My Jour­ney Through French Cinema

For cinephiles of a cer­tain age, there was per­haps no more trea­sured pos­ses­sion than a well-worn VHS copy of Mar­tin Scorsese’s 1995 doc­u­men­tary, A Per­son­al Jour­ney Through Amer­i­can Movies. A trea­sure-map of the filmmaker’s for­ma­tive influ­ences, many almost impos­si­ble to see in those pre-gold­en age days of home video, it offered innu­mer­able pick-your-poi­son grail-quests for those of us yet to know our Budd Boet­tich­er from our Delmer Daves.

Just two years old­er than Scors­ese, Bertrand Tav­ernier was too young to come of age as a film­mak­er dur­ing French cinema’s most wide­ly-cel­e­brat­ed époque, the New Wave. He was, how­ev­er, present for its incep­tion – whether hang­ing with François Truf­faut on the set of The 400 Blows or cruis­ing through the streets of Paris with Jean-Pierre Melville as he extem­po­rised on the two cat­e­gories of film (“crap” and ​“mas­ter­piece”) from behind the wheel.

Tavernier’s route from young cinephile to crit­ic to film­mak­er was a famil­iar one, and serves as the struc­tur­al back­bone for his own per­son­al jour­ney through French movies in this essen­tial doc­u­men­tary. Where Scors­ese cast his net wide, large­ly chart­ing the psy­cho­log­i­cal impact his film­mak­ing heroes had on an impres­sion­able mind, Tav­ernier takes in a mere dozen over the course of his 192 min­utes, gen­er­ous­ly appor­tion­ing time to illu­mi­nat­ing tech­ni­cal com­men­tary and digres­sion­al, first-hand myth-busting.

Even if you’re famil­iar with many of the films under dis­cus­sion, Tavernier’s point­ed analy­sis serve to send you back to the works in ques­tion with fresh eyes, his acute for­mal read­ings often accom­pa­nied by a dis­man­tling of estab­lished truths. So while we get an extend­ed read­ing of the func­tion of Jean Renoir’s lat­er­al cam­era move­ments with­in the con­text of a scene (“A reac­tion against his father’s attempts to abol­ish depth of field”), we also get a dis­missal of his self-pro­claimed impro­visato­ry skills on a cel­e­brat­ed sequence-shot, along­side Jean Gabin’s barbed char­ac­ter­i­sa­tion – ​“As a direc­tor, a genius; as a per­son, a whore.”

While Tavernier’s per­son­al rela­tion­ships with many of the film­mak­ers in ques­tion help to human­ise through a fas­ci­nat­ing suc­ces­sion of anec­dotes, his crit­i­cal idio­syn­crasies (“With time I came to feel Bob le flam­beur was over­rat­ed”) nev­er stray far from the affec­tion­ate. He offers an extend­ed defence of Mar­cel Carné – ​“The only direc­tor inca­pable of writ­ing a scene. And yet the films exist, and some of them are masterpieces.”

Tavernier’s own thrill in the sense of dis­cov­ery is chan­nelled through tech­ni­cal know-how, his evan­ge­lism for ​“the prince of fringe direc­tors,” Edmond T Gréville, say, guar­an­tee­ing a bee-line made for his lit­tle-known, ​“stag­ger­ing­ly bold stud­ies of sex­u­al impo­tence.” Men­aces from 1938, star­ring a masked, crip­pled Eric von Stro­heim, can only take the top-spot on count­less to-see lists as a result.

If the film is by no means com­pre­hen­sive, one can take com­fort in the promise in the cred­its of a sec­ond part to come. On the evi­dence of this essen­tial hymn to film­mak­ing and cinephil­ia, it can’t come soon enough.