Lembrando que Lardeau quase escreveu um livro sobre Cimino para a editora dos Cahiers

Nagisa Oshima, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, estos tres cineastas imprimieron su huella en el cine de los años setenta y es probable que esta década pase a la historia del cine como la suya. Gishiki, Porcile, Die dritte Generation, Deutschland im Herbst, Oshima, Pasolini, Fassbinder: los tres proceden de países que han engendrado el fascismo y perdido la guerra. Los tres son cineastas de la no reconciliación, del rechazo del olvido. Los tres han llevado a la pantalla el desgarro interno de las familias, la rebelión de los hijos contra los padres y la imposibilidad de estos padres de mantenerse en su papel después de tantas atrocidades cometidas en su nombre durante la guerra. Los tres critican tenazmente en su obra la negación del pasado, base sobre que la Alemania, Japon o Italia reconstruyeron su industria e instauraron los principios democráticos de gobierno. Los tres han visto en esta negación, en el hipócrita silenciamiento del pasado, el fracaso de la democracia venidera, el escollo en el que ésta habría de tropezar, incluso antes de su restablecimiento: la mayoría se somete dócilmente a las reglas de la democracia, porque le han dicho que ése es el camino del bien, igual que anteriormente se había sometido ciegamente a la caprichosa voluntad de un déspota. En ambos casos, el poder es exterior, trascendente y arbitrario. Oshima, Pasolini, Fassbinder, los tres han visto, en esta aceptación dócil del orden dominante, al mismo tiempo una amenaza permanente para la democracia y una promesa tácita de retorno, si no del fascismo propiamente dicho, al menos de una sociedad totalitaria.

Mamma Roma, Seishun Zankoku Monogatari, Liebe ist kälter als der Tod, Götter der Pest, las obras de Fassbinder, de Pier Paolo Pasolini y de Nagisa Oshima comienzan igualmente con la descripción de los bajos fondos. Ya sea la miseria de la prostitución, ya la ira y la desesperación del proxeneta, la soledad del trabajador inmigrante griego, turco o italino en Alemania, coreano en Japón, procedente de Friuli en los suburbios de Roma, los tres han criticado la sociedad, han expressado su rebelión fuera de los caminos trillados de la lucha de clases, no según el esquema clásico del proletariado contra la burguesía, sino a partir de la marginación, de las minorías, de los rechazados y de los excluidos de la sociedad - del lumpenproletariat -, y han denunciado una sociedad cuya cohesión radicaba en el rechazo, en el odio exacerbado al Otro, en cuanto éste era distinto por su origen, du conducta o su sexualidad.

Los tres son cineastas del deseo, a la vez como pulsión, como energía y como determinación, contra el que viene a romper, a encallar, cualquier norma social. Los tres han visto en el deseo un doble límite a la sociedad, a la vez como expresión radical de la subjetividad y como violencia natural, como fuerza destructora, como potencia aniquiladora de la sociedad que ésta ha de reprimir para poderse desarrollar. Oshima, Pasolini, Fassbinder, los tres han filmado el deseo en su relación con la norma, en su carácter irreductible frente a esa norma - como potencia de la negación (El imperio de los sentidos, Desesperación). Los tres han articulado el fascismo con el deseo, han visto en él una forma específica, patológica, de la perversión de la ley. El fascismo es consecuencia de la negación del deseo, de que se reniegue de él por pánico, de su retorno en forma negativa, mortífera, totalmente vuelta hacia la destrucción del Otro y, a través del Otro, de uno mismo.

Para Griffith, Vidor, Ford o más recientemente Cimino, la Historia es resultado de la lucha en defensa de unos ideales y de trayectorias individuales. Para Eisenstein, para Brecht, para Lang y, más recientemente, para Jean-Marie Straub, es fruto de la lucha de clases, de un enfrentamiento de masas. Para Vertov, para Rossellini, y tambiém para Jean-Luc Godard, es consecuencia de un conflicto entre una incomunicación, un malentendido fundamental entre los seres humanos, y una comunicación generalizada, planetaria. Para Nagisa Oshima, para Pier Paolo Pasolini, para Rainer Werner Fassbinder, nace de um rechazo del Otro, de una tendencia de la sociedad a organizarse en castas y de un agujero abierto en este sistema por la energía incontrolada del deseo, lugar geométrico del sujeto. Nagisa Oshima, Pier Paolo Pasolini y Rainer Werner Fassbinder encarnan en el cine el último proyecto original, coherente, consecuente y logrado de una visión de la Historia, el último intento de un cine que cuestiona la sociedad.

Yann Lardeau, Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Dodes'kaden

Par Louis SKORECKI — 4 septembre 2003 à 00:50
CinéCinéma Classic, 18 h 05.

Comparer Dodes'kaden à tout ce que le cinéma a produit, chefs-d'oeuvre et navets, depuis son invention par Auguste et Louis Lumière, c'est le genre de choses qui n'est pas pour nous déplaire. Pour ceux qui ont la chance de n'avoir pas encore vu Dodes'kaden, on dira juste que c'est à la fois ce qui anticipe la fin du cinéma et ce qui la rend dérisoire, ce qui rend dérisoire l'existence même du cinéma. Dire que Dodes'kaden est le dernier film de «cinéma», ça nous fait une belle jambe. Dire que c'est le dernier film à englober le monde, ça ne nous avance pas plus.

Ça nous ferait même plutôt reculer. Ce qui fonde l'existence même de Dodes'kaden, qui vaut bien mieux qu'un simple film de Kurosawa, et bien plus que la figure dérisoire de ce petit maître de l'entropie, c'est la remise en question, non pas du «cinéma», mais de l'«homme». L'existence de l'«homme» est-elle encore possible et à quel prix ?

Dodes'kaden ne s'occupe que de ça, ce qui survit d'humain dans l'homme et, à défaut, ce qui reste de l'homme dans le sous-homme. Sous-homme, dit Dieu à l'oreille de Kurosawa, c'est mieux que rien. Quel Dieu ? murmure le vent à l'oreille du vieux Kurosawa. Quels dieux lui soufflent d'en finir avec la vie devant l'insuccès (financier, artistique, public) de ce film d'outre-tombe ? Disons, pour donner une idée du dialogue entre Kurosawa et ses démons (ses dieux, si l'on préfère), qu'il s'agit d'histoires, de bribes d'histoires, de paraboles. Dans deux des dernières grandes religions, le bouddhisme zen chinois et le judaïsme transcendantal des grands maîtres hassidiques du XIXe siècle, celui qui fait suite aux illuminations de charretier du Baal Schem Tov, ce sont les histoires qui comptent avant tout. La variante d'une histoire zen (l'une des plus connues) trouve sa place dans un épisode de Dodes'kaden. C'est celle du voleur et du volé.


Dodes' kaden (2)

Par Louis SKORECKI — 8 septembre 2003 à 00:53
CinéCinéma Classic, 22 h 10.

Dans toute histoire, il y a un voleur et un volé. Le problème, ce n'est pas de savoir qui est le voleur et qui est le volé (même si c'est parfois plus compliqué qu'on ne l'imagine), c'est d'abord de savoir en quoi consiste précisément le vol. Les mystiques passent leur vie à élucider de telles questions, des questions qui intéressent malheureusement assez peu les cinéastes, et encore moins les scénaristes. Kurosawa s'est laissé gagner sur le tard par l'ivresse intellectuelle et sensuelle de ce genre de questions existentielles. Dommage qu'il ne leur ait consacré qu'un seul film, Dodes' kaden, à la fois son plus grand film et l'un des deux ou trois sommets de l'art cinématographique du XXe siècle. Dodes' kaden parle de ce très court instant entre la naissance et la mort qu'on se risque parfois maladroitement à appeler «la vie». La vie, en tant qu'elle se résume à quelques flashes de couleur, quelques émotions fortes, une ou deux histoires d'amour. La vie en tant qu'on ne cesse de buter dessus, en tant qu'on ne s'en remet pas, en tant qu'on en meurt. Pas mal comme scénario, non ?

On ne fera qu'effleurer ici la surface de ce film gigantesque, torturé, suicidé, apaisé. D'autres mots ne cesseront de ne pas avoir raison de ce film. Tôt ou tard, le film se venge des mots. Pour en finir provisoirement avec ce qui ne cesse pas de ne pas finir, il faut bien qu'on dise quelque chose de cette histoire du voleur et du volé. Dans l'un des fragments de ce recueil de nouvelles cinématographiques (plutôt de mauvaises nouvelles, d'ailleurs), un vieil homme se fait voler. Plus discret que lui, plus transparent, on ne fait pas. La police ramène le voleur et demande au vieil homme s'il le reconnaît. «Mais vous vous êtes trompé, dit le vieillard, cet homme est mon ami, vous avez arrêté un homme à qui je venais de donner de l'argent. Il n'a rien volé du tout.» L'homme est relâché. Il pleure. Pleure-t-il avant ou après avoir été relâché, c'est toute la question.

(A suivre)


Dodes'kaden (3)

Par Louis SKORECKI — 12 septembre 2003 à 00:57
CinéCinéma Classic, 16 h 50.

Dans toute histoire, il y a un homme et une femme. Même si la femme est une chienne, même si elle a des couilles, ça ne change rien. Dodes'kaden est un film qui parle de l'homme en tant qu'il fait encore partie du monde, du monde animal, du monde végétal, et même du monde minéral. Faire partie du monde, ce n'est pas mal, surtout à une époque où être au monde se conçoit si mal. Quand il y a trop de choses autour de toi, dit en substance le vieux Kurosawa, c'est comme s'il n'y avait rien. Mais quand il n'y a rien du tout, la comédie de la vie (la tragédie, si l'on préfère) peut commencer. «Quand on fera danser les couillons, faisait dire Pagnol à l'un de ses personnages, tu ne seras pas à l'orchestre.» On rit autant chez Kurosawa que chez Pagnol, mais c'est nettement plus trivial.

Si un mot devait résumer Dodes'kaden, ce serait précisément «trivialité». Ces grilles de fer forgé qu'un père et son fils, réduits à la mendicité, imaginent autour d'une maison idéale, une maison de rêve, elles sont vraiment en fer. Les larmes que le vieil amoureux ne sait plus comment verser quand sa femme se décide enfin à revenir, ce sont de vraies larmes. Les deux hommes qui échangent leurs femmes, sans même s'en apercevoir, ils les échangent pour de bon. Le crétin qui joue au petit train (do-des-ka-den, c'est le bruit de la locomotive qu'il imagine dans sa tête tout au long du film), il y joue vraiment. Il la conduit pour de bon, sa locomotive. On ne l'appelle pas «le train fou» pour rien. Il n'est pas bête, il voit bien qu'elle n'est pas là, la loco, au moment précis où il voit bien qu'elle est là. Au spectateur de décider si elle est pour de vrai, ou non. Et le reste ? Toutes ces histoires éclatées, ça raconte quoi ? L'homme qui a des tics, ça rime à quoi ? Ces hommes perdus qui ne cessent de mordre dans le réel sans avoir peur de se mordre les doigts, on en fait quoi ? Où est le fruit du réel ? Et où sont les pépins ?.

Louis SKORECKI

Salvatore Giuliano

Michel Ciment


With Salvatore Giuliano (1961), Francesco Rosi developed the style and method that would make him, during the sixties and seventies, the greatest political filmmaker of his time. If Sergei Eisenstein could be considered the master of political cinema in the first half of the twentieth century, Rosi, in a way his peer, offers a totally different approach to the realities of power. Joseph Goebbels, allegedly an admirer of the Russian director’s films, would have been unable to endorse Rosi’s analytical conclusions. Eisenstein uses the tools of propaganda, playing chiefly on emotion and a Manichean view of the world. Rosi, though able to provoke deeply sensitive reactions from his spectators, always manages to make them think by tracking down and exposing the lies that obscure the inquiries and the scandals of our societies. His filmography can be viewed as a vast panorama of the historical past of his country, as well as its present.

Influenced by both Italian neorealism and the American crime-film tradition (from Jules Dassin to Elia Kazan), Rosi had worked as an assistant director with such filmmakers as Luchino Visconti, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Mario Monicelli before striking out on his own as writer and director with two films, La sfida (The Challenge, 1958) and I magliari (1959), the first situated in Naples and the second among Italian immigrant cloth sellers in Hamburg. Having mastered his craft, Rosi inaugurated with Salvatore Giuliano a new kind of realism that, while strongly influenced by neorealism, went beyond its immediate model by examining such issues as power and the relationships between the law and lawbreakers, while also shedding light on the causes and consequences that determine the ways in which society functions.

Salvatore Giuliano is set in the mezzogiorno, that southern part of Italy (including Sicily) that has been left on its own to struggle with poverty and exploitation. It is this region that dominates most of the director’s work, from Le mani sulla città (Hands Over the City, 1963) to Il caso Mattei (The Mattei Affair, 1972) and Cadaveri eccellenti (Illustrious Corpses, 1976). Salvatore Giuliano was initially entitled Sicilia 1943-–1960, a title that reveals the director’s intention to create a portrait of the island, complete with its contradictions and its historical evolution. Salvatore Giuliano, the Sicilian bandit whose name was to become the final title of the film, is present only as a corpse in a courtyard in Castelvetrano, or on a slab in a morgue, or even as a figure in a white shirt running up and down the rocky slopes of the Sicilian mountains. By using the name of a more or less absent man as the title of his work, Rosi found an immediate way to stress his rejection of character identification and, even more strongly, of the hero worship that generally characterizes the storylines of the biopic.

Rosi scales back dramatization and achieves the effect of alienation through his unorthodox treatment of the storyline. Shaking up the chronological order, the director juxtaposes disparate narrative blocks, thus creating a back-and-forth movement in time that sheds light on the causes and effects. In the first part of the film, Giuliano’s death (the discovery of his body at Castelvetrano in July 1950; the police report; the anguish on his mother’s face as she identifies the body on the altar at the morgue) serves as the film’s present tense. But the surrounding scenes (Palermo in 1945 and the Sicilian separatist movement; Giuliano’s partisans, the pisciotti, attacking the armed forces; the roundups organized by the military among the inhabitants in the village of Montelepre; the massacre of the communists on May 1, 1947, at Portella della Ginestra) are not treated as flashbacks (as in Citizen Kane, for instance) but rather as fragments of a mosaic that bit by bit reveal their meaning. In the second part of the film, the events at Viterbo—where the pisciotti and their leader, Gaspare Pisciotta, Giuliano’s right-hand man, were put on trial—become the film’s present while allowing the director to clarify other preceding events, such as the betrayal of Giuliano by Pisciotta or the removal of the bandit’s body by the carabinieri. The final sequence is a flash forward that takes us to 1960 and the assassination of a Mafioso implicated in Giuliano’s death. Rosi concludes the film with a scene reminiscent of the film’s opening—another man left for dead by an unseen shooter.

The political and philosophical decisions involved in this type of structure also evolved from an ethical decision by Francesco Rosi, who refused to invent or imagine events of which he had no knowledge. His method, which included exhaustive research into documents (trial minutes, photographs, testimony, newspaper articles) followed by on-site verification, led him to include his doubts, his questions, and even the inevitable gaps in his investigation in the narrative structure. Although shot at least ten years after the events in question (a necessary separation in time can also be found in Rosi’s other docudramas, Il caso Mattei and 1974’s Lucky Luciano), Salvatore Giuliano still ran up against the law of silence in the collusions between the Mafia, the legal system, political parties, the army, the police, and the bandits. But it is precisely these uncertainties that give the film its complexity and its aura of mystery. Asking questions rather than providing answers, Salvatore Giuliano was able to reach far beyond the usual boundaries of political cinema, which all too often simply seeks to reassure its audiences.

The impact of Salvatore Giuliano and the authenticity of its images have led some to see it as a documentary. But if Rosi made a documented film, what he shows us is the result of a patient and inspired reconstruction. There has never been a film that aimed more strongly at destroying romantic illusions, at deflating the very spirit of the epic, while at the same time offering more beauty, more potential to inspire a kind of epic passion in the viewer that at any moment can carry political awareness into a new dimension. A Neapolitan by birth, Rosi brings together the two cultural tendencies of his native city: rationalism inherited from the philosophy of the Enlightenment, and an emotional drive that turn towards death and tragedy. His filmmaking brings about a fusion of the realism of the Rossellini of such films as Paisà (1946) and the formal splendor of the Visconti of La terra trema (1948). From this we can conclude the following: Truth is beauty; Beauty is truth.

In Salvatore Giuliano, Rosi used only two professional actors, Frank Wolff (Gaspare Pisciotta) and Salvo Randone (President of the Court of Assize). The remainder of the cast was gathered from the Sicilian population. By asking the Sicilian natives to relive traumatic moments of their own history, the director was thus able to create psychodramas of overwhelming emotional impact: Giuliano’s mother wailing over his body; the procession, complete with horses and flags, across the valley of Portella della Ginestra as gunshots ring out from the surrounding hills; the roundup in Montelepre, with mothers and wives demanding that the army give them back their men; the pisciotti, imprisoned behind bars in the courthouse, standing with pride against the bourgeois system of justice.

By analyzing a specific situation in minute detail, Rosi, through the depth of his approach, was able to give his film a universal quality. In Salvatore Giuliano one can in fact witness the opposition between the north and the south, the disinherited—those left behind in the economic development—pitted against the impersonal power of Rome as manifested in the legal system, the army, and the police. One also sees how the outcasts of the earth are manipulated and deceived by the local powers-that-be, whether Mafia or landowners. No wonder then that from the moment they appeared in the early sixties, Salvatore Giuliano and Rosi’s next film, Hands Over the City, became immediate references for fellow filmmakers such as Elio Petri and Gillo Pontecorvo, whose The Battle of Algiers was co-written by Franco Solinas, one of Rosi’s screenwriters for Salvatore Giuliano. The latter film was also a strong influence on Brazilian Cinema Novo directors such as Glauber Rocha (Black God, White Devil [Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol, 1964]) and Ruy Guerra (The Guns, [Os Fuzis, 1964]), as well as on the Hungarian Miklos Jancso (The Round Up, [Szegénylegények, 1965]) or the Greek Theo Angelopoulos (The Reconstruction, [Anaparastasis, 1970]).

Salvatore Giuliano can be seen as the cast from which Rosi struck all of his subsequent films, all of them reflections on power and death, all of them chapters in the history of twentieth-century Italy, all of them acts of courage and fountains of beauty, the work of a man, a poet, and a citizen.

JEAN-PIERRE GORIN ON L'ENFANCE NUE

Pialat: "All modesty aside, L'Enfance nue (69) was done under Lumière's influence. As I was shooting L'Enfance nue I was thinking Baby Has a Snack." It's right there with the first shot, a union march through the streets of a mining town. It takes its time. No rushing through it. No hunger to reach a drama within the scene, to tag it to someone or something. But there's some meticulous carbon dating taking place (the clothes, the style they confer and how much it s-p-e-l-l-s 1969). The first shot turns sequence. We understand very fast that the set up we enter is not going to be hijacked by the constraints of plot. Whatever it is, it is going to follow its own groove, bang out its own tempo. No drama to reach for or, to be more precise, life as drama. The setup as drama. Thank you, Mr. Lumière. A footnote: Lumière filmed his workers coming out of the factory. Pialat looks at them almost a century later, parading down Main Street, a little older, with less spring in their step, more ghosts of struggles past. At any rate, L'Enfance nue speaks of class, as in "working."

The first shot again, but the soundtrack this time. Mixed in the collective brouhaha of the union march (and at a level that fluctuates between prominent and receding/barely audible) are the voices of an older couple and two young boys. An intimate story. The two older voices: it's about love, and children, and adoption. The two younger voices: it's about questions. What we don't know yet is that later on, more than halfway through the film, we will be witness to this conversation. The two boys seated across from the old couple in a kitchen, the woman, smiling, seated on the man's lap; the boys smiling, too, across the table; the whole room filled with patches of yellow and blue, falling somewhere between Courbet and Cézanne. Yes, never forget that Pialat started as a painter. But to go back to the soundtrack, the intimacy of a couple's story weaved sonically in and out of the collective noise of the march. Two things to say about that: the word "class" yet again (in France voice is class), but also the word "maneuver." A tension between the collective and the personal, the unease of not quite getting it as we fail to decipher the words. What's important here is Pialat's choice to work the material. Yes, the Lumière moment of the union march, but Pialat's will to not leave it at that. And the way he proceeds by tagging the image with the intimacy of this voiceover, with a story, a sound as inchoate, as rambling, as the march itself. This folding of life onto life. Lumière on the soundtrack, too. Pialat as a painter who never forgets to be a filmmaker, who never forgets to work out the material beyond itself so to speak, to get some aesthetic surplus value out of it. Not too different from Godard in that respect, but achieving it by opposite means. Where Godard wrenches out, Pialat stirs in. Godard hits and runs or steals. Pialat accumulates and saturates. A footnote: Pialat claimed Lumière as a father, but who could he claim as a son? Another great saturator like Belá Tarr in Satantango?

Let's stay in this kitchen for a while. On the wall, there's this swat of yellow, aggressive enough to make the retina squirm (if not "scream," as Pialat would have it). But that's the least of it. It's patterns all around. On the old woman's kitchen frock, on the tablecloth, on the curtains. And it's the same baroque accumulation in every room we'll visit. The minimal simplicity of this working-class home, where the drama of the foster child, Francois, is at loggerheads with the visual complexity of the patterns that fill and mold the space. A simple story, simply told and awkwardly played, in an amazingly, almost maddeningly, texturally busy space. What is Pialat doing? There is, of course, the anthropologist at work. A monograph on working-class taste, with its "and · and · and" fractured aesthetic (a "this pattern plus this pattern" accumulation where each element is savored for itself and vies for its own and where the whole and its aesthetics never operate by blending). But more important, there is someone who wants the retina to work anew every time. The film is entirely in this directorial gesture that forces the eye into a constant deciphering of patterns and thus imbues the space with a constant unfamiliarity. A Pialat scene in L'Enfance nue always puts the viewer through the same paces: we enter a space that is so texturally busy that it gains a surreal foreignness; we are given time to get familiar with it (the fact that life is the drama and that the scenes drone at the pace of life is a condition of this gift of time); and then we move again. We are made to experience what is at the core of the foster child's life: unfamiliarity/deciphering/displacement/unfamiliarity again. For Pialat, visual strategy derives from and contributes to drama. The pleasure of Pialat's film is, among other things, to see a director who never falls prey to the decorative, to see someone for whom visual strategy never collapses into the mournfulness of eye candy. A footnote: The radical difference between 400 Blows and L'Enfance nue? We are looking at Truffaut's imp. But we are seeing through the eyes of Pialat's.

Let's stay with the footnote for a moment. Because we are looking at the world as François does, we have little time to spoon too much saccharine onto him. L'Enfance nue is astonishingly devoid of sentimentality. We are with François in the world and just as eccentric to it as he is (in effect, the character spends more of his film life at the edge of the screen than at its center). Thus the fact that the pathos of Pialat's film is all the zig and the zag of disconnection and thwarted emotions. It has at its core an instability, a muted, latent violence, a skittish oscillation between love and emotional flight. And because we visually experience the world as François does, the only familiarity we gain is a familiarity with the fits of violence that punctuate his life. Pialat's problem is to get us there, not to provide judgment about it. To give us the normality of it and the nakedness of François's response. To throw light on a life molded by institutional fiat. The film gains its poignancy by eschewing all the trite and true paths to poignancy. Footnote: If Lumière enters the psychological realm, do we call him D.W. Griffith?

The kitchen scene, yet again. The old couple and the two boys. Nobody has been sent over by central casting. The nonpro, the amateur is, welcome here, in all his or her sumptuous awkwardness. The only rule seems to be authenticity. The shapes and looks of bodies and faces, the accents and tones are perfect on both sides of the age divide. And, yes, yet again, a strong sense of class fuses the whole thing together. But what's most interesting is the way Pialat makes it function, working off the awkwardness of these bodies and the unsettled delivery of these voices. The space he creates is a space where documentary and fiction mingle. And one gets a strong sense of how we got there. This old couple was listened to, patiently and carefully. And then they were asked gently to go through it again for the camera. And a setup was offered to anchor the scene: the woman sitting on the man's lap with the boys across the table. A spatial fictionalization of a documentary moment. And the scene will hit the right note with its very precarious staginess. There is with Pialat the sense that things are always cooked to order, that the scene is the result of some words just pronounced in front of the director, some gestures made just a day or so ago that have been collated in a visual setup of disarming simplicity. And it is in this simple setup that the transmutation of the real into the fictional happens, the subject turning actor of his or her own life (or some elements of it) onscreen. Thus this very peculiar feel of a Pialat scene, almost like watching a butterfly unfolding out of the chrysalis. One gets the sense that things have been rehearsed but rehearsed just enough not to get stale. Or more adequately said, that the director is intimately persuaded that it would be ridiculous to ask this old couple or these boys to "fall into character." It's simply (and here's where the heavy lifting comes in) a matter of providing adequate framing to flows of emotions all the more intense that they are not mimicked, that they are delivered by awkward gestures and voices that feel so completely authentic for always sounding as if they stood an inch to the left or the right of their own emotion. In L'Enfance nue, because nothing is strictly said and the ill fit between emotions and their expression is constantly explored, the body plays as crucial a role as in any Cassavetes film. Another footnote: A man who explores the potential of the amateur with such zeal and pleasure in his first film can only become addicted to it. It could not but make for stormy relationships with the pros he encountered later in life. Pialat's shoots were famous for their tension and the epic tussles he got into with his stars. He did well by them and managed to give them back some rough edges. A third footnote (thrown in as a contemporary signpost): Mystic River as cultivating an antithetical politics of acting.

Insist on the fact that poignancy is achieved and taken away in the same gesture. In Pialat's film, one doesn't rush onto the beach to see the sea à la 400 Blows, one is a voiceover that writes from the reformatory to a couple of aging foster parents. A perennial in-betweener hoping to be freed by Christmas. There is a ferocious cinematographic intelligence behind the conclusive inconclusiveness of L'Enfance nue, its refusal to submit to the pathetic of the fictional, and its incessant oscillation between fiction and documentary. An intelligence that likes to articulate drama more than it cares to illustrate it, and one that revels in triangulating its subject matter to do so. To talk about Pialat's realism, as some are fond to do, is only half of it. What's important is how much maneuvering gets into it, how Pialat circles around the material and multiplies the angles of attack. That's where its currency and its modernity lie.