If you depend on your local mall’s multiplex for your moviegoing, little in a new book on French cinema will have caught your attention. In the shadow of Hollywood, it can sometimes seem that the Gallic film artistry that once engaged untold numbers of American college students has gone dormant.
Far from it, says Tim Palmer, author of the new book Brutal Intimacy: Analyzing Contemporary French Cinema (Wesleyan University Press). Palmer writes that “embattled but enduring health” have marked those decades of French filmmaking, as has an “extravagant range of different approaches…from the popular to the antagonistic, the opulent to the austere, the generic to the unclassifiable.” The scholar, an associate professor of film studies at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, is also co-founder and co-editor, with his wife, Liza Palmer, of Film Matters, a journal for undergraduate writing about film.
Devoted Franco-cinephiles will be best equipped to gauge whether Palmer is justified in claiming that the “vivacity” of French film gives the lie to Time magazine’s 2007 announcement of “The Death of French Culture.”
He calls his book a “conceptual survey of France’s modern filmmaking ecosystem”—a “heavily regulated business coupling mandated top-down government initiatives to the economic resources of, variously, production bodies, national television networks, regional and international grant agencies, artists and artistic enterprises, and cautious investment companies.”
Government support is not all generosity, but in good part geared to protect French cinema from more market-driven varieties, chiefly Hollywood. One result is that the film culture of Paris remains “still far and away the world’s most advanced,” says Palmer in a phone interview. In fact, says the Englishman and ardent Francophile, “France is a best-case scenario, where you can find all kinds of links and conversations ongoing, and the filmmakers are astonishingly cineliterate.”
He adds: “Whatever you like about film, it’s happening in France: animation, short films, films by young directors, films by women which is a sad rarity elsewhere, avant-garde films, films that seek to challenge or antagonize the viewer. Or, at the other end of the continuum, mainstream films, genre spectaculars and weird hybrids” in which mainstream and esoteric forms mingle. Take, for example, films like Gaspar Noé’s polarizing, brutal, rape-revenge shocker, Irréversible (2002), where 1970s exploitation thriller incorporates art-house elements as unorthodox as anything in the avant-garde.
Much of the innovation and imagination in current French cinema comes from its much-encouraged young directors, Palmer says. About 40 percent of French films are made by first-time directors, and they are consistently mature and sophisticated, fresh and original, thanks to a generously government-underwritten film-school system that provides thorough grounding in both the practical and theoretical aspects of the craft.
In particular, the elite national, state-funded La Fémis—L’École Nationale Supérieure des Métiers de l’Image et du Son, in Paris—has turned out numerous “conceptually fluent film practitioners,” he says. There, he says, “you learn by doing and you learn to do by studying.”
That wedding of craft and theory stems from a long-held French belief in “the confluence of theory-pedagogy and actual filmmaking practice,” a potent amalgam that justifies any amount of critical highfalutin’ in indulgent film journals, another high point of the French film ecosystem.
Educating young directors so thoroughly in all kinds of film results in a variety of products that lead Palmer to claim that “certain critical gospels are simply no longer apt,” particularly the one that holds “that French cinematic practices high and low do not mingle.”
Among his key arguments is that all quarters of French film share a “cinephilia,” an “abiding passion for film in all its forms” to a far greater degree than in any other national film culture. In such features as the French predilection for lingering shots, prolonged well beyond what is needed for narrative purposes, Palmer diagnoses visual relish, a rhapsodic sensuality, “stylistic virtuosity for its own sake.” Young directors imbibe this “cinephilia” in film schools, he says—as a key element of “a production process, a train of stylistic thought, a methodology.”
Palmer clearly has been infected with that strain, too, after growing up in a small, film-starved English town: “Most of my school days, I was in rather a daze, because I’d been up the night before watching my own little one-man retrospective. Fortunately the U.K. is blessed with quite good TV programming, so I would be constantly, in video days, taping things and watching things all night. I grew up in a house where there was only one TV and one VHS player, which is probably inconceivable, these days. I had access to the family TV late at night, when everyone else was asleep, so I would go down and watch these things.”
Years of viewing and studying French film, later, he has also frequently programmed campus and festival film series in Wilmington and other Southern towns and cities, often generously assisted by programs of France’s cultural ministry.
What does Palmer think, then, of the style of film whose “brutal intimacy” provides his book’s title – the cinéma du corps, or cinema of the body? The films, which embrace the force of cinema to disturb and even disgust, but in high-concept style, constitute the most galvanizing development in French cinema of the last two decades.
Irréversible, In My Skin, Twentynine Palms...Are they revolutionary, or just plain exploitative, gratuitously violent, indulgent, and vile?
While far from a blanket fan of the form, Palmer nonetheless says: “If you look back historically, oftentimes France becomes a catalyst, or flashpoint, or center of new developments in film. This happened already in the 20s with French Impressionism. People argued already in the 20s that film was becoming debased.”—Peter Monaghan