The Story of Film by Cousins Mark

Author:Cousins, Mark [Cousins, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3
ISBN: 9781909108141
Publisher: Pavilion Books
Published: 2012-10-29T23:00:00+00:00

199

Jules et Jim used a range of stylistic jokes and devices including, in this scene, short freeze-frames of Jeanne Moreau’s infectious laugh. Director: François Truffaut. France, 1961.

One crucial fact should be mentioned at this point: the New Wave was not a political movement. Some of its directors were, or became, left-wing, backing the students and union workers in the militant demonstrations in Paris a decade later. Others, like Truffaut, Chabrol and Coutard, were traditionalists, decrying the messy world of social engagement or actively disagreeing with it. Agnès Varda, whose La Pointe Courte (1954) partly heralded the New Wave, belonged to a different group of Parisian filmmakers. Her editor, Alain Resnais, had been drafted in the Second World War and subsequently made a sombre, poetic documentary about the Nazi concentration camps, Nuit et Brouillard/Night and Fog (1955). Resnais and Varda were more politically committed than the Cahiers filmmakers and more interested in the new complex novels being written in France at the time, but his L’Année Dernière à Marienbad/Last Year in Marienbad (1961) questioned the nature of film editing as much as Godard’s A bout de souffle. Set in a grand palace, it features a man thinking back to a year earlier when he may or may not have met a woman who may or may not have been with her husband. The first chapters of this book told how filmmakers, such as Ralph Ince (His Last Fight, USA, 1913) found a way of using reverse-angle editing and eye-line matching to clarify who was speaking to whom in a scene, or what they were looking at. L’Année dernière à Marienbad breaks all these rules. For example, on several occasions a character will talk passionately to another yet, when Resnais cuts, to what in Ince’s system would be a reverse angle, to the listener, no one is there. This is disorientating, but is only the first step in the film’s complete undermining of the spatial and temporal logic of editing. Throughout the film, the camera tracks through the grand mansion yet, just when a sense of geography is established, Resnais has rooms connect that surely could not. The same confusion occurs with time. The woman in the film is never sure whether she really met the man a year ago, but neither is it clear where he is, what he is remembering and what he is inventing. Based on a novel by Alain Robbe-Grillet, L’Année dernière à Marienbad questioned the very building blocks of narrative cinema as much as Bresson attacked its assumptions about truth and realism.

It was this determination to explode cinema, to shatter schema, that made French filmmakers the most interesting in the world in the early 1960s. Just as Resnais and Godard were re-evaluating editing, the Dane Carl Theodor Dreyer, now working in France, released his follow-up to Ordet (1955) in 1964. Gertrud, Dreyer’s last film, an apparently stagy story about a woman in 1910 who leaves her husband to have an affair, then lives alone (200), was slaughtered by the trendy Parisian critics.

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