The following originally appeared in the booklet for the 2009 Masters of Cinema UK DVD release of La gueule ouverte [1974] which I co-produced.
Dan Sallitt's 2008 essay on Police (which he considers one of his favorite pieces of his own writing) has just been posted at his blog, here. A dossier of my translations of interviews with Pialat about the film has been posted here.
Dan's 2010 MoC essay on À nos amours. has also been posted at his blog here. A visual I made for the film along with my translation of the 1984 Le Monde conversation between Maurice Pialat and Jean-Luc Godard can be found here.
My essay on Passe ton bac d'abord... — "The War of Art" — can be read here. A dossier of my translations of four interviews with Pialat around the film can be read here.
I'm posting these Pialat pieces on the occasion of the retrospective of Maurice Pialat's complete features (and the Turkish shorts) that runs from October 16 till November 1 at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens.
[Isabelle in La Dombes]
Directed by Maurice Pialat
Year of Première: 1951
Format: Black & White / 1.37:1 Original Aspect Radio
with: Paulette Malan
Congrès eucharistique diocésain.
[Diocesan Eucharistic Congress.]
Directed by Maurice Pialat
Year of Première: 1953
Format: Black & White / 1.37:1 Original Aspect Radio
Drôles de bobines
[Funny Reels]
Directed by Maurice Pialat
Year of Première: 1957
Format: Black & White / 1.37:1 Original Aspect Ratio
with: Maurice Pialat
L'ombre familière
[The Familiar Shadow]
Directed by Maurice Pialat
Cinematography: Maurice Cohen
Scenario: Maurice Pialat
Sound Design: André Almuro
Year of Première: 1958
Format: Black & White / 1.37:1 Original Aspect Ratio
with: Jacques Portet, Sophie Marin, Jean-Loup Reinhold
L'amour existe
[Love Exists]
Directed by Maurice Pialat
Cinematography: Gilbert Sarthre
Scenario: Maurice Pialat
Assistant Director: Maurice Cohen
Camera Assistant: Jean Bordes-Pages
Editor: Kenout Peltier
Score: Georges Delerue
Producer: Pierre Braunberger
Year of Première: 1960
Format: 35mm Black & White / 1.66:1 Original Aspect Ratio
Jean-Loup Reynold as the Narrator
Janine
Directed by Maurice Pialat
Cinematography: Jean-Marc Ripert
Scenario: Claude Berri
Musical Score: René Urtreger
Year of Première: 1961
Format: 35mm Black & White / 1.66:1 Original Aspect Ratio
with: Hubert Deschamps, Claude Berri, Evelyne Kerr, Mouflette
Bosphore
[Bosporus]
Directed by Maurice Pialat
Cinematography: Willy Kurant
Musical Score: Georges Delerue
Producer: Samy Halfon
Year of Première: 1964
Format: 35mm Color / 1.37:1 Original Aspect Ratio
Byzance
[Byzantium]
Directed by Maurice Pialat
Cinematography: Willy Kurant
Texts: Stefan Zweig
Producer: Samy Halfon
Year of Première: 1964
Format: 35mm Black & White / 1.37:1 Original Aspect Ratio
narrated by André Reybaz
La Corne d’Or
[The Golden Horn]
Directed by Maurice Pialat
Cinematography: Willy Kurant
Tex:t Gérard de Nerval
Musical Score: Georges Delerue
Producer: Samy Halfon
Year of Première: 1964
Format: 35mm Black & White / 1.37:1 Original Aspect Ratio
narrated by André Reybaz
Istanbul
Directed by Maurice Pialat
Cinematography: Willy Kurant
Producer: Samy Halfon
Year of Première: 1964
Format: 35mm Black & White / 1.37:1 Original Aspect Ratio
Maître Galip
[Master Galip]
Directed by Maurice Pialat
Cinematography: Willy Kurant
Poems: Nazim Hikmet
Producer: Samy Halfon
Year of Première: 1964
Format: 35mm Black & White / 1.37:1 Original Aspect Ratio
narrated by André Reybaz
Pehlivan
Directed by Maurice Pialat
Cinematography: Willy Kurant
Producer: Samy Halfon
Year of Première: 1964
Format: 35mm Black & White / 1.37:1 Original Aspect Ratio
Van Gogh
(aka Auvers-sur-Oise or Auvers)
part of the series Chroniques en France
Directed by Maurice Pialat
Year of Première: 1965
Format: 35mm Black & White / 1.37:1 Original Aspect Ratio
La Camargue
Directed by Maurice Pialat
Year of Première: 1966
Format: 35mm Black & White / 1.37:1 Original Aspect Ratio
Translated from the French by Craig Keller
Janine, the short I made with Claude Berri, was shot with direct sound, except for maybe a few seconds that I had to dub. In addition to that, the film was butchered, but that’s another story... It wasn’t worth getting worked up over — for example, we were shooting in a café, well, we were shooting from the other side of the glass, the camera was outside, or the other way around. And then, you have to recognize that I was doing the dubbing, but on the spot, at the time of the shoot. We’d shoot a scene, there wouldn’t exactly be ‘kilometers’-worth’ of tape, and we’d re-perform the sound right away, sometimes in an approximate manner, not always synchronous. I’ve never shot other than with sound.
In order to make those shorts about Istanbul, we stole a bit of film-stock from Robbe-Grillet. Not an enormous amount, but in the end there was enough of it to easily make a half-dozen short films. I would have even been able to make a feature, which would have been much more exciting. It’s too bad... These documentaries made in Istanbul were silent, given a soundtrack after the fact, along with a commentary. [...] Alright, the crew consisted of four individuals... But I had a topic: it was a poem by Nazim Hikmet, that I used somewhere else in a different short which, in my opinion, is the best one: Maître Galip. But I haven’t seen it in twenty years. [...] Maître Galip is the only one that corresponds to what I would have been able to make at the time within that genre, without the slightly pompous commentary that accompanies it, as I don’t think that this was necessary to make it better. It’s really reportage, but reportage that’s more architectural than documentary or sociological. I was kind of telling stories, recounting historical events like the seizure of Istanbul... •
“Pialat spends three months filming Istanbul with his cameraman Willy Kurant. In an impulse we easily imagine to be obsessive, they make shots, take views in the Lumière sense of the term: it’s a true return to the primitive in the way of working the real: the faces, the stones, the alternation between movement in the streets and images at a stand-still, photographs, almost, in their lumineuse évidence.”
— Clélia Cohen, Cahiers du cinéma no. 566, March 2002
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