Sight&Sound - 11.2019

42 | Sight&Sound | November 2019

f Maurice Pialat never had the same

impact outside the country of his birth

as he did within it, perhaps that is partly

down to his mission – to show France nue, naked,

with all its prejudices, sexual imbalance and

class tensions laid out before his camera, with

no apology or direct criticism. When Cahiers du

cinéma in 1998 convened a meeting of young

French filmmakers to discuss the influence of the

New Wave, the conversation soon turned to Pialat,

with the majority asserting that he was far more

significant in their formation. While his refusal

to concede to cliché and the sentimental, as well

as his boldness in tackling unpredictable subjects,

is perfectly evident in the work of such overt

disciples as Cédric Kahn and Arnaud Desplechin,

it’s much harder to define exactly where Pialat

himself springs from – and in what tradition

in French cinema he takes his place, if any.

Any attempt to assess Pialat’s cinema is

necessarily a catalogue of contradictions.

In generational terms, he should rightly be

considered a member of the French New Wave,

but he stood apart from them and only shot his

first feature, L’Enfance nue (Naked Childhood), in

1968, when he was 43. His films were challenging

in their brutal subject matter and elliptical

narratives, and extremely autobiographical, yet

he was capable of reaching a large audience, and

moving them with an underlying tenderness. He

was open to working in genre – the cop thriller

(Police, 1985), the literary adaptation (Under the

Sun of Satan/Sous le soleil de Satan, 1987, from a

Georges Bernanos novel), the biopic (Van Gogh,

1991) – but they emerged with all the hallmarks

of his more personal projects. In their directness

and rough edges his films often appeared to be

largely improvised, but were actually in the

main very closely scripted. And while he enjoyed

working with non-professionals, he was happy to

cast established stars – Gérard Depardieu, Isabelle

Huppert, Sophie Marceau, Jacques Dutronc – and

succeeded in moulding them to his vision.

Born in the centre of France, the Auvergne,

Pialat spent his formative years in the Parisian

suburbs, the latter experience reflected in the

bleak alternative view of the city provided by

his early short documentary L’Amour existe (Love

Exists, 1960). The film that made the greatest

impression on him as a boy was Jean Renoir’s La

Bête humaine (1938), a contemporary adaptation

of Emile Zola’s novel dominated by working-

class figures steeped in the soot and oil of the

railways. This was very much la France profonde,

the near-mythical world of rural life outside the

big cities, up there on the big screen. It’s easy to

see Jean Gabin, the star of Renoir’s film, as a model

actor for Pialat – a solid man of the people, totally

believable in a fictional context and unaffected

in his speech and manner. Although Pialat was

very grudging in his praise of other filmmakers

(while at the same time denying his own worth),

he held to Renoir and Marcel Carné as the two

masters of classic French cinema. Of the two, he

inclined more to Renoir’s brand of realism – a

natural way of acting, a freedom to react to the

conditions of the shoot, an open camera style

in natural locations – than Carné’s supremely

crafted world filled with poetic dialogue and

gestures, and usually filmed on elaborate sets.

Pialat himself tried on various hats through

the 1950s and 60s, making observational

documentaries and quirky shorts borrowing

from silent cinema and surrealism. L’Enfance

nue grew out of a documentary project about

the fostering of children. He had researched the

subject deeply in the same town – Lens, in the

north of France – where he made the film. As he

would later express it, “While shooting L’Enfance

nue, I was thinking about Repas de bébé.” He was

referring to Baby’s Breakfast, a short made by the

Lumière brothers in 1895, a static record of an

amusing, everyday event, but one staged for the

camera. And this sense of the lens as observer,

transforming a reality into something potentially

miraculous, remained central to his method,

and his approach to whatever happened in

front of it. This placed him some distance from

the famous New Wave directors, who in their

backgrounds as film critics had a deeply self-

conscious relationship with cinema – Godard

deconstructing the medium, Truffaut celebrating

literary tropes, Rivette reflecting on the theatre

and life, and so on. If Pialat was close to anyone

from that generation, it was the now rather

forgotten Jacques Rozier, whose Adieu Philippine

(1962) was a wry tale of young men and women

playing amorous games, filmed in real locations

with an unknown cast. But Rozier’s film freely

employs post-synchronised dialogue and music-

driven sequences, which were far from Pialat’s

preference for direct sound, however rough, and

his very sparse use of music, usually heard

from onscreen gramophones or performers.

MAURICE

PIALAT

AND THE NEW FRENCH REALISM

Deep Focus

Maurice Pialat’s stark, unsentimental films left a mark on French cinema that arguably outweighs even that of the

nouvelle vague. A director who thrived on conflict, he captured moments of searing emotional power on screen,

inspiring a generation of French directors and actors. As Sight & Sound brings the first complete Pialat retrospective

in the UK to BFI Southbank, alongside a programme of films by the Pialat-influenced young French filmmakers of

the 1990s, David Thompson explores the pugnacious realist’s career, Ginette Vincendeau assesses his impact on 90s

new realism, and James Bell talks to Olivier Assayas about a master who only received his full due late in life.

This sense of the lens as observer,

transforming a reality into

something potentially miraculous,

remained central to Pialat’s method

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VERSION Deep Focus, 1