The Notebook Primer introduces readers to some of the most important figures, films, genres, and movements in film history.
Femmes femmes
“Post New Wave” has mutated into a catch-all term that not only accounts for French directors whose output began to crest in the 1970s and beyond, but also for those who may have operated adjacently, or even on the fringes of the five-pronged Nouvelle Vague. Belabored attempts to identify a newly-minted movement in French cinema and subsequently foist it upon a sect of filmmakers typically buckle under closer scrutiny. The more one burrows and subdivides this unwieldy categorization, the more the examples only grow more far-flung, resisting the very grouping that collected them side by side in the first place.
Although not a direct predecessor of André Bazin and his acolytes, Diagonale et Co., the production company founded by one-time Cahiers du cinéma critic and director Paul Vecchiali, exists as one of the few veritable collectives in French film culture, a network of friends and peers that also consisted of Jean-Claude Biette, Jean-Claude Guiguet, Marie-Claude Treilhou, Adolfo Arrieta, and Gérard Frot-Coutaz, united by an ethos that originated naturally from personal experience. Born in Ajaccio in 1930, Vecchiali followed the same obligatory syllabus for French cinephiles-cum-auteurs, without the same international recognition that bestowed itself upon François Truffaut before him, and Olivier Assayas later. Like these directors, Vecchiali has actively indulged his cinephilia in his own films, casting actors from who he had imbibed the wonderment of movies at a young age in his own projects, an act of endearing reverence that also hints at the larger, collective achievements of Diagonale et Co.
Each film by the company stands as a confluence of memory and secondhand storytelling, which almost invariably ropes in an element of working-class routine and/or artistic endurance. Before working as an assistant on Vecchiali’s Drugstore Romance (1979), Treilhou bounced between various front-of-house jobs, many of which then crop up in her own superlative Simone Barbes or Virtue (1979). Arrieta, a painter before he was a filmmaker, traipsed through Paris’ independent artworld after moving to the city from Spain in 1967, a simultaneously peripatetic and interdisciplinary bearing that practically explains his inclusion under the Diagonale umbrella (he’s also remembered as one of the first to make an “underground” Parisian film). Biette’s films frequently situated themselves from within the exact divide between an artistic career and basic survival, a considerable raison d’être, as he co-founded the magazine Trafic with Serge Daney.
The extracurricular pursuits of founder Vecchiali himself only double down on his singular––and admittedly, grandiose––tastes, collected in his tomes to French cinema. For example, to Vecchiali, Jean-Pierre Meville is a “narcissist” not worth engaging with, although the French New Wave’s derided “tradition of quality” remains a rich text for him. As the Diagonale director with both the longest-spanning and largest filmography, Vecchiali is also the one who has had the most films sacrificed within this primer. But his steady workflow has yielded consistently curious and evocative––if not totally “masterful”––work, from the early, Jean Eustache-starring short, Les roses de la vie (1962), to his films of just the last few years, like White Nights on the Pier (2014) and Un soupçon d’amour (2020).
The communal comportment of Diagonale effectively annexes this distinct group from the overbearing institution of French cinema, yet it is not an acrimonious split. One gets the impression that each director’s respective creative temperaments were both stoked and validated by their cohort. These prevailing, mutual preoccupations transcend even the formality of the production company (not every film soon to be mentioned bears the logo), coming together more as an unquestionable entity than mere names on a production log. The films themselves reflect this particular pragmatic contentment, many of which take place within working class communities that are supported by insoluble and deep bonds between the mechanics and pharmacists, former actresses and prostitutes, hotel porters and porn theater ushers. Drama still rears its head––sometimes violently, other times tragically, occasionally absurdly––though the workaday commitments themselves are shot through with the kind of musical romanticism that is unabashedly indebted to Jacques Demy.
Diagonale’s oeuvre are the perfect cult object, self-contained but fitfully prolific, engendering obsession among those who stumble across any of their films and even inspiring gnawing befuddlement about how they’re not the subject of any regular retrospectives stateside, or how they’re not even at least in the sights of some boutique distributor (considering the lamentable quality of some of the films, a good number that have no English subtitles, to boot). Nevertheless, as the internet continues to open up new avenues to access the films of Diagonale et Co., what emerges is a solar system of the utopian possibilities of cinematic community, and how the modern world both demoralizes and encourages such togetherness. Like the characters portrayed by Hélèn Surgère or François Fabian in its films, Diagonale has experienced the ruthless vicissitudes of age, with many of its members no longer with us, with those surviving having to push back against a fickle film industry (Vecchiali satirized the difficulties of contemporary film funding in the 21st century with 2004’s À vot’ bon coeur).
This general dissolution isn’t entirely unexpected, however. One doesn’t get the impression that Diagonale was founded as a legacy establishment, one that’d outlive those directly associated with its inception. Not dissimilar from the general porousness of the films––where genre, narrative and characterization are all mercurial and can easily evaporate at any given interval––the relative unaffectedness of the Diagonale movement was customary, flowering from a specific time and place, in front of and behind the camera. What follows is a timeline of this natural development, with a few stops along the way to give just a sample of the remarkable depth provided by Diagonale et Co.
POEMS ABOUT THE NIGHT: 1972–1974
L’étrangleur
L’étrangleur (Vecchiali, 1972): A noir refracted through Vecchiali’s own bodily and plangent cinema, the narratively heady L’étrangleur foregrounds the inciting gestures and emotional implications of the serial murderer of the title, while rendering the police chase a bizarre game between the culprit, Émil (Jacques Perrin), and Inspector Simon Dangret (Julien Guiomar), as both masquerade as informants and allies to their respective causes alike. Later films from the director would situate their purviews from within a community, but L’étrangleur presents an alternative route not taken, with Émil acting as the binding force as he hopscotches across Parisian suburbs accumulating various victims (he works at a fruit stand during the day): at one point, he fails to fully subdue a prostitute, and is chased by the woman and her fellow streetworkers, in a sequence reminiscent of the nighttime clusters of illicit workers in Pasolini’s early, neorealist work. Émil is something of a copycat killer, witnessing the nigh-random strangling of Sonia Saviange as a child in the opening minutes of the film, an eerie parallel of Vecchiali’s own preproduction process, which saw him roaming the streets at night and partaking in automatic writing of the script after 15 days, crafting his, “poem about the night,” which harks back to the abstract-flirting popular cinema of the late 1920s early 30s, from Sternberg to Epstein.
Femmes femmes (Vecchiali, 1974): The film whose success allowed the director to found Diagonale et Co., Femmes femmes fully introduces––beyond past walkon appearances––the two actresses who’d come to personify the ethos of Vecchiali and friends: Sonia Saviange and Hélène Surgère. The two women dramatize their own status as aging, mostly out-of-work actresses in Paris, living together in a shabby apartment that ominously overlooks Montparnasse Cemetery, and hosts a good majority of the film. The high-contrast black and white looks forward to Garrell, but it plays with an intended cheapness in Femmes femmes, where champagne sparkles and food rots, the floorboards creak under the roving, Ophülsesque camerawork (courtesy of regular cinematographer Georges Strouvé), and musical sequences sound as if they’re playing from a worn ‘45. Vecchiali posits that self-liberation sometimes necessitates self-destructive tendencies, yet the relationship between the two actresses, even its descent into alcoholism and hallucination (which manifests not unlike the nightmares of the detoxing sharpshooter of Le cercle rouge, by Vechialli’s sworn enemy, Melville) is treated with such sympathy that one has no wish to see them part ways, no matter how amenable it could be to both. Also of note are the neighbors and nearby laborers who stride in and out, like the delivery man from the grocery store, or Michel Delahaye as a put-upon, local doctor. After this film, Pasolini snagged Surgère and Savange for Salò, where they were the scatalogical masters of ceremonies.
SECRETS BEYOND THE DOOR: 1977–1978
Les belles matières
La machine (Vecchiali, 1977): An interdisciplinary experiment with gutting results, La machine navigates the vicissitudes of media-stoked capital punishment through an amalgamtion of “news” footage and straightforward drama (the former of which places the viewer at an even further distance, by shooting these sequences as they play on a TV set). Pierre Lentier (Jean-Christophe Bouvet), a factory worker whose only friends appear to be his mother and the barflies at his local dive (who are catalogued in a virtuosic long take from outside the establishment), murders an 8-year-old girl, and is thus tried and sentenced to death, while he and those close to him endure a maelstrom of public malice and tabloid invasiveness, notably headed by Gérard Blain. The knee jerk comparison for Vecchiali’s film is M, but with the actual act is entirely omitted, the closest analogue we’re offered is the government stipulated reenactment, and the ways in which those present practically salivate over their proximity to Pierre and his site of murder is reminiscent of the crime-scene tour of Fritz Lang’s own Secret Beyond the Door.
Le théâtre de matières (Biette, 1977): Dedicating one’s life to theatre subsequently requires a recalibration of one’s personal life, where work and relationships can easily whither under the newfound commitment. Jean-Claude Biette’s Le théâtre de matières navigates this performance-life ratio, a pocket ensemble picture that unspools from a ragtag theatre company in the Parisian suburbs. Dorothée (Savange), a travel agent practically sleepwalking through her day-to-day, joins the company of Hermann (Howard Vernon), a former first-chair violinist of the Berlin Philharmonic who now acts as Le théâtre de matières’ imprimatur. Hermann’s intense classicism casts a reasonable spell, although his dire financial straits also beget some petty manipulation: Dorothée is a temporary benefactor, who’s often chided behind her back for not remembering her lines, and then greeted with a seductive smile. Given both to screwball scenarios (what if you took off work to audition at the theatre and found your boss there?; what if the coat check attendant won’t return your jacket?; what if your friend keels over dead in the middle of dinner?) and working class anxiety (one actor is fired from his restaurant dayjob steaming potatoes for going over his lines on the clock), Le théâtre de matières is a remarkably dense yet compact interrogation of a life in the arts, replete with references to Bataille, Pasolini (who was killed only two years earlier), C F Von Schiller, Bruckner, and more. One knows it can’t last, but it’s still unutterably moving when Savange breathily mutters, “I wish your theatre would never end.”
Flammes (Arrieta, 1978): Flammes is fantastic and insular, inviting and impenetrable, childlike and bracingly adult. Adolfo Arrieta’s fairytale world equates play with physical and emotional intimacy, planting the initially unnameable erotic charge in early childhood, when a little girl awakes screaming from a dream where a provincial fireman (spit-shiny helmet and inky black uniform and all) has climbed through her bedroom window. Interiors remain paramount to the Diagonale filmmakers, and the countryside manor of Flammes is brought to multi-sensorial life as Femmes femmes before it: dank wallpaper that’s offset by its classical patterning, vocal floorboards, late afternoon sun that does its best to infiltrate the estate. Incommunicable distances are fomented by that young girl, now a young woman (played by Caroline Loeb), whose broodingness, directed at her family and friends, can only be assuaged by inviting “le pompier” (Xavier Grandès) through her window each night, esconsing herself within a private universe of sex and love. Like Vecchiali, Arrieta doesn’t constrict this burgeoning romanticism to Loeb and Grandès, and soon all residents of the manor, permanent and itinerant, fall into similarly poignant relationships, forging the path towards the intricate, crisscrossing relationships that’d come to define later Diagonale films.
Les belles matières (Guiguet, 1978): Another apartment film, countering manicured opulence with natural beauty, and locating the equally tragic and transcendent results therein. The young, provincial, and presumably naive Camille (Emmanuel Lemoine) takes on a job as a multifunctional hired hand in the resplendent Paris home of Courtray (Surgère), who is trying and failing to lure her shut-in son out of his attic room. Camille is small but coiled; his rippling build is only distracted from by a few visible scars that denote a hardscrabble childhood. His own beauty is internalized by others, but he’s otherwise projected upon, tellingly, often addressed by Courtray or her son while they look at themselves in their respective mirrors. Guiguet prefers a clipped editing rhythm, which animates Les belles matières with a Bressonian rhythm, although the director conversely maintains his operatic dispositions––moments of emotional and physical violence are framed beautifully, before the cut then propels us further towards the tragic ending.
LOVE IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD: 1979–1986
Simone Barbes or Virtue
Drugstore Romance (Vecchiali, 1979): The workplace setting of a garage immediately places us in the universe of Demy; what follows, however, is a signature Vecchiali treatise on age and love, the immovable desire to ignore incompatibility exploded across Drugstore Romance’s kaleidoscopic two hours, the first true instance of Vecchiali ditching his hitherto claustrophobia and dancing out into the street. Nicolas Silberg’s Fauré obsessed mechanic, Pierrot––a prototype to Nicholas Cage in Moonstruck, if there ever was one––falls head over heels for Jeanne-Michèle, Sugère’s local, aging pharmacist. His advances repeatedly rebuffed, Pierrot descends into melodramatic depression, and bounces back with some performative civil disobedience, perching outside Jeanne-Michèle’s pharmacy for days on end, his stunt attracting crowds and the police; but when a terminal diagnosis comes down the pipeline, Pierrot finds his desires fulfilled, and the now-couple experience an emotionally rich vacation refracted through unpredictable montage. Rounding out the two lovers are Pierrot’s neighbors, who inspire annoyance yet provide the proper foundation of any tight-knit apartment block.
Simone Barbes or Virtue (Treilhou, 1980): Like Vecchiali, Marie-Claude Treilhou pays particularly poignant attention to the workers of her onscreen community, with Simone and Martine (Ingrid Bourgoin and Martine Simonet, respectively) as porn theater ushers––who are visited by their older, male friend, who states he has to return to work; he’s in the obvious garb of a janitor or maintenance man––and the auxiliary cast filled out with bartenders, waitresses, box office attendants, and the like, all drawn from the director’s own past work life. There may be rough edges on the fringes of this wide-reaching group––the “nutter couple” that puts on an unnervingly histrionic breakup performance outside the establishment––but the directorial commitment to routine and being bereft of exposition sands them down, this brief, locational survey playing as a privileged experience. We’re lucky to be able to see, to hear the exaggerated moans of porn acting play out against an endless parade of male patrons, a feminist punk song that upsets some of the more square lesbian bar guests, the final car ride that seems to permeate so many different layers of intimacy just through the sharing of a riddle. It’s almost heartbreaking when the streetlights go off and the dawn comes.
Rosa la rose, fille publique (Vecchiali, 1986): The ideal Diagonale film for the uninitiated, Rosa la rose, fille publique is a sparkling compendium of Vecchialisms––classical French melodrama recast in distinctly not picturesque Parisian backstreets; the reigning influence of Demy, Ophüls, and even Guy de Maupassant––all succinctly stitched together in under 90 minutes. The lynchpin of a family-like community of pimps and prostitutes, Rosa (Marriane Basler) inspires besotedness amongst clients and colleagues alike, a sparkling whirling dervish of youth and beauty set loose on the outskirts of Les Halles arrondissement. Gliding along like a musical almost entirely bereft of actual songs, the film operates with the inevitability of any romantic tragedy, the mobility of the camerawork only growing more and more doleful as the curtain slowly closes on Rosa. The surrounding carnival can’t offset that yawning doom that cleaves its way between Rosa, her blue-collar lover Julien (Pierre Cosso), and her possessive, cinephile pimp, Gilbert (Jean Sorel), the perceived ownership of all those surrounding this sparkling example of freedom a bitter kissoff to a singular ebullience. If it signifies anything, it’s that the more encumbered and unforeseeable romances of the late ‘80s and 1990s were not far off.
Faubourg St Martin (Guiguet, 1986): If Rosa la rose functions as a waltz, Faubourg St Martin is Guiguet’s episodic sibling, a similar narrative of desire rubbing up against unwarranted possession, the locus of these events a shabby hotel in the 10th arrondissement, where all who’re staying appear to be lifers, if not merely employees. As the evocatively named Mademoiselle Coppercage, popular singer Patachou fulfills a similar role as Sugère and Saviange before her, her managing of the hotel a slightly modulated reflection of her early days as a performer, when she owned a Cabaret in Montmartre with her husband. In fact, the cross-generational relationships between the women in the hotel come together as a venn diagram of varying experiences, which Guiguet explores via his lovingly pieced-together dramaturgy and judiciously painterly imagery. François Fabian is an older prostitute, feeling her age (Fabian also stars in 1981’s La visiteuse, Guiguet’s ten minute dry-run for Faubourg St Martin); Marrie Rosseau is her younger counterpart, who hopes to leave behind the intermittent violence exacted by past clients as her monogamous relationship with Stéphane Joubert accumulates more and more trust. Emmanuel Lemoine traipses through the periphery as a submanager, as if the Camille of Les belles matières were absorbed into the larger working world. By the time the viewer realizes how the hotel has purposed itself as a refuge for its denizens, it’s almost too late, and the doors are shuttered.
IRRADIATED ROMANCE: 1988–1999
The Carpathian Mushroom
Encore (Vecchiali, 1988): Encore bears an albatross of misplaced attention: of the scant writing that exists on Vecchiali across the internet in English, even his middling Wikipedia makes sure to mention that it is the first French film to reference homosexuality in reference to the AIDS crisis. This overbearing distinction suggests a certain shallowness, equating queerness with disease, when in fact, Encore is much more a parable of life and love, confronting the unfettered terror of watching a loved one pass at its close, wracked with anxiety if that very love was truly reciprocated. The film conducts itself as a series of long takes, with an indeterminate amount of time between each, beginning with Louis (Jean-Louis Rolland) selfishly abandoning his unstable wife; later, he falls in love with a man, whose own aloofness drives him to similar despair. Augmented by musical numbers and a signature Vecchilian stable of auxiliary players (subway performers, incestuous daughters, club security guards), Encore houses the germs of innumerable other films, so much so that it ultimately appears as both underwritten and overwhelming, a generous dispatch tethered to one character’s unsuredness in life. And with the use of widescreen, Vecchiali’s mise-en-scène is affably stretched, adhering to the extreme horizontality locations of beach fronts, docks and stagelike apartments, the significant duration of each shot recalling late-Hollywood melodrama, such as Vincente Minnelli’s Home from the Hill or Nicholas Ray’s Bigger Than Life.
The Carpathian Mushroom (Biette, 1990): With the petty intrigues of the fine art and theater world now thoroughly expounded upon (in La théâtre de manières and Loin de Manhattan, respectively), Biette was free to render his drama even more mutable, gathering ostensibly inharmonious narrative threads with confidence, and thus, The Carpathian Mushroom, even in its marriage of nuclear anxiety and independent thespianism, is entirely shorn of directorial uncertainty. “Once upon a time...after Chernobyl,” ominously opens the film, which continues with a fainted young woman being spirited away by a spectral figure in a hazmat suit. She’s a local theater’s Ophelia, and her radiation poisoning halt’s Jeremy Fairfax’s (Vernon, again as the endearingly unreliable director) production of Hamlet––rivulets of drama course around the stunted play, like the mushroom of the title, which is proffered as a catch-all cure by a pair of siblings, one of whom is spiritually invested in the healing properties, the other with dollar signs in his eyes. Like the radiation that rains down from the sky, Biette’s prevailing melancholy is an invisible entity that gels with the post-fallout precariousness and the brittleness of the winter setting. Like the other films mentioned in this section, The Carpathian Mushroom tackles the discomfiting obligation of having to visit a loved one in a debilitated state, put off by the sterility of hospitals and the corporeality of imminent death. Closure is sidestepped, but estranged parents and children briefly come together, old friends return, and relationships break apart and then seam themselves back together––plus, another Patachou appearance.
Les passagers (Guiguet, 1999): It was only a matter of time before a Diagonale director would self-reflexively acknowledge the overflowing, yet tightly––if slightly uneven––packed narratives of their respective films. Without sacrificing the enlivening poignancy that made Les belles matières and Faubourg St Martin, Guiguet embraces the innate voyeurism of his work in Les passagers, as Véronique Silver presides over this filmic flitting in and out of different characters’ lives, her straight-to-the-camera narration not unlike her observational role in François Truffaut’s The Woman Next Door. As she speaks life to those she’s surrounded by on the Saint-Denis Bobigny streetcar, Guiguet follows suit, following subjects upon their disembarkment from the tram, and circling back again when different paths invariably cross. Sojourns are made to hospitals where abandoned AIDS patients lie, funerals are entirely bereft of friends and family; the stigma surrounding the disease has cleaved its way across Paris, so each newly minted relationship––romantic or platonic––is modestly miraculous, an everyday affirmation to life continuing.
Even more so than Faubourg St Martin, Les passagers freely culls its cast from different annals of film culture, past and present, with players also appearing in films by the aforementioned Truffaut, Serge Bozon, André Techiné, Godard, and João César Monteiro. Guiguet passed away only six years later after Les passegers’ release, and beyond being his last feature, it plays as a capstone to the preceding three decades of Diagonale’s filmmaking, pinpointing the survival of all the romantic possibilities of films past within the uncertain times of the turn of the century.