A Few Brief Words in Honor of Maria Schneider

I probably should have written something earlier about the sad and untimely passing of the late, great Maria Schneider, but, well, I've been insanely busy.

 And it would be natural for me to write something about her performance in Last Tango in Paris, given that it's her best-known part and given my obsession with Bertolucci, so I suppose I can link here to my slideshow with Bertolucci, in which he discusses a rather deceitful thing he did with her while making the film (and for which he recently kind of sort of apologized, believe it or not).

But instead, for whatever reason, I've decided to link to this clip from Jacques Rivette's deranged and sublime Merry Go Round, a film that's still very hard to find in the U.S. Watch Schneider here. To be honest, she doesn't really act -- whether she actually could act may even be a matter of dispute. But she's so herself in front of the camera; it's hard to keep our eyes off her. In a way, even more than someone like Anna Karina, Maria Schneider is the godmother of so many of the ingenues we see today -- someone devoid of artifice who couldn't seem to be anything but herself once the camera was on. She was a natural, as they say. And she will be missed.