(Early) François Truffaut

It’s May, and it keeps on raining, and I’ve been watching many Truffaut films on the ol’ VCR.

Truffaut died of a brain tumour in 1984, aged 52. His goal was to make 30 films and then retire to write books in his remaining days. He was 5 films short of his goal. From what I’ve seen, the real gold of Truffaut is his early work, a fellow fan of his recently said to me, ‘How must it feel to look back on a long career and see that your first works were by far your best?’

Antoine Doinel series

His first feature film was 1959’s Les Quatre Cents Coups /The 400 Blows, an instant success and a defining film of the New Wave genre. Jean-Pierre Léaud plays Antoine Doinel, a 12-year old boy growing up in Paris during the 1950s. Misunderstood and thought to be a troublemaker, Antoine frequently runs away from home. A semi-autobiographical film reflecting events of Truffaut's and his friend's lives, the film is also an exposé of the injustices of the treatment of juvenile offenders in France at the time.

Although Truffaut did not initially plan for Antoine to be a recurring character, he returned to the character in one short and three full-length films depicting ‘his altar-ego’ at later stages of his life.

Jean-Pierre Léaud, Truffaut was immediately 

captivated by the precocious fourteen-year-old

The sequels are surprising. Stolen Kisses (1968) and Bed and Board (1970) don’t seem to have anything in common with the original film, especially in style. In Stolen Kisses, the film takes on an enjoyably farcical note as Antoine drifts from job to job, becomes an inept private detective, and fumblingly attempts to catch the object of his affections, Christine. Bed and Board follows this mood and story line, with Antoine and Christine struggling through matrimony in a building full of quirky characters remindful of Amelié Poulain’s residence. The unfortunately disappointing final instalment, 1979’s Love on the Run, does look back on the first film, linking everything together and letting you know what happened to all the characters, but isn’t much of a story in itself, and is actually mostly scenes thrown together from the previous films.

Works of Henri-Pierre Roché

In 1962 came the epic Jules and Jim, ranked 46 in Empire magazine's 100 Best Films Of World Cinema in 2010. I’ve always loved this film, perhaps it’s the exuberance, the shock element, or because the characters ‘share an interest in the world of the arts and the Bohemian lifestyle’. Perhaps it’s because it follows the novel of its origin more closely than other films (a narration in parts of the film is basically readings directly from Roché’s novel).

Truffaut came across Henri-Pierre Roché's 1953 semi-autobiographical novel, about his relationship with writer Franz Hessel and his wife, Helen Grund, whilst browsing through some secondhand books in Paris. He befriended the elderly Roché, and the author approved of the young director's ideas about translating his work to another medium.

Roché died in 1959. The adaptation of Jules and Jim was a main cause of the book's belated success. Roché’s second book, Les deux anglaises et le continent/ Two English Girls, published in 1956, also based on an episode of his life, was also made into a film by Truffaut in 1971 (also known as Anne and Muriel) and it’s interesting to watch and see the links between the two stories. Truffaut used the tragic element of the material to allude a lot to the lives of the Bronte sisters, of whose work he was a great admirer. The film was long and lacked the vitality of Jules and Jim, and was not a success. Truffaut cut large amounts and rereleased it in the hope to help the film’s reception (though it can now be seen again in its original cut). He was said to be troubled and unable to understand why the beauty and romanticism of the story didn’t appeal to people.

Julio Medem

…or ‘Watching more things on VCR’.

Nearly the whole of April was cold and rainy… same old story. Fortunately for me I discovered my local libraries lease old VHS films for free! …because no one else wants them. So I got to watch entire works of Julio Medem.

The film of his I’d seen was Lucía y el sexo / Sex and Lucia, absolute classic. Visually rich, lots of sun and moon imagery, a little Almodovar-esque in its use of bizarre coincidences and a twisting plot; scenes from the past, the present, fantasy and one of the character’s written fiction blend together as Medem explores the pull of desire, temptation and sexuality.

Medem made short films in the 70s and 80s using his father’s Super8 Camera. In 1992, Vacas, his first full length film, won him the Goya award for best new director. Another highlight is the recent Room in Rome/ Habitación en Roma. This film has gorgeous music and setting, and consists of two beautiful women in a hotel room spending a night talking and seducing each other. Obviously I loved it, but it wasn’t just the titillation. It’s an intimate play that unfolds through the night in tricky surprising ways.

Vacas, 1992

The Red Squirrel/ La Ardilla Roja, 1993

Room in Rome, 2010

Caótica Ana/ Chaotic Ana, 2007, was inspired by Medem’s younger sister, who died in a car crash in 2001. 'My sister Ana Medem was a painter, and she still remains one through her paintings. My sister celebrated her largest exhibition of paintings at a winery resort in Carignan, south of Zaragoza, Spain. Arriving by car to this wine region I again recognized the reddish hue of the landscapes of Tierra (Earth), my third film that I shot there five years back. My sister was meeting us, relatives and friends, at the entrance hall of the exhibition. That is, the people she most wanted were waiting for her, by a closed door that she should open. A few minutes before the fixed opening time, three kilometers away, my sister died in a car accident. We did not enter the exhibition. I have in my mind a full moon in the sky in late afternoon, almost red, and almost over the highway, while driving my car to Zaragoza. The next day, before they closed my sister’s coffin, I decided – and I told her – that one day I would shoot a film on her.' The film features the artwork of Ana Medem.

Song, Tiempo Y Silencio, and art from Chaotic Ana

19th Century Frenchies

Learning a lot about the business side of the writing world at the moment - marketing, what’s commercial, how to sell your work… I've always found it hard to marry this side of things with the creative. When you’re forced to think about the former, the latter can become a confusing convoluted process.

Fortunately I've been inspired by watching many art documentaries on youtube, especially those nineteenth century Frenchies and their artistic endeavour.

  

Paul Cézanne is an interesting character. Angry, frustrated, disagreeable, he received a small allowance from his disapproving father so he wasn’t exactly painting for his bread. But he was a failure in the Parisian art world, ridiculed into leaving, and this hurt him deeply. 

He had a wife and child. They lived in Paris, and he in Aix-en-Provence. He had ostensibly little affection for them. His passion was for the Provence landscape and for painting. And when his father died and he became financially independent, he lived wholly for them, pursuing his vision and form of expression, and honing his craft. When he was ill and nearing the end of his life, he contentedly painted the Mount Sainte-Victoire everyday.

After his death, he is hailed as a genius, ‘forming the bridge between late 19th-century Impressionism and the early 20th century's new line of artistic enquiry, Cubism, inspiring a generation of artists including Matisse and Picasso.  

With notoriety comes dollar value, and with dollar value comes notoriety. It’s strange and fascinating that in 2011 The Card Players became the most expensive painting ever, sold for a price estimated between $250 million and $300 million. 

Édouard Manet, a man of contradictions, was distressed and sometimes discouraged by the hostility shown towards his work in his day. He always hoped for official recognition, aiming to be included in The Paris Salon – but he refused to modify his style for the sake of success, and his art bewildered his generation. His early masterworks, The Luncheon on the Grass (Le déjeuner sur l'herbe) and Olympia, engendered great controversy but served as rallying points for the young painters who would create Impressionism.

Pissarro's Portrait of Cézanne 1874

Camille Pissarro was a genteel character who rallied the impressionists when they were achieving little respect or success, and was a mentor to Cezanne. He came to London with Claude Monet to avoid the Franco-Prussian war. After a while, in desperation, he went back to Paris. ‘Here there is no art. Everything is a matter of business. It is only abroad that one appreciates how beautiful, great and hospitable France is.’ In his forties, success still eluded him. He had a family to support. His wife was saying he should give up the dream, but he stayed true to his instinct, that he and the group of artists around him were doing something important.

Manet’s portrait of Émile Zola, who defended Manet’s work against its many controversies, and published the first serious study of his work. Zola was childhood friends with Cezanne, and Zola strongly encouraged Cezanne to follow his artistic endeavour. Cézanne broke off the friendship after the latter used him as the basis for the tragic fictitious artist in his novel His Masterpiece (L'Œuvre).

  

I realise the processes of making a painting and writing a novel are so similar. I have a lot of trouble splashing down a well written chapter on an empty page. It starts with sketches, then going to your canvas, putting down layers, painting over things, adding things, and never being really satisfied. 

Quirky Storytellers

A couple of quirky storytellers: Miranda July and Cédric Klapisch

I heard David Sedaris read a Miranda July short story on those fantastic New Yorker fiction podcasts. And so I sought her very good book of short stories: No One Belongs Here More Than You. 

And she’s a film maker too. Saw The Future (2011) which had some interesting parts, including an irresistible bit of opening dialogue between a couple:

‘Could you get me some water?’

‘I wasn’t getting up, I was just changing positions.’

As for Cédric Klapisch, I recently re-watched the ‘cult classics’ L'Auberge Espagnole, about Xavier, a young Frenchie played by Romain Duris (whom Klapisch discovered before he had considered acting), and the people he meets on an Erasmus Program in Barcelona, and its sequel Russian Dolls (and a third installment in currently being filmed!). 

And damn, they are so good! There’s a part I love in Russian Dolls where Xavier is trying to write a love story, and soap opera clichés continuously run through his head…

There’s something you don’t know about me, I’m broke, and I’m having an affair, and I have a twin brother… actually, I am the twin…

The tragedy of romance is unraveled, as is the lure of desire and the idea of perfect beauty, ‘Life is so short, of course we want to spend it on the street of perfect dimensions.’

Looked at Klapisch’s other films. The earlier stuff is fun, what’s consistent throughout is the fun and enthusiasm in the storytelling; and the more recent Paris (2008) is very good. Maybe I wouldn’t have liked it so much on its own, but it sits alongside Klapisch’s other life-affirming films nicely.

Then I read a negative review saying Klapisch can ‘only do light and breezy.’ Well, Paris is about the not so light and breezy subject of a dying man, who isn't bitter about his fatal illness, but is suddenly in awe at the world and can't stop watching people through his window and thinking about their stories. 

Also, making something seem ‘light and breezy’ can be the hardest thing to do. It’s easier to display quality in something heavy and dramatic because it’s drawing on certain emotions. Polanski famously changed the ending to the script of Chinatown, making the story more tragic, and said, ‘That’s why it stays with you, that’s why we're still talking about it today.’ Keep a happy ending, you might be pleased, but you can forget the story shortly afterward. How many classic/ beautiful comedies that appeal to many and stand the test of time are out there? Not many.

  

On the Paris soundtrack, I discovered the beautiful music of Artur Nunes

Tia - Artur Nunes

…an interesting character, part of a very interesting music scene. The following was taken from the garb below the above youtube clip:

  

More on the amazing Angolan scene of the early 1970s:

Angolan pop music in the '60s became an affirmation of national and African identity in the face of severe repression from Portuguese colonial authorities, we're talking concentration camp stays for major musicians, the root forms coalesced into a new, distinctly Angolan mix by the 1970s.

...the country's best-known figure, Bonga, has lived in exile since the '70s and Zé, de Castro, and Nunes all died during the post-independence factional infighting, military rebellion, and civil war of mid-'70s Angola. Can't help but make you think about what might have been. - Don Snowden

More on Autur Nunes here

Reading John O'Hara Like a Writer

Coming to the end of the very illuminating Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose. Prose looks at a varied choice of work from the likes of Dickens, Emily Bronte, Flannery O'Conner and John le Carre, explaining their appeal and effect. Towards the end she reveals her passion for the short stories of Chekhov, telling of the solace brought to her during a tough time in her life, which involved a daily two hour commute:

(me paraphrasing)

‘It was my ritual and reward. I never had to read a page or two before thinking that maybe things weren’t so bad. The stories were not only profound and beautiful, but also involving. I would finish one and find myself miraculously a half-hour or so closer to home, and yet there was more than distraction, a sense of comfort came over me. For thirty minutes I had been taken away and shown another world, a world full of sorrows, sorrows very different and yet very much like my own, and also a world full of promise. 

It made me empathise with the urban world around me, and see that nothing was wasted, maybe I could use all this one day. I felt as close to happiness as I was likely to come. This was the pleasure and mystery of reading. And some people think that books will disappear, they are still the best way of taking great art and all its consolations with us on a bus. 

His stories are illuminated with the deepest, broadest, at once compassionate and dispassionate, observation of life that I know. The most important thing is observation and consciousness. Keep your eyes open, think clearly, think about what you see, ask yourself what it means. The wider and deeper your observational range, the better, the more interesting and truthfully you will write.

And on the subject of the joys of great short stories, this year I’m very happy to have discovered the work of John O’Hara. An interesting man too, difficult, vain and a heavy drinker, he produced much of his pages through a hangover. From wiki-p: O'Hara had a reputation for personal irascibility and for cataloging social ephemera, both of which frequently overshadowed his gifts as a storyteller. Writer Fran Lebowitz called him "the real F. Scott Fitzgerald." John Updike, one of his consistent supporters, grouped him with Chekhov in a C-SPAN interview. By contrast, Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times dismissed him as "a well-known lout."

John O’Hara, A Natural Writer, By John Updike - He was too cantankerous and late-rising to hold a job for long, but this was a mercy in disguise; it kept him at what he did best, freelance writing.  

And a short article here, where there’s also a New Yorker audio of discussion on O’Hara and one of his short stories:

 - O'Hara was very successful in his day but hasn't really become a household name like his contemporaries Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Faulkner. Why do you think he’s fallen out of fashion?

 - He was well known as a short story and novella writer, then he drifted into writing bestselling novels (some made into very successful films) which I don’t think were his best work…

O’Hara (center) with Hemingway (left) and Stork Club owner Sherman Billingsly, New York, circa 1934 (photo: ExplorePAHistory.com)

James M. Cain, Long Lost Novels

After a very productive November, here I am, stalled in December, why does November feel like such a better time to write? Perhaps it’s the evening part of the year, with its special twilight.

There’s been a little reading during this time and theme has been … moider!

Decades after his death, The Cocktail Waitress, a lost James M. Cain novel, has resurfaced. Ok, it’s not sensational, but the labour of love behind its publication is. Cain was 83 years old, his star had fallen, suffering from painful ill health, but he was a writer and everyday put pen to paper. He was branching out, writing historical and children’s fiction, but when he knew he had only one book left in him, he went back to his roots, The Cocktail Waitress is a crime story that mirrors the classic Cain novels. He showed it to his publisher but wasn’t satisfied and kept hold of it, continuously tinkering. It disappeared after his death, clues as to its existence only lay in the odd correspondence.

The Cocktail Waitress was published by Hard Case Crime, an imprint of hardboiled crime novels founded in 2004 by Charles Ardai and Max Phillips, who felt the paperback crime novel style of the 40s and 50s needed to be revived. The covers feature original art done in the pulp style by artists such as Robert McGinnis and Glen Orbik. The collection includes both reprints of books from the pulp era and new novels written for the collection.

Ardai searched for a decade to track down the elusive manuscript, obtained the rights to print it, and edited a definitive version from all the different versions Cain had written. Ardai was such a fan of Cain’s work, he said – he even read the stuff that wasn’t that great. 'Without Cain, there would be no Hard Case Crime.' 

There’s an interesting afterword by Ardai at the end of the novel. On my previous blogpost on Cain, I pay reverence to an established a master, translated into eighteen languages and whose work is taught in universities. But back in the day, Cain was seen as full of sin, scandal, and lurid lowbrow. One critic called him a whore-y old sensation monger. His books were banned. Even Raymond Chandler, who adapted for the big screen the classic Double Indemnity, said, 'He is every kind of writer I detest, a dirty little child with a piece of chalk.'

Cain wrote of depravity, reality and sexuality of all flavours, but he wasn’t a sensationalist, he put the material to work, writing about life as it is lived, and language as it is spoken, the affect of crisis on the human soul and the ability of the human animal to survive.

A great read for those interested in writers and their process is The Paris Review Interviews. Here, Cain argues with the fact that he’d been typecast as a hardboiled writer: ‘I don’t write whodunits. You can’t end a story with the cops getting the killer. I don’t think the law is a very interesting nemesis. I write love stories. The dynamics of a love story are almost abstract. The better your abstraction, the more it comes to life when you do it – the excitement of the idea lurking there. Algebra. Suspense comes from making sure your algebra is right. Time is the only critic. If your algebra is right, if the progression is logical, but still surprising, it keeps.’

I was going to write some more on moider, but that’s a long post. Won’t mix my morbid pleasures, til next time, Happy Christmas!

A Writing Rabbit

There won't be so many blogposts for a while as I'm putting my writing muscles into other projects, including nanowrimo 2012, amazing how well known and popular it is these days, so many people around the world getting creative and writing their novels - Henry Miller would be so proud. Will take this opportunity to pat myself on the back for doing weekly blogposts for a year, its been a fun challenge, only missed one week when I spent a whole afternoon trying to join twitter (but getting continuously banned, which was weird).