The Year 01

L'an 01

France

1973

90 Min

Black and White

French

Currently 3.5/5 Stars.
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DIR Jacques Doillon, Alain Resnais, Jean Rouch

DP Gérard de Battista, Michel Houssiau, William Lubtchansky, Jean Monsigny, Renan Pollès

CAST Romain Bouteille, Coluche, Gérard Depardieu, Miou-Miou, Véronique K. Colucci, Albert Delpy, Jacques Higelin, Lee Falk, Jean-Paul Farré, Marcel Gotlib, Daniel Laloux, Patrice Leconte, Stan Lee, Henri Guybet, Josiane Balasko, François Béranger, Georges Bernier, Cabu, Christian Clavier, Gébé, Véronique Alain, Professeur Choron, Delfeil de Ton, Philippe Defrance, Christine Dejoux, Marcel Gassouk, Gérard Jugnot, Nelly Kaplan, Martin Lamotte, Thierry Lhermitte, Patrice Minet, Jean-Pierre Moulin, David Pascal, Marie Pillet, Maud Rayer, Jacques Robiolles, Jean-Pierre Sentier, Susan Shapiro, Jean-Paul Tribout, Frédéric Tuten, Xavier Bonastre, François Valleix

MUSIC François Béranger, Jean-Marie Dusuzeau

Director

A remarkably humanistic writer/director whose introspective features often dwell on youthful malaise, French filmmaker Jacques Doillon has an uncanny knack for exploring human nature and the impact of people’s actions on those most dear to them. Perhaps it was his penchant for directing documentary shorts early on that gave Doillon his insight, but by the time he moved into feature territory in the early ‘70s he had suitably mastered the ability to tell a solid and affecting story. In 1979, Doillon was nominated for two César awards for his compelling psychological drama The Hussy, and his 1984 film La Pirate was a Golden Palm nominee at the Cannes Film Festival. By the 1990s, Doillon’s career had gained effective momentum. His 1990 film Le Petit Criminel, which told the involving tale of a troubled adolescent, was nominated for multiple César awards. After his success with film Le Jeune Werther in 1993, the director scored his biggest international hit to date with the 1996 drama Ponette… read more

Alain Resnais

While a seminal figure of the French New Wave, Alain Resnais was not, like so many of his contemporaries, an alumnus of the film journal Cahiers du Cinema. In fact, he existed well outside of the sphere of filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, and Jacques Rivette, with a dedication to formalism, modernist concerns, and social and political issues not found in the work of his fellow innovators. Focusing repeatedly on themes of time and memory, Resnais drew from the well of serious literature to offer a singular philosophical and artistic vantage point, employing enigmatic narrative structures, lush cinematography, and lyrical editing patterns to create some of the most provocative and controversial work of the period. Born June 3, 1922, in Vannes, France, Resnais began making his first 8 mm films at the age of 14. In 1943 he enrolled at the newly formed Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinematographie, leaving the following year after declaring his studies too theoretical. He… read more

While a seminal figure of the French New Wave, Alain Resnais was not, like so many of his contemporaries, an alumnus of the film journal Cahiers du Cinema. In fact, he existed well outside of the sphere of filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, and Jacques Rivette, with a dedication to formalism, modernist concerns, and social and political issues not found in the work of his fellow innovators. Focusing repeatedly on themes of time and memory, Resnais drew from the well of serious literature to offer a singular philosophical and artistic vantage point, employing enigmatic narrative structures, lush cinematography, and lyrical editing patterns to create some of the most provocative and controversial work of the period. Born June 3, 1922, in Vannes, France, Resnais began making his first 8 mm films at the age of 14. In 1943 he enrolled at the newly formed Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinematographie, leaving the following year after declaring his studies too theoretical. He then spent the mid-‘40s working primarily as an actor. Resnais returned to filmmaking in 1945, helming the surrealist 16 mm short comedy Schema d’une Identification.

Between 1964 and 1967, Resnais directed a string of 16 mm silent films, known collectively as the “visite” series, profiling a number of noted artists, among them Lucien Coutard, Felix Labisse, Hans Hartung, Cesar Domela, and Oscar Dominguez. He also helmed La Bague, a mime-drama starring Marcel Marceau, and Journee Naturelle, a study of artist Max Ernst. The 1948 piece Van Gogh proved so successful in its original 16 mm form that it was subsequently remade in 35 mm, winning a prize at the Venice Film Festival as well as an Academy Award. Further art films followed, including 1950’s Gauguin, Guernica (a study of the famed Picasso masterwork co-directed by Robert Hessens), and Les Statues Meurent Aussi (a politically charged essay on native art among France’s African colonies co-directed by the great Chris Marker). The early half of the 1950s was largely a fallow period for Resnais. His film work was limited to only two editing projects, Paul Paviot’s 1952 effort Saint-Tropez, Devoirs de Vacances and Agnes Varda’s 1955 work La Pointe Courte. Finally returning to the field of short films in 1955, he began collaborating with noted literary figures, a trend which continued throughout his career. The first such partnership was with writer Jean Cayrol, with whom Resnais teamed for his 1955 breakthrough Nuit et Brouillard, a brilliant, powerful account of life and death in the Nazi concentration camps. Again, however, a follow-up was slow in forthcoming, as he next edited Nicole Vedres’ Aux Frontieres de l’Homme. The 1956 Toute la Memoire du Monde, a short about the Biblioteque Nationale, was next, and in 1958 Resnais worked with writer Raymond Queneau on Le Chant du Styrene, a commissioned work about the manufacturing of polystyrene.

However, the true follow-up to Nuit et Brouillard was 1959’s landmark feature Hiroshima Mon Amour. Written by novelist Marguerite Duras and photographed by Sacha Vierny, it brilliantly fused the past with the present and poetic imagery with stark documentary footage to arrive at an alchemical kind of filmmaking without obvious precedent. The picture launched Resnais to the front lines of the New Wave, alongside Godard and Truffaut, and was a major critical and commercial success the world over. In 1961, he returned with L’Année Derniere a Marienbad, another unqualified masterpiece even more radically experimental than its predecessor. Penned by Alain Robbe-Grillet, it was less a film than a beautifully composed riddle, one which pushed the formal boundaries of filmmaking while proving to be a surprising commercial success as well. With 1963’s Muriel ou le Temps d’un Retour, Resnais left behind the stylistic flourishes of his previous work, focusing instead on a more subtle and emotional kind of storytelling. La Guerre est Finie followed in 1966 and marked his return to experimental narratives by means of a series of foreboding flash-forwards, a technique Resnais described as the “future conditional” tense of filmmaking. When 1969’s Je t’aime, Je t’aime proved a financial disaster, he disappeared from sight for half a decade, resurfacing only in 1974 with Stavisky. Resnais next made 1977’s Providence, his first English-language feature. Upon returning to France, he helmed 1980’s playful Mon Oncle d’Amerique, the first unqualified hit of his career. La Vie Est un Roman followed in 1982, with Amour à Mort on its heels in 1984. In 1986, Resnais filmed the ambitious Mélo, an adaptation of a 1929 melodrama by a forgotten playwright named Henry Bernstein. The 1989 I Want to Go Home closed out the decade, and in 1993 he won a number of French Cesar awards for the two-part, five-hour Smoking/No Smoking, based on Alan Aykbourn’s stage cycle Intimate Exchanges. The director’s tribute to the legendary TV writer Dennis Potter, On Connaît la Chanson, followed in 1997.

(From http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=2:108005~T1)

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Jean Rouch

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… read more

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.

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