May
2 - 4 and May 8 - 11, 2003
Beyond
the Nouvelle Vague: Neglected Films of the French New Wave
The French New Wave was less a cohesive movement than a journalistic
term of convenience coined to embrace the sudden appearance
of new and stylistically innovative films by young directors.
The great critical and commercial success of such still-revered
films as The 400 Blows (Truffaut), Hiroshima Mon
Amour (Resnais), Breathless (Godard), Les Cousins
(Chabrol), and Lola (Demy) gave producers the necessary
encouragement to finance the work of young filmmakers throughout
the country, sparking an interest in fresh talent that quickly
spread across the globe.
In 1959, 24 directors made their first feature films in France;
a year later 43 more filmmakers were able to launch their first
projects; and by 1961 more than 100 first films received financing.
This period remains one of the most fertile in the history of
film, spawning works with wildly differing approaches full of
cinematic impertinence, playfulness, emotion, and personal conviction.
While certain efforts from this era are regularly revived, many
other accomplished works have fallen by the wayside, often simply
because of the vagaries of distribution. Covering roughly a
30-year period from the mid-1950s to the early 1980s, this series
is a modest attempt to showcase a few of the many examples from
the rich variety of cinematic practice brought forth in the
wake of the Nouvelle Vague.
The series is highlighted by several films never before screened
in Philadelphia (in rare English subtitled prints) with introductions
by some of the leading voices in contemporary film studies.
 Friday,
May 2 at 8:00pm
La Pointe Courte
dir. Agnès Varda, France, 1954, 35mm, 89 mins, b/w, French
w/ English subtitles
Introduced by William Van Wert
Often considered a progenitor of the French New Wave, Agnès
Varda interweaves two parallel stories to create a portrait
of the Mediterranean fishing port in which she grew up. The
first involves a married couple who struggle to right their
relationship in the face of deep differences of personality
and background. The other story, told in the manner of Italian
Neorealism, focuses on the fishermen of La Pointe Courte and
their struggles against poverty and officialdom. Varda’s debut
feature moves back and forth between these two bodies of material,
imitating, as she has said, Faulkner’s technique of parallel
construction in The Wild Palms.
Preceded by:
L'Opera-Mouffe
dir. Agnès Varda, France, 1958, 35mm, 17 mins, b/w, French
w/ English subtitles
Music (hence the “Opera” of the title) links these documentary
scenes from the vegetable market on the rue Mouffetard in Paris.
Varda herself was pregnant at the time she made this film, and
the images and moods reflect her peculiarly heightened sense
of her condition as she seeks out symbolic reinforcement in
the objects and people around her. The director insisted that
this work was neither reportage nor documentary but a special
genre she preferred to call “neighborhood cinema.”
William Van Wert is the Laura Carnell Professor of English at
Temple University where he teaches courses in film and creative
writing. He is the author of several novels and poetry collections
and two film books, The Film Career of Alain-Robbe Grillet
(Redgrave, 1977) and The Theory and Practice of the Cine-Roman
(Arno, 1978).
Saturday, May 3 at 8:00pm
Adieu Philippine
dir. Jacques Rozier, France, 1963, 35mm, 106 mins, b/w,
French w/ English subtitles
Adieu Philippine was director Jacques Rozier’s first
feature film and arguably the work that most vividly captures
the essence of the French New Wave. Using improvisation, amateur
performers, hidden microphones, and cameras in real locations,
the film possesses a rough spontaneity that conforms as much
to the aesthetics of cinéma verité as to those of the Nouvelle
Vague. In his last few months before military service, Michel,
a young television technician on holiday, befriends two aspiring
actresses, Liliane and Juliette. The trio shares a holiday in
Corsica as a prelude to Michel’s probable deployment to Algeria.
At the time of its release, Jean-Luc Godard called Adieu
Philippine “quite simply the best French film of these last
years.”
Preceded by:
 Santa
Claus Has Blue Eyes
dir. Jean Eustache, France, 1966, 35mm, 47 mins, b/w, French
w/ English subtitles
Eustache made his second film with 35mm black-and-white stock
left over from Godard’s Masculine-Feminine (1966) and
also used that film’s star Jean-Pierre Léaud. Set in the provinces
of Eustache’s youth, the film focuses on the character Daniel,
an unemployed young man who spends most of his time unsuccessfully
trying to meet girls and dream up money-making scams. One day,
needing a new coat, he takes a job as a street-corner Santa
Claus and in this role suddenly finds himself able to cope with
the opposite sex. This fresh, introspective study of French
youth won the International Critics’ Week Prize at the Cannes
Film Festival.
Sunday, May 4 at 7:00pm
 Le
Gai Savoir (The Joyful Knowledge)
dir. Jean-Luc Godard, France, 1968, 16mm, 95 mins, color,
French w/ English subtitles
Originally commissioned as a modern version of Rousseau’s
Emile for French television (which subsequently refused
to air it) and re-edited after the tumultuous events of May
1968 in Paris, Le Gai Savoir is an investigation into
the nature of language and image. Godard’s multi-level exploration
employs two symbolic characters: Patricia (Juliet Berto), a
daughter of Patrice Lumumba and the Chinese Cultural Revolution
and Emile (Jean-Pierre Leaud), great-great-grandson of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau. The film takes place in the metaphorical void of a
deserted television studio. The two agree that they must go
back to the “degree zero” of cinema, dissolving its sounds and
images to find a new revolutionary structure.
Preceded by:
Two American Audiences
dir. Mark Woodcock, USA, 1968, 16mm, 40 mins, color
In early 1968, Godard and second wife Anne Wiazemsky went on
a college lecture tour across the United States. Woodcock’s
rarely seen documentary, shot along the tour, captures a discussion
between Godard and New York University graduate students on
filmmaking and politics. The discussion is intercut with scenes
from Godard’s La Chinoise (1967).
Thursday, May 8 at 8:00pm
 Nathalie
Granger
dir. Marguerite Duras, France, 1972, 35mm, 83 mins, b/w,
French w/ English subtitles
Filmed in Duras’ own home at Neauphle-le-Chateau near Paris,
Nathalie Granger coincided with the period of intense
political activity and lively theoretical debates which marked
the early years of the post-1968 French feminist movement. Linking
the violence of the young to their frustrations with forced
conformity, Duras’ film deals with a child who refuses to continue
going to school. As in all of her films, Duras attempts to implicitly
deconstruct traditional perceptions of “masculinity” and “femininity.”
In her own words, “Nathalie Granger is a bit like looking
at and correcting other people’s cinema.” With Jeanne Moreau
and Gerard Depardieu in one of his first major screen roles.
Preceded by:
En Rachachant
dir. Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, France, 1982,
16mm, 9 mins, b/w, French w/ English subtitles
Based on Marguerite Duras’ text Ah! Ernesto (1971), En Rachachant
is Straub/Huillet’s elliptical and comic tale of a young boy
who refuses to cooperate in the educational process. Photographed
by the late Henri Alékan (La Belle et la bête, The Wages of
Sin).
Friday, May 9 at 8:00pm
 Les
Contrabandières (The Smugglers)
dir. Luc Moullet, France, 1967, 35mm, 81 mins, b/w, French
w/ English subtitles
Introduced by Jonathan Rosenbaum
Luc Moullet was one of French film journal Cahiers du Cinema’s
most brilliantly idiosyncratic writers during the 1950s and
1960s (and again, for a time, in the 1980s and 1990s) and was
dubbed by filmmaker Jacques Rivette as “our Alfred Jarry.” As
a filmmaker, he’s always possessed a uniquely private, comic
sensibility. This defiantly “amateurish,” non-adventure adventure
film concerns three people off in the wilds with no skills whatsoever.
In its terminally digressive, aggressively slapsticky way, the
film manages to encapsulate an entire era. Called by Jean-Marie
Straub “maybe the best film not made by Godard,” and by Moullet
himself as, “the best film of Robbe-Grillet,” this movie about
borders and barriers sports a cameo appearance by the director,
who is listed in the credits as “pompous fool.”
Jonathan Rosenbaum, currently film critic for the Chicago
Reader, has contributed film commentary to such publications
as Sight and Sound, The Village Voice, and
Film Comment. He is the author of Film: The Front Line
1983 (Arden, 1983), Greed (BFI, 1993), Placing
Movies: The Practice of Film Criticism (California, 1995),
and co-author with Mehnaz Saeed-Vafa of Abbas Kiarostami
(Illinois, 2003).
Saturday, May 10 at 1:00pm
Varieties of the New
Wave Short Subject
Alan Williams, author of Republic of Images: A History of
French Filmmaking, presents four short films from his personal
archive. All films are in French with no English subtitles.
A simultaneous translation will be provided.
Toute la mémoire du monde (All the World’s
Memory)
dir. Alain Resnais, France, 1956, 16mm, 21 mins, b/w
A documentary evocation of the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris
which becomes, for Resnais, an objective correlative of our
collective memory, a maze of corridors and stacks out of the
fiction of Jorge Luis Borges and the impossible architectures
of Winsor McCay.
Mon Chien
dir. Georges Franju, France, 1955, 16mm, 19 mins, b/w
A devastating film about the grim fate of abandoned dogs in
Paris directed by the saddest and most atmospheric of French
directors.
Chickamauga
dir. Robert Enrico, France, 1962, 16mm, 30 mins, b/w
Adapted from a short story by Ambrose Bierce, a young, deaf-mute
witnesses the carnage of the American Civil War as a surrealistic
dream.
La mer et les jours (The
Sea and the Days)
dir. Alain Kaminker and Raymond Vogel, France, 1958, 16mm,
26 mins, b/w
A sobering documentary about the harsh conditions facing fishermen
on Brittany’s Ile De Sein. Commentary by Chris Marker.
Saturday, May 10 at 7:00pm
Anatomy of a Marriage: My Days with Francoise
dir. André Cayatte, France, 1963, 16mm, 112 mins, b/w, French
w/ English subtitles
Followed at 9:00 PM by:
Anatomy of a Marriage: My Days with Jean-Marc
dir. André Cayatte, France, 1963, 16mm, 95 mins, b/w, French
w/ English subtitles
Introduced by Alan Williams
In 1963, André Cayatte undertook a bold experiment in film narrative
in the tradition of Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950) and Cukor’s
Les Girls (1957). Anatomy of a Marriage tells the same
story from two different points of view, forming a cinematic
dyptich that anticipates later works like Alain Resnais’
Smoking/No Smoking (1993). Husband Jean-Marc (Jacques Cherrier)
and his spouse Francoise (Marie-Jose Nat) each propose their
own account of their disintegrating marriage, and it is
only through the sequential viewing of these two films that
the complete meaning emerges. André Cayatte was an influential
moral voice in French film, neither adhering to the “rules”
of the Nouvelle Vague nor making concessions to popular taste.
Alan Williams, Professor of French at Rutgers University, NJ,
is the author of several books on cinema and history including
Max Ophuls and the Cinema of Desire (Arno, 1980),
Republic of Images: A History of French Filmmaking (Harvard
University Press, 1992), “Pierrot in Context(s)” in D.
Wills, editor, Pierrot le fou (Cambridge University
Press, in press), and Film and Nationalism, editor (Depth
of Field series by Rutgers University Press, 2002)
Sunday, May 11 at 4:00pm
 L’Amour
Fou
dir. Jacques Rivette, France, 1968, 16mm, 252 mins, b/w,
French w/ English subtitles
This legendary, largely unseen, four-hour masterpiece is the
film that solidified Jacques Rivette’s reputation as a major
innovator in French cinema. A study of disintegrating personal
relationships, L’Amour Fou focuses on a theater group
preparing to stage Racine’s Andromaque as they are being
filmed by a television crew. During the rehearsal, the play’s
director recasts the lead role, replacing his wife with his
former mistress. The film, shot in both 16mm and 35mm, developed
from the ideas of the cast and technicians who improvised during
filming. Its length is integral to its meaning and texture,
bearing what critic Jean-André Fieschi calls, “the fruit of
an impossible encounter between the two extremes of absolute
control and absolute freedom.”
For their invaluable support in helping to organize this series,
we thank Sam DiIorio, Marie Bonnel and French Cultural Services
(NYC), The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Paris), The Alliance
Francaise (Philadelphia), Juliette Parnet and the French Institute
for Culture and Technology at the University of Pennsylvania,
Temple University Department of English, The Film Studies Program
at the University of Pennsylvania, The Department of Romance
Languages at the University of Pennsylvania, Harry and Stephanie
Markovitz, Jonathan Chaiken and Rebecca Graves. |
