L’univers de Jacques Demy. The Foundation Stones. His Early Short Films.
Welcome to the first of four articles covering the career of Jacques Demy. Demy’s world is amongst the most unique and intriguing as they come, his work existing in a beautifully realised, self-contained universe. Over the next couple of weeks we will be taking a look at how this came to be.
For much of the last fifty years Jacques Demy has, perversely, been little more than an extended footnote in French cinema culture as far as the worldwide stage is concerned. Take Alan Williams’ epic charting of the French film industry Republic Of Images for example, in which Demy receives only three mentions. It’s a similar story with Rémi Fournier Lanzoni’s French Cinema: From Its Beginnings To The Present (2 notes) and Charles Drazin’s Faber Book Of French Cinema (a single nod). His reputation within Nouvelle Vague oriented circles and studies is healthier, with noted candle holder for the filmmaker Ginette Vincendeau seeing fit to include numerous citations for Demy’s work, in The French New Wave: Critical Landmarks, the volume for the BFI that Vincendeau oversaw alongside Peter Graham, while Richard Neupert’s A History Of The French New Wave sees the director healthily represented. Neupert even adds an extensive post-script detailing the films of the Left Bank filmmakers in the second edition of his book, further charting the impact of Demy and his collaborators across the river, Alain Resnais, Chris Marker and Agnes Varda.
While the likes of Truffaut and Godard may have had a consistently eager audience of critics and fans alike for the last fifty or so years, Demy is increasingly becoming more widely known within the wider context of the French cinema. Thanks to the efforts of his wife, Agnes Varda, and their son, the actor and filmmaker Mathieu Demy, Jacques Demy’s legacy has been carefully protected in recent years. His oeuvre was the subject of a major Cinematheque Francaise exhibition last Spring, which also saw a number of his films painstakingly restored. With restoration comes re-familiarisation, and that’s certainly the case here, with Demy’s films extensively reissued on home video around the world. The latest such set, and the reason that this series of articles are being written now, is to mark the release of a 6-film box-set released this month by the US’s Criterion Collection, which gathers Demy’s Lola, Bay Of Angels, The Umbrellas Of Cherbourg, The Young Girls Of Rochefort, Donkey Skin and Une Chambre en Ville, and contextualises them with a wealth of extra material, including a number of Varda’s own films on the life and work of her husband, L’univers de Jacques Demy and The Young Girls Turn 25. Indeed, it’s difficult to look at either Demy without frequently making mention of the importance of Varda, and vice versa, with theirs one of the great filmic partnerships.
The box-set also offers a much welcome opportunity for the reappraisal of a number of early shorts, which, in typical fashion, suggest a filmmaker trying to find his style. The first short, Les horizons morts, made in 1951 when the director was just 20 years old, carries with it all the hallmarks of such an early project, with Demy’s dreamlike visuals owing a debt to Jean Cocteau. It’s brief, but competent, and never amateur, with one particularly inventive transition elevating the film in to bona-fide must see territory.
Demy’s second short, 1956’s Le saboteur du Val de voire leans away from Cocteau and closer to Bresson, stylistically. The story of an elderly clog maker, it’s an unexpectedly romantic tale wound in a story of impending (or maybe even avoided) modernity and mortality, as the man, encouraged to do so by the death of a friend, faces up to his own eventual fate. The film is widely billed as being a documentary, but the aesthetics suggest otherwise. Watching sight unseen one would be far more inclined to label it a factually-inspired drama. Bresson is again a key stylistic pointer with Ars, the third short included here. Faith and cabaret stand at the fore of this essayistic charting of the life of Jean-Baptiste-Marie Vianney, making it an unlikely, but ideal companion piece to Lola. Aesthetically the two are nothing alike though, with the earlier film, released in 1959 just as the Nouvelle Vague was beginning to emerge, playing like a Chris Marker film essay, and a kindred spirit to Alain Resnais’ Toute la mémoire du monde.
The final short, La Luxure is from the 1962 anthology film The Seven Deadly Sins, which saw the Demy film placed alongside other shorts on each of the eponymous seven deadly sins from filmmakers such as Claude Chabrol, Philippe de Broca and Jean-Luc Godard. Pun-filled and of the playful tone of the films that would follow, La Luxure revolves around a pair of artists as they regale one another with tales of their youthful experiences. In keeping with this notion that Demy was a filmmaker whose progression can be seen when one views his work chronologically, La Luxure is a technically sound accomplishment. A particular highlight is his vision of hell, inspired by the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, the work of whom features in the text of the movie. Partially based upon Demy’s own childhood, it’s worth briefly taking in to account the nature of that upbringing. Demy looks back fondly. He’s from a good home, where the children are treated as such, immediately separation him from Francois Truffaut, who would become his closest stylistic contemporary within the 1960s French cinema: he’s not Antoine Doinel. This period would be examined on-screen in far greater depth almost three decades later by Agnes Varda, in Jacquot de Nantes, her feature-length retelling of Demy’s childhood in the titular port town (itself an important factor within Demy’s oeuvre, and something we will examine further in subsequent instalments). Varda’s film was released in the wake of Demy’s 1990 death, though Demy did occasionally supervise on set when he was well enough to do so.
In part two of this four part look at Demy’s work as presented in the Criterion Collection’s The Essential Jacques Demy we will be taking a look at the early black and white dramas, Lola and Bay Of Angels.
