Noir Project #1 - Shoot The Pianist
There are some opinions that are so common and rarely-questioned that even people who genuinely believe them should refrain from stating them - people would only think you're saying it because it's an 'acceptable' opinion. An example: François Truffaut, after a brilliant early career, became exactly the kind of bloated sentimentalist he'd always decried.
I'm never quite sure about this, for two reasons. Firstly, the greater tragedy of the Nouvelle Vague for me was that Jean-Luc Godard turned out to be so reactionary and self-indulgent in his later career1. Secondly, I can't really go with that word "became". Truffaut was always sentimental, never more so than when compared to the steely, intellectual Godard.
Now, there's nothing wrong with sentimentality. Sentimentality can be as effective as any other emotional register if you get the feeling that the artist is sincere about it. I'm just saying that it's no coincidence that the most widely-viewed film Truffaut ever put his hand to was directed by Steven Spielberg (Close Encounters of the Third Kind, in which Truffaut played Claude Lacombe).
Shoot the Pianist (in French, Tirez sur la Pianiste, usually translated as the rather inelegant Shoot the Piano Player) is a movie based on the novel Down There by David Goodis. I have not read Down There, but I think I can hazard an educated guess as to which elements of Shoot the Pianist are taken from it. Down There was published in 1956, towards the tail-end of the classic noir era2, and Truffaut's film includes many noir staples.
The hero, Charlie (played by Charles Aznavour) is a poor man who makes a living as a musician. He is quiet and withdrawn, and seems to be on the run from something dark and unnameable - a fact established with admirable economy in the opening minutes of the film, which literally show Charlie running away from something, then acting slightly cold towards someone he meets in the street. The women in his life, from Michèle Mercier's earthy Clarisse to Marie Dubois's haunting Léna, represent choices he can make and problems facing him. The film is shot in crisp black and white with a preference towards impenetrable shadows.
All of the above is prime noir material - indeed, remove the specific details of shots and actors and it would serve extremely well as a plot summary for Edward G Ulmer's canonical American noir Detour. But Truffaut takes it somewhere different. What interests him is not so much the mechanics of Goodis's thriller plot, but how the characters in it feel, and how they relate to each other.
The technical facility of the early Nouvelle Vague pictures remains staggering even after close to fifty years. The rain of jump-cuts, tracking shots, POV shots, montage, musical numbers, subtitles (no, not just the ones to help you understand the French) and early experiments with split-screen is thrilling and remarkable. Much of it is in the service of humour, like the gangster who swears on his mother's life that he's telling the truth - cue a jarring cut to a middle-aged woman falling onto the floor. Some of it has been very influential - I never realised before watching this how many French films seem to end up on the veranda of a lovers' bedroom, a setting employed by the Nouvelle Vague directors as a way to show off the fact that, unlike the staid, boring studio movies they were rebelling against, their films were shot in real buildings and on real streets.
All this preoccupation with style and humour and relationships is key to understanding Shoot the Pianist's place, not just in French cinema or even world cinema, but in noir. The film is often very funny, but not in the same way as the American noirs, which often employed very bitter gallows humour to add light relief and raise the tension at the same time. Working in a country not subject to the ruthless puritanism of the Hays Code gives Truffaut the freedom to make a more overtly sexual movie than the American noirs, but in doing so, he loses the sweaty repressed eroticism and obsessiveness that formed a vital part of the identity of the earlier movies.
Now, I'm not saying Truffaut did this by accident - he was one of the cabal of critics who invented the term, so he absolutely knows what he's doing. If critics cannot agree when the noir era started and finished, then perhaps we could agree that this is the first neo-noir, in that it is consciously a response to a genre which many people were unaware of before Truffaut and his colleagues turned a style into a movement?
And there's more. Just as Alfred Hitchcock's films (which Truffaut adored) are frequently read as serious personal statements disguised as popcorn entertainment, Shoot the Pianist tells you a lot about Truffaut without appearing to be a straight confessional3. It tells you that he loves movies, and women, and life, and that he cannot bring himself to fully believe in a vision of the world that is dismal and corrupt. So OK, yes, he is a bit sentimental. But you could see it happening as far back as 1960.
Shoot the Pianist isn't quite perfect - it is, for example, hard to credit Charlie as being cripplingly shy when we've just seen him enjoy a very lively fuck with Michèle Mercier (though this does occasion a terrific breaking-the-fourth-wall gag). But it's a really wonderful film nonetheless. Like Truffaut, really. With all his flaws and occasional self-indulgence, European cinema needs someone with a heart as big as his.
1 And Truffaut certainly agreed with me. In the full text of his infamous letter to Godard terminating their friendship, he notes that "Jean-Pierre [Léaud, an actor both men employed] is not the only one to have changed in fourteen years; if we would screen during the same night A bout de Souffle and Tout va Bien, the disillusion of the second movie would cause concern and sadness."
2 Working out precisely when the classic noir era ended has caused more headaches than any other issue attached to this genre: most critics generally agree that it started in the early Forties and ended in the late Fifties. In any case, it was active when Goodis wrote his novel, and inactive when Truffaut made his film (1960).
3 Which would be the film he made immediately before Shoot the Pianist, The 400 Blows.
I'm never quite sure about this, for two reasons. Firstly, the greater tragedy of the Nouvelle Vague for me was that Jean-Luc Godard turned out to be so reactionary and self-indulgent in his later career1. Secondly, I can't really go with that word "became". Truffaut was always sentimental, never more so than when compared to the steely, intellectual Godard.
Now, there's nothing wrong with sentimentality. Sentimentality can be as effective as any other emotional register if you get the feeling that the artist is sincere about it. I'm just saying that it's no coincidence that the most widely-viewed film Truffaut ever put his hand to was directed by Steven Spielberg (Close Encounters of the Third Kind, in which Truffaut played Claude Lacombe).
Shoot the Pianist (in French, Tirez sur la Pianiste, usually translated as the rather inelegant Shoot the Piano Player) is a movie based on the novel Down There by David Goodis. I have not read Down There, but I think I can hazard an educated guess as to which elements of Shoot the Pianist are taken from it. Down There was published in 1956, towards the tail-end of the classic noir era2, and Truffaut's film includes many noir staples.
The hero, Charlie (played by Charles Aznavour) is a poor man who makes a living as a musician. He is quiet and withdrawn, and seems to be on the run from something dark and unnameable - a fact established with admirable economy in the opening minutes of the film, which literally show Charlie running away from something, then acting slightly cold towards someone he meets in the street. The women in his life, from Michèle Mercier's earthy Clarisse to Marie Dubois's haunting Léna, represent choices he can make and problems facing him. The film is shot in crisp black and white with a preference towards impenetrable shadows.
All of the above is prime noir material - indeed, remove the specific details of shots and actors and it would serve extremely well as a plot summary for Edward G Ulmer's canonical American noir Detour. But Truffaut takes it somewhere different. What interests him is not so much the mechanics of Goodis's thriller plot, but how the characters in it feel, and how they relate to each other.
The technical facility of the early Nouvelle Vague pictures remains staggering even after close to fifty years. The rain of jump-cuts, tracking shots, POV shots, montage, musical numbers, subtitles (no, not just the ones to help you understand the French) and early experiments with split-screen is thrilling and remarkable. Much of it is in the service of humour, like the gangster who swears on his mother's life that he's telling the truth - cue a jarring cut to a middle-aged woman falling onto the floor. Some of it has been very influential - I never realised before watching this how many French films seem to end up on the veranda of a lovers' bedroom, a setting employed by the Nouvelle Vague directors as a way to show off the fact that, unlike the staid, boring studio movies they were rebelling against, their films were shot in real buildings and on real streets.
All this preoccupation with style and humour and relationships is key to understanding Shoot the Pianist's place, not just in French cinema or even world cinema, but in noir. The film is often very funny, but not in the same way as the American noirs, which often employed very bitter gallows humour to add light relief and raise the tension at the same time. Working in a country not subject to the ruthless puritanism of the Hays Code gives Truffaut the freedom to make a more overtly sexual movie than the American noirs, but in doing so, he loses the sweaty repressed eroticism and obsessiveness that formed a vital part of the identity of the earlier movies.
Now, I'm not saying Truffaut did this by accident - he was one of the cabal of critics who invented the term, so he absolutely knows what he's doing. If critics cannot agree when the noir era started and finished, then perhaps we could agree that this is the first neo-noir, in that it is consciously a response to a genre which many people were unaware of before Truffaut and his colleagues turned a style into a movement?
And there's more. Just as Alfred Hitchcock's films (which Truffaut adored) are frequently read as serious personal statements disguised as popcorn entertainment, Shoot the Pianist tells you a lot about Truffaut without appearing to be a straight confessional3. It tells you that he loves movies, and women, and life, and that he cannot bring himself to fully believe in a vision of the world that is dismal and corrupt. So OK, yes, he is a bit sentimental. But you could see it happening as far back as 1960.
Shoot the Pianist isn't quite perfect - it is, for example, hard to credit Charlie as being cripplingly shy when we've just seen him enjoy a very lively fuck with Michèle Mercier (though this does occasion a terrific breaking-the-fourth-wall gag). But it's a really wonderful film nonetheless. Like Truffaut, really. With all his flaws and occasional self-indulgence, European cinema needs someone with a heart as big as his.
1 And Truffaut certainly agreed with me. In the full text of his infamous letter to Godard terminating their friendship, he notes that "Jean-Pierre [Léaud, an actor both men employed] is not the only one to have changed in fourteen years; if we would screen during the same night A bout de Souffle and Tout va Bien, the disillusion of the second movie would cause concern and sadness."
2 Working out precisely when the classic noir era ended has caused more headaches than any other issue attached to this genre: most critics generally agree that it started in the early Forties and ended in the late Fifties. In any case, it was active when Goodis wrote his novel, and inactive when Truffaut made his film (1960).
3 Which would be the film he made immediately before Shoot the Pianist, The 400 Blows.