#la permission

[moviemosaics]

The Story of a Three-Day Pass

directed by Melvin Van Peebles, 1967

[schlock-luster-video]

Today in French New Wave and Blaxploitation history: on July 8, 1968 Melvin Van Peebles’s The Story of a Three-Day Pass debuted.

Here’s a portrait of the filmmaker!

[cinedippers]

Story of a 3-Day Pass is Van Peebles’ most stylistically assured and emotionally satisfying film. There is a joy in the freewheeling aesthetic conceits. He unpacks scenes using highly subjective techniques like split-screen, subject-on-dolly moves, freeze frames, abrasive, looping musical interludes, and extended POV shots, allowing us to enter the world of Turner in a way he never again explored with such elegance. Relying heavily on direct address to the camera, Van Peebles finds a nice analog to the black suspicion of the white gaze—we constantly inhabit Turner’s perspective as people talk to him.

[naginie]

Gilles, Drieu la Rochelle, La permission, Chapitre 9

"Plus il était insensible, plus elle s’absorbait en lui. Elle devenait mystique. L'idée de sacrifice se substituait petit à petit à l'idée de don. Les femmes sont toute sensualité, mais la sensualité est un instinct; or, rien ne se fourvoie plus facilement qu'un instinct. Regardez les bêtes sauvages, elles tombent facilement dans une fosse que recouvre à peine un léger branchage."

[92ny]

Melvin Van Peebles: Love, That’s Occupy Wall Street

Thirteen/WNET New York's MetroFocus did a short but very interesting interview with Melvin Van Peebles in which he talks about one of his songs, “Love, That’s America," used in Occupy Wall Street related videos:

When I found out that the song had been co-opted by Occupy Wall Street, my jaw dropped. It went viral online. People were remixing it and mashing it up with videos from the protests. The time I wrote it it was a time of social upheaval, the Stonewall Riots had just happened. Forty years later, the same thing was going down in the streets of New York City.

You can read more here.

See Van Peebles debut feature film La Permission and a performance by Melvin Van Peebles widLaxative at 92YTribeca tomorrow, Feb 25.

Melvin Van Peebles will be present to participate in post-screening Q&A and will then perform with his band Laxative in the Mainstage space. [Melvin Van Peebles Screening + Live Music]