Ray Pride

I grew up on a couple-acre patch of green amid rolling farmland in the west of Kentucky—I spent eighteen years there one week, the tired joke goes—and didn’t grow up with movies. I grew up among people. People who talked. And talked. Stories were everywhere. Histories were spoken aloud. Women and men in their eighties and nineties who had sat on the lap of Civil War veterans when they were small. Legacies were alive. Everyone knows and trusts implicitly the basic, indispensable relationships and alliances and mutual associations in a town of a thousand. You’re forced to, through fires, floods, illness, economic slumps. Cemeteries were filled with the names of people you knew who were the successors of the passed. A dozen identical headstones would answer to the same name. One night, young, I saw both "Nashville" on a big screen and "The 400 Blows," uncut, Janus Films logo and all, on late-night TV. And that was it. There was a path in the darkness ahead, like through the thicket across the way. Many movies followed. Stories—movies—still hold weight for me in the smaller, smallest details, such as every aspect of the final, chilling, thrilling shot of young Jean-Pierre Leaud's face at the end of "400 Blows." Truffaut described similar vivid details, glimpsed only by the viewer in solitude with a character, as "privileged moments." "The 400 Blows" is one extended privileged moment.

"The 400 Blows" starts Friday at the Music Box, with the thirty-minute short, "Antoine and Colette."

(2008-01-29)

Also by Ray Pride

The Abercrombie Blair Fitch Project
Last weekend's $46-million top-grosser reeks of it. "Cloverfield" is a triumph of brilliant mass-marketing, largely because its makers have left the monster hidden, but only just beneath its silly surface, the monster that is trumpeted by Rudolph Giuliani for his raison d'etre as a politician, man and savior, and aptly summarized by Senator Joe Biden as "noun, verb, 9/11"
(2008-01-22)

Tip of the Week
Point-of-view documentaries are rife in the marketplace; Daniel Karslake's "For the Bible Tells Me So" mixes media to examine the side of five Christian families in the U.S. who happen to be gay. What do their religions say?
(2008-01-22)

Tip of the Week
Documenting the year in the birth and life of a Steinway concert grand piano, Ben Niles' "Note by Note: The Making of Steinway L1037" is a beauty
(2008-01-15)

Inner Space
Marjane Satrapi's "Persepolis" is a fantastic, fantastical adventure down the streets of one characters' mind. Her work won acclaim as a two-part graphic novel (first published in France in 2000 and 2001), and the film version, co-directed by French comics artist Vincent Paronnaud, took a jury prize at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival. People who've seen the animated movie on the festival circuit generally love it
(2008-01-15)

The Chemo Brothers
(2008-01-08)

Tip of the Week
(2008-01-08)

Butts Out
(2008-01-08)

The Fugitive Kin
(2007-12-31)

Tip of the Week
(2007-12-31)

Tip of the Week
(2007-12-31)

Eagle-Eyed
(2007-12-26)

Tip of the Week
(2007-12-26)

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