baracine

Sacha Guitry (1885-1957, see: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0347589/ ) was one of France's most prolific playwrights, actors and film directors. He was the heterosexual Oscar Wilde, the Gallic Noel Coward and the French Orson Welles. His film output went from filmed plays to films that were truly revolutionary in their narrative structure (Le Destin Fabuleux de Désirée Clary) and epic grandeur (Napoléon, Si Versailles m'était conté).



His presence on DVD is felt in France (Region 2 - see: http://www.amazon.fr/s/ref=nb_ss_w/4...s=sacha+guitry ) but his films are practically not available in Region 1, except in horribly mangled bootleg-quality, dubbed editions.


Si Versailles m'était conté: A 165-minute colour epic history of the château of Versailles from its creation by Louis XIII to the XXth century, a film that was interpreted by all of France's luminaries in 1954, as a benefit for the restoration of the castle: Brigitte Bardot, Orson Welles, Claudette Colbert, Edith Piaf, Gérard Philipe, the list is endless. See: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0047484/

I have written Criterion to encourage them to rediscover this original genius who was unjustly maligned by the Cahiers du Cinéma mafia in the 50's and whose reputation has never really recovered since, even though he remains as popular as ever with anyone who has been exposed to his films of intelligence, wit and critical appraisal of France's great and not-so-great men and women. He would be a perfect fit for a few boxsets in the Criterion label or the Eclipse no-frills label.

The films are there, they are well preserved, judging from the transfers used on French TV. All they are lacking are subtitles to be understood by the North-American public.

If you feel as I do, just write Criterion: http://www.criterion.com/asp/support_home.asp

Thanks!

jdcopp

The December issues of Cahiers in that era were generally "special issues" and in 1965 the December issue was dedicated to Marcel Pagnol and Sacha Guitry.
The introduction to the spread honoring both film/theater legends reads

"To pay homage to Sacha Guitry and Marcel Pagnol, as two genuine filmmakers, and nothing less, does not go without paradox and challenge. The paradox applies obviously since both men are men of the theater before, pre-eminently, before being filmmakers. And more so, since they consider cinema as an intermediary, an intermediary at the service of the global art of drama. Thus, they are filmmakers a little bit in spite of themselves. What is admirable is that while taking cinema as nothing more than a medium, at a time when everyone had eyes only for the image and looked for the specificity of cinema only in the plastic, they served it as much through their films which begin precisely where theater ends. The exemplary is that passing beyond rules, conventions and techniques, they have invented a new language (and there lies the challenge) where the New Wave, as much as they do in the Americans, Renoir and Cocteau, should find its reason to be." (page 22-23 my translation)

Jacques Bontemps writing of Guitry in that issue wrote,
"It does not elude me that the fact of dedicating this special issue to Sacha Guitry and Marcel Pagnol will assume much an aspect of a provocation, or a paradox at the very least. If, with the latter, it is a case of one of the greatest auteurs in French cinema, the case of the first named is more complex. The object of a strong admiration previously at Cahiers, and more recently, but more rapturously, in cinephile circles, Guitry remains somewhat (and there where, next to reason, lucidity dwells) more yet than rejected, unrecognized. Unrecognized due in great part to a work itself literary and, let's agree here, a lot more legitimately,dismissed with the double label of "Parisian wit" and "boulevard theater". (again, it is convenient to ask ourselves on the legitimacy of the pejorative tone which freely coincides with the use of these expressions. But such is not our intention.) Thus, the filmmaker is accused of participating in a wit and a theatrical genre globally despised. He participates exactly a great deal too much in order not to find himself by that quiet elsewhere." (page 103 my translation)
"But, in cinema, Guitry had no patrimony. Without doubt, this is why he did it so well. Going completely against the grain, being naively content to film his own plays, he found himself an innovator and he remains one. While others wore themselves out exhausting all the possibilities of a new invention while being, in fact,unheedful of its profound mission, some, among them, Guitry and Pagnol , lost interest in its workings and placed themselves well within the cinematic in order to land on both feet on the bend of a secret road."(page 103 my translation)

In March 1956- Cahiers published a review of the film "Si Paris nous était conté" written by François Truffaut. that review was introduced with this editor's note,
"No one here is being taken in, but there is to be found one advocate of this film where Paris was forgotten. His name is François Truffaut. To this lone wolf, this outsider, let's give the floor."
(page 52 my translation)
Truffaut wrote,
"But a critic who possesses the qualities - verve, cult of the master, fantasy, imagination and fluency - of Sacha Guitry would be unthinkable."
"Let's be serious, the daily critics to whom I am tied by feelings confraternal can not at the same time reject Astruc for being primarily a technician and Guitry for flouting technique . . . In any History of Cinema worthy of that name, Sacha Guitry would, with no reservations, find a place in the chapter, "Auteurs of Films", his name alongside that of Cocteau and Malraux and then of Bresson, Astruc, Gance, Ophuls and Renoir. French cinema would be diminished if some of these titles which I will conclude by enumerating were expunged.
Ceux de chez nous
Le Nouveau testament
Le Roman d'un tricheur
Faisons un rêve
Ils étaient neuf célibataires
Deburau
La Poisin
Si Paris nous était conté."
Cahiers du Cinema March 1956 page 53 my translation

jdcopp

Benny, what Cahiers do you read?

jdcopp

You have had the happy effect of sending me back to François Truffaut's The Films in My Life which, luckily for us, is available on-line at Google Books and, in gratitude for your sending me on that journey, I would also like to share this page from that book with you:


Truffaut on Sacha Guitry from The Films in My Life

baracine

JDCopp, as usual your quotes only serve to bolster my argument, in this case that Guitry was unjustly maligned by the Cahiers in the 50's.

I usually steer clear of Cahiers du Cinéma, which is a compendium of effete snobbery, lies, misinformation, ignorance, cowardice, hypocrisy, esprit de chapelle, inbred, insular, short-sighted protectionism, slavish admiration of foreign directors, petty jealousies, shady intrigue, règlements de comptes (vendettas) and ridiculous dogmatic statements by overrated idiots and incompetents. The only subject they could write knowingly about is failure at the box office.

If I were a librarian, I'd put the entire Cahiers collection under "Herpetology", the study of snakes.

Guitry was "rehabilitated" (although they made it sound like they had actually discovered the man) in the Cahiers du Cinéma eight years after his death when his entire work had been shown on French television to immense popular acclaim and when a large proportion of France's classically-trained actors owed their survival to the occasional revival of one of Guitry's successful plays. In other words: when it had become inescapable - even to those trendy shut-in imbeciles - that he and Marcel Pagnol were indeed judged very highly by anyone other than the Cahiers du cinéma, who had spectacularly "missed the boat", as they say, about the cinematic qualities of those two great men of the theatre. And even in that issue, great care had to be taken to camouflage the fact that Guitry had been treated like a "boulevardier", an "amateur", an amuseur public, an outsider and a pariah (not unlike Julien Duvivier) by all the principal writers and founders of this august publication while Guitry was still alive. ("Paradox"! "Challenge"! "Provocation"!) I am SO not impressed!

But during Guitry's last years, between the creation of Cahiers du cinéma and his death (1957), he was mostly ignored, ridiculed, reviled, hated and spat upon by that little nerdy clique of frustrated upstarts, Truffaut's 1956 article being the single, solitary exception, also bristling with caveats, "ifs" and "buts", like Mark Anthony speaking timidly over Caesar's 56 bleeding wounds, in fear of his own life.

Truffaut's 1956 article about Si Paris nous était conté is full of compliments à rebrousse-poil (i.e.: compliments delivered with all the graciousness of a cat's spitted hairball) and had to be introduced, for good measure, by a special disclaimer by one of his colleagues absolutely distancing himself (and the magazine) from whatever crazy, insane, eccentric rave Truffaut was about to deliver to an unsuspecting public ("No one here is being taken in") about a director they considered to be the very worst example of "cinéma de papa" (i.e. non-New Wave).

Even the book you quote by Truffaut is about (1) a quirky, minimalist, late-Guitry (literally his next-to-last) film, Assassins et Voleurs (1957), which no one had seen and was certainly never a popular success when as early as Les Perles de la Couronne (1937), Guitry had shown examples of revolutionary brilliance that would inspire Preston Sturges and Orson Welles in their later narrative experiments, and (2), in the chapter "Guitry le Vilain" (p. 216 of the English translation), a brief summary of all the abuse Guitry had to endure from Truffaut's colleagues - without naming names, of course, the Cahiers mafia never turning on its own publicly.

P.S.: The only quote by Truffaut available online in the book you link to is on p. 25: "although the importance of Sacha Guity and Marcel Pagnol has been underestimated by historians of the cinema" - which is exactly my point and the reason why my appeal is addressed to the Criterion Collection who usually know which side their bread is buttered on, rather than to any so-called intellectual French elite.

cupcake jesus

Does not compute.

cheers,

-the Jesus

baracine

In his anthology of great wit, called L'Esprit, Guitry quotes Oscar Wilde often, mentioning that he admires the writer but that his observations on women have to be taken with a grain of salt by any self-respecting womanizer (as Guitry was).

The Bus

baracine, I think your post wins for most French in any post I've ever seen here.

jdcopp

An interesting Guitry anecdote:

A History Lesson from Sacha Guitry

jdcopp

This study drawn from Eric Bonnefille's recent (2002) 2-volume biography of Julien Duvivier condenses that author's material on the reaction of ALL Parisian critics to the films of that director during the hey-day of the jeune turcs at Cahiers and at Arts.

Julien Duvivier, the 'young turks' contre the Paris critics: the Bonnefille connection

baracine

Thank you so much for that anecdote about Duvivier slapping Jean-Pierre Léaud's face on set after that little merde dared to tell him to take directing lessons from François Truffaut. I would have liked to be a fly on the wall...

jdcopp

I’m trying to figure all of this out. Benny says that Cahiers “spit on” by ignoring. But when it is pointed out to him that “Assassins and Voleurs” got a glowing review from François Truffaut, Benny says that the film was “not a success” and that is was ”quirky” and “minimalist” and faults Truffaut for not having written a glowing review of “Les Perles de la Couronne” which was released in 1937.. So let’s see Truffaut does nasties to Guitry. Despite having written a glowing review because Benny says the film needs to be dismissed. So, who is trashing Guitry here? Benny or Truffaut?
Truffaut at 25 writes a glowing review of a Guitry film but Benny complains because he didn’t write a review of film (“Les Perles de la Couronne”) that was released when he was five (Does Benny think that François’s kindergarten class published a class newspaper complete with film reviews?)
Well, that’s Benny logic for you.

baracine

Get your facts rights. Then, we'll talk about my logic. Truffaut wrote "a glowing review" of Assassins et Voleurs in his book Les Films de ma Vie, which came out in 1975, not in the Cahiers du cinéma, and many years after Guitry's death. The only positive review to have appeared in Cahiers du cinéma while Guitry was alive was Truffaut's appreciation of Si Paris nous était conté (1956) and that occasion was considered so exceptional that it had to be prefaced by a special disclaimer by the magazine's editors who didn't want to be associated with that review because Guitry had cooties. As long as Truffaut was writing retrospectively in Les Films de ma Vie (1975), it wouldn't have cost him much to mention other triumphs in Guitry's career. But he probably had never even heard of them.

Besides, praising a bitter, cynical film like Assassins et Voleurs, almost 20 years after the fact, is a little like saying that Shakespeare never wrote anything worthwhile until King Lear. It's just another facile, ignorant put-down.

jdcopp

François Truffaut's The Films in my Life is a collection of film reviews by Truffaut. Like most collections, it consists of past writings by the author. The review of Assassins et Voleurs is a reprint of the review by Truffaut which was published in issue 70 - April 1957 - of Cahiers du Cinema.

One can go to the Cahiers site and archives >> rechercher un article >> No. du cahiers - issue 70 >> lancer la recherche >> bottom left on page one Du cinéma pur pages 46-47.

You did not read my Guitry anecdote, did you?

A History Lesson from Sacha Guitry

Geez, Benny, you're almost 60 and you don't realize that a collection of films reviews is a book of past writings.

Does this straighten the facts out?

baracine

I stand corrected. Truffaut published a second article about Guitry (Assassins et Voleurs) in the Cahiers a full three months before Guitry's death. Better late than never, I say. Although that was cutting it pretty close.

I will not pay good money to read that article. And as long as you stoop low enough to mention my age in this discussion, a tactic not dissimilar to that of the "mean girls" of the Cahiers, I will mention that I first became aware of Guitry's films at age 7 or 8 when they were first broadcast on the French Radio-Canada network. It's fair to say that I already knew more about his films at that age than Truffaut ever did.

jdcopp

untanglng a web of deceit

baracine wrote and posted on 11-18-07, 11:32 AM


In an interview in La Gloire de Pagnol, Jacqueline Pagnol -- Marcel Pagnol's widow -- speaks with Alain Ferrarri of Pagnol's problems with film critics. They discuss La Critique des critiiques published in 1947 (coincidentally at a time when the young turks were still teenagers) a book in which Pagnol launches a broadside against the film critics of that time and they also discuss the generally negative reaction of critics to Manon des sources in 1953. Ferrari, in a footnote, mentions as an example of a positive review André Bazin's review which Ferrari says is for the most part "elogious". In that review which was republished in What is Cinema? (1958, though for someone slow-witted I must emphasize that Bazin's review was originally published in January 1953), Bazin said that Pagnol had done, in cinema, for words what D W Griffith had done for images (Why, Benny, do I get the idea that you will somehow interpret that as an insult?). Jacqueline Pagnol went on to say,

"Recognition of Marcel by film critics came later with François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard when they were writing for Cahiers du Cinema. Marcel was very touched by the fact that these young people spontaneously spoke of their admiration. He received several of them at our home."


Now, I kind of wonder who knows more of the relationship between the Marcel Pagnol and the Cahiers critics, Mademoiselle Pagnol or Mister Racine?

jdcopp

I am "mean" to mention your age. In an argument with me about two years ago you attempted to add authority to your comment by claiming to have been born in 1950 (or sometime thereabout).


As Jack McCoy on Law and Order has been told, oh, so many times, "You opened the door, Mr McCoy"

baracine

So Godard, Truffaut and Bazin were kind to Pagnol (1895-1974), who lived much longer than Guitry. Truffaut braved the ire of his brother snakes by writing two favourable articles about Guitry while Guitry was still alive. This still doesn't change my basic affirmation that the Cahiers - for the most part - ignored and even maligned Guitry in the fifties.

What would you like me to say? That Guitry was an idol of the Nouvelle Vague?

jdcopp

In Wakeman's World film directors, Richard Roud is quoted in the article on Guitry as saying (page 432):

"In the late 1950s, the Cahiers du Cinema group acclaimed Guitry's last three films and reappraised the earlier films. But, perhaps the most decisive blow in Guitry's favour was struck by Alain Resnais, when he declared that he, Chris Marker and Godard had all been influenced by Guitry."

"And it is not fanciful to see in the work of Eric Rohmer a continuation of that oeuvre, though in a more serious vein."


If in one of the most important film reference books one of the most renowned American film historian (the founder of the New York Film Festival and also a holder of the Legion D'honneur) is quoted as suggested you should, it might be a good idea to give a listen when it is suggested that Guitry was an idol of the young turks and other New Wave directors.

jdcopp

Noèl Simsolo in his book on Sacha Guitry's films has noted that François Truffaut was the lone film critic among the Paris press-corps to give a thumbs up to Sacha Guitry's Si Paris nous était conté. This, by the way, was the reason for the editor's introduction to the review. He goes on to describe the review as being

"full of compliments à rebrousse-poil (i.e.: compliments delivered with all the graciousness of a cat's spitted hairball)".

In contrast, Simsolo in his book speaks of how touched Guitry was that Truffaut came to defense and of how Guitry went out of his way to contact Truffaut to thank him. Well, if Benny's " rebrousse" assessment of that review is correct, then, he must be saying that Guitry was too much of a naif to realize he was being conned.

baracine

The operative words here, as usual, are late fifties , i.e. after Guitry's death in 1957. I have already conceded that Truffaut ("the lone film critic") authored two favourable articles during Guitry's lifetime. Now it appears there is third one, which you will no doubt produce in time out of the archives. As for reappraising the earlier films, that was already covered in the special Sacha Guitry and Marcel Pagnol edition of 1965 where, in typical fashion, the slimy character assassins of the Cahiers tried as best they could to cover their tracks and their poor record of praising an obvious genius that the whole of France had already taken to their hearts and glorified in a thousand different ways, without waiting for the self-serving constipated Cahiers crowd to rewrite history.

Besides, who can tell? Maybe Guitry died of shock at finding himself praised by that upstart Truffaut in the pages of the Cahiers.

William Fuld

Link?

jdcopp

http://forum.dvdtalk.com/showthread.php?t=469702

posted on 06-27-06, 09:10 AM

and as that post demonstrates it actually comes from a discussion on the IMDb boards which has since been archived.

baracine

jdcopp, I have never made a secret of my age. I'm just questioning the advisability of your using it in a personal attack in a discussion like this one.

If you want to hijack this thread to prove that Sacha Guitry was the darling of the New Wave, I say: More power to you! As long as you see it as a way of getting more people to write Criterion to put Guitry on the map of Region 1 - the original intent of this thread - and not as a personal vendetta against me.

Criterion's address once more is: http://www.criterion.com/asp/support_home.asp

jdcopp

How is it "advisable" for you to mention your age and not "advisable" for those who read your post to not repeat what you have said. As I said, you opened the door.
I did not "high-jack" this thread. When, in your original post you alluded to the relationship Sacha-Guitry-New Wave, you invited a discussion of that relationship. All I am trying to do is to "get the facts straight". I suppose that you think that it is not "advisable" for me to identify the poster who wants the facts to be gotten straight.


apologies to Robert Frost