Greer Cloots

Roads make cities, and cities make suburbs. It is “lying in a burned-out basement” somewhere in the aforementioned suburbs that Shakey – now adolescent and tentatively matured – gives us his state of the union address and the interpretational key to his entire oeuvre.

Jules et Jim is a candidate for the French New Wave film, and maybe the French film of all time. Perhaps the only generational epic (the clichéd tale of a generation-spanning friendship torn apart by love and war blah blah blah) that is able to maintain humbleness, idiosyncrasy, and intimacy, Jules et Jim is responsible for generations of off-beat yet sincere movies.

What is consistently inspiring about the films is their ability to move freely, uninhibited by convention. Often it seems they are structured and chaptered as novels, and they frequently suggest literary underpinnings. Behind the veil of his films are slow-moving cosmologies and ill-defined empires that only graze the aesthetic surface. For instance, when we watch Leonard Lawrence in Full Metal Jacket slowly alienated and punished for his faults, we are watching the roots of antagonism and subversiveness…