A Film-by-Film Look at Icarus Films’ Extensive Two-Disc Blu-ray Collection
BLU-RAY STREET DATE: SEPTEMBER 19, 2023/ICARUS FILMS
It feels like something of a risk for Icarus Films to begin its highly impressive two-disc nineteen-film collection of Early Short Films of the French New Wave with Alain Resnais’ 21-minute All the World’s Memory (1956), the highlight film of its own 2022 collection, Alain Resnais: Five Short Films. But then again, the legacy of the French New Wave is nothing if not risks. Besides, Resnais’ stunningly photographed and playfully bombastic library documentary can always justify a revisitation. The same can generally be said about his witty 1957 color documentary short The Song of Styrene, which is also included in this collection and the previous Resnais set.
Icarus then gets out of the library and into the real world with the second short on this set, Jacques Rivette’s Fool’s Mate (1956). “The real world”, in this case, being producer Claude Chabrol’s apartment. That’s where much of this delightfully lightweight and sly love triangle resourcefully takes place. Fool’s Mate is about a young woman who’s been gifted a fur coat by her lover, then must scheme to trick her husband into letting her keep it. Some consider this directorial debut of Rivette to be the true launch of the French New Wave. Is it? It’s certainly rife with tropes… not to mention cameos by Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, and François Truffaut.
After that, it’s off from Paris to Parris Island with The Marines (Les Marines). François Reichenbach’s 1957 documentary look at how the United States Marines trains its new recruits is presented uncensored. That means Reichenbach’s critical portions that the Marines officially ordered to be removed from the film are back in. The project includes the filmmaker’s dismay at how he perceives basic training as an intentional destruction of the individual, as well as a grim recollection of how one drill sergeant’s persistence ends with multiple deaths due to exhaustion. It’s a rather gripping piece bolstered heavily by its outsider’s perspective.
Then it’s a sudden ping-ponging back into narrative lightweight character-driven filmmaking for a pre-fame Jean-Luc Godard’s 1957 short All the Boys are Called Patrick. Produced by French super-producer Pierre Braunberger and written by Éric Rohmer (also yet to become well known), the film is an accomplished if otherwise forgettable situation comedy. In it, two young female flatmates (played chipper by Anne Collette and Nicole Berger) are separately wooed and asked out by the obvious lothario, Patrick (Jean-Claude Brialy). Of course, neither know that their potential new beau is in fact the same Patrick. They simply jump to the jokey conclusion that “All the boys are called Patrick!”. The paper-thin premise- the first in a proposed series about these girls- is well managed by all parties, particularly Godard, who’s airy way around the streets of Paris can safely be said to prefigure his approach to making his landmark film Breathless a few years later.
Next up is another documentary, Albiet another fairly witty one. Agnès Varda’s Ô Saisons, Ô Châteux (1958) makes what it can of its task to document old castles on behalf of the French Tourist Bureau. Varda supplements the for-hire project with various 16th-century poems. The twenty-one-minute piece is only moderately interesting at best, I’m afraid.
We then swing wildly from Varda’s gig-based doc to Jacques Doniol-Valcroze’s thematically ambitious short The Overworked (Les surmenés, 1959). Co-written by Truffaut, the film launched with a poignant prologue of stock footage and voiceover narration that details the plight of modern humanity amid our self-made accelerated lifestyle that revolves around soul-sucking work. Amid the “Great Resignation” of recent years, this bit pops as a promising start. Then there’s some flashy illustrated opening titles, then the story proper. And, this is where Doniol-Valcroze runs into trouble. Yane Barry plays the lead, the character unfortunately dubbed “Bubble Head Girl”. She’s an engaged small-town girl who’s move to Paris takes her down all the wrong avenues. All the while, she’s all too foolish to realize that she’s a cautionary tale of sorts. Beyond the intriguing prologue, the film is not great in any way, though Barry and company give it their best. Dare I say the tale of “Bubble Head Girl” hasn’t aged particularly well. It only goes to show that however progressive the French New Wavers fancied themselves, the respectful agency of women tended to be a blind spot.
Things get more interesting with the 1958-filmed/1961-debuted directorial collaboration between Godard and Truffaut, A Story of Water (Une histoire d’eau). Dedicating to American silent film comedy impresario Mack Sennett, the project demonstrates a certain lighthearted quality but is by no means slapstick. So don’t get the wrong idea. Apparently, a number of IMDb reviewers, per their scathing dismissals, did just that. “Nothing happens!!”, they say. Actually, what happens is: a young lady (Caroline Dim) in the flooded-out area of Villeneuve Saint Georges wanting to get to Paris secures a boat ride with a young man with romantic intent (Jean-Claude Brialy). It’s an extremely lightweight piece that was apparently stripped of much of its initial story by Godard in editing. What we’ve got is a bemusing twelve-minute jaunt replete with disaffected voiceover narration and at least one reference to Balzac (in case you doubted the validity of who made this short). By gum, they really did go trudging out into the drink for this one.
Godard’s next one in this set, Charolette and her Boyfriend (Charlotte et son Jules, 1958), takes on no such burden. Set almost entirely in the apartment of a layabout chauvinist played by Jean-Paul Belmondo, the whole of the film’s thirteen minutes is him self-righteously mansplaining his many beefs with Charolette (Anne Collette, pixie-like and unphased). On and on and on he goes in this greyscale room-bound forebearer of many a Godardian couple’s sequence. This one, however, has the good humor to end with a joke. The title itself, not even bothering to include the name of “her boyfriend” is a clear indication of the famously prickly filmmaker’s allegiance with Charolette. Whatever that’s worth.
“Sad, grey, and boring suburbs go by in the rain…”. In his 1961 docu-short Love Exists, filmmaker Maurice Pialat quotes the line once sung by singer Édith Piaf twice, once in quotes, once matter-of-factly. He does so with good reason, as the nearly-twenty-minute film is a character-free narrated look at contemporary economic struggle in Paris. While the film demonstrates an artful stylishness throughout, it is without question a project that today would be singled out as “poverty porn.” Without calling Pialat disingenuous, the attention paid to image casting ends up distancing the viewer from the human struggles on display. It is, however, effective as a depressing, sad watch. It looks absolutely striking on this Blu-ray.
The next film marks the first American filmmaker to land a spot in the Early Short Films of the French New Wave set. 500 Francs (Les Cinq Cent Balles; 1961) by Melvin Van Peebles is a refreshingly simple story that, perhaps surprisingly, goes dark. Shot in monochrome and less than thirteen minutes long and without synch sound (there is some squeaky violin music playing over it), Van Peebles’ humble tale of a young French boy whose quest to rescue a 500 franc note from a Parisian storm drain is innocent, provincial, suspenseful, frustrating, charming, and finally just. He can almost reach it……! What begins as a cute little dollop becomes a sharp commentary about the violence inherent in greed. This is one of the more universally accessible films in his French New Wave set, though it is ironically not made by a Frenchman.
Maurice Pialat’s 1961 short, Janine, is a pointed sixteen-minutes of two men (Hubert Deschamps and Claude Berri) that are unfortunate in the ways of love but share a mutual fixation for the self-assured sex worker, Janine (Evelyne Ker). Pialat’s touch with characters and drama is assured even at this early phase of his career. The sheer darkness of the image is particularly satisfying as the guys wander about in the late night hours.
Guy Gilles’ short Paris, A Winter’s Day (Paris un jour d’hiver) winds down the first disc’s program in postcard fashion, as the great city is pontificated about as it’s displayed in a series of interesting freeze-frames. The black and white imagery is all well framed and artfully considered as an unaffected male voiceover considers the plight of Parisian seasonal change. It’s all quite weirdly compelling, eventually giving way to a vibrant Kodachrome palate at the very end.
On to Disc Two…. But first, a cautionary consideration on the dangers of rock n’ roll. Director François Reichenbach begins In Memory of Rock, his 1963 twelve-minute black and white look at the hotly-debated effects that the newfangled syncopated beats of rock music are having on the impressionable youth, with scrolling text that urges one to “decide for yourself” how threatening this new phenomenon is. What follows is a an experimentally assembled collage of young people rocking out live with Johnny Hallyday and other anarchic ambassadors of teenage hedonism. Sometimes there are moments of strife, but mostly is just crowds of kids gettin’ down and having fun. Is Reichenbach’s alarmist intro a satirical put-on, or does he really give credence to rock music fermenting delinquency? I honestly couldn’t tell you.
Then it’s off to The Little Cafe, Albiet still in the stead of 1963-era François Reichenbach. Like the previous short on the disc, this one also clocks in around twelve minutes, is in black and white, and has a collage-like assembly. For the duration, we hang out in a moderately busy hotel-based cafe. Eventually, a bride and groom show up, a bit weary and maybe a little irritable. The editing and the musical choices are always interesting, though it lacks the immediacy of In Memory of Rock.
Next, we hop ahead to 1965 to check in with social realist filmmaker Jean Rouch in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. The twenty-seven-minute documentary opens with the public establishment of “The Young Merrymakers”, an apolitical organization devoted to acceptance and equality. This organization includes all manner of artists, performers, and tradespeople. In formal meetings, it is decided that a public dance celebration will be held to celebrate their own culture. Rouch keeps things wonderfully simple, as the entirety of The Goumbé of the Young Revelers is a straight-line voyage to the high-energy party. Once it’s declared that all male attendees must wear white dress shirts and black trousers to the event, we cut to them cutting loose with their hypnotic syncopated percussion as they move to it in time with glorious abandon. As François Reichenbach was questioning the driving beats of rock n’ roll in his own film a few years prior, one shudders to think what he’d make of this unintentional one-upmanship in this celebration that Rouch is clearly endorsing.
Undiagnosed depression dominates The Botanical Avatar of Mademoiselle Flora, Jeanne Barbillon’s 1965 short about female isolation and loneliness. Bernadette Lafont, who would go on to star in Jean Eustache’s internal 1973 epic The Mother and the Whore, plays the dejected Flora with pouty scorn. Her lover, Charles (Louis Mercuret) may as well not be around or makes things worse. Eventually, all she can do is slouch into a pile of fresh vegetables and long to become “one with the waters” of the nearby lake. An effective little film from Barbillon, who barely directed anything else, and is more known for her writing.
The set proper goes out with a bang with Jean Rouch’s twenty-five-minute 1966 character study, The Fifteen Year Old Widows. This film is an essay on teenage girls in Paris in the summer of 1964. That sentence is the English translation of the text that begins the film.
Apropos to very little concerning the French New Wave beyond perhaps technique, the set’s bonus film is a twenty-two-minute fly-on-the-wall bit of rehearsal footage called Directing Actors by Jean Renoir. Directed by the wife of producer Pierre Braunberger, whose name appears on a number of the short films in this set, Gisèle Braunberger also stars in the piece opposite the great director Jean Renoir. It’s just the two of them in a small office for most of it as he aggressively coaches her on a brief but intense line reading. One wonders to what degree the presence of the documentary camera may be affecting the scenario, as he seems too assertive, and she seems very self-conscious.
It’s interesting to see Renoir engaged in this struggle to get the performance he wants. He never loses his cool with Braunberger even as he hurls every trick in the book, including line readings, at her. Finally, they move into a studio for a camera test. There, we hear all her dialogue. And, she’s pretty good! One imagines that Directing Actors with Jean Renoir was part of the lot that Icarus Films acquired to make this set, so why not include it?
All in all, Early Short Films of the French New Wave is a tremendously well executed assembly of nineteen very disparate works. A unifying factor in this unique batch is that audio/visual quality is consistently high, and subtitles are consistent. For fans of classic French cinema, particularly those who thrive on tonal and stylistic variety, this set is a must-own.
Here’s the official rundown of the set’s titles:
Disc 1 –
ALL THE WORLD’S MEMORY – Alain Resnais (1956)
FOOL’S MATE – Jacques Rivette (1956)
THE MARINES – François Reichenbach (1957)
ALL THE BOYS ARE CALLED PATRICK – Jean-Luc Godard (1957)
THE SONG OF STYRENE – Alain Resnais (1957)
Ô SAISONS, Ô CHÂTEUX – Agnès Varda (1958)
THE OVERWORKED – Jacques Doniol-Valcroze (1958)
A STORY OF WATER – Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut (1958)
CHARLOTTE AND HER BOYFRIEND – Jean-Luc Godard (1958)
LOVE EXISTS – Maurice Pialat (1960)
JANINE – Maurice Pialat (1961)
500 FRANCS – Melvin Van Peebles (1961)
PARIS, A WINTER’S DAY – Guy Gilles (1962)
Disc 2 –
IN MEMORY OF ROCK – François Reichenbach (1963)
THE LITTLE CAFE – François Reichenbach (1963)
THE GOUMBÉ OF THE YOUNG REVELERS – Jean Rouch (1965)
THE BOTANICAL AVATAR OF MADEMOISELLE FLORA – Jeanne Barbillon (1965)
THE FIFTEEN YEAR OLD WIDOWS – Jean Rouch (1966)
Bonus Film:
DIRECTING ACTORS BY JEAN RENOIR – Gisèle Braunberger (1968)
DETAILS:
- 2 DISCS
- Run Time: 348 MINUTES
- COLOR/B&W