Rather than attempting an encyclopedic approach that would cover all of the great names of French filmmaking, Tavernier sticks to the movies, and names, that have had personal meaning to him. He takes the audience from the 1930s to the 1970s as he remembers, examines, and extols the classics of the French screen that inspired him as a boy growing up in France and influenced him as an artist.
He includes well-known classics, such as The Rules of the Game (1939) and Army of Shadows (1969), and genuine obscurities, such as Gas-Oil (1955) and Macao, l'enfer du jeu (1942). He examines directors from the renowned, including Jean Vigo, Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Melville, Claude Chabrol, and Agnès Varda, to the more or less forgotten, like Edmund Greville and Guy Gilles.
Along the way, he samples nearly 100 titles through clips, and offers his own ruminations on filmmakers and their styles. "I felt I was seeing another type of cinema," he declares of Jean Renoir's The Grand Illusion (1937). Director Jacques Becker, whom Tavernier calls "the most American" of French filmmakers, "flexes emotion [in 1952's Casque d'Or] like you flex your muscles."
Tavernier also delves into actors, extolling Jean Gabin as a "working class hero," and even obscure composers like Maurice Jaubert, who died in 1940 after scoring such classics as L'Atalante (1934) and Le Jour Se Leve (1939).
In a sense, the documentary represents Tavernier coming full circle professionally. He began his career as a film critic, and after writing essays about Jean-Pierre Melville he was able to meet that director, who hired him as his assistant. Tavernier's personal recollections of Melville are vivid, and he admits, "I was a lousy assistant." After being fired by Melville, Tavernier got a job as a press agent for Godard and other filmmakers, and eventually became a director himself. He has made classics including Coup de Torchon (1981), 'Round Midnight (1986), and Life and Nothing But (1989).
Funding for this documentary was difficult to come by. Canal Plus showed interest, he recalled, but only with Martin Scorsese directing! Finally, Tavernier said, "somebody at Gaumont said 'this film must be made,'" and it wound up as a co-production between Gaumont and Pathe, with the participation of other companies (including Canal Plus). The film premiered at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival and later played in French cinemas and on French television and received a limited American arthouse release from Cohen Media Group.
By Jeremy Arnold
