Christian-Jaque, Jean Devaivre, René Wheeler thumbnails

These are three more of the thumbnail critiques form the May 1957 "Situation of French Cinema" special issue of Cahiers du Cinema.

Christian-Jacque

Were talent measured by productivity, he would be king; by the length of tracking shots, he would be emperor; by receipts, he would be the Pope. Unfortunately, his ambitions are more short-term. His best films (L'Enfer des anges, Les Disparus de Saint-Agil, L'Assassinat du Père Noël) today seem forced. Martine Carol deserves better than Lucrèce Borgia, Nana, and Madame DuBarry. Fanfan la Tulipe is competent, but somewhat warped and dry on a second viewing. Trying his hand at "generosity", he tripped over Si tous les gars du monde. From a commercial point of view, his success can not be questioned and his films open foreign markets to French productions. With his wife Martine, he made a triumphant tour of the world, an excellent pair of ambassadors for French cinema.It needs such. But it also needs to be rigorous with this likable and intelligent man who, for the moment, leaves cinema with only two or three morsels of anthology (the tracking shot of the song of the "p'tit cordonnier" and the horse in the mist in Sortilèges, the battle scenes from D'homme à hommes). He has defined "director", thusly, "A one-man band who while playing all his instruments must avoid cacophony." Has he avoided that in any one of his films?

Jean Devaivre

In light of the contretemps Bertrand Tavernier-Cahiers du Cinema that surrounded that release of Tavernier's Laissez-passer in 2002 which told the story of the war-time exploits of this director and also screenwriter Jean Aurenche, it is interesting to see what was written in Cahiers in 1957 about Devaivre. This thumbnail is reputed to have been written by Claude Chabrol. Devaivre directed two films in the Caroline, cherie series.

One-time editor who began his career with the second Le Roi des reaquilleurs, he possesses a remarkable sense of rhythm and his La Dame d'onze heure can be considered excellent. He was ambitious with La ferme des sept péchés, a commercial failure but a highly respectable film. Then, he specialized in uninteresting carolinades. He is returning after a long silence to the detective story.

René Wheeler

This writer-director was also a character in Tavernier's Laissez-passer. He was old friend whom Jean Aurenche sees reduced to selling shoelaces on the curb and whom Aurenche presses into service as a co-writer.

Inconsistent screenwriter, inconsistent director. Premières armes lacks neither courage nor originality, but nevertheless it is an unsteady, irritating, conventional film. But Châteaux en Espagne is a beautiful, unsung work. Everything there is unique, the realism, the dark poetry, the respect for language, the contentiousness of the play of the actors. This is "la minute de verité", it is also one of those rare films romanesque. . . and modern. Uneasy temperament, knowing full well where facility begins and ends, and gifted only for difficult and thankless works, Wheeler would need a complete freedom to be an "auteur of films": our Zinnemann.

Cahiers and the Tradtion of Quality May 1957

In the May 1957 "Situation of French Cinema" special issue of Cahiers du Cinema an article featured sixty French directors with a capsule chronology and filmography and a thumbnail critique for each one. These thumbnails were written by Charles Bitsch, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Donoil-Valcroze, Claude de Givray, Jean-Luc Godard, Robert Lachenay, Louis Marcorelles and Luc Moullet. The presence of “Robert Lachenay” in this group reveals the participation of François Truffaut.

Yves Allegret

Dédée d'Anvers, Une si jolie petite plage, Manèges and Les Orgueilleux form a coherent whole with a progression towards a mastery of style and a world-vision, questionable as it be. This noir suite denounces injustice and social hypocrisy, greed, the corrupting power of money, the loneliness of those who do not play the game and the impossibility of love. Praiseworthy concerns, but mingles with an indulgence for the that is shown, No matter, the undertaking was viable, strewn with robust scenes, taken from uncompromising ethnological documents on man who is referred to as civilized but who is in the twentieth century savage. Then came three failures. Even should this remain the state of things, Yves Allégret deserves a paragraph in the history of cinema, but no more than that.

Marcel Carné

Gamboling not without some awkwardness in a private world of the most formal poetry (Les Visiteurs du soir, Juliette ou La clef des songes) but asserting a consistent taste for recreating the atmosphere of an epoque (Drôle de drame, and Les Enfants du paradis which so enchanted the Anglo-Saxon spectators). Carné is quite himself only as a populist. He has frequented all the little bistros of the Republic, of the faubourg Saint Martin or of Boulogne-Billancourt, the dance halls and the furnished townhouses. His Parisien films have the “back-to-work” sourness of the day after a holiday when it is necessary to return to work. He remains quite strictly tied to a social period -- the Popular Front. Carné lived his golden age at the core of one of the most perfect teams of French cinema -- Prevert, Trauner, Jaubert and Gabin. friends quarrel intensely and do good work together. Today Carné must defend by himself a prestigious reputation, but he is still the good artisan whom we knew before 1939. Mad lover of impeccable work, tending towards a formalism a little too dried out that he perhaps inherited from his master, Jacques Feyder.

Claude Autant-Lara

For many producers, he is the surest of the prominent directors. this blessing constrains him to subjects less demanding and less personal than he might want (but he pressed Marguerite de la nuit, one of his poorer films), Censorship has also played him some dirty tricks. For these two reasons, the ensemble of his work, careful, intelligent, and skillful does not avoid a certain classicism which poorly fits this auteur - passionate, mettlesome, explosive, quarrelsome and “committed”, but also aesthetic and sentimental. For this reason, one must wonder if, with the march of time, Diable au corps and Le Blé en herbe will still scandalize the right-thinking. Our wager: these films will pass for romantic - which perhaps they are - which certainly Le rouge et le Noir is, despite that the accent is placed there on social rather than psychological drama. By contrast, La Traversée de Paris, represents in his body of work, the ideal convergence of the ambitions of the auteur and public success. If the fashion of judging the world there is more out of the 1930s - an epoque where the judgment of an Autant-Lara or an Aurenche is set - than of 1957, if thus this fashion of judgment was then more revealing than today, it is less that Autant-Lara has preserved the spirit of his youth for which he should be reproached than to the time-lags and contradictions of production. He is attracted to stories of adolescent love but his “children who love” remain, in general, rather theoretic. And that is why the bitter and always revolting of Lara is better accommodated by a pitiless analysis of disagreeable characters such as those of La Traversée de Paris.

Carlo Rim

As “Carlo” does rhyme with “bravo”, let us regret not being able to applaud his work. L’ Armoire volante, in taking us to cloud nine, was not a “signed Levitan”. The sketch film La Gourmandise left us dreaming of enchanting tomorrows: one must not feel disenchanted. If René Clair’s fault is not allowing himself to be guided by his instinct, Carlo Rim, by contrast, would gain by more self-analysis and better self-control: the crudities would be prevented from becoming vulgarities, the bawdiness from becoming obscenity, and the jokes from becoming oafish. His comic style makes him a cabaret artist-filmmaker who came too late to mise-en-scene. As with Franju and Roquier, the pre-war climate would have been more propitious to the fostering of his talent. The young cinephiles prefer “Admiral” Carbonnaux to this montmartrois, Carlo Rim.

André Cayatte

After nine average films where only the skillfulness of Le Chanteur inconnu stands the test of time, he made the last of the great Jacques Prevert films Les Amants de Vérone, a work confused and often irritating but more often moving in its tragic and poetic expression of destiny. Would he be the new Carné? No, his reputation and celebrity since, and (including Justice est faite) rests on four “thesis” (whatever that means) films: distinguished, demanding, skillful and often courageous and which, legal pleas rather than works of art, defy esthetic judgment and the “crtitique ofbeautés”. He defends his ideas as one defends one’s clients, speaking to the gallery. Here, a series of techniques and gestures which might have a polemic value but which are not relevant to the art of film. Oeil pour Oeil, shot entirely on location and without any thesis will be awfully revealing. He speaks primarily for himself.

René Clair

A complete film auteur who, form the silent era has brought to French cinema intelligence, finesse, humor, and an intellectualism a bit dry but smiling and in good taste. He was very nearly hobbled by the “talkie” but he quickly understood that his style, inherited from the French “primitives” could easily adapt to this additional frill. Quatorze Juillet marks a high point. What follows appears more labored, but “quality” remains. His four post-war films demonstrate an evolution but betray a certain difficulty in finding subjects and end with Les Grandes manoeuvres, a finely chiseled and melancholy work. Porte des Lilas is announced as a more unusual film with finer turns. In whatever manner that his career continues, he has created a cinematographic universe which is his own, a universe rigorous and not shorn of fantasy, thanks to which he remains one of the greatest film-makers.

René Clément

To call him the greatest French director would be a gratuitous compliment, if one did not imply that Renoir or Bresson are greater because they are more auteurs. All the more so as he as proven in Monsieur Ripois that his talent could flourish without the help of Aurenche and Bost and as he is now, with Irvin Shaw, the author of the adaptation of Un barrage contre la Pacifique whose mastery and quality we can logically presume. More than everything else, beyond their scenarists, all Clément’s films - including his only failure Le Château de verre- manifest a continuous philosophy which is well the doing of their director. His characters are all prisoners of historical or geographical conditions or, more simply of themselves and it is their desperate battle to break through the bars and vanquish their solitude. Battles, doomed to failure or derision, which he paints for us with a meticulous and lucid realism which broaches at once both cruelty and lyricism. He is more than the obstinate architect of proud buildings constructed in tailored stone, more than a majestic director of actors, more than the master of a rigorous style, he is also -- in the proportion that one can measure living artists -- the “film genius”.

Henri-Georges Clouzot

At the age of seven, he wrote a play whose protagonist rid himself of his wife by putting nails in her soup. The story of his life reveals him to be stubborn, clear-sighted, concerned to express the “hard face” of existence. This is a “film auteur”. “I do not believe,” he says, “in a director who is not his own writer.“ He loves his metier. “I am most of all physical, but my greatest pleasure in directing a film, is the shooting, the editing.” He depicts situation with no concern for the judgments of society, but he puts himself in danger of taking the bite from his films by targeting too great a number of spectators. “I work for the Gaumont-Palace,” he proclaims. But we know so well that his concerns, his obsessions -- perversion, true cruelty -- are not compatible with the wants of the great public. Thus, how Clouzot is careful of self-censorship. Furthermore, he knows where he is going and why, in his gallery of monsters, he puts great emphasis on the revolting, the sadistic, the subversive, the executioner. By subtraction, he little-by-little reveals, with the sharpness of a photographic negative, the dazzling image of pure innocence and of selfless friendship.

Jean Delannoy

More than festival awards, his films have most often known success with the public, and, as much evidence confirms it, have “touched” the spectators. A paradoxical situation, since, what critics in general have mostly reproached him -- who has given us this definition “cinema is a movement of the heart” -- for the coldness of his narration and the dryness of his direction, despite a sureness of technique and a copiousness of craft. Academicism, a superficial exploitation of great literary or social problems, say the most severe. Is this only a pre-judgment? Well a critic as perceptive and little inclined to vehemence as Pierre Lephoron came to this conclusion which we will make our own: “One would have to believe that the director of Marie-Antoinette reine de France tends toward an art that he is incapable of attaining, that his ambitions, as noble as they are, lead him and his finished work astray.”

Julien Duvivier

Some tell you that today’s Duvivier is not worthy of yesterday’s Duvivier and rate L’Affaire Maurizius by wailing for Pépé le Moko. One could respond by burning Un carnet de bal in the name of Sous le ciel de Paris. In fact, Duvivier’s career is like a temperature chart with spiked highs and vertiginous slumps that, when led back to a happy medium witnesses an enviable warmth. If it it is rare that his films make rapt, it is rarer that his films make bored. His taste for a certain style of the baroque, culminating with La Fête à Henriette make him the champion of the unexpected, often guileful, sometimes aggravating. Constructed in stucco rather than cut in marble, his structures are not those that last but perishables are not the lest of foodstuffs.

Jean Grémillon

Since 1953, Jean Grémillon has not directed a feature film. However, Remorques, Lumière d'été and Le 6 juin à l'aube suffice to assure him renown. But, from one who, after the Liberation was considered the most complete French director: better still, it was hoped, above all, that his culture and his moderation would undoubtedly permit him to fill the delicate role of giving our screen that social conscience that it still lacks. But the imperatives of production decided otherwise and Grémillon’s character did the rest. These half-solutions didn’t suit him which his last three films illustrate, yet though that L’Amour d'une femme deserved a better reception.

Henri Decoin

A little out-of-fashion with his silk scarf in his open-collar shirt. But what of it! Directors who are indulged by history shoot what they want, when they want, where they want. And since long ago, Henri Decoin is one among them. He shoots anything, anywhere, with anyone, but not anyway, however. Decoin spurs integrity to all way to reflection on the subjects offered to him. Light-hearted, some twenty years ago, when his heart beat for Danielle Darrieux, his name now weighs heavily in the arguments of producers. For Henri knows, without panache, to adapt himself to all genres, all styles. Why reproach him for this facility? it permits him to be the darling child of the distributors. What says it better?

Thumnbails May '57 Cahiers du Cinema

These three thumbnail critiques are translated from the May 1957 "Situation of French Cinema" issue of Cahiers du Cinema.

Pierre Prévert:
Jacques Prévert's younger brother, a director who sometimes collaborated with his older brother. Most of the directors considered by Cahiers in that 1957 issue had been active in since 1954. Pierre Prévert had not directed a feature film since 1947 and was the longest inactive director for Cahiers to consider.

"Has played an important role in the career of his brother and thus in the evolution of French cinema. Should also have been the point-man for a new comic cinema, a promise of all his films. The failure of Voyage-surprise marked an ending, although this charming, poetic and awkward film should have been a starting point." page 62

Alex Joffé:
Alex Joffé was a successful French director of the 1950s whose advice François Truffaut sought out early in his career. Joffé appears early in "Shoot the Piano Player" as the passer-by who helps Chico (Albert Rémy) up when he runs into the pole. It is sometimes said that Truffaut especially wanted Joffé to play the part because Joffé physically resembled Jean Renoir.

"Joffé is at once a poet and a realist. His work is based principally on two theories, change of scenery (a Paris bus in the middle of the boondocks, a villager alone in Paris) and the case of conscience in professional wrongdoing (Lettre ouverte and Les Assassins du dimanche). His subjects brush up against melodrama but are farces. The greatest reproach which one can make of him is of being poorly aware of the art of ellipse so dear to Lubitsch. But in the final account Joffé is a Max Sennett as seen by Labiche." page 58

Marcel L'Herbier:
Marcel L'Herbier is one of France's legendary avant-garde directors of the silent era who did not fare well in the sound era. He is also remembered for his founding of the Film school IDHEC which is now known as FEMIS.

"Dedicated his life to the seventh art. The place which he holds today owes more, undoubtedly, to his many activities on behalf of film than to his bountiful cinematic work which belong to the past. Worried about vulgarizing "the intelligence of film" especially among the young who are precisely those who are ignorant of his work - apart maybe from L'Honorable Catherine -, he has travelled a long itinerary, beginning in the avant-garde (Villa Destin, Don Juan et Faust, L'Inhumaine) which merits better than find termination in Les Derniers jours de Pompei or Le Père de mademoiselle. But he has some projects for television where he does not lose hope of finding again the "innocence of El Dorado"." page 60

Cahiers du Cinema May '57 some director thumbnails

The May 1957 “Situation of French Cinema” special issue of Cahiers du Cinema featured an article “Sixty French Directors” which consisted of a capsule chronology and filmography for each one and sketched out a thumbnail critique of each one of them. The ensemble is credited to Charles Bitsch, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Donoil-Valcroze, Claude de Givray, Jean-Luc Godard, Robert Lachenay, Louis Marcorelles and Luc Moullet. The presence of “Robert Lachenay” in this group, probably signals the participation of François Truffaut. So-called “young turks” all except for Doniol-Valcroze.What follows are some of the thumbnails for the directors who, these "young turks" were known to have high regard. They are all my translations.

Note added October 14, 2006: Jean-Luc Godard; articles, essais, entretiens. Introduction et notes par Jean Narboni published in 1968 by P. Belfond reprints the thumbnails for Robert Bresson, Norbert Carbonnaux, Roger Leenhardt and Jacques Tati as the work of Jean-Luc Godard.

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ROBERT BRESSON

"In today’s world, in whichever domain, France can, henceforth, shine only through exceptional works. Robert Bresson illustrates this as it applies to cinema. He is French cinema as Dostoyevsky is the Russian novel or Mozart is German music. Let’s listen to him:

“A good artisan likes that board that he is planing.”

“There is a mal-address which is indifferent to virtuosity”

“It is of such faults that the emotion of the spectator is born, an emotion similar to the one that guides us when we do what our skills condemn.”

"My metier is something of an apprenticeship which does not mean something which can be transmitted as a lesson.”

“Film is a kind of work which demands a style. It requires an auteur, a writing.”

“Break with pre-judgment in exchange for simplicity.”

“To know how to choose tools and to often choose the wrong one provides that one knows poorly.”

“It is necessary to hold back and give.”

JEAN COCTEAU

"He constructs tables and leaves to others to make them sing. “I am a designer,” he says, “It is my nature to see and hear what I write, to endow it with a formal beauty.” Translation: He is a poet. A poet gifted for cinema, a great film-maker. In fact, all his films including "The Eagle Has Two Heads”, a brilliant and moving work, wrongly underestimated, are admirable. Worried about exceeding decorative art, he achieves a realism and a crudeness, almost obscene, “Les Parents Terribles” His dialogue in spite of its theatrical emphasis and poetic inflation rings more exact than dialogue heard in films spoken of as realistic or psychological, as one of his characters says (and we are with him) “in legend up to our necks”. The sparkling and harrowing “Orphée” is like a prism which mixes all the rets of the light of a thought particularly abundant and richly dispersed, It is not surprising that this prism glistens like a diamond. Realism and dream --- “a manner of living, but of living a life retold”, he says of the characters of “La Belle”--- join each other in his work in a kind cinema at face which he knows how to realize. Friendly artisan who knows the value of the hand and the workman with an audacity and an exemplary courage. Deprived of him for seven years, French cinema does itself no favor and hobbles itself seriously."

ABEL GANCE

"He is a visionary, even a poly-visionary. It might be said of him that he is the French King Vidor, but it has already been propounded that King Vidor is the American Abel Gance.... A definition should be accurate and measured. Gance, labyrinthine and excessive, much the same as his cross-Atlantic colleague, lends himself poorly to all definition. All the good that his admirers find in his work never goes without a some qualification, all the bad that his detractors find never goes without some jealousy. If Gance is simple, it is in the fashion of Victor Hugo, like the Himalayas."

ROGER LEENHARDT

"The most subtle theoretician of film in France. He despises paradoxes, but he creates them. He despises false arguments, but he gives them. He despises cinema, but he loves it. He does not like good films, but he shoots them."

JEAN-PIERRE MELVILLE

"His last two films “Quand Tu Liras Cette Lettre“ “Bob the Gambler" are not as appreciated as his first two “The Silence of the Sea” and “Les Enfants Terribles”, however, though they lack a literary basis, they are not unworthy for that. One discerns here a certain lyricism in the narrative line. Without any doubt, Melville is more of a producer than a director. The best of his inspiration, he perhaps owes to his worries for economy. He shoots with second-tier actors and directs them admirably. He uses real locations and shows them as no one shows them. If Jean-Pierre Melville has nothing to say, he says it very well."

MARCEL PAGNOL

"Generally despised by pure cinephiles, he has known for a short time now a second harvest {regain} of interest. To tell the truth, one does not know what to think. Often unbearable, wretched and botched, he surprises when we least expect it. “Manon des Sources” and “Lettres de Mon Moulin” at the best moments, We recall “Angele” rather than “La Fille du puisatier”."

NORBERT CARBONNAUX

"He changes the spelling of his name with each new film. Still his style remains a little muddled but personal, lazy but sinuous, a style more Rue Caumartin than Rue de L’Estrapade which at the same time shows Carbonnaux’s limits and his ambitions -- which are great. Intelligent enough to become commercial, he put everyone in his pocket with "Courte Tête”, a film which he did not too much like but a film which finally permitted him a “free hand”. Let’s stake Carbonnaux to a place between Alex Joffé and Michel Boisrond."

JEAN RENOIR

"Thousands of lines have been published in the magazine on Jean Renoir, they can not be summed up in a thumbnail. In every phase of his long career -- French, American, Indian, Italian and French once more -- he has proven again and again that he knows how to draw out the best in all conditions and all genres, that he will finish every time with cinematographic material which is exceptionally rich, free, highly textured, as much so on a esthetic plane as on a spiritual one. Wrongly, some have civen him grief over his evolution, As Picasso, he has his periods, -- blue, rose or black --, and throughout them, he has kept a sureness of line, a vigor of thinking and a love of metier that is exemplary. A great work warmed from within by the pleasure that he taken in making it. a great creator whose contribution radiates beyond cinema. a great twentieth-century artist who describes what he, himself, has given this century, “All that I can contribute to this illogical and cruel world is my love.”

AGNES VARDA

"The “Benjamin” of French cinema. One film, rather chinois and a little misbegotten serves to confirm the lively and unusual personality of Varda whose career still remains uncertain. The two most literary characters in the history of cinema solemnly discuss there a solid documentary on the little port of “Pointe Courte”. The hieratic quality, visual and oral, of the couple makes a drole two-some with familiar images of the village, but the ensemble raises a strange and durable charm."

ROGER VADIM

"We like him because he only speaks about what he knows, such that Butchers strive to pass themselves off as intellectuals, let’s applaud the intellectual who rather than exploiting his culture and vulgarizing his ideas, endeavors in his work to grant primacy to his own instinct and that of his actors, to the reality of the epidermis and of gestures, without forgetting the truth of feelings and phrases even more biting. Vadim has already become a part of that race dear to Cocteau, “the ragpickers of genius”. He finds his dialogue at the Elysées Club, his mise-en-scene at St. Tropez and his rhythm is the Ferrari Europa which brings him close to Roberto Rossellini. He is our only modern filmmaker."

JACQUES TATI

"With him, French neo-realism was born, “Jour de fête”, by inspiration resembles "Open City”. Less liked because it is more personal, “Mr Hulot‘s Holiday”, all the same, invites us to taste, secretly, the bitterness and pleasures of existence. Yes, Jacques de la lune is a poet as in the time of Tristan the Hermit. He looks for high noon at two PM and finds it there. He is capable of filming a beach uniquely to show children who are building sandcastles cry louder than the roar of the waves. He will similarly film a countryside only because at that instant the window of a small house in the background of the shot is opening all by itself and a window that opens itself, oh well, it’s oddly funny, at once, everything and nothing, blades of grass, a kite, children, a little old man, anything, everything which is at once real, unusual and charming. Jacques Tati has a sense of the comic because he has a sense of the unusual. A conversation with him is not possible. He is the anti-theoretician, par excellence. His films are good despite his ideas. Made by anyone else, “Jour de fête” and “Mr Hulot‘s Holiday” would seem little of anything. To sum it up, he has become after two films the best French director of comedy since Max Linder and with his third, “Mon Oncle”, Jacques Tati will maybe become the best, period."

JACQUES BECKER

"Without ever surrendering to the fashion which he knows to be unfashionable of poetic realism, he attaches himself to the most modern graces whether they are called Auteuil, Quartier Latin or Pigalle. When he had to pay his share in 1900, he avoided the trap of pastiche and he knew how to see as contemporary the subtlest appearances of a world disappeared. Jacques Becker’s art borders on chamber music, he is the Francis Poulenc of our cinema. Why does he sometimes feel himself obliged, like Edouard, to play for his concierge? Keen portraitist of a world intimate and delicate, his cinematographic phrasing, without being romantic, accommodates adjectives more than verbs. He often gladly abandons action to the profit of his characters whom he loves like a father. When comes the great work melancholy and free which everything destines him for? When the modern Casque d’Or?"

SACHA GUITRY

"Greatly underappreciated by some, borne on the shoulders of others. What has made his glory will not survive him. Neither megalomaniac jokes or so-called cynical light comedies uphold second viewings or second readings. But he can not be praised enough for this essential. Jansenist in his manner, he refuses all technical trickery, all exterior artifice: every effect rests on the expression of the actor and the least of his gestures is stylish on its face value. Let’s forget the historical insipidities since, in his best hours, the auteur of a comedy like "Assassins et Voleurs” shows us that he knows where the foundation of cinema is hidden."

ALEXANDER ASTRUC

"A lyric poet who reminds one of expressionism, but also a rigorous constructor who knows the value of American precision. This intellectual made with “Le Rideau Cramoisi” a great film of love and passion. This baroque artist, in "Les Mauvaises Rencontres ”, bore witness ton a precise aspect of post-war youth. A technique so overwhelming has been able to mask from the eyes of some the profound merits of his first feature, but the essential is this: A style and something to say. He has quite une vie ahead of him."