Slogan (film)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Movie
German title slogan
Original title slogan
Country of production France
original language French
Publishing year 1969
length 85 minutes
Rod
Director Pierre Grimblat
script Pierre Grimblat,
Francis Girod ,
Melvin Van Peebles
production Francis Girod
music Serge Gainsbourg
camera Claude Beausoleil
cut Françoise Garnault ,
Jacques Witta
occupation

Slogan is a French romance movie from 1969 with Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin in the lead roles. The director was Pierre Grimblat , who also wrote the script.

action

The film only has a very loose story arc. Serge Fabergé, a successful commercial filmmaker, is 40, married and has one young child. At the advertising film festival in Venice he runs into the 18-year-old Evelyne from England. They fall in love with each other over both ears.

His wife tolerates the affair, but for the emotionally immature Evelyne, who lives well into the day, it is great love, and she asks Serge to get a divorce. Serge doesn't really want to make a decision and is therefore glad that the divorce procedure is dragging on. Gradually the young love falls into a crisis. They quarrel more often until Evelyne leaves him. Serge stays with his wife and soon meets another young woman.

Design

The first half of the film consists largely of a sequence of turtle scenes between Serge and Evelyne. The scenes change between Paris, Venice, a London that is only claimed in interior shots, and the beach at Honfleur . The characters move in a luxurious sphere of creative advertisers and filmmakers. The office equipment consists of colored Plexiglas and Serge's apartment corresponds to the fashionable designs of the time.

Grimblat had directed a single feature film, the crime thriller How Easily Can That Go In The Eye (Me faire ça à moi , 1961) with Eddie Constantine ; Serge Fabergé projected excerpts from it in slogans . He then worked as a commercial filmmaker with considerable success. The slogan was to be his return to directing feature films. “It's true, I wanted to make 90 commercials, each one for 1 minute.” He was inspired by photographers David Bailey and Helmut Newton .

Origin background

Grimblat couldn't get a failed love affair out of his head and he told François Truffaut about it. He advised him to get rid of it by using the story for a script. Grimblat tailor-made the main role of Gainsbourg, with whom he had been friends for a long time, and deliberately kept the dialogues short because that was Gainsbourg's essence. The production of the film was severely hampered by the May riots because neither equipment could be rented nor film material could be bought. A documentary filmmaker friend who had supplies helped out. The team consisted largely of friends.

Grimblat and Gainsbourg traveled to Venice at the end of May 1968 in the hope of being able to make some recordings at the Festival of Commercials that they wanted to use in feature films. A few commercials that Grimblat had previously produced ran, which he had completely forgotten, in the competition, and he was assigned a front row seat for the evening of the awards ceremony. Shortly before the start of the event, he swaps places with Gainsbourg. The jury surprisingly announced that the Grand Prize would go to Grimblat. The intimidated Gainsbourg, encouraged by Grimblat, moved onto the stage and, shaking hands with the president, the mayor and other dignitaries, accepted the award under the eyes of the photographers. The footage can be seen shortly after the start of Slogan . Filming began two weeks later.

Grimblat wanted a beginner because he saw actors as a projection of the director and could more easily shape them; he was looking for a girl who was naive and at the same time a bitch. The search for the actress from Evelyne turned out to be difficult. Grimblat first looked in vain in France and then in several European cities for a woman who had the charm of his exes. The last round of applications was in London, where, after an unsuccessful morning, Grimblat discovered a girl who met his expectations in a snack bar. When asked by him, she replied that she would come to see him that afternoon ... Jane Birkin had never heard of Gainsbourg, and Gainsbourg met her with condescension and indifference. After a week of shooting, Grimblat took action. In order to loosen up the atmosphere for the remaining seven weeks, Grimblat ordered the two of them to have dinner so that the three of them could express themselves - and the only one who did not appear. Gainsbourg and Birkin spent the evening eating and dancing and became that couple in love that they no longer needed to play because they were one.

Birkin didn’t speak a word of French, so he found it difficult to learn the dialogues. Her then two-year-old daughter Kate can be seen as a child of the Fabergés. During the editing, Grimblat's friend Jacques Deray , who urgently needed a replacement actress for The Swimming Pool, got in touch, looked at the recordings, and Birkin already had another engagement in France. The release of Slogan was delayed and The Swimming Pool came into theaters first. For Slogan the time had come in the summer of 1969 and the strip had 564,000 admissions in France. Gainsbourg and Birkin were sold as "Couple of the Year" on the movie posters . The musician, who until then had only got rogue supporting roles, explained: "It was the first film in which the director let me play for who I really am."

Criticism and assessment of film history

In 1970, Jean-Paul Thirard von Positif judged that Grimblat was telling the autobiographical plot brilliantly, but superficially, in the format of an anecdote in which feelings weighed lightly, and wished the director to put this self-promotion behind him in the future and finally go to the cinema.

Most popular film reference works do n't mention slogans at all. Only the lexicon of international films commented that the film's “sentimentalities and externalities” prevented an analysis of the characters' egoistic pleasure behavior. The French DVD was released in 2007 and the German DVD in 2008. Contrary to the actual year of release of the film, the German DVD publisher praised the disc with the slogan “The cult film from the summer of love '68” . On the occasion of the release of the CD, Manfred Prescher from evolver .at said: “It doesn't matter that this film is not a masterpiece. Nevertheless, it transports the spirit of a decade in the most charming way. "

Former advertiser Frédéric Beigbeder , author of the novel Thirty-Nine Ninety , which was filmed as 39.90 , referred to the character Serge as an ancestor of his novel hero. Grimblat wonderfully portrayed the frustration of the commercial filmmaker, who has enormous resources for something very mundane and who grapples with customers who have no idea.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f Pierre Grimblat interviewed by Pierre Lescure, bonus material on the DVD Slogan , Pierrot le fou 2008
  2. ↑ Pierre Grimblat in the television program 'Samedi et compagne' from November 1, 1969, in the bonus material on the DVD Slogan , Pierrot le fou 2008
  3. ↑ a b c Jane Birkin interviewed by Pierre Lescure, bonus material on the DVD Slogan , Pierrot le fou 2008
  4. ↑ according to Tout le ciné.com ( memento of the original from January 1, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.toutlecine.com
  5. ↑ Serge Gainsbourg in the TV show 'Eté magazine' from September 8, 1969, in the bonus material on the DVD Slogan , Pierrot le fou 2008
  6. ^ Jean-Paul Thirard: Slogan . In: Positif , March 1970, p. 69
  7. ^ Lexicon of International Films, Volume 3, Q – Z, Zweiausendeins, Frankfurt am Main 2002, ISBN 3-86150-455-3
  8. ↑ Manfred Prescher : The sugar-sweet sixties . In: Evolver.at
  9. ↑ Frédéric Beigbeder in: Cinéma & publicité, bonus material on the DVD Slogan , Pierrot le fou 2008