French film festival goes retrospective

French film festival goes retrospective

By Jane Freebury

JAKARTA (JP): A prominent name in contemporary French cinema
is the subject of a retrospective at Teater Tertutup, Taman
Ismail Marzuki, this week: Francois Truffaut.

First a film critic and then a director, Truffaut was a key
figure in the radicalism that crept into French film-making from
the 1950s. Radicalism which created the "new wave" classic A Bout
de Souffle. Truffaut wrote the screenplay of this seminal film
and in the latter half of the decade was collaborating closely
with Jean-Luc Godard (an even bigger name in French cinema).

Early in the 1950s Godard, Truffaut and others, set out to
change the landscape of French film culture for good. Truffaut
mounted a challenge against tradition with his famous article on
a 'certain tendency' in film. A key concept was the idea of
author (i.e. the director) as the ultimate authority on a film's
meaning - an argument that would get Truffaut into trouble today.
Essentially a film director was quite simply an artist, as
creative as any poet or painter. It follows, neatly, that cinema
is art.

Revolutionary thinking - for the time. Today the notion of
'author', in film or in any other medium, is contentious. Now we
are wondering 'What is an author?' Can a film have an author? If
it can, then who - the cinematographer, the screenwriter, the
editor? Is making film and its meaning a collaborative activity,
or orchestrated by a single vision, or both? When we talk about
Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence and we say Steven
Spielberg's Jurassic Park, is author status a given?

But in the 1950s the notion of 'author' was radical and a tool
- a way to look anew at classic Hollywood - the ageless John Ford
western, the nasty but brilliant thriller of Alfred Hitchcock.
And it was a way of debunking popular French cinema of the time.

How? How else but by sending it up? Thus there are many
elements of Truffaut's Jules et Jim (1962) which invite
comparison with the traditional romantic drama. There is to begin
with many settings that looked staged. In these sequences the
camera does not draw attention to itself but stays pretty well on
the spot to allow character action and dialog and setting to
dominate the image. But every now and then, Truffaut's hand (that
is to say, the hand of Raoul Coutard, the cinematographer)
'slips' and we see the camera swish quickly between characters in
conversation. Instead of cutting, the camera moves abruptly and
disconcertingly, and the image blurs until it refocuses on its
new subject. This sort of thing is a key to what Truffaut and his
colleagues of the 'new wave' in French cinema were up to. Their
aim was to distance audiences from the reality effect which
involves an audience in film and to show up the editing, the
camerawork, the acting - all the things that go together to give
an impression of realism.

Like so many of Truffaut's films, Jules et Jim is intensely
intimate. The lives of Jules, a German, and Jim, a Frenchman,
intersect in 1912. They are joined by vivacious Catherine, also
French (Jeanne Moreau), who is at first boyish fun to be with and
then becomes the amorous center of the trio. They form a team of
sorts, each happy to play follow the leader, all three clowning,
Chaplin-style, complete with bowler hat, cane and, sometimes,
moustache. They live together until Jules and Catherine pair off,
despite a lingering attraction between Jim and Catherine.

World War I intervenes and Jules and Jim discover the horror
of trench warfare, but from opposite sides, each afraid they
might be involved in killing the other. This episode uses black-
and-white documentary footage which blends in with the black-and-
white stock Truffaut chose for his film. things looks seamless at
this point. 'With our averages maybe we'd make a good couple.'
Jules and Catherine decide to put each of their numerous liaisons
behind them, and to marry. They have a child, a little girl they
call Sabine and settle in the countryside. Then Jim comes to
visit them. Later on he leaves, then he returns again.

Perhaps it was the point she made when she jumped into the
river once, perhaps it was the perfume bottle full of sulfuric
acid she kept at the ready for lovers who tell lies, perhaps it
was her infidelities, but Catherine retains a dangerous quality.
The drama she created is constantly undercut by the peaceful
relationship between the two men. She plans her final journey,
she will take Jim with her. It is an extravagant gesture, but in
the end, also funny.

In this film (which is really a story about a story of
romantic love) the actors may seem to be acting, self-consciously
quoting their lines, playing their parts. The narrator reinforces
this impression and so does the editing and camerawork. You will
see a number of moments of frozen motion, when the image is held
with a freeze-frame. Sometimes the camera appears to have a life
of its own, free of any particular character's point of view.
This distances us from the goings-on, it offers us a place
'outside' the film, disconnected from the emotional life of the
story. A critical distance.

Narrated with voice-over, Jules et Jim has the ache of
personal experience, but contradicting this there is a droll
humor which lifts the mood - even when two of the protagonists
have been cremated and are no more than papery charred remains
inside a burial; One casket! How can this be? It is not the tale,
but it is the telling.

Other films of the festival:

* Tirez sur le Pianiste (1960). A key film of the French nouvelle
vogue (new wave), which came out at around the same time as A
Bout de Souffle, aka Breathless (Ignore that Hollywood version
with Richard Gere!). A story of lovers and gangland murder, told
while acknowledging its debt to Hollywood. Charles Aznavour in
the lead role.

* Baisers Voles (1968). With Jean-Pierre Leaud, a key lead actor
in many Truffaut's autobiographical-type films of the time.
Another three-hander, but this time with two women and one man.
Prominent female actor of French modernist film, Delphine Seyrig,
also stars.

* Les Deux Anglaises et le Continent (1971). Jean-Pierre Leaud
becomes involved with two women, Englishwomen this time. The
dilemma of a young man, the conflicting needs of two women - and
the eternal triangle.

* L"Homme qui Aimait les Femmes (1977). This is the original
Intersection, the original version of the film which has been
screening here (with Richard Gere, again!) recently.

* La Chambre Verte (1978). The dead - his wife and lost friends -
seem to surround Julien (played by Francois Truffaut himself)
since the catastrophe of World War I. His obsession with
necrology draws him into a mystery over which he has little
control. Nathalie Baye (as Cecilia) draws him further in.

* La Femme d'a Cote (1981). The woman across the road may be more
than your neighbor, she could might be a long lost lover. For
Bernard (Gerard Depardieu) and Mathilde (Fanny Ardant), now both
married too others, their affair could bring one or both to the
emotional brink.

* Le Dernier Metro (1980). Two icons of the French cinema,
Catherine Deneuve and Gerard Depardieu, together in a tale about
the world of stage theater under the regime in power in France in
1942. A strong narrative about politics and psychology, with
equally strong performances.