Journeys Through French Cinema (Preview)
Reviewed by David Sterritt

Produced by Frédéric Bourboulon; directed and written by Bertrand Tavernier; cinematography by Jérôme Alméras, Garance Garnier, and Camille Clément; edited by Guy Lecorne and Juliette Alexandre; music by Bruno Coulais; with Bertrand Tavernier and André Marcon. Color and B&W, French dialogue with English subtitles, total running time 420 min. A Cohen Media Group release, streaming on Amazon.

Before he became an internationally acclaimed French auteur, Bertrand Tavernier was a cinephile, a critic, a movie-club entrepreneur, and a press agent employed by the great Jean-Pierre Melville, who gave him that job when Tavernier declared himself a failure as an assistant director. Continuing as a press agent, Tavernier worked for producer Georges de Beauregard and then in partnership with the polymathic Pierre Rissient, an arrangement that worked for ten years “without the slightest argument,” as Tavernier recalls in his new TV series Journeys Through French Cinema, the sequel to his 2016 documentary My Journey Through French Cinema. He directed his first shorts in 1964 and his first feature, The Clockmaker of St. Paul, in 1974. A long list of productions, honors, and awards have followed.

I mention Tavernier’s varied background at the outset because his intimacy with every aspect of movie production, distribution, and exhibition shines through each installment of Journeys Through French Cinema. When he was working on the series, Tavernier felt it would be a touch less personal than the 2016 documentary, since he’d now be discussing some cineastes he had never actually known. But there’s no question that everything on view—every director, excerpt, archival interview, and movie poster—is Tavernier’s considered choice, as are the always heartfelt, frequently opinionated, occasionally cantankerous words he speaks in voice-over or directly to the camera. Attentive watchers will learn a great deal about French cinema and also a fair amount about Tavernier, from his passion for movie music to his esteem for François Truffaut, whose judgments he regularly cites and quotes, and his admiration for Jean Gabin, who appears in clip after clip after clip.

Much of the series consists of fleeting moments linked by themes and motifs that come and go according to the flow of Tavernier’s recollections. Certain keynotes recur in multiple episodes, such as Tavernier’s implicit fondness for movies with mercurial changes of emotion and for films that don’t fuss too much about plot, and he’s good at spotting underrecognized historical trends, as when he points out the large number of sick and disabled characters in films made during the Occupation, as if France’s defeat was producing symptoms of metaphorical decay. Most of the series is unpredictable enough to keep you steadily curious about what’s around the next bend in the river.

The first two episodes deal with “cinéastes de chevet” or “bedside filmmakers,” creators of works especially close to Tavernier’s heart. This establishes a pattern for the series, where indisputably canonical auteurs rub shoulders with lesser lights, or lights that may seem lesser to eyes conditioned by the rankings of Andrew Sarris, assorted Cahiers du cinéma and Positif critics, and their influential ilk. “It’s a very French habit to defend one director against another,” Tavernier remarks in Episode 6, but the habit is hardly limited to his native land. In any case, his main goal is to celebrate, commemorate, and in some cases rehabilitate the talents he spotlights, and their heterogeneity often delights him, as when he notes with pleasure that he discovered Jacques Tati and Robert Bresson in the same year.

So it’s not surprising that the towering Tati, Bresson, and Max Ophüls, the more modest Sacha Guitry and Marcel Pagnol, and the relatively minor Jean Grémillon and Henri Decoin all converge at Tavernier’s welcoming bedside. Fun facts abound: Decoin had “no schooling” but read Jean Giraudoux every morning to savor his verbal subtleties, and Jack Nicholson has named Ophüls’s sometime star Anton Walbrook as his favorite actor. More surprisingly, a video clip shows Olivier Assayas likening Guitry to Quentin Tarantino for the speed and density of his dialogue, and Tavernier finds a Tarantino touch in Bresson’s 1966 masterpiece Au hasard Balthazar, so dark and concentrated is its story. This retrospective journey takes many unexpected turns.

Episode 3 deals with songs in cinema, a subject that has intrigued Tavernier ever since he entered a showing of Jean Renoir’s 1937 The Grand Illusion during the scene when the prisoners of war interrupt a whimsical pastime to sing “La Marseillaise” with intense patriotic fervor. This introduced Tavernier to the “dramaturgical importance” of songs, which can function as interludes, evoke past loves, create “dramatic counterpoint,” unfold “a story within a story,” establish a setting, or suggest a narrative theme. Quite a few French actors (Fernandel, Suzy Delair) came to the movies from the music hall, and Tavernier probes the previously unstudied topic of directors who doubled as lyricists, including Renoir, René Clair, Henri Colpi, Agnès Varda, Jacques Demy, and even Julien Duvivier, whose generally “forbidding” films often contain songs that serve as “little islands of tenderness, nostalgia, joyous interludes, a secret part of his personality.”

Turning to the World War II era, Tavernier begins by discussing foreign filmmakers in France before the war. The first to arrive were Russians fleeing the Soviet regime in the Twenties, among whom Viktor Tourjansky is a Tavernier favorite, and the next wave comprised cineastes fleeing Nazism in Germany and Austro-Hungarian despots elsewhere. The arrival of directors Fritz Lang and Robert Siodmak, cinematographers Eugen Schüfftan and Harry Stradling, set designer Alexandre Trauner, and others shook up the “academicism and conservatism that had bogged down French cinema since the advent of the talkies.” But their employment sparked protests by French cinema workers, who streamed down the Champs-Élysées to complain that foreigners were stealing work from them. Tavernier’s account points up a darkness in the industry that snared such major figures as Marcel L’Herbier and Jacques Feyder at one time or another.

The darkest time of all was the Occupation, although new films continued to appear, affording a crucial means of escape for stressed-out citizens. Tavernier cites Truffaut’s observation that of 220 fiction features made during the Occupation, no fewer than eighty-nine were “interesting” or better, and that while Italian films were blatantly fascist during the era, the overwhelming majority of French productions, although “conservative and reactionary” in some instances, managed to avoid the collaborationist pit. Tavernier singles out several of his culture heroes, most notably screenwriter Charles Spaak, who bravely deleted the anti-Semitic overtones of a novel he was adapting behind bars in a Gestapo jail, and screenwriter Henri Jeanson, who “held the record…for fines and prison sentences” levied by the French and Germans alike on charges of incitement to murder a Nazi, denunciation of anti-Semitism, pacifism, and anticolonialism…

To read the complete review, click here so that you may order either a subscription to begin with our Summer 2020 issue, or order a copy of this issue, which also includes a feature interview with Bertrand Tavernier.

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