6. La Ronde
I love it, again it’s very French. It takes Marcel Carne to next level. It uses a lot of circular filming motifs and beautiful uses of sound and movement which somehow captures, for me, a European, voluptuous decadence! Also, it would be Max Ophül’s son Marcel Ophüls would do the one of the most shocking films about the about the Holocaust, and Nazis near Lyon, The Sorrow and the Pity, I think is the name of that film. It’s also very long.
And I lived in the area, which I found out later, was where the Sorrow and the Pity had been filmed, because that was one of the centres of Nazi operations, even keeping young people in sort of semi prisons before they were deported. I never experienced the Holocaust or anti-semitism in that way because I was brought up in Jewish-friendly New York City. Still that’s had a very big effect on me, now being a European, since I’ve been living in so many different place – in Holland, in Italy, Belgium and France – and I’ve come upon the whole "Jewish problem", I came to know of various "disappearances" and things you don’t hear of in America.
