August 31 - Maurice Pialat

Happy Birthday, Maurice Pialat! Born today in 1925, this French actor, screenwriter and film director is noted for the rigorous and unsentimental style of his films. 

His work is often described as "realist", though many film critics acknowledge it does not fit the traditional definition of realism. 

Pialat originally intended to become a painter, but met with little success. 

Having acquired a camera at age 16, he tried his hand at documentary films before making his first notable short in 1960. 

Pialat came to filmmaking late at age forty-four in 1969. The film, which was co-produced by François Truffaut, won the Prix Jean Vigo. 

During his thirty-five-year career, Pialat completed ten major features, many of which have been interpreted as autobiographical. He directed French actor Gérard Depardieu in four films. 

Most notably, this included the feature of which Pialat is best known for co-writing and directing. This was the 1980 French drama/romance film 'Loulou'. 

Young bourgeois Nelly (Isabelle Huppert) is married to her boss André (Guy Marchand), whose domineering personality she finds suffocating.  

Sick of André's jealousy and possessiveness, Nelly has a fling with Loulou (Gérard Depardieu), a petty crook. 

Soon enough, Nelly leaves her stunned husband and moves in with the street thug.  

However, her social respectability deteriorates as she transitions from one world to another, discovering in the process that neither really offers any sort of lasting fulfillment. 

For 'Loulou' Pialat was nominated for the Palme d'Or. This occurred at the 33rd Cannes Film Festival in May of that same year. 

In a posthumous tribute written for the French film magazine Positif, French critic and film historian Noël Herpe called Pialat's style "a naturalism that was born of formalism."  

In English-language film criticism, Pialat is often compared to John Cassavetes ('Shadows', 'Faces', 'A Woman Under the Influence', 'The Killing of a Chinese Bookie'). 

Summarizing Pialat's stance as a filmmaker in a profile for Film Comment, American comedy writer, performer, and critic Thomas Kenton "Kent" Jones wrote the following:  

"To say that Pialat marched to the beat of a different drummer is to put it mildly. In fact, he didn't really march at all. He ambled, and fuck anybody who got it into their head that they'd like to amble along with him. Or behind him. Or ahead of him." 

According to his style, Pialat's films are often noted for their loose yet rigorous style and for their somewhat elliptical editing, which emphasizes an unsentimental worldview. 

Describing the unique aesthetics of Pialet's work, Jones wrote the following: 

"Even more than Jean Eustache ['The Mother and the Whore'] [...] Pialat was an irascibly private artist, charting a twisted, crook-backed path with each new movie, almost always emerging with works in which the mind-bending vitality of immediate experience trumps all belief systems, allegiances, plans. [...] 

More than Cassavetes, more than Renoir, Pialat wanted every frame of celluloid bearing his name to be marked by the here and the now. [...] 

He was always willing to bend his narratives around experience. And the frequent ruptures, discontinuities, perspective shifts, and ellipses in his work are less single-minded than those of Cassavetes, more far-reaching in their implications." 

Pialat's work is marked by the use of long takes, often with sudden peaks of dramatic intensity in character interaction. He also played supporting roles in some of his films. 

Pialat was, in fact, already renowned for being irascible and difficult to work with, but that reputation – like the once fairly common (and inaccurate) categorisation of his work as that of a ‘French Ken Loach’ – gives us little idea of how tender, compassionate and affecting his best films are. 

In his Biographical Dictionary of Film, Critic David Thomson described Pialat with the following:

“...a wounded, battered humanist” whose work “evokes the French naturalist tradition of Renoir” – one of very few compatriots whose films Pialat appeared to have been impressed by.  

Others have name-checked Cassavetes as a point of reference, though again that comparison can be taken only so far, since Pialat’s films are, in the end, unique unto himself." 

In the 2009 edition of American quarterly film magazine Cineaste, Professor of Modern British History Dr. Adam Bingham wrote the following:  

"It is ultimately in this area that the true worth of Maurice Pialat can be most keenly felt: here was someone for whom filmmaking was an expression, an extension, of the soul, who was compelled to lay himself prostrate before his art and unpick his life before his camera’s unblinking eye.  

Filmmaking was for Pialat a way of life, less as an obsessive cinephile in the manner of his Nouvelle Vague contemporaries, less even as a simple mode of self-expression.  

Rather, one senses that for this director cinema was something of a mirror, an arena of self-exploration, even self-exorcism, in which he could look at and assess, question and reprimand himself. [...]  

But beyond such marquee names there are few major auteurs that spring readily to mind as offering anything like the gut-wrenchingly personal yet never self-regarding cinema of Pialat." 

Pialat is one of the greatest, most influential, and most misunderstood modern directors. It’s too easy, today, to love his films, precisely because their influence has rendered their style and tone familiar. 

His features superficially resemble many lesser American independent dramas and run-of-the-mill European dramas, or, rather, vice versa—these films resemble his, as a result of his direct or osmotic influence.  

However, many of these successors and tributaries shy away from the very tensions that his films embody. Their most salient traits render Pialat’s films not merely unlovable but almost odious—and that’s their distinctive and inimitable virtue. 

Pialat had been active from 1951–1995. 

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