Two French films currently in the news were shot entirely abroad: Julia, a feature film made in Los Angeles and Mexico by Erick Zonca and Young Yakuza, a documentary about the Shinagawa neighborhood in Tokyo by Jean-Pierre Limosin. The two are very different, made in financial and shooting conditions that have little in common. Nonetheless, a shared attraction for the faraway brings them together, either in their curiosity for a culture that is impenetrable to us, or the seduction of elsewhere, with its images that fill our theaters. It is in this outlook that we went to talk to Jean-Pierre Limosin, Erick Zonca and his producer François Marquis, as well as Bruno Dumont whose film-before-last, Twentynine Palms, was set in Californian deserts and who has a new “American” project.

French cinema getting out among foreign countries is nothing new. From Méliès to Ophuls, from Renoir to Demy, filmmakers did not wait until the end of the century to work outside France. But most of the time, it was emigration, a lasting integration into another system, or even an exile. American cinema was born of these imports, particularly Germans such as Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, Ernst Lubitsch, Robert Siodmak and so many others.
Yet it was collective history, one of wars and dictatorships, of exiles as well as commercial opportunities linked to the economic potential of an art that was still new. Of course, this history is not over, but in the majority of cases, it is now about individual stories, personal challenges and specific esthetic proposals. Contemporary filmmakers were and are viewers, especially in France where American, as well as Japanese cinema was discovered and analyzed, stimulating many vocations. The strong appeal of America and Asia for European cinema of course has its roots in the love of cinema as it developed in the 1950’s. American cinema is still in the sights of the youngest of French filmmakers and not only in the form of a parodical relocation or simple homage: Le Tueur by Cédric Anger, for example, showed how American imagination could serve a rigorous description of Paris.
But going overseas is an opposite journey. It is precisely about going to meet, not a type of cinema, but a territory. Is it to dissipate the aura of images that have so seduced these filmmakers? François Marquis explains that Erick Zonca was drawn to two things: “American mythology and the desire to shoot in the United States. Reality imposed itself with the subject.” He put the image and the legend to a reality test. Zonca and Dumont admit that it is the territory, landscape or border that initially appealed to them. “The desire to make sense of the images that are sent to us,” sums up Dumont, “to go to the places where most American films are shot.”
According to each of the filmmakers interviewed, making sense implies losing one’s bearings. Dumont speaks of impressionism. Zonca admits to tying himself to the speed of a thriller. Limosin describes the impenetrability of the world of the yakuzas represented in his film, and Japan in general, where he shoots regularly, along with the feeling of something “direct” when immersed in a foreign country and language: “what I like every time I work there is that I don’t have an interface with the Japanese. There is something very direct,” sensations “that don’t allow simulation.” Paradoxically, the partial or complete loss of direction caused by the confrontation with a foreign language is an advantage, a more direct way of grappling with the signs of a culture, the material of a language, the presence of a body and the expressivity of a face. But this loss of bearings, as Limosin reminds us, does not give access to transparency and naked truth. It is rather the opportunity to work on the interface between the filmmaker and the world. This interface is of course the image and we understand that inventing a way of being in a foreign country means inventing an image. The means accepting Takeshi Kitano’s suggestion of being inspired by accents heard in the street, of indicating the presence of an interpreter or an automatic translator and of reinforcing or removing the obstacles standing between meaning and sign.
Of course all this does not happen without problems of production or distribution and difficulties working with foreign crews, mentalities, systems and audiences. It is inevitable that globalization can represent an advantage (the multiplication of financial resources) as well as raising a range of problems, given that the systems, expectations and conceptions of cinema are so different. Erick Zonca, François Marquis and Bruno Dumont describe them in detail in their respective interviews. Only Jean-Pierre Limosin worked with a French crew, of course due to the more flexible format of a documentary. But they all agree on one point: going abroad is going in search of unknown resources and the capacity to adapt to reality. It means shaking up one’s own system to make images that have cast off habits and clichés.

Bastien Hader

Read the interview with Jean Pierre Limosin
Read the interview with Erick Zonca
Read the interview with François Marquis
Read the interview with Bruno Dumont

Films re-releases play a crucial part. They usually give to forgotten movies a new perspective and help highlight living or dead filmmakers and get some masterpieces out of the attic! Without them, many people wouldn’t have been able to discover Alfred Hitchcock’s or Fritz Lang’s movies in good conditions.

Re-releases play a part in heritage cinema management and perception. Often initiated by cinema owners and distributors, who are eager to give a second breath to films that have been weakened by tired prints, a re-release gives to the viewer the opportunity to discover or rediscover a film as it was originally shown. New prints help get a film out of a purely heritage aspect status that can mostly be aggravated by scratches, delayed colours or low contrasts. Cleaning is a way to remove an aura (which is a burden unless your name is Tarantino); re-releasing is a way to highlight an ancient film.

At some point, one could think the DVD would overshadow those re-releasing initiatives. On the contrary, the DVD is likely to have increased the re-releases frequency but it has also made the choices more complex: a new type of movie buff can discover a filmmaker’s work through DVDs and choose to see the same films then in theatres. That new type of film lover may be more demanding in technical terms than the previous generation of movie addicts. To learn more, we have interviewed with Jean-Max Causse, founder of the legendary Action theatres in Paris (Grand Action, Action Ecoles, Action Christine) and now owner of the Quartier Latin theatre located in rue Champollion. We have also interviewed with Vincent Paul-Boncour from Carlotta Films, an established French theatrical and video distribution company specialized in heritage cinema.

The landscape is now much more complex than in the fifties. The film critic is of course no more responsible for all the discoveries and choices of re-releases: on the contrary, it feeds him a lot. In his interview, Vincent Paul-Boncour depicts how Carlotta handled its first re-release in France -that of Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, ten years ago. Beyond the traditional press reviews, it aroused at that time the publishing of critical apparatus and exclusive archives, giving a taste of what would be later the company’s policy in terms of DVD releases. Furthermore, DVDs have become a new place for critics, as many journalists and writers would pursue and reformulate their work with them. Far from killing each other, the different media have found a common path, allowing cinephilie, distribution and critic to begin their mutation.

Each year in France, the National Center of Cinematography (CNC) grants money to annual re-releases programs and examines their quality as much as the quality of the distributor’s work from past years. Films that are eligible must be at least twenty years old –that’s why cinema of the seventies has been specifically highlighted in France over the last fifteen years. By giving subsidies, the CNC regulates the relationship between distributors and cinema owners: it encourages theatres to back up these releases and to make the films available for educational programs.

Each country has obviously its specificity and every cinematography doesn’t have the same attitude toward its heritage. In some Asian countries for instance, where theatres don’t prevail anymore over home cinema and where illegal discs proliferate. But if France distinguishes from some countries by its constant and numerous re-releases, other countries also do, like the United Kingdom or the USA where, apart from museums initiatives, young companies like Rialto Pictures restorates, makes subtitles and relaunches ancient movies.

Francis Chérasse & Bastien Hader

Like any creative art, cinema is not separate from, and shouldn’t try to be separate from, the world in which it exists. At a time when work has become a mere synonym for effort, and when some people feel we must “make work more worthwhile” -a simple expression that belies the vagueness of its meaning- it is interesting to note how much the cinematic vision of work and of individual accomplishment differs from one continent to another.

Self-Made Men

There are fundamental and recurrent themes. The place of the individual in a society defined by his or her profession, and his or her rise or fall, is the ideal basis for a screenplay, allowing for a snapshot of social life in a specific country or for the creation of a tale or a fable from scratch. With the beginning of talking movies, American cinema established a double-edged model of fear of upward social mobility. The historic foundation of the United States gave rise to the archetype of the self-made man, a natural extension of the myth of the pioneer leaving the Old Country with nothing and creating a new life on a virgin continent. Much of American cinema has approached individual accomplishment via social mobility in this way. The gangster is probably the most emblematic figure; but from Capra to the Yuppies, different models exist.
Consider Leo McCarey’s Ruggles of Red Gap (1935). A British butler is “lost” in a gambling bet by his employer, a Lord, and must follow his new master to the U.S. He is torn between his new boss, a sort of cowboy, rough at the edges, who has become a successful businessman, and the mistress of the manor who dreams of importing the European art de vivre to her American hometown and of making her husband a civilized man. In a struggle to stand apart, Ruggles ends up opening a business and gives a brilliant lesson to the natives by reciting the Declaration of Independence. Ruggles is the archetype of the individual who, by breaking the class barrier, attains freedom at the same time he becomes a success. The American persona is built for success.

Naturalism and Farce

While American movies are marked by the myth of the conquering pioneer, European cinema broaches the subject of breaking through class barriers from a completely different angle. Upward social mobility is not such a fundamental theme as it is in American cinema. With a vision inherited from feudalism, and with class struggle as a reference point, upward social mobility is considered in French, Italian and English cinema as impossible, or even as a personal defect. Jean Renoir’s La Règle du Jeu (1939), to take the most famous example, depicts French society in the stranglehold of a caste system. European cinema, from Italian neo-realism to English working-class cinema, has long praised the dignity of the working class imprisoned by its social status. The Italian proletariat suffers from its social status, but doesn’t wish to join the bourgeoisie, described as superficial, out of touch with the genuine pleasures of life and tainted by money and power. The goal is not to change camps, but to promote the value of the living conditions and the work of an entire class. In Italy, the bourgeoisie is ridiculed, in line with the great tradition of the commedia del’arte, and neo-realism tried to point out the hermetic nature of social classes, as in Roberto Rossellini’s Voyage in Italy, where a wealthy couple vacationing in an Italian villa decide to separate, and the wife is driven into the tumultuous reality of the people.

Asian Monsters

While literature from the industrial age still has a lasting impact on Western screenplays, with Dickens and Zola as critical influences on French and English cinema, Asian culture is based on a continuous vision of history, and less affected by epistemological shifts. The caste system in China and the feudal state in Japan are still present in the minds of movie heroes in Asia. In Ugetsu, Kenji Mizoguchi and his screenwriter, Yoshikata Yoda, recount a potter’s thirst for recognition: when he is highly praised by a rich woman, he doesn’t realize that she is a ghost. In this adventure, the potter eventually abandons the dead woman and child he finds when the illusion vanishes. Respect for one’s condition is a critical factor and hubris is systematically sanctioned in fables. Zhang Yimou’s Raise the Red Lantern is the perfect example: one of a powerful man’s four wives punishes her servant for decorating her own apartment with the ornaments of a veritable concubine’s.
Without going so far as to effacing the individual within the State –a method specific to propaganda cinema in certain totalitarian regimes–, characters in Asia are often so remote from the structures of power that decisions seem to come down upon them from nowhere. In The President’s Last Bang, by Sang-soo Im, the last days of the Korean president in 1979 are recounted as a farce, a chain of grotesque and incomprehensible decisions, since such a distance deforms reality. In this way, economic self-sufficiency and injustice in the spheres of power may, in cinema, be comparable to no-law zones. Capitalism is even more savage in Asia than elsewhere and the tendency in American film to present upward social mobility as a cutthroat, predatory sport is found in Hong Kong and Japan as well. One recurring word is often uttered by Asian filmmakers when characterizing the empire built by their forefathers: monstrosity. Blood and Bones by Yoichi Sai, for example, relates the growing influence of a Korean immigrant in a Japanese neighborhood, as he slowly becomes a loan shark, striking fear with his erratic behavior and violence. With power being mingled with the symbol of the father, upward mobility is often impeded by a violent and unfair state of affairs.

The Latest Rung

Today, American cinema is turning somewhat back to models of the 80s: easy money and immoral golden boys, and successful women, working girls who can be mothers and highly-trained agents, as in Renny Harlin’s delightful The Long Kiss Goodbye. But the 80s are not the only reference: cinema since 2000 draws heavily on its first century of existence. Scorsese’s The Departed brings back the 30s mob film, Ridley Scott’s American Gangster recalls gangster flics of the 70s, Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can resurrects the archetype of the 60s smooth talker, …. But cinema this decade does not recycle and parody its ancestors as it did in the 90s, with a suspended moral, historic and esthetic lightness. There’s no more need to mimic the wear and tear of time and the corniness of former codes. Cinema in the 2000s re-reads the masters of the last century not to impose a moral judgment, but rather, for the time being, to find new fathers, new heroes and new devils. As for French cinema, many have accused it of abandoning the working class and of privileging the malaise of upper-middle-class –and mostly Parisian– society, but it too is moving further away from the naturalist tradition and towards alternative outlets, whether they be aesthetic (by establishing a connection with American cinema that is not mere imitation –see the article about Angels and Predators) or political as with Pierre Carles’, who proposes alternative models -read the interview of his producer: Annie Gonzalez- or especially as specific ‘world’ cinemas that are so deeply rooted in realities, whether political/economic/social/geographical/cultural, that their destinies seem to be doomed to an ‘alternative’ model way ahead (The Take by Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein, Me You Them by Andrucha Waddington, Tinpis Run by Nengo Pengau, Qiu Ju by Zhang Yimou, Atanarjuat by Zacharias Kunuk or The Lip by Christian Rouaud).

Bastien Hader & Francis Chérasse

As far as the theme of work is concerned, fictional films have focused on individual destinies: social classes are the mainspring of success stories. Let’s take a look at the fiction of social climbing in American and French cinema, where it is seen as either a tragedy or a fairytale.

Bolts, angels, predators and mullets

1. Bolts. There are plenty of workers among cinema’s first heroes. In France, there were those from the Lumière Factory, filmed as they left the workplace of their illustrious bosses. In the United States, workers from American slapstick were given a central position in industrial society. Charlot from Modern Times is a cog in the production system, a grain of sand in the machine, a regulating element as well as the threat of complete deregulation. Burlesque man is an insider and an outsider. When he is both a worker and a tramp, he makes society run like a machine, attracts policemen like a magnet, heightens political awareness in the streets and the workshops and provokes riots for which he becomes the spokesman despite himself. In the era of silent movies, no individual voice was really heard. Burlesque man shook up the whole social schema. Perhaps it took the talkies for an individual to make himself heard and push his way through the crowd. Singin’ in the Rain is a memorable illustration of this, when Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly) relates the pitiful career of movie stuntman prior to his glory. It is as if his story alone gives dignity to his past; as if no legend is possible without a voice.

2. Angels. There is an increase in great tales of social climbing with the arrival of the talkies. Two voices can be heard in American cinema. The first is Frank Capra, who, from the 1930s, along with his scriptwriter Robert Riskin, systematized the genre of the social fable that was personified by two great actors, Gary Cooper and James Stewart, in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington or Meet John Doe. It could be an edifying tale or more simply a magic trick: in Lady for a Day (1933), an apple seller who lied to her daughter about her miserable living conditions is taken for a sumptuous night out when her daughter comes to visit. Fiction offers an ordinary character the fleeting opportunity to access the highest spheres, even if it is only an illusion: return of wizardry and magic, the chance for the viewer to imagine being transformed into Cinderella. This conversion is reversed two decades later in It’s a Wonderful Life, where in one of the most beautiful scenes in cinema’s history, an heir thinking of suicide is shown by his gardian angel the hell his hometown would have become without him. All Capra’s heroes (he is still wrongfully criticized for it) are helped by passing angels, unless they become angels themselves. Even when heaven sends its blessings, James Stewart/Mr. Smith or Gary Cooper/John Doe seek the common good rather than personal profit.

3. Predators. One year before Lady for a Day, Scarface by Howard Hawks defined another type of fiction: social climbing described as a murder instinct. Even when the psychological portrait tempers his thirst for profit, Tony Camonte is described as a predator. Social condition and family concerns are such burdens that only murder allows enrichment. Murder is necessary. It drives the hero while at the same time signaling his end: this tragic movement is perfectly embodied in White Heat by Raoul Walsh, when James Cagney exultantly says to his mother, “Made it, Ma! Top of the world!” While the Capra vein did not spread through American cinema without taking on a more complex and less fiercely utopian appearance, the Scarface vein has not really changed. There are simply more murders and psychological portraits are less sketchy. An Oedipus complex is no longer enough to explain the temperament of Tony Soprano in the series created by David Chase, of Tony Montana in De Palma’s Scarface, or to take the most recent example, of Frank Lucas the drug barron in American Gangster (Ridley Scott), whose ambition was to create an African-American counterweight to Mafia networks.

4. Mullets. France has welcomed and showcased these two types of fiction, but without ever forgeting that they were part of the American Dream, i.e. inaccessible or false. Some people still vehemently regret French cinema’s inability to access this fairytale. But the response is often unconvincing, complacent, American-style cinema. There are a thousand possible reasons for this incapacity: a certain documentary tradition that leaves workers at the mercy of a point of view instead of giving them the opportunity to become legends; a realistic and literary current that condemns characters to pay the price of their ambition sooner or later. Etc. After L’Esquive (Games of Love and Chance), Abdellatif Kechiche’s new film, La Graine et le Mulet (The Secret of the Grain), is a rare example of a cross betweeen the temptation of Hollywood and a French model. The title identifies the ingredients of couscous as well as two charcters whose destinies come together in the final scene. On one hand is an old unemployed worker who has the daring, impossible idea of opening a floating restaurant with the help of only his family. On the other is his mistress’ daughter, who helps him with the project and makes the customers wait while a cargo of missing couscous is replaced. A Capra-style tale with a touch of Zola, but whose vitality takes it beyond a tragic dead-end. France does not have a magic wand but it has found the formula: sweat and impurity.

Bastien Hader

Police blotters and news in brief have always fascinated the general population. From the recent increase in the number of TV shows in France about criminal cases, sparked by the success of Faites Entrer l’Accusé on France Télévision, to the rise in circulation of newspapers like France’s Le Petit Détective, and despite (or perhaps thanks to?) scandalous headlines and baseless extrapolations, interest in these snapshots of ordinary horror has not waned. Fiction writers have always sought inspiration in real-life events and banner headlines, from which they could, more or less accurately, approach their audience’s day-to-day experiences and evoke their daily lives.

Based on a True Story

When we try to figure out what lies behind these news items, what specifically defines them, we see that it is their compact headlines and the range of possibilities they open up. What makes them interesting, beyond the fateful moment they recount or what happens afterwards (e.g., the investigation, the trial), is the disturbance in everyday life (or how fundamentally disturbed everyday life actually is): what comes before, what causes the event. In this regard, the case of Jean-Claude Romand (who murdered his wife, children and parents after living a life of lies for years) and the way it is handled is rather symptomatic of what authors must face when tackling an adaptation of a police blotter for cinema. How can you reconstruct the circumstances of such a tragedy? If the ending is known from the outset, all that is left is the approach. From Nicole Garcia’s L’Adversaire (The Adversary) to Laurent Cantet’s L’Emploi du Temps (Time Out), and including numerous documentaries about the case, the different ways it is depicted are as diverse as they are divergent. The end is known and the characters are still an enigma: the news item becomes the only concrete element of an entirely malleable reality. It is therefore an ideal basis for fiction writers. It is a single moment, a single act, too huge to have been made up, onto which they can project whatever they like. From a few lines in a newspaper, Claude Chabrol made La Cérémonie and addressed one of his favorite topics, the petite bourgeoisie provinciale, better than he ever had before, and directed one his most relevant films on everyday class struggle. René Allio understood it all when he adapted Moi Pierre Rivière ayant égorgé ma mère, ma sœur et mon frère based on the murderer’s writings and on research by Michel Foucault. By casting inhabitants of the region with no prior acting experience in the main roles, he gave the characters additional depth. And by deciding to cast professional actors in the roles of gendarmes and magistrates, he affirmed in a single move an obvious truth: news in brief is by nature a frozen instant, it knows no temporality other than that of the criminal act, and stops at the point when the judicial system takes over.

“A young screenwriter is found dead in the swimming pool of a former silent-film star.”

But crime news in fictional cinema is not merely the adaptation of real-life events by writers; it is also a distinct way of approaching detective movies. Thus, Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, which was originally intended to open with a scene of corpses in a morgue recounting their deaths, was changed after test previews to begin with journalists and police officers gathered to observe the death of William Holden, whose corpse is floating in a swimming pool. The fantastical aspect was removed and the movie took the more relevant form of an utterly trivial news item, and was hence more accessible and had a stronger impact. Cinema has also managed to comprehend the importance of crime news in a more indirect way. From Clouzot’s La Vérité (The Truth) to Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder, the courtroom has often been the setting where the murderer’s history is written retroactively, including his motives and the circumstances of the tragedy the trial is meant to clear up. What defines news in brief is the fact that it is both the starting point and the ending of the story. Otto Preminger’s movie is thus a perfect illustration of the problems stemming from handling a criminal investigation as a news item. A soldier is accused of murdering the man who raped his wife. During the entire film, which encompasses to time of the trial, Preminger’s movie, adapted from a bestselling novel, demonstrates the inability of the judicial system to get to the truth about the precise causes and circumstances of the murder. The verdict is returned, and its absurdity is highlighted by a final ironic twist. All that remains is the objective element, the starting and ending point, i.e. the news item itself: one man killed another.

As we have seen, news in brief feeds authors’ creativity because they proceed from an inherently fascinating mechanism: the reconstruction of the event. And these news items will, without a doubt, hold the public’s interest for years to come, since it is the extreme projection of their everyday life and the object of infinite speculation. Movies will thus continue to use the mechanisms of spectacular information, whose very form influences its contents, and will undoubtedly give rise to even more cinematic masterpieces.

By Olivier Gonord

To read more : Gus Van Sant and the News in Brief

“Rock filmmakers don’t exist”, said F.J. Ossang as he left the projection of Silencio, his new, powerful short film presented at the latest Festival Paris Ciné (read the interview with F.J Ossang). At a time when Julien Temple’s two feature films are being released – Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten, a biographical homage magnificently documented, but unfortunately, with no surprises, and Glastonbury, about the legendary festival (read the interview with Julien Temple)–, F.J. Ossang brings into question the genre “rock cinema”, if indeed such a concept even exists.

“Of course, my whole cinema is fueled by everything I love, and above all, rock music,” he says, “but that doesn’t make me a rock filmmaker, a label which for me is meaningless. If push came to shove, you might say Eisenstein, for his editing, is the closest any filmmaker has come to rock music. There are some filmmakers who have tried to make movies about rock music, or about the lives of rock musicians, but generally it has little to do with rock as a process.” What defines rock music and how is it embodied in cinema?

When media first recognized rock ’n’ roll as a phenomenon, Hollywood seized hold of the movement and the immense interest it aroused in a youth whose purchasing power had constantly increased since the end of World War II (read the review of the Rock’n'Roll exhibition in the Fondation Cartier). The studios created projects from scratch that allowed them to capitalize on the emerging celebrity of new idols and at the same time helped the artists launch their careers once and for all. From Little Richard or Bill Haley to Elvis Presley, going before the camera became a mandatory step. These films, often put together with a certain degree of cynicism, aimed in reality at exploiting the artist’s image and delivering a much more controlled vision of it. Rock ’n’ roll in these films is reduced to the original soundtrack and a Happy Days imagery. Catchy titles like Don’t Knock the Rock, Rock Pretty Baby, Let’s Rock or Shake, Rattle and Rock and stars on the movie posters were enough to ensure the films’ success and give birth to the teenage movie genre. But for the “spirit of rock”, we need look elsewhere. It is much more present in films that are not about music, but explore youth itself: Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause, starring James Dean, and László Benedek’s The Wild One, starring Marlon Brando, exposed the world to the malaise of teenagers who were in direct conflict with the values of their elders. And although these two movies were made with anything but a “rock ’n’ roll” budget, and even though neither film contains a single rock song, they’re much closer to rock music in their intention. Future links between rock ’n’ roll and cinema were to spring from this very dichotomy: exploitative products banking on imagery for more or less honorable purposes, versus cinematic works that rely more heavily on a counter-cultural manifesto.

In the early 60s, with the end of the studio system and the emergence of new, independent means of production and distribution – the “new Hollywood” – a cinema was born that could really be called “rock ’n’ roll”. From Arthur Penn’s Bonny and Clyde to Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider, refrains of anti-establishment rebellion were sung, bringing into doubt a suffocating social model, and completely exposing the diktats issued by deciders who were disconnected from young adults trying to redefine themselves. For that is where the spirit of rock ’n’ roll is best expressed: in the most complete independence, and in defiance against all forms of authority.

Upon closer inspection, it is effectively not in musical films that we find what is essentially “rock”. Although Alan Parker’s The Wall, conceived with Pink Floyd, and, on another level, Jean-Luc Godard’s Sympathy for the Devil, showing the Rolling Stones in a recording session, may manage to capture the spirit that animates musicians, they have nothing of the definitive quality of universality that defines rock ’n’ roll. What is ultimately the essence of rock ’n’ roll is found more in the films of John Waters or Russ Meyer (in his early period, before his pure frenzy of mammary fetishism), such as Faster Pussycat Kill Kill or Super Vixens, in the debauchery of sex and violence, in a challenge to dominant morality and established order, and in a certain art of provocation. For in the end, rock ’n’ roll is not so much a question of music as it is a state of mind. Ultimately, there’s infinitely more rock ’n’ roll in any one film by John Carpenter than in the entire filmography of Elvis Presley, and in their own way, John Huston or Luis Bunuel are undoubtedly much more rock ’n’ roll than all the A Hard Day’s Nights and Almost Famouses in the world.

From the experimental opus of Kenneth Anger to the recent, and nastily in-your-face, films by Rob Zombie (lead singer of White Zombie and, in 2005, director of Devil’s Rejects, which brilliantly brought back to life the “bad-ass” attitude of the 70s), the “spirit of rock” can never be expressed in cinema in more than an indirect way. Political provocation, self-destructive hedonism, rebellion against the established order: what makes the “rock ’n’ roll attitude” can only be captured beyond the music itself and only expressed outside the shackles of films produced by a studio system that is inevitably destined to consolidate the largest number, while, in fact, the rocker is by definition alone against the world, an anti-hero, a magnificent loser with a fate that is necessarily as tragic as it is grandiose.

By Olivier Gonord with Jean Jacques Rue.