Of Christophe Honoré: New Wave Legacies and New Directions in French Auteur Cinema

SEC 7 (2) pp. 135–148 © Intellect Ltd 2010 Studies in European Cinema Volume 7 Number 2 © Intellect Ltd 2010. Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/seci.7.2.135_1 ISABELLE VANDERSCHELDEN Manchester Metropolitan University The ‘beautiful people’ of Christophe Honoré: New Wave legacies and new directions in French auteur cinema ABSTRACT KEYWORDS Drawing on current debates on the legacy of the New Wave on its 50th anniversary French cinema and the impact that it still retains on artistic creation and auteur cinema in France auteur cinema today, this article discusses three recent films of the independent director Christophe French New Wave Honoré: Dans Paris (2006), Les Chansons d’amour/Love Songs (2007) and La legacies Belle personne (2008). These films are identified as a ‘Parisian trilogy’ that overtly Christophe Honoré makes reference and pays tribute to New Wave films’ motifs and iconography, while musical offering a modern take on the representation of today’s youth in its modernity. Study- adaptation ing Honoré’s auteurist approach to film-making reveals that the legacy of the French Paris New Wave can elicit and inspire the personal style and themes of the auteur-director, and at the same time, it highlights the anchoring of his films in the Paris of today. Far from paying a mere tribute to the films that he loves, Honoré draws life out his cinephilic heritage and thus redefines the notion of French (European?) auteur cinema for the twenty-first century. 135 December 7, 2010 12:33 Intellect/SEC Page-135 SEC-7-2-Finals Isabelle Vanderschelden 1Alltranslationsfrom Christophe Honoré is an independent film-maker who emerged after 2000 and French sources are mine unless otherwise who has overtly acknowledged the heritage of the New Wave as formative in indicated. When page the development of his career as a director. Critics in France tend to discuss numbers are not provided, it is because his filmography in this light, while highlighting his auteur status and self- the sources were conscious style. This article focuses on the study of three films: Dans Paris/In consulted on the BIFI Paris (2006), Les Chansons d’amour/Love Songs (2007) and La Belle personne/The database in Paris which does not Beautiful Person (2008), identified as Honoré’s ‘Parisian trilogy’. It will use these indicate pages. films to redefine the notion of French and maybe even European auteur cinema, and address the question of the legacy of the New Wave in the twenty-first 2Thereweresimilar century. events in New York In December 2008, a debate was organized by the Centre Pompidou and (Museum of Arts and Design) and Paris (‘la the trendy urban French cultural review Les Inrockuptibles on the theme of Nouvelle Vague’ at the ‘filiation transmission and possible genealogies of current cinema’, including Champo). Arte devoted a special discussions on cinephilia and more specifically on the legacy of the New Wave ‘Thema’ to ‘La in current French cinema (Lalanne and Honoré 2008; Ferenczi 2008). Honoré, Nouvelle Vague a 50 who was a member of the panel, declared that he was wary of using the terms ans’. The Cannes Festival also of ‘filiation’, ‘heritage’ or ‘family’ when it came to the connection between his programmed a series films and the New Wave. He argued that films are not made ‘in the manner of events in 2009. of’, but rather that he prefers to think that covert references are at play in the film-making process. As evidenced from the extract below, Honoré believes that viewing films made in the past leaves memories, and that these, in turn, contribute to the artist’s identity: Honoré noted the language pitfalls of terms like ‘filiation, heritage, family, failing to recognise himself in this silly notion that he would be the son of daddy Truffaut and mummy Godard’ (the parental functions are probably interchangeable). They all admitted that cinéphilia stops where practice starts, at least consciously. That one does not make films ‘in the manner of, but that there are underlying references, because the watching films of the past ‘memory’ more than filiation, insists Honoré – feeds into the identity of the artist-creator. (Ferenczi 2008)1 As the 50th anniversary of the New Wave was being celebrated in 2009, more publications have revived the discussion on the New Wave legacy. Sight and Sound and Cahiers du cinéma commissioned special dossiers. New books like La Nouvelle Vague: Portrait d’une jeunesse/The New Wave: Portrait of a Young Generation (De Baeque 2009) were published, while The New Wave: Critical Landmarks was re-issued by the BFI during an anniversary conference held in London in March 2009 (Vincendeau and Graham 2009). Screenings were programmed in London at the Ciné-lumière and National Film Theatre in the spring of 2009, followed by ‘La Nouvelle Vague: Une génération d’acteurs’ at the Paris Cinémathèque in September. Amongst the highlights was the release of a new print of Pierrot le fou (Jean-Luc Godard, 1965)2. In February 2009, Philippe Person wrote an article in Le Monde diploma- tique, entitled ‘Un label devenu carcan: A-t-on le droit de critiquer la nouvelle vague?’/‘A label that has become a straight jacket: is it allowed to criticise the New Wave?’ (Person 2009), in which he blamed New Wave directors and their disciples for navel-gazing at subject matter that alienates French filmgoers. This argument is not new. Since the 1960s, many critics and journalists have been prompt to look out for the legacy of the New Wave or its most recent 136 December 7, 2010 12:33 Intellect/SEC Page-136 SEC-7-2-Finals The ‘beautiful people’ of Christophe Honoré: New Wave legacies and new ... manifestations as reasons behind a number of subsequent trends in French 3SeeforexampleJill cinema. Recent examples include Aldo Tassone’s Que reste-t-il de la Nouvelle Forbes’s The Cinema in France after the New Vague?/What is Left of the New Wave (2003) and David Vassé’s Le Nouvel âge du Wave, 1992. cinéma d’auteur français/The New Age of French Auteur Cinema (2008). In the 1980s, the ‘cinéma du look’ had been seen as a new, new wave 4SeealsoKateInce’s (Austin 2008: 145), even though directors like Luc Besson or Jean-Jacques ‘Introduction’ to Five French Directors which Beineix (but not Léos Carax) mostly rejected certain values of New Wave cin- retraces the revival of ema, in part also to appeal to their younger audiences. In the 1990s, the return auteurism since the to more realist trends with a new generation of ‘young’ directors was received 1990s (2008: 6–11). She emphasizes the even more enthusiastically, as Claude Marie Trémois’s study Les Enfants de la plurality of the notion liberté/The Children of Freedom (1997) illustrates. of auteur cinema and the auteurist For 50 years now, the New Wave that admittedly revolutionized the way tendencies of the Jeune films are made has been used as a benchmark to measure the vitality and cinéma Français. potential for innovation of independent French cinema ‘leaving behind it a sense of freedom, an eternal youth, a fresh look of the things of life, a fatal plastic beauty’ (Palou 2009). Apart from Geneviève Sellier in La Nouvelle Vague: un cinéma au masculin singulier/The French New Wave: a Cinema in the First Person Masculine (2005), who draws overtly on gender studies, French scholars have tended to focus on the aesthetic and formal considerations of the films. Outside France too, the New Wave has represented a major point of reference for the identity of French cinema.3 In the United States, where the impact of French cinema is usually marginal, and where access to French films is often limited to cinephile audiences in a few large cosmopolitan cities, the New Wave directors have been revered by film critics since the 1960s. American scholars have pro- duced numerous critical studies of this period, the most recent examples being Richard Neupert’s History of the French New Wave Cinema (2002) and Naomi Greene’s The French New Wave: A New Look (2007). The New Wave has also been associated with the advent of the auteur as a key concept of film studies and is connected to the polarization of French cinema into auteur films versus commercial cinema. In auteur theory, the visible director who controls the film-making process offers his/her personal vision of the world, develops a style and explores coherent motifs from film to film. Although it exceeds the scope of this article to discuss ways that auteur theory has gone through a series of redefinitions and rejec- tions by scholars, these debates are well documented: Dudley Andrew’s essay ‘The unauthorized auteur today’ (1993) or Rosanna Maule’s comprehensive study Beyond Auteurism (2008) provide two relevant examples of reassessment. Auteur cinema today is used to refer to a broad category of artistically ambitious independent films aimed at cinephile audiences. Auteurism is still defended by many French critics, in fact it is even used as ‘one of the most successful of French cinema’s marketing strategies’ (Powrie 1999: 8).4 However, auteur films are also regularly dismissed for their lack of popu- lar appeal due to their elitism and narcissism. For Person, for example, auteur cinema today promotes ‘professional inexperience and autobiographical narcissism as markers of artistic authenticity’ (Person 2009). In this context, the influences exerted by the New Wave and auteurist criticism on Honoré’s cinema can be interpreted in distinct ways: as a nostalgic look to the past which tries to emulate it, illustrating the very criticism developed by Person; or as a reflection of a revisiting of New Wave approaches in which the director seeks to create a personal style, related to, but not defined by, the New Wave, and which examines contemporary themes.

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