Master Classes: De Oliveira's Belle Toujours and Von Trotta's I Am the Other Woman
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Each year the Toronto International Film Festival screens several hundred films, features and shorts, within the space of a week. While I like the fact that so much is available, it becomes very difficult to select which films to attend. In the course of the 2006 festival, I saw a number of excellent works by filmmakers whose work I know: Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Climates, Benoit Jacquot's L'Intouchable, Jia Zhang-ke's Dong, Abbas Kiarostami's Roads of Kiarostami, Jay Rosenblatt's Afraid So and Tsai Ming-liang's I Don't Want to Sleep Alone. In addition I was introduced to the work of Christoph Girardet and Matthias Muller; Kristall, which consists solely of mirror shots taken from Hollywood and European feature films, is fascinating, illustrating the many ways in which a mirror reflection can be used to comment on its subject and, by extension, the film's thematic. Yet the films that gave me the most pleasure were Manoel de Oliveira's Belle Toujours and Margarethe von Trotta's I Am the Other Woman. De Oliveira conceived Belle Toujours in admiration of Luis Bunuel and Jean-Claude Carriere and their 1967 film Belle de Jour. Although von Trotta may not have undertaken I Am the Other Woman expressly because of its connections to Vertigo, she has crafted a film that unequivocally demonstrates the impact Hitchcock's film has had on her. De Oliveira and von Trotta prove themselves to be worthy of the artists they so lovingly evoke. The rewards of watching Belle Toujours and I Am the Other Woman are twofold, appreciating the films in their own right and as creative tributes to great filmmakers. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] A word of caution: if you don't want to know about the plots of these films, stop reading. Belle Toujours In the 70 minute Belle Toujours, which de Oliveira wrote and directed, Michel Piccoli reprises his role of the worldly Henri Husson and Bulle Ogier replaces Catherine Deneuve as Severine, who in Belle de Jour is the young and sexually repressed wife of one of Henri's best friends, Pierre/Jean Sorel. The setting of de Oliveira's film is present day Paris and the premise is simple: Henri, attending a classical music concert, spies Severine in the audience and decides to contact her. Henri and Severine haven't seen each other since they parted thirty-nine years ago as he was about to inform Pierre of Severine's secret afternoon life as a brothel prostitute. (Pierre, blind and crippled, didn't know that the man who shot him was a jealous client of Severine's). As Severine leaves the concert hall, she recognizes Henri, but, instead of acknowledging him, flees. Henri is determined to catch her and, after several failed attempts, does so and gets Severine to agree to attend a dinner at his hotel. She agrees on the condition that he will tell her whether or not he told Pierre about her double life. As the above description of Belle Toujours indicates, its pleasures involve a familiarity with and appreciation of the Bunuel-Carriere film. On the other hand, de Oliveira's film has its own distinctive identity. For instance, the tone of Belle Toujours is playful and affectionate whereas Belle de Jour is more sombre and disquieting. While de Oliveira provides his film with surrealist elements--the premise itself utilizes the notion of chance, Henri's hectic pursuit of Severine suggests a classical Hollywood madcap comedy, Bulle Ogier, to evoke Deneuve's Severine, wears an ill-fitting blonde wig, the dinner ends with the appearance of a live rooster in the hallway as seen through the opened front door of Henri's hotel suite immediately after Severine, in exasperation, has bolted out of the room--he isn't interested in using surrealism, as did Bunuel and Carriere, as a means to acknowledge the unconscious. In fact, Belle Toujours strikes a tone that is more akin to the absurdity that underlies The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), another Bunuel-Carriere collaboration. (The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, in addition to featuring both Piccoli and Ogier, contains a wickedly funny performance by Ogier. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".