Choice of Arms
The French Crime Thriller 1958-2009
August 26 to October 12, 2016
To start off the season, the Film Museum presents Part 2 of its retrospective dedicated to French crime cinema. Around 1960, propelled by the growth spurt of the New Wave, the crime film was catapulted from its "classical" period into modernity. As the genre mirroring the state of the nation, its metamorphosis entailed aesthetic, political and cultural changes.
While Jean-Pierre Melville, as figurehead and role model, steered the gangster film towards an absolute "purity", a new generation of directors ranging from François Truffaut to Claude Sautet set out to completely revise the traditional genre, transforming it for a younger audience. Father figure Jean Gabin, the epitome of an international superstar à la française, is thereby replaced by new types of masculinity: Lino Ventura triumphs as Gabin's gruffer successor, while Jean-Paul Belmondo's youthful cool secures him (with the possible exception of Alain Delon) a unique status whose impact on crime film will last decades. A worthy heir doesn't appear until 1980, when Gérard Depardieu enters the genre with a raw ferocity which feeds on the politicization and radical escalation of the genre in the hands of the leading directors of the 1970s (Alain Corneau, Yves Boisset, Philippe Labro) and authors such as Jean-Patrick Manchette, who coined the French umbrella term polar.
At the same time, mainstream cinema goes the route of surface tension (as in the action flicks centered around Belmondo), resulting in the Cinéma du look. This trend was epitomized by Jean-Jacques Beineix' Diva in the early eighties and turned into a global brand by Luc Besson (Nikita) in the decades to follow. However, unlike the rest of Europe, France successfully held its own against the simultaneous leveling of crime stories under the ever-increasing pressure of television competition, proof of which is found in key works by old masters such as Claude Chabrol (La Cérémonie) as much as in the continuation of the sociological polar tendency, carried into the new millennium by Jacques Audiard or Éric Valette.
The radical change in French crime thrillers from the late '50s onwards comes on the heels of a fresh, new attitude towards life, fueled by the revolt against the paternalism of the post-war era. Internationally oriented and prone to playful stylization, it runs parallel to the Hollywood-molded New Wave politique des auteurs. The American influence is evident in Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, a radical treatment of gangster film dedicated to the low-budget studio Monogram, as in Truffaut's adaptation of David Goodis' Shoot the Piano Player, or in Louis Malle's choice of having Miles Davis create the score for Elevator to the Gallows. Alfred Hitchcock becomes a reference point for Truffaut (The Bride Wore Black with Jeanne Moreau as femme fatale) as well as veteran René Clément, whose Purple Noon (based on a Patricia Highsmith novel) makes a star of Alain Delon in the role of an amoral killer. Meanwhile, thanks to a radical purification and supreme laconism, the generic polar creates its own modern forms, heralded in Sautet's Classe tous risques, starring Ventura and Belmondo, and completed in Melville's masterpieces of the 1960s and early '70s.
A further thrust is provided by the turbulence of May '68 and the subsequent end of the De Gaulle era – a long since defunct symbol of economic and social "stability". While major Chabrol films such as The Butcher laid bare the inner corruption of the bourgeoisie, a left-wing, i.e. anarcho-satirical fraction emerged – a tougher, angrier, sharpened neo-polar, inspired by Jean-Patrick Manchette's crime novels. The pitch-black (also in terms of its humor) Nada, an apogee of Chabrol and Manchette's work, is the ultimate example of 1970s ideological criticism. However, it was Yves Boisset who became the pivotal director of the movement, flanked by anarchists such as Jean-Pierre Mocky (L'Albatros) and virtuoso directors like Philippe Labro (The Inheritor).
In his deconstructions of the police (Un condé, La Femme flic) and the law (Judge Fayard Called the Sheriff), Boisset fuses the power of popular cinema and social protest in an exemplary manner. His masterpiece, the antiracist thriller satire Dupont Lajoie (The Common Man, 1975), touches on a truly sore point: reactions to the inflow of North African immigrants characterize the polar as much as current national affairs. The directors' takes range from Bertrand Tavernier's The Pigsty (1981), a reflection on the colonial era, Maurice Pialat's genre swan song Police (1985) up to Mathieu Kassovitz's La Haine (1995). Many crucial tendencies come to a climax in La Haine: Alain Corneau's banlieue analyses in his Série noire and on the margins of Choice of Arms, his apotheosis of the "Melvillian" model; but also cinema's shift towards commercial youth culture in the wake of Beineix and Besson. Still, polar's renaissance in the new millennium was not discouraged by these developments: films such as Audiard's A Prophet, emphasizing the fear of Muslims, or Valette's State Affairs with its leftist fusion of a political thriller and the empowerment of policewomen demonstrate the vitality of the polar tradition in the present.
Dominik Graf, the most significant director of crime thrillers in the German-speaking world, will be a guest at the Film Museum on September 8 and 9 and speak about the French neo-polar. The retrospective has been organized with generous help from the Cinémathèque suisse.
To start off the season, the Film Museum presents Part 2 of its retrospective dedicated to French crime cinema. Around 1960, propelled by the growth spurt of the New Wave, the crime film was catapulted from its "classical" period into modernity. As the genre mirroring the state of the nation, its metamorphosis entailed aesthetic, political and cultural changes.
While Jean-Pierre Melville, as figurehead and role model, steered the gangster film towards an absolute "purity", a new generation of directors ranging from François Truffaut to Claude Sautet set out to completely revise the traditional genre, transforming it for a younger audience. Father figure Jean Gabin, the epitome of an international superstar à la française, is thereby replaced by new types of masculinity: Lino Ventura triumphs as Gabin's gruffer successor, while Jean-Paul Belmondo's youthful cool secures him (with the possible exception of Alain Delon) a unique status whose impact on crime film will last decades. A worthy heir doesn't appear until 1980, when Gérard Depardieu enters the genre with a raw ferocity which feeds on the politicization and radical escalation of the genre in the hands of the leading directors of the 1970s (Alain Corneau, Yves Boisset, Philippe Labro) and authors such as Jean-Patrick Manchette, who coined the French umbrella term polar.
At the same time, mainstream cinema goes the route of surface tension (as in the action flicks centered around Belmondo), resulting in the Cinéma du look. This trend was epitomized by Jean-Jacques Beineix' Diva in the early eighties and turned into a global brand by Luc Besson (Nikita) in the decades to follow. However, unlike the rest of Europe, France successfully held its own against the simultaneous leveling of crime stories under the ever-increasing pressure of television competition, proof of which is found in key works by old masters such as Claude Chabrol (La Cérémonie) as much as in the continuation of the sociological polar tendency, carried into the new millennium by Jacques Audiard or Éric Valette.
The radical change in French crime thrillers from the late '50s onwards comes on the heels of a fresh, new attitude towards life, fueled by the revolt against the paternalism of the post-war era. Internationally oriented and prone to playful stylization, it runs parallel to the Hollywood-molded New Wave politique des auteurs. The American influence is evident in Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, a radical treatment of gangster film dedicated to the low-budget studio Monogram, as in Truffaut's adaptation of David Goodis' Shoot the Piano Player, or in Louis Malle's choice of having Miles Davis create the score for Elevator to the Gallows. Alfred Hitchcock becomes a reference point for Truffaut (The Bride Wore Black with Jeanne Moreau as femme fatale) as well as veteran René Clément, whose Purple Noon (based on a Patricia Highsmith novel) makes a star of Alain Delon in the role of an amoral killer. Meanwhile, thanks to a radical purification and supreme laconism, the generic polar creates its own modern forms, heralded in Sautet's Classe tous risques, starring Ventura and Belmondo, and completed in Melville's masterpieces of the 1960s and early '70s.
A further thrust is provided by the turbulence of May '68 and the subsequent end of the De Gaulle era – a long since defunct symbol of economic and social "stability". While major Chabrol films such as The Butcher laid bare the inner corruption of the bourgeoisie, a left-wing, i.e. anarcho-satirical fraction emerged – a tougher, angrier, sharpened neo-polar, inspired by Jean-Patrick Manchette's crime novels. The pitch-black (also in terms of its humor) Nada, an apogee of Chabrol and Manchette's work, is the ultimate example of 1970s ideological criticism. However, it was Yves Boisset who became the pivotal director of the movement, flanked by anarchists such as Jean-Pierre Mocky (L'Albatros) and virtuoso directors like Philippe Labro (The Inheritor).
In his deconstructions of the police (Un condé, La Femme flic) and the law (Judge Fayard Called the Sheriff), Boisset fuses the power of popular cinema and social protest in an exemplary manner. His masterpiece, the antiracist thriller satire Dupont Lajoie (The Common Man, 1975), touches on a truly sore point: reactions to the inflow of North African immigrants characterize the polar as much as current national affairs. The directors' takes range from Bertrand Tavernier's The Pigsty (1981), a reflection on the colonial era, Maurice Pialat's genre swan song Police (1985) up to Mathieu Kassovitz's La Haine (1995). Many crucial tendencies come to a climax in La Haine: Alain Corneau's banlieue analyses in his Série noire and on the margins of Choice of Arms, his apotheosis of the "Melvillian" model; but also cinema's shift towards commercial youth culture in the wake of Beineix and Besson. Still, polar's renaissance in the new millennium was not discouraged by these developments: films such as Audiard's A Prophet, emphasizing the fear of Muslims, or Valette's State Affairs with its leftist fusion of a political thriller and the empowerment of policewomen demonstrate the vitality of the polar tradition in the present.
Dominik Graf, the most significant director of crime thrillers in the German-speaking world, will be a guest at the Film Museum on September 8 and 9 and speak about the French neo-polar. The retrospective has been organized with generous help from the Cinémathèque suisse.
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