Word: godard
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...very long ago that he was turning out some of the most accomplished little films of the past decade. It was Truffaut's 400 Blows after all, that launched the New Wave back in 1959 and Truffaut's name on the credits that got Godard's Breathless released soon afterwards. Now thirteen years and nine features later, he has tripped into the pitfalls of artistic self-satisfaction--into the flaccid, the superficial and the frivolous...
...criticism of "bourgeois forms" part of the "data" imparted to an audience. (Every well-meaning cloud-nine intellectual should be required to serve in a factory of a chain gang.) Thus, say Sontag and Poirier, the most important films of the past decade have been the political works of Godard and Rocha, even though these guys are in the baby league as far as politicians go. For my money, the best political film ever made is called Salvatore Giuliano, and was made by an Italian Marxist. Francesco Rosi, in 1962. He was one of the first of his countrymen...
...hardly denying his right to make social statements. But like Godard, he forgets or ignores the fact that in art as implicit social criticism is far more effective than explicit didacticism. Thin of Rules of the Game. Unlike Tanner, Jean Renoir understand that the best way to show how society maltreats people was through the struggles of his characters to define themselves while playing their game. In the Renoir film we are dealing with people who are truly caught between expediency and integrity...
...critic that shows through most plainly. Tanner has watched Truffaut, Godard, and Rohmer closely, and he has learned his lessons well. His story, realistic enough in substance, has that fringe of the unlikely which made the best of the New Wave so eminently palatable. Pierre (Jean-Luc Bideau), a struggling young writer, is commissioned to produce a television script to be based on a recent incident in the news: a young girl called Rosemonde was accused by her uncle of attempted murder with his old army rifle. The girl, for her part, claimed the gun went off while the uncle...
...FRENCH NEW WAVE lost its steam in the mid-sixties, when the experiments of the early part of the decade began to turn into repetition on the one hand and polemic on the other. Chabrol churned out Chabrols and Truffaut, Truffauts. Daniel Cohn-Bendit gave Godard politics. No one gave Resnais money. This same vacuum which so facilitated the ascension of Eric Rohmer seems likely to do similarly for Alain Tanner. But like Rohmer. Tanner at his moment of success is no fresh young talent. He is a middle-aged Swiss with a varied career behind him that includes apprenticeship...