I recall him often described as the “French Cassavettes.” Loulou and A Nos Amours are both amazing. Don’t think I’ve seen anything else by him. Is he still alive even? Sort of disappeared.
He died in ‘03. He was as raw and demanding as they come. If it’s physicality you’re looking for, an immediacy of performance and an emotional nakedness, he has to be on your list. He was absolutely unsparing towards his characters and himself. His film shoots were legendary. The tension between he and producers, actors and crew can be see in the work itself. Pialat thrived on conflict. He courted it.
The accounts of the shoots are priceless: often hilarious stories of Pialat’s relentless recourse to cruel bullying, strategies of psychological torture, physical threats – we’re given the portrait of a man’s life-long existence on the edge of a precipice, barely able to prevent matters from hurtling totally out of control, in both his life and his work.
Pialat made this element of chaos or catastrophe work for him; it formed the basis of his mise en scène. He allowed for an inordinate margin of error or accident in his scenes, but not in any careless way. Instead, his genius was to peg the desire for the accident, the ‘first time’, to a rigid, largely intuitive concern for emotional exactitude. This led to scenes that provoke a mixture of cringing awe and giddy empathy. ~ Fergus Daly.
I haven’t seen his final film “Garcu”. No distributor would pick it up. (Can anything be done about this, Daniel Kasman? Maybe we can see it here at TA one day). He took all of life’s messiness, its sordid qualities, and its unpleasantness and turned all that into a brutally incisive realism. He was special.
KJ, you’ve repiqued my interest in Pialat. What else should I watch by him? Or, better put, what else is available by him? I think I saw Loulou and A Nos Amours on Criterion.
“The Mouth Agape” is available. Coming soon are “Graduate First” and “We Won’t Grow Old Together”. I have a shitty VHS of “Under The Sun Of Satan”, which Eureka Entertainment may hopefully remedy one day, now that they’ve decided correctly that Pialat’s work must not disappear. As I said above, I need to see “Garcu”. [One more appeal to Daniel Kasman should he read this thread].
I’d love to see some Pialat. His films have been very hard to see for too long now.
I’ve only seen Loulou and À Nos Amours by Pialat like Ari. I also want to see Van Gogh and Under the Sun of Satan to see what they’re like. However, I’m most curious about his debut feature L’Enfance Nue (Naked Childhood). Has anyone seen that, and would like to comment on it? It’s been released by MoC in the UK I believe, but other than that, it seems hard to come by…
I saw Naked Childhood for the first time recently, and was mightily impressed. It’s my favorite Pialat film I’ve seen thus far, but I have several others that I still need to see. Because it’s in a rather identifiable genre (it’s a coming-of-age movie), it feels a bit less plotless than his later films. It’s well worth tracking down the movie.
My review, for the record:
http://www.moviemartyr.com/1968/nakedchildhood.htm
Masters of Cinema has put out some great R2 editions of Pialat: http://eurekavideo.co.uk/moc/
I was not able to find his films on dvd except for a nos amours. I found several others ( “satan” and “childhood”) on the internet but van gogh continues to elude me…
Sean John
One of my favorites, however, I’ve yet to hear anything about him on this site. Your thoughts, please?