{"id":1052,"date":"2015-09-13T12:54:50","date_gmt":"2015-09-13T19:54:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.maureeneppstein.com\/mve_journal\/?p=1052"},"modified":"2015-09-13T12:54:50","modified_gmt":"2015-09-13T19:54:50","slug":"movies-for-the-intellectual-set","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.maureeneppstein.com\/mve_journal\/?p=1052","title":{"rendered":"Movies for the intellectual set"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"marianbad<\/a>

Images of the original posters are from rottentomatoes.com<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve seen Last Year at Marienbad<\/em> seventeen times already,\u201d our college friend Bill told us as he showed us around London on our arrival in 1962. \u201cI still haven\u2019t figured out what really happened. I\u2019ll have to go again this weekend.\u201d This enigmatic movie, directed by Alain Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet, is considered a masterpiece of the French New Wave. The movie website rottentomatoes.com<\/a>\u00a0 comments: \u201cElegantly enigmatic and dreamlike, this work of essential cinema features exquisite cinematography and an exploration of narrative still revisited by filmmakers today.\u201d<\/p>\n

For my husband Tony and me, it exemplified the rich cultural life we discovered in London. In New Zealand, where we grew up, to be an intellectual was to live as a small coterie on the outskirts of society, viewed with suspicion by the mainstream. To be an intellectual in London was to be part of a big vibrant conversation, fueled by articulate reviews of movies, books, art exhibitions, plays and dance performances in the Sunday Times<\/em> and other papers. In between job hunting and flat hunting, we took the opportunity to participate as much as possible.<\/p>\n

Reading again a letter to parents dated April 18, 1962, not long after we arrived, I note a distancing of myself from this new world of ideas, possibly a Kiwi reluctance to admit my eagerness to be part of it. I wrote:<\/p>\n

\"smiles<\/a>London is chockfull of fascinating characters \u2013 you meet them everywhere \u2013 on the street, in the Underground. All sorts and shapes and sizes. We met the intellectual set last night \u2013 went up to a cinema at Hampstead Village \u2013 on the edge of the Heath \u2013 which is obviously run by and for the intellectual crowd \u2013 hard red and black in the d\u00e9cor, and the finishing touch a handsome beaten copper plaque for the exit sign. They have been showing a series of all Ingmar Bergman, the modern Swedish director\u2019s films. The place was packed out with long hair and beards and intense faces. Almost as interesting to watch as the film. It was a very delicate and charming piece called \u201cSmiles of a Summer Night.\u201d We also saw another interesting film the other night \u2013 Alain Resnais\u2019s \u201cLast Year at Marienbad\u201d \u2013 highly psychological (and apparently the intellectuals\u2019 current talking-point!) The story (if you can call it that) is that a woman meets a man at a spa who tries to convince her that they were intimate there the previous year, but she thinks she has never seen him before. Scope for highly intriguing playing around with time and facts, with emotional distortions.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"seventh<\/a>\"jules<\/a>Over the next few years, we saw almost all of Ingmar Bergman’s movies, which I still love, along with many by the French New Wave directors. I learned to accept that I too was an intellectual.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cI\u2019ve seen Last Year at Marienbad seventeen times already,\u201d our college friend Bill told us as he showed us around London on our arrival in 1962. \u201cI still haven\u2019t figured out what really happened. I\u2019ll have to go again this weekend.\u201d This enigmatic movie, directed by Alain Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet, is considered a masterpiece […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[213,9,123,5],"tags":[300,302,301],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.maureeneppstein.com\/mve_journal\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1052"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.maureeneppstein.com\/mve_journal\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.maureeneppstein.com\/mve_journal\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.maureeneppstein.com\/mve_journal\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.maureeneppstein.com\/mve_journal\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1052"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.maureeneppstein.com\/mve_journal\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1052\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1064,"href":"https:\/\/www.maureeneppstein.com\/mve_journal\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1052\/revisions\/1064"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.maureeneppstein.com\/mve_journal\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1052"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.maureeneppstein.com\/mve_journal\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1052"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.maureeneppstein.com\/mve_journal\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1052"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}