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November 03, 2005
Cinema? It's finished: Auteur weariness
Geoffrey Macnab fingers Jacques Audiard as the vital The Beat My Heart Skipped opens in the UK and the not-prolific French writer-director is not all that sanguine about the industry's heartbeat: "There is something unusual, even perverse, about European filmmakers remaking American movies. Generally, the traffic is all the other way. The stereotypical thinking is that Hollywood cheapens and sullies the arthouse gems it forcefeeds through the studio machine. Ironically, in this case, Audiard's film has been far more of a commercial success than the Toback prototype [1978's Fingers]. It has done brisk box-office business in France and earned some very flattering reviews in the US... Audiard seems to have had a vexed relationship with his own father, Michel Audiard, an acclaimed writer who worked in the cinema but held it in very low regard. "He (my father) often said that filmmakers were idiots. He didn't see cinema as a true art form. That was the atmosphere I grew up in as a child."...
"He hated making his debut feature See The Men Fall (1994). "I thought that's it. I'll go back to screenwriting. The whole situation drove me a bit crazy." Pressed as to what he so disliked, he points to the hierarchy and power games on film sets. "Cinema? It's finished," he exclaims before embarking on a lengthy rant about how anachronistic the medium seems in the digital age. "When I was a child, you'd go to the cinema and see the news projected on the screen. Whether it was Fox Movietone, Gaumont or Pathé news, you'd see images of the real world. The camera they recorded the news with was the same camera they recorded fiction with in the movie studios. Everything was just recorded on 16mm. Now, that's no longer the case. When I see a modern film, I don't know where the pictures have come from..." [More comparing the original and Audiard's variation at the link.]
Posted by pride at November 3, 2005 07:33 PM
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