French Cinema: A Student's Guide This page intentionally left blank French Cinema: A Student's Guide Phil Powrie and Keith Reader The authors and publishers would like to thank the following for permission to reproduce copyright illustrative material: bfi Collections 15, 25, 34, 43, 47, 50, 100, 111; bfi Stills, Posters and Designs 52; Ronald Grant Archive 32, 42, 94. Orders: please contact Bookpoint Ltd, 130 Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX 14 4SB. Telephone: (44) 01235 827720. Fax: (44) 01235 400454. Lines are open from 9.00 - 6.00, Monday to Saturday, with a 24 hour message answering service. Email address: orders®bookpoint.co.uk British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library ISBN 0 340 760044 (PB) ISBN 0 340 760036 (HB) First Published 2002 Impression number 1098765432 1 Year 2007 2006 2005 2004 2003 2002 Copyright © Phil Powrie and Keith Reader 2002 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher or under licence from the Copyright Licensing Agency Limited. Further details of such licences (for reprographic reproduction) may be obtained from the Copyright Licensing Agency Limited, of 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 9HE. Typeset by Phoenix Photosetting Printed in Great Britain for Hodder & Stoughton Educational, a division of Hodder Headline Plc, 338 Euston Road, London NW1 3BH by MPG Books Ltd Contents Introduction 1 1. History 3 1896–1929: the silent period 3 1930-1939: the 'early classic era' – from sound to the Second World War 7 1939-1945: the war years 13 1945-1959: le cinema de papa 16 1959-1968: the New Wave 20 1968-1981: the New Wave (postscript), realism and comedy 28 1981-2001: heritage, the look, women, Beurs, Banlieue, Le Jeune Cinema 36 Conclusion 53 2. Theory 54 1900-1945: early film theory 56 1945-1960: Andre Bazin and the politique des auteurs 58 1950-1970: sociology and structuralism 60 1968-1970: ideology and suture 66 1970-1980: psychoanalysis and post-structuralism 68 The space(s) of cinema: Daney, Burch and Gardies Gardies 71 The movement(s) of cinema: Deleuze 74 The sound(s) of cinema: Chion 80 3. Practice 85 4. Writing about French films 93 Essays 93 Sequence analysis 127 Appendices 163 Table 1: History of the French cinema (stars, movements, directors) 163 Table 2: French theorists of the cinema 164 Table 3 and Figure 1: numbers of spectators 1945-1999 166 Table 4 and Figure 2: numbers of films produced 1945-1999 167 Table 5 and Figure 3: share of the French market 1945-1999 170 Table 6: best-sellers 1945-1999 171 Table 7: the top 50 French films 1945-1999 (by number of spectators) 183 Table 8: French prizes 1945-1999 185 Table 9: Oscar for Best Foreign Film won by French films 192 Table 10: key technical terms in English and French 192 Further reading 196 Bibliography 199 Index of films and proper names 209 VI This book is dedicated to the memory of our colleague and friend Jill Forbes, Professor of French at Queen Mary & Westfield College, London. Jill was one of the finest writers on French cinema; she died at the far too early age of 54 on Friday, 13 July 2001. This page intentionally left blank INTRODUCTION Since the early 1980s there has been a gradual increase in the number of people teaching and researching French cinema courses in UK universities. There are now some 45 staff members in universities in the UK alone publishing material on this subject; these and many more also teach French cinema on a regular basis. French cinema forms an integral part of many French/Modern Languages university degrees, as well as being an important component of what is now called World Cinema in Film Studies degrees, in both the UK and the USA. Surprisingly, though, there is no single volume that serves as a reasonably comprehensive back- ground for such study. Although there have been many histories of the French cinema, French-specific theorising on the cinema has not to our knowledge formed part of any introduc- tory texts; 'film theory' is seen as a global phenomenon that tends to elide French- specific continuities. There are guidebooks on how to study or write on film, but, again, these are not French-specific. There are no books for students outlining the different types of research in French cinema; this is confined to scattered reviews in learned journals or alluded to in a fragmentary way in scholarly tomes. Our volume is an attempt to combine all of these strands - history, theory, prac- tice - with the more usual statistics one might expect to find in a student hand- book. We have decided to focus specifically on French, rather than Francophone, cinema. The reader will therefore not find references to French-speaking African cinema, nor to Swiss cinema (for example, the films of Alain Tanner), nor, finally, to Belgian cinema. We have included an annotated Bibliography in addition to the usual References, which will act as 'further reading' for those readers wishing to pursue some of the strands outlined in this volume. Film titles are given in their original French version, without a translation (unless this is necessary in the context). French Cinema: A Student's Guide The volume has been written in collaboration; however, there has usually been a main writer for each section. The credits are as follows. History 1930-1939, 1939-1945, 1945-1959, 1959-1968, 1968-1981 and Conclusion (Keith Reader); 1896-1929 and 1981-2001 (Phil Powrie) Theory Introduction, 1945-1960 and 'The spaces of cinema' (Keith Reader); all other sections (Phil Powrie) Practice Phil Powrie Writing about French films Phil Powrie Appendices Phil Powrie We would like to thank Manchester University Press for allowing us to use part of Phil Powrie's volume, Jean-Jacques Beineix (200 Ib), in one of the sequence analyses, and the Journal of Romance Studies for allowing us to rework a review article by Phil Powrie for the section on 'Practice' (Powrie, 2002). Particular thanks too to our stu- dents - Abigail Murray, Ellen Parker and John Williams - for allowing us to use their work. Chapter One HISTORY The world's first screening of a motion picture to a paying audience took place at the Grand Cafe in Paris on 28 December 1895; it was a programme of short films by Louis Lumiere, who with his brother Auguste ran a photography firm in Lyon. Ever since that date, cinema has occupied a central place in the culture of France, a place the French state, as we shall see, has always been concerned to protect and promote. The Paris Cinematheque, founded by Henri Langlois and Georges Franju in 1936, has remained since then the world's best-known cinematic archive, and there is no city in which it is possible to see a greater range and variety of films than Paris. The cinematic involvement of leading figures from the worlds of literature and theatre, from Sacha Guitry to Marguerite Duras, is another indication of how important a place in French culture cinema holds. Pride in a national invention, the dominant place of Paris in the national culture (not even London or New York can lay claim to such hegemony), the city's reputation as a byword for intellectual and cultural innovation and, after the Second World War especially, France's long- standing love/hate relationship with the United States, epicentre of world cinema, are among the main reasons for this centrality. 1896-1929: THE SILENT PERIOD The two best-known names in French silent cinema are those of Lumiere and Georges Melies. This is largely because between them they permit the division of the field into two conveniently complementary halves. Lumiere allegedly described the cinema as 'a fairground showman's trade', and the brothers, initially at least, saw their short films as valuable publicity for their photographic business. Their titles, such as Sortie d'usine/Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory or Arrivee des congres- sistes a Neuville-sur-Saone/Debarcation of Photographic Congress Members at Lyon, suggest the careful documentary observation of bourgeois life that caused them to be hailed as the first cinematic realists. Renoir, Duvivier and Truffaut are among the leading inheritors of this tradition. Melies, on the other hand, was a conjurer and illusionist whose short films now appear as naive precursors of Surrealism. Le Voyage dans la Lune (1902) parodies the ambitions of scientists and shows an oddly winsome form of sadism in the scene French Cinema: A Student's Guide where a space rocket lands in one of the moon's 'eyes', causing it to weep. Le Royaume des fees (1903) features a line-up of'fairies' more reminiscent of dancing showgirls. The fantastique tradition in which Melies's work is now generally read can be traced through Cocteau and the Surrealists to culminate, in a manner technically at least far more sophisticated, in the extravagant illusionism of a con- temporary film-maker such as Leos Carax. This binary reading is given further credence by the differing fortunes of the film- makers. Lumiere retained his fortune thanks to a swift move out of film-making into production and, once the market became saturated, concentrated again on the photography business. Melies, bankrupted by changing public tastes and the First World War, wound up living on charity in a home for retired artists. Realism/ the bourgeoisie/money as against imagination/bohemia/impoverishment - the dichotomy is a seductive one, but open to criticism and modification.