The Crimson Curtain

The son of journalists, Alexandre Astruc (b. July 13th 1923) grew up on the ideas of Jean-Paul Sartre, was one of the youthful literati surrounding the philosopher in the St Germaine-des-Près cafes, espousing a new French culture that demanded new representations in fiction and film. After publishing his first novel Les vacances in 1945 and beginning his career as a journalist and film critic, he carved out his niche in the small library of worthwhile film theory. His short article “The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Camera-Stylo” in L’Ecrain Français argued that film should “write” in its own language as opposed to that of the theatre or literature. Astruc got his first taste of filmmaking, assisting directors Marc Allegret and Marcel Acherd in the late 40s, but his own highly anticipated films were slow in coming. Aside from a couple routine 16mm shorts, it was 1952 before he directed the 45-minute long, critically-acclaimed Le Rideau cramoisy (The Crimson Curtain), a 19th century mystery tale reduced to a set of unforgettable images and a soundtrack containing no dialogue whatsoever.

Astruc adapted (with Roland Laudenbach) his first feature-length film, Les Mauvaises recontres (The Bad Liaisons, 1955), from a contemporary crime novel set in Paris intellectual society, and though he filled it with complex and almost abstract visual effects, his treatment of its human story was cool and remote, a criticism that would follow him throughout his career. His reputation as a filmmaker rests on his next two films, Une vie (End of Desire, 1958), considered by most his best work, and _La proie pour l’ombre (Shadow of Adultery, 1961). The former featured “impressionistic” colour photography by Claude Renoir and music by Roman Vlad and seemed finally a distillation of what he had meant by using the cinema as “a means of writing,” while the insistent emotionalism of his leading lady Maria Schell warmed his customary coldness. In the latter, more personal, modestly-budgeted movie, Astruc seldom permitted himself “the image for its own sake” but managed to construct a haunting film by standing back from his characters and viewing them objectively without losing his involvement in them.

Astruc’s repeated commercial failures doomed his feature filmmaking career, bringing an end to his exploration of crises in marriage and love on the big screen. He would make two war pictures, La longue marche (The Long March, 1966) and Flammes sur l’Adriatique (Flames Over the Adriatic, 1968), and the second one, made with the full cooperation of Marshall Tito’s Yugoslav military, marked his last feature to date. He acted in Roger Vadim’s La Jeune fille assassinée (The Murdered Girl, 1974) and co-directed (with Michel Contat) a documentary on his early mentor, Sartre par lui-meme (Sartre by Himself, 1974), but his reputation as box-office “poison” has confined him to directing for the small screen. Wisely, he has renounced his obsession with style as it was his emphasis on style over substance which proved a detriment to his films. Although his career as a director was a disappointment, his film theory is still vital and correct, and his real legacy is as a critic and theorist (who happened to make a couple worthy movies). —www.film.com