The French masters of cinema

Why is French film important? Not only because the French, such as Auguste and Louis Lumiére — who invented the cinématographe — and Alice Guy Blaché were among the pioneers of film technology, but because as film directors and film actors/actresses, not to mention theoreticians of cinema, they have made a lasting and very influential contribution to cinema and therefore to film history.

To mention but one example from the first half of the 20th century, Jean Renoir’s La Régle du Jeu (The Rules of the Game) of 1939 is regarded by many film critics as one of the greatest films ever made. Interestingly, Jean Renoir was the famous French impressionist painter, Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s son, and it is with a sense of historical “justice” that one witnesses the son turning to another visual art from the one practised by the father.

Arguably, modern film theory originated (to a large extent) in the contributions made to the film magazine Cahiers du Cinema which was founded by film theoretician André Bazin around the middle of the century (although one should not ignore the significant contribution to cinema theory by Russians such as Eisenstein). The striking thing about this magazine was that several of its contributors ended up directing films themselves, including Francois Truffaut — whose wonderful film, Les Quatre Cent Coups (The 400 Blows) of 1959 is one of his most memorable — Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard (of Breathless fame) and Eric Rohmer. In the process they created what was to become known as The French New Wave (Nouvelle Vague), which continued the experimental spirit that French film had already become famous for.

The New Wave directors were nevertheless significantly influenced by Hollywood movies (and made intra-cinematic reference to them, for example Chabrol referencing Alfred Hitchcock’s films, or Godard paying tribute to gangster films, etc), with the result that they introduced a more realistic idiom into French film, compared to what these directors saw as the theatre-oriented approach of traditional French film. Instead, they concentrated on bringing a sense of realism to cinema, often using improvisation (sometimes with ordinary members of the public walking into the picture frame and unwittingly conversing with actors), hand-held cameras and natural lighting.

In turn, the New Wave films have influenced Hollywood directors such as Quentin Tarantino, with their use of techniques which, in a manner reminiscent of Brechtian theatre alienation devices, constantly surprise audiences, and deviating from the notion that film should hide its status as film through the “suspension of disbelief”. Instead, they sought to draw attention to films’ status as cinema, as artificial, in this way contributing to the modernist (and later postmodernist) elements of self-referentiality (familiar in literature). These included characters addressing the audience directly, voice-overs, use of slang phrases, people arbitrarily walking into the picture-frame, flashbacks, jump cuts (to avoid the impression of continuity that mainstream film thrives on) and so on.

In short, New Wave cinema in France was innovatively ground-breaking, and one could make out a strong case that what Gilles Deleuze calls the “cinema of the time-image” (as distinguishable from the “cinema of the movement-image”, which preceded it) could be perceived as emerging in the cinema of the French New Wave.

One could go on to talk about many other French directors’ work, such as the extraordinary work of Alain Resnais — sometimes associated with the New Wave — especially his most famous films, Hiroshima mon Amour (1959) and Last Year at Marienbad (1961), where the latter comes very close to negating, via its cinematography, what is ostensibly the very essence of cinema, namely movement, and comes across as a kind of Platonism in film, or a film-counterpart of Yeats’s Sailing to Byzantium, and which subverts the qualities of life by instantiating a kind of motionless, bloodless world of ideas, but paradoxically, in visual terms.

Or one could point out that one of the cult films of recent times was directed by a French film director, namely The Fifth Element by Luc Besson (1997). Or, again, that directors who were of foreign birth, but worked in France, sometimes contributed hugely to the fame of French film — especially Krzysztof Kieslowski, whose magnificent trilogy, Three Colours Blue, White and Red, and his series of ten films on the Ten Commandments, or Decalogue, have shifted the barriers of film as an art form. (I have written on his work on Thought Leader before.)

Or I could elaborate on the cinematic work of one my personal favourites, namely Jean-Jacques Beineix, whose Diva of 1981 (if I recall correctly) was referred to (perhaps not uncontroversially) by Fredric Jameson as the first postmodernist film.

Both Diva and Betty Blue attest to Beineix’s film genius. The former does this by its deft merging of the genre of “serious art film” (it pursues the question, “what is an artwork?” as if it is in conversation with philosopher Walter Benjamin on the effect of the reproducibility of artworks on their status as art) with that of a thriller (with one of the most nail-biting chase scenes ever filmed).

The latter, in turn, must rank with Roman Polanski’s Repulsion as one of the very best cinematic studies of insanity, filmed from the perspective of an uncomprehending and increasingly disconcerted boyfriend, who witnesses his girlfriend (Betty) slowly descending into insanity (in contrast with Polanski’s film, which shows the audience the incrementally and perversely distorted world from the perspective of the woman who is going insane).

There is a scene-sequence in Diva that exemplifies what Lyotard refers to as the “postmodern sublime”, which works, not by omitting certain contents (as the modern sublime does), but by innovation — that is, by using the formal means of presentation themselves to introduce what Lyotard terms (in the process condensing Kant’s “definition” of the sublime) the “presentation of the unpresentable”).

This occurs where Jules, the postman-protagonist, having illicitly recorded the voice of the diva who refuses to be recorded, and stolen her gown as a kind of fetish, lies down on a settee of sorts (or is it a displaced car seat?) in his Parisian loft, and, as the ethereal notes of La Wally, sung by the eponymous diva, wash over him, the film camera commences a visual tour of the contents of the loft floor for the audience.

It is impossible to show the audience everything at once, of course, so 360 degrees are traversed slowly, teasingly, because the diverse items and scenery cannot possibly be taken in at a glance. They vary from the mechanical remains of car engines (and a diversity of other kinds of debris) to hyper-realist painted images on the floor and walls, of people in cars, or falling out of cars, holding glasses of champagne in their hands, and so on, and on.

But at no time is it possible for the viewer to hold the visual spectacle firmly in his or her mind — what is presented, metaphorically suggests the unpresentable as the cultural world of the time, with all its historical debris as well as its promise of creative innovation (pardon the tautology).

This scene-sequence from Diva is among the best that cinema is capable of because it pushes at the very limits of the medium. And it is but one among many in French cinema, which will have to remain absent here.