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Vive la différence! A Guide to French Films on Cassette

The article from the October 1982 issue of American Film is so quaintly and absurdly dated now that I can’t resist reproducing it. -– J.R.

The prospect of choosing ten French movies that I’d like to own on videocassette is pretty hard to resist –- even for someone who still doesn’t own a cassette recorder. And when I consider the losses that any great film is bound to suffer on a home screen, I find myself consoled by the opinion of Jean-Luc Godard, expressed, twenty years ago:

”Even with films like Lola Montès and Alexander Nevsky, something comes through on television, despite the distortion, the rounded screen, the lack of definition, the absence of color. . .With Lola Montès, what you lost visually you often gained by having your attention focused on the dialogue. If only part of the film survives. It will be enough to bring it across.”

Admittedly, Godard was speaking here about old-fashioned network transmission — and French television at that, which offered a higher visual definition, and no time-slotting cuts or commercial breaks. Still, the overall thrust of his point, is true. Reproducing a classic film on cassette may do something drastic to its original purpose and format, but something essential remains.

Video technology has rendered the myth of Robinson Crusoe obsolete. To rediscover or reinvent culture today, none of us has to be shipwrecked; we can create our own proverbial desert islands in the privacy of our homes. In the list that follows, I’ve omitted a few classic titles available on tape -– like Le jour se lève, Shoot the Piano Player, and Jules and Jim -– because they’re not prime desert island material.

Conversely, at the end I’ve listed three movie tapes that currently aren’t available In the United States, but should be.

1. Paris qui dort (The Crazy Ray, 1923)

An obvious plus in having René Clair’s firs feature on cassette is that one can stop it and start it up again at any point. This is just what the investor Dr. Crase does to Paris in this silent romantic comedy — freeze time, with his ingenious “crazy ray”. The young hero, a night watchman on the Eiffel Tower, descends one day to find the entire city in suspended animation. Eventually he meets some similarly immune visitors from Marseilles who are also bemused and enchanted by this miracle, which transforms Paris into an enormous playground for those who are still mobile – a city ripe ,tor the taking. With your own copy of The Crazy Ray you can literally become your own Dr. Crase –- or Dr. Clair.

2. Un chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog, 1928)

Sad to say, this is the only French film by the great Luis Buñuel presently on cassette. Luckily, the first and shortest of his films (only seventeen minutes long) is also his most outrageous and corrosive (with only L’age d’or, his first feature, a close competitor). And, arguably, it’s still his best. “Once upon a time…” this silent Surrealist protest begins jauntily, in mockery of a narrative form that it seeks to obliterate, and before long its famous and still-shocking close-up of an eyeball sliced by a razor catapults the fractured plot into a string of deliriously unforgettable events and images.

3. La règle du jeu (The Rules of the Game, 1939)

Many critics have offered a strong case for this as the greatest French film by the greatest French director, Jean Renoir — even though, like many great films, it was a commercial disaster when it first came out. “People go to the cinema in the hope of forgetting, their everyday problems,” Renoir remarked thirty-five years later, “and it was precisely their own worries that I plunged them into. . . . I depicted pleasant, sympathetic characters, but showed them in a society in the process of disintegration, so that they were defeated at the outset.” Perhaps the French film with the greatest number of major characters (at least until Playtime), democratically subdivided into all possible classes, it converts their intricate interminglings into a farcical, tragicomic ballet of tenderness and passion. It’s funny, sad, and glamorous, and boasts one of the richest demonstrations of mise en scène. Considering the brilliance of the dialogue, it’s a pleasure to report that the cassette version is subtitled –- as are all the films listed below.

4. Orphée (Orpheus, 1949)

Jean Cocteau is one of the best-represented French filmmakers insofar as the three films generally thought to be his finest -– The Blood of a Poet, Beauty and the Beast, and Orphée -– are all accessible for home use. This is good news, for if the personal poetics of Cocteau can reach a broad public in this manner, the best of such disciples as Georges Franju (Les yeux sans visage) and Jacques Demy (Lola) may not be far behind. My own preference for Orphée partly stems from the totalizing power of its private cosmology, which virtually re-creates the vocation of poetry and the resonance of myth in the banality of Cocteau’s social milieu. Like Godard’s Alphaville, is a science fiction myth set in the natural locations of contemporary Paris and hence, at the very least, a very witty (if campy) social satire. The title poet (jean Marais) is led away by elegant Death (Maria Casares) attended by sleek black-leather motorcyclists, mirrors become portals of entry and car rides blast cryptic messages from the outer reaches.

5. Les vacances de Monsieur Hulot (Mr. Hulot’s Holiday, 1953)

It’s a real pity that you can’t get Jacques Tati’s Playtime or Trafic on tape, and an outright crime that his Parade (1973) hasn’t yet been seen in the United States in any form -– all the more inexplicable because that charming and original circus film was originally shot on video, and seems a natural for prime-time American television. But we can still rejoice in the fact that the two most popular Mr. Hulot efforts, Mr. Hulot’s Holiday and Mon oncle (1958), are on cassette. Like all of Tati’s major comedies, they need no translation, for their language of gesture and custom is universal. The likable silliness of seaside vacationers in the former is set down with a sense of space and volume, sound and silence, tempo and rhythm that is unique in film: elegant boxlike structures of off-center action and reaction, that make Tati’s Hulot something of a philosopher as well as a comic bumbler whenever he happens upon a landscape.

6. A bout de souffle (Breathless, I960)

Of all the New Wave tributes to American movies, Jean-Luc Godard’s first feature is undoubtedly the flakiest, funniest, smartest, and most enduring. Jean-Paul Belmondo, in his first big role, is the definitive Bogey-style crook on the run, and Jean Seberg was never more winningly enigmatic than as his pretty, heartless American girl friend. This is the movie that introduced jump cuts and cinematic in-jokes to the world at large — both of which keep, bubbling long thanks to Martial Solal’s superb jazz score and an unpredictable pace that lurches forward when you’re least expecting it. Paris was seldom lovelier.

7. L’Année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad, l96l)

It’s nice to know that Alain Resnais’ first two features –- Hiroshima, mon amour and this one – are on cassette. It’s not so nice to realize that the latter, the only Cinemascope film on my list, can only be had in a television-scanned version. This process trims both sides of the wide-screen frame and re-edits some shots in order to center certain details –- a maddening procedure roughly equivalent to either omitting or italicizing every fifth word in a novel. (For my money, shrinking the image so that a black border is visible above and below, is infinitely preferable – and the solution most often adopted on French television.) Yet considering all the perverse yet seductively teasing games that Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet play with our narrative expectations and movie reflexes, one hopes that this will prove to be only a minor distraction. The intense, “musical” pleasures of Resnais’ beautifully nuanced way with camera movements and cuts make this movie bear repeating as often as a favorite symphony.

8. Au Hasard, Balthazar (Balthazar, 1966)

As the most erotically powerful of all French filmmakers, Robert Bresson belongs on the shelf next to Hitchcock and Carl Dreyer. Alas, I know of none of his films that has yet made it onto cassette, and viewers who like their French art sexy will have to settle for dubbed versions of Roger Vadim’s And God Created Woman (1956) and Circle of Love (1964), which focus on the bodies and antibourgeois frolics of Brigitte Bardot and Jane Fonda, respectively. Bresson’s art and erotics are made of sterner stuff; in the case of Balthazar, it is a vision that extends to include the world’s brute suffering and human cruelty, as filtered through a fable on the life of a donkey. Told in quick, bold flashes of image and sound, Bresson’s harsh story conveys such a material grasp of the real world that it makes spirituality and carnality seem almost indistinguishable.

9. Céline et Julie vont en bateau (Celine and Julie Go Boating, 1974)

Unlike Godard and Truffaut, New Wave directors Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette, and Eric Rohmer aren’t yet on tape. If Rivette’s delightful 192-minute feminist comedy in color seems a prime candidate, this is largely because audiences have generally shown themselves to be well ahead of most critics and distributors when it comes to appreciating the giddy challenges of a mind-blowing spree of this kind. Given half a chance, this, movie could provide home viewers with as many youthful kicks as Diva, plus a lot more to think about afterward. The goofy title heroines, a magician (Juliet Berto) and a librarian (Dominique Labourier), make episodic visits to a haunted house,, where phantom ladies Bulle Ogier and Marie-France Pisier repeatedly plot one another’s undoing. Rarely has the spirit of Alice in Wonderland – and Montmartre in the summertime — been so well exploited.

I0. India Song (1975)

If Rivette’s free-form farce occasionally offers us more than we want — which may make us want to consume it in installments (an easy matter with a cassette) — Marguerite Duras’s no less innovative color masterpiece may disconcert us at first by providing us with less than we expect. A haunting tango and a hypnotic litany of offscreen voices delivering Duras’s pithy, rhythmic dialogue accompany languid, handsome, semi-motionless shots of Delphine Seyrig, Michel Lonsdale, and others inside swank interiors with mirrors that suggest peering through dark brandy. But as with popcorn, one may find that the more one gets, the more one wants; and after a while, Duras’s seemingly minimal strategies take on a maximal impact. Familiarity breeds entrancement and infatuation, and what better way to nurture this than to have your own copy?

Published on 11 Apr 2013 in Notes, by jrosenbaum

Cinemeteorology [Serge Daney on TOO EARLY, TOO LATE]

Here’s a piece by Serge Daney that I translated back in 1982, for a catalogue accompanying a Straub-Huillet retrospective that I curated in New York that fall. Danièle Huillet sent me the original review in French, suggesting that it be included. Too Early, Too Late, shot in 16mm, remains, for me, one of their two most beautiful landscape films, along with the much later Operai, Contadini (Workers, Peasants, 2001), making it all the more regrettable that neither of these favorites is available on DVD, even in France; I’m also very sorry that the frame reproductions included here couldn’t be any better. — J.R.

What do John Travolta and Jean-Marie Straub have in common? A difficult question, I admit. One dances, the other doesn’t. One is a Marxist, the other isn’t. One is very well-known, the other less so. Both have their fans. Me, for instance.

However, one merely has to see their two films surface on the same day on Parisian screens in order to understand that the same worry eats away at both of them. Worry? Let’s say passion, rather — a passion for sound. I’m referring to BLOW OUT (directed by Brian DePalma) and TOO EARLY, TOO LATE (co-signed by    Danièle Huillet), two good films, two magnificent soundtracks.

The cinema, you may persist in thinking, is “images and sounds.” But what if it were the reverse? What if it were “sounds and images?” Sounds which make one imagine what one sees and see what one imagines? And what if the cinema were also the ear which pricks itself up — erectile and alert, like a dog’s — when the eye loses its bearings? In the open country, for instance.

In BLOW OUT, John Travolta plays the part of a sound effects freak who, starting off with one sound, goes on to identify a crime and its author. In TOO EARLY, TOO LATE, Straub, Huillet and their regular sound engineer, the inspired Louis Hochet, lose themselves in the French countryside before they set about wandering along the Nile and within its delta, in Egypt. Starting off with sounds — all the sounds, from the most infinitesimal to the subtlest — they too identify a crime. Scene of the crime: the earth; victims: peasants; witnesses to the crime: landscapes. That is, clouds, roads, grass, wind.

MAHMOUD ENGELS

In June 1980, the Straubs spent two weeks filming in the French countryside. They were seen in places as improbable as Treogan, Mottreff, Marbeuf and Harville. They were seen prowling close to big cities: Lyon, Rennes. Their idea, which presides over the execution of this opus 12 in their oeuvre (already twenty years of filmmaking!) was to film as they are today a certain number of places mentioned in a letter sent by Engels to the future renegade Kautsky. In this letter (read offscreen by Danièle Huillet), Engels, bolstered with figures, describes the misery of the countryside on the eve of the French Revolution. One suspects that these places have changed. For one thing, they are deserted. The French countryside, Straub says, has a “science fiction, deserted-planet aspect.” Maybe people live there, but they don’t inhabit the locale. The fields, roadways, fences and rows of trees are traces of human activity, but the actors are birds, a few vehicles, a faint murmur, the wind.

In May 1981, the Straubs are in Egypt and film other landscapes. This time the guide isn’t Engels but a more up-to-date Marxist, author of the recent and celebrated CLASS STRUGGLES IN EGYPT, Mahmoud Hussein. Again offscreen, the voice of an Arab intellectual speaks in French (but with an accent) about the peasant resistance to the English occupation, up until the “petit-bourgeois” revolution of Neguib in 1952. Once again, the peasants revolt too early and succeeded too late as far as power is concerned. This obsessive recurrence is the film’s “content.” Like a musical motif, it is established from the outset: “that the middle-class here as always were too cowardly to support their own interests/that since the Bastille, the plebes had to do all the work.” (Engels)

The film is thus a diptych. One, France. Two, Egypt. No actors, not even characters, especially not extras. If there is an actor in TOO EARLY, TOO LATE, it’s the landscape. This actor has a text to recite: History (the peasants who resist, the land which remains), of which it is the living witness. The actor performs with a certain amount of talent: the cloud that passes, a breaking loose of birds, a bouquet of trees bent by the wind, a break in the clouds; this is what the landscape’s performance consists of. This kind of performing is meteorological. One hasn’t seen anything like it for quite some time. Since the silent period, to be precise.

THE WIND MAKES NOISE

While seeing TOO EARLY, TOO LATE (especially the first part), I recalled another film, shot in Hollywood in 1928 by the Swedish director Victor Sjostrom: THE WIND. This magnificent movie showed how the sound of the wind drove Lilian Gish mad. The film was “silent,” which only gave it more force. Anyone who’s seen THE WIND knows that it’s an auditory hallucination. Anyway, there’s never been a “silent cinema,” only a cinema deaf to the racket produced inside each spectator, in his very body, when he becomes the echo chamber of images. Those of the wind, for instance.

One had to wait for the sound film before silence had a chance. Again, Bresson is optimistic when he writes, “The sound film invented silence.” The possibility of silence, at least. Take the example of the wind. One doesn’t have a clear memory of the wind in the films of the Thirties, Forties, Fifties. Or, rather, it was the thunderstorms which went whoosh in pirate films. But the North wind, the draught, the air current, all those winds so close to silence? The West wind? And the evening breeze? No. One had to wait for the Sixties, the small sync-sound cameras, the New Waves. One had to wait for Straub and Huillet.

THE EAR SEES

For at the point of refinement when they arrived at the practice of direct sound, a very strange phenomenon is produced in their films (such as FROM THE CLOUD TO THE RESISTANCE). One rediscovers there the “auditory hallucinations” proper to the “silent” cinema. The same phenomenon crops up in certain recent films by some “old”figures of the New Wave: Rouch (AMBARA DAMBA), Rohmer (THE AVIATOR’S WIFE), Rivette (NORTH BRIDGE). As if the direct sound brought back the absence of sound. As if, out of a world that’s integrally sonorous, the body of a burlesque actor once again emerges.

It’s normal: when the cinema was “silent,” we were free to lend it all the noises, the tiniest as well as the most intimate. It was when it set about talking, and especially after the invention of dubbing (1935), that nothing remained to challenge the victory of dialogue and music. Weak, imperceptible noises no longer had a chance. It was genocide.

They came back again, gradually. In America through an orgy of sonorous effects (see Travolta), in France through the re-education of the ear (see Straub). TOO EARLY, TOO LATE is, to the best of my knowledge, one of the few movies since Sjostrom’s that has filmed the wind. This has to be seen — and heard — to be believed. It’s as if the camera and the fragile crew took the wind for a sail and the landscape for a sea. The camera plays with the wind, follows it, anticipates it, comes back behind like a ricocheting bullet. As if it were held on a leash or tied to another machine, like the one invented by Michael Snow in that stupefying film that was THE CENTRAL REGION (in Snow’s case as well, the terrain of the camera’s performance was a deserted planet of sorts. This explained that.

To see and hear at the same time - but that’s impossible, you’ll say! Certainly, but (1) the Straubs are stout-hearted, and (2) voyages into the impossible are very instructive. With TOO EARLY, TOO LATE, an experience is attempted, with us and in spite of us: at moments, one begins to see (the grass bent by the wind) before hearing (the wind responsible for this bending). At other moments, one hears first (the wind), then one sees (the grass). Image and sound are synchronous and yet, at each instant, each of us can create the experience in the same order in which one arranges the sensations. It is therefore a sensational films.

DO NOT DISTURB

This is the first part, the French desert. It works differently in overpopulated Egypt. there, the fields are no longer empty, fellahs work there, one can no longer go anywhere and film anyone any which way. The terrain of performance becomes again the territory of others. The Straubs (whoever knows their films realizes they’re intransigent on this matter) accord much importance to the fact that a filmmaker should not disturb those whom he films. One therefore has to see the second part of TOO EARLY, TOO LATE as an odd performance, made up of approaches and retreats, where the filmmakers, less meteorologists than acupuncturists, search for the spot — the only spot, the right spot — where their camera can catch people without bothering them. Two dangers immediately present themselves: exotic tourism and the invisible camera. Too close, too far. In a lengthy “scene,” the camera is planted in front of a factory gate and allows one to see the Egyptian workers who pass, enter and leave. Too close for them not to see the camera, too far away for them to be tempted to go towards it. To find this point, this moral point, is at this moment the entire art of the Straubs. With perhaps the hope that for the “extras” thus filmed, the camera and the fragile crew “hidden” right in the middle of a field or a vacant lot would only be an accident of the landscape, a gentle scarecrow, another mirage carried by the wind.

These scruples are astonishing. They are not fashionable. To shoot a film, especially in the country, means generally to devastate everything, disrupt the lives of people while manufacturing country snapshots, local color, rancid back-to-nature museum pieces. Because the cinema belongs to the city and no one knows exactly what a “peasant cinema” would be, anchored in the lived experience, the space-time of peasants. It is necessary therefore to see the Straubs, city inhabitants, mainland navigators, as lost. It is necessary to see them in the middle of the field, moistened fingers raised to catch the wind and ears pricked up to hear what it’s saying. So the most naked sensations serve as a compass. Everything else, ethics and esthetics, content and form, derives from this.

One may find the experience unbearable; that sometimes happens. One may stop finding the very idea of the experience bearable; that happens every day. One may decide that filming the wind is a ridiculous activity. What a lot of hot air! One may also bypass the cinema when it takes the risk of straying from its own turf, away from the beaten paths.

Translated by Jonathan Rosenbaum

Originally published in Libération, February 20-21, 1982

Originally published in English on November 2, 1982, a catalogue for a twelve-day Straub/Huillet retrospective (the last one to date to be held in the U.S.) at the Public Theater in New York.