| In the heady days of cinephilia in the late 1950s and early 1960s, French filmmakers including Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer and François Truffaut were on the leading edge of the nouvelle vague (or "new wave").
But before many of them had even loaded their first canister of film into a camera, they were critics and editors with the film journal Cahiers du cinéma. The Cahiers, therefore, played a central role in the development of the new wave, both as a spawning ground and as a forum for polemical discussions about the direction taken by this new breed of filmmakers.
To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Cahiers, Alliance Française has combined forces with the French Foreign Ministry to bring a retrospective of six films, including a couple of contemporary works, to the Plaza Theatre.
LE BEAU SERGE
The series kicks off with Chabrol’s debut Le Beau Serge (Handsome Serge 1958), which is widely regarded to be the first film of the new wave. The film is noted primarily for its mise en scène, which highlights the contrast between its two central characters, François (Jean-Claude Brialy) and Serge (Gérard Blain), living in small-town France.
The film hints at what one critic called Chabrol’s "entomological" style – an observational approach to character that leaves some viewers cold. Nevertheless, this approach – similar to that of Alfred Hitchcock, whom Chabrol greatly admires – has served the director well throughout his career, from the early masterpiece Les Bonnes Femmes (1960) through last year’s Nightcap.
PIERROT LE FOU
Godard’s Pierrot le fou (Pierrot Goes Wild 1965) lives up to its crazy name, and is among the most celebrated of the great auteur’s films. As a reinvention of narrative, Pierrot le fou saw Godard blowing his entire cinematic wad on this story of a bourgeois playboy (Jean-Paul Belmondo) who elopes to the south of France with his former babysitter (Anna Karina).
Not only a parody of the gangster genre and the road movie, Pierrot le fou also has its serious side and, in many ways, is an elaboration of the connection between art and death.
LE GENOU DE CLAIRE
Who but Rohmer could make the story of a man with a knee fetish so sweetly compelling? As one of a series called the Six Moral Tales, Le Genou de Claire (Claire’s Knee, 1970) is a comedy of manners that would easily be included among the director’s best works.
Rohmer has long had a keen eye for the perverse, but not perverted, complexities of contemporary relationships. I’ve long admired Le Genou de Claire for its matter-of-fact delineation of sexual desire.
LA FEMME D’A COTE
At the time of its release, Francois Truffaut’s second-last picture, La Femme d’à côté (The Woman Next Door, 1981), was held by critics to be a disquieting reflection on the "indifferentiation engendered by love." Starring Gérard Dépardieu and Fanny Ardant, the film is about a pair of former lovers who find themselves reunited in a small village after seven years apart.
IRMA VEP
One of my favourite films from the past decade, Irma Vep (1996) is the spirited portrayal of a film production gone hilariously awry. Jean-Pierre Léaud stars as a mentally unstable director trying to remake Louis Feuillade’s legendary silent serial Les Vampires. Hong Kong superstar Maggie Cheung stars as the actress playing the role of cat-burglar Irma Vep in the remake.
With Irma Vep, director Olivier Assayas (himself a Cahiers critic in the 1980s), has delivered one of the funniest and most well-observed films ever made about filmmaking.
LES GLANEURS ET LA GLANEUSE
It only seems fitting to close a retrospective of this nature with a film that bridges the gap between the past and the future. Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse (The Gleaners and I, 2000) is the latest work from Agnès Varda, who was a key figure in the new wave.
Reportedly, Les Glaneurs draws a correlation between Varda’s own activities as a documentary filmmaker and the behaviour of those who live off the detritus of society.
As a reflection, then, on the nature of cinema, and on contemporary ways of life, it should leave us with much to consider about the present condition of French cinema. |
