Mr. Bean’s Holiday

“I am very familiar with the French critic as protester, off to tilt at the windmills of the Gaumont Theatre chain; the constant spoiler who breaks up the game. I know him very well: I was he, or at least one of them, from 1954 to 1958, always ready to defend the widow Dovzhenko, Bresson the orphan. I had noticed, for example, at the Cannes Festival in 1958 that the flower vases placed in front of the screen to add a festive air were arranged to offer the best effect for the official spectators in the balcony, but that they blocked the subtitles for the mere movie lovers in the first ten rows of the orchestra. That was all I needed to call the directors of the Festival a lot of bad names. They grew so tired of my incessant attacks that eventually they asked my editor-in-chief to send another reporter the following year. I was back in Cannes in 1959 for the Festival, but I was seated in the balcony for Les Quatre Cents Coups (The 400 Blows). From that perspective I could appreciate unreservedly the lovely effect of the flowers in front of the screen...” (François Truffaut, “What Do Critics Dream About?”, The Films in My Life).

The digital intermediate renders backgrounds that are out of focus (such as the daylight exteriors on the train platform) into shapes recognizable from any computer graphics program.