Auteur François Truffaut

Auteur François Truffaut was born 1932 in Paris and died 1984 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, near Paris. His mother and stepfather sent Truffaut when he was a young boy to live with various nannies as wll as an important loving grandmother, who nurtured his love of the arts. As a teenager, he was an enthusiastic moviegoer, often found in the front row of Henri Langlois et la Cinémathèque française, which was co-founded by Georges Franju and Jean Mitry. Langlois (1914-1977) was a French film archivist and cinephile. During the Second World War, Langlois and his colleagues helped save many films that were at risk of being destroyed during the Nazi occupation of France

As a pioneer of film preservation, Langlois was an influential figure in the history of cinema, where his film screenings in Paris in the 1950s are often credited with providing the ideals that led to the development of the politique des auteurs (auteur theory) on the generation of young cinephiles and critics who would later become the La Nouvelle Vague (French New Wave). Among the directors included were Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer and Alain Resnais. The future filmmakers were called les enfants de la cinémathèque (children of the cinémathèque), as they could often be found in the front row of packed screenings.

When Truffaut first took a chair at the cinémathèque he spoke that when the screen lit up, it was the first time he could see films that had been banned, films that he had never been allowed to see, films that he didn’t know had existed, and films that ultimately changed his life – the effect was immense, overwhelming, transformative. Even more so, for Langlois would screen the films, back-to-back, without any breaks between them: westerns by John Ford, comedies by Chaplin, and Josef von Sternberg films with Marlene Dietrich; gangster films by Howard Hawks, musicals by Vincent Minnelli and crime dramas by Robert Bresson and Fritz Lang; and, most importantly, films by Jean Renoir and Alfred Hitchcock, who would become his idols. It was akin to seeing them all at once.

For Godard and Truffaut: In Defense of Henri Langlois et la Cinémathèque française scroll below to post script.

After starting his own film club in 1948, Truffaut met film critic, André Bazin, who had a great effect on his professional and personal life, ultimately becoming his spiritual father. Bazin was the head of another film society and became a personal friend and helped him out of various financial and criminal situations during his formative years. At 18, Truffaut joined the French Army in 1950, but spent the next two years trying to escape, and was arrested for attempting to desert the army and incarcerated in military prison. Bazin used his political contacts to get Truffaut released and set him up with a job at his new film magazine, Cahiers du cinéma (Notebook of Cinema), which allowed Truffaut a platform to echo Bazin’s critical film philosophy, the politique des auteurs, a theory which changed the landscape of film criticism and cinema forever.

For more Auteur, scroll below to post script and see the politique des auteurs.

Composer and conductor Maurice Jauber.

Maurice Jaubert (born 1900 in Nice) was a prolific French composer who scored some of the most important French films of the early sound era. Jaubert grew up in a musical household, and began playing the piano aged five. Jaubert left for Paris and studied law and literature at the Sorbonne, but became seduced by classical music. His music was written in a style of clarity, frankness and freedom, in which he did not seek novelty for the sake of it, where his spontaneity is not weighed down by pedantic formulas.

Maurice Jaubert was the second son of François Jaubert, a lawyer who would become the president of the Nice Bar Association. He followed in his father’s footsteps and upon graduation from the Sorbonne, became the youngest lawyer in his hometown.

After Jaubert was awarded the baccalaureat (a college bachelor’s degree), from the Lycée Masséna in Nice in 1916, he enrolled at the Nice Conservatory of Music, where he studied harmony, counterpoint and piano. He was awarded the first piano prize in 1916.

Although Maurice Jaubert understood and appreciated film composing and scoring, he also had other creative musical outlets. As music director of Pathé-Nathan studio, he conducted musical orchestrations of several other composers, including Arthur Honegger and Darius Milhaud.

Left to right: Maurice Jaubert, French writer Jean Giono, and Brazilian-French film director, Alberto Cavalcanti, courtesy of Underscore,fr/portraits.L

Jaubert was a French army officer in engineering during World War I, and was demobilized in 1922. The next year he completed his musical education in Paris with Albert Groz, while undertaking a variety of music related jobs such as proof correction and checking Pleyela rolls.

The compositions by Jaubert’s in the early 1920s included songs, piano pieces, chamber music and divertissements. He wrote his first stage music in 1925 for a play by Calderón, Le Magicien prodigieux, using the Pleyela, a revolutionary player piano at the time. He was then hired by Pleyel to record rolls on the Pleyela.

Left to right: Maurice Ravel, French Romantic composer and best man at Jaubert’s wedding; Georges Neveux, devenu secrétaire de La Comédie; and Jaubert as the new smiling husband, courtesy of Underscore,fr/portraits.

Jaubert as a young composer, was attracted by technical innovations that could serve his artistic aspirations. While working on the play, Le Magicien prodigieux, he met a young soprano, Marthe Bréga, who would later sing most of his vocal compositions. They married in 1926, with composer, Maurice Ravel as his best man.

In 1929, while pursuing his work for the concert hall and the stage, Maurice Jaubert began writing and conducting for the cinema. He collaborated with prominent directors such as Alberto Cavalcanti (Le Petit Chaperon Rouge), Jean Vigo (Zero for Conduct and L’Atalante), René Clair (Quatorze Juillet), Julien Duvivier (Carnet de bal and La Fin du Jour), and Marcel Carné’s Drôle de drame, Hôtel du Nord and Quai des brumes (Port of Shadows).

Maurice Jaubert and François Truffaut

Thirty years after Maurice Jaubert’s death, director François Truffaut, purchased the publishing rights to four of his orchestral compositions.

It is believed that Truffaut first discovered Jaubert’s compositional music scores on the radio, but it’s never been determined which score he first heard. Perhaps it was Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante, where Jaubert in an early scene asked his musicians play the score backwards, similar to what George Martin would do in The Beatles’ recordings 35-years-later. Or, possibly from the film, Carnet de bal, where Jaubert enhanced director Julien Duvivier’s illusionary imagery with his own brillant use of lyrical imagery in his compositional music soundtrack.

Nevertheless, an emotional bond was set, when Truffaut used four of Jaubert’s orchestral compositions to four of his own films: Le Chambre Verte, L’Histoire d’Adèle, L’Homme qui aimait les femmes and L’Argent de poche.

Le Chambre Verte (The Green Room, 1978) was a deeply personal project for Truffaut, where he spent several years working on the film’s script, played the main character, Davenne, and felt a special connection to the theme of honoring and remembering the dead. In the film, he finds a forgotten, derelict altar, and rebuilds it and rechristens it as his own Altar of the Dead. The film is adapted from Henry James’ 1895 short story, Altar of the Dead and also two other works by James: The Beast in the Jungle and The Way It Came. Inside the chapel Davenne places portraits of people from his own life, which included composer Maurice Jaubert, writer Henry James and actor Oskar Werner, taken from footage of Jules and Jim, when Werner was an Austrian-German soldier during the Great War.

Cécilia, played by Nathalie Baye, then better known as the script girl in Truffaut’s1973 film, La Nuit américaine (Day for Night), plays the role of a young woman who helps him build his alter. Complications arise when Cécilia requests that one of the candles represent her former deceased lover, but is rebuffed by Davenne, due to a betrayal by the deceased man in the past.

Le Chambre Verte was one of Truffaut’s most critically praised films, and considered by some as his most personal, but also one of his least successful financially. From that point on, Truffaut’s films were never quite the same, making more popular mainstream films like the crowd pleasing Le Dernier Métro, a 1980 historical drama film, which won ten César Awards for best film, best actor (Depardieu), best actress (Deneuve), best cinematography, best director, best editing, best music, best production design, best sound and best writing. The box office and accolades were immense, but for many serious critics it spelled the kiss of death of Truffaut’s personal films. Truffaut followed with La Femme d’à côté, a film about adultry, and the detective film, Vivement dimanche!, where he did display his personal vision in his love of genre films. In a sense; one for Renoir and one for Hitchcock.

The 1975 film, L’Histoire d’Adèle (The Story of Adèle H.) is a historical drama directed by François Truffaut, and starring Isabelle Adjani, Bruce Robinson and Sylvia Marriott, based on Adèle Hugo’s diaries. The narrative is about Adèle Hugo, the daughter of writer Victor Hugo, once considered the most famous man in France. Victor Hugo was so famous that Adèle would only use the first initial of her surname to hide her identity. Adèle Hugo’s unrequited love for a military officer leads to her downfall. Throughout the film she is on a quest to find the military officer, but, as the film ends, she has become battered and weary to the point of destitution, that when she finally finds the officer, she passes by him without realizing who he is.

As in all four of Truffaut and Jaubert films, the images, sound and music are profound. But much notice was given to 20-year-old Isabelle Adjani, who justifiably received critical acclaim for her performance as Adele H., which led to her status as a legend on the French screen today.

Truffaut’s 1977 film, L’Homme qui aimait les femmes (The Man Who Loved Women) is billed as a romantic comedy about a man who loves women. The film stars Bertrand Morane, played by Charles Denner, a Truffaut regular who had appeared in his earlier films, 1968’s La Mariée était en noir (The Bride Wore Black) and 1972’s Une belle fille comme moi (Such a Gorgeous Kid Like Me). The movie begins with one the most joyful funerals in film history, where in attendance are all the women with whom Morane loved in his life. The ensemble of female actors is too irresistible not to list, which features, Brigitte Fossey, the former child star of Clément’s1952 landmark film, Jeux Interdits (Forbidden Games), Leslie Caron, with no introduction required; Nelly Borgeaud as one of Bertrand’s emotionally unstable lovers; Geneviève as Hélène, a lingerie saleswoman; and Valérie Fabienne, one of Bertrand’s former lovers, who he regrets making her think that he wanted a serious relationship with her.

As noted above, Bertrand Morane loved women, as Truffaut did as well; so, let’s close with the opening of one of the cinema’s most euphoric funeral sequences in L’Homme qui aimait les femmes.

The cast also included, Roselyne Puyo as Nicole, in a bit part as an usherette, who in real life is deaf. Truffaut also served as a passionate voice for those who suffered from disabilities; reminding audiences that they too exist, and to also show those who suffer with disabilities, a pathway to live a relativity normal life and join or re-join “normal society.” This act of courage is best illustrated by T-Boy’s Brom Wikstrom. So take a trek to Machu Picchu in a mobile wheelchair with Brom and his bride, Anne’: Looking Back: Lima, Machu Picchu, Peru – Brom Wikstrom, Traveling Boy

In 1976’s L’Argent de poche, Truffaut mixes the story of his actors with childhood experiences and the challenges of a number of children. Scenes include life at school; a toddler and a cat, playing on an open windowsill but falling down unhurt; a young girl, played by Truffaut’s daughter, causing confusion with a bullhorn; Bruno showing his friends how speak to girls; a double date at a movie theater; a child telling a dirty joke; first love and a first kiss. The main character is the motherless Patrick, who lives alone with his father who uses a wheelchair for mobility and an automatic page turner to read books. His mysterious friend, Julien, lives in poverty, has long unwashed hair and cannot stay awake at school due to long nights without sleep, wandering the empty, dark city streets. Patrick notices Julien constantly refuses to change his clothes for gym class, and his curious why does not.

In the end, Julien and his classmates realize why he doesn’t remove his clothes for gym classes; to hide his bruises that cover his body, making it obvious that he was beaten by his parents. Once the criminal news of Julien’s parent’s cruel abuse becomes public, he is rescued from his family, who are arrested as angry mobs of citizens pound their fists on the police wagon, aware that abusing a child is the greatest crime ever commited by a parent.

L’Argent de poche ends with an important message by one of the schoolteachers, Jean-François Stévenin, in a stunning performance by Jean-François Richet, about child abuse, injustice, children’s rights, hope, love and resilience: Of all mankind’s injustices, injustice to children is the most despicable! Life isn’t always fair, but we can fight for justice… If kids had the right to vote, they would have better schools. Life isn’t easy. You must learn to be tough. I don’t mean ‘gangster-tough’. What I mean is having endurance and resilience… Time flies. Before long, you will have children of your own. If you love them, they will love you. If they don’t feel you love them, they will transfer their love and tenderness to other people. Or to things. That’s life! Each of us needs to be loved.”

François Truffaut’s first feature: Les quatre cents coups

Jean-Pierre Leoud plays a loose version of Truffaut in 1959’s “Les quatre cents coups” (“The 400 Blows”), a film highly influenced by Jean Vigo’s “Zero for Conduct” which paralleled tragic instances in Truffaut’s own childhood. Before the film was made, Truffaut dedicated it to his spiritual father, Andre Bazin, who succumbed to death prior to the film’s release. Photograph courtesy of In a Lonely Place Film, Growing-up is Still Difficult.

The narrative of Les quatre cents coup is taken from the point-of-view of Truffaut’s cinematic counterpart, Antoine Doinel, a reacurring character who appeared in four features and one short film, often referred to as the Antoine Doinel Cycle. The film re-creates the trials of Truffaut’s own childhood, unsentimentally portraying aloof parents, oppressive teachers, and petty crime, with Antoine Doinel played by actor Jean-Pierre Léaud, a veteran of six and a half of Truffaut’s films. Les quatre cents coup marked Truffaut’s passage from a leading film critic to trailblazing auteur of the La Nouvelle Vague. In the 2022 Sight & Sound Critics’ Poll, Les quatre cents coups was ranked 50th as one of the greatest films ever made.

Truffaut and Fatherhood

In both of Truffaut’s public and private life, the concept of fatherhood was an endearing theme; a biological father who abandoned him in his early childhood; Andrea Bazin, his spiritual father; Jean Renoir and Alfred Hitchcock, fathers who mentored his own love and art in cinema; and Jean-Pierre Léaud, who referred to Truffaut as his cinematic father.  Later, after Léaud appeared in Antonie and Collete, he played in a number of Jean-Luc Godard films, and was quoted as saying: If Truffaut is my father, then Godard is my uncle. As Truffaut became older he became obsessed with finding the name of his own biologicall father to the point of hiring private detectives. Eventually the name of his real father was found, a successful French dentist of Jewish ancestry.

François Truffaut: film critic, now director, received the award for Best Director at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival.

In 1958, François Truffaut was regarded as the enfant terrible of film critics, due to the politique des auteurs, and was banned from the Cannes Film Festival. The next year, he submitted his directorial debut to the festival, Les quatre cents coups and received the award for Best Director and a Palme d’Or nomination. From that year onward, Truffaut’s life dramatically changed forever. 

Truffaut as Actor

English language film director Alfred Hitchcock made cameo appearances in 40 of his 53 surviving major films. Truffaut was also fond of appearing in his own films, but often as a lead character. He also appeared in films made by other directors, such as the playing the role of Claude Lacombe, a French scientist with a bad command of English, in Steven Spielberg’s 1977 film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Later, Truffaut spoke of his own first encounter on the film’s set: When I first arrived on the set of the Spielberg film, I quickly put my book by Stanislawski back into my suitcase.

Jaubert as Composer

As music director of Pathé-Nathan studio, Jaubert conducted the film scores of several other composers, including Arthur Honegger and Darious Milhaud. In the 1930s he gained a reputation as a conductor in France and abroad, most notably for the final season of Marguerite Bériza’s opera company and the season of opéras-bouffes for the 1937 exposition. At the Comédie des Champs-Élysées, in 1937, he conducted the premiere of Philippine, an opérette, by Marcel Delannoy with libretto by Henri Lyon and Jean Limozin.

Maurice Jaubert (1900-1940)

Jaubert enlisted in a French army engineering company during World War II which he would command as a reserve captain. When his company mobilized in September 1939, he was fatally wounded after having successfully blown up a bridge. He died at age 45 a few hours later at the Baccarat Hospital on June 1940. His letters to his wife reflected a spirit of sacrifice tinged with deep humanism. Jaubert did not live to hear his last two compositions, written at his base camp. Jaubert’s gravesite rests in Montmartre Cemetery in Paris.

Maurice Jaubert left a legacy of written articles about lectures, his musical tastes and political opinions, which included a passionate support of German-born American composer Kurt Weill, who created a revolutionary kind of opera of sharp social satire in collaboration with the writer Bertolt Brecht.

François Truffaut, (1932-1984)

Truffaut suffered from a brain tumor and underwent an operation at the American Hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine on September 12. He died just over a year later in the hospital on October 21, 1984 at the age of 56-years-old. At his bedside were Madeleine Morgenstern, film producer and ex-wife; their two children, Laura and Eva; and actress Fanny Ardant, with wholm he lived with from 1981 to 1984 and had a daughter, Joséphine Truffaut (born September 1983). Ardant apeared in Truffaut’s final two films, La Femme d’à côté and Vivement dimanche! As he had requested, his body was cremated and his ashes were buried also in the Montmartre Cemetery in Paris. Truffaut was an atheisit, but chose to have a Mass celebrated for him at the church of Saint-Roche, believed to be in the honor of the Roman Catholic Church.

At the time of Truffaut’s death, he was considered by many critics and moviegoers as the most popular French film director of his era. Film audiences flocked to his films, whose main themes were passion, women, childhood and awareness of the disabled, which struck a chord with both critics and moviegoers alike.

To hear more about François Truffaut and Maurice Jaubert, consider purchasing the album, Bandes Sonores Originales Des Films, which includes the scores, L’Argent de poche, L’Histoire d’Adèle, L ‘Homme qui aimait les femmes and Le Chambre Verte, available on vinyl and CD.

And don’t miss film critic Walt Mundkowsky’s film review of François Truffaut’s “Stolen Kisses” – A Look Back – Traveling Boy

Also, if you wish to revisit The Film Soundtracks in Our Lives, Part I, see Ennio Morricone and Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Western, Once Upon a Time in the West. You can buy, but not on our site, Morricone’s Complete Spaghetti Western Compilation, also available on vinyl or in three-discs or a five-box set on CD.

POST SCRIPT:

Godard and Truffaut: In Defense of Henri Langlois et la Cinémathèque française

In 1968, French culture minister Andre Malraux tried to fire Henri Langlois by stopping funding of la Cinémathèque française, allegedly due to Langlois’ arrogance and iron-fisted rule. Local and international uproar ensued, and even the prestigious Cannes Film Festival was halted in protest that year. Malraux eventually backtracked. Below is an announcement made in 1968 by Jean-Luc Godard and They were once soliders-in-arms in the art of cinema, but as their careers’ progressed, Godard’s films became increasingly political, specifically Marxist, and dismissed Truffaut as a bourgeoisie film director. Truffaut replied, I make personal films, and I can’t remember the last time I took a bus.

READ More: the politique des auteurs – The policy or politics of auteurs: In his 1954 journal, Une certaine tendance du cinéma français (A certain trend in French cinema) Truffaut wrote as a critic for the French film publication, Cahiers du Cinéma (Cinéma Notebook) and introduced the concept that directors should be considered the real creators of the films they create. When translated literally, the French word auteur means author in English. The term is applied to a film director with complete creative control over their work, often defined as a director who has a recognizable personal style, signature and vision which is evident in each film they make. When applied to the other arts, a painting by van Gogh or a symphony by Mahler is instantly recognizable to audiences. When film critic and director, Jean-Luc Godard wrote that Hitchcock was as profround an artist as Dostoevsky, traditional film critics thought he had gone mad. They failed to recognize that Hitchcock was just as profound in his own medium of film as Dostoevsky was in his medium of literature.

Truffaut referred French directors, Jean Renoir, Robert Bresson and Jacque Tatil as auteurs. He contrasted auteurs with directors of commercial studio films, whom he called, merely “metteur en scène” or stagers of a script created by someone else.

In the US, The Auteur Theory was coined and expanded by New York film critic, Andrew Sarris, the Father of American Auteurism. After Truffaut first introduced this new theory, which was based on film critic, Andre Bazin’s earlier work, it eventually spread to the US in 1963 through the writings of Sarris and film critic/director, Peter Bogdanovich.

But, many US film critics thought the concept was preposterous to the point that a film director should even be called an artist. This applied, in particular, to the highly influential San Franciso based film critic, Pauline Kael, who attacked both the theory and Sarris. The battles between them were legendary, and still discussed today, even though Kael finally embraced the theory and championed her own favorite directions, Robert Altman, Sam Peckinpah, Bernardo Bertolucci and even Truffaut. In the end, Sarris said that Kael was not anti-auteur, but anti-genre, and recognized the director as an artist, but still not necessarily the sole artists in a collaborate medium which included cinematographers, edits, art directors, etc. Sarris counter with, who is in charge of all the collaborators who helps the director create their personal vision of a film?

Truffaut on Cinephiles: But the cinephile is… a neurotic! (That’s not a pejorative term.) The Bronte sisters were neurotic, and it’s because they were neurotic that they read all those books and became writers. The famous French advertising slogan that says, “When you love life, you go to the movies,” it’s false! It’s exactly the opposite: when you don’t love life, or when life doesn’t give you satisfaction, you go to the movies.

Art is not scientific; why should criticism be? The main complaint against some critics, and a certain type of criticism, is that too seldom do they speak about cinema as such.

Every critic should take to heart Jean Renoir’s remark: All great art is abstract. He should learn to be aware of form, and to understand that certain artists, for example Dreyer or Von Sternberg, never sought to make a picture that resembled reality.

The post The Film Soundtracks in Our Lives, Part II: Composer Maurice Jaubert and Auteur François Truffaut appeared first on Traveling Archive.

76. Roman Polanski

The best films are because of nobody but the director. – Roman Polanski

Films for Review:

• Knife in the Water  (1962)
• Rosemary’s Baby (1968)
• Chinatown (1974)

77. Samuel Fuller

A film is like a battleground. It’s love, hate, action, violence, death… in one word, emotion. – Samuel Fuller

Films for Review:

I Shot Jesse James (1962)
Pickup on South Street (1953)
Shock Corridor (1963)

78. Jean Cocteau

An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture. – Jean Cocteau

Films for Review:

The Blood of a Poet  (1932)
Beauty and the Beast  (1946)
Orpheus (1950)

79. Donald Siegel

I’ve never had a personal publicity man working for me. – Don Siegel

Films for Review:

• Invasion of the Body Snatchers  (1956)
• Dirty Harry  (1971)
• Charley Varrick  (1973)

80. King Vidor

The director is the channel through which a motion picture reaches the screen. – King Vidor.

Films for Review:

• The Big Parade (1925)
• The Crowd (1928)
• Northwest Passage (1940)

81. Wong Kar-wai

My films are never about what Hong Kong is like, or anything approaching a realistic portrait, but what I think about Hong Kong and what I want it to be. – Wong Kar-wai

Films for Review:

• Chungking Express (1994)
• Fallen_Angels_(1995)
• In the Mood for Love (2000)

82. Leo McCarey

I don’t know what my formula is. I only know I like my characters to walk in clouds. I like a little bit of the fairy tale. Let others photograph the ugliness of the world. I don’t want to distress people. – Leo McCarey

Films for Review:

• Duck Soup (1933)
• The Awful Truth (1937)
• Make Way for Tomorrow (1937)

83. Nagisa Ōshima

Nothing that is expressed is obscene. What is obscene is what is hidden. – Nagisa Ōshima

Films for Review:

• The Ceremony (1971)
• In the Realm of the Senses (1976)
• Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983)

84. Francis Ford Coppola

The language of cinema was invented at the turn of the last century by pioneers who were free to experiment but today you can’t dare to experiment. People who control the motion pictures want to make profitable films. Now we’re at a turning point: As artists we can change the world but to do that we need to be free to experiment. – Francis Ford Coppola

Films for Review:

• The Godfather (1972)
• The Conversation (1974)
• The Godfather Part II (1974)

85. Pier Paolo Pasolini

When I make a film I’m always in reality among the trees, and among the people like yourselves. There’s no symbolic or conventional filter between me and reality as there is in literature. The cinema is an explosion of my love for reality. – Pier Paolo Pasolini

Films for Review:

• Accattone (1961)
• The Gospel According to Matthew (1964)
• Teorema (1968)

86. Peter Bogdanovich

You see so many movies… the younger people who are coming from MTV or who are coming from commercials and there’s no sense of film grammar. There’s no real sense of how to tell a story visually. It’s just cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, you know, which is pretty easy. – Peter Bogdanovich

Films for Review:

• Targets (1968)
• The Last Picture Show (1971)
• Saint Jack (1979)

87. Jane Campion

I’m a much better filmmaker than painter. But studying it did make me visually acute and taught me lessons like being economic: Say something once and you don’t have to say it again. – Jane Campion

Films for Review:

• An Angel at My Table (1990)
• The Piano (1993)
• The Power of the Dog (2021)

88. Olivier Assayas

I like to film reality when it’s beautiful, when it’s ugly, when it’s unpleasant, I don’t care. – Olivier Assayas

Films for Review:

• Irma Vep (1996)
• Carlos – TV Miniseries (2010)
• Clouds of Sils Maria (2014)

90. Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet

The material and its treatment are purely religious-philosophical. – Jean-Marie Straub

Films for Review:

• Not Reconciled (1965)
• The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (1968)
• From the Clouds to the Resistance (1979)

91. Woody Allen

If you’re not failing every now and again, it’s a sign you’re not doing anything very innovative. – Woody Allen

Films for Review:

• Annie Hall (1977)
• Manhattan (1979)
• Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)

92. George Cukor

Give me a good script, and I’ll be a hundred times better as a director. Real talent is a mystery, and people who’ve got it, know it. – George Cukor

Films for Review:

• The Philadelphia Story (1940)
• Gaslight (1944)
• Travels with My Aunt (1972)

93. Abel Gance

Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Beethoven will make films… all legends, all mythologies and all myths, all founders of religion, and the very religions… await their exposed resurrection, and the heroes crowd each other at the gate. – Abel Gance

Films for Review:

• J’accuse (1919)
• La Roueoue (1923)
• Napoléon (1927)

94. Nicolas Roeg

Movies are not scripts – movies are films; they’re not books, they’re not the theatre. – Nicolas Roeg

Films for Review:

• Performance – Co-directed by Donald Cammell. (1970)
• Walkabout (1971)
• Don’t Look Now (1973)

95. Frank Capra

My advice to young filmmakers is this: Don’t follow trends, start them. – Frank Capra

Films for Review:

• It Happened One Night (1934)
• Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)
• It’s a_Wonderful_Life (1946)

96. Bernardo Bertolucci

I accept all interpretations of my films. The only reality is before the camera. – Bernardo Bertolucci

Films for Review:

• Before the Revolution (1964)
• The Conformist (1970)
• Last Tango in Paris (1972)

97. Pedro Almodóvar

I don’t want to imitate life in movies; I want to represent it. And in that representation, you use the colors you feel, and sometimes they are fake colors. But always it’s to show one emotion. – Pedro Almodóvar

Films for Review:

• All About My Mother (1999)
• Talk to Her (2002)
• The Skin I Live In (2011)

98. Aki Kaurismäki

Real film is light; digital is electricity. – Aki Kaurismäki

Films for Review:

• Leningrad Cowboys Go America (1989)
• Man Without a Past (2002)
• Le Havre (2011)

99. René Clair

Nothing essential has been added to the art of the motion picture since D.W. Griffith. – René Clair

Films for Review:

• Un chapeau de paille d’Italie (The Italian Straw Hat, 1928)
• Under the Roofs of Paris (1930)
• Le Million (1931)

100. Terrence Malick

I will be true to you. Whatever comes. – Terrence Malick

Films for Review:

• Badlands (1973)
• Days of Heaven (1978)
• The Thin Red Line (1998)

101. Charles Laughton

The Night of the Hunter (1955) was the only film that actor Charles Laughton ever directed. The film features Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters and Lillian Gish, with a screenplay by James Agee; photography by Stanley Cortez, who also shot Orson Welles’ 1942 film The Magnificent Ambersons; produced by his friend Paul Gregory; and art direction by Hilyard M. Brown. In preparation of directing the film, Laughton studied the original nitrate prints of D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, Intolerance, and German expressionist films of the 1920s. At the time of its original release, it was a critical and box-office failure, and Laughton never directed again. The Night of the Hunter was cited by Cahiers du Cinéma in 2008 as the second-best film of all time, and has been selected by the United States National Film Registry for preservation in the Library of Congress.

The post The Complete List: Traveling Boy Selects the Greatest Film Directors of All-Time. appeared first on Traveling Archive.

The T-Boy Society of Film & Music’s latest poll is devoted to our 20 favorite films of 1971. Part One in the series focuses on films voted by our members from eleven to twenty. Part Two will feature the final top ten.

The genesis of our poll was highly influenced by Christina Newland’s thoughtful piece in BBC Culture, entitled, Why 1971 was an Extraordinary Year in Film.

Ms. Newland writes, In the late 1960s the Hollywood film industry was floundering financially, and many of the struggling major studios were bought out by non-media companies. By ’71, film admission in Hollywood had slowed to less than a quarter compared to the heyday in the 1940s. There was no set path for studios to follow, and no certain road into the future of filmmaking.

When critics and scholars talk about the remarkable artistic flowering that came from the “New Hollywood” of the ’70s, it’s often about how artists slipped through the cracks in the chaos between the old guard fading away and the new guard taking over. By 1971, this seemed to be precisely what was occurring.

Yes, we agree with Ms. Newland’s assessment that the abundance of unique 1971 films were the tip of the iceberg, where young Hollywood filmmakers responded to the decline of U.S. optimism, reflected by the political assassinations of JFK, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and the continuation of the amoral War in Vietnam, complete with napalmed children and unpunished U.S. war criminals a fixture on the evening news. The studio brass was confused, and it seemed that anyone who was young with long-hair and a beard was handed a camera to make a movie. But, keep in mind, most of the new films were of literary content, not necessarily form or visual style.

So, it’s important to note that the young Hollywood directors were highly influenced by the French Nouvelle Vague’s use of new lightweight cameras and sound equipment, natural lighting and high-speed film which allowed shooting on the streets, as director Jean-Luc Godard and photographer Raoul Coutard once did when they pushed a hidden camera in a shopping cart while filming Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg on the Champs-Élysées in À bout de souffle (1960).

But, the Nouvelle Vague influences – similar to how Italian Neorealism effected the French filmmakers – did initially impact the early visual style of certain new Hollywood directors; in particular Francis Ford Coppola, John Cassavetes, Arthur Penn, Jack Nicholson, Martin Scorsese, William Friedkin, Hal Ashby and Brian De Palma. Akin to the Beatles and the British Musical Invasion of the 1960s who taught us to appreciate our own music, the Nouvelle Vague did the same with our Hollywood movies with many of its filmmakers previously film critics on the journal Cahiers du Cinéma, who had an understanding of the works of Hollywood masters such as Hitchcock, Hawks and post-Citizen Kane films by Orson Welles. In Peter Biskind’s landmark text, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, he explains that  Warren Beatty first offered the screenplay of Bonnie and Clyde to Godard and Truffaut before Arthur Penn, which reinforces the influence of La Nouvelle Vague on the new Hollywood directors; where Godard himself is considered the most influential filmmaker of the post-World War 2 era.

But, with that said, our list of top films of 1971 is not made at the expense of established masters such as directors like Don Siegel, Stanley Kubrick, Franklin J. Schaffner.

So, once again, the T-Boy Society of Film and Music’s list of our 20 favorite films of 1971 begins with Part One; films from eleven to twenty.

Initial Comments:

• For me, it’s all about change, realism (not the aging studio, “shot-on-the-backlot” attempts at realism). – Jim Gordon, T-Boy Society of Film & Music
• I spent much of my time at college in the dark, at a movie theater steps away from my apartment. A roll of ten tickets cost ten dollars. That might have been the best investment I ever made, because I honestly believe I learned more from these and other films I saw there (a special nod to Bergman, Truffaut, Fellini, Rossellini, and Visconti) than I did from all that fancy education. – Stephen Brewer, T-Boy Society of Film & Music
• Fifty years ago, with both the industry and wider society in turmoil, an astounding set of movies was born – which offer pause for thought about cinema today. Amid US films, there was often a fascinating split between pro-establishment works and those which embraced the spirit of the counterculture. – Christina Newland, BBC Culture
• Violating the boundaries between life and art to make their material their own was a dangerous way for these filmmakers to work. It was successful for a while, enriching both the life and the art, but as the two became more extravagant and interchangeable, New Hollywood directors lost the detachment of artists, and their lives and art sank into quicksand, joined in a fatal embrace. – Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls
• “Born again Christian” Johnny Cash was asked why he recorded a cover version of the Nine Inch Nails’ song ‘Hurt,’ which focused on heroin addiction. His reply was simple: “A good song is a good song.” That echoes my selections of films that stand alone devoid of 1971 cultural and literary sensibilities. – Ed Boitano, T-Boy Society of Film & Music
• A movie is a movie is a movie. – Alfred E. Newman, Mad Magazine

Number 20: TWO ENGLISH GIRLS

Director: François Truffaut; Writers: François Truffaut, Jean Gruault (adapted from Les deux Anlaises et le continent by Henri-Pierre Roché); Cinematography: Néstor Almendros; Music: Georges Delerue; Film Editing: Martine Barraqué, Yann Dedet; Production Design: Michel de Broin; Costume Design: Gitt Magrini.

Players: Jean-Pierre Léaud, Kika Markham, Stacey Tendeter, Sylvia Marriott, Marie Mansart, Philippe Léotard, Mark Peterson, David Markhm, Georges Delerue (the film’s music composer in small role).

Synopsis:

At the beginning of the 20th century, Claude Roc, a young middle-class Frenchman meets in Paris, Ann Brown, a young Englishwoman. They become friends and Ann invites him to spend holidays at the house where she lives with her mother and her sister Muriel. During the holiday, Claude, Ann and Muriel become very close and he gradually falls in love with Muriel. But both families lay down a one-year-long separation without any contact before agreeing to the marriage. So, Claude goes back to Paris where he has many love affairs and sends Muriel a farewell letter.

Memorable Line:

Stacey Tendeter as Muriel Brown (in letter): Dearest Claude, I came to see you to bury this thing. I’m glad you were the first, because it’s you, because you wanted it. I shan’t cry. Listen to me as you once did when I told you love was stirring in me. Now I tell you that it must die. So that I may live.

Extras:

• Truffaut had earlier adapted another Henri-Pierre Roché novel, Jules and Jim.
• Anne’s last words in the film are, If you send for a doctor, I will see him now. These were writer Emily Brontë’s last words before she died. We assume that Truffaut probably used her words in the film as an homage or to compare her to the character of Anne.
• Jean-Pierre Léaud ultimately appeared in seven films directed by Truffaut.

Critics:

• Truffaut’s “Two English Girls” is a film of such beautiful, charming and comic discretion that it isn’t until the end that one realizes it’s also immensely sad and even brutal, though in the non-brutalizing way that truth can sometimes be. – Vincent Canby, NY Times
• As a man obsessed with memories of the past, Truffaut continues with his tradition of period pieces. Even many of his contemporary genre films feature flashbacks to earlier days. – Ringo Boitano, T-Boy Society of Film & Music
• Because Truffaut doesn’t strain for an emotional tone, he can cover a larger range than the one-note movies. Here he is discreet, even while filming the most explicit scenes he’s ever done; he handles sadness gently; he is charming and funny even while he tells us a story that is finally tragic. – Roger Ebert, RogerEbert.com

Number 19: NICHOLAS AND ALEXANDRA

Director: Franklin J. Schaffner; Writing: James Goldman, screenplay (based on the book by Robert K. Massie); Cinematography: Freddie Young; Film Editing: Ernest Walter; Production Design: John Box; Art Direction: Ernest Archer, Jack Maxsted, Gil Parrondo; Costume Design: Yvonne Blake.

Players: Michael Jayston, Janet Suzman, Ania Marson, Lynne Frederick, Candace Glendenning, Fiona Fullerton, Tom Baker, Jack Hawkins, a young Brian Cox as Trotsky, and Daniel Day Lewis (uncredited).

Synopsis:

Tsar Nicholas II, the inept last monarch of Russia, insensitive to the needs of his people, is overthrown and exiled to Siberia with his family.

Memorable Line:

Michael Jayston as Tsar Nicholas II: The Russia my father gave me never lost a war. What shall I say to my son when the time comes? That I had no pride? That I was weak? I’ve always thought God meant me to rule. He put me here. He chose me, and whatever happens is His will. We shall fight on until victory.

Extras:

• Tsar Nicholas II was the first cousin of Great Britain’s King George the 5th and Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm the 2nd.
• Director Franklin J. Schaffner deliberately cast unfamiliar leads (Jayston, Suzman, Baker) so the audience would focus on the storytelling.
• Schaffner had Michael Jayston, Janet Suzman, Roderic Noble, Ania Marson, Lynne Frederick, Candace Glendenning, and Fiona Fullerton live together during filming so that the actors would form a family-like bond, in an effort to make their scenes together more authentic.

Critics:

• The writing is excellent. “Nicholas and Alexandra” is a slice of history and intriguing. –  Richard Carroll, T-Boy Society of Film & Music
• There’s always a kind of fascination in royalty. We democratic Americans even seem to like royalty more than those nations who have some. Nicholas and Alexandra may not have been the flashiest of czars and czarinas, but maybe they weren’t entirely to blame; the muted tone of the age was set by Queen Victoria, who (as Vincent Canby notes) was the grandmother of practically everybody in World War I – Roger Ebert, RogerEbert.com

Number 18: THE DEVILS

Director: Ken Russell; Writing: Ken Russell, screenplay (based on the play by John Whiting & novel by Aldous Huxley); Cinematography: David Watkin; Music: Peter Maxwell Davies; Film Editing: Michael Bradsell; Art Direction: Robert Cartwright; Costume Design: Shirley Russell; Set Design: Derek Jarman.

Players: Vanessa Redgrave, Oliver Reed, Dudley Sutton, Max Adrian.

Synopsis:

In 17th-century France, Father Urbain Grandier seeks to protect the city of Loudun from the corrupt establishment of Cardinal Richelieu. Hysteria occurs within the city when he is accused of witchcraft by a sexually repressed nun.

Memorable Lines:

Oliver Reed as Grandier: Lies! Lies and heresy. The Devil is a liar, and the father of lies. If the Devil’s evidence is to be accepted, the most virtuous people are in the greatest of danger, for it against these that Satan rages most violently. I had never set eyes on Sister Jeanne of the Angels until the day of my arrest, but the Devil has spoken, and to doubt his word is sacrilege.

Vanessa Redgrave as Sister Jeanne: Oh, Christ, let me find a way to you. Take me in your sacred arms. Let the blood flow between us uniting us.

Grandier: My lords, I am innocent of the charges. And I am afraid. But I have the hope in my heart that, before this day ends, Almighty God will glance aside and let my suffering atone for my vain and disordered life. Amen.

Extras:

• Soon to be a director in his own right, Derek Jarman’s sets are modeled on Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927).
• Ken Russell wanted to avoid the clichéd look of period films and insisted on anachronistic, even futuristic, design.
• Russell’s guidance to Jarman was that it should echo the ‘rape in a public toilet’ line from the Huxley novel that inspired the film.

Critics:

• Two years before “The Exorcist” hit the screen, Ken Russell puts the Catholic Church in the spotlight by filming one of the most disturbing films of all times. Except from being a sheer technical and aesthetic masterpiece, “The Devils” provokes as a film with its relentless sense of anarchy. Religious hysteria and illusions, the horror of human arrogance and depravity and the love that turns to cherishing that turns to hatred. – Vassli, IMDB.com
• Though Russell wrote the screenplay for “The Devils” his scripts and by others are only a starting point for him to transcend his own personal vision. Frustrating for many, but glad he was around. – Ed Boitano, T-Boy Society of Film & Music

Number 17: WALKABOUT

Director: Nicolas Roeg; Writing: Edward Bond, screenplay (based on novel by Donald G. Payne and story by Nicolas Roeg); Cinematography: Nicolas Roeg; Music: John Barry; Film Editing: Antony Gibbs, Alan Pattillo; Production Design: Brian Eatwell Art Direction: Terry Gough.

Players: Jenny Agutter, Luc Roeg, David Gulpilil, John Meillon.

Synopsis:

Two city-bred siblings are stranded in the Australian Outback, where they learn to survive with the aid of an Aboriginal boy on his walkabout, a ritual separation from his tribe.

Memorable Lines:

Jenny Agutter as the Girl: I don’t know why you are telling him all this. He can’t understand. He doesn’t know what a ladder is. I expect we’re the first white people he’s seen.

Luc Roeg as White Boy: He didn’t say goodbye to us. The Girl: Yes, he did. That’s what the dance was about. It’s there way of saying goodbye to people they loved.

Narrator (last lines from “Poem XL” by A.E. Housman’s “A Shropshire Lad”): Into my heart an air that kills, From yon far country blows: What are those blue remembered hills, What spires, what farms are those? That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain, The happy highways where I went, And cannot come again.

Extras:

• In Australia, when an Aborigine man-child reaches sixteen, he is sent out into the land. For months he must live from it. Sleep on it. Even if it means killing his fellow creatures. The Aborigines call it the walkabout.
• In his first screen role, David Gulpilil spoke no English at the time of filming.
• Director Nicolas Roeg’s son, Luc Roeg, in his first film role, was actually sun-burnt in the scene where the aboriginal boy treats his back by rubbing him with fat from a wild boar. Nicolas Roeg thought it would make a good scene for the film so he picked up the camera and shot it.

Critics:

Roeg’s desert in “Walkabout” is like Beckett’s stage for “Waiting for Godot.” That is, it’s nowhere in particular, and everywhere. – Roger Ebert, RogerEbert.com

Roeg revels in the hallucinatory, creating a wilderness that exists as much in the mind as it does the land. – Luke Buckmaster, The Guardian Australia

Number 16: GET CARTER

Director: Mike Hodges; Writer: Mike Hodges, screenplay (based on the novel Jack’s Return Home by Ted Lewis); Cinematography: Wolfgang Suschitzky; Music: Roy Budd; Film Editing: John Trumper; Art Direction: Roger King.

Players: Michael Caine, Ian Hendry, Britt Ekland, John Osborne, Tony Beckley, George Sewell, Geraldine Moffat.

Synopsis:

When his brother dies under mysterious circumstances in a car accident, suave London gangster Jack Carter travels to his working-class hometown in Newcastle to investigate his death in this chilling neo-noir.

Memorable Line:

Eric the gangster: So, what’re you doing then? On your holidays?
Michael Caine as Jack Carter: No, I’m visiting relatives.
Eric: Oh, that’s nice.
Jack Carter: It would be… if they were still living.

Extras:

• Mike Hodges’ work was influenced by Raymond Chandler and Hollywood tough guy films such as Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955), as they showed “how to use the crime story as an autopsy on society’s ills.”
• Mike Hodges favored the use of long-distance lenses (as he had used previously on ITV Playhouse: Rumour.
• The role of mobster Cyril Kinnear is played by writer John Osborne, whose play Look Back in Anger ushered in the British cultural movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s, known as the Angry Young Men or kitchen sink realism. The movement changed the artistic landscape of contemporary Britain, which reflected the disillusionment of society, anger and an impatience for change.

Critics:

• Mike Hodges has thrown his actors into real life – the faces of the old men in the pubs and betting shops, and the revelers at the dancehall take the movie into something akin to cinéma verité, even as mayhem erupts in the foreground. – Michael Hann, The Guardian
• No one can play a tough like Michael Caine; a disturbing mix of charm, kindness and savage restitution. – Ringo Boitano, T-Boy Society of Film & Music
• “Get Carter” is Hodges’ best film, where the coaly Northeastern English Industrial Revolution town of Newcastle actually serves as a character in the film. Ed Boitano, T-Boy Society of Film & Music

Number 15: SUNDAY BLOODY SUNDAY

Director: John Schlesinger; Writing: Penelope Gilliatt; Cinematography: Billy Williams; Film Editing: Richard Marden; Art Direction: Norman Dorme.

Players: Peter Finch, Glenda Jackson, Murray Head, Peggy Ashcroft, Tony Britton, Maurice Denham, Vivian Pickles, Frank Windsor, Daniel Day-Lewis (uncredited).

Synopsis:

A Jewish doctor, Daniel Hirsh and a middle-aged woman, Alex Greville are both having affairs with the same male artist, Bob Elkin. Not only are Hirsh and Greville aware that Elkin is seeing the other but they actually know each other as well. Despite this, they are willing to put up with the situation through fear of losing Elkin who switches freely between them. Schlesinger’s film highlights some worrying facts about how much people’s attitudes to relationships and each other have changed over just two generations.

Memorable Lines:

Peter Finch as Daniel (speaking to the camera): When you’re at school and you want to quit, people say, “You’re going to hate it out in the world.” Well, I didn’t believe them and I was right. When I was a kid, I couldn’t wait to be grown up, and they said “Childhood is the best time of your life.” Well, it wasn’t. And now, I want his company and they say, “What’s half a loaf? You’re well shot of him,” and I say I know that… but I miss him, that’s all and they say “He never made you happy” and I say, But I am happy, apart from missing him.

Critics:

• A story of a ménage à trois is a sad reflection on settling for less than we want, with London drizzle setting the mood and an onscreen, same-sex kiss crashing through barriers. – Stephen Brewer, T-Boy Society of Film & Music
• I think “Sunday Bloody Sunday” is a masterpiece, but I don’t think it’s about what everybody else seems to think it’s about. This is not a movie about the loss of love, but about its absence. – Roger Ebert, RogerEbert.com
• Director John Schlesinger reportedly used the approach associated with Alain Resnais in preparing this film; he asked Penelope Gilliatt, a writer with a definite and highly developed fictional world, to produce an original screenplay, and he influenced the work through discussions but did not contribute a single word himself. – Walt Munkowsky, Traveling Boy, Time Capsule Cinema

NUMBER 14A (Tie): CARNAL KNOWLEDGE

Director: Mike Nichols; Writer: Jules Feiffer; Cinematography: Giuseppe Rotunno;
Film Editing: Sam O’Steen; Production Design: Richard Sylbert.

Players: Jack Nicholson, Candice Bergen, Art Garfunkel, Ann-Margret, Rita Moreno, Carol Kane.

Synopsis:

Chronicling the lifelong sexual development of two men who meet and become friends in college.

Memorable Lines:

Jack Nicholson as Jonathan (narrating his slide show): Marcia, 13 1/2 or thereabouts, I kissed her one night at a spin-the-bottle party. This one’s Rosalie. Rosalie looked just like Elizabeth Taylor in “National Velvet.” I had a crush on Rosalie from 14 to 15 and I never went near her. In those days, we had illusions. Here’s Charlotte. Not much on looks, but great tits for 15. Here’s Gloria, the best-built girl at Evander Childs. I took her to the Bronx Zoo once and on the bus, copped a cheap feel. Here’s Bobbie! My wife. The fastest tits in the West and king of the ball-busters. She conned me into marrying her and now she’s killing me with alimony.

Extras:

Jules Feiffer said Mike Nichols told him he was considering Jack Nicholson for the role of Jonathan. Feiffer went to see Easy Rider(1969) and thought the guy with the “hip Henry Fonda stance and twangy New Jersey drawl” had nothing in common with “the young Jewish misogynist” at the center of his script. Nichols told him: “Trust me, he’s going to be our most important actor since Brando.”

Critics:

• “Carnal Knowledge”‘ was ahead of its time (as was Mike Nichols). – Jim Gordon, T-Boy Society of Film & Music
• The structure of the film, as well as the visual form given it by Nichols (lots of soliloquys in tight close-ups), is that of a Feiffer cartoon, or, more specifically, like a series of cartoons that cover the 1940s (when Jonathan and Sandy are in college), the 1950s (when Sandy is married and beginning to envy Jonathan’s bachelor freedom), the 1960s (when Sandy begins to wander from his suburban paradise), and the 1970s (when the only way in which Jonathan can successfully overcome his impotency is by elaborately pre-arranged masquerades). – Vincent Canby, NY Times

Number 14B (Tie): FIDDLER ON THE ROOF

Director: Norman Jewison; Writing Credits: Joseph Stein, screenplay (based on stories by Sholom Aleichem, with further adaptation by Arnold Perl); Cinematography: Oswald Morris; Music: Jerry Bock (based on music for the stage play by Alexander Courage, and Sheldon Harnick, lyricist for the stage play by Isaac Stern); Music Department: Jerry Bock, orchestrator; Eric Tomlinson, violin soloist; John Williams, conductor and music adapter.

Players: Topol, Norma Crane, Leonard Frey, Molly Picon.

Synopsis:

In prerevolutionary Russia, a Jewish peasant contends with marrying off three of his daughters while growing anti-Semitic sentiment threatens his little village of Anatevka. Among the traditions of the Jewish community, the matchmaker arranges the match and the father approves it. The milkman Reb Tevye is a poor man that has been married for twenty-five years with Golde and they have five daughters. When the local matchmaker Yente arranges the match between his older daughter, Tzeitel, and the old widow butcher, Lazar Wolf, Tevye agrees with the wedding. However, Tzeitel is in love with the poor tailor Motel Kamzoil and they ask permission to Tevye to get married that he accepts to please his daughter. Then his second daughter Hodel (Michele Marsh) and the revolutionary student Perchik decide to marry each other and Tevye is forced to accept. When Perchik is arrested by the Czar troops and sent to Siberia, Hodel decides to leave her family and homeland and travel to Siberia to be with her beloved Perchik. When his third daughter Chava decides to get married with the Christian Fyedka, Tevye does not accept and considers that Chava has died. Meanwhile the Czar’s troops evict the Jewish community from Anatevka.

Memorable Lines:

Topol as Tevye: Traditions, traditions. Without our traditions, our lives would be as shaky as… as… as a fiddler on the roof!

Tevye to God: I know, I know. We are Your chosen people. But, once in a while, can’t You choose someone else?

Tevye: You are just a poor tailor!
Motel: That’s true, Reb Tevye, but even a poor tailor is entitled to some happiness!

Extras:

• Canadian director Norman Jewison was brought into the project by executives at United Artists who thought he was Jewish. His first words to the executives upon meeting them were, “You know I’m not Jewish, right?”
• The title comes from a painting by Russian artist Marc Chagall called The Dead Man which depicts a funeral scene and shows a man playing a violin on a rooftop. It is also used by Tevye in the story as a metaphor for trying to survive in a difficult, constantly changing world.
• To get the look he wanted for the film, Jewison told director of photography Oswald Morris to shoot the film in an earthy tone. Morris saw a woman wearing brown nylon hosiery, and thought, “That’s the tone we want.” He asked the woman for the stockings on the spot and shot the entire film with a stocking over the lens. The weave can be detected in some scenes.
• Morris nabbed the Best Cinematography Oscar for his work.

Critics:

There are some contrived and artificial moments in “Fiddler,” but it becomes more convincing, naturalistic, and involving as it goes on, and finally builds to a powerful climax. It ranks high among the best musicals ever put on film. -Paul Sargent Clark, The Hollywood Reporter

Number 13: THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

Director: Peter Bogdanovich; Writing: Peter Bogdanovich & Larry McMurtry, screenplay (based on Larry McMurtry novel); Producers: Stephen J. Friedman, Bert Schneider; Cinematography: Robert Surtees; Editing: Donn Cambern, (Peter Bogdanovich, uncredited); Production & Costume Design: Polly Platt; Music: Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, Phil Harris, Johnny Standley, Hank Thompson.

Players: Timothy Bottoms, Jeff Bridges, Cybill Shepherd, Ben Johnson, Cloris Leachman, Ellen Burstyn, Eileen Brennan, Clu Gulager, Randy Quaid, Sam Bottoms.

Synopsis:

In 1951, a group of high schoolers come of age in a bleak, isolated, North Texas town.

Memorable Lines:

Ben Johnson as Sam the Lion: You boys can get on out of here, I don’t want to have no more to do with you. Scarin’ a poor, unfortunate creature like Billy just so’s you could have a few laughs. I’ve been around that trashy behavior all my life, I’m gettin’ tired of puttin’ up with it. Now you can stay out of this pool hall, out of my cafe, and my picture show too. I don’t want no more of your business.

Sam the Lion: If she was here I’d probably be just as crazy now as I was then in about 5 minutes. Ain’t that ridiculous? Naw, it ain’t really. Cause being crazy about a woman like her is always the right thing to do. Being an old decrepit bag of bones, that’s what’s ridiculous. Gettin’ old.

Timothy Bottoms as Sonny Crawford:  Nothin’s really been right since Sam the Lion died.

Cloris Leachman as Ruth Popper (last line in film): Never you mind, honey. Never you mind.

Extras:

• Ben Johnson was persuaded to accept the role of Sam the Lion by his friend, director John Ford. Johnson had turned the part down three times because, according to Peter Bogdanovich, the part had too many words, but Ford reportedly persuaded him by asking if he only wanted to be playing John Wayne’s sidekick for the rest of his career.
• This film was one of the first to use already popular recordings by original artists to score a film that included songs by Frankie Laine, Hank Williams, Jo Stafford and others.
• Cloris Leachman’s last scene in the movie was printed on the first take without any previous rehearsals. She wanted to rehearse the scene, but director Bogdanovich thought it would ruin the scene if it was rehearsed. After she completed the take, she said to him, I can do better. Bogdanovich replied, No, you can’t; you just won the Oscar. Ultimately his sense of direction paid off, as Leachman won the Academy Award for her performance as Best Supporting Actress.

Critics:

• A relentless look at the banality of life manages to be energizing and affirming. – Stephen Brewer, T-Boy Society of Film & Music
• Bogdanovich was more than a director, having embraced the “Auteur Theory” in 1963. With his reviews of earlier Hollywood genre films made by masters, he too taught us much about our own films. – Ringo Boitano, T-Boy Society of Film & Music

Number 12: FOUR NIGHTS OF A DREAMER (quatre nuits d’un rêveur)

Director: Robert Bresson; Writing: Robert Bresson (loosely based on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s short story White Nights); Cinematography: Pierre Lhomme; Music: F.R. Daid, Louis Guitar, Chris Hayward, Michel Magne; Film Editing: Raymond Lamy; Production Design: Pierre Charbonnier.

Players: Isabelle Weingarten, Guillaume des Forêts, Jean-Maurice Monnoyer, Giorgio Maulini.

Synopsis:

Loosely based on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s short story White Nights, the lead character is Jacques, a young painter, who by chance runs into Marthe as she’s contemplating suicide on the Pont-Neuf in Paris. They talk, and agree to see each other again the next night. Gradually, he discovers that her lover promised to meet her on the bridge that night, and he failed to turn up. Over the next couple of nights, Jacques falls in love with her, but on the fourth night her original lover returns.

Memorable Lines:

Marthe as the woman: ” What’s the matter?
Jacques as the dreamer: ” I love you. That’s the matter.

Extras:

• Two types of films: those that employ the resources of the theater (actors, direction, etc…) and use the camera in order to reproduce; those that employ the resources of cinematography and use the camera to create. – Robert Bresson
• To be constantly changing lenses in photographing is like constantly changing one’s eye glasses. – Robert Bresson

Critics:

• Though considered to be Bresson’s ‘lightest’ film, “Four Nights of a Dreamer” offers an intense emotional experience that began with “Diary of a Country Priest” and ended with his last film, “L’Argent.” Due to the economy of his directorial style, many consider his films slow, when in fact they are remarkably fast. Each image is ironed out, with no image taking on a greater significance than the other. Bresson frees himself from what he calls ‘postcardism,’ which he considers a forced, superficial aestheticism. – Ed Boitano, T-Boy Society of Film & Music
• ” Four Nights of a Dreamer” is a rare Bresson film where the mainstream audience actually laughs along with the film as opposed to laugh at it, due to a lack of understanding of Bresson’s deeply personal style. The staged ‘movie premiere’ is the closest he’s ever come to a comedy. – Phil Marley, T-Boy Society of Film & Music

Number 11: KLUTE

Director: Alan J. Pakula; Writing: Andy Lewis & David E. Lewis; Cinematography: Gordon Willis; Film Editing: Carl Lerner; Music: George Jenkins, Michael Small.

Players: Jane Fonda, Donald Sutherland, Charles Cioffi, Roy Scheider, Dorothy Tristan, Rita Gam.

Synopsis:

A small-town detective searching for a missing man has only one lead: a connection with a New York prostitute.

Memorable Lines:

Jane Fonda as Bree Daniels: Men would pay $200 for me, and here you are turning down a freebie. You could get a perfectly good dishwasher for that. And for an hour… for an hour, I’m the best actress in the world, and the best fuck in the world.

Bree Daniels: Tell me, Klute. Did we get you a little? Huh? Just a little bit? Us city folk? The sin, the glitter, the wickedness? Huh? Donald Sutherland as John Klute: Ah… that is so pathetic.

Extras:

• The first installment of what informally came to be known as Pakula’s Paranoia Trilogy. The other two films in the trilogy are The Parallax View (1974) and All the President’s Men (1976).
• According to her autobiography, Jane Fonda hung out with call girls and pimps for a week before beginning this film in order to prepare for her role. When none of the pimps offered to “represent” her, she became convinced she wasn’t desirable enough to play a prostitute and urged the director to replace her with friend Faye Dunaway.
• Jane Fonda said that she had to throw up while preparing for the scene where Bree goes through photos of dead prostitutes to identify her friends. She actually had gone to the city morgue too and it came as a great shock.

Critics:

• “Klute” showed the world Jane could act (though I always knew she could). – Jim Gordon, T-Boy Society of Film & Music
• “Klute” is Fonda’s movie, and both Pakula and Sutherland seem to recognize that. It is not an argument in favor of sex work per se, even though it does the necessary service of combating the cliches and stigmas around the practice. But Fonda’s Oscar-winning performance as Bree does argue for a fullness of character – and of womanhood – that feels radically open to different possibilities and a wide spectrum of emotional experiences, including moments during therapy where she expresses uncertainty about her future and the choices she’s made. – Scott Tobias, The Guardian

END OF PART 1
Stay Tuned for the Top Ten Films of 1971 in PART 2 of our series which proves to be both mind boggling and hopefully educational.

If readers have a favorite that’s not listed in Part One or Two, no doubt you can access it on Feature Film, Released between 1971-01-01 and 1971-12-31 (Sorted by Popularity Ascending) – IMDb.

Send us your own list, at ed****@Tr**********.com and we will publish it in our Readers’ Poll.

The post The 20 Best Films of 1971, Part One appeared first on Traveling Archive.