The Oldest Profession

Claude Autant-Lara (5 August 1901, Luzarches, Val-d’Oise – 5 February 2000, Antibes, Alpes-Maritimes), was a French film director and later Member of the European Parliament (MEP).

Autant-Lara was educated in France and at London’s Mill Hill School during his mother’s exile as a pacifist. Early in his career, he worked as an art director and costume designer, his best known work in this vein was possibly for Nana (1926), a silent film directed by Jean Renoir. Autant-Lara also acted in the film.

As a director, he frequently created provocative movies, saying “if a film does not have venom, it is worthless”. In the 1960s, he turned his back on the New Wave movement, and from then on he had no popular successes.

On 18 June 1989, he came to public notice again, controversially, when he was elected to the European Parliament as a member of the National Front and the oldest member of the assembly. In his maiden speech, in July, he caused a scandal by expressing his “concerns about the American cultural threat”, provoking a walkout by the majority of the deputies.

In an interview granted to the monthly magazine Globe in September 1989, he engaged in what Minister of Justice Pierre Arpaillange referred to as “racial insults, racial slandering and incitements to racial hatred”. He also described Nazi gas chambers as a “string of lies”. The resulting scandal led to his resignation as European deputy. Moreover, the members of the Academy of the Fine Arts, of which he was a vice-president for life, voted to prohibit him from taking his seat thenceforth.

His memoir, The Rage in the Heart, appeared in 1984. —Wikipedia

Mauro Bolognini (28 June 1922 – 14 May 2001) was an Italian film director of literate sensibility, known for masterful handling of period subject matter.

Mauro Bolognini was born in Pistoia, Tuscany.

A former architectural student, Bolognini began his film career as an assistant to director Luigi Zampa in Italy, and directors Yves Allegret and Jean Delannoy in France. He began directing his own feature films in the mid 1950s, and had his first international success with Gli innamorati (“Wild Love”).

His other notable films of the 1950s and early 1960s include Giovani mariti (“Young Husbands”), La notte brava, La giornata balorda (“From a Roman Balcony”), and the Marcello Mastroianni-Claudia Cardinale starrer Il bell’Antonio (arguably his masterpiece), all written by Pier Paolo Pasolini.

Parting professionally with Pasolini in 1961, Bolognini went on to direct two sensual love stories starring Cardinale, La Viaccia and Senilità, before turning his talents to a series of international anthology films, including Le bambole (The Dolls), I tre volti (“Three Faces of a Woman”), Le fate (“The Queens”) and Le streghe (The Witches).

Returning to features in the late 1960s with Mademoiselle De Maupin, his later works included the accomplished period dramas Metello and Bubu (both featuring Massimo Ranieri), Fatti di gente per bene (La Grande Bourgeoise) starring Giancarlo Giannini, Catherine Deneuve and Fernando Rey, L’eredità Ferramonti (The Inheritance) with Anthony Quinn and Dominique Sanda, and La Dame aux camélias featuring a young Isabelle Huppert.

In his later years, Bolognini continued directing feature films, as well as opera and the television miniseries The Charterhouse of Parma and The Time Of Indifference. His final movie feature was the soft-core erotic drama Husbands and Lovers, released in 1992. In 1994 he directed the show that the top female Greek singer Haris Alexiou appeared in the world famous Odeon of Herodes Atticus. He died in Rome in 2001. —Wikipedia

Philippe de Broca has worked consistently since the 1960s, directing films for theatrical release and television. Yet when one thinks of de Broca, one thinks not of his recent titles but of his earliest and most successful films: sincere, playfully impudent comic spoofs made with dexterity and vigor, which stress illusion over reality. In these early films, which he also co-scripted, de Broca’s characters are nonconformists who celebrate life and the joy of personal liberation. Structurally the films are highly visual, more concerned with communicating by images than by any specifics in the scenario. And these images often are picturesque. De Broca acknowledges his desire to give pleasure to the esthetic sense and, as such, he is a popular artist. While these early films are neither as evocative as those of François Truffaut (with whom de Broca worked as an assistant director on The 400 Blows ) nor as cinematic as those of Claude Chabrol (with whom de Broca worked as an assistant director on Le beau serge and Les cousins ), they exude style and wit. While they might be fanciful in content, their essence is emotionally genuine.

De Broca’s films are non-tragic, and feature humorous treatments of characters and their situations. One of his favorite themes is the relationship between the sexes, explored in his earliest films— Les Jeux de l’amour, Le Farceur , and L’Amant de cinq jours —each with Jean-Pierre Cassel playing a lighthearted lover. This character appears 20 years older in Le Cavaleur , featuring Jean Rochefort as a bored, self-centered womanizer. De Broca’s most popular early-career films, however, star Jean-Paul Belmondo: Cartouche , a flavorful comedy-swashbuckler chronicling the exploits of kind-hearted criminals in 18th-century Paris; and L’Homme de Rio , a charming James Bond spoof about a soldier on leave who is led to a stunningly photographed Brazil on a chase for treasure. His most renowned effort is Le Roi de coeur , set during the final days of World War I in a town that has been abandoned by all except the residents of an insane asylum. Thematically speaking, Le Roi de coeur is a perfect film for its time. Released just as the anti-Vietnam war movement was gaining momentum, it is a pungent satire that lampoons the very nature of war and conflict. Not surprisingly, Le Roi de coeur fast became a cult favorite among college students. It ran for six-and-a-half years alone at a Cambridge, Massachusetts, moviehouse. Le Roi de coeur is de Broca’s idea of an anti-war film. Typically, he does not focus on the calamity of a youthful hero who is robbed of his life (as in All Quiet on the Western Front ), or soldiers needlessly and maddeningly put to death by a military bureaucracy (as in Paths of Glory and Breaker Morant ), or the bloody slaughter of his protagonists. Deaths and tragedies in a de Broca film usually are obscured by humorous, feel-good situations. In Le Roi de coeur he gently, satirically celebrates individual freedom. His inmates appear saner than the warring society that has labeled them mad.

De Broca is more concerned with good than evil. He began his career as a newsreel cameraman in Algeria and made several documentary shorts, but switched to narrative filmmaking because he “decided the real world was just too ugly.” At his best, de Broca deals with possibilities—for peace, beauty, hope, love. Nevertheless, the work in his first half-decade as a feature filmmaker generally is more satisfying than his efforts of the past three decades. Among de Broca’s higher-profile post-1960s films are Le Cavaleur and Tendre Poulet ( Dear Inspector and Dear Detective ), a romantic comedy about a female cop who rekindles a romance with an old lover while sniffing out a killer. The latter was so popular that it spawned an American made-for-TV movie and an inferior de Broca-directed sequel, On a vole la cuisse de Jupiter ( Jupiter’s Thigh ). By the 1990s, de Broca mostly was directing for French television. A typical credit was Le Jardin des plantes ( The Greenhouse ), a chronicle of the warm and protective relationship between a little girl and her grandfather in the waning days of World War II. Le Jardin des plantes is a thematic throwback to Le Roi de coeur in that it may be interpreted as a statement about the folly of war. It also reflects on the less-thanhonorable behavior of some Frenchmen and women under the German occupation. Yet despite its somber setting, Le Jardin des plantes is consistent with de Broca’s cinematic view in that it primarily is a candy-coated entertainment that exudes a sentimentality for a time and place that in reality was brutal and dangerous.

By far de Broca’s highest-profile late-career theatrical feature is Le Bossu ( On Guard ), which may be linked to Cartouche as a swashbuckler/ripped-bodice period piece. Le Bossu is set in the France of Louis XIV and charts the derring-do resulting from a faithful swordsman’s rescue of an infant princess from the grasp of her sinister relations. While entertaining and acclaimed—it won nine César Award nominations— Le Bossu is nothing more than a slick, by-thenumbers commercial vehicle. In the end, de Broca’s best films were those made in the 1960s.—Rob Edelman

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)