Saturday, September 6, 2008

Henri Decae - Les Cousins

As much as we love to understand the French New Wave as an inaugration and canonization of the director as auteur/artist, we would do well to note also that the French New Wave was an inaugration and canonization of new, adventurous, experimental, courageous and inventive cinematographers. From Henri Decae, Raoul Coutard, Gilsend Cloquet, Pasquali DeSantos and many others, the genius of the French New Wave is inextricably linked to the openness, comraderie and collaboration of the French New Wave cinematographers with the director/ auteurs. What Truffaut might have been raging against in his article," A Certain Tendency in French Cinema," was not just the stilted adapation of literary subject matter, but also the stilted cinematography that incarcerated these adaptations as "cinema of quality" but not a cinema of dynamism. When we look carefully at Henri Decae's work in Claude Charbol's LES COUSINS we should be startled by the purposeful dynamism through which the work is delivered to us in its cinematography. The opening shot of LES COUSINS is of the character of Charles leaving the train station. The shot begins from a high angle and then dollies in to a medium close up which frames Charles' suitcase as he leaves through the station turnstiles. It is the fluidity of movement in this opening shot that is superfluous to the narrative but emphatic in demostrating the subsequent visual style of the film. Decae establishes a certain detachment from characters by moving his camera away from characters to capture their milieu. His camera pans in 360 degrees, dollies and tracks through the apartment and the bar that the characters inhabit to emphasize the 'cinematic context' wherein which this drama unfolds. It is not a static representation of characters in a narrative (a la the cinema of quality) but a dynamic presentation of characters in a the context of the cinematic artform. To move beyond the cinema of quality and get to a 'French New Wave' there had to be two technological advances: lightweight mobile cameras and faster and more sensitive film stocks. Decae takes advantage of both of these advances in LES COUSINS. One has to look in wonder (even today with the poor low light resolution of some digital cameras) how Decae was able to shoot the party sequence where Paul turns out the light and moves through the apartment with only a candlelabra as the single light source. Was there an edit when the lights were turned off to switch to a faster film stock? Did he control the camera's f-stop in sync with the lights as they were switched off? Or was the film stock so flexible that it was able to handle the sudden shift from full electric lighting to candlelight? However the sequence was constructed it was certainly a monumentous showcasing of the dexterity of the faster film stocks that helped to establish the groundbreaking appeal of the French New Wave. Moreover, the camera is constantly moving (circulating) around the apartment in this sequence which suggests that the 'jib' or armature upon which the camera was situated was small enough to fit within the location and smooth enough to make this sequence a testament of French New Wave cinematic dynamism. So when we look at the French New Wave movement we should bear in mind that collaborative spirit between director/auteur and cinematographer that changed our understanding of the cinema as a dynamic artform and not just a medium to record a theatrical performance.

1 comment:

jdcopp said...

It is interesting to note a propos your post here that Truffaut's target in "A Certain Tendency", the screensriter Jean Aurenche, says in his memoir "La Suite a l'ecran" ("The Rest is on the Screen") that he abandoned any ambition he had to move from writing to directing because of the extent to which the cinematographer's in the 40s and 50s dominated and bullied the directors. He wanted no part of the kind of argument that he saw going between directors like Claude Autant-Lara and Jean Delannoy and their DPs. And he cited Jean Renoir as the lone example of a French director from that period who was not intimidated by the DP.

jdcopp