Z [1969)

He lives!

[in ancient Greek]

A letter was banned.

Why did Putin have the letter Z emblazoned on every military vehicle (particularly tanks) invading Ukraine?

Z mean “he lives” in ancient Greek.

Why did Putin have the letter Z emblazoned on every tank entering Ukraine?

There is no Z in the Russian Cyrillic alphabet.

There is likewise no Z in the Ukrainian Cyrillic alphabet.

If Z stands for Zelensky, why not use the Russian or Ukrainian equivalent of a Z?

Why use a Roman letter?

My gut feeling tells me this was psychological warfare.

The obvious answer would be a campaign to scare Zelensky.

But I feel there is more to this story.

Find out.

Did Vladimir Putin like movies?

Yes.

What kind of movies?

Soviet spy movies.

Is Putin a fan of the James Bond franchise?

Yes.

007.

Putin retired as a Lieutenant Colonel of the KGB in 1991 after 16 years of service.

At least five of those years were spent in East Germany.

Putin speaks German as a second language.

This film predates the start of Putin’s KGB career by six years.

Z was taken up by the followers of Yves Montand’s character after his murder in this film.

The Z was painted on the street during a clash between protestors and police.

What is Z about?

Corruption.

At the highest levels.

Durham.

Zorro.

Revenge.

Righteous vengeance.

May 2, 2014.

Trade Unions House in Odessa.

32 pro-Russian activists died of suffocation.

They were burned alive in the building.

The doors were barricaded so they could not get out.

An additional 10 pro-Russian activists jumped to their death from windows of the building as it was on fire.

Seven of those who died were women.

One was a 17-year-old boy.

As activists tried to escape, they were beaten by Ukrainian “unity” (pro-Maidan) protestors.

The pro-Russian activists were vastly-outnumbered.

46 of those killed in the fire were Ukrainians from Odessa.

The other two were Ukrainians from other towns.

The true story of Grigoris Lambrakis.

And his death in Thessaloniki.

The first letter of the Greek word, “Zi”.

“He lives”.

A graffito from 1960s Greece after the death of Lambrakis.

But Z is also the last letter of the English alphabet.

Biblical.

I am the alpha (first letter) and the omega (last letter).

The end.

The end times.

The last battle.

The last straw.

The hill to die on.

2/22/22.

The 26th letter of the English alphabet.

Invasion on the 24th of February.

What was the planetary alignment on 2/22/22?

Ezra Pound went by Z.

As you can see why.

Zorro.

An outlaw.

Who avenges the helpless, punishes cruel politicians, and aids the oppressed.

Putin on a horse.

Tornado.

Zorro is Don Diego Vega.

A fictional character created 100 years ago by Johnston McCulley.

An important detail.

Zorro’s mother is dead.

Putin’s mother died of tuberculosis when he was 18.

The dead moms club.

Zorro is a metaphorical chess master.

Intelligent.

Master of complex strategy.

Master of planning.

Planning before a battle.

But also a master of improvisation.

Zorro is not about brute force.

Zorro uses psychological warfare.

Zorro provokes his opponents into errors.

Zorro prods his opponents to seek revenge.

And be blinded by vengeful rage.

Zorro is a master of provocation and setting traps.

Zorro is a spy.

Like Putin.

Zorro provokes anger.

Like a punk rocker.

To keep his enemies off-balance.

Don Q, Son of Zorro.

1925.

Douglas Fairbanks.

Q Z.

Don Trump.

Z, son of Q.

World War Z.

Virus.

Biolabs.

Lavrov confirmed.

https://t.me/GeneralMcInerney/2400

Zombie pandemic.

The last war.

Philadelphia.

Bill Gates.

Smallpox.

Merck.

Costa-Gavras.

The most important thing about this film is Raoul Coutard.

It was just one month ago that the world lost Christos Sarzetakis.

President of Greece 1985-1990.

Let’s not forget that Greece was ruled by a military junta from 1967-1974.

So this film (1969) came at a particularly tense time in the country’s history.

And it was made in French.

Not Greek.

I agree with some of this film.

#NoMoreNATO .

Agreed.

#USAoutofNATO is my preferred tag.

Jan. 6 was a set-up.

9/11 was an inside job.

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/68bDf5v7OSzGE43SWlq2Oc?si=9b6adeef05b94d4d

-PD

Les Portes de la nuit [1946)

I don’t know who I’m writing for.

Or why.

Maybe myself.

Because I think God grants us little bits of happiness.

So I am celebrating humanity.

Through cinema.

Poor words.

Can’t handle.

Sick of my face.

And my voice.

In cinema, we must remember the past.

We must speak every language.

So that Destiny is always equally “tired Death”.

Which is to say, Death.

Tired of doing His job.

I am death.

So I sometimes moonlight as destiny.

Jack Fate.

Jean Vilar.

Avignon.

Fate.

Jews being deported 2600 years ago.

Film influences.

Lesser films (like Schindler’s List) which receive state support often tell us how to think.

Cinema is dead in the United States.

But like Machiavelli, I believe our virtù can live again.

We may have killed the French film industry with jazz, but we birthed so much as well.

By this time he was simply known as Carette.

[it does not follow]

No one appreciates your Joycean take on the Arcades Project.

Same stream of thought which would make knowledge so ostensibly important at the start of the 21st century.

Julien Carette…of whom I’ve written before.

It is a very impressive verbal camouflage to say that code isn’t dead.

Cipher is too easy. Too practical.

Is why art speaks in code.

But cinema is “neither an art nor a technique” (to quote Godard).

It is “a mystery”.

So to understand À bout de soufflé or Vivre sa vie, we must know Les Portes de la nuit.

It’s disgusting.

To be shot in the back.

Not necessarily in that order…

Marcel Carné. Encore.

Another classic.

The great code.

The biggest mystery of all.

An unimportant list in an inconsequential book by Céline Scemama-Heard.

You will have to learn another language to continue down this path.

Now that the NSA has stopped jamming my computer. Momentarily.

Nothing could be more absurd!

Yves Montand looks like Richard Hell here.

And we begin to understand Alan Vega even more.

You must remember this…les feuilles mortes sont “the dead leaves”.

Not autumn.

Lost in translation.

Nathalie Nattier would have to go to the end of the earth to make this a masterpiece.

Which is exactly what she did.

île de Pâques.

-PD

7 Comments

Pépé le Moko [1937)

I was alive.

Really alive.

I thought about one way, but took another.

Because the unpredictable had become routine.

We write until we die.

Romantic outlaws.

My crime?

Thirst.

It is a masterpiece from Julien Duvivier.

Jean Gabin is trapped in the Casbah.

Like the digital ghetto known as Facebook.

I didn’t coin the phrase.

But it is not my primary impetus.

It comes secondary.

Pépé from Toulon. It’s been too long.

Not long enough.

Just as Yves Montand dreamed of Pigalle in Le salaire de la peur.

Here Jean Gabin dreams of Le Métro.

Like Baudelaire’s “La Chevelure”…

Gabin inhales the perfume of freedom.

Sick of his life.

Running.

Hiding.

Sick of life.

But Fréhel teaches the most poignant lesson.

“Où est-il mon moulin de la Place Blanche?
Mon tabac et mon bistrot du coin?
Tous les jours pour moi c’était dimanche!
Où sont-ils les amis, les copains?”

Where’s my tobacco shop and my corner bistro?

I dreamt of France for ten years. Finally I made it there.

And Paris? I was there for an hour or two. In the back of a van. Gazing out the windows.

And like Fréhel I had my day of glory.

The very name of this website. Pauly Deathwish. My stage name.

And so, for us, a picture from our youth becomes a mirror.

And we wind the phonograph like the engine of a Ford Model T (pre-1919).

But I have my memories of Doc.

Of the thatched roof.

I thought only Debussy hung the moon.

But it was also dear Ravel who made the birds sing and the flowers bloom.

And so perhaps Ravel’s Piano Concerto…middle movement…in the hands of Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli.

Perhaps this is my “Où Est–il Donc?”

Algiers. Alger. Algeria. Kabyle.

ⵟⴰⴳⴷⵓⴷⴰ ⵜⴰⵎⴻⴳⴷⴰⵢⵜ ⵜⴰⵖⴻⵔⴼⴰⵏⵜ ⵜⴰⵣⵣⴰⵢⵔⵉⵜ

Berber or Tamazight in the Maghreb.

Yes, there are no English words to sum up the emotion I have for this film.

The secret of the world can be found in French films.

-PD

8 Comments

Le Salaire de la peur [1953)

Only appropriate that we would reapproach France during these tense times with this film which is, believe it or not, more full of tension than anything I can recall in Hitchcock’s oeuvre.

Yes, The Wages of Fear by director Henri-Georges Clouzot is unlike anything I have ever seen. More or less.

A parallel can be made to the Humphrey Bogart film They Drive by Night, but Le Salaire de la peur is of a different caliber altogether.

Believe it or not, Yves Montand actually out-acts Bogart in this here film.

From the bizarre beginnings, we hardly have any clue where this flick is going.

Where are we? Tegucigalpa? No, not enough oil. Venezuela? Perhaps.

D’où Venons Nous / Que Sommes Nous / Où Allons Nous???

Mexico. A fictional (?) town called Las Piedras. The stones.

Not to be confused with pies (feet).

Indeed, stones play an important part in this film. And so do feet.

But initially we are disoriented by the Eisenstein-like montage reminiscent of ¡Que viva México! A small child with a sombrero and no pants playing with cockroaches.

And as the film gets going we notice the multitude of languages. Spanish, French, German (?), Italian…maybe Dutch?

The Dutchman in question is played by German actor Peter van Eyck (born Götz von Eick).

In fact, I thought for much of the film that I was watching Oskar Werner (much to my chagrin upon consulting the credits).

And so we have a hodgepodge of refugees in this one-horse town of Las Piedras, but the oil industry beckons…on the frontier. It is a dangerous industry (and becomes infinitesimally more dangerous through the course of this film).

I do believe I have heard Clouzot described as the French Hitchcock. After seeing this, that makes perfect sense.

Le salaire de la peur is such a pithy, visceral film.

I don’t want to give too much away, but this is a very powerful film which takes aim at corporate callousness. But the real theme is danger. Fear. Anxiety. The sickness of worry.

It reminds us that we shouldn’t judge our fellow humans too harshly. We can never know the exact feelings or the exact situation.

One final thought. Nitroglycerine plays an integral part in this film.

I pray that the Russian soldiers who died yesterday will not have died in vain. May the leaders of Turkey and the other NATO countries come to their senses in what has been sheer geopolitical insanity along Russia’s border. What restraint Russia has shown compared to the egregious stunt pulled by Turkey! As with all actions emanating from the West, I wouldn’t be surprised if the incident was ordered to occur (giving propitious conditions) by a power residing much further west than Ankara.

May courage and wisdom be with the militaries of all nations, the soldiers of which are thrust into the most unenviable positions imaginable. War for profit has hit its maximum potential. If there be one true diplomat left on the planet, let him or her please stand up at this crucial time.

Don’t count too much on your simulations.

-PD

7 Comments

Tout va bien [1972)

This might be the most important film ever made.

You can’t start like that.

This whole “internal monolog” gets boring…

Illiterate Joyce fanatic.

After fucking around for four years, Godard and Gorin (like Marx and Engels) finally got the funding needed to deal a deathblow to bourgeois capitalism. Bourgeois? Monopoly. Monopoly?

I feel film review coming on…itching like a well-known wool blanket.

Jane Fonda is devastatingly good in this.

Yves Montand nails it.

Godard and Gorin fling a manifesto at the world. Hollywood has failed miserably in mustering a riposte.

Over 40 years ago.

Who speaks for Hollywood?

And who speaks for not Hollywood?

A state of mind more than a place.

New forms for new content.

Not Hollywood.

You know Jacques Tati and Jerry Lewis.

We get a hilarious choking performance from Vittorio Caprioli.

It’s not a thing to hide…the fact that one is marked for death.

But hidden it is.

A loudmouthed agitator who learned to unlearn. Through books.

A conundrum. No, there is no stopping being an intellectual.

If you don’t know the Dziga-Vertov Group’s work, you won’t realize that Tout va bien is actually reflective.

It is a perfect gentle art bomb.

No box office data.

Not what we meant anyway.

Must be a pain in the ass to parse these “reviews” on behalf of the control freaks.

A good psychologist would tell you to buy a mirror. Buy some time. Reflect.

But there are no good psychs…seems.

No, surely there are.

A lot (two words) of professions seem glutted with criminals.

And the psychs are there to define criminality.

Judges by the benison of nepotism.

By which we mean judges. [new subject]

By this time they broke the fourth wall so efficiently and effortlessly. With Jane Fonda.

The wrong woman.

Diegesis or die a Jesus?

Opacity of performance?

I think what they mean is, by being weird it causes the audience to ask, “Why are they being weird?”

Who cares.

Too beautiful to end there.

The most important. Perhaps.

Can’t this motherfucker complete a goddamned sentence?

New forms for new content. (2)

Seriously, the boss has to piss!

And is that the cock from Persona?

Cock. I never would’ve said it that way.

Check. Check. Check. Check. Check. Check. Check. Check. Check. Check. Check. Check. Check. Check. Check. Check.

She told me.

Double-spacing was an antiquated technique. Something about a journalism degree. I tried.

Obviously, people are watching.

Route me out of the main stream. Rout.

I know my true brothers and sisters, but they remain invisible.

Little signals over the ether and we take the helm.

Rub your jade.

Yes. Look look look.

Doesn’t matter. They want you to know that clearly.

The movies where the hero is a shitbag who finally does the right thing at the end…and utters one last dying quotable.

Karate for life. For instance.

Capitalize the first noun, and then shut the fuck up. It’s just a title.

What’s in a goddamned name?

Shaky sphere at the globe. On the shore. Of a ditch.

The borr(o)wed. Borr()wed.

Barred.

If there’s a right way to write about film, this ain’t it.

Unremitting self-referential showmanship.

Serves to defuse…de fuse.

Someday. Someday. A couple of holy grails will roll down the hill.

Goddamn.

-PD

6 Comments

paulydeathwish

musician and film critic

Tag Archives: Yves Montand