Degrees of passion (The Young Girls of Rochefort addendum)

"And in her wonderful documentary about the film--The Young Girls Turn 25, which I saw at the Chicago International Film Festival in 1993--we encounter a French teenager with a backpack who proudly and calmly informs us that she carries the CD of Bach's Saint Matthew Passion and the video of Les demoiselles de Rochefort everywhere she goes, unwilling to spend even a night without them. Such a degree of passion about art is bound to seem demented in a 'utilitarian' (i.e., money-minded) society such as ours, but it's entirely compatible with the degree of passion expressed in the film itself."

-Jonathan Rosenbaum, "Not the Same Old Song and Dance", Chicago Reader, November 27, 1998

A stolen thought on The Young Girls of Rochefort, a still that illustrates it, plus more

"In The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967) [Jacques] Demy uses, between the big song and dance numbers, a lot of humming, people singing to themselves, fiddling around on musical instruments -- so that the act of music making is everywhere in the everyday...

Dancing constantly shoots in and out of the frame, traverses this rectangular window, like it's going on everywhere all the time, whether we can see it or not. Lastly, Demy intermingles walking with dancing, with some participants gliding almost imperceptibly into the foreground action from a long way in the background."

-Adrian Martin, "Musical Mutations: Before, Beyond, and Against Hollywood," in Movie Mutations, The Changing Face of World Cinema. Annapolis: British Film Institute, 2003.

Today's Image.

Magnificent Obsession (Douglas Sirk, 1954)