A labour of love, this book spotlights the influence of French New Wave cinema

CINEMA
Far from the Masters – Experimentations in Post-New Wave French Cinema
eds. Cornell Cash and Corey P. Cribb
Index Press, $29.95

Issued by a small Melbourne-based publisher, Far from the Masters is modest in form but ambitious in purpose. A labour of love originating from a Melbourne University film club devoted to French cinema, it’s only 112 pages long and the quality of most of the reproductions is poor.

But it turns a bright spotlight on filmmaking practices often overlooked in discussions of how the nouvelle vague – the French New Wave, generally linked to the work in the 1950s and ’60s of writer-directors such as François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol and Agnes Varda – not only rejected the “cinéma du papa” that preceded it but also left its mark on what came afterwards.

Made up of nine essays by local writers, the book grapples with various ways in which particular films and their creators from the late ’60s onwards have engaged in what the book labels “post-New Wave experimentations”. The introduction by editors Cornell Cash and Corey P. Gribb, academics now based abroad, sets the scene, proposing that these films generally “turn away from the innocence or lightness of discovery prevalent in the films of the New Wave” and, both formally and thematically, grapple with “a crisis in the relation between personal life and collective meaning”.

The following eight chapters scrutinise specific films in this context, more or less. Their interest is primarily in analysis, in how the films work as forms of expression, rather than in any evaluation of their worth, although philosopher Scott Robinson’s scathing account of JR and Agnes Varda’s Visages Villages (2017) makes explicit his contempt for the film and for its betrayal of Varda’s earlier work.

The names of a couple of the contributors will be familiar to regular readers of this masthead. Jake Wilson shows himself to be as comfortable in this more scholarly context as he is in his regular reviewing stint with his excellent study of Jacques Rivette’s Le pont du Nord (1981), illuminating the ways that its preoccupation with the inevitability of change flows through its imagery as well as its plot. And former Age film critic and arts writer Philippa Hawker brings her customary eloquence to an insightful study of Les Idoles (1968), a rarity made by Marc’o (born Marc-Gilbert Guillaumin), tracing its transformation from a radical performance work into a film and neatly contextualising it in relation to a wide range of better-known works.

Melbourne University English Department academic Miranda Stanyon perceptively draws on her special area of interest in her examination of Rivette’s L’amour fou (1969), which deals with rehearsals for Andromaque, Jean Racine’s 17th-century play born of Greek mythology. Her excavation of the parallels between the characters in the play and in the film points to the modernist undercurrent which is everywhere implicit in the book (but, curiously, never mentioned).

Editors Cash and Cribb offer instructive readings of, respectively, uncompromising writer-director Maurice Pialat’s searing À Nos Amours (1983) and Patrick Deval’s Acéphale (1968), the most experimental of all the works discussed in the collection and a film that “in its search for new modes of existence, embraces all those unwanted and violent parts of ourselves that we have neglected to recognise as human”.

And Jack Keenan’s probing of Truffaut’s L’enfant sauvage (1970), based on the actual case of a doctor’s attempt to introduce a “feral child” to civilisation, eschews any straightforward reading of the film. Drawing on details of Truffaut’s own life and career, Keenan astutely excavates a complicated and self-questioning autobiography from the film, even if he unnecessarily decorates his commentary with some Lacanian psychoanalysing.

Only Michelle Yuang’s bloggy account of her encounter with Chantal Akerman’s groundbreaking Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) sits uncomfortably in the book. “The most memorable cinematic experiences are those that inspire new emotions within me,” she writes. Which is fair enough, I suppose (whatever these “new emotions” might be), but her job as a commentator is surely to ask how they do this.

More interested in her own response to the film than in what makes it tick (even if she doesn’t totally ignore this), her contribution seems at odds with the project outlined in the opening.

Taken as a whole, though, Far from the Masters is thoughtful and informed, likely to leave readers well-equipped to appreciate one of the less-travelled roads in world cinema.

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