French New Wave Mini-List Discussion + Suggestions

[domino harvey]

If only the first volume of the Deville DVD set had subs-- those are all good at worst and predominantly great films. A direct port of that set with English subs would be release of the year for any boutique label

[knives]

Is there a funnier New Wave-related film than Lautner's Gangster Uncle?

Les tontons flingueurs (Georges Lautner 1963)
Nothing here is "New Wave" and indeed seems like exactly the kind of movie your father or grandfather would get more out of in its middle aged concerns and "Those darn kids" touches.

I've seen some gangster movie he made with Jean Gabin and it runs exactly as you describe that. It's ridiculously mediocre with a bland flavour to it that seems like the sort of stiff stuff that the New Wave was against.

[Michael Kerpan]

Oh well, maybe I liked it because I AM an old guy...

[knives]

Now time for some star vehicles. I've already seen a decent chunk of Belmondo films, but this trio (really quad) give a sense of how much a star he became in a really classical sense. It helps to provide a sense of how France's cinema at large was incorporating the New Wave in a fashion that's not unique to cinema. It also made me like Belmondo a little bit less, but there are easy cures to that.

That Man From Rio
This is an incredibly difficult film to talk about because I came into it expecting something bad, but came away with something I liked a lot as high quality popcorn. My fear was based mostly out of two things. The first and biggest is that the phrase '60s French Comedy is something that should strike fear into the heart of all men. I'm still recovering from the last Belmondo comedy effort I saw, Oury's The Brain, and the selling of this as a Bond spoof makes it sound all the worse. Additionally de Broca and I haven't gotten along well so far. His segment from Seven Deadly Sins, the only genuinely New Wave work I've seen from him is simply not good while King of Hearts is an actively bad movie in the worst tradition of staid, mainstream French cinema.

I suspect it is that preconceived negativity that is causing me when I try to write out my feelings here to only be able to phrase my enjoyment in terms that on their surface sounds bad, in this way the film is similar to Big Trouble in Little China. For example the film carries a very farcical tone, but doesn't really have jokes and isn't funny which sounds insulting. Those elements though are what make it so good as a light and breezy adventure. One piece that I will unapologetically call great though is Françoise Dorléac. Here she is in full Audrey Hepburn mode giving a perfect farcical performance up there with A Woman is a Woman. In a film that seems very interested in forcing old '20s and '30s serials to played out in the real world she forces the movie to be otherworldly. It honestly makes me wish even more than I already did she got to live for a few more decades. Also this film does the impossible and has a Short Round who is not annoying and used just enough.

Up to His Ears
It's a tad unfortunate though completely understandable that they had to go with Up to His Ears as the title as the original stands out a bit more. This is significantly less good than the previous film mostly due to the pacing. Once things get going with the world run around the film is fairly entertaining, but that means putting up with about a half hour of boring setup that the previous film got done with in about ten minutes. Also Belmondo's moping fop routine is just not as compelling as his earlier Tintin. The film also seriously degrades its female lead with a fairly generic Ursula Andress stopping the film in its tracks rather than the great performance by Dorleac. This makes me sound down on the film, but it does genuinely become good once they leave Hong Kong with some very nice if simple action scenes. Most surprising of all is that the jokes for the most part actually land with the film inducing smirks regularly.

Greed in the Sun
It's probably going to be said a lot, but this definitely has learned all the right lessons from Wages of Fear while managing to repackage them in a very different plot and a more commercial form thanks to the heist nature of the plot after the prologue. It's, to be a little cheeky, more American of a film than a lot of the adventure films being produced at the same time building tension off of star power and getting into the grit of a fantastical situation. If it weren't for just how explicit if surface level the politics are there wouldn't be anything sincerely French about the movie. All of which makes it fun, but as far as it relates to the New Wave it seems to exist as a counterpoint. As far as I know Verneuil, an Armenian immigrant, had no connections to any of the New Wave elements beyond occasionally using their actors such as Belmondo here and was in fact established nearly a decade before '58. This would almost seem to place him as a member of the tradition of quality generation. If so then that pejorative makes even less sense now coming out of the mouth of fans of America cinema given the rough sense of a bitter John Ford (which I guess means a regular Howard Hawks ala Red River) the movie holds. I suppose though that their criticisms have for a while now have been held in regard as silly.

[domino harvey]

Verneuil is only listed by the Cinema '58 article that was the first to catalog "New Wave" directors, which is the least useful of the period texts as a marker for the movement but an interesting resource nonetheless. I haven't seen any of his films yet (I'll move up Cent mille dollars au soleil though since it's getting some discussion), but based on this being the sole resource saying he belongs, it's unlikely he'd make even my second round of whittling down New Wave directors into something more meaningful (and manageable) -- but like I said in the first post, my goal here for eligibility is to present as wide a net as possible until I'm able to provide a more valid series of metrics. That's the problem with folding in ~200 directors into a first pass-- there's still a lot of movies I need to get to and I've been actively working on this research for well over a year!

As for those de Brocas, well... L'Homme de Rio is the better of the two action adventure flicks with Belmondo, but neither works for me. Both are better than de Broca's first two films. At the risk of already becoming a broken record with Deville praise, the twin pairings of Philippe de Broca’s first two utterly dreadful romantic comedies Les Jeux de l'amour and Le farceur sound an awful lot like Deville’s work on paper: fast-paced, intricate plotting, knotty characterizations, and upended narrative expectations. But there’s a big difference: de Broca's films suck. They are not funny or clever and exhibit none of Deville’s cinematic wit. It’s a literal Goofus and Gallant example that highlights how good Deville is by showing how easily it could all go off the rails. I was tickled to read Jean Douchet's review of Deville's Ce soir ou jamais the other day in which it turns out he had the exact same thought I did about de Broca: "Now that we have Deville, we don't need de Broca." Amen, brother! I still have a few more of de Broca's titles from this period to get to, and hope to find something more of value within, but I don't have my hopes up...

[knives]

I guess I have to get to that Deville next now to appreciate a little of what you're saying though that might mean watching more de Broca's which I don't think I'm up to.

Edit: Welp that plan died on the vine. My French isn't good enough to even try one of these films without subs.

[domino harvey]

Oui, they are all densely dialog-heavy. The best Deville film from this period available on back channels with English subs is Adorable menteuse and I highly recommend it-- it will be making my list and in some alternate universe of home media availability it would be widely considered as obvious a New Wave highpoint as any of the usual suspects

[knives]

That's definitely that seemed most up my alley so I'll definitely check it out when I get to the Ds.

Les Miserables-----Le Chanois
This isn't eligible, but I wanted to see for context at least one unadulterated cinema du papa for this list. Which brings me to what a load it is. Made in the revolutionary year of 1958 this is the first film of tradition I've seen to make it clear why a house cleaning by the new wave was needed. This is a big, grand scale adaptation of THE French novel with The French star of yesteryear in scope and technicolour ultimately chocked to death on its own professionalism to the point where the film remains dead. It is more interested in casting big names than the right actor so that every role feels played wrong. This is especially bad with regards to Bernard Blier's bloviated Javert which feels more like a bad television parody of the character. Even casting that sounds like it should be good like Bourvil as Thenardier is played with so little personality and style you'd think this was Stalin's adaptation of the novel. There's also a lot of weird changes from the novel such as with the rescue at the beginning that don't change the narrative, but weaken a lot of the themes until all we're left with is a story that by itself is only minimally interesting thanks to it being told so well so often. That also gets at how this is a film, not unlike a lot of modern Hollywood, that is so desperate for cool action scenes not in the book that it must show every action just hinted at in the book at the cost of character and theme (it's telling that Bernard's much longer version has far fewer scenes). After watching this I want to rebel against the elder generation too and they've been dead for decades now. It would be cool though, given how foundational the text is, to see what a genuinely New Wave version shot as if it set in modern France would have been like.

Moi, un noir
Instead here's the foundational text for the New Wave. This was completely unlike anything I expected which I suppose should have been expected given what I have seen of Rouch. People throw around the term ethnography with regards to Rouch so much I didn't even pause and consider that even the documentary format could be flummoxed in a New Wave fashion without resorting to Robert Kramer or Rivette type exercises. This seems to have been shot quite traditionally, but the editing process is quite radical for the narrative it makes and the use of voice over.

Now for all of this there is clearly a political dimension, but even if I wanted to dig into it (the film is quite complicated on that front) the context of its rare aesthetic informs everything to a degree that you can't talk Rouch's themes without first establishing his aesthetic which I assume can uncontroversially be called great. That aesthetic is ultimately a love of bullshit and using the opportunity afforded by the limitations of the production to provide a lot of it. Rouch is fairly open about that explaining from the start that the narration is an invention in which two of the subjects of his camera play characters and invent a narrative over the movie Rouch has made (that point by the way being the main reason I can't completely agree with Sembene's critique of the film however well argued it is). The bull shit isn't limited to the voice over. The editing is based around a barely concealed lie as well. Rouch visually makes a narrative of concise events taking place over a few days when it seems clear he shot for longer and that the sequencing is heavily out of order which is not a problem and never should be considered one (Wiseman's made a career on it after all), but the plain way that Rouch sets up his narrative to be seen as such only to discard it when convenient helps add to the experience of the film which is delightful as long as you like being lied to.

While it is quite clear how this connects to the New Wave (Godard in his first four or five films is practically remaking this) I'm still not sure how Rouch at large fits in. He was quite well established before this, but Resnais was much more so with an Oscar and everything. I suppose Resnais looks more intimately connected to the New Wave (as does Marker) thanks to their associations with Varda, Robbe-Grillet, and several others which Rouch doesn't have so much. Maybe more context will bare the reality out, but for now I don't know. Though this did serve as a good reminder I should try to check out some of those non-Godard Lemmy Caution movies. Now there's a really weird connection to the New Wave.

A Game for Six Lovers
Wow. The sheer incompetence of this is so shocking I'm left speechless on the other elements of the film. This is exactly the opposite of everything good about the New Wave and exactly what its detractors saw in it. This is a movie of such stunningly bad camera work and acting it seems unfair to compare it to even something like The Lovers which I was not fond of. Instead it seems more comparable to something like The Beast of Yucca Flats. The ellipses threaten to build interest in the product, but mostly they give the film a scene to scene incoherence like a particularly bad AIP product or a Ray Dennis Steckler picture. All of this is just impress upon the few curious about this film to tell you it really isn't worth your time however valuable an actor and critic Doniol-Valcroze may have been to the movement. This is exactly one of those twenty minute films stuck inside an 83.4 minute feature. The short, The Overworked, this came with is decent enough though I suppose.

[alacal2]

A question, primarily for Domino. In trying to root out some background contextual stuff I've buried away (and never got round to reading) I came across 'Francois Truffaut At Work' by Carole Le Berre (Phaidon Press). It looks like a coffee table book but appears to have a lot of interesting detail on Truffaut's working methods and I wondered if it's a useful resource for this project. There's a great photo of Truffaut on the cover strapped into the boot of a 2CV with his camera!

[domino harvey]

I haven't read that book, so I'll turn your question around: I hope you'll tell me if it's a good resource for the project! Always happy to get good recommendations

Knives, Les surmenés has a shot of making my Shorts list-- it is completely alien to the two features I've seen from Doniol-Valcroze as a director, and that's a good thing!

[knives]

It's certainly better edited than the feature in that not everything is done in static long shots. I'm not sure if it could stand a top ten for me, but top fifteen and it would certainly make the list. It's surprisingly well structured with a nice central motif to make a reason for following these characters at this time. In a lot of ways I think it works best as a fetus for Truffaut's post-New Wave work in the same way A Story of Water is fairly pre-natal post-New Wave Godard more than anything Truffaut.

[Altair]

Some thoughts on Louis Malle's Les amants (1958), especially in regards to its use of space (apologies for the tone: I have read too many bad academic papers by this point and I fear it's infecting my style):

Beneath the opening credits we see a 17th century Carte du tendre, drawn by Madeleine de Scudéry for her novel Clélie (1654) and whose geography is made to refer to female genitalia, Malle hinting that's going to connect environment, emotion, and sexuality in a direct, significant way. Brahms' Opus 18 (String Sextet No. 1 in B Flat Minor) is also heard for the first time here, its swelling, brooding romanticism contrasting with the opening shots of Raoul (José Luis de Vilallonga) playing polo, although he's no knight in shining armour, but a cavalier sportsman performing for Jeanne (Jeanne Moreau, of course) and Maggy (a very good Judith Magre), with Jeanne not even understanding the rules of the game. Malle introduces us an to an environment of artifice, of mock athleticism - Raoul refuses his trophy partly out of deprecation, but also because it is meaningless. Raoul's questioning of Jeanne as to how she cares for him, feels 18th century in tone, showing a rich, bored wife taking on a lover. Malle is thinking both of Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary and of pre-revolutionary libertine literature. Yet here Malle frames Jeanne's affairs as her attempts to self-actualise and liberate herself.

Malle constructs Jeanne's evolution over the course of the film by relating it to her environment: each location holds some kind of meaning for Jeanne, either on a narrative or symbolic level. The contrasting pair of city and province (in this case, Paris against Dijon), is one of the major aspects of pastoral literature; Jeanne at the film's start desires to be Parisian, be part of Maggy's socialite world. Her furtive affair with Raoul is an attempt to as sophisticated as her friends. Yet she can only access Paris for a weekend every fortnight, an escape from country home and its fraught marriage with Henri (Alain Cuny). It's apt that Paris is seen little in the film: a polo ground, fairground, hotel, restaurant. They're places you visit, but don't linger at: she has no stable home in Paris. The night time visit to the fun fair with Raoul is almost unreal, dominated by bright, glaring lights, crowds, and the swirling movements of the rides themselves, with none of the staticity of Dijon.

Raoul and Maggy are rendered as both upper class but also urban figures, Jeanne the former but not the latter. She tries to import Paris back to her home in Dijon, where her attempt at Parisian chic is rebuked. Her daughter says her new hairstyle is like a doll's, while Henri mocks her language: '"Always" is a woman's word,' he tells her. Henri is rooted to the countryside. When we see their home for the first time, it's darkly lit, blinds drawn, Jeanne picked out by Henri Decae's camera, contrasting her against the heavy, wood panelled texture of the interior—she doesn't fit in. Brahms is heard once again, but as on-screen music this time, being played by Henri. Jeanne enters the living room and turns down the volume on the record player. When they have dinner, they're seated confrontationally directly across from each other, the camera sharing Henri's point of view, his cigar smoke blowing into her face, dismissing her.

Split between two worlds, and belonging to neither, Malle therefore stages the film's turning point not in Paris or at the country home but on the road (a much more nouvelle vague attitude). When Jeanne meets Bernard (Jean-Marc Bory) on the roadside after her car has broken down, he initially seems to fit the 'gallant' mould of Raoul, stopping to help after others passed her by. Yet he disavows Paris and the privileged family he belongs to, dubbing the socialite clique of Maggy 'a plague', and deliberately takes Jeanne on a long route back to her home. Jeanne is unsure how to interact in this truly provincial environment; when's in a village and approaches one of the men in its garage to repair her car, she shouts at an apparently deaf man, yet later in the scene he shows he can hear. She's unable to speak 'their' language, Malle showing the impossibility of communication between the working and bourgeois classes. The same is true when, earlier in the film, Jeanne visits Henri at the printing press. Shot in long, tracking shots, Jeanne in her immaculate white attire is completely out of place in an environment of ink and work; the secretary says to her, 'We're not used to seeing you here.' IT's space she cannot navigate, environments either belonging to Henri or Bernard.

The final third of the film is dedicated to Jeanne's transformation from oppressed wife to autonomous woman. The intermittent voiceover, narrated by Moreau, is written in the third person, an anonymous figure passing comment on the proceedings like a 19th century novelist. During a dinner at the house with Henri, Roaul, Maggy, Bernard, and Jeanne, she is largely silent as the trio of men subtly gauge each other. Malle positions the camera as dinner begins to show Bernard entering through a separate door simultaneously as the others come through another. It creates a split screen effect, the camera stationary in the middle of the room, commenting on how Henri views Roaul as an acceptable lover for Jeanne due to his social status (he appears in the gossip column of Henri's paper), while Bernard is an outsider and a threat.

Throughout the dinner, the camera tracks around the table in a slow, circular movement, with few cuts. Malle seems to embrace a very classical aesthetic, reminiscent of Hollywood or even the tradition de qualité which the Nouvelle Vague wanted to reject. Malle was never truly part of the Nouvelle Vague; rather, he was a contemporary of the directors associated with Cahiers du ciném, but he never shared in their formal experimentation. Instead, he forged here a certain 'flatness' of style. By shooting Les amants in widescreen, there are few close-ups, with events unfolding such as the dinner as a tableaux, the camera gliding around the characters in deep focus, with a sensitivity for chiaroscuro in the dimly lit dining room. Malle planned the film out as a succession of three minute sequences, a pattern of cutting which he adheres to. The control of the mise-en-scene reminds me of Otto Preminger. The sense that Les amants is in some ways old fashioned is apt, as the milieu it depicts, is one where its inhabitants have tried to pick up from where they left off in 1940.

It's only when Jeanne and Bernard take their night time walk does Malle adjust his style. The focal length of the camera is shortened to leave the background slightly out of focus, while the cuts are hidden by pools of darkness blackening out the screen momentarily, creating a sense of unreality. Jeanne is dressed in a long, flowing white nightdress, as though she were a ghost, while Bernard appears in the garden from the side of the screen, the audience left unsure as to where exactly he has been. There's little sound, only the sound of birds chirping and rushing water, and it's only now Jeanne seems to fully belong to her environment, as she gives herself up to Bernard. Shot and framed as a dream, Jeanne asks Bernard, 'Is this a land you invented?', even though it lies just outside her home. Malle heightens the atmosphere by focusing on the rather obvious visual metaphors of fecund plants and running brooks. When they return to Jeanne's room and begin to undress, the camera follows their intertwining bodies in one take, abandoning the previous cutting patterns. In the deep shadow which envelopes the pair as they make love, their bodies seem to merge together into one. Space is collapsed and we focus on Jeanne—she's no longer defined by her environment.

As part of this rupture with her previous life, Jeanne leaves Henri for Bernard, leaving her child Catherine. To take to the road with Bernard, with no certain destination, makes no sense with a child. The film refuses to moralise her actions and Malle himself stressed he wanted to complicate the audience's relationship with Jeanne: 'the really shocking proposition in The Lovers: [was] that she had a child and that she would leave anyway.' It's the most definitive act Jeannes makes in the film, made without consulting Bernard. Malle perhaps wants us to infer that Jeanne's daughter is a force used by Henri to tie her to the family home. With no attempt to cast Jeanne as a 'bad mother', the audience is led away from the conventions of romance and towards a tentatively positive ending as she and Bernard drive away to some kind of freedom, although what precisely this liberation will entail for Jeanne is never made clearly. We are neither meant to be exulted or unhappy. Jeanne has moved on from being bourgeois, but what she now is, is left ambiguous. Malle shows us that to escape from a bourgeoisie life, you have to abandon everything, although in favour of what is never specified. Godard would spend the next few decades trying to describe the alternative, but Malle, perhaps wisely, leaves it be.

[domino harvey]

I'm a bit rusty with Les amants since it's been a while since I've seen it and I'm afraid I enjoyed it not at all (though all this great discussion so far about it is goosing me into revisiting), but I'm curious what you mean by Godard devoting decades to an alternative which Malle ignores in the film-- are you referring to a lack of political dimension in Malle's film?

[Altair]

I'm a bit rusty with Les amants since it's been a while since I've seen it and I'm afraid I enjoyed it not at all (though all this great discussion so far about it is goosing me into revisiting), but I'm curious what you mean by Godard devoting decades to an alternative which Malle ignores in the film-- are you referring to a lack of political dimension in Malle's film?

I'm chiefly thinking of Godard's post-Weekend films and his work with Gorin and the Dziga-Vertov cinema collective, as a kind of attempt to articulate an aesthetic alternative to capitalism, i.e. Godard wanted to see through the radical implications of his politics with his films, while the implications of Les amants' ending is left hanging, and was continued to be left hanging, by Malle's subsequent career. I do think Les amants is political, but more in terms of the sexual politics around Jeanne's character (it was scandalous at the time for its suggestion of oral sex, almost a cinematic equivalent of Lady Chatterley's Lover, whose controversy awakened around the same time). Even today, it'd be hard to imagine a film with a female protagonist abandoning her young child and still treat her sympathetically, and that feels daring. Chiefly though, it's the 'flat' quality of the film that I most respond to, a kind of detached dryness which makes for a wonderful surface. It's a shame Studio Canal haven't issued a BD yet to my knowledge.

[domino harvey]

Thanks for the clarification. It's actually coming out next month from Artificial Eye in their Louis Malle Blu-ray box set

[NABOB OF NOWHERE]

Lautner, Verneuil and De Broca are immensely popular in France and Tontons flingeurs and Barbouzes are regular candidates for special edition re-issues on DVD and Blu and in fact mooted for a 4K blu release. Lautner and Verneuil are smart journeymen directors mainly in the caper/thriller mould with occasional lapses into execrable spy spoof material. Both had taken Gabin by the arm in his twilight years to achieve a superannuated pension. Their stuff is good wet Sunday afternoon fare but don't really fit into the rubric of Nouvelle Vague
De Broca is a manufacturer of romps with tedious humour and is just a star-fucking playboy.
If anyone has the inclination and energy to look outside of the copious prescribed list there are more interesting characters in the form of Henri Decoin and André Cayatte.
Decoin an ex-Olympic swimmer and husband and mentor to a young Danielle Darrieux has one entry within the NV timescale with 'Maléfices' starring Juliette Greco with a soundtrack by musique concrete pioneer Pierre Henry. It shares with Franju a clever sense of the use of real location imbued with a feeling of unease and the fantastic. In this case a tidal causeway that separates Greco's Voodoo inspired leopard owning seductress from the object of her desire, a young local married vet. Fatal desire and turbulent waters inevitably combine.
Cayatte was a film-maker and lawyer as well as occasional screenwriter working with amongst others Gremillon.
He was committed to films about judicial procedure and campaigned against the death penalty which was rigorously applied in France by guillotine up until 1977 and only abolished in 1981. Again for the purposes of time-scale the only candidate is Le Glaive et la balance starring a post Psycho Anthony Perkins. It is a high concept premise. Two murdering kidnappers are pursued by police speedboat to a small uninhabited island where they are apprehended except there are three identically clad men with no evidence of another boat. Each one claims that the other two had just landed and deny any knowledge of them. (This not a spoiler as it plays out with in the opening minute). The rest is a court-room drama trying to fathom out the truth. Maybe not strict candidates for the Nouvelle Vague but the guys in Cayatte's film sport very stylish turtle-neck sweaters that must count for something.

[swo17]

Maybe not strict candidates for the Nouvelle Vague but the guys in Cayatte's film sport very stylish turtle-neck sweaters that must count for something.

I don't believe the Decoin or Cayatte would be eligible per domino's rules, but you do make a very good argument!

[domino harvey]

I knew I'd be able to vote for Maynard G Krebs somehow!

Cent mille dollars au soleil (Henri Verneuil 1964)
Truck driver Jean-Paul Belmondo absconds with a new truck and its precious cargo, causing former co-workers Lino Ventura and Reginald Kernan to give chase. As suspected, there’s zero markers of the New Wave here of any real consequence, and the film is actually surprisingly slick mainstream cinema that could pass for anything Hollywood was releasing at this time. If I discovered George Seaton had directed this under an assumed name, I wouldn’t blink. The film is long and feels it, and it ends with the nth variation on “buddies hash it out over a long fistfight” resolution. What scant narrative pull there is to this movie is disregarded by the end, and I found the non-resolution we get here insulting to the time the film asked us to spend following its whims. (R1/A Olive Films [As “Greed in the Sun”])

Four Shorts by Jean-Daniel Pollet: Pourvu qu’on ait l’ivresse... (1958) / Gala (1961) / Méditerranée (1964) / Bassae (1964)
Pollet’s four shorts surveyed here divide evenly into two wildly different modes. The first two give us lightly comic glimpses of dance halls. In Pourvu… we find a hapless loser (Pollet regular Claude Melki) tentatively trying to get someone to dance with him. Melki is eventually reduced to completely disguising himself via costume in order to persuade a woman (on her wedding night?) to dance with him. The film is filled with grotesque inserts of assorted low characters interspersed with documentary footage of the dance hall, and I had little patience for the freak show ogling Pollet employs here. Learning Bruno Dumont considers this one of his favorite films was the least surprising thing I’ve ever heard. Gala is more polished but even less tethered to conventional narrative: a black nightclub owner goes about his business for the night, with the only joy seemingly found in kitschy toys like a bubble-blowing elephant, while his employee Melki awkwardly does his job and earns some side money. All four of these shorts struggle to justify their existence, but this one really seems like a stretch.

Méditerranée signals a hard-left turn into the most transparent Alain Resnais aping imaginable. Roughly a minute of footage of ancient ruins and artifacts is intercut with traveling shots of a beautiful woman on an operating table, footage of bulls being gored, a rotting orange, and some empty palatial estates (in case you forgot to remember Marienbad) while the narrator speaks a conglomeration of various authors, mishmashed together into a melange of nothing. I gallantly gave this as much rope as I could, but by the end I felt utterly scammed. This is ultimately an unintentional parody of the intellectual discourse of Resnais or Godard, as though any material prattled on and on over looped footage makes for “High” filmic engagement of ideas. The film is nonsense, drawing tenuous yet obvious conclusions (We will soon be forgotten and left to ruin, just like those in antiquity? Oh cool, I’ve read Ozmandias too) via a limiting and self-important presentation. Rosenbaum claims this film was an influence on Le mépris, which would really be something considering that it wasn't completed until a year after Godard's film came out. Bassae, with narration written by Astruc and seemingly constructed from footage left over from Méditerranée, at least has the foresight to only be 20% as long. (Pourvu qu’on ait l’ivresse / Gala : No commercial English-subbed release, no circulating English subs / Méditerranée / Bassae: No commercial English-subbed release, available with English subs via back channels)

[swo17]

I suppose I can't dispute any of the facts you state about Méditerranée, but I respectfully disagree as to the film's value. I find it all rather moving.

[NABOB OF NOWHERE]

Is there any relatively quick and easy way to check the list of directors against the films that provide their NV credentials? I would love to find out for example what tickets Lautner, Verneuil, De Broca, Yves Robert and Denis De Patelliere rode in on. This is not just to poo-poo them ,although the urge is strong, but to see if I have seen the films or have access to them.

[domino harvey]

There isn't, since each source has their own metric (or lack thereof). Every director you mention save de Broca is solely listed by the Cinema '58 article, which as I've mentioned, is pretty much worthless as anything more than a historical curiosity. De Broca was named by Durgnat, Cahiers, Neupert, and Douchet on the strength of his first films, his direct ties to an undisputed Nouvelle Vague film via his work on Le beau Serge, and Chabrol's production of his first two features

[domino harvey]

I suppose I can't dispute any of the facts you state about Méditerranée, but I respectfully disagree as to the film's value. I find it all rather moving.

I really wanted to like it. I found the initial footage, especially the inexplicable shots where the camera is affixed to a hospital gurney, compelling. But as it wore on, I became conscious that I wasn't getting anything out of what Pollet assembled-- and it wasn't for lack of trying!

Also worth noting that you don't really need subs for Gala (I think there are like two lines of dialog, none of it consequential) and Pourvu has no dialog

[knives]

That's really good to know. Thanks.

[swo17]

as it wore on, I became conscious that I wasn't getting anything out of what Pollet assembled-- and it wasn't for lack of trying!

That's fair.

[domino harvey]

J’irai cracher sur vos tombes (Michel Gast 1959)
A black man passes for white in Trenton after seeing his brother get lynched down south for sleeping with a white woman. He runs up against the local roughs, sleeps with white women, and things progress along the expected Noir path. It’s interesting to see a Noir film with all the stuff Hollywood would never allow at this time-- miscegenation and nudity, primarily-- but I’m not sure the film rates much higher than your average American programmer apart from this appeal. The best material here involves our white-passing protagonist getting an unedited vantage to Northern white attitudes, but given that the protagonist is coming from Mephis, the casual racism not only can’t be a surprise, it's gotta be comparatively mild. I liked how in the grand tradition of Hollywood playing fast and loose with European geography, in the film New Jersey borders Canada! The movie does at least have a great Noir title (“I'll Spit On Your Tombstones,” which is surely up there with Kiss the Blood Off My Hands). One notable non-fan of the film is the author of the source text, who was so unhappy with what the filmmakers did to his material that he started vigorously boo-ing within minutes at the film’s premiere— and then dropped dead on the spot! (No commercial English-subbed release, English subbed-version available via back channels)

Un nommé La Rocca (Jean Becker 1961)
Jean-Paul Belmondo avenges his friend’s wrongful imprisonment by making increasingly poor choices. This is an odd film. For the first thirty minutes or so I thought I’d discovered a little gem of a movie, as Belmondo inserts himself into the criminal underworld and the film gives us an obvious riff on Melville while still offering up a compelling tone throughout. This storyline comes to a head with the unforgettable image of four burly American deserters roaming the actual streets of bad neighborhoods with the camera and bright lights framing them as even more alien-looking. Their plan to shake-down club owners comes to an impasse in what will be the first of several bad and illogical moves in the film. The film then changes gears into three (!) different successive movies, each less interesting than the last (and one poorly cribbed straight from Ten Seconds to Hell). There is something telling about the way the film refuses to criticize Belmondo for the lousy returns on his violent bravura, and a better film would have highlighted with a critical eye how, in direct opposition to the norm in this genre, his use of violence consistently makes things worse. But this film isn’t interested in much of anything. I enjoyed the junior Becker’s next film, Echappement libre (1964), which also starred Belmondo and repaired him with Jean Seberg, much more (even if it isn't much more than a breezy lark), but this is a mess, albeit one with a compelling first act. (No commercial English-subbed release, English subbed-version available via back channels)