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2.0 out of 5 stars
Re-fights very old film wars., June 13, 2001
How did a type of film - the gangster film/film noir - so rooted in an American social, historical and cultural context (e.g. Prohibition, the Depression, McCarthy) become so popular and influential with French audiences and directors, to the extent where, in the 1960s and 70s, it was by far the leading genre in the country? Why, when directors as iconoclastic as Godard wanted to challenge ocnventional narrative cinema, did they use film noir as a vehicle? These are the questions Robin Buss, the author of 'The French Through Their Films', sets out to answer in this book, the first of its kind in English.
Buss's method is to devote a chapter to each theme loosely centred around a key film or figure (usually a director, surprising in a mainstream genre dependent on big stars). 'In Black and White' traces the transposition of conventional thriller and mystery stories to a French context, through the career of Clouzot, whose socially precise and cynical films (e.g. 'Le Corbeau', 'The Wages of Fear') caused critical outrage, accused of immorality and misanthropy.
'La Route de Villennes' uses Becker's 'Touchez Pas Au Grisbi' to show how film noir became a vehicle for allegorising national crises such as the Nazi Occupation and the de-colonialisation process. 'Jazz', centring on Godard, highlights the increasing 'amorality' and formalism of a genre originally dedicated to the problems of law and criminality, while 'Criminal Types' uses Chabrol to explore the inadequacy of the genre's simplistic moral certainties. 'Police', and Costa-Gavras, charts the genre's move into the political thriller.
The heart of the book lies in the closing two chapters: 'Serie Noire' defines the post-modern thriller, its 'inventive' form (Corneau) and its descent into vacuous glossiness (Beineix, Carax, Besson); 'Back to Base' centres on the moral backlash against this trend, finding inspiration in Bresson's 'L'Argent', with its rigorous analysis of evil. The book concludes with a filmography of 101 key French films noirs.
There are a number of unsatisfactory aspects to this study. It has no clear thesis - at various, unconnected points it can be about the reaction to French noir of the British press (who cares? The audiences in this country for such films was always small. More interesting would have been a detailed look at domestic opinion), the development of cinema technology, or the notion of banal evil after World War Two. Film students are likely to find the book lacks intellectual rigour, while general film fans must wade through discussions of many films unavailable outside France. There is no account of the developments in the genre by directors from an immigrant background, and if you're looking for feminist critique of a man-heavy genre, forget it.
It is understandable that Buss would want to limit his focus to 1942 onwards, the period in which American noir truly begins, but this excludes the importance of pre-1942 literature (e.g. the books of Leblanc, Leroux, Allain et Souvestre) and cinema (e.g. Feuillade), which had as much influence on French noir as the American form, and a knowledge of which is indispensable to understanding what the French do to the foreign genre.
The marginalising of the genre's most important figure, Jean-Pierre Melville, the man who did more than any to shift its terms, and to enlarge and enrich it, is baffling. Actually, it's not: Buss is a British critic, and, like many of the old-style British critics he quotes, he believes film should be a medium for tackling moral questions, hence the sniffy dismissal of Godard, and those directors concerned with deconstructing the language of the genre. It is the old Sight and Sound/Cahiers du Cinema argument about content and form again, and it is as outdated as most of the ideas in this book.
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