My favorite:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvEc6gAKvRE

edit:

or this up-to-date version:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3av3kcfEi8

Last edited by Horace (2007-09-01 04:40:22)

My Existentialist 'work':   http://www.filmnoirbuff.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=818

Everything is linked!

Original Modernist Dicky Dodson on the French influence in London -


"The Teds' suits were boxy so we got an Ivy League suit and wore dark glasses. Dark glasses were cool. There was a lot a stuff we all had in common because things were limited and we all watched the same American films.

But then we started art school, which was still '58, '59 and we became students too. We changed to flat haircuts, razor cut, and then came the turning point in 1960. The big film was Shoot The Pianist with Charles Aznavour and it was alll of a sudden the French look.

The girls started cutting their hair like Jean Seberg and we all wanted to be Jean Paul Belmondo, he was the hero. After Shoot The Pianist we would go to the Globe in Putney and watch all the French and Italian films. They weren't art films but proper black-and-white foreign films. We thought they were the coolest films. We wanted that lifestyle, we wanted a girlfriend that looked like Jean Seberg and live the way they did in those films and from that wanting to know everything about it. We moved totally away from the American stuff which we now considered too showy and wanted to be French.

The Girls looked like boys and the guys were ultra cool Smoking out the corners of their mouths. Alain Delon had a scooter, he was in Paris and he had a girl on the back. Fuck me, what more could you want? we would notice every little detail, details of our heroes. It got totally obsessive and completely took us over. It got so bad that the film didn't matter. What mattered was seeing what Belmondo or Delon was wearing and knowing we couldn't get it so we would have to improvise.

We would actually sit in the cinema in the dark with sketch pads and try to draw clothes, what the collar was like on the shirts, how far the lapel was away from the shoulder and so on. Luckily we were art students so the drawings were not too bad in the daylight.

You would pull up outside a club on your scooter and never say a word, you never pulled anybody. Never bothered with small talk, that was uncool. You just stood by the door and found something to lean against. We saw one film with Belmondo where he was doing something with his lip so we all did it. We called it 'throwing a noodle'. The girls would got to see the same films and eventually we'd bump into girls who knew about the same stuff we did and this was the East End. The East End girls were cool."

Last edited by The Style Council (2007-09-05 04:30:18)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYR1lGegWiU

Fun stuff.

Hmmmm, having just re-read this thread I'm beginning to doubt if there's really much more that can be added to French Cool in general, so would any article on the French Cut in fact not be just a summary of what was written here ?

And here : http://www.filmnoirbuff.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=202

Last edited by Alex Roest (2008-01-15 03:49:41)

Another PM popped out in public:



"Only lack of talent stops me doing more.

There is an untold story there with the French Cut, but as you say to do it properly would a real job.

Equally nobody has yet produced anything to equal Richard Barnes' 'Mods' when looking at 'Minet' style... And you can pick holes in 'Mods' too if you try...

- Maybe the real point of all this is that none of it was ever meant for the kind of neat essays that you and I like reading? None of it was ever meant for the essay-reading sort of person.

---- ---- ----

Of my little set I was the first to shop at Harvard Square's "The Crimson Shop" (Only two shirts & five watchstraps ever) and for a while afterwards I was very boring about the place - How it was cooler than J. Press (and Press was far cooler than plain old Brooks) because only I knew the place, etc. - Bollocks, of course.

How can that spirit make sense when noted down & posted on the internet?

How can you make sense of the impact of cultural transplantation when applied to what were originally some very dowdy clothes in their original setting (Let's be honest)?

It's all beyond me.

... And the unsayable thing is to ask just who on the Internet would get any of the above anyway?

No Andyland "Trad" would.
Few Modculture"Mods" would.

A handful of guys on FNB would nod & smile, but it would all be well over everybody else's heads.



All you can ever do is to try."



D.

Anyone familiar with 'Paris when it Sizzles' (1963) with Audrey Hepburn and William Holden? 

I watched it the other night and was struck by the small part played by undercover cop Tony Curtis.  TC plays a method actor who appears wearing orangy-red v neck sweater (no shirt), wheat colour Levis (his description in the movie) and arrives on a two tone Lambretta.  He appears to be wearing Hush Puppies and on reaching Audrey's table at the cafe he draws off a pair of string backed gloves.  During his brief part he makes ref to Le Drugstore.  Minet?

^ True, that.

I just like to remind the world of things they might not like to be reminded of -  'Ivy League' style in England was spearheaded by the Working Class.
Elsewhere in Europe it's Jazz fans of whatever class.
In Japan it's just fun-lovers generally.

We don't reckon Ralph Lauren's fantasy world over here.