June 23, 2022 43The protagonist of Marin Karmitz’s
Nuit noire, Calcutta (Dark Night, Cal-
cutta, 1964) is male but in every other
aspect is obviously a self- portrait of
Duras: he is writing a work about the
French vice- consul of Calcutta (ev-
idently a version of her India Song),
suffering writer’s block, succumbing
to alcoholism, and exhibiting a strong
fondness for felines. (It was perhaps not
the best idea for Karmitz to juxtapose
Duras’s final statement about artistic
paralysis with an image of a kitten ador-
ably asleep above the writer’s head.)
Marcel Hanoun’s masterpiece Une
simple histoire (A Simple Story, 1959),
a film much admired by Godard, re-
counts the journey of a woman who
travels from Lille to Paris to look for
work and ends up homeless with her
little girl after exhausting her meager
savings. The film’s stark poeticism be-
comes almost liturgical in passages ac-
companied by the music of Vivaldi and
Cimarosa. Unaccountably, the films in
“Forgotten Filmmakers” often resort to
baroque music, Bach especially. Even
José Bénazéraf’s soft porn L’Éternité
pour nous (1961), which lives down to
its English title, Sin on the Beach, relies
on frequent bursts of Handel to gild its
trashy tale about a composer manqué
performing as a lounge pianist in a sea-
side hotel. (Frodon selected the film for
inclusion in the series, but a showable
print could not be found.)Some of the best works in “Forgotten
Filmmakers” deal with the Algerian
War (1954–1962), the major political
event of the period in France. Jacques
Rozier’s Adieu Philippine (1962) hewsclosest to the traditional definition of a
New Wave film in its larky account of
a television technician romancing two
women who happen to be best friends.
With its nonprofessional actors, vigor-
ous street shooting, and emphatic visual
devices (jump cuts, soft vertical wipes),
Adieu Philippine captures both the
Americanization of French culture—
the women vacillate between Schweppes
and Coca- Cola in a café—and the en-
forced hedonism of mass tourism when
the trio ends up at a Corsican version of
Club Med. All is not youthful exuber-
ance, however. Adieu opens with a text,
“1960 sixth year of the Algerian War,”
and as in Jacques Demy’s Les Parapluies
de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cher-
bourg, 1964), the colonial conflict shad-
ows every moment of joy and freedom in
the film, as the young protagonist awaits
his inevitable summons for the draft.
The perennially rediscovered Les
Oliviers de la justice (The Olive Trees of
Justice, 1962) by the American James
Blue, which was banned in France for
many years, suggests a confluence of
Albert Camus and Robert Bresson in
its austerely lyrical chronicle of a young
pied- noir’s reluctant return to Algiers
to tend to his ailing father. Oliviers
repeatedly plaits past and present,
employing conventional flashbacks to
portray the son’s paradisal childhood
on the family farm with his Arab side-
kicks, one of whom later becomes a
fighter in the struggle for independence.
Based on a novel by Jean Pélégri,
who played the police inspector in
Bresson’s Pickpocket (1959) and stars
here as the expiring patriarch, Oliviers
clandestinely captures evidence of the
war—tank convoys, barricaded streets,a policeman searching an abandoned
shopping bag for a bomb—as the son
traverses the avenues and markets of
Algiers. Blue said that his intention in
the film “was to avoid any kind of fabri-
cated emotion,” and the film reaches an
i ntensity of a f fect i n a long ta ke nea r the
end in which an Algerian farmworker
complains about being cheated by a
racist boss who attempted to pay him
one tenth of what a Frenchman would
have been given for pruning her trees.
“A country should be for everyone,” he
says, “otherwise there is no justice.”
René Vautier’s documentary Al-
gérie en flammes (Algeria in Flames,
1958), an agitprop paean to the Alge-
rian fighters against French colonial-
ism, concludes with imagery of massed
corpses, while Alain Cavalier’s stylish
thriller- romance Le Combat dans l’île
(1962) takes a much more oblique ap-
proach to portraying the conflict. Jean-
Louis Trintignant, lean and glinting,
plays an industrialist less interested in
his position as the scion of a powerful
family than in playing war games with
a shadowy right- wing group, never
named in the film but quite clearly as-
sociated with the paramilitary OAS.
Cavalier grafts the politics of the
Algerian War onto a classic love trian-
gle. When Trintignant is forced to flee
France after a botched assassination at-
tempt, his wife (a radiant Romy Schnei-
der) takes up with his sweet- natured
childhood friend (New Wave stalwart
Henri Serre), a bookbinder who lives
in the country, and resumes her career
as an actress, which her controlling
husband had forbidden. As the film’s
English title, Fire and Ice, indicates,
Cavalier schematizes the two men aspolar opposites, down to their sartorial
choices—the fascist industrialist given
to tight- fitting suits and upturned trench
coats, the leftist artisan to loose, hand-
knit sweaters—so that the combat that
concludes the film becomes an overly
symbolic clash between opposing values.
Cavalier’s next film, L’Insoumis
(The Unvanquished, 1964), based
on the true story of Mireille Szatan-
Glaymann, a Communist lawyer who
defended Algerian militants and was
kidnapped in Algiers by the OAS be-
fore being freed by one of her captors,
dealt so overtly with the politics of the
Algerian War that it ended up being
severely censored. In Cavalier’s fiction-
alized version, the sympathetic jailer
is played with glacial aplomb by Alain
Delon, who also produced the film.
Szatan- Glaymann sued for violation of
privacy, and a court ordered twenty- five
minutes of the film to be excised, effec-
tively rendering it incomprehensible.
(The print in the retrospective is fully,
splendidly restored.) Tersely efficient—
the kidnapping takes place over the
course of one minute to a taut, unnerv-
ing beat of percussion—L’Insoumis be-
gins as a war film before becoming an
existential drama, a political thriller,
and a road movie, until it finally turns,
in one of cinema’s greatest homecom-
ing sequences, into a western.
Whether “Forgotten Filmmakers” ef-
fects a substantial reconfiguration of the
French New Wave or merely provides a
momentary provocation with its liberal
expansion of the movement’s linea-
ments, the series proves most revelatory
when it renews critical scrutiny of sev-
eral films that, if not unremembered,
remain neglected. QCreators, Innovators, and Theatremakers:
DEFY THE SMALLNESS OF THE STAGE
WITH THE GREATNESS OF YOUR DARING
Wo n g ’s fi rst book upended tragic literary theory by arguing that risk is the dramatic fulcrum of the
action. It also launched an international playwriting competition (risktheatre.com). His second book
expands on how chance directs the action, both on and off the stage.Inside you will fi nd three risk theatre tragedies by acclaimed playwrights: In Bloom (Gabriel Jason
Dean), Th e Value (Nicholas Dunn), and Children of Combs and Watch Chains (Emily McClain).
From the poppy fi elds of Afghanistan to the motel rooms and doctors’ offi ces lining interstate
expressways, these plays—by simulating risk—will show you how theatre is a dress rehearsal for life.Six risk theatre essays round off this volume. In a dazzling display from Aeschylus to Shakespeare,
Th omas Hardy, and Arthur Miller, Wong reinterprets theatre through chance and probability theory.
Aft er risk theatre, you will never look at literature in the same way.TOMORROW, WHOEVER SAYS DRAMA WILL SAY RISKEdwin Wong (1974–) is a classicist and theatre researcher specializing in the impact of the highly
improbable. He has been invited to talk at venues from the Kennedy Center and the University
of Coimbra in Portugal to international conferences held by the National New Play Network,
the Canadian Association of Th eatre Research, the Society of Classical Studies, and the Classical
Association of the Middle West and South. His fi rst book, Th e Risk Th eatre Model of Tragedy, is
igniting an international arts movement. He was educated at Brown University and lives in Victoria,
Canada. Follow him on melpomeneswork.com and Twitter @Th eoryOfTragedy.“Independent and provocative”— Robert C. Evans,
I. B. Young Professor of English at Auburn University at Montgomery
BECAUSE THEATRE
IS LIFE’S DRESS REHEARSAL
DEAN
DUNN
MCCLAINQuandt 41 43 .indd 43 5 / 25 / 22 3 : 24 PM