This month brings the Criterion/Eclipse release of the five film box set “Agnès Varda in California,” making August the perfect time to revisit her seminal 1962 film Cléo from 5 to 7. The close to real-time film covers 90 minutes (the title is a slight fib) in the life of a beautiful French pop singer (Corinne Marchand).
THE DIGITAL ERA: REAL-TIME FILMS FROM 2000 TO TODAY 40 years before, in 1960, lighter cameras enabled a cinéma vérité-flavored revolution in street realism. By 2000, new digital cameras suggested a whole new set of promises, including telling stories that would have been unimaginable within minimum budgets for features even ten years before. In 2000, …
THE POST-1960S, PRE-DIGITAL AGE: REAL-TIME ONE-OFFS, 1975-1998 British filmmaker John Byrum is responsible for the first (and in some ways only) real-time period film. Inserts (1975), set in the early 1930s, is about a Boy Wonder movie director (called Boy Wonder, played by Richard Dreyfuss fresh from American Graffiti (1973) and Jaws (1975)) now washed …