ In ‘Cleo from 5-7′
by Christina Nersesian
Volume 41, Issue 21 | Mar 10 2008

Just when you thought Irvine was one of those hopelessly boring towns void of any cultural character, out comes Orange County’s sole cinematheque from your very own UC Irvine. It is a time of transformation for the familiar classroom environment of the Humanities Instructional Building. Patrons find that once a week during the school-year quarters, its stadium seating is truly put to good use.

This quarter the Film and Video Center (FVC) is directed and run by Professor Lauren Steimer from the Department of Film and Media Studies. For her, screenings held by the FVC act as an extension to the world outside the classroom not only for students, but for community members as well. The FVC screenings are often times singular events within the Orange County area and with some programs, the entire country.

Last week the FVC screened ‘Cleo de 5 a 7,’ a film from 1962 by French director Agnes Varda whose focus on documentary realism in her films was clearly evident within the proposed fictive world of this particular film. The use of a ‘real-time’ edited narrative is indicative of this film as we follow a single character through two hours of her life.

Cleo, played by actress Corinne Marchand, is a French pop icon we follow as she waits for medical test results. She fears the worst and allows her fears to overcome her, and her assumptions become proven realities in her mind, she turns to existential thought. In questioning what purpose she is living at this point, she has several encounters that propel her to take stock of her own existence.

Documenting her every move, the film includes long shots of the main character crossing the street. These are moments the audience is usually unaware of as most films cut from one side of the street to the next. Unless what happens in the middle of the street is essential to plot development, a long take of crossing a wide street is not going to embellish the narrative. This is Varda’s incorporation of real time into the narrative.

‘Real time is rarely used in films because ‘real’ life is so very boring that it often becomes necessary to insert temporal ellipses between a character’s more interesting moments in order to make a story pleasurable,’ Steimer said. ‘Varda worked with this premise in mind when she structured the narrative of this film around the mundane meanderings of a self-involved pop star.’

Revealing inner monologues allow us a peek into characters’ true intentions regarding their surrounding situations. In this we find the existential aesthetic of the French New Wave as well as during moments when Cleo’s surrounding world is externalized from inside cab rides. From things she passes by and the content heard from the cab radio, we see how Cleo responds to the world around her.

‘As Varda was considered part of Left Bank film movement, which was decidedly more politically left, some say Cleo is a commentary on the female characters created by the French New Wave, stuck in exciting situations but essentially vacant human beings.’ Steimer explained, ‘Others say that the character is a metaphor for the Paris itself, as self-absorbed, beautiful but vacant and awaiting the life-changing event that would happen a few years later.’

Returning for the spring quarter, the FVC will start off with Hitchcock, and will then delve into co-sponsoring the Latin-American Film Festival. The bulk of the FVC’s programming, however, will focus on films stemming from the ideals surrounding the French student rebellions in May 1968. The moment of that ‘life-changing event’ has inspired the ‘French Cinema of the 1960s’ and the ‘New Hollywood’ series set for next quarter.

So I was channel surfing the other day, and came across a random black and white movie that was playing. And it made me realize that, hey, I haven’t seen any really old movies in quite a while! Well, okay, that’s a lie, but I haven’t seen any that weren’t Canadian or Korean in quite a while. That’s a little sad. So why not make a blog post commemorating some I’ve seen, and loved? And maybe help spread the word on them a little bit?

M by Fritz Lang (1931)

À bout de souffle (Breathless) by Jean-Luc Godard (1960)

Cléo de 5 à 7 (Cléo from 5 to 7) by Agnès Varda (1962)

Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves) by Vittorio De Seca ( 1948 )

Rashomon by Akira Kurosawa (1950)

Double Indemnity by Billy Wilder (1944)

Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) by Robert Wiene (1920)

Smultronstället (Wild Strawberries) by Ingmar Bergman (1957)

And, last but certainly not least…

The Gold Rush by Charlie Chaplin (1925)

Since Em is bringing up French cinema, I thought I’d share one of my favorite scenes. It’s from Cleo from 5 to 7, shot in real time as a pop singer awaits her appointment to get the results of her cancer biopsy:

i was talking about this film again yesterday and got a little thrill again. it is so very expressive of desperation and youthful wistfulness and finally, inescapability. the three lead actors are vincent cassel, hubert kounde, and said taghmaoui. they are three young men in a housing project just outside of paris who are reacting to the beating of their friend by the police. they are, essentially, trying to make something different happen. i cannot say enough that this film is so worth watching.

i came to this film entirely because i have admired vincent cassel since “read my lips.” (and a quick aside to say that the director, jaques audiard, also made “the beat that my heart skipped”, which is also worth seeing.) he’s excellent at playing characters who are both cruel and falliable, human. now i will be looking for more of his films.

hubert kounde was the doctor in “the constant gardener” and coined the word “parkour“. a performance of which can now be seen in car commercials on television. urban restlessness and invention.

back to the film–another adjunct where i teach uses “crash” to illustrate aspects of post-colonialism in her composition class (ethnic diversity, racism, class and so on.) a far inferior film. we discussed the relative merits of exposing college freshmen to difficult foreign films that may be more artistically beautiful versus domestic films which may more effectively raise the issues we wish to discuss. i suggested that she see l’haine, and i would always try for the more difficult film first. (i did screen “the gleaners and i” by agnes varda in a freshman composition course. i forget the themes i was considering. see varda’s “cleo from 5 to 7″ if you’ve never.)

this is too many digressions, even for me.

firstly, i was shocked at how great and intricate the camera work was in this film. i haven’t seen a whole lot of new wave, but from what i remember about godard, camera work was not of great interest to him. i’m gonna go ahead and use a modern day basketball analogy to illustrate my point. godard was more like the golden state warriors and agnes varda (at least in cleo) is like the san antiono spurs. godard was more of a run and gun style of film making, while varda’s seems meticulously planned out. i mean that scene when cleo is buying the hat? amazing! i can’t exactly recall if it was one long take, but the mise en scene and composition are fantastic. it seems much more thought out than godard, and it is something that i can really admire.

(excuse this next paragraph as i try to comment on the film’s dealings with feminism. i am in no way an expert on the subject, nor do i really know what i’m talking about so take it with a grain of salt)

i also like the way varda deals with feminism in the film. contrasting cleo with women who seem, on the exterior at least, much more ambitious and self-reliant. the first time we see this is when cleo takes the cab ride with the female cabby. the cab driver tells the story about dealing with customers who don’t want to pay the fare, and how she isn’t afraid of who to pick up. contrasting that with cleo who is afraid of getting cancer, and to a greater extent loosing her beautiful appearance. also cleo with her friend who poses for the sculpting class. she has this sort of independence, self confidence, and freedom that cleo does not.

but now for what i had problems with. if you’ll recall and earlier post i had about the seventh seal, i said i thought bergman was the biggest pessimist the world has ever known; which i still think is somewhat true. i had a problem with this film because it seems to say that the world doesn’t care about people.  we get the scene when cleo goes into the cafe and plays one of her songs, then proceeds to strolls around the aisles waiting for someone to recognize her.  when she realizes that no one does or no one even cares, i feel like the film is generalizing this for the whole world.  that people don’t care about other people’s suffering.

but overall i think the film does stay away from trying to make any overt statements.  and just from a technical aspect, i think this film is a joy to watch (plus i feel like i’ve left out a great deal of things to discuss).

week of april 1:

twelve angry men by sidney lumet

i’ve had numerous people tell me i need to see it, and this was one that wasn’t even really on my radar.

week of april 7:

cléo from 5 to 7 by agnés varda

a little classic new wave

week of april 14:

the 400 blows by francois truffaut

continuing the new wave for another week

week of april 21:

the 39 steps by alfred hitchcock

one of those few hitchcock films i’ve left to see

week of april 28:

2001: a space odyssey

i’m not really looking forward to it. it seems like too much to undertake