Interview BERTRAND TAVERNIER
| My Journey Throug h French Cinema is Tavernier's voyage into the light. It is an ingenious mix of the personal and the historical in which he tells tales about venerated masters as well as recounts his own stor y, the making of a major cinéaste explorer. The film gives a glimpse of the backstage lives of Marcel Carné a nd Jacques Prévert and spotlights Tavernier's favor ite actors—including Jean Gabin, Arletty, and Simone Signoret—the set designer Alexandre Trauner, and Maurice Jaubert, who composed music that drums like a heartbeat for Carné's Le Jo ur se lève and Por t o f Sh a do w s, and who died too young, at 40. At 75, Tavernier—president of Lyon's Institut Lumière and director of award-winning films ranging from The Princess of Montpensier (2010) back to The Clockmaker of St. Paul (1974), made in his native city—has reached into the corners of his past to make this boldly eclectic new work. My Journey Through French Cinema shuns using such term s as Nouvelle Vague or "Cinéma de papa," though as an early contr ibutor to both Cahiers du cinéma and its rival Positif, edited by his friend Michel Ciment, Tavernier can't quite get over how the New Wave blew away ever ything in its wake and still influences filmmakers today. One scene in particular, from a film before the New Wave, has always stuck with Tavernier—a chase in Jacques Becker's 1942 Dernier atout. Becker is the hero of Tavernier's new documentary; his dramas and romantic comedies were made in the shadow of the war. Yet My Journey Through French Cinema is also about key affiliations and complex relations: Becker started out as an assistant to Renoir, and Tavernier had a rough beginning as an assistant to Melville. We learn of drama on the set of Army of Shadows, like when Lino Ventura wouldn't speak to Melville and had to be directed via an intermediary. In the film, Tavernier, who remembers everything down to the page number of the book in which a picture was captioned incorrectly, evokes his comrades in arms from early neighborhood ciné-clubs, Pierre Rissient and Bernard Martinand, and also tells his own stories—abouttaking Sam Fuller to the set of Pierrot le fou; about his American friend, John Berry, who took refuge from McCarthy in France; about Eddie Constantine, Godard's Lemmy Caution. My Journey Through French Cinema premiered in this year's Cannes Classics and screened at Bologna's cinephile haven Il Cinema Ritrovato, which is where I spoke with Taver nier. By putting Becker, the director Godard saluted as "Frère Jacques," at the heart of his documentary, t he filmmaker bridges the gap between the Cahiers du Cinéma youngbloods he admire d as a publicist on the set of their movies—Godard, Chabrol, Rivette, Rohmer—and his brethren at Positif. Perhaps with My Journey Through French Cinema, wh ich has two more installments to come, one war at least may be put to rest.
The filmmakers you focus on seem to converse with and react to one another—from Carné to Becker, Melville to Claude Sautet. How did you choose these directors and this perspective? I made it a point to pay no attention to labels. Labels make for laziness and put films that are radically different in the same boat. Critics are good at concocting slogans, just like advert isers. When everything suddenly became the New Wave, it was annoying—there were those who were for it and those against it. Yet Rohmer and Godard couldn't be more different: one writes elaborately with a particular language, while the other makes collages. Both shoot outdoors with high-speed film, but what do they actually have in common? There are works that speak to each other without belonging to a school, films created by the mood of the times, such as those madeunder the Occupation that portray impotence—the men are sick, less dynamic than their wives or daughters. It's as if the filmmakers reacted to the disaster that fell on the French army by showing a society where women take over, as in Grémillon's Le Ciel est à vous [The Woman Who Dared], in which Madeleine Renaud's character flies a plane. |
And in Becker's comedy Edward and Caroline, Caroline is stronger than Edward.
That's because Becker was a feminist, and he really "got" American movies—he loved Henry Hathaway, and assimilated his movies. But with the New Wave, so many filmmakers tried to imitate American movies and fell short. And American critics scandalously ignored Becker. He was eclipsed by Renoir, who seemed more revolutionary. But it was Becker who made movies about the group, not the individual. And contrary to popular perception, even before the New Wave, we had cinephile critics and directors: Gréville, a major filmmaker, wrote about King Vidor and Erich von Stroheim, and he was crazy about Joan Crawford. He loved Norma Talmadge so much that he said, "Cinema should be called CinéNorma." Your movie links filmmakers from different worlds—Melville and his admiration for William Wyler, for example. Melville always thought he was making an American movie. He thought he was Wyler with his long takes, but he was more like Bresson with his long silences and no music. And how would you describe the difference between Becker and Renoir? Becker is more secretive. He too is revolutionary, but not the same way. For the first time, in Touchez pas au grisbi, we see gangsters brushing their teeth before they turn in for the night, and Rendezvous in July looks almost as if we were still in wartime, a time we want to forget. Everything looks dark in Rendezvous in July, but nobody says a word about the war. I never knew that there was so much frenetic dancing and jazz in Paris. They wanted to forget the war. Can we compare them to young people in New Wave movies of the '60s? During the New Wave, ordinary people vanished from the movies— you don't see any workers, not in Rohmer or in Truffaut, neither masculine nor feminine. And no trade unions: you see Saint-Germaindes- Prés, bookshops, the Café Flore... But in Julien Duvivier, Henri Verneuil, and Claude Autant-Lara, you see workers, and in so many of the parts that Jean Gabin played! You can't talk about the Popular Front without talking about Gabin, an actor who said, "I'm for the Europe of the worker and against the capitalist's Europe!" Words that resonate today! In your chapter on Le Jour se lève, you demonstrate how in the finale, when Gabin is holed up in a room at the top of the stairwell in the guesthouse, [production designer] Alexandre Trauner made a vital contribution to the movie by putting his set on the fifth floor, above the crowd, giving the denouement more drama. Le Jour sè leve was Samuel Beckett's favorite movie. I wanted to show things that touch me as a filmmaker and are not always noticed by the critics. Trauner changes the film; he changes the dramaturgy. Also, by putting in that stairwell that becomes a character, he changes the spirit of the film. And that moves me. But Gabin is unique! He also plays a deserter in another Carné/ Prévert movie, Port of Shadows. Gabin was our first working-class hero. In Renoir's La Bête humaine, he's a working-class hero undone by passion. Gabin admired Renoir, but he never forgave him—he had heard of certain letters Renoir had written back then to the Minister of Information under Vichy, referring to Jews as "scum." Gabin also reacted to his adopting American nationality, saying, "When your name is Renoir, you don't become an American citizen." |
