Search Results

This chapter focuses on Maurice Pialat's relationship to the Nouvelle Vague and to two major filmmakers of the 1930s and 1940s against whose work Pialat measured his own: Jean Renoir and Marcel Carné. Pialat's outburst reflects his longstanding resentment over the fact that the young directors of the Nouvelle Vague had already begun to make names for themselves in the 1960s while he was still struggling to make films. His sense that he had not been given the same opportunities as the little group of friends at Cahiers led him to reject the Nouvelle Vague and belittle its importance. He turned elsewhere to find a model for a successful career in film, looking back to the popular cinema of the 1930s and 1940s, to films by major directors such as Pagnol, Carné or Renoir and the Saturday night cinema he had loved as a child. Yet the small-budget revolution associated with the Nouvelle Vague made it increasingly difficult for any filmmaker to aspire to a career in the mould of Pagnol or Carné.

The ‘author - auteur’ appears in the disjunctions and hiatuses not as the artist who creates the complete work, but rather in the formula of Godard, ‘the work and the idea of the work’, ‘the work and the theory of the work’, the presence of the author as critic and as reflecting on the work and its processes, questioning what the work is and so completely as to efface the author - in the tradition of the Nouvelle Vague.

This chapter seeks to contextualise Chabrol’s extensive filmography; reassess its place and significance in French Cinema; and shed light over key influences on Chabrol’s aesthetic. The detailed analysis of his first four films, Le Beau Serge, Les Cousins, A Double tour and Les Bonnes Femmes, helps to understand the formal inventiveness and diversity of his overlooked Nouvelle Vague palette whilst offering key insights into recurrent Chabrolean motifs: the gradual blurring or undermining of realistic / naturalistic modes of representation; expressionistic mise en scène; self-reflexive structures and theatricality; voyeurism; oppressive relationships and family dynamics. Whilst the influence of Lang, Hitchcock and Renoir on Chabrol is already well established, in this chapter Balzac’s pragmatic aesthetic is identified as pivotal: beyond the numerous diegetic references to Balzac, Chabrol draws on Balzac’s ‘mosaic’ approach in order to conceptualise his œuvre. It is argued that the Balzacian strategy of the recurrence of characters (see the recurring trio of Charles, Paul, Hélène) helps Chabrol to turn contemporary material into ‘myths’ and build his own dark Human Comedy.

This chapter argues that the French popular film is a contradiction in terms: French cinema has long been associated with high culture, and despite the iconoclastic verve and youth appeal of the Nouvelle Vague, the longer-term impact of this hugely influential movement was to reinforce perception of French film as self-reflexive and demanding rather than aimed at a wide audience. It defines cinema as an intrinsically popular medium. Not only does cinema's visual storytelling appeal across levels of education and class, but the ontological shift its invention produced in the subject's relationship to space, time and other subjectivities gave pleasure to the mass of the population. Developments in cinema's wonderful capacity to take people elsewhere continue to thrill a socially diverse public, and to inflect their vision in the widest senses of the word.