Claudine Bories
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True/False 2022: Reconvening
One of my favorite memories of attending a decade-plus of True/False is from the 2015 edition of the now-defunct Neither/Nor sidebar, annually dedicated to a small retrospective with accompanying monograph. A selection of unknown-to-me Polish cinema programmed by Ela Bittencourt structured that year’s on-the-ground experience from my first screening, Marcel Łoziński’s 1981 How to Live, as hilarious as promised by its description: “In the 1970s, young Polish couple [sic] attend a government-sponsored summer camp where they learn to become the ideal communist family.” The sidebar produced a number of related beguiling sights, not least the now very senior filmmakers in attendance […]
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 21, 2022 -
True/False 2015: Rules of the Game, Spartacus & Cassandra and I Am The People
For once my favorite movie of True/False 2015 was an honest-to-goodness crowdpleaser, a counterintuitively funny film on a grim topic. Claudine Bories and Patrice Chagnard had the earned gumption to title their film Rules of the Game; in French it’s distinguished from Renoir’s film by the first word being Les rather than La, but that distinction doesn’t translate. It’s not just a cutely attention-getting appropriation: Renoir’s film anatomizes unspoken codes of conduct for French high society which, if observed, should successfully conceal hypocrisies and personal betrayals. Bories and Chagnard’s reworked title refers to clothing, eye contact, portfolio neatness and other job interview variables that — rather than work ethic and qualifications […]
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 17, 2015
