Jean-Pierre Gorin Movies

Finnish director Ilkka Jarvilaturi directs an international cast in this deadpan post-Cold War spy farce. Jaded CIA veteran Harry (Bill Pullman) and young SVR agent Natasha (Irene Jacob) are on-again off-again lovers who have little to do in Helsinki except spy on one another, until a courier (Bruno Kirby) shows up with a porno tape bearing top-secret US satellite codes. Natasha wants the tape to get her psychotic boss (Udo Kier) off her back, while Harry needs it to placate his Boy Scout colleague fresh from spy school. History is Made at Night was screened at the 1999 Toronto Film Festival. ~ Jonathan Crow, All Movie Guide

Perhaps quirky to some but still intriguing, this documentary compares the tiny world created by model train buffs as a setting for their tracks and locomotives to paintings by Manny Farber, and features excerpts from his writings. The model train system is complex and large enough to occupy a part of an airplane hangar in Del Mar, California. Small cities and villages, hills and valleys and bridges, an entire rural and urban landscape in miniature provide the setting for a railway system built by a group of aficionados. But what the model train enthusiasts see as essential to a realistic and ideal landscape may or may not coincide with what Farber sees in an American view of both landscape and culture. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

Director Jean-Pierre Gorin follows up a news story in this interesting documentary on twin girls, ten years old, who speak to each other in their own language. The girls are shown speaking to each other here, and Gorin has sessions with their therapists, their family, and the specialists who work with the twins. This instance of a language created out of whole cloth is certainly unusual if not unique. The twins' grandmother speaks only German, and their mother speaks both English and German, yet it is postulated that since the girls grew up hearing a variety of languages as their parents moved from place to place, they may have inadvertently been stimulated them to create their own language. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide

After collaborating on a series of small-scale political films under the alias of the Dziga Vertov Group, pioneering French director Jean-Luc Godard and filmmaker and activist Jean-Pierre Gorin attempted to fuse their Maoist theories of revolutionary art with a more accessible structural framework in this leftist comedy drama. Susan (Jane Fonda) is an American journalist working as a French correspondent for a radio network; her husband, Jacques (Yves Montand), was once a major filmmaker during the French New Wave, but now supports himself directing television commercials as he tries to come to terms with his political responsibilities. Jacques tags along when Susan visits a sausage factory to interview the manager (Vittorio Caprioli); their visit unexpectedly coincides with a wildcat strike staged by the plant's employees, who hold the boss captive as they lash out against both their employers and their union in a bid for more money and greater dignity. Over the course of the day, many of the participants speak to the camera about their varying degrees of commitment to radical political and economic change, while we are also afforded an inside look at Susan and Jacques' splintered relationship. Shortly after Tout Va Bien was released, Jane Fonda made her famous (or infamous, depending on your perspective) visit to Hanoi, an action which led Godard and Gorin to create a companion film, Letter to Jane, in which they dissected a photo of Fonda in Vietnam for its multiple levels of political meaning. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

This is a somewhat experimental radical-chic film made by director Jean-Luc Godard and the Dziga-Vertov filmmakers cooperative. It depicts a trial resembling that of the "Chicago Eight," in the U.S. in the '60s, and also shows something of the everyday lives of several of the defendants. Another issue touched on is the taut relationship of the Black Panthers with Chicago and Federal authorities. Included as part of the film are discussions by the director and cooperative members about what they have filmed, or are going to film, and how they plan to handle aspects of the movie. There is a great deal of political preaching, both within the story and in the filmmaker's discussions, and the film was considered to be somewhat heavy-handedly anti-U.S. at the time of its release. Godard is better known for some of his earlier films, such as Les Carabiners, A Bout de Souffle (Breathless), and Le Mepris. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide