Yet another great word from Douchet’s Nouvelle Vague (see this post)! In a passage on Jacques Rivette, he writes: “Dire de Rivette que l’Histoire des Treize de Balzac est son livre de chevet, et l’idée du complot la base et de sa vie et de son cinéma, relève de la lapalissade.” [To say of Rivette that Balzac’s The History of the Thirteen is his bedside book, and that the idea of conspiracy is the basis of both his life and his cinema, is a matter of lapalissade.] The last word was unknown to me, so I checked Wiktionary: “An obvious, self-evident truth, especially humorously so; a tautology or truism.” The etymology is sheer delight:
From the name of Jacques de la Palice (a French nobleman and military officer, died in the Battle of Pavia, 1525) + -ade. His epitaph reads ci gît Monſieur de la Palice: s’il n’était pas mort, il ferait encore envie (“here lies the lord of La Palice: if he weren’t dead, he would still be envied”). However, due to the similarity between the letters ⟨f⟩ and ⟨ſ⟩ (long s), it was misread (accidentally or intentionally) as the truism s’il n’était pas mort, il serait encore en vie (“if he weren’t dead, he would still be alive”).
Poor guy! But at least his memory lives on…
Some jokers ran with the concept.
Véase también Pedro Grullo.
Great stuff!
, und wenn sie nicht gestorben sind, dann leben sie noch heute “and if they haven’t died, they still live today” is one of the canonical ways for fairytales to end in German.
(so instead of dann for proper archaism.)
Captain Obvious avant la lettre …
Incidentally, in a further confirmation that All Threads are One:
J’ai lu dans les vieux écrits
Qui contiennent son histoire,
Qu’il irait en Paradis,
S’il était en Purgatoire.
The early part of An Elegy On The Death Of A Mad Dog is an English lapalissade.
So was lapalissade coined by Goncourt or that’s just the first written usage lexicographers could find?
Except that Rivette himself has declared that he hadn’t read Balzac when he filmed OUT1; Rohmer had pointed out the Balzac book to him, but Rivette only read the preface. The plot of OUT1 has nothing to do with that of Balzac’s stories, it was largely improvised (Rohmer got to play a Balzac expert, though).
Useful to know, although one can never trust writers/directors/artists when they respond to a suggestion of influence with “Hell, I’ve never even read/seen that!”
It’s in an interview included with the German DVD box of OUT1, given at a time when hardly anyone had seen the full version and apparently legends about its genesis had developed which he wanted to correct.
@mollymooly: See also “There Was an Old Woman Who Lived Under a Hill”.
Man, I really want to see OUT1. Come on, Criterion…
See also “There Was an Old Woman Who Lived Under a Hill”.
The WP article has a comment about the poem by… Oliver Goldsmith, whom mollymooly brought up. He liked that sort of thing, which he didn’t hate.
one of the canonical ways for fairytales to end in German
In Hausa, ƙungurus kan kusu “off with the rat’s head!”
No idea why.
Kusaasi folktales typically end with “that’s why they say …”, often introducing a Moral, but often only something like Asumbul mɔr yam hali la “Br’er Rabbit is very clever.” No rats are harmed.
I honestly don’t think it makes much difference whether he’d read it or not; Balzac wasn’t around in ’68 and it’s very much about ’68. And it’s also very much Rivette at his best, so if you like Céline et Julie and Le Pont du Nord you really need to find a way (I wouldn’t hold my breath for Criterion).
Namechecked in Ulysses:
The Blu-Ray release has been available from filesharing communities for years now, I downloaded it in 2021 and then watched the whole thing over two sittings. I immediately concluded that I’ll probably never see it again. Other Rivette films justify their long running times, as do some other famous marathons like Satantango, but OUT 1 doesn’t.
After seeing so much Rivette recently, you might be in a good position to enjoy Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control. Among Jarmusch’s films, this one got a poor critical reception, but I think that most of those critics were oblivious to the fact that this film is an homage to, among other things, Rivette and the latter’s fondness for conspiracies.
The WP article has a comment about the poem by… Oliver Goldsmith, whom mollymooly brought up. He liked that sort of thing, which he didn’t hate.
I didn’t notice that comment that’s possibly by Oliver Goldsmith. But yes, for people who like the kind of poem that is, it is just the kind of poem such people like. (Quote Investigator article.)
I like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Belle_Noiseuse
but in retrospect it leaves me kind of … itchy … I remember
it as providing a killer response to most stories about the torments
of muse obsession.
The whole woman-as-muse thing is inescapably creepy. No real live woman deserves to be reduced to the level of a mere artistic inspiration. We have goddesses for that.
From the WP:
it tells how a famous old artist is stimulated to come out of retirement and do one last painting of a beautiful young womanit tells how a famous old director is stimulated to do one more movie reaffirming a well-entrenched hoary stereotype of the French
Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control
Did the studio bury this one? I consider myself a big Jarmusch fan but I don’t think I have ever heard of this film. And I was living in Boston at the time. I mean, granted Boston is not a big college town, but in 2009 we still had a lot of options for out of the mainstream indie and foreign films.
I don’t think I have ever heard of this film.
The ‘net is awash with information about it, where to buy the DVD etc. There’s even an hour-long Lincoln Center on-stage interview with Jarmusch about it from 2009, archived on Youtube.
Sounds cinematically transgressive and boring af. That may be why you haven’t heard of it.
@David Eddyshaw: There can be positive artist-muse relationships. I think of Calvin Trillin* and his girlfriend-muse-wife Alice, who he wrote about extensively and who influenced a lot of his writing on other topics as well. On the other hand, the Trillins’ partnership is probably more the exception than the rule; there is a reason TV Tropes has a page about “Muse Abuse.”
* Is Trillin well known outside North America? He seems like a writer who might not be.
there is a reason TV Tropes has a page about “Muse Abuse.”
…whose “Real Life” section is rather too short
@ Stu
… boring af …
I’m afraid so..,
Re this sort of truism/tautology I am reminded of the lines from the bluegrass standard “The Moonshiner” (which exists with many lyrical variants of course …) that go
“I’ll eat when I’m hungry and I’ll drink when I’m dry
If whiskey don’t kill me, Lord, I’ll live ’til I die.”
Which seems worse than tautological in the sense that the conditional qualification doesn’t even make literal sense – even if whiskey does kill you, you will still have lived ’til you died. Maybe you have to implicitly understand it as “’til I would have been otherwise expected to die at a normal lifespan”?
Funny, I just heard that verse sung in Louisiana Story — I’ve loved the song for a long time (I probably first heard it on a Clancy Brothers record). It doesn’t seem to go back as far as I would have thought, though the “I’ll eat when I’m hungry” bit apparently can be traced back to the 18th century.
cf werewolves of London \&c
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%27ll_Sleep_When_I%27m_Dead_(An_Anthology)
…whose “Real Life” section is rather too short
and even artists who are themselves appalling in these kinds of ways can sometimes manage to make fairly compelling work from the theme – neil gaiman’s “Calliope” in the Sandman cycle comes to mind – though i don’t know that i’ve found any of them re-readable once i knew that they were writing from direct experience.