Georges Franju’s background was in theatrical set design. As a set designer, he would have learned to create atmosphere through the use of subtle visual queues but he would also have learned that every scene and every shot are a world of their own. Properly conceived, a single shot can convey as much information as an entire page of dialogue. Where the camera focuses, when people enter, where objects stand and how they are lit are not merely aesthetic variables, they are to cinema what words are to poetry and literature. As such, it is perhaps fitting that Ruthless Culture’s first look at a work of Franju should be a short film that is practically silent; His 1949 short film about Parisian slaughterhouses Blood of the Beasts.
Category / French Film
Cinematic Vocabulary – The Opening to This Man Must Die (1969)
As with most of the big names of the New Wave, Claude Chabrol began his cinematic career as a critic for the Cahiers du Cinema. This critical career culminated with the release in 1957 of a book about the films of Alfred Hitchcock. This attraction to Hitchcock’s style and subject matter followed Chabrol when he ‘crossed the aisle’ from criticism to film-making and his early output quickly earned him a reputation as the ‘French Hitchcock’ and the influences can also be seen in the film I am going to be writing about today.
Que La Bete Meure (1969) was adapted by a novel by the British poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis. It is the story of a man who tries to avenge the death of his son by tracking down the man who ran him over. After seducing the man’s sister-in-law and infiltrating himself into the killer’s family, the grieving father discovers that the family have no more love for the thuggish monster than he does. The scene I want to talk about is the extraordinary opening sequence leading up to the death of the child and the father’s discovery of the body.
REVIEW – Anything for Her (2008)
Falsely accused of murdering her boss, Lisa (Diane Kruger) is sent off to prison. As the appeals process dries up, Lisa drifts into a dark depression and attempts suicide. Realising that he is losing a wife and his son a mother, Julien (Vincent Lindon) realises that his current existence is untenable and devotes everything he has to planning and executing an escape attempt that will allow the family to be re-united, albeit for a life on the lamb. Framed initially as a family drama in which Julien has to deal with the repercussions of an imprisoned wife, Anything For Her then mutates into an introspective crime drama as a teacher decides to reinvent himself as a criminal mastermind. The critical reaction to the film has tended to snag upon how unbelievable it is that a man in such a position would decide to break his wife out of prison, but this is to miss the point. Anything For Her (Pour Elle) is an interstitial work that exists on the fringes of the traditional drama and the crime genre. If it fails as a film (and I think ultimately that it does) it is not because of its crime elements or its interstitiality, it is because of the fundamental weakness of its dramatic elements.
Demonlover (2002) – Back from the Primitive
I recently re-read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902) for the first time since taking up criticism as an activity. I originally read the novella as a very straight-forward conceptual breakthrough story in which a Victorian comes to realise the literally horrifying nature of existence. However, upon further reflection it strikes me that, while sticking to this interpretation of the novella, there are three possible insights to take away from the book :
- Firstly, that existence outside of the confines of civilisation is horrific. Under this interpretation, the desiccated world of doilies, influential aunts and ancient men we see in the opening section of the novella are a price we have to pay in order to protect ourselves and escape from the Horror of the Hobbesian state of nature.
- Secondly, that existence is whatever humanity makes of it. Rather than building a new world or exporting the values of the European elites, colonialism has in fact opened the way for the rapaciously greedy to create a sort of hell on Earth. A hell in which a man’s capacity to kill elephants and enslave the local population makes him a great man. When Kurtz dies, he groans not for the horror in the world, but the horror he and his imitators have unleashed.
- Thirdly, that Kurtz’s groans are a moment of conceptual break-through. Under this view, humanity is trapped between the anguish and misery of being and the terrifying nothingness of non-being. Whether a Dutch merchant or a Congolese fisherman, the dilemma is the same even if we do not necessarily realise it. Kurtz, by venturing far outside the confines of his native culture, has realised the truth about existence. A truth that horrifies him even as he dies.
These three different interpretations represent different solutions to the question of why existence is so horrifying : Is existence tainted by our actions? Is it something that is present in the world but escaped from thanks to civilisation? Or is it something that permeates all of existence, but which we only catch a glimpse of from time to time when we are paying attention?
Critically panned at the time of its release, Olivier Assayas’ Demonlover (2002) is an attempt to provide an answer to this question by considering not only the ways in which humans treat each other but also the ways in which human civilisation deals with the savage nature of existence through its media and its institutions.
The Panic Tone – Polanski and Topor’s The Tenant (1976)
In my piece on Polanski’s Repulsion (1968), I highlighted the homage paid by Polanski to the generation of Surrealist filmmakers who came before him. In this piece, I want to examine the similarities in tone between another of Polanski’s films and the branch of French Surrealism that provided the source material for one of Polanski’s best known films, The Tenant (1976).
By 1960, the vultures had started to circle the Surrealist movement. What had started out as a desire to destroy and rebuild the iconography of Western Art in the aftermath of the First World War now seemed like a circular and pointless endeavour through which one section of the bourgeoisie tried to shock and outrage another section of the same narrow social institution. While members of the Generation of ‘27 burned with anger at the Franquist government which had exiled and jailed them, the alliances with Marxism that would impact film-makers such as Bunuel were still a way off. Facing such creative stagnation, Fernando Arrabal, Alejandro Jodorowsky and Roland Topor came together to form Burlesque, a creative clique which would later inspire itself from the god Pan and name themselves the Panic Movement.
Polanski Week
While I try to move outside of my comfort zone in the films I choose to watch, sometimes I find myself in a place where only a certain kind of film will satisfy me. At the moment, that type of film is the psychological thriller. One of the masters of this particular genre is the Polish-French director Roman Polanski. Holocaust survivor, husband to Sharon Tate (who was murdered by Charles Manson and his ‘Family’) and fugitive from justice, Polanski has made many powerful and disturbing films though perhaps none as disturbing as his Apartment Trilogy.
- Repulsion (1965)
- Rosemary’s Baby (1968)
- The Tenant (1976)
In order to pay appropriate hommage to my current obsession, I have decided to turn Ruthless Culture over to the study of Polanski’s Apartment Trilogy for a period not exceeding one week.
REVIEW : Before I Forget (2007)
It is difficult for me to articulate quite why it is that I adore Jacques Nolot’s Avant Que J’Oublie (2007), or Before I Forget as it is known to English speakers. Ostensibly your typical French drama about middle class angst, alienation and spiritual decay, the film deals with an ageing gay man who looks back over his life with considerable bitterness as he considers all the things he lost and all the things he failed to gain. However, while filled with negativity about his own past, the central character Pierre (played by Nolot) is gripped by terror when he thinks about the future as his health dwindles, his sex drive sputters and his days come to be consumed by talk of money, food and how he will most likely die alone. There are hundreds of films that deal in exactly this kind of bourgeois malaise and many of them leave me completely cold. What makes Nolot’s films so special is that, unlike many dramas that aim for the universality of human emotions while achieving only the generic, Nolot’s films are specific. They carry the specificity that comes only from the autobiographical and it is the candour with which Nolot describes his life that makes his films so uncomfortable and yet so utterly compelling.
L’Argent
My review of Marcel L’Herbier’s excellent silent film L’Argent has gone up over at Videovista.
One thing that occurs to me looking back at the review (aside from the fact that I needed to do another pass through it in order to tidy up the prose… oops) is that I think that in the film version of the story, Saccard is supposed to be Jewish. In the original novel by Zola, Saccard is presented as an anti-Semite who manipulates the market in order to ‘put one over’ on the Jewish bankers represented by Gunderman. However, in the film, Gunderman is not Jewish but, if anything, Aryan; a blond-haired man with a Germanic name.
Looking at the cover of the DVD, Saccard certainly seems to be presented in a pose reminiscent of anti-Semitic caricatures as a greasy, swarthy looking man grubbing a huge pile of gold.
I’ve Loved You So Long
All Conflict is Drama.
All Drama is Artifice.
The first film by Philippe Claudel, a French novelist turned screenwriter, turned writer-director, I’ve Love You so Long is a masterclass in emotional manipulation. Far from the cerebral complexity of Ingmar Bergman or even the constructed pseudo-realism of Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah (2008), Claudel reveals himself to be a dramaturgical martinet, a man whose skill as a story-teller allows him to effortlessly control the flow of information to the audience while using music, acting and camera-work to impose a precise emotional state upon them. I’ve Loved You So Long is a film that is experienced and not merely watched. However, as purposeful as Claudel’s story-telling may be, the film does beg one serious question: does the ending undermine the rest of the film?
Ruthless Culture 