Sight&Sound - 11.2019

November 2019 | Sight&Sound | 47

favoured first-time filmmakers. Changes in the

French audiovisual landscape equally worked

to the newcomers’ advantage. One was the

reconfiguration of the IDHEC film school in

Paris as the Fémis in 1986, with a more overt

orientation towards auteur cinema, which led

to the 1990s filmmakers sometimes being called

the ‘Fémis generation’. Another was the increased

role of television, especially the Franco-German

channel Arte, launched in 1992, which notably

commissioned a landmark series of nine films

with an autobiographical remit, Tous les garçons

et les filles de leur âge (‘All the boys and girls of

their time’) in 1994. This enormously influential

series was made up of hour-long films directed by

Chantal Akerman, Assayas, Olivier Dahan, Emilie

Deleuze, Denis, Laurence Ferreira Barbosa, Kahn,

Patricia Mazuy and André Téchiné – a list that sees

many of the new cineastes showcased alongside

established directors such as Akerman and

Téchiné. Three of the films – Assayas’s Cold Water,

Téchiné’s Wild Reeds and Kahn’s Trop de bonheur

(Too Much Happiness) – were subsequently released

theatrically in expanded versions, to great acclaim.

Setting aside Frodon’s reservations, I would

divide the Young French Cinema into two trends.

One is the autobiographical slant, epitomised

• and encouraged – by the Arte series, but also
  evident in Savage Nights, Cédric Klapisch’s Le
  Péril jeune (1994), Desplechin’s My Sex Life... Or
  How I Got into an Argument (1996) and others, and
  descended from the New Wave ethos of a cinema
  ‘in the first person’. But whereas New Wave films
  were almost entirely white, male and straight,
  the 1990s auteurs demonstrated a diversity of
  ethnic origin, gender and sexual orientation.
  The second trend I would describe as a
  ‘political turn’ – both in terms of the contents
  of the films and the positions taken publicly by
  filmmakers. A landmark event in this respect
  was the February 1997 campaign in support of
  the ‘sans papiers’ (illegal immigrants threatened
  with deportation), spearheaded by filmmakers
  Pascale Ferran and Desplechin. ‘Politics’ in these
  films means a concern with humanitarian
  causes – a shift linked to the waning of traditional
  political parties and trade unions. The films
  of the Young French Cinema typically filtered
  politics through their impact on individual
  protagonists, or on the microcosm of a family
  or neighbourhood. Archetypally, the films of
  Guédiguian, such as Marius et Jeanette and La
  Ville est tranquille (2000), document this shift in
  the south of France, his emphasis on solidarity
  across generations and ethnic groups a response
  to the rise of the populist National Front.
  Across the Young French Cinema the new
  realism was typified by a mise en scène that
  privileged natural locations, long takes, ambient
  sounds, a lack of conventional glamour and
  naturalistic performances. Challenging the
  ubiquity of elegant Parisian locations in French
  cinema, the deprived suburbs frequently
  appeared (as in Jean-Claude Brisseau’s De bruit
  et de fureur, 1988; Denis’s No Fear, No Die; and
  Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine, 1995), as well
  as provincial locations, facilitated by regional
  subsidies: Lyon (in Laetitia Masson’s En avoir
  (ou pas), 1995), Normandy (in Human Resources),
  the north (in La Vie de Jésus and The Dreamlife

of Angels) and the south-west (in Wild Reeds).

Instead of picturesque Provence, the midi is urban

in Guédiguian and agricultural in Sandrine

Veysset’s Will It Snow at Christmas? (1996).

Beyond these aspects, however, commentators

have struggled to find a comprehensive definition

of the new realism, speaking variously of a ‘return

to the real’, a realism of ‘proximity’, ‘intimacy’,

‘solidarity’, ‘rusticity’, ‘rawness’, which produces

a ‘cautionary’, or ‘state of the nation’ cinema. For

scholar Phil Powrie, the films inhabit “an uneasy

middle ground between the ethnographically

dispassionate and the dramatically

compassionate”, while Martin O’Shaughnessy

talks of “a fragmented, disruptive and undigested

real” and Martine Beugnet a “French néo-realism”.

But if one single definition of the new realism

is elusive, there are common features that stretch

both the definition of realism and the concept of

auteur cinema: classic, Bazinian, realist tropes,

but always combined with another dimension,

whether spectacular or literary. Beyond the onus

placed on the personal dimension of auteur

cinema, one reason can be found in the traditional

French suspicion of the ‘sociological’ film, lauded

when British (as in the case of Mike Leigh or

Ken Loach) but not French; it is noticeable that

many of the films of the Young French Cinema

were praised for not being ‘just’ a portrait of a

milieu or predicament. Thus, a self-reflexive

dimension always gets in the way of transparent

representation. In La Haine, for instance, Kassovitz

imagines the Parisian banlieue through the lens

of Scorsese; in My Sex Life..., Desplechin filters

his narcissistic Parisian intellectuals through

Joyce; and in Will It Snow for Christmas?, Veysset

juxtaposes patriarchal exploitation with fairytale.

Riding the wave

With hindsight, both the accent on the personal

and the political in the new French realism have

blossomed into major trends in the 21st century.

The continued surge in women’s filmmaking in

particular has been astonishing. Female directors

of the Young French Cinema generation, such

as Breillat, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Dominique

Cabrera, Anne Fontaine, Nicole Garcia, Tonie

Marshall, Laetitia Masson and Brigitte Roüan,

are all still working, opening the door for Céline

Sciamma, Agnès Jaoui, Rebecca Zlotowski and

others. In films by women, but not only, the

combination of sexual explicitness and violence

paved the way for the ‘new French extremism’,

or cinéma du corps (cinema of the body), from

Breillat’s Romance (1999) and Virginie Despentes’s

Baise-moi (2000) to Julia Ducournau’s Raw (2016).

The new realism also fed into the proliferation

of documentaries, such as Agnès Varda’s The

Gleaners and I (2000) and Nicolas Philibert’s Etre

et avoir (2002), and to socially conscious but more

classically made films such as Jacques Audiard’s A

Prophet (2009) and Stéphane Brizé’s The Measure of

a Man (2015). The success of Savage Nights, Xavier

Beauvois’s Don’t Forget You Are Going to Die (1995),

Wild Reeds and Olivier Ducastel and Jacques

Martineau’s Drôle de Félix (1999), meanwhile,

led to a significant French queer cinema.

Recently, there’s been a trend for films, such

as Mia Hansen-Løve’s Eden (2014), that mine the

1990s for historical background. Lying behind

them is a nostalgia for ‘the best of times and the

worst of times’. The latter was the Aids crisis,

rarely explicitly touched on by the French films of

the 1990s, with the exception of Savage Nights; but

20 years later Robin Campillo’s 120 BPM (2017)

and Christophe Honoré’s Sorry Angel (2018) have

returned to the topic. But in other ways, it was the

best of times for French filmmakers. Ultimately,

the 1990s still shines brightly because it was

the last real golden era for French cinema – an

age when films were not in competition with

longform TV series, when cinemas were not

threatened by electronic devices; a time when

French cinema felt thrillingly alive and vital.

Several of the films mentioned above screen

in the S&S Deep Focus season ‘Maurice Pialat

and the New French Realism’, at BFI Southbank

from 14 October until the end of December

Cyril Collard’s Savage Nights (1992) Olivier Assayas’s Cold Water (1994)

The new realism privileged

natural locations, long takes,

ambient sounds and a lack

of conventional glamour

Sandrine Veysset’s Will It Snow for Christmas? (1996)

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VERSION Deep Focus, 6