I’m still working my way through Douchet’s Nouvelle Vague (see this post), which is one of the best books I’ve read about movies and which I recommend to anyone interested in the change that took place in the late 1950s which we summarize as “New Wave” (there’s an English translation by Robert Bonnono); in the section on dialogue, he describes the passage from the stylized exchanges of the classic French cinema of the ’30s, when the screenwriter was considered the most important creative element, to the more naturalistic speech of movies like The 400 Blows and Breathless (“le discontinu, le ce qui passe par la tête, l’imprévu et l’impromptu, bref qui obéit à l’humeur de l’instant”) and gives this description of Rohmer’s attempt to find a middle way:
Rohmer, bien qu’appartenant à cette génération, participe, cinématographiquement parlant, de l’esprit de la suivante. Si ses dialogues sont un modèle du genre, considérés comme littéraires au point d’être publiés (ce qui est peu fréquent), il n’empêche qu’ils ont pour ambition première de saisir, quasi sociologiquement, le parler de notre temps. On sait comment il procède: fréquenter ses futurs interprètes, et ce de six mois à un an avant le tournage, et retenir des constantes conversations badines qu’il entretient avec eux les tournures de phrases et d’esprit, les tics et les mots propres aux actrices et acteurs. Il les injecte dans un dialogue très écrit qui prend, ainsi, un tour familier, procure l’illusion de l’instantané et du pris sur le vif. La rigueur grammaticale va de pair avec la ligne de conduite des personnages. Elle est nécessaire pour donner du jeu — un jeu pervers — à la rectitude de leur parcours, pour instiller, par un glissement libertin des mots et des phrases, une licence à leur morale. Rohmer fabrique ainsi un parler qui serait le français de notre époque si on savait garder encore, correctement et simplement, le bon usage de notre langue. Tentative de fusion entre le «parler écrit xᴠɪɪɪᵉ siècle» et le «parler parlé» de la fin xxᵉ. En résulte une impression d’étrangeté, fascination en forme de suspense qui attache à de longues discussions a priori anti-cinématographiques un public désormais captif et attentif.
My translation (I don’t have access to Bonnono’s):
Rohmer, although belonging to this [earlier] generation, participates, cinematically speaking, in the spirit of the following one. If his dialogues are a model of their kind, considered literary enough that they were published (which is rare), their primary ambition is nevertheless to capture, almost sociologically, the speech of our time. We know his working method: he spends time with his future actors, for six months to a year before filming, and from the constant light-hearted conversations he has with them he learns the turns of phrase and wit, the mannerisms and words specific to the actresses and actors. He injects these into a dialogue that is very much scripted but which thus acquires a familiar turn, providing the illusion of a snapshot, something caught in the moment. Grammatical rigor goes hand in hand with the characters’ line of conduct. This is necessary to introduce some play – a perverse play – into the straightness of their journey, to instill, by a libertine slippage of words and phrases, some license into their morality. Rohmer thus manufactures a way of speaking that would be the French of our time if we still knew how to maintain, correctly and simply, the proper use of our language: an attempt to fuse the “written speech of the 18th century” with the “spoken speech” of the late 20th century. The result is an impression of strangeness, a fascination in the form of suspense that binds a now captive and attentive audience to long discussions that one would assume would be anti-cinematic.
That’s extremely enlightening, and provides a clue as to why I always have a slight problem with Rohmer, even though I’ve greatly enjoyed many of his movies: there’s something excessively formal about them, something that contrasts with the spontaneous feel of films by Godard, Truffaut, and others of his cohort. Of course, Rohmer is trying to do something different and has a right to his method, but it leaves me feeling a tad dissatisfied.
And speaking of being dissatisfied, I recently watched a movie by Alexandre Astruc, who has the reputation of being a cold formalist (he invented the notion of the caméra-stylo, and cared more about the perfection of his images than the human impact of the whole); I liked it more than I expected (Annie Girardot’s acting is terrific), but the story is still a tedious rehash of the sad-adulteress plot (she leaves her domineering husband for a man who also proves unsatisfactory and winds up miserably alone). What really bothered me was going to the Wikipedia page and discovering that it was under the title Prey for the Shadows. As I indignantly explained in the note I left when moving it to be under its French title La Proie pour l’ombre, “‘Prey for the Shadows’ is never used in English and is based on a misunderstanding of the French title.” I added the following explanation to the article text: “the title is from the French expression lâcher la proie pour l’ombre, which literally means ‘to let go of the prey for the shadow’[5], referring to Aesop’s fable The Dog and Its Reflection.” We don’t really have an equivalent expression in English.
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