If Pialat was close to anyone from that generation, it was the now rather forgotten Jacques Rozier, whose Adieu Philippine (1962) was a wry tale of young men and women playing amorous games, filmed in real locations with an unknown cast. La Maison des Bois (The House in the Woods, 1971) This placed him some distance from the famous New Wave directors, who in their backgrounds as film critics had a deeply self-conscious relationship with cinema – Godard deconstructing the medium, Truffaut celebrating literary tropes, Rivette reflecting on the theatre and life, and so on. As he would later express it, “While shooting L’Enfance nue, I was thinking about Repas de bébé.” He was referring to Baby’s Breakfast, a short made by the Lumière brothers in 1895, a static record of an amusing, everyday event, but one staged for the camera.Īnd this sense of the lens as observer, transforming a reality into something potentially miraculous, remained central to his method, and his approach to whatever happened in front of it. He had researched the subject deeply in the same town – Lens, in the north of France – where he made the film. L’Enfance nue grew out of a documentary project about the fostering of children.
Pialat himself tried on various hats through the 1950s and 60s, making observational documentaries and quirky shorts borrowing from silent cinema and surrealism. Of the two, he inclined more to Renoir’s brand of realism – a natural way of acting, a freedom to react to the conditions of the shoot, an open camera style in natural locations – than Carné’s supremely crafted world filled with poetic dialogue and gestures, and usually filmed on elaborate sets. It’s easy to see Jean Gabin, the star of Renoir’s film, as a model actor for Pialat – a solid man of the people, totally believable in a fictional context and unaffected in his speech and manner.Īlthough Pialat was very grudging in his praise of other filmmakers (while at the same time denying his own worth), he held to Renoir and Marcel Carné as the two masters of classic French cinema.
This was very much la France profonde, the near-mythical world of rural life outside the big cities, up there on the big screen. The film that made the greatest impression on him as a boy was Jean Renoir’s La Bête humaine (1938), a contemporary adaptation of Emile Zola’s novel dominated by working-class figures steeped in the soot and oil of the railways. His films were challenging in their brutal subject matter and elliptical narratives, and extremely autobiographical, yet he was capable of reaching a large audience, and moving them with an underlying tenderness. In generational terms, he should rightly be considered a member of the French New Wave, but he stood apart from them and only shot his first feature, L’Enfance nue (Naked Childhood), in 1968, when he was 43. While his refusal to concede to cliché and the sentimental, as well as his boldness in tackling unpredictable subjects, is perfectly evident in the work of such overt disciples as Cédric Kahn and Arnaud Desplechin, it’s much harder to define exactly where Pialat himself springs from – and in what tradition in French cinema he takes his place, if any.Īny attempt to assess Pialat’s cinema is necessarily a catalogue of contradictions. When Cahiers du cinéma in 1998 convened a meeting of young French filmmakers to discuss the influence of the New Wave, the conversation soon turned to Pialat, with the majority asserting that he was far more significant in their formation. Read more about Pialat and the young French talent he inspired, including an interview with Olivier Assayas, in our November 2019 issue. The S&S Deep Focus season Maurice Pialat and the New French Realism screens at BFI Southbank, London, until the end of December.
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