Six in Paris

Jean Rouch (Paris – 31 May 1917, Niger – 18 February 2004) was a French filmmaker and anthropologist.

At their best his films are about peak experiences and are densely packed with detail. They show individuals who display a creative spirit, a wholeness and excitement which are rare in any cinema and virtually unique in ethnographic films. Moreover they are not just about “primitive peoples” but also depict his own culture and always they are concerned with dynamic situations of culture change.

He is considered to be one of the founders of the cinéma vérité in France, sharing the aesthetics of the direct cinema in the US pionered by Richard Leacock, D.A. Pennebaker and Albert and David Maysles. Rouch’s practice as a filmmaker for over sixty years in Africa, was characterized by the idea of shared anthropology. Influenced by his discovery of surrealism in his early twenties, many of his films blur the line between fiction and documentary, creating a new style of ethnofiction. He was also hailed by the French New Wave as one of theirs. His seminal film Me a Black (Moi un Noir) pionered the technique of jump cut popularized by Jean-Luc Godard. Godard said of Rouch in the Cahiers du Cinéma (Notebooks on Cinema) n°94 April 1959, “In charge of research for the Musée de l’Homme (French, “Museum of Man”) Is there a better definition for a filmmaker?” Along his career, Rouch was no stranger to controversy. He would often repeat, “Glory to he who brings dispute.”
He began his long association with African subjects in 1941 after working as civil engineer supervising a construction project in Niger. However, shortly afterwards he returned to France to participate in the Resistance. After the war, he did a brief stint as a journalist with Agence France-Presse before returning to Africa where he become an influential anthropologist and sometimes controversial filmmaker.

Jean Rouch is generally considered the father of Nigerien cinema. Despite arriving as a colonialist in 1941, Rouch remained in Niger after independence, and mentored a generation of Nigerien filmmakers and actors, including Damouré Zika and Oumarou Ganda.

Arriving in Niamey as a French colonial hydrology engineer in 1941, Rouch became interested in Zarma and Songhai ethnology and began to film local people and their rituals. In the 1940s he met Damouré Zika the son of a Songhai/Sorko traditional healer and fisherman, near the town of Ayorou on the Niger River. After ten Sorko workers in a construction depot which Rouch supervised were killed by a lightning strike, Zika’s grandmother, a famous possession medium and spiritual advisor, presided over a ritual for the men, which Rouch later claimed sparked his desire to make enthographic film.

By 1950, Rouch had made the first films set in Niger with “au pays des mages noirs” (1947), in 1948 " l’initiation à la danse des possédés" and “Les magiciens de Wanzarbé” in 1949, all of which document the spirit possession rituals of the Songhai, Zarma, and Sorko peoples who live along the Niger river.

Damouré Zika and Rouch became friends, and Rouch began in 1950 to use Zika as the focus of his films demonstration the traditions, culture, and ecology of the people of the Niger River valley. The first of 150 in which Zika appeared was “Bataille sur le grand fleuve” (1950–52), portraying the lives, ceremonies and hunting of Sorko fishermen. Rouch spent four months traveling with Sorko fishermen in a traditional Pirogue filming the piece.

During the 1950s, Rouch began to produce longer, narrative films. In 1954 he filmed Damouré Zika in “Jaguar”, as a young Songhai man traveling for work to the Gold Coast. Filmed as a silent ethnographic piece, Zika helped re-edit the film into a feature length movie which stood somewhere between documentary and fiction, and provided dialog and commentary for a 1969 release. In 1957 Rouch directed in Cote d’Ivoire “Moi un noir” with the young Nigerien filmaker Oumarou Ganda, who had recently returned from French military service in Indochina. Ganda went on to become the first great Nigerien film director and actor. By the early 1970s, Rouch, with cast, crew, and cowriting from his Nigerien collaborators, was producing full length dramatic films in Niger, such as Petit à petit (“Little by Little” : 1971) and Cocorico Monsieur Poulet (“Cocka-doodle-doo Mr. Chicken”: 1974).

Still, many of the ethnographic films produced in the colonial era by Jean Rouch and others were rejected by African film makers because in their view they distorted African realities.

He is considered as one the pioneers of Nouvelle Vague, of visual anthropology and the father of ethnofiction. Rouch’s films mostly belonged to the cinéma vérité school – a term that Edgar Morin used in a 1960 France-Observateur article referring to Dziga Vertov’s Kinopravda. His best known film, one of the central works of the Nouvelle Vague, is Chronique d’un été (1961) which he filmed with sociologist Edgar Morin and in which he portrays the social life of contemporary France. Throughout his career, he used his camera to report on life in Africa. Over the course of five decades, he made almost 120 films.

With Jean-Michel Arnold he founded the international documentary film festival, the Cinéma du Réel at the Pompidou Centre in Paris in 1978.

He died in an automobile accident in February 2004, some 16 kilometres from the town of Birni-N’Konni, Niger.

Jean-Daniel Pollet (1936-2004) is a French film director and screenwriter who was most active in the 1960s and 1970s. He was associated with two approaches to filmmaking: comedies which blended burlesque and melancholic elements, and poetic films based on texts by writers such as the French poet Francis Ponge.

Pollet was born on 20 June 1936 in La Madeleine, Nord, in France. His film career started in 1958, when he did a short film set in Paris called Pourvu qu’on ait l’ivresse…, in which Pollet filmed the movements of dancers’ silhouettes. Pollet built on the images and themes from this first film in many of his later works, by incorporating elements of popular comedies imbued with both burlesque and melancholic elements. In the early 1960s, Pollet began exploring another approach to filmmaking with the film Méditerranée, which he made over two years with Volker Schlöndorff. Pollet tried to create a form of poetic film, using texts and commentaries by writers such as Philippe Sollers, Jean Thibeaudeau, and Francis Ponge.

In the 1990s, he was paralyzed after a train accident, and so he filmed his last movies in the areas around his house in the French town of Cadenet. In 2006, when Pollet realized that his death was approaching, he wrote his last screenplay, Jour après jour, which was finished by Jean-Paul Fargier. Pollet died at the age of 68 on 9 September 2004 at Cadenet, Vaucluse, in France. —Wikipedia

The most subtle and traditional of the many luminaries launched to prominence as a member of the French New Wave, Eric Rohmer is also among the movement’s most consistent and enduring talents. Basing his work upon antecedents in literature as much as those in the cinema, Rohmer made his name crafting talky, feather-light romantic comedies and chamber dramas distinguished by economical camerawork, a warmly ironic tone, an affection for youth, and a fascination with place and time. His intensely personal private life — according to legend, not even his own mother knew he was an internationally acclaimed, albeit pseudonymously named, filmmaker — has stood in direct contrast to the emotional openness of his movies, which, in intimate and illuminating detail, explore the limitless entanglements, disappointments, and possibilities facing contemporary relationships.
Born Jean-Marie Maurice Scherer on December 1, 1920, in Nancy, France, Rohmer later relocated to Paris, where he worked variously as a newspaper reporter and a literature teacher. In 1946, he assumed another pseudonym, Gilbert Cordier, to publish a novel, Elizabeth. At the end of the 1940s, he began moving away from reporting to focus on film criticism, becoming a fixture of Henri Langlois’ Cinematheque Francais alongside the likes of fellow movie buffs Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, and Claude Chabrol. In 1950 — the year Rohmer completed his first 16 mm short film, Journal d’un scelerat — he, Godard, and Rivette founded the short-lived Gazette du Cinema, and by the next year he and his cohorts had joined the staff of Andre Bazin’s Cahiers du Cinema. After abandoning work on his never-completed feature debut, Les Petites Filles Modeles, in 1956, Rohmer assumed editorial control of the famed publication, a position he held for the next seven years. In 1957, he and Chabrol also collaborated on Hitchcock, an influential study of the film master.
With Godard serving as producer, Rohmer also continued helming short subjects like 1956’s La Sonate à Kreutzer. After one more short film, 1958’s Veronique et son Cancre, his long-awaited feature-length bow, La Signe du Lion, appeared the following year. Low key and warm, the film set Rohmer squarely apart from his Cahiers associates and their more consciously revolutionary aims. Springing forth from more literary and philosophical conceits, he soon began work on his Six Moral Tales, a sextet of subtle and deeply personal psychological portraits exploring the role of temptation in contemporary relationships. The first in the series, the short La Boulangere de Monceau, appeared in 1962, but after wrapping up 1963’s hour-long La Carriere de Suzanne, Rohmer was forced to suspend work on the project in the wake of resigning from his Cahiers post. In 1964, he accepted a position in the French television industry, where over the next several years he directed over a dozen films including profiles of Lumiere and Dreyer for the Filmmakers of our Time series, as well as other documentaries on such diffuse subjects as the Parsifal legend, the Industrial Revolution, and the lives of Paris’ female student population.
At the same time, Rohmer also continued his extracurricular film projects. On 1964’s short Nadja a Paris, he first teamed with cinematographer Nestor Almendros, who would become the director of photography on much of his greatest work, and a year later he contributed an episode to the New Wave compilation Paris vu Par…. Finally, in 1966, Rohmer completed La Collectioneuse, the third of the Six Moral Tales and the first shot in color. The winner of the Silver Bear Award at the Berlin Film Festival, the film fully established his graceful, sensual style and ability to employ the natural settings of his work to create an evocative, almost tangible narrative environment. With 1969’s Ma Nuit Chez Maud, he achieved his international breakthrough, netting Oscar nominations for Best Foreign Language Picture and Best Screenplay. Its follow-up, the crystalline 1971 feature Le Genou de Claire, was another major critical success across the globe, and with the next year’s L’ Amour l’Apres-midi, Rohmer drew to a close the Moral Tales series with yet another success.
Four years passed before Rohmer returned to filmmaking. Turning away from the personal storytelling of his previous work, he next adapted the period novella Die Marquise von O…. In 1978, he offered Perceval le Gallois, a retelling of Chretien de Troyes’ 12th century epic poem set to music. Though among his finest films, it was also his least typical, and failed to find favor with the majority of his supporters. After a TV film titled Catherine de Heilbronn, Rohmer returned to the contemporary material of his greatest popular successes, launching a new six-feature series dubbed Comedies and Proverbs with 1981’s La Femme de l’Aviateur. After 1982’s Le Beau Mariage, he mounted the following year’s Pauline à la Plage, garnering another Silver Bear in Berlin. The fourth installment in the series, Les Nuits de la Pleine Lune, premiered in 1984. Le Rayon Vert bowed two years later, winning the Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion honors and raising eyebrows when it premiered not in theaters but on French pay-television.
In 1986, Rohmer delayed concluding the Comedies and Proverbs series by first helming Quatre Aventures de Reinette et Mirabelle, a return of sorts to the tradition of his morality tales. Finally, 1987’s L’Ami de Mon Amie brought the sextet to a close. Quickly, Rohmer began work on a third series, the Tales of the Four Seasons quartet. The first film, Conte de Printemps, appeared in 1989, with Un Conte d’Hiver bowing three years later. Again, however, Rohmer chose to delay a work-in-progress, next turning to 1993’s L’ Arbre, le Maire et la Mediatheque. The episodic Les Rendez-Vous De Paris followed in 1995, but the next year Rohmer returned to his season cycle with Conte d’Été. Conte d’Automne followed in 1998, achieving further international acclaim for the director.

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The lynchpin of the French New Wave, Jean-Luc Godard was arguably the most influential filmmaker of the postwar era. Beginning with his groundbreaking 1959 feature debut A Bout de Souffle, Godard revolutionized the motion picture form, freeing the medium from the shackles of its long-accepted cinematic language by rewriting the rules of narrative, continuity, sound, and camera work. Later in his career, he also challenged the common means of feature production, distribution, and exhibition, all in an effort to subvert the conventions of the Hollywood formula to create a new kind of film.

Godard was born in Paris on December 3, 1930, the second of four children. After receiving his primary education in Nyon, Switzerland – during World War II, he became a naturalized Swiss citizen – he studied ethnology at the Sorbonne, but spent the vast majority of his days at the Cine-Club du Quartier Latin, where he first met fellow film fanatics Francois Truffaut and Jacques Rivette. In May 1950, the three men united to publish La Gazette du Cinema, a monthly film journal which ran through November of the same year; here Godard printed his first critical pieces, which appeared both under his own name and under the pseudonym Hans Lucas. With Rivette’s 1950 short feature Quadrille, Godard made his acting debut, also appearing in Eric Rohmer’s Presentation ou Charlotte et son Steack the following year.

In January 1952, Godard began writing for Cahiers du Cinema, the massively influential film magazine which also grew to include staffers Truffaut, Rivette, Rohmer, and Claude Chabrol, among others. However, Godard’s first tenure at Cahiers proved to be brief: In the autumn of 1952, he left France to return to Switzerland, where he worked on the construction of the Grande-Dixence Dam. With his earnings, Godard was able to finance his first film, the short subject Operation Beton. While in Geneva in 1955, he helmed his sophomore effort, the ten-minute Une Femme Coquette, subsequently appearing in Rivette’s Le Coup de Berger. Upon returning to France in the summer of 1956, Godard resumed his work at Cahiers after a four-year break from writing. There he rose to the top ranks of French film criticism while honing his increasingly fresh and freewheeling directorial style over the course of the short comedies Tous les Garcons s’appellent Patrick (1957), Charlotte et son Jules, and Une Histoire d’Eau (both 1958), the latter co-directed by Truffaut.

In 1959, Godard embarked on his feature debut, A Bout de Souffle (Breathless). Released at roughly the same time as Truffaut’s Les Quatre Cents Coups and Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour, the picture helped establish the emergence of what was dubbed the French New Wave, a revolutionary movement in film heralded primarily by Cahiers alumni. A Bout de Souffle quickly earned global acclaim as the definitive document of its era. Based on a rough story outline contributed by Truffaut, it was shot without a script, its inspiration the American gangster movies which its director loved so passionately. Crafted with a rough-and-tumble, home-movie-like quality, it dodged all accepted notions of narrative and visual storytelling, adopting a freeform hipness unlike anything before it and sparking a revolution in low-budget, on-the-fly independent filmmaking. Seemingly overnight, Godard was revered as the most important cinematic talent of his generation.

Quickly, however, Godard’s refusal to be pigeonholed became apparent, and despite a few works of lesser quality, his work over the course of the upcoming decade was a remarkable period of innovation, experimentation, and sustained genius. In 1960, he resurfaced with his second feature, an oddball political thriller titled Le Petit Soldat. The first of many films to star his then-wife Anna Karina, it became the subject of controversy over its characters’ connection to the Algerian crisis and was banned in France for three years. Shooting for the first time in color and in CinemaScope, he next filmed 1961’s comic tale Une Femme Est une Femme, followed a year later by the episodic essay on prostitution Vivre Se Vie. Again, both starred Karina, prompting criticism – similar to the charges of indulgence leveled at Michelangelo Antonioni over his frequent use of actress Monica Vitti – that Godard was using her as a non-actress, a mere screen presence utilized and manipulated in ways that she herself did not fully comprehend.

The first of Godard’s films to receive a critical thrashing was 1963’s war drama Les Carabiniers, but Le Mepris, a study of the nature of cinema itself, starring Brigitte Bardot, returned him to reviewers’ good graces. An astonishingly prolific and brilliant period followed, led off by 1964’s Bande a Part and Une Femme Mariee. Pierrot le Fou and Alphaville, une Etrange Aventure de Lemmy Caution, a singular science fiction effort, appeared in 1965, and a year later no less than three new features – Masculin Feminin, Made in USA, and Deux ou Trois Choses Que Je Sais d’Elle – bowed. Godard repeated the trifecta in 1967 with La Chinoise, ou Plutot a la Chinoise, Loin du Viet-Nam, and finally the apocalyptic Weekend, his most formally radical film since A Bout de Souffle.

Beginning in 1968, Godard’s so-called “radical” period emerged and took form during an era when the political leanings below the surface of many of his earlier works began to position themselves as the director’s dominant focus. Through Anne Wiazemsky, his second wife, Godard was initiated into Paris’ Maoist underground. Ultimately, his entire worldview shifted from that of the obsessive cinephile to a radical outlook which even prompted him to reject his own film oeuvre as “bourgeois.” The global tumult that defined 1968 further informed his consciousness as he mounted Le Gai Savior, a series of political dialogues punctuated by telling images and symbols. Next was Un Film Comme les Autres, a collection of images juxtaposed with the various conversations between workers and students. One Plus One – a documentary portrait of the Rolling Stones also known as Sympathy for the Devil – followed. The final project of 1968, One American Movie (a planned cinéma vérité collaboration with D.A. Pennebaker and Richard Leacock), went unrealized.

In the summer of 1968, Godard also co-founded (with Jean-Pierre Gorin, Gerard Martin, Armand Marco, Nathalie Billard, and Jean-Henri Roger) Dziga Vertov Group, a collective designed to make “political films politically” and in the process revolutionize the motion picture language. The films created by the group were produced and written based upon concepts of class struggle and dialectical materialism, all in an attempt to revive a kind of proletarian culture. Once a die-hard auteurist, here Godard began working closely with other Dziga Vertov members, in particular Gorin, shooting in 16 mm on extremely low budgets and forgoing the usual channels of distribution and exhibition. As a result, the collective’s work – 1969’s British Sounds (See You at Mao), Vent d’Est, and Amore e Rabbia, and 1970’s Vladimir et Rosa and the uncompleted Jusqu’a la Victoire – went unseen by virtually anyone outside of student and activist circles, existing outside of common theatrical situations and never even appearing in the U.S.

In 1972, Tout Va Bien marked the ending of the Dziga Vertov Group; an attempt to deliver the collective’s messages to a more mainstream audience, it actively sought distribution on commercial circuits and was even bankrolled with American financing. After completing 1972’s Letter to Jane, Godard relocated from Paris to Grenoble, planning to remodel a video studio and establish alternative methods of production and distribution (primarily by passing out videotapes to networks of friends and associates). There he met Anne-Marie Mieville, forging a long-lasting partnership which began with 1974’s Ici et Ailleurs and continued with 1975’s Numero Deux and the following year’s Comment ça va? In 1976, Godard and Mieville moved to the small Swiss community of Rolle and immersed themselves in video and television work. After a decade, Godard began moving away from radical politics, returning to more personal material, exploring issues of subjectivity and individuality.

Among their first projects in Switzerland was Six Fois Deux (Sur et Sous la Communication), a series of a half-dozen two-part programs commissioned for Swiss television. Another TV series, France Tour/Detour Deux Enfants, followed over the course of 1977 and 1978 before Godard and Mieville returned to France to begin work on 1979’s Sauve Qui Peut (La Vie). In 1980, Godard traveled to California to work with Francis Ford Coppola on a biography of mobster Bugsy Siegel which failed to progress beyond the planning stages. Upon returning to Paris, he began work on his “trilogy of the sublime,” a collection of films – 1982’s Passion, 1983’s Prenom: Carmen, and 1983’s highly controversial Hail Mary (which Pope John Paul II denounced as “blasphemous”) – all fascinated with notions of beauty, feminine allure, and nature.

After 1985’s neo-noir feature Detective, Godard and Mieville produced 1986’s Soft and Hard (A Soft Conversation Between Two Friends on a Hard Subject) for England’s Channel Four. A series of projects, including 1986’s TV film Grandeur et Decadence d’un Petit Commerce de Cinema, and 1987’s Soigne ta Droite and King Lear, appeared in quick succession, but Godard did not again resurface until 1990’s Nouvelle Vague. Over the course of the decade he mounted Histoire(s) du Cinema, a ten-part video study of France’s film legacy; most of Godard’s 1990s work was auxiliary to the series, including 1991’s Allemagne Annee 90 Neuf Zero and 1994’s JLG/JLG – Autoportrait de December. Forever Mozart, an episodic film about the attempts of a French theater troop to put on a play in Sarajevo, followed in 1996. The following year, Godard completed the third and fourth installments of his Histoire(s) du Cinema series with 3A: La Monnaie De L’Absolu; 4A: Le controle De L’Univers; he also starred in Nous Sommes Tous Encore Ici, an episodic comedy-drama directed by Mieville.

(Source: http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=2:91804~T1)