La Pointe Courte

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Movie
German title La Pointe Courte
Original title La Pointe-Courte
Country of production France
original language French
Publishing year 1955
length 80 minutes
Age rating FSK 16
Rod
Director Agnes Varda
script Agnes Varda
production Ciné-Tamaris
music Pierre Barbaud
camera Paul Soulignac , Louis Stein
cut Alain Resnais
occupation

La Pointe Courte (AKA La Pointe Courte ) is in black and white twisted French film drama by director Agnès Varda from the year 1955 . The feature film, which works with both semi-documentary and strongly stylized elements, set the trend for the film movement of the Nouvelle Vague .

Emergence

In addition to her work as a theater photographer, Agnès Varda turned to the medium of film for the first time with this work. She realized La Pointe Courte in her own production with comparatively little resources, with only two professional actors (including Philippe Noiret in his first film leading role) and with the participation of amateur actors from among the residents of La Pointe Courte, a fishing district on the Étang de Thau the southern French town of Sète , where the film was shot in its entirety. Varda was a memorial to the city to which her family had fled during the Second World War and where she had spent her youth.

Plot and structure

In four sequences, the story of a crisis in the relationship of a young married couple is told: They have fulfilled a long-cherished wish by spending a holiday in La Pointe Courte, the place where they come from. She, the Parisian, follows him and encounters a world that is initially completely foreign to her. While the two wander aimlessly in and around La Pointe Courte, the antagonism of the characters - he is modest in his claims and content with the relationship, she, on the other hand, is driven by unfulfilled longings, feeling alienation from her husband and about to leave him - in Dialogues obviously. Only gradually, beginning with a central scene in the empty hull of a shipwreck, does the wife develop a deeper understanding of the nature of her husband with the growing knowledge of the milieu, and the couple come closer to each other and finally they reconcile .

For the scenes in this storyline, Varda used an exaggerated visual language and stylized dialogues: " Je voulais que le couple soit une chose parfaitement abstraite, [...] je voulais qu'il soit un homme et une femme qui n'avaient pas de nom, pas de métier, [...] qu'il n'y ait pas un dialogue réaliste. J'ai donc fait une dialogue théâtral. "(" I wanted the couple to be something completely abstract [...] that it was a man and a woman who had no name, no profession, [...] that there was no realistic dialogue. So wrote I have a theatrical dialogue. ")

This action is framed and interrupted by five sequences that thematize the lives of the inhabitants of La Pointe Courte. Their already meager livelihood, the mussel fishery, has been called into question because they have been banned from using the mussel beds due to pollution by sewage, and disregarding the ban brings them into conflict with the authorities. Everyday life in this milieu is reproduced in the film in a variety of aspects, which include tragic and joyful moments (the death of a child, the successful wooing of a young man), work and celebrations.

In stark contrast to the dramatic stylization of the previously mentioned fictional storyline, this thread based on actual events shows a greater degree of closeness to reality and blurs the boundaries between staged storyline and ethnographic documentation. The quays and alleys of La Pointe Courte with their poor houses, the waterways and banks, the boat workshops and boat cemeteries - a symbolic backdrop for the couple's dialogues - can be understood here as integral parts of a living environment.

The two strands of the film initially show hardly any direct points of contact, the respective perspectives seem incompatible, and the contrast that the hard existence of the fishing families forms with the story of the couple emphasizes the self-consciousness of the two, through which they in their tourist- Role basically stay isolated from the locals. But at the moment when the young wife begins to develop a feeling of familiarity, a sequence in which the couple witnesses the traditional fishing joust (Joute Nautique “Fête de la Saint Louis”) in the Canal Royal in Sète is linked two strands: “ The couple weave their own destiny into this human tapestry ” (André Bazin).

Varda was inspired by William Faulkner's double novel The Wild Palms ( Wilde Palmen and Der Strom ) to create this structure, which interweaves two strands of contrasting content and style in an alternating sequence . As a means of avoiding identification and creating a critical distance, Varda also compared this form with the Epic Theater Bertolt Brecht , which she had got to know while working as a photographer at the Paris Théâtre National Populaire under Jean Vilar .

Reception and effect

La Pointe Courte was at the suggestion of André Bazin , editor of Cahiers du cinema , as part of the International Film Festival of Cannes premiered 1955th A broad reception was denied to him, however, because the film was not distributed. The decisive factor for this fact was that it did not comply with the guidelines of the French film funding authority CNC (Center national de la cinématographie) and was therefore considered an amateur production. Nevertheless, due to his courageous, independent production method and his advanced form, he found an echo among the authors of the Cahiers du cinéma . The emphatically literary style and the unusual, deliberately stylized play of the dialogue scenes, on the other hand, was sometimes misunderstood - for example in a contemporary review by François Truffaut - as a weakness in the staging and acting.

The film was later recognized for its historical bridging position: on the one hand, the film is stylistically and through the use of amateur actors in their usual milieu close to Italian neorealism ( Luchino Visconti's La terra trema ( The earth quakes ) and Roberto Rossellini's Viaggio in Italia ( Journey in Italy ) were already mentioned comparatively by contemporary critics), although this was not a conscious reference by the director, who, according to her own statement, was barely film literate at the time. On the other hand, it is regarded as the immediate forerunner of the French Nouvelle Vague or as its first work. Alain Resnais ( responsible for editing in La Pointe Courte ) made a few years later, the feature film Hiroshima, mon amour (1959) , is stylistically related .

Last but not least, the special visual qualities of the work were highlighted: “ What makes this a stunning movie, beyond its loose, alternating narration, is its visual style, most particularly the camerawork, framing, and staging of actors. There is a strange and haunting visual quality to La Pointe Courte that uses the local light, setting, and inhabitants as if they were simultaneously carefully crafted elements of mise-en-scene and chance, found objects. ”(“ What makes this film breathtaking, beyond the free, alternating story, is its visual style, especially the camerawork, the frame work and the way the actors are staged. There is an extraordinary and haunting visual Quality at La Pointe Courte , which uses the local lighting conditions, locations and the locals as if they were carefully designed elements of the staging and chance finds at the same time. ”) (Richard Neupert)

The scene in which the couple descends into the belly of a moored boat has strong visual parallels to a similar scene in Ingmar Bergman's Wie in a Spiegel (1961). Like Varda, Bergman also used shots in his films from the late 1950s onwards in which one person is photographed frontally and the other in profile within a picture. It has not been established whether Bergman knew Varda's film or was influenced by it.

While working on her autobiographical documentary Les plages d'Agnès ( The Beaches of Agnès ) from 2008, Agnès Varda returned to the location of La Pointe Courte filming .

A few months after Varda's death, a photo of the filming served as the template for the official festival poster for the 72nd Cannes International Film Festival .

Film start

In the Federal Republic of Germany , La Pointe Courte was first broadcast on March 16, 1964 on ZDF .

literature

  • Alison Smith: Agnès Varda . Manchester University Press, Manchester 1998, ISBN 0-7190-5060-X (French Film Directors)
  • Astrid Ofner (Ed.): Demy / Varda . Schüren, Marburg 2006, ISBN 3-901770-19-4 (catalog book for the retrospective of the Viennale and the Austrian Film Museum October 2 to 31, 2006)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ In the original opening credits of the film, the title "Pointe-Court" is written, in later re-performances by Varda's own Ciné-Tamaris this was preceded by a title without a "-". Internationally, too, the title is mostly spelled “Pointe Courte”, including Germany.
  2. ^ Alison Smith: Agnès Varda . Manchester University Press, Manchester 1998, p. 71.
  3. ↑ a b Jean-André Fieschi, Claude Ollier: Weltliche Gnade. Conversation with Agnès Varda . In: Astrid Ofner (Ed.): Demy / Varda . Schüren, Marburg 2006, p. 78.
  4. ^ A b André Bazin: La Pointe Courte . In: Astrid Ofner (Ed.): Demy / Varda . Schüren, Marburg 2006, p. 90.
  5. ^ Agnès Varda on La Pointe Courte (interview with Agnès Varda). Contained in: La Pointe Courte. A film by Agnès Varda . The Criterion Collection, 2008 (DVD-Video).
  6. ^ Michel Marie: The French New Wave: an Artistic School . Blackwell, Oxford 2002, p. 51.
  7. ^ François Truffaut: La Pointe Courte . In: ders .: The films of my life. Essays and Reviews . Verlag der Autor, Frankfurt am Main 1997, pp. 413-415.
  8. ^ Alison Smith: Agnès Varda . Manchester University Press, Manchester 1998, p. 5.
  9. ^ Georges Sadoul: Dictionary of Films . University of California Press, Berkeley 1972, p. 288.
  10. ^ Richard Neupert: A History of the French New Wave Cinema . Second edition. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison 2007, p. 60.
  11. ^ The official poster of the 72nd Cannes International Film Festival . In: festival-cannes.com, April 15, 2019 (accessed April 15, 2019).
  12. ^ La Pointe Courte in the Lexicon of International FilmsTemplate: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used .