The Art of Directing
A Concise Dictionary of France’s Film Directors
Summary
(Ben McCann, Associate Professor of French Studies, University of Adelaide)
«This impressive book is full of passion and fun facts. A wonderful work of scholarship, comprehensive and yet personable.»
(Dr Christophe Gagne, Associate Professor in French, University of Cambridge)
«The Art of Directing is a fabulous new resource for everyone interested in French cinema. Scholars and film-lovers alike will find much to be informed and inspired by in its concise but rich entries on 121 different directors. This will be the starting point for anyone wanting to know more about the directors who have shaped French cinema from the silent era to the present day.»
(Mairi McLaughlin, Professor of French, University of California, Berkeley)
«From Chantal Akerman to Claude Zidi, from auteur cinema to mainstream filmmaking, this wide-ranging book explores the world of French film directors, many ignored by critics until now. It includes entries by specialists from around the world and will be essential reading for students and lovers of the French-speaking world and film buffs alike.»
(Professor Nina Parish, Professor of French and Francophone Studies, University of Sterling)
«The Art of Directing is an indispensable tool for anyone interested in French cinema since its beginning. This volume takes us on a fascinating journey where we will meet not only leading figures of the seventh art but also littleknown filmmakers. Comprehensive, thorough, and impressively researched.»
(Pierre-Philippe Fraiture, Professor of French, University of Warwick)
It is not by chance that films by Renoir, Bresson, Varda, Godard, or Truffaut – to name just a few – have become widely studied around the world, with their directors becoming household names. Yet there are so many others who have made their mark on French and international cinema. The aim of this dictionary is to shed light on the directing process and to help people discover forgotten directors and rediscover prominent ones who have made Francophone cinema what it is today.
This book is intended as a reference resource for students, scholars, and academics as well as film lovers, who will find both biographical and filmographic references, allowing them to gain an understanding in a nutshell of a particular director’s career and its influences as well as its impact upon and legacy for the world of French cinema – and beyond. When one considers all the directors who have impacted French cinema – from the silent era to our current digital and streaming age – this work is as exhaustive and inclusive as possible.
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- About the author
- About the book
- This eBook can be cited
- Contents
- Preface
- Chantal Akerman (1950–2015) (Adam Roberts (Freelance writer))
- Marc Allégret (1900–1973) (Elisabeth-Christine Muelsch (Angelo State University, USA))
- René Allio (1926–1995) (Katharina Bellan (Université d’Aix-Marseille))
- Mathieu Amalric (1965–) (William Brown (University of Roehampton))
- Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) (Baz Gibbons (Independent scholar))
- Olivier Assayas (1955–) (Lance Lubelski (University of Illinois))
- Alexandre Astruc (1923–2016) (Warren Buckland (Oxford Brookes University))
- Yvan Attal (1965–) (David Jack (Independent scholar))
- Jacques Audiard (1952–) (Gemma King (The Australian National University))
- Michel Audiard (1920–1985) (Gemma King (The Australian National University))
- Jacqueline Audry (1908–1977) (Adrienne Boutang (Université de Bourgogne-Franche-Comté))
- Claude Autant-Lara (1901–2000) (Sarah Leahy (Newcastle University))
- Christophe Barratier (1963–) (Jade Patterson (The University of Melbourne))
- Jacques Becker (1906–1960) (Sylvie Blum-Reid (University of Florida))
- Jean-Jacques Beineix (1946–2022) (Lance Lubelski (University of Illinois))
- Yamina Benguigui (1955–) (Ramona Mielusel (University of Louisiana at Lafayette))
- Luc Besson (1959–) (Stéphane Narcis (Université de la Réunion))
- Bertrand Blier (1939–) (Lance Lubelski (University of Illinois))
- Dany Boon (1966–) (Jade Patterson (The University of Melbourne))
- Rachid Bouchareb (1953–) (Álvaro Luna-Dubois (New York University Abu Dhabi))
- Catherine Breillat (1948–) (Lance Lubelski (University of Illinois))
- Robert Bresson (1901–1999) (Keith Reader (University of London, Institute in Paris))
- Dominique Cabrera (1957–) (Cybelle H. McFadden (The University of North Carolina at Greensboro))
- Guillaume Canet (1973–) (Noah C. Goodwin (University of Minnesota–Twin Cities))
- Laurent Cantet (1961–) (Hannah Grayson (University of Stirling))
- Leos Carax (1960–) (Éamon Ó Cofaigh (NUI Galway))
- Claude Chabrol (1930–2010) (Lance Lubelski (University of Illinois))
- Pierre Chenal (1904–1990) (Felicity Chaplin (Monash University))
- Patrice Chéreau (1944–2013) (Guilhem Billaudel (University of Oxford))
- Christian-Jaque (1904–1994) (Anna Dimitrova (University of Pittsburgh))
- René Clair (1898–1981) (Barry Nevin (Dublin Institute of Technology))
- Henri-Georges Clouzot (1907–1977) (Anna Dimitrova (University of Pittsburgh))
- Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) (Elizabeth Benjamin (Coventry University))
- Alain Corneau (1943–2010) (François Massonnat (Villanova University))
- Costa-Gavras (1933–) (Seth Compaoré (University of Missouri–Columbia))
- Julie Delpy (1969–) (Felicity Chaplin (Monash University))
- Paula Delsol (1923–2015) (Katie Docwra (Royal Holloway))
- Jacques Demy (1931–1990) (Jennifer Rushworth (University College London))
- Claire Denis (1946–) (Geoff Brown (Birkbeck College))
- Arnaud Desplechin (1960–) (Éamon Ó Cofaigh (NUI Galway))
- Julia Ducournau (1983–) (Éamon Ó Cofaigh (NUI Galway))
- Germaine Dulac (1882–1942) (Maryann De Julio (Kent State University))
- Bruno Dumont (1958–) (Michael Grace (King’s College London))
- Marguerite Duras (1914–1966) (Marie Gastinel Jones (Cardiff University))
- Julien Duvivier (1896–1967) (Sarah Leahy (Newcastle University))
- Jean Epstein (1897–1953) (Katharina Bellan (Université d’Aix-Marseille))
- Marie Epstein (1899–1995) (Anya Ekaterina (University Of North Carolina at Wilmington))
- Pierre Etaix (1928–2016) (François Giraud (The University of Edinburgh))
- Jean Eustache (1938–1981) (Sonali Joshi (Freelance writer, curator and subtitler))
- Louis Feuillade (1873–1925) (Meaghan Emery (University of Vermont))
- Jacques Feyder (1885–1948) (Barry Nevin (Dublin Institute of Technology))
- Anne Fontaine (1959–) (Rachel Krantz (Shepherd University))
- Georges Franju (1912–1987) (Anna Dimitrova (University of Pittsburgh))
- Nicole Garcia (1946–) (Maribel Peñalver Vicea (Universidad de Alicante))
- Philippe Garrel (1948–) (François Giraud (The University of Edinburgh))
- Tony Gatlif (1948–) (Rebecca Raitses (The Graduate Center, CUNY))
- Francis Girod (1944–2006) (Marion Hallet (King’s College London))
- Jean-Luc Godard (1930–2022) (Adam Batty (Independent scholar))
- Alain Gomis (1972–) (Anna V. Keefe (University of Wisconsin – La Crosse))
- Michel Gondry (1963–) (Marcelline Block (CUNY, New York))
- Pierre Granier-Deferre (1927–2007) (Marion Hallet (King’s College London))
- Jean Grémillon (1901–1959) (Ray Balstad (University of Minnesota))
- Robert Guédiguian (1953–) (Paul Risker (Freelance writer))
- Sacha Guitry (1885–1957) (Caroline Rossi (Université Grenoble Alpes) and Satya Dusaugey (Actor))
- Alice Guy-Blaché (1873–1968) (Alison McMahan (Homunculus Productions, Florida))
- Mia Hansen-Løve (1981–) (Anne Quinney (The University of Mississippi))
- Michel Hazavanicius (1967–) (Jean-Marc Quinton (Film consultant))
- Mikhaël Hers (1975–) (Felicity Chaplin (Monash University) and David Jack (Independent scholar))
- Christophe Honoré (1970–) (Romain Chareyron (University of Saskatchewan, Canada))
- Agnès Jaoui (1964–) (Stéphane Narcis (Université de la Réunion))
- Jean-Pierre Jeunet (1953–) (Lance Lubelski (University of Illinois))
- Nelly Kaplan (1931–2020) (Maribel Peñalver Vicea (Universidad de Alicante))
- Mathieu Kassovitz (1967–) (Ramona Mielusel (University of Louisiana at Lafayette))
- Abdellatif Kechiche (1960–) (Jean-Marc Quinton (Film consultant))
- Nacer Khemir (1948–) (Rachel Krantz (Shepherd University))
- Cédric Klapisch (1961–) (Ramona Mielusel (University of Louisiana at Lafayette))
- Claude Lanzmann (1925–2018) (William Pimlott (UCL))
- Georges Lautner (1926–2013) (Isabelle Vanderschelden (Manchester Metropolitan University))
- Patrice Leconte (1947–) (Lance Lubelski (University of Illinois))
- Claude Lelouch (1937–) (Guilhem Buillaudel (University of Oxford))
- Max Linder (1883–1925) (Arnie Bernstein (Triton College, USA))
- Auguste (1862–1954) and Louis Lumière (1864–1948) (Lance Lubelski (University of Illinois))
- Maïwenn (1976–) (Cybelle H. McFadden (The University of North Carolina at Greensboro))
- Louis Malle (1932–1995) (Elizabeth Benjamin (Coventry University))
- Chris Marker (1921–2012) (Elizabeth Benjamin (Coventry University))
- Georges Méliès (1861–1938) (Lance Lubelski (University of Illinois))
- Jean-Pierre Melville (1917–1973) (Dan Akira Nishimura with Marc Svetov (Independent scholars))
- Claude Miller (1942–2012) (Noah C. Goodwin (University of Minnesota–Twin Cities))
- Jean-Pierre Mocky (1929–2019) (Guilhem Billaudel (University of Oxford))
- Musidora (Jeanne Roques, 1889–1957) (Lydia Vázquez (Universidad del País Vasco / Euskal Herriko Unibersitatea))
- Gaspar Noé (1963–) (Lance Lubelski (University of Illinois))
- Marcel Ophüls (1927–) (Mary M. Wiles (University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand))
- Max Ophüls (1902–1957) (Barry Nevin (Dublin Institute of Technology))
- Gérard Oury (1919–2006) (Guilhem Billaudel (University of Oxford))
- François Ozon (1967–) (Levilson C. Reis (Otterbein University, USA)
- Marcel Pagnol (1895–1974) (Marie Gastinel Jones (Cardiff University))
- Claude Pinoteau (1925–2012) (Adrienne Boutang (Université de Bourgogne-Franche-Comté))
- Jean-Paul Rappeneau (1932–) (Jean-Marc Quinton (Film consultant))
- Jean Renoir (1895–1972) (Sylvie Blum-Reid (University of Florida))
- Alain Resnais (1922–2014) (Lynn A. Higgins (Dartmouth College))
- Jacques Rivette (1928–2016) (Adam Batty (Independent scholar))
- Éric Rohmer (1920–2010) (Lance Lubelski (University of Illinois))
- Jean Rouch (1917–2004) (Michael Fitzgerald (The University of North Florida))
- Claude Sautet (1924–2000) (Marion Hallet (King’s College London))
- Pierre Schoendoerffer (1928–2012) (Philip Dine (NUI Galway))
- Céline Sciamma (1978–) (Éamon Ó Cofaigh (NUI Galway))
- Ousmane Sembène (1923–2007) (Lance Lubelski (Independent scholar))
- Coline Serreau (1947–) (Jenny Platz (University of Rhode Island))
- Abderrahmane Sissako (1961–) (Vincent Bouchard (Indiana University) and Antoine Constantin Caille (Free University of Brighton))
- Jacques Tati (1907–1982) (Lance Lubelski (University of Illinois))
- Bertrand Tavernier (1941–2021) (Lynn A. Higgins (Dartmouth College))
- André Téchiné (1943–) (Seth Compaoré (University of Missouri–Columbia))
- Danièle Thompson (1942–) (Pauline Souleau (University of St Andrews))
- Éric Toledano (1971–) and Olivier Nakache (1973–) (Jean-Marc Quinton (Film consultant))
- Justine Triet (1978–) (Peadar Kearney (Maynooth University))
- François Truffaut (1932–1984) (Sonali Joshi (Freelance writer, curator and subtitler))
- Roger Vadim (1928–2000) (Guilhem Billaudel (University of Oxford))
- Agnès Varda (1928–2019) (Amy Bertram (Belmont University))
- Francis Veber (1937–) (Stéphane Narcis (Université de la Réunion))
- Nicole Védrès (1911–1965) (Leah Vonderheide (Emerson College, USA))
- Henri Verneuil (1920–2002) (Isabelle Vanderschelden (Manchester Metropolitan University))
- Jean Vigo (1905–1934) (Michaël Abecassis (University of Oxford))
- Claude Zidi (1934–) (Guilhem Billaudel (University of Oxford))
- Index
Preface
In two previous volumes, which addressed closely related aspects of French culture and civilization, we were interested in the actors and actresses who made their indelible marks upon French cinema as well as the singers who dominated the French-speaking world of chanson and song. This, our third opus, is about French film directors and functions as a pendant to our two earlier publications.
The film director is both the team leader and the creator of the cinematic work, a true conductor at all stages of a film’s production. Directing is indeed an art, but it is a collaborative effort between many involved in the film industry, including cinematographers, film composers, screenwriters, actors, editors, producers and set/production designers. The film director is not often as well known as the actors and actresses that he/she directs and that are in the limelight. However, unlike screenwriters who are central figures of the world of cinema but have little recognition, some film directors have become cult in their own right, not only in the Francophone world but as sources of inspiration internationally. It is not by mere chance that films by Bresson, Godard, Renoir, Truffaut or Varda, to name just a few, have become widely studied around the world, their directors becoming household names. The techniques and the films’ recurring themes are unique for each of them but partake in the collective practice of filmmaking.
When one considers all of the directors who have impacted French cinema for nearly two centuries – from the silent era to the talkies to our current digital and streaming age – this work is as exhaustive and inclusive as possible. Although many directors were not born in France, their influence on French cinema is such that they are featured in this volume. This comprehensive volume therefore includes as many of the film directors as possible whom our authors consider to have made a major impact upon French cinema from its origins to the present day. Each author, in his or her personal way, paints a portrait of the director they have studied, according ←xix | xx→to what they consider as paramount traits of their filmic language and narrative, as well as a more biographical account of their personality.
As with a dictionary, the film directors included in this volume appear in alphabetical order. This book is intended as a reference resource for students, scholars and academics as well as film lovers who will find both biographical and filmographic references, allowing them to gain in a nutshell an understanding of a particular director’s career and its influences as well as its impact upon and legacy for the world of French cinema – and beyond. Cinema is a world in progress and production techniques continue to evolve with the development of new technology. However, the aim of this volume is to shed light on the directing process at a given time and to help people discover forgotten directors and rediscover prominent ones who have made French and Francophone cinema what it is today.
adam roberts (freelance writer)
Chantal Akerman (1950–2015)
Chantal Akerman was a second-generation Jew, that is, a Jew born after the Shoah, to parents who survived despite it all to have children. Akerman’s mother and father were typical (as Nadine Fresco has described in her 1981 paper ‘La Diaspora des cendres’1) in choosing not to talk to their children of the Shoah, of the near total annihilation of Akerman’s forebears in Poland and Belgium by the Nazis. Akerman grew up, as she put it, with a history ‘pleine de trous’ [full of holes].2 Silence, and the contemplation of absence, the scrutiny of surface in a search of hidden truth, and a need to divine from outward signs the complexities of emotional reserve, became the means by which she looked at the world – bringing her lens, and ear, unblinkingly to bear as she studied the superficialities of life, finding profundity in places and milieus inevitably overlooked by any other.
Akerman was not much interested in making theoretical or didactic arguments; she did not wish to preach nor instruct. Yet Akerman wanted those who saw her work to both see and understand, as much as she herself needed to see and understand. If Akerman looked at a housewife methodically filling her day, she would do so with careful attention and commitment. From such a radical concern with the everyday, the quotidian, might arise contact with the predicament of the other, in denial of what Emmanuel Levinas has called totalization. Akerman was never evasive: her camera was always placed front and centre, clearly out of respect for the understanding she took from Levinas, whose lectures she went to at the École Normale ←1 | 2→Israëlite Orientale in Paris. As Akerman said: ‘I have an understanding that making films is very much about frontality, about facing off.’3 Her directly looking is also the fruit of her resolve to confront truth, to refuse silence, to resist evasion, to look for and find self and identity in the movements and gestures of the other.
Akerman first thought to study film under André Delvaux at INSAS (Institut national supérieur des arts du spectacle et des techniques de diffusion) in Brussels, but left early to make her first film, a short that was screened on Belgian television, and provided her with an entrée when she went to New York in 1971, where she was befriended by Babette Mangolte, the photographer who would afterwards serve as Akerman’s cinematographer in a number of her films. Mangolte also took Akerman to avant-garde screenings at Anthology Film Archives on Lafayette Street. There Akerman encountered work by Michael Snow, Andy Warhol and Jonas Mekas. The result of these encounters were several experimental films, often shown mute, structural in many ways, although interested always in the lives of others, in the relationship between the body and its confines, in the haunted passageways that separate lives, as at the now demolished Hotel Monterey, where Akerman filmed long-term residents sitting and standing about in their rooms and the common areas, seemingly at home, yet suggesting displacement or unease. This film of 1973, Hotel Monterey, hovers between a document and a figment of the imaginary, a quality evident in all her work, rooted always in reality and yet arranged carefully in sculpted structures of crystalline perfection.
Moving back to Europe in 1974 brought a return to a narrative mode, with Je, tu, il, elle [I, You, He, She] (1974), in which Akerman plays a woman to be found at first confined to her room, where she gorges on sugar, shifts furniture and scribbles incessantly, as if enclosed in a Beckettian drama without words. But she breaks free and takes to the road, where she offers a lorry driver a little of what he needs sexually, before arriving at the home of a woman friend with whom she shares an extraordinary sexual union, in defiance of every norm of the sexual on film, draining cinema of its addiction to scopophilia to open the door on a wholly unprecedented aesthetic ←2 | 3→project. Here are bodies in motion, coiling in delight that does not depend on a desire born of those who look.
Akerman reverenced her mother, and said of her brilliant breakthrough film of 1975 Jeanne Dielman 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles that it was a love letter to her mother. But it is a love letter in which the housewife Jeanne Dielman offers sex for the money that funds her petit bourgeois life. It is the care and sterilizing rituals with which Dielman prepares for her customers, as much as her fussy regime in the kitchen, that give us a clue as to the dislocations between self, other and body that Akerman’s anthropological 200 minutes of observation accumulates. The film ends in a kind of disaster but it is the moment of release from the horrors of holding chaos and meaninglessness at bay. It is remarkable that a film of such ambition was the work of a 24-year-old, whose previous work provided little clue about what was to come. This film has been widely programmed and studied ever since, often cited as the beginning of women’s cinema.4
Akerman returned to New York throughout her life, and she followed Jeanne Dielman with News from Home (1977). This is a film shot on the streets and subways of the city, and lastly aboard the Staten Island Ferry. New Yorkers idle on subway platforms, street corners and pavements of the city. They often look back at the camera, curious yet alert. For a soundtrack Akerman made use of the letters her mother had written to her while her beloved daughter was away. These are not literary texts; they are the sort of letter that most will know. And yet as Akerman reads from the letters, in the hurried voice of one who rereads, and her voice competes with city sounds that swell and fade, sometimes becoming inaudible, the viewer is drawn into the warp and weft of Akerman’s life and experience. The final shot of the film, a rearward gaze from the ferry, as the human aspect of the city diminishes, is a shot lasting no less than 10 minutes. The film is often described as documentary, and yet it is a text whose meanings multiply, and whose objects are revealed as aspects of the subject, in a film that far exceeds its quotidian materials.
←3 | 4→Following the success of Jeanne Dielman Akerman would explore other registers, ranging in duration and idiom. The narrative feature that followed was Les Rendez-vous d’Anna [The Meetings of Anna] (1978), which follows a woman film director as she travels from festival to festival, trapped in hotel rooms, paying brief and unsatisfactory visits along the way, including to her mother. Life as a successful filmmaker is evidently not without its vicissitudes. A comedic vein would be opened up with Toute une nuit [All Night Long] (1982), a schnitzleresque series of interconnecting vignettes in the course of one warm insomniac Brussels’ night.
Akerman made work for television such as the moyen-métrage L’homme à la valise [The Man with the Suitcase] (1983), also in comedic vein, in which Akerman plays a writer who returns to her apartment to find her flat-sitter, a man, simply will not go away. Another film of this duration, a delightful account of teenage heartbreak and longing, would be Portrait d’une jeune fille de la fin des années 60 à Bruxelles [Portrait of a Young Girl at the End of the 1960s in Brussels] (1994).
Akerman’s father was also a survivor, having lived in hiding through the war. He went on to run a glove shop in a Brussels shopping mall. He and his life inspired what was to become Akerman’s lovely musical comedy Golden Eighties (1986). Bright and lively though the film is, with songs and dancing, Akerman does not avoid the grim realities of running a business in the recessionary 1970s; indeed, these worries lend substance to the songs of yearning and of wishing for faraway places.
Akerman also made adaptations of literary works. She adapted Proust with La Captive [The Captive] (2000), a film of multi-layered sophistication dealing with obsessive desire that craves knowledge of its object and yet is necessarily denied the comfort of knowing; and she adapted Conrad with La Folie d’Almayer [Almayer’s Folly] (2011), a radical reworking of the novel that explores what it is to both know and not know, to abhor the past and then be driven mad by the inescapable presence of the past.
Akerman began making documentaries early in her career. Dis-moi [Tell me] (1980) was commissioned for television. It is a set of interviews with elderly women survivors of the Shoah, evoking poignantly life in the annihilated shtetls of Poland, a project in which Akerman’s own mother is heard but never seen. In this way, Akerman may have been attempting to fill ←4 | 5→‘holes’. Her film D’Est [From the East] (1993) was made in Eastern Europe in the last days of communism. Her camera would gaze with deep concern at the lines of freezing men and women lined up waiting for buses and trains that seem never likely to arrive, or else idling away time in dimly lit apartments and bars, where sentimental music plays, or where couples cling to each other to dance. For Akerman such waiting and lining up evoked for her the Shoah, ‘always that’, as she would lament in her installation work D’Est: au bord de la fiction [From the East: Bordering on Fiction] (1995).
With longer documentaries made from 1999 onwards, Akerman looked beyond Europe to other terrains, finding only violence, oppression and injustice: in Sud [South] (1999) she investigated a lynching in the deep south of the United States, in De l’autre côté [From the Other Side] (2002) the immigrant predicament on the Mexico/US border, and in Là-bas [Down There] (2006) the insoluble complexity of Israel/Palestine. As with all her filmmaking the forms are simple, looking at length, allowing the viewer time to look, giving her subjects time to be. As Akerman has said: ‘I want people to feel the time that it takes, which is not the time that it really takes.’5 These are films that go to the heart of the matter, talk to just the right people, whether what they have to say is agreeable or not, whether they find words easily or not. In Là-bas Akerman is heard on the phone, out of sight of the camera, unable even to leave the apartment she has borrowed, frightened and perplexed, peering out at local residents apparently so at ease. No better response can be imagined that might illuminate the impossibility of the place she is visiting, of the tension between place and displacement.
For Akerman’s last film she would turn her camera on her own mother Nelly, near the end of her life and in need of care. Akerman frames the spaces that she and her mother now share, and at last Nelly talks to Akerman of the Shoah, of the murder and extermination that has lain always at the heart of their family life. Yet despite it all, it is tenderness between mother and daughter that prevails, even if, as with all love affairs, the longing for contact must contend with a yearning for independence. Akerman completed No Home Movie in 2015, the year Nelly died.
←5 | 6→A year later Akerman took her own life. An artist who had produced work informed always by a generous and compassionate point of view, yet haunted by the fact of the Shoah, a fact that proved inescapable, had died by her own hand, another victim surely. Yet hers is work of permanent relevance because it grants authority to its subjects, it bears witness, and never discards what might otherwise be thought of as unimportant. In Akerman’s work that which is discarded holds out the promise of understanding.
Finally, it is essential to record her late flowering as an installation artist and as a writer. Akerman placed some of her film work freshly into the gallery context (e.g. D’Est, which became D’Est au bord de la fiction, mentioned above), re-presented or placed into correspondence with new images and sounds. Akerman used camcorders and even her phone to make recordings of her daily life, to generate material for juxtaposition and overlay, in works that explore her relationship with place, self and other. Her books, written in French, deal with her own life, in Brussels as a member of a small family, as a woman dealing with the complexities and consequences of passionate love, and as a daughter remembering her mother.6
She is admired, perhaps revered, by artists and filmmakers, including luminaries of every kind, from Jean-Luc Godard to Jonas Mekas, from Greta Gerwig to Todd Haynes, and from Tacita Dean to Jem Cohen. In 2022, Akerman became the first woman director to top the Sight and Sound Greatest Films of All Time poll with her 1975 film Jeanne Dielman.
1 Nadine Fresco, ‘La diaspora des cendres’, Nouvelle revue de psychanalyse 24 (1981), 205–20.
2 Chantal Akerman, Chantal Akerman: Autoportrait en Cinéaste (Paris: Editions Cahiers du cinéma, 2004), 30.
3 Élisabeth Lebovici, ‘No Idolatry and Losing Everything that Made You a Slave: Chantal Akerman’, Mousse Magazine (1 November 2011).
4 Laura Mulvey: ‘Chantal Akerman Undoubtedly Created a Women’s Cinema’, in The Chantal Akerman Retrospective Handbook, ed. Joanna Hogg and Adam Roberts (London: A Nos Amours London, 2019).
5 Miriam Rosen, ‘In Her Own Time’, Artforum International 42/8 (2004), 122–7.
6 Hall de nuit [Night Lobby] (1997), Une famille à Bruxelles [A Family in Brussels] (1998) and Ma mère rit [My Mother Laughs] (2013).
elisabeth-christine muelsch (angelo state university, usa)
Marc Allégret (1900–1973)
Strangely, the life and work of Marc Allégret, one of France’s most successful and prolific film directors, who in 1967–1968 also briefly served as the president of the Cinémathèque française, has not truly been the subject of extensive biographical research. The few publications that exist often focus heavily on his relationship with André Gide, Allégret’s mentor and one-time lover. It is, therefore, no surprise that many articles on Allégret appear in publications of the Association des Amis d’André Gide. While the importance of this relationship for either of the two men cannot be denied, it might be unfair to see the life and work of Allégret as entirely overshadowed by an almighty Gidean presence. Allégret had an astute sense of what works in cinema and what does not. He was a ‘découvreur de stars’ [discoverer of stars], who according to a 1942 film critique discovered at least one new star every year.1 In 1934, Allégret cast his lover Simone Simon in Lac aux dames [Ladies Lake] and a few years later, he gave the 16-year-old Michèle Morgan her first big role in Gribouille [Heart of Paris] (1937) alongside the iconic actor Raimu. Allégret actively worked on creating this mover-and-shaker image of himself, observing and hiring young aspiring actors, launching their careers as well as those of novice filmmakers and scriptwriters, thereby significantly shaping the French film industry of the 1930s, 1940s and early 1950s, until he fell victim to the criticism of the nouvelle vague directors.
Allégret believed in the invigorating power of youth. In a 1970s interview, he stated that he believed firmly in youth and even in inexperience, because the awkwardness of a beginning actor could contribute realness ←7 | 8→and genuineness to a film. Quite a few of Allégret’s films – for example, Entrée des artistes [The Curtain Rises] (1938), Félicie Nanteuil [Twilight] (1944) and Futures vedettes [School for Love] (1955) – tell the stories of young aspiring actors and artists, illustrating the hardships and obstacles they had to face, all the while emphasizing their incredible potential and commitment. Allégret saw film producers and distributors as the major stumbling block to the promotion of young talent. They were more inclined to go with well-established names that would draw crowds into the movie theatres and guarantee a film’s financial success.
In 1952, Allégret and Roger Vadim, who had become his protégé, would embark on a television project for Radiodiffusion Télévision Française, working closely with Claude Courtelle, aka Claude Loursais. The working title for this show was ‘Entrée des Artistes’ – clearly alluding to Allégret’s eponymous 1938 film that had become a springboard for the then-young actors Odette Joyeux and Janine Darcey. The project was conceptualized as a series composed of 30-minute shorts, in which narrator Roger Vadim (and on occasion Allégret himself) would present struggling young actors, introducing them to already successful actors and producers. Next, the audience would see short film clips of successful actors such as Jean-Louis Barrault, Michèle Morgan and Simone Simon (all discovered by Allégret) in their first roles. The different struggling young artists – among them Brigitte Bardot! – would subsequently be asked to replay the scene for a screen test that would be aired on television. Afterwards, the audience could vote for the young actor they liked best. Allégret hoped, of course, that this public endorsement of an actor would provide the necessary support to convince producers and distributors to hire the young talent.
Although LGBT laws in France might not have been as restrictive as they were in other European countries during the twentieth century, homosexuality or bisexuality could not be lived openly without risking social ostracism; this was even more the case in the Protestant milieu in which Allégret grew up.
Marc Allégret was born on 23 December 1900 in Basel, Switzerland, the son of Elie Allégret, a pastor and missionary who had been André Gide’s preceptor. Elie took his family to Africa, but eventually his wife Suzanne decided to return with the children to Paris, where, in Elie’s absence, she ←8 | 9→was supported by Gide. ‘Oncle André’ took on a paternal role with the boys. Struck by Marc’s beauty and intrigued by the 16-year-old’s rebellion against Protestant narrow-mindedness, Gide – who had been subjugated to stern Protestantism himself – began a relationship with Marc that was not only sexual but also involved the moral, philosophical and literary education of the young man. Gide introduced Allégret to the Parisian literary scene and sought to nurture in him a lasting love for literature and truth. Their excursion to the Congo and the ensuing documentary Voyage au Congo [Travels in the Congo] (1927), which Allégret shot while travelling, is seen as the beginning of Allégret’s cinematic career. The film’s producer was the young Pierre Braunberger, who twenty-five years later would be at Allégret’s side to produce another documentary, Avec André Gide [With André Gide], filmed during the last two years of Gide’s life and released in 1952, a year after Gide’s death.
Allégret’s and Gide’s African experience triggered in both men a decidedly critical attitude towards French colonial politics. It is to Allégret’s credit that he was able to shed critical light on French colonialism in blockbuster movies such as Zouzou (1934), a film about the lonely rags-to-riches performer Zouzou (Josephine Baker) that subtly showed French audiences their own bias toward the colonized other.
Among the large body of films Marc Allégret has created, cinematic adaptations of novels play a prominent part. Most of them focus on heterosexual love interests, scenarios to which Allégret was no stranger. According to his film editor Denise Tual-Batcheff, he maintained multiple heterosexual relationships simultaneously.2 Although these films show heterosexual love relations, they do not necessarily display preconceived notions about gender. A surprising number of them portray a crisis of masculinity: men who pretend to be something they are not, who are often in financial distress, who feel swamped and overtaxed by women (Lac aux dames), who have to work as kept men (Entrée des artistes), or who are driven to madness by a woman (L’Arlésienne [1942]). Frequently unable to communicate their feelings, they are misunderstood. For Allégret, who had often been accused of being hard to read, his films became a means of expressing his ←9 | 10→inner turmoil and stress, enabling him to convey things that could not be said. In a 1946 interview that identified him as a ‘psychologue de l’écran’ [psychologist of the screen],3 Allégret explained that he wanted to bring the spectator out of his passive role and integrate him as much as possible ‘dans la zone subconsciente de mon histoire’ – into the subconscious of Allégret’s own story.
1 Bernard J. Houssiau, Marc Allégret découvreur de stars. Sous les yeux d’André Gide (Bière Switzerland: Cabedita, 1994).
Details
- Pages
- XXII, 542
- Year
- 2023
- ISBN (PDF)
- 9781800797642
- ISBN (ePUB)
- 9781800797659
- ISBN (Hardcover)
- 9781800797635
- DOI
- 10.3726/b19439
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 2023 (May)
- Keywords
- French cinema Film direction Biographies of filmmakers
- Published
- Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, New York, Wien, 2023. XXII, 542 pp.
