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CHAPTER 1
CAHIERS DU CINÉMA STREET VENDOR:
Excuse me, Mister — do you have something against Youth?
MICHEL: Yeah, I prefer old people.
Breathless (A Bout de souffle, 1960), Jean-Luc Godard's debut feature
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YOUNG CINEMA AND FIRST-TIMERS
Among critics and filmmakers, the expression le jeune cinéma français is often used to refer to any striking or especially creative surge in contemporary French film-making. It translates literally as young French cinema, a useful way of considering what Réné Prédal calls the film industry's "incessant renewal," its velocity and forward momentum. Young cinema: the term suggests enthusiasm and vigor, youthful films made by ambitious newcomers, something to reinvigorate a stale tradition. Such traits can be qualified, though, by more negative aspects of textual youthfulness — films that are culturally ephemeral, perhaps, or faddish and immature. Weighing up both sides, as one recent French first-time director observed: "There is surely more clumsiness or errors in a first film, but they're often effaced by the feeling of sincerity, of energy and passion for the work." Either way, this notion of young cinema — a generative force that supplants old cinema, shaping a field in constant flux — is vital for understanding contemporary French film. So prompted, this chapter will explore the phenomenon of young, first-time cinema in France today, a surprisingly neglected issue. As we will see, modern French film culture relies heavily on a vanguard of emergent professionals, debutants, whose unpracticed but often startlingly accomplished talents are foregrounded forcefully within a highly competitive industrial marketplace. This systematic emphasis upon young cinema makes France unique.
Pursuing the French young cinema model, often described as an elastic or rather slippery term, does confirm the importance of debutant filmmakers, both historically and in the contemporary moment. This is an industry built strategically around getting untried first-timers, often with little or no professional experience, into the trade quickly, then soliciting disproportionate attention to their work. This system is a legacy, of course, of France and arguably world cinema's most beloved moment, the French New Wave, which based much of its (self-) promotion, artistic profile, and commercial viability on the fact that its Young Turks were amateur-professionals, unschooled movie brats both on- and off-screen. As a group, the Cahiers cohort and its acolytes traded off the rupture with the past they embodied, as uncorrupted outsiders breaking — rapidly — into an outmoded profession, reinventing the medium from more unorthodox, personal, and, above all, youthful perspectives. So attractive was this New Wave paradigm — young cinema as rebellious as freethinking as modern — that it became French cinema's definitive global export. Today, still, the work of contemporary debutants pays homage to the legacy of landmark debuts from this period, like Jean-Pierre Melville's The Silence of the Sea (Le Silence de la mer, 1949), Agnès Varda's La Pointe-Courte (1954), and their more famous descendents Breathless and The 400 Blows (Les 400 coups, 1959).
Since the 1950s the figure of the first-time filmmaker, usually young, has become an institutional fixture of French cinema, integral to its national and international identity. A sizeable portion of French production now hinges upon CNCsponsorship of emergent film-making, part of the French state's mission to safeguard French cinema domestically and boost its profile abroad. Although the CNC had intervened in the film industry since its 1946 inception, its efforts became more aggressive throughout the 1950s, eventually consolidating around the avances sur recettes grants. These avances sur recettes were tested in different forms between 1955 and 1959 (the year after André Malraux moved the CNC from the Ministry of Industry and Commerce to the Ministry of Culture), and then implemented as formal policy in 1960. Avances sur recettes responded to two of French cinema's most chronic problems. The first point, a bottom-up concern, was that the 1950s film industry seemed unable to integrate its younger professionals with any alacrity. In an era when obligatory traineeships lasted up to ten years, and conservative producers resisted hiring newcomers in advanced roles like director anyway, it was widely felt that the trade was ossified. The second matter was a top-down perception, that despite the commercial rejuvenation of postwar French cinema, to many, its artistic imperatives were being overlooked. Hence, pressure mounted on the CNC to support more creatively ambitious projects, worthy flag-bearers for French film culture. Responding to both issues, the CNC designed the avances sur recettes in its own words "to promote the creative renewal and to encourage the direction of first films, and to support an independent cinema, audacious in relation to marketplace norms, which could not maintain its financial equilibrium without public aid."
Following this logic, avances sur recettes applicants (typically French directors, although scriptwriters, producers, and even filmmakers of other European nationalities were eligible) submitted production proposals based on their demonstrated artistic ambition and French-language orientation, with strong preference given to debutants. Soon, a young cinema began en masse, while the avances sur recettes became arguably the world's most famous and influential film grants, credited widely, as Charlie Michael suggests, with encouraging "a slew of young directors and low-budget productions, soon to be embraced as the aesthetic of the New Wave." More than 120 first-time directors, in fact, made commercially released features between 1958 and 1964 alone. (Between the late 1940s and mid-1950s, by contrast, first-timers were responsible for fewer than thirteen features a year.) And while the New Wave always snatches the headlines, today it is worth noting that 15 percent of all films produced in France each year still result from successful avances sur recettes pitches, many of them by new directors.
Following this production dynamic, the cult of young cinema has become central to the way that French cinema showcases its wares, at home and abroad. The model underpins government-sponsored agencies like UniFrance, which exists to "play a role at every stage in the life of a French film abroad: from its selection at a recognized film festival or its screening at an international market to its commercial release in one or more international territories. ... In this way, UniFrance works to increase the visibility of all recent French films." A number of organizations affiliated with UniFrance explicitly cite the jeune cinéma mantra, such as the Saint-Ouen-based Collectif Jeune Cinéma. This independent cooperative, founded in 1971, supports upcoming filmmakers through events like its Paris Festival des Cinémas Différents, and a foreign sales division which gives export opportunities for new short filmmakers, as was recently the case with figures like Frédéric Tachou, Emmanuelle Sarrouy, and Augustin Gimel. More generally, a crucial part of the French mission to valorize its newest cinema is highlighting the latest breakthrough directors. UniFrance's regular collaborations with the New York City-based New Directors New Films festival is just one effort to position recent French cinema as internationally distinctive, pioneering. In the same vein, also in America, is the French Ministry of Culture's Nouvelles fictions series, a package of ten to twelve debutant films which are pitched annually as a heavily subsidized touring screening package to schools and higher education institutions in North America. In such instances, young cinema travels internationally as the distillation, or epitome, of what French cinema has to offer.
Reinforcing this mentality, many French institutions, some iconic, champion the nation's young cinema. Most prestigious of these is the debutant film-making prize at France's annual national film awards, the Césars. After the French Film Academy (L'Académie des Arts et Techniques du Cinéma) was formed under the direction of Georges Cravenne in 1974, the Césars began the following year, with a debutant category inaugurated in 1982 as the award for Best First Work (César de la meilleure première œuvre). The prize not only recognized, belatedly, the importance of a debutant generation to French cinema, but also neatly differentiated the Césars from their American counterparts, the Academy Awards. Additionally, the Best First Work was a nice antidote to cinema awards programs dominated by veterans being compensated for long professional service. In 1982 — retrospectively a symbolic moment — the first ever Best First Work César went to Jean-Jacques Beineix's controversial cinéma du look harbinger Diva: to many eyes a vulgar, apolitical, and excessively youth-oriented commercial piece; to its supporters a lively and welcome break with a dour recent cinematic past. In keeping with its youthful ideology, moreover, the first-timer César is constantly repackaged and reinvented by the French Film Academy. In 2000 it became the César for Best First Work of Fiction (César de la meilleure première œuvre de fiction), and then in 2006 it received its current, more streamlined title, simply the Best First Film (César du meilleur premier film).
Whatever its name, the debutant César award is just part of a constellation of French cinematic events that favor, and honor, the newcomer. These include, notably, the Prix Jean Vigo, a highly prestigious award for artistic originality and excellence, which since 1951 has been heavily weighted towards first-timers. Its recipients include Claude Chabrol, forLe Beau Serge (1959), Godard, for Breathless, and, more recently, Bruno Dumont, for La Vie de Jésus (1997). In 2000, the venerable Prix Louis-Delluc committee followed suit by adding a Best First Film prize, given that first year to Laurent Cantet's Human Resources (Ressources humaines). Even more systematically, the principle of youthful cinema and emergent filmmakers shapes France's highest profile site of global film culture, the Cannes Film Festival. At Cannes, the pro-new doctrine informs the Un Certain Regard panel (which awards one to three annual grants to enable distribution for newer directors in France); the annual Caméra d'or prize for Best First Film (awarded, for instance, to a French film in 2002, Julie Lopes-Curval's Seaside [Bord de mer]); and the International Critics Week series, which screens both features and shorts that are limited to first- or second-time films.
Turning to a contemporary frame, the vitality of debutant cinema is clear across the French production landscape. Consider, as evidence, the figures compiled by the CNC about first-time productions in France. Statistically, the data confirm that first-timers now reliably contribute around 40 percent of all films made or coproduced in France, a process augmented by the avances sur recettes.
From our evidence so far, the phenomenon of young French cinema, and specifically the contingent of films directed and released by first-timers, seems undeniably important to an assessment of contemporary French cinema. Obstacles to such an approach, however, soon become clear, as does a corollary critical reluctance to address, or an outright bias against, debutant filmmaking, not only in relation to French cinema but also in film studies itself. (Here and elsewhere, analyzing recent French cinema yields productive conclusions about the state of an entire critical discipline.) There is, most pressingly, the ubiquitous auteur complex, a methodology predicated on an established oeuvre and coherent body of texts bearing a signature style and themes. Respondents to recent French cinema, it must be said, return time and time again to familiar auteur candidates (especially Luc Besson, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, and Mathieu Kassovitz) whose impact, while obviouslyimportant, becomes disproportionately inflated. In an industry predicated on newness and high cultural turnover, this lure of the familiar — critics nuancing the known rather than broaching the unknown — narrows the canon and neglects the discourses, and texts, that continually propel French cinema forwards.
Focusing instead on French debutant cinema creates invigorating challenges. How do we appraise a filmmaker or group of filmmakers with only one feature, and possibly a handful of student works or shorts, to their name? Must critical intervention wait until the newcomer becomes an established auteur, or at least survives the passage of time? (The CNC'Sdata confirm that approximately half of France's debutant filmmakers do manage to complete at least one follow-up feature.) The hazards — but also rewards — facing the analyst of young French cinema are incisively explored by Michel Ciment in a 2003 Positif editorial, "Premières œuvres." Ciment's agenda, drawn up for an issue dealing with a slew of debut features, claims that many prejudices circulate around debutant cinema — accounts of which, he reports, are surprisingly rare in any case. Most reductive, Ciment suggests, is the fatally patronizing tone which permeates analyses of first works, as if the qualities of a debut text emerge merely as precursors to subsequent achievements; the first work can only ever be a work-in-progress. Almost never, moreover, does the critic rest content with an overarching analysis of a filmmaker or an emergent work based on that emergent work alone. Although the litany of never-repeated debut masterworks is clear — the editorial cites as obvious targets Citizen Kane (1941), L'Atalante (1934), and Hiroshima mon amour (1959), plus lesser known contenders like Luchino Visconti's Ossessione (1943) and Joseph Losey's The Boy With Green Hair (1948) — Ciment argues that few explore the common principles guiding the first work sui generis. This is to our loss, Ciment concludes, for the debut work, considered on its own terms, offers the engaged critic "an audacious madness, a praiseworthy lack of concern for the rules of the trade, its setbacks, the economic contingencies that can bring [the filmmaker] down." Among many artists, indeed, from Welles to Truffaut, a case could be made that the first feature is often their richest and most lasting contribution of all.
Already, we have seen that a sustained analysis of first-time cinema is crucial to understanding contemporary French film. We should follow Ciment, however, in approaching this debutant cinema as a distinctive tendency, as neither a set of "precursor" works by nascent auteurs-to-be, nor "pure" works abstracted from France's cultural-industrial complex. Instead, we can analyze contemporary French debutant cinema on its own terms: its transtextual features, the attributes that so engage — and are consciously configured by — the mechanisms of France's proyoung cinema industry. None of this is to deny, of course, the extraordinary accomplishments and artistic flair often shown by individual filmmakers among French first-time productions. But a guiding rationale here is that seeking out new or breakthrough films, some of them obscure outside France, is a vital tool to assess the true breadth of French cinema, the source of its perpetual regeneration. In this way, we enrich the twenty-first-century French canon, while also understanding the subsidized newness that is designed to elevate French film above its peers.
To pursue this agenda we will now address chiefly, as a representative sample, the five features that were nominated for the Best First Film César on January 24, 2008, films that were all released in 2007. The films are: Lola Doillon's Et toi, t'es sur qui?, Vincent Paronnaud's and Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis (Persépolis), Mia Hansen-Løve's All Is Forgiven (Tout est pardonné), Céline Sciamma's Water Lilies (La Naissance des pieuvres), and Anne le Ny's Those Who Remain (Ceux qui restent). In their design, execution and reception, this group provides an array of materials, a benchmark with which to analyze French debutant cinema. (Hansen-Løve, Paronnaud, Satrapi, and Sciamma all received avances sur recettes grants for their work.) While all the 2008 nominees were hailed in the trade press as a keenly competitive batch, representative of a vigorous industry, the First Film category was especially singled out for praise — François-Pier Pelinard-Lambert, for instance, referred to it in Le Film français as "a beautiful palette of talents." Another fact universally noted was that all five films were either directed or codirected by women, a prompt about the impact of feminine cinema that will be taken up systematically in Chapter 4. For our purposes, this first-time quintet poses interrelated questions. Why were these particular films seen as pinnacles, best case scenarios, of the craft of first-time French cinema? What circumstances created such debutant productions, and how were they marketed? What textual features unite them, as first-time works, and in what ways do they address their status as novice projects with auteurist ambitions? How did these debutants intervene in their own cultural reception in France, ingratiating themselves with critics? A final issue to consider is the matter of this quintet's engagement with the currents of cineliteracy that so decisively shape contemporary French cinema.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Brutal Intimacy"
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Copyright © 2011 Tim Palmer.
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