We live, we make movies, as if we were occupied. I was listening to the radio yesterday, in the middle of the night, an interview with Godard. And Jean-Luc says: "the French have always made a great prisoner's cinema, the most beautiful prisoner's cinema in the world." And when I saw Bresson's Pickpocket, I realised there was greatness in being a prisoner. But a Bressonian prisoner is also Dostoevskian (...).
(...) Telling a story, a bit like wondering what came before me, what I inherited without realising it. And it's no mystery: we inherited war, 1940-45. And we must be the only country in the world that was occupied, didn't resist much and produced a very strong cinema during the war. It was, as Autant-Lara said, the heyday of French cinema. And from his point of view, it's correct (...).
But others were making a cinema that prepared something else, or said something else. And one could follow that. But they were at the margins: Franju, Melville, Cocteau, Bresson, Tati. So the official idea I developed of French cinema was that it was made by mavericks, by non-conformists. There has been so many of them since the beginning, since Feuillade. (...)
That's the war. Everything in French cinema that was professional, unionised, with home-made aesthetics and ideology, is rather what I have no interest in. And I say "rather" because there are magnificent things. I'm interested in what was marginal. But I feel this can only be said of France. American cinema has some great and sublime mavericks but (...).
Extract from Sous le vent, a film by Robert Kramer that was part of a series of film commissions (La culture en chantier) by the French Ministry of cultural affairs in 1991. My (quick) translation.
Posted by LK at 2:19 pm
Serge Daney hits New York theatres
Murmur of the World