Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Ballet Mécanique
Last Year at Marienbad
Au Hasard Balthazar
Weekend
Atlantics
The remainder of the record
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has been out for every week and the critics agree: it is rather, very French.
While Sandfall Interactive’s RPG has been praised for its creative storytelling and trendy visuals, its nation of origin has additionally turn out to be a degree of fascination for gamers. Clair Obscur is proudly French, full of visible references to the nation’s wealthy artwork historical past. If your playthrough has you desperate to be taught extra about different media that paints a portrait of the tradition, enable me to welcome you to the world of French cinema. There, you’ll discover a storied historical past of eccentric, rule-breaking movies that may be tender, unpredictable, and human. If you like the best way Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 reimagines the RPG style in a contemporary method, you might be able to recognize how French filmmakers have achieved the identical with films for over a decade.
For the sake of comedy, I’ve put collectively an inventory of 33 obscure French movies that you would be able to dig into alongside your playthrough. Are these movies truly obscure? Okay, look: The cinephiles amongst you’re going to scoff at how primary a few of these picks are, however in the event you’re extra of a gamer, most of those movies will most likely be solely overseas to you. Still, I’ve tried to work round among the apparent picks like Breathless and The 400 Blows in favor of extra experimental or much less appreciated work by the medium’s largest names. I’ll spotlight just a few foundational ones to get you began, however every thing on this record ought to be in your watchlist.
Ballet Mécanique
Much has been made about the best way Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 experiments with the RPG kind established in Japanese classics like Final Fantasy. You can’t speak about French formal experimentation with out mentioning Ballet Mécanique. Released in 1924, the Dadist quick is known for stretching the boundaries of what a movie appeared like at a time the place the medium’s voice was nonetheless being hammered out. It’s a flurry of stream of consciousness imagery and animation that set the stage for what would turn out to be a legacy of cinematic rule-breaking. Does Clair Obscur owe a little bit of its spirit to it? I’d wish to assume so.
Last Year at Marienbad
Part of Clair Obscur‘s power comes from its visual design, which can often as surreal and unsettling as it is gorgeous. I’ll take that as a very good excuse to advocate considered one of my favourite movies of all time, Last Year at Marienbad. Directed by Alain Resnais, the avant-garde drama takes place solely at a resort and facilities round an affair. It’s a sluggish, disorienting movie designed to mess along with your sense of time and place. It’s most iconic shot sees the digital camera peering out right into a backyard, the place folks and shrubs forged inconsistent shadows. Though it definitely isn’t as fantastical as Clair Obscur, it’s equally haunting in a method that may persist with you even in the event you don’t absolutely perceive what’s occurring.
Au Hasard Balthazar
Clair Obscur could also be “weird,” nevertheless it’s additionally remarkably tender. It tells a human story about collective grief and a world banding collectively to beat it and create a greater future for these nonetheless to come back. There’s one thing coronary heart wrenching and grounded in all of its excessive design. What’s an amazing French movie that captures that very same feeling? Au Hasard Balthazar, one other private favourite of mine. The quiet movie follows the lifetime of a donkey as it’s handed round between farms and households. It’s a narrative about an animal, nevertheless it’s by way of his harmless eyes that we get to watch the chaos of human drama round him. It’s the traditional that set the stage for movies like Flow to tug on viewers’s heartstrings, all whereas rethinking who the star of a movie must be so as to join with people. Balthazar is principally Monoco is what I’m saying.
Weekend
You can’t speak about French movie historical past with out mentioning Jean-Luc Godard and the New Wave motion. Godard, alongside filmmakers like Agnès Varda and François Truffaut, took pleasure in breaking nearly each established rule in cinema in his day, from using tough handheld digital camera pictures to randomly slicing leap cuts into scenes. But the movies of the French New Wave motion weren’t solely counter-culture works; they have been extremely indebted to American movies and appeared to construct on the works that impressed French filmmakers of the period. You can draw a parallel to Clair Obscur there in the event you’re, oh I don’t know, attempting to determine a very good excuse to jot down about Weekend in a online game article. Weekend is considered one of Godard’s most difficult and formally creative movies, couching a seething consumerist satire right into a collection of unforgettable sequences. You’ll by no means have a look at a site visitors jam the identical method once more (however be warned that it additionally accommodates a grisly animal demise that’s robust to abdomen).
Atlantics
Admittedly, these 4 movies are a tricky place to start out in the event you’re solely new to movie prefer it, so I’ll shut this off with extra of a transitional movie that’s straightforward to trace down. Atlantics is a 2019 drama from director Mati Diop and it’s obtainable to observe through Netflix. It’s each dense and sparse in the identical breath, referring to every thing from grief to a refugee disaster in a quiet ghost story that has caught with me ever since I first watched it. More than any movie on this record, it’s the one I’d most instantly pair with Clair Obscur. It’s not as a result of it’s loud and trendy, however moderately as a result of it does such an amazing job at constructing a relationship between the human and otherworldly. It’s a non secular movie that makes use of the ocean as a recurring visible, not too dissimilarly to the best way that Clair Obscur has gamers peering out on the Paintress throughout an enormous ocean. Am I actually pushing it right here? You guess, however I’m simply attempting to convey slightly tradition to the RPG sickos! Sue me!
The remainder of the record
The Beaches of Agnès
The Beast
Beau Travail
Black Girl
Day for Night
Eyes Without a Face
Fat Girl
Fantasmagorie
Forbidden Games
Goodbye First Love
The Illusionist
Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
La Bête Humaine
La Haine
Last Summer
Les Misérables (2019)
Ma Mère
Mon Oncle
Murmur of the Heart
Petite Maman
Rififi
Saint Omer
Sans Soliel
The Seventh Continent
Stranger by the Lake
Summertime (2015)
Tout Va Bien
Vagabond