The Sign of Leo (Le signe du lion)

Jean-Luc Godard making his appearance during the party sequence

Éric Rohmer on the Rue de la Huchette during the making of the film short La Sonate à Kreutzer, 1956

THE SIGN OF LEO (Le signe du lion)             B+                  

France  (103 mi)  1959  d:  Éric Rohmer

Maintaining his secrecy throughout his life, Rohmer was either born in Tulle (southwestern France) under the name Jean-Marie Maurice Schérer or born in Nancy (northeastern France) under the name Maurice Henri Joseph Schérer.  The truth remains a mystery.  His first feature was made in 1959 for Claude Chabrol’s new production company AJYM, though the film was recut and restored in 1962 when Chabrol was forced to sell the company and Rohmer disowned the recut version.  In 1962 Rohmer and his longtime producer Barbet Schroeder co-founded the production company Les films du losange which produced all of Rohmer's work except his final three features.  A lone film, not part of his Comedies And Proverbs or Moral Tales, it has continually slipped under the radar of Rohmer retrospectives, along with half a dozen rare short films from the 50’s ranging in length from 10 to 50 minutes that never screened outside of France.  Rohmer was already over 40 by the completion of this film, at least ten years older than any of the other critics who went on to become filmmakers in the Cahiers du Cinéma group, Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, and Rivette, and his first film failed to have the explosive impact of his contemporaries, where The 400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups) (1959), LES COUSINS (1959), and BREATHLESS (1960) were very much in the style of early French New Wave, becoming a major disappointment for Rohmer who returned to his work at Cahiers and continued making 16 mm shorts while having to wait another decade before making another feature.  Unavailable on DVD (though available on Region 2, Eric Rohmer - The Early Works) and one of the hardest Rohmer films to see, viewers will have to search out film schools and art house theaters for a screening of this film. 

Rohmer is considered the most literary and conservative-minded of the Cahiers group, whose low-budget films were rigorously prepared and shot, but in contrast to the early films of his contemporaries, where every frame announces it intends to change the course of cinema, this has none of the jarring New Wave techniques, yet it aptly belongs with those films by bringing the camera out into the streets, making bold use of urban locales as the aesthetic architecture of the film, where shooting locations become an expression of the character’s interior world.  While it’s a very poised and austere morality tale, taking an absurdist view of life where fate can be uncommonly cruel and without mercy, the heavily despairing overall mood is a sobering cinematic experience.  Rohmer is accused of focusing his attention on the banality of life, characterized by overly chatty, dialogue-driven films, often featuring educated, yet highly materialistic characters, including intellectuals and artists, who are constantly talking about themselves, placing themselves at the center of their existence, yet happiness, and the security of emotional attachments, remain elusive.  Rohmer has used no music in his films after this one and has always been an interior storyteller, confining himself to conventional, neatly contained, bourgeois worlds where racial diversity, for instance, simply doesn’t exist, and characters quickly grow alienated from the world around them, often displaced from God and unable to find meaning in their existence.  What is perhaps most unique about Rohmer is not so much his heralded literacy, but his undeniable success in finding cinematic images for common, everyday and ordinary moments that would otherwise seem so uncinematic.  While characters usually discuss these moral concepts at length, known for his characteristic literary and philosophical classicism, not in this film, a more gloomy effort where themes of disillusionment are instead wordlessly introduced through visual internalization.  Supposedly a favorite of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, where his film FOX AND HIS FRIENDS (1975) could be described as a variation on a similar theme, unrelentingly pessimistic, where a down and out carnival worker (Fassbinder as Fox) wins the lottery and suddenly has friends mooching off him left and right, all contending to be friends, which Fox desperately wants to believe, until they’ve stolen everything he has, leaving him utterly penniless and alone. 

Rohmer’s film has an unusual lead, Indiana-born Jess Hahn, a U.S. Marine who served in France during the war and became a French citizen afterwards, playing Pierre, whose heft and strong man appearance could easily pass as a gangster in a Jean-Pierre Melville film, a French-speaking American musician living a bohemian existence in Paris who is surrounded by well-to-do friends, who at the outset is informed his fabulously wealthy aunt has died, where he assumes right away he’s rich beyond his dreams, even sharing the inheritance with his cousin, inviting everyone he knows over to his flat for a celebratory party, borrowing money and running up huge debts, as accumulating bills are suddenly the least of his worries, where in typical Chabrol style (each of his earliest films feature an elaborate party sequence), he features an exuberant, but entirely naturalistic, bohemian party scene with an abundance of food and free flowing wine, where none other than Jean-Luc Godard in dark glasses, taking a break from shooting BREATHLESS (1960), shows up playing his favorite passage on the phonograph player over and over again.  In the morning he’s served an eviction notice, also news that his cousin inherited everything, so he’s quickly booted to the street, the first sign of his precipitous fall from grace.  At first, he maintains his friendships and easy connections, but they soon lose touch when’s he’s thrown out of every last known address, where angry hotel landlady Stéphane Audran (lead actress and former spouse of Chabrol) insists upon reporting him to the police (her brother is a policeman), so all hotels refuse to accept him.  As a result, Pierre spends his time endlessly walking around the Parisian neighborhoods, becoming something of a love letter to the bohemian quarters, selling his books to a mystery lover street vendor, none other than Jean-Pierre Melville, spending his final few pennies on bread, where eventually he’s forced to sleep on the street, where a dissonant and psychologically shatteringly Louis Sageur violin piece plays throughout (a rarity in a Rohmer film), whose exasperating repetitiveness may prove irksome for some.   

 

The jovial tone of the film shifts to neo realism and becomes a long, drawn out and near wordless encounter with the streets of Paris in the 50’s, capturing the mood and atmosphere of the steamy hot month of August, using the available natural light of summer, shot by pre-war cinematographer Nicolas Hayer, where despite the New Wave’s love of the streets in Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups) (1959), Godard’s BREATHLESS, Chabrol’s Les Bonnes Femmes (both 1960), Rivette’s PARIS BELONGS TO US (1961), or even Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore (La Maman et la Putain) (1973), no other film is as graphically detailed in such carefully observed documentary style, where the city becomes the dominant force of the film, literally teeming with life from the cars on the street, strolling pedestrians, patrons sitting in outdoor café’s, to the narrow confines of hawking street vendors, like a street bazaar, and on into the heavily populated city parks, where the idle can sit uninterrupted for hours on benches, or even sleep at night, literally a time capsule conveying the sights and sounds, something along the lines of George Orwell’s autobiographical first book, Down and Out in Paris and London, which details prolonged periods of hunger, taking odd jobs to avoid destitution, and living among the working poor.  Similarly, Rohmer’s film is a bleak portrait of despair, where without friends or money or food, Pierre’s life is spiraling into a physical and spiritual decline, where his existentialist journey of endlessly walking the streets also becomes a picturesque cinematic travelogue not only of the photogenic bridges extended across the Seine River with people sitting along the river banks, but Paris is also viewed as a cumbersome city, often loud and dirty and hot, especially when seen through the eyes of the impoverished, where an air of gloom hangs over the city, especially alone at night, lonely and painful moments conveyed through the emptiness of a series of night shots. 

The is not the familiar New Wave setting of Paris with pretty girls, fast cars, or gunfights, but is a nightmarish, cruel, and indifferent city where the protagonist is not seen hanging around the street café’s, but along the lower riverbanks of the Seine, where the city is seen as an urban inferno, frustrating, and utterly forbidding.  The city itself stands for the doomed protagonist’s deteriorating state of mind, where the customary welcoming attraction of the City of Lights, where Paris is considered the romance capital of the world, sweet and inviting, instead turns into a heartlessly dark city where he finds himself abjectively alone.  Pierre is continually portrayed as a human ghost walking among the living, watching intimate couples kissing or overhearing bits and pieces of conversations, until it appears he is beyond hope, that he has lost all connection to humankind.  For whatever reason, the man is never seen looking for work, though he does work up a musical act performed in front of tourists in the street café’s under the wing of another street tramp (Jean Le Poulain) he meets on the banks of the Seine, a loud street peddler who ingratiates himself to American tourists and the wealthy, asking for donations, as he often makes a spectacle of himself, which Pierre hates and finds humiliating, though there are moments of humor, such as this stream of overheard conversation, “Is that beggar playing Bartok?”  “No, he’s just out of tune.”  “Well, it’s modern at any rate.”  Co-written by Paul Gégauff (who wrote the dialogue), ironically this was the only time that Rohmer did not write the dialogue to one of his movies.  Interspersed throughout Pierre’s wanderings are glimpses of his former friends, a newspaper photographer continually sent out of the country on work assignment, or friends discussing his disappearance, where now even if they saw him, due to his haggard appearance, they wouldn’t recognize him.  But what Rohmer’s really suggesting is that money determines your identity and social status, that without it you’re invisible and may as well not even exist to the rest of the country.  The director then rethinks that thought and offers a less fatalistic view, one apparently more in tune with chance and the possibilities of the cosmos, more akin with the finale of his later work, Le Rayon Vert (Summer) (1986).  THE SIGN OF LEO is the only Rohmer film to exhibit any hint of lower class consciousness, where the tragic hero descends into dire poverty and homelessness, but nonetheless continues to wear a suit, like most all of Rohmer’s male characters, spending the rest of his career exclusively probing the interior consciousness of the middle class.    

Les Bonnes Femmes

Bernadette Lafont  Obituary by Ronald Bergan from The Guardian 

I don't usually get into posting obituary notices, something of a morbid habit, and certainly a reminder of our own impending demise, but this is one of my all time favorite actresses.

I never thought of her as one of the first New Wave actresses, just generally thinking of Jeanne Moreau in Jules and Jim, and perhaps Bardot in ...And God Created Woman, but she was a driving force behind Jean Eustache's The Mother and the Whore (La Maman et la Putain) (1972), where one of the key scenes was seeing Bernadette Lafont drown her sorrows by repeatedly listening to Edith Piaf sing her 1948 recording “Les Amants de Paris” seen here: (YouTube - La maman et la putain on YouTube 3:05), which remains one of the essential works of cinema.

My favorite Chabrol film remains Les Bonnes Femmes (1960), a completely unpretentious film about bored Parisian working class girls who spend all day waiting to clock out of their dreary jobs so they can go out at night.  While utterly realistic, it remains as captivating today as when it was made, largely due to the naturalistic performance of Bernadette Lafont.

I still think of  her as that young and vibrant force driving French films, not quite the screen presence as Anna Karina, but she was probably the working class version, which is why I always felt I could relate to her.  There was no distance separating her from the audience, as she felt like one of us, which is something you just don't experience anymore. 

LES BONNES FEMMES       A 
France  Italy  (100 mi)  1960  d:  Claude Chabrol

Before Chabrol started mocking the complacency of the bourgeoisie with artificially stylized whodunits, he made at least two stabs at a social realist film, BEAU SERGE (1958), a naturalistic rural drama, and this deceptively complex work that on the surface appears to be a free wheeling, light-hearted drama about the social patterns of young Parisian girls, shot in a near documentary style following events as they occur over the course of several days.  Balancing their time at work in an appliance store with no customers to speak of, where the highlight of the day is a hopeful visit from a delivery man, the film examines the lives of four young girls who work there, each more bored than the next where their low-end wages offer little hope for a better future.  While they tease one another at work all day and continue socializing at night, it is clear they exhibit an artificial cheerfulness to hide their otherwise empty lives, very much in the manner of John Cassavetes, particularly in FACES (1968).  In fact outside of Cassavetes, this is one of the best films to capture the emotional authenticity of young women and the difficulty they face enduring men who are exaggerated caricatures of themselves, all promising to be more than they are.  While the men are uncomfortably obnoxious, this is all part of the mating ritual where the social art of persuasion is a double-edged sword, where if you allow yourself to get lured in, you may suffer the consequences.  On the other hand, if you take no chances at all, you’re back where you started from, which is a neverending routine of endless monotony.  Chabrol, with help from cinematographer Henri Decaë, does an excellent job finding the rhythms of the streets of Paris which exude a wonderful sense of energy and hopeful possibilities while the oddly dissonant score by Pierre Jansen and Paul Misraki may give some the creeps. 

Bernadette Lafont plays Jane, perhaps the most liberated and sexually audacious of the group, who through acts of exuberant spontaneity hopes to find happiness, while Stéphane Audran, soon to be the director’s wife, working in dozens of films together for some twenty years, plays her roommate Ginette, living a secret life as a singer in a variety revue.  Lucile Saint-Simon plays Rita, an attractive blond who is incessantly schooled by her fiancé how to please his snooty, overbearing parents, demanding that she change to become the girl of his dreams, while newcomer Clothilde Joano plays Jacqueline, a recent hire late on her first day on the job, a shy, quiet girl lost in her thoughts about a young motorcyclist (Mario David) who shows up regularly without so much as a word, staring at her through the storefront window, following her on his bike, always keeping his eye on her.  From an early sequence where a couple of the girls are followed by two guys in a white Cadillac, the audience has an idea what’s in store for them and can see these men are little more than goons, but the girls have a zest for living that typifies the sudden influx of boldly energized New Wave films.  What follows is a wild strip club sequence with a bon vivant Bridgitte Bardot look-alike that gets the guys pinching and grabbing, followed by an extended party sequence that plays out like New Years, where it’s all Jane can do to fend them off, which she does brilliantly until a night of champagne finally wears down her defenses.  Jane can be seen in the same clothes spraying perfume under her arms the next morning as she joins her roommate for another day at work, interrupted by a frantic run to the zoo at lunchtime where they interact with the caged monkeys, rare birds, and a stalking leopard before returning back to work where Jane ends up asleep.  One by one each of the girls is called into the boss’s office to be fondled and pinched, a day where time literally stops, counting the minutes until the work day is done. 

Interesting that the guys surrounding these girls are typically crude, boorish and ill-mannered, more interested in dominating any female desire to express themselves, like hunters caging wild animals or rare birds (“They don’t look rare to me.”), while the girls themselves couldn’t be more vividly gorgeous and appealing in their feminine charm, spending their days in dead end jobs filled with hopes and dreams that someday it might all be different.  There’s a strange swimming pool sequence where the original louts that picked up Jane decide to bully the girls, thinking it’s fun to throw them in the water and continually dunk them, like rude water polo, until they are rescued by the motorcycle guy who runs off the imbeciles.  In perhaps the strangest scene in the film, the motorcyclist takes Jacqueline for a ride into the country, where they walk deeper and deeper into the woods.  It is clear Jacqueline has never been happier, that she is finally, at this moment, herself, in a scene highly reminiscent of similar scenes with the happy and dreamy-eyed Giulietta Masina on her wedding day in Fellini’s NIGHTS OF CABIRIA (1957), a walk in the woods sequence borrowed again by Fassbinder in BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ (1980) featuring Barbara Sukowa as Mieze in the beautifully choreographed Part XII “The Serpent in the Soul of the Serpent.”  These are scenes of utter heartbreak and despair, shown without a hint of excess, probably the turning point in each film.  The ramifications are beyond description, the audience is in a state of disbelief, as this was thought to be a dizzyingly absurd New Wave comedy of sorts, was it not?  The final sequence is just as exasperating, as the tone has completely shifted to a stunned audience that can’t quite comprehend what just happened.  This brilliant change of gears offers a completely new appraisal of the film, adding a profound layer of depth to these girl’s lives, where Chabrol expresses a surprising level of sympathy for their stark vulnerability in such a harsh world that barely notices they exist.

The House in the Woods (La Maison des Bois)

THE HOUSE IN THE WOODS (La Maison des Bois) – made for TV       A                      

7 Episodes, 53 min, 47 min, 40 min, 53 min, 53 min, 56 min, 58 min

France  (360 mi)  1971  d:  Maurice Pialat 

If I had to choose the one film that best allows the viewer to penetrate into Maurice Pialat's universe, I would unhesitatingly choose THE HOUSE IN THE WOODS. This series happily combines a profound naturalism and a strange sense of fantasy, a liberty in its tone where hidden or manifested suffering alternates with an astonishing happiness to be alive.

—Joel Magny from Cahiers du Cinéma, May/June 2004

While much admired by Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut, Pialat was considered a problematic director, difficult to work with on a set, claiming as many detractors as fans.  “I don’t like you either,” he allegedly snarled at a Cannes Film Festival audience in 1987 when his film UNDER SATAN’S SUN was an unpopular winner.  After a failed career as a painter, Pialat dabbled in theater and documentary filmmaking, making his first notable short, L’AMOUR EXISTE, in 1960 at the age of 35.  He was 43 when he made his first feature, after the fervor of the New Wave had waned.  He appeared as a hard-nosed teacher in Jean Eustache’s 1974 film MES PETITES AMOUREUSES, a director who shared his pessimistic, dire, and bleak worldview.  He used long takes and handheld cameras to sharply reproduce the psychological tensions between characters, producing films that are unsentimental, defiant, deeply personal and sexually bold.  His honest and raw portraits of family life, sexual warfare, and emotional abandonment have had a tremendous influence on contemporary French cinema. 

A volatile realist who’s often compared to John Cassavetes, though their works have very different tones and effects, both share a tendency to observe extreme behavior with an objective, realistic eye.  According to Film Comment editor-at-large Kent Jones: “Where the breaks in a Cassavetes film are strictly behavior-oriented, getting at the essential unpredictability of people...Pialat’s often feel like the exquisite agony of the moment, which must always come to an end, the transience of experience, eternally invigorating and just as frustrating—few filmmakers have ever come as close to capturing it on film…Of his 11 features, three — WE WON'T GROW OLD TOGETHER (1972), À NOS AMOURS (1983), and VAN GOGH (1991) — are among the finest films made in France or any other country in the last half century, and the rest aren't far behind.” 

To which I would add this film, as easily my favorite Pialat film is this expansive six-hour film made for French television, 7 episodes of 52 minutes each, where the length of the film allows the director to meticulously detail the rhythms of small-town life in the countryside during WWI, from 1914 to 1918, completely absent any sentimentality, building interest and emotion through time and through the presentation of the smallest details, by observing ordinary family life, much like Olmi’s THE TREE OF WOODEN CLOGS (1978), but less spiritual and more realistic, utilizing a series of vignettes to paint a large, impressionistic portrait of a community, ultimately revealing a remarkable view of humanity.  The film, written by René Wheeler, then re-written by Pialat and Arlette Langmann, who also co-edits the film, follows young, rambunctious all-male schoolchildren and the close scrutiny provided by their teacher, played by the director himself, the Catholic priest and the goings-on behind the scenes with the altar boys stealing a bit of the Father’s wine, a rotund gamekeeper (Pierre Doris) and his nurturing wife (Jacqueline Dufranne), along with their sensitive teenage son (Henri Puff) and strikingly beautiful daughter (Agathe Natanson), who take in two young Parisian boys left abandoned during the war, their fathers called up to the front, whose mothers write regularly and come to visit bearing gifts every Sunday, as well as another troubled child, Hervé (Hervé Levy), who was dropped on their doorstep, who hates the visiting mothers, as he has no family contact or visits of his own, yet his warmth and spontaneity infectiously draws us and others to him, the leading character in the film, as most of the action is seen through his eyes.

Using plenty of character development and charming personality, always utilizing humor by revealing the idiosyncrasies of everyone involved, especially among the playful and mischievous boys, whose authentic realism is simply phenomenal in this film, who curiously want to see the arrival of ambulances bringing wounded soldiers, or the aristocratic Marquis (Fernand Gravey) who lives on a gigantic estate continuing to live a life of refinement as if there is no war on, whose wife is killed early on in a suspicious roadside fatality, or a grumpy socialist barkeeper who is filled with cynical suspicions of the Marquis, or the frail postman on his bike who regularly delivers letters to the family while muttering nonsense to himself, or the visiting Parisian mothers, who may as well be tottering fools, so out of place are they in the country wearing their flamboyant, feathered hats, or a local airman and his girlfriend who befriend Hervé and even allow him up in the air to fly, not to mention pastoral picnics in the countryside filled with languid moments where time, and the war, seem to drift away entirely. 

All of this layered backdrop sets up who lives in the town so that we grow to know and care about its inhabitants.  This is especially significant by the fourth episode, which brings the war and its ramifications to the door of this sleepy country town, opening with a long line of soldiers walking slowly through the countryside, where the kids run and greet them and ask for photographs and other mementos before the young men from the town are enlisted themselves, including the gamekeeper’s son.  This is an exquisitely filmed episode, including an aerial sequence between a German and a French plane, balancing the loneliness and the quiet of the soldiers against the mothers and families hugging and kissing their young sons goodbye.  Of course, many never return.  The cost of war is shown in painfully intimate detail, not by any graphic war imagery or disfigurement, but in the mayor’s arrival at the gamekeeper’s doorstep to report the death of their son, which sets off an agonizing chain reaction which is stunning in its emotional range from screams to silence, where we can feel the weight of the world hanging on their shoulders.  When the Armistice is signed, the town weeps in a joyous celebration of flag-waving and relief as the soldiers return home.  There’s an interesting juxtaposition of the town’s quiet memorial tribute with the teacher reminding the schoolchildren of the human price paid for freedom. 

When the war is over, the children are rounded up by their families and returned to Paris, even Hervé’s father arrives with his step-mother and step-sister, leaving the gamekeeper’s residence suddenly empty and alone.  In Paris, Hervé’s new parents throw a welcome home party, where one women sings several soprano arias to the slightly off-tune piano, but eventually, the unspoken grief from the loss of their original spouses becomes painfully evident, and they fight and argue with each other.  So after hearing that the gamekeeper’s wife is seriously ill, Hervé runs away back to the countryside.  His quiet return to their home, and in particular, the unspoken emotions created by reducing the images strictly to the essentials has a profound effect, literally inducing a transforming religious experience without anyone ever mentioning the name of God, something out of the transcendent poetry of Bresson (Introduction to Bresson).  But as his family arrives to bring him back to the city, we are left with the ravishing beauty of the country home, with its life force abruptly removed once again.  The use of music, the dark voice of the soprano in Ravel’s “Trois Beaux Oiseaux du Paradis”  3 Beaux Oiseaux du Paradis , Ravel - YouTube (3:21) is also extremely well chosen, usually opening and closing each episode in a wordless still image of haunting beauty.

The Grin Without a Cat (Le Fond de L’Air Est Rouge)

A GRIN WITHOUT A CAT (Le Fond de L’Air Est Rouge)        A 

France  (240 mi)  1977     re-edited 1993 US version (180 mi)  d:  Chris Marker 

The workers will take the struggle from the fragile hands of the students.

One is unlikely to ever see so much collected Communist footage without watching propaganda films, as Marker, a member of the “Left Bank” of the New Wave for his Marxist inspired politics, fought in the French Resistance during World War II, and his films, like ¡CUBA SI! (1961), are often sympathetic to Socialist movements around the world.  His work combines social issues with formal experiment, getting his start as a foreign correspondent and inquiring reporter, where he is especially interested in transitional societies, “Life in the process of becoming history.”  His films are not only set in specific places, they are about the cultures of those places, calling his approach “Involved objectivity.”  An epic, years-in-the-making history of militant/revolutionary struggle from the 1960’s, there are essentially two versions of this film, a 1977 four-hour version in French, which would probably score a higher grade, and a 1993 re-edited, three-hour English language translation, which likely loses something without the original French speakers, such as Yves Montand and Simone Signoret, who are among the collective of French narrative voices.  Ideally, in film essays, one appreciates the tone of the narrative voice, such as the authoritarian, yet highly personal voice of Terrence Davies in Of Time and the City (2008), whose eloquence and perfect diction reflects his devout Catholic upbringing, which he angrily rails against in his heavily autobiographical film.  Without hearing the intended voices when Marker made the film, one can only surmise what must be missing from this American version, as the dry and emotionless English language narrator continually takes the air out of the wealth of material with his monotone and often lifeless readings.  That’s unfortunate, as certainly one of the revelations of this film is the rare historic nature of the collected archival materials, where the narrator should help put this invaluable footage in perspective.  Consider this segment with a French narration, presumably Marker himself, beautifully recalling a childhood experience when he first watched Eisenstein’s BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN (1925) Grin Without a Cat (Opening Sequence) - Chris Marker - YouTube (4:04), emphatically describing that magical moment when he first hears the words “Brothers!”  This opening POTEMKIN sequence is utterly enthralling, especially with that mix of militarism and Mozart in the original score written by Luciano Berio, using carefully edited clips from the original movie, then cleverly introducing chosen footage of 1960’s demonstrations that resulted in bloody clashes with heavily armed police, mirroring the chaos and pandemonium from the Odessa Steps sequence. 

Along with Jean Eustache’s film The Mother and the Whore (La Maman et la Putain) (1973), these are definitive expressions of innocence lost, reflecting the aftermath of the failed French revolution in May 1968 and the end of the French New Wave, while Bertolucci’s film Before the Revolution (Prima della rivoluzione) (1964) is a wonderfully insightful critique of the Communist Party leading up to that promised day when the revolution would finally come.  Marker’s video essay is comprised entirely of archival footage on revolutionary events between 1966 and 1977, dividing his work into two parts, first examining the unity and optimism gearing up for May 1968 in France, while also documenting the subsequent collapse of global socialist struggles, leaving the Left fractured and in disarray afterwards.  If there is one word that encapsulates what the 60’s was about, that word would be Vietnam.  Marker shows footage of American armed merchants selling their wares, including explosive devices that can be hooked up to common household items such as soap dishes, proudly displaying their effectiveness, claiming this could easily blow up a car as well.  America’s fascination with weapons is displayed by an overzealous Air Force pilot filmed while on a mission dropping bombs and napalm on Vietnam, positively exhilarated that he was able to obliterate live targets seen running on the ground out in the open Air Force pilot in Vietnam: at war and loving it - YouTube (2:00).  Perhaps the poster faces of revolution in the 60’s were that of a youthful Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, both advocates of guerilla warfare.  While this tactic may have worked in Cuba, leading Parisian socialists were not so quick to pronounce this an effective strategy in Europe.  Nonetheless, there is plenty of footage of Castro analyzing the various international strategies, such as the Cuban Missile crisis or the Russian decision to abandon Cuba, where more than any other, he is the most featured speaker.  The film examines the effectiveness of Stalinism, suggesting one of the problems of the Russian Revolution was the lack of input from ordinary citizens, where it was not a people’s revolution, ruling instead through despotic control, using the police and armed military to prevent dissent, so the socialist mindset was never accepted by ordinary citizens, believing it was imposed upon them rather than a collective method where everyone contributed to the whole, which is exactly how Russia always portrayed itself in the propaganda films.  By contrast, the Chinese Revolution is a people’s revolution, where ordinary people are the engine that generates activism, where they have a personal stake in the output, generated by local party council meetings where they are constantly feeding input to the top.  The problem, however, is corruption, where a few would rather consolidate their own power, taking advantage of their position in the party for special favors.  Nonetheless, effective or not, there was a growing influence of Maoism, especially after the Sino-Soviet Split, where even the American Black Panther Party carried around Mao’s Little Red Book, aka Quotations from Chairman Mao.   

Without ever endorsing any particular method, Marker is careful not to editorialize, but offers perhaps the best composite overview and critique of his own failed Marxist dream, occasionally interjecting an eccentric electronic score that adds a fragmented touch of dissonance or discord, where the events leading up to May 1968 are prefaced by other Protests of 1968, including a worldwide series of demonstrations and strikes, largely comprised of students and workers, including the Tlatelolco massacre of 200 protesters in Mexico ten days prior to the 1968 Summer Olympic games, where not a single country lodged any protest.  May 1968 is significant because the world might be a different place had there been a different outcome, truly a historic moment in time when the Parisian student demonstrations combined with nationwide French worker strikes creating the largest general strike in the history of an advanced industrial nation, a prolonged two-week strike involving 11 million workers and nearly a quarter of the French population.  The impact was so significant it brought about the collapse of the De Gaulle government, but there is still plenty of disagreement about what went wrong, where the general consensus is the lack of a cohesive direction, where the Communist Party all but supported the government, as the leftist student movements never made the case for a worker’s movement, the foundation of any socialist revolution, allowing a wedge to be brought between the two groups which the government capitalized upon.  Major Ralph “Pappy” Shelton is seen in his Pentagon offices describing the capture and killing of Che Guevara in the mountains of Bolivia, proudly gloating at this success, eager to assess blame that Che’s mistake was relying upon a Communist Party that hadn’t established a footing and never connected with the locals in Bolivia, leaving him isolated and vulnerable.  This event seems to foreshadow more ominous occurrences yet to come. 

Marker’s analysis of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August of 1968 is nothing short of breathtaking, perhaps the high point of the film, as it capsulizes the deflated hopes of those advocating international socialism, that call to arms for fraternal brotherhood so brilliantly depicted in POTEMKIN.  Even Castro is outraged, calling it an illegal act when a socialist nation militarily occupies another nation, as it goes against everything the international brotherhood of socialists stand for and only weakens their position worldwide.  Marker also provides stunning footage of recently elected Socialist President Salvador Allende in Chile addressing a gathering crowd, charming and completely relaxed, displaying a candid logic and intelligence while attempting to alleviate tensions about converting the nation to a socialist state, claiming there are already capitalist precedents.  He is also seen giving a surprisingly honest speech about the necessity of imposing a wage freeze to avert inflation, for which he received jeers and hisses at a worker’s hall gathering where he speaks about a worker’s moral obligation, but he was the tragic victim of a U.S. backed military coup shortly afterwards, allegedly committing a forced suicide while surrounded by an armed opposition, immediately installing military head Augusto Pinochet.  We see Allende’s daughter Beatriz gravely addressing a crowd in Cuba afterwards, receiving a warm reception, but she later committed suicide.  A collection of TV reports, guerrilla newsreels, government propaganda, speeches, and various interviews, the images are drawn mainly from rarely shown footage shot by others, chiefly outtakes from other documentaries, Marker has a way of distilling seemingly disparate ideas in surprisingly provocative ways.  A memorial to those free spirits who fought for liberty, equality, and human solidarity, Liberté, égalité, fraternité, the national motto of France, Marker’s film is bluntly critical, while remaining poetic and perceptive in its analysis, a landmark work where there is nothing else remotely like it.  Unfortunately, a moving and significant credit at the end remains untranslated in the American version, paying tribute to the collective nature of filmmaking, “The true authors of this film are the countless cameramen, technical operators, witnesses and activists whose work is constantly pitted against that of the powers that be, who would like us to have no memory.”

Excerpts from a 15-page Marker essay entitled Sixties originally released by Icarus Film Distribution Company upon the film’s 2008 DVD release, seen here:

Sixties - MARKER - 2008 - Critical Quarterly - Wiley Online Library 

In May anyway the final whistle came quickly: with the first casualty. Not too serious for revolutionaries, but it’s a fact, the murder of Pierre Overney by a Renault watchman would bring everyone back to the real value of lives, things and words. On the workers’ front, the great wave finally met its dikes, a phenomenon summarised by former minister Edgar Pisani in one sentence, ‘a terrible connivance between the conservative apparatus of the CGT (the communist-led union) and the conservative apparatus of the government’. And a great disorder fell on everyone’s mind.

Strangely, the small clannish fights used to draw a kind of overdetermination from the fact they had developed in this fuzzy space of the imaginary revolution. Left to their own devices amidst a reassured country, they became weakly and purposeless. Historical Anarchy had died – heroically – in Spain. To refer to it now made no more sense than being a royalist, unless it became an ideological business, quite profitable at that. The Communist Party had missed every helping hand offered by History and started the long spin of a motorless airplane. French Maoism would remain a landmark in the history of teratology. The foolishness of morons is a plague, but statistically speaking we have to put up with it. What is fascinating is the foolishness of clever people and in this particular case, some of the cleverest.

Elsewhere, things were more violent, more difficult than in France, but the curve was the same. For having gleaned a few traces of these luminous and murky years, I tinkered with these films. They don’t claim to be any more than that: traces. Even the most megalomaniac, A Grin Without a Cat (originally four hours long, wisely reduced to three but without modifying the content, just shortening it, with a short monologue at the end), is in no way the chronicle of a decade. Its inevitable gaps would become unjustifiable. It revolves around a precise theme: what happens when a party, the CP, and a great power, the USSR, cease to embody the revolutionary hope, what looms up in their place and how the showdown is staged. The irony is that thirty years later, the question is irrelevant. Both have ceased to exist and the only chronicle is that of the unending rehearsal of a play which has never premiered.

2012 Top Ten Films of the Year: #7 Something in the Air (Après mai)

SOMETHING IN THE AIR (Après mai)                     A-                               

France  (122 mi)  2012  d:  Olivier Assayas 

With a love a madness for Shelley
Chatterton Rimbaud
and the needy-yap of my youth
has gone from ear to ear:
I HATE OLD POETMEN!
Especially old poetmen who retract
who consult other old poetmen
who speak their youth in whispers,
saying:--I did those then
but that was then
that was then--
O I would quiet old men
say to them:--I am your friend
what you once were, thru me
you'll be again--
Then at night in the confidence of their homes
rip out their apology-tongues
and steal their poems.

—“I  Am 25,” by Gregory Corso, from Gasoline, 1958

This is an elegiac and largely autobiographical account of Assayas’s own youth, a companion piece to his earlier work COLD WATER (1997), arguably his best film, where both beautifully capture the mood, atmosphere, and raw, unpretentious intensity of anxiety-ridden adolescents caught up in their own indecisions, the terrible choices they do make, how easy their emotions are sparked and then extinguished, and how eloquently, beyond their own words, the films describe their fatalistic viewpoint about their all-too-hopeless future.  The French title, After May, is much more apropos, as the film is a collection of leftover remembrances after May 1968, a historical moment in French history that nearly brought revolutionary change, a combined student and worker protest that involved nearly a quarter of the entire French population over a period of two continuous weeks, initiated as a student rebellion, but eventually spreading to workers across the nation who joined the students, ultimately quelled by the forcible actions of the police who literally clubbed and beat the protesters into submission.  The film won the Best Screenplay award at Venice, opening with blistering footage of these protests, as the streets are aflame with police in riot gear with clubs literally attacking the students, with the guys wearing jackets and ties, or sweaters, but also helmets, who are seen running for their lives through the tear gas, many of them hauled off to jail APRÈS MAI [SOMETHING IN THE AIR] OLIVER ASSAYAS - clip YouTube (1:03).  There is scant evidence of rebellious long hair, jeans, sandals or beards.  The Assayas film views this period as a rite of passage, an intensely personal account of developing political idealism through a radicalization process initiated in high school, where teachers, interestingly enough, were actually teaching students about Marx, how he challenged socialists as small thinking utopians, advocating instead a complete overhaul of the economic system.  In the high school segment, various factions are still arguing many of these same theories about how to best implement a radical change. 

Set in 1971, Clément Métayer as Gilles is a stand-in for the director, a somewhat moody kid who draws and paints and sells leftist newspapers on the street while getting instructions from older Trotskyites.  He and a small clan of students initiate a clandestine night raid spray painting activist political messages directly onto their school building, where the school ID of one of the activists is found on the scene, where the authorities unsuccessfully attempt to get him to name names.  Also in the clan is Gilles’ girlfriend Christine, Lola Créton (where interestingly Gilles and Christine were the names of the protagonists in COLD WATER), perhaps his best friend Alain (Felix Armand), a fellow artist, who has a visiting American girlfriend Leslie (India Menuez), the implicated student Jean-Pierre (Hugo Conzelmann), who works at his father’s socialist printing press, while Gilles is also secretly seeing another woman on the side, Laure (Carole Combes), a free spirited soul with wealthy parents who’s about to leave the country for an extended summer excursion.  Her absence brings Gilles closer to Christine, where they also travel together to Italy during the summer, where Christine hooks up with a leftist film production, Gilles visits art museums where he continues to draw and paint, while Alain studies painting with an artist in India.  While they all undergo radical interior transformations, which includes rampant drug use, art, music, travel, experimental films, more open sexual relations and frequent displays of nudity, this group filters out in various directions around the world where their radical views evolve, with each developing a unique view of what they can contribute, while continuing their education and artistic development.  Gilles remains the central character, but becomes distressed at his need for individualized artistic expression, which goes against the grain of radical Marxist sentiment which accentuates the needs of the collective by submerging individualism. 

Much of this pays tribute to Bresson’s 60’s films, including the youthful impressionism of the budding painter in Four Nights of a Dreamer (Quatre nuits d'un rêveur... (1971) and the disenchantment with radical politics of The Devil, Probably (Le diable probablement) (1977).  The Grandaddy of post May 1968 films is Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore (La Maman et la Putain) (1973), often viewed as the end of the French New Wave and the best expression of the end of the 1960’s hope and optimism.  Like COLD WATER, the defining scene of the film is a spectacular party sequence with music and dancing, beautifully shot by Eric Gautier, where Laure has become a drug addicted bohemian living at a palatial country estate, where bonfires are set and the musical choices are simply sublime, in perfect synch with the moment, expressing a kind of trippy psychedelia from Syd Barrett and the Soft Machine, Nick Drake, and the Incredible String Band.  Assayas integrates music into his films as well as anyone else alive, where the unspoken fluidity of this sequence speaks volumes, offering an elegiac poetry to the expression of the counterculture, which has since faded from view.  It should be noted that many of the wordless sequences from this film are among the best Assayas has ever done.  As Gilles tells his father, however, a television screenwriter (as was Assayas’s), he felt the writing on the show was “too strained.”  This aptly describes much of the forced political positions which are squeezed into this film, where there are more ideas than the film knows what to do with, where perhaps the weakest element of the film is a lack of development of the characters, none of whom, outside of Gilles, are sympathetic or really very memorable at all.  This unfortunately detracts from the overall impression of the film, which bears a similarity to Lou Ye’s SUMMER PALACE (2006), where the vitality of the youthful counterculture and freedom movements in each film are literally off the charts, expressed with dazzling camera virtuosity, where youth is like a bright flair burning in a sea of societal indifference, where once it burns out, all that’s left is the indifference.