Philippe Garrel

Michael Leonard

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781526115973
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Described by Giles Deleuze as 'one of the greatest modern auteurs', Philippe Garrel is widely acknowledged as the most significant filmmaker to emerge in France after the New Wave. His deeply personal cinema traces the troubled sentimental lives of couples, exploring the relationship between art and political struggle. This study observes the eclecticism of the director's influences, looking to avant-garde movements such as the Situationists, Surrealism, Arte Povera and the American Underground, in order to explore his original body of work. Consideration is also given to Garrel's relationship with other members of the so-called 'post-New Wave', including Jean Eustache and Chantal Akerman. The first book on Garrel's cinema to appear in English, it will appeal to Garrel enthusiasts as well as to students and lecturers specialising in film studies or French studies.

1

Cinema and revolution

The culmination of the adolescent period of Garrel’s film-making coincided with the revolutionary événements of May 68. Having started out by making several short films and working for French television as a young teenager, Garrel began a frenetic period of production. Within two years the director made four feature films: Anémone (1967), Marie pour mémoire (1967), Le Révélateur (1968) and La Concentration (1968). He was also responsible for one of the collectively produced agitational films referred to as cinétracts which was made during the événements of May 68. Actua I (1968) was shot on the streets of Paris, occupied by demonstrators engaged in pitched battles with the CRS (Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité).

In addition to the task of finding a cinematic response to the political turmoil in France in the late 1960s, a significant challenge faced by the film-maker when starting out was how to negotiate a relationship with the substantial heritage of the New Wave. René Prédal compares the influence of the New Wave on the directors who followed to that of a shock wave with numerous aftershocks. Referring directly to Garrel, he writes: ‘[M]‌ême les auteurs révélés à la fin des années 1960 ont été classés eux aussi dans la postérité directe d’une Nouvelle Vague vite légitimée et volontiers dotée d’une généreuse descendance, certes évidente pour Philippe Garrel (Anémone 1967)’¹ (Prédal 2008: 5). Although the influence of the film style and thematic preoccupations of the New Wave are evident in Garrel’s adolescent works, the young director progressively deviated from this, developing a distinctive aesthetic resonant with the prevailing political climate in France and beyond. This growing distinction is evident in Garrel’s reaction to dominant photo-journalistic depictions of political dissent in Actua I. It is also evident in the film-maker’s desire to bring to the surface a repressed trauma underlying the outbreak of revolt in May, in Le Révélateur and La Concentration. The austerity of these films signals an approach to form and film meaning that breaks with Garrel’s cinematic antecedents.

At this time Garrel made references in public statements and within his films to the Situationists, a political avant-garde whose utopian slogans, including ‘ne plus jamais travailler’,² ‘sous les pavés la plage’³ and ‘vivre sans temps mort, jouir sans entraves’,⁴ have since come to define May 68 in the popular imagination. In addition to agitating through slogans daubed on walls around the city of Paris, the Situationists propagated their ideas through the journal the Internationale Situationniste and through the film work and writings of Guy Debord, who published The Society of the Spectacle in 1967. The latter text delivered a withering critique of the violence of late capitalism, and its transformation of authentic lived experience into ‘mere representation’. Critical concepts developed by Debord, including détournement (the hijacking and redirection of existing imagery and texts for critical purposes) and the notion of an ‘anti-cinema’, were resonant in intellectual circles in France at the time and captured the attention of Garrel. The critical theory and practice of the Situationists open avenues for interpreting aspects of the film-maker’s later adolescent works which are often resistant to simple exegesis.

Early shorts and television work: Les Enfants désaccordés (1966), Droit de visite (1966), Bouton Rouge and Seize million des jeunes

Before progressing to making feature films, Garrel’s cinematic debut was announced with two short films which were followed by several works made for French television. While at times reflecting the significant influence of the New Wave, these early works are testament to the remarkable innovation of the young director and contain the seeds of the distinctive stylistic traits that would mark his later cinema.

The title of Garrel’s first short, Les Enfants désaccordés, translates roughly as ‘children out of tune’. It provides a snapshot of a young couple at odds with society. Christiane Pérez plays the role of the adolescent girl and Pascal Roy plays the role of the adolescent boy, neither of whom is given a name. The film is defined by a striking oneiric quality and a non-realist style. An example of this treatment is evident when the couple are shown sitting on a park bench as the boy alludes to the constraint and pressure imposed by his family. When he notes that his mother would have liked him to have become an actor, the image cuts to a series of still shots of the boy in various poses, like screen tests, the last of which shows his head in his hands in despair. This anti-realist, parodic quality is sustained when the couple’s absence is dissected in the form of television-style interviews with the young man’s teacher (Marcel Domerc), and the girl’s father (Maurice Garrel).

During the father’s laconic testimony, following his daughter’s disappearance, he refers to his own childhood. Searching for explanations for his daughter’s behaviour, he alludes to the war at one stage, commenting parenthetically ‘où on a été … été … occupé’.⁵ His hesitation plays on the double meaning of ‘occupé’ in French, meaning ‘occupied’ but also the more neutral and anodyne ‘busy’. The latter euphemistic deployment suggests an explanation behind the flight of the boy and girl. Their rebellion appears as a reaction to the hidden horrors of the French collaboration with Nazi Germany, something that many in France were keen to repress.

Having met in a Parisian café, the couple decide to steal a car before driving to an abandoned chateau. Here they perform a Baroque dance in an empty room. The camera oscillates around them, forming a swirling chiaroscuro against the light entering by the windows. Discussing the lyrical explosion of the dance sequence, Garrel posits it as indicative of the distinction between his film and the cinema of the New Wave: ‘Dans un film de la Nouvelle Vague on aurait vu un slow dans une chambre, un Teppaz’⁶ (Garrel and Lescure 1992: 35). However, in many other respects the film’s affinities with the New Wave predominate. The choice of the setting for the first encounter between the young couple is consistent with many New Wave films in which cafés often serve as locations for meetings and chance encounters. The story of youthful rebellion resonates strongly with films such as François Truffaut’s Les Quatre cents coups in which the young Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud) finds himself in conflict both with his family and the institutions of school and penitentiary, before his desperate flight in search of freedom. Finally, the insertion of still photographic portraits of the girl and of the boy adopting a range of poses are reminiscent of the use of freeze frames of Jeanne Moreau in Truffaut’s Jules et Jim (1962), simulating various expressions of contrasting emotion.

The film reflects an experimental treatment of narration and oneirism. A silent sequence towards the end of the film opens with a shot of the young man in a white dressing gown holding a large axe in his hands. This is followed by a lengthy, fast-moving tracking-shot of the girl, clothed similarly to the boy and filmed from behind, fleeing across the grounds of the chateau. As she eventually falls to the ground in exhaustion, a low-angle shot of the boy in shadow shows him swinging the axe violently towards the ground in what we assume to be her direction. Despite this apparent act of violence, the girl reappears in the penultimate sequence, pushing the young boy in a wheelchair as though touring the grounds of an asylum. These chronological inconsistencies and aberrations in cause and effect clash with realist tendencies in the film and create a distinctive oneiric quality in Garrel’s evocation of the young people’s malaise.

Despite the film’s indebtedness to existent tropes of the New Wave, the burlesque, violent rage of Pascal could in fact be considered as a precursor to the cannibalistic violence of the Seine and Oise Liberation Front, witnessed at the conclusion to Godard’s Weekend (1967). Like Godard’s film, which has been considered as a prognosis of the anger and discontent that would explode in May 68, Garrel’s work, even at this early stage, appeared to have a finger on the pulse of a wider sentiment within France. In this respect, his reflections on the film in an interview that coincided with its first screening for French television in 1967 are noteworthy. Jacques Demeure, the presenter of the programme Banc-d’essai, pushes Garrel to concede that the film is ultimately an evocation of dissatisfaction and rebellion among young people. Garrel, whose manner appears somewhere between arrogant and insecure, refuses Demeure’s premise. Rejecting the assertion that the film is merely about disaffected youth, he positions the out-of-tuneness of the young protagonists as part of a general malaise afflicting society, diagnosing a type of monstrosity that no right-thinking person is immune to: ‘Manifestement, toute personne qui a intérêt pour les choses vraies doit de temps en temps voir une espèce d’évidence en face de la monstruosité de la vie extérieure’,⁷ adding, ‘Mettre ça sur le dos de la jeunesse serait trahir ce que je voulais dire.’⁸

Les Enfants désaccordés was followed by a second short film Droit de visite. A boy, whose parents are divorced, visits his father and his father’s young mistress for the weekend. The style of the film is more conventional than Les Enfants désaccordés and the oneiric quality of the previous work is less marked. It is noteworthy, however, as a reflection of Garrel’s integration of his personal life with his cinema from an early stage. Maurice Garrel relates how Philippe, having found himself in a similar position to the young boy of the film, following his father’s separation from his mother, sought to integrate this lived experience into his cinema. He adds that the treatment of youth and adolescence in his son’s first two short films was ‘directement inspiré de la vie’⁹ (Morice 2012: 167).

Following his two short films, Garrel began working for the programmes Bouton Rouge and Seize million de jeunes on French television. The works directed by Garrel for Bouton Rouge feature musicians such as Donovan, The Who and French pop artists including Ronnie Bird, Michel Polnareff and the model Zouzou, who later played a leading role in two of Garrel’s early feature films. Other works marry a playfulness on Garrel’s part with a growing polemical slant. Handa et la sophistication (1967) proposes a portrait of the female dandy, embodied by a model named Handa. Filmed in close-up, she recounts her day-to-day life. Precocious and unapologetic, she concludes her account with a provocative address to the audience: ‘Bon, si vous êtes tombée amoureuse de moi, vous pouvez m’écrire, vous risquez rien. Vous n’avez aucune chance, j’ai horreur, mais vraiment horreur des gens qui regardent la télé.’¹⁰

Handa’s provocative address to the TV-watching public is mirrored in an introduction delivered by Garrel to a programme on the theme of young people and money, Les jeunes et l’argent: France Gall, Marianne Faithful (1967). In a short piece-to-camera the director begins by detailing how the programme is about young people’s adaptation to the capitalist system, before adding:

Entendez par là, ceux qui ont déjà accepté de lutter pour l’argent et plus précisément, ceux qui ont réussi. Cette soirée étant placée sous le signe de la jeunesse, c’est à eux que je m’adresse, parce que moi je commence vraiment sérieusement à manquer d’air.¹¹

In these moments of provocation, Nicole Brenez recognises Garrel’s rare success in adopting a critical stance while working in an audiovisual field governed both by the Gaullist state and the diktat of commercial interests. Brenez also observes how within this largely forgotten period of the film-maker’s career, stylistic traits (approaches to portraiture, oneirism) and themes central to his cinema (dandyism, drugs, romanticism, anarchism) are present, in addition to a humorous tone that is often unacknowledged in his work (Brenez 2013).

For Bouton Rouge Garrel also directed Godard et ses émules (1967), a feature-length documentary focusing on the most recent generation of film-makers in France whose careers began in the wake of the New Wave. It features interviews with Jean Eustache, Francis Leroi, Jean-Michel Barjol, Romain Goupil and Luc Moullet. The interviews are intercut with short extracts from the work of the directors in question, including Eustache’s Le Père Noël a les yeux bleus (1967), which had been released in the same year. The film opens with a long panning shot of the Parisian skyline accompanied by a voice-over from Garrel in which he attacks the current climate of film production in France and a critical culture that has led to the neglect of young film-makers ‘qui s’obstinent à réaliser des films libres’.¹² A refrain of many of those interviewed is their indebtedness to Godard’s revolution of film form and modes of film production, as well as his financial support for their work. Garrel is said to have decided to make the work in part as a pretext for having access to the set of La Chinoise (Tsukidate 2018) and the documentary inc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Plates
• Series editors’ foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Philippe Garrel, an irregular auteur
• 1 Cinema and revolution
• 2 Cinema of the underground
• 3 Narrative turn: Autobiography and the imaginary self
• 4 Dialogues
• 5 Past and future generations
• Conclusion
• Filmography
• Select bibliography
• Index