Untitled - Monoskop

Ignored by the Jury
desperate need to dig one's heels in: not to mention the prizewinners, that is,
or the sixty-odd other films, . but to concentrate . exclusively on A . gnes Varda,
Jacques Demy, Alain Resnals and Jacques Rozier - the French cmema of the
future.
As a matter of fact this is the only critical advantage afforded by the internationalization
of the Tours Festival. All things considered, France emerges
as a brilliant victor in the light of this Franco-foreign confrontation. Worthless
as it is, for instance, Les Bains de mer by Jean LhOte and Charles Prost
still outclasses its Belgian satirical equivalent, Gestes du repas ;2 and crudely
sensational as it is, J. J. Languepin's Des Hommes dans Ie ciel still outclasses
its Czech dramatic equivalent, Dangerous Trades.3
The one exception, however, is animated films: McLaren, of course, with his
delightful Le Mer/e, and quite a few more, including Popesco-Gopo with
his amusing and inventive series on the seven arts; the Pole Borowczyk with
Sentiments recompenses, very artistically accompanied by the Warsaw Gas
Company's wind orchestra; and the American John Hubley, whose Tender
Game would surely have delighted Mademoiselle de Scudery.4 But animated
films apart, every film from Germany (Federal or otherwise), Russia, Portugal,
Brazil, Canada, Japan, Britain, Hungary, was either terrifyingly empty
or unbelievably incompetent.
So, as I was saying, two films eclipsed all the rest by their majesty and control.
Le Bel Indifferent has the edge over Le Chant du Styrene in that it was
booed during the screening. Who was to blame? The producers themselves,
S.N. Pathe-Cinema, whose grotesque excision of ten minutes from this
remarkable film has made it ten times more mysterious and difficult to understand
than it was. In fact Jacques Demy had filmed Cocteau's celebrated
monologue in a manner so terribly simple, so terribly pure, that any betrayal
the Cocteau of La Voix humaine might have felt was simply in favour of the
Cocteau of Renaud et Armide.5 The screen on which Le Bel Indifferent is
projected is the mirror before which Cocteau paraded and behind which
Demy is now hidden. This year, however, two Chinamen have been awarded
the Nobel Prize for demonstrating that things do not necessarily happen
behind a mirror as they do in front of it, and that, contrary to the famous laws
of parity, reality sometimes acts differently from its reflection. The beauty of
Jacques Demy's film is thus scientifically verified. And Roger Leenhardt6 is
wrong in maintaining that Demy should have moved his camera at the same
pace as Cocteau's text. Moreover, the modem French cinema owes so much
to the director of Les Parents terribles and the man who wrote the diary of
the shooting of La Belle et /a Bite, that I find it absolutely incredible that
anyone can now speak ill of Le Bel Indifferent. In filming it, Jacques Demy
had the remarkably noble purpose of wanting to repay his debt, and at the
same time make a second film. A setting of fantastic beauty, carpeted by the
blood of the poet or tiled with the azure that enfevered Rimbaud, a setting
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Bernard Evein, has enabled Demy to back three winners with
s
o u e ngour, the beauty of inevitability, palpable tragedy. It is the most