Peter Bogdanovich and The Grand Illusion

On Saturday afternoon, The International Federation of Film Archives honoured filmmaker and historian Peter Bogdanovich for his contributions to preservation of cinema.

Bogdanovich was in attendance to accept the award -- a film canister made of silver from old film negatives. As part of the presentation event, the recipient is given the opportunity to show a classic film, and in yesterday's case, Bogdanovich chose Renoir's 1937 masterpiece, La grande illusion.

In discussing the film, he commented that for him it is one of greatest films ever made and that "the grand illusion" of the pic was that The First World War would be the last great war.

He added that Orson Wells, a huge follower of Renoir's work, said it was the one film he would take with him to a desert island. (Bogdanovich countered that the one film he would take would also be a Renoir pic, French Cancan, because it's a musical and if you're stuck on a deserted island you might want a little singing and dancing.)

The film itself was a newly restored print of La grande illusion and it looked superb. One criticism, however, was the shoddy subtitling -- at times subtitles would appear when no one was speaking, occasionally they were out of sync with the dialogue, and even worse, there would be long passages when the dialogue wasn't translated at all. All this was surprising given the fanfare around the new version.

Posted on 09/09/07 by: garyc 03:50 PM