#Lighthouse keeper movie movie

Through a friendship with cinematographer Georges PГ©rinal, who shot many of his early movies, including The Lighthouse Keepers, he began working in the film industry, first as a title writer and editor.

#Lighthouse keeper movie movie

In the early 1920s, he played in a pit orchestra at a movie theater, a job that married his musical vocation with his burgeoning interest in cinema. His first love was music, and he defied his parentsвЂ™ disapproval by going to Paris to study violin and composition. That harmony is always threatened by private obsessions and conflicts, sometimes by outright madness-forces that break the cyclical patterns of daily life and communities.Д«orn in 1901 in Bayeux, Normandy (home of the famous medieval tapestries depicting the Norman Conquest in storyboard fashion, a milestone in the art of visual narrative), GrГ©millon had Breton ancestry and grew up partly in Brittany, the area he captured on screen with such vivid and visceral feeling. Music and dance also run through these films, shaping their rhythms and structures, and representing the beating heart of communal life. Here, it is the maintenance of a lighthouse elsewhere it is the threshing of grain, the mechanics of airplanes or ships or printing presses, the meticulous creation of tapestries or performance of surgery.

His documentary methods also convey a love of work and attention to the detailed processes of physical labor. Many of his films, like The Lighthouse Keepers, are under the spell of the rugged, storm-swept coast of Brittany, and of the sea itself in its ever-changing, never-changing vastness. First, despite their lyrical tone and dreamlike atmosphere, his films remain rooted in documentary clarity-truly deserving the label вЂњpoetic realism.вЂќ GrГ©millon frequently shot on location and always distilled a potent sense of place. The Lighthouse KeepersВ ( Gardiens de phare), his second feature and last silent film, already displays elements that define GrГ©millonвЂ™s art. Those lucky or determined enough to track them down find works of singular grace and sensitivity, with a vision that is often melancholy but always humane. Obscure outside of France, the great director Jean GrГ©millon is a tantalizing figure even for those Americans who discover him, since most of his films remain difficult to see.