Bruno Dumont

Seen his first three, what's up with Slack Bay? is that the slapstick/musical comedy?

I liked The Life of Jesus and L'Humanite less so. Twentynine Palms on the other hand rung me like a bell.

I love his use of CinemaScope/cheap looking anamorphic lenses. It takes something to start your career in 2:35:1 as an independent. Makes these small, aggressively strange, often very violent films look like Hollywood perversions.

"Seen his first three, what's up with Slack Bay? is that the slapstick/musical comedy?"

In his own way it is. Its not so much in debt to Chaplin/Keaton (or even Tati, who made a less funny stranger version of those comedies) as maybe Henri-Georges Clouzot's bourgie dramas of the 40s and 50s, cut with some Bressonian austerity, iirc.

I've now seen Vie de Jesus, L'Humanite, Flandres, and Hadewijch. I saw L'Humanite at the time and loved it, but the other three left me impassive. There's something imprecise about a lot of the filmmaking, like the camera could have been placed here or there instead of where it was; he doesn't have the rigour of Bresson, though he's ready to copy the ending of Pickpocket as a handy bit of closure when needed.
I haven't seen any of the comedy films, and I don't really see how his attitude would transfer to that genre. Someone like Tarr has a strain of Beckett in him, but I don't even see that in Dumont.

I like all the ones you've seen, apart from Hadewijch, maybe. I'm not sure about that one. The comic ones are much wilder, more hit and miss and I imagine it's to do partly with french comedy not translating and partly to do with his lack of rigour, as you noted. He obviously makes an effort to appear "rigourous"/severe, as an approach/aesthetic, in his serious stuff. Hors Satan, for example, is like torture and seems somehow profound when you're watching it but disappears afterwards. I honestly don't think I could tell you a single thing about it now other than there were two people on their knees a lot and I'm not sure why.

Okay, I actually think that life is a horrible struggle for a lot of people but Dumont is not one of these people but for some reason, he wants to make films about those people and I'm not really sure that his reasons to do so are good reasons.

Hmm, that was one of my thoughts after seeing The Turin Horse, which I felt universalized its characters more than Dumont does. But that film was powerful where Dumont is usually puzzling.

His first Joan of Arc movie was one of the most excruciating films I've ever seen. I hated everything about it. Due to some strange compulsion I saw the second one anyway and liked it quite a bit, to my surprise. (If it had been another musical with the same composer I wouldn't have bothered.)

I quite liked France when I saw it last year. I might try to watch Jeannette despite the dislike here.

haven’t seen Joan of Arc or France yet, but La vie de Jesus, Humanité, Flanders, and Slack Bay were all really interesting films I thought

he's ready to copy the ending of Pickpocket as a handy bit of closure when needed.

He does this again in France, which I hadn't seen when I wrote that. Léa Seydoux does a great job, but the film isn't really pointed enough to be the satire that (it seems) he's aiming for.