Of all the cinéma de papa stylists so despised by the nouvelle vague, René Clair stands alone as the sole member of the old guard to stand down in the face of critical opposition. Or so it seems: Les fêtes galantes (1965) was his last film.
While Carné and the rest struggled on, defiantly filming when they could, Clair apparently had no stomach for the fight: if people thought he was old-fashioned, maybe he should stop.
One doesn't have to hate Clair with the ferocity that Truffaut could muster in order to see some sad wisdom in this retirement: for some time, Clair's films had been a little stiff. His early days among the surrealists, when he could make a kinetic exercise in visual absurdity like Entr'acte (1924), were long gone, and the vein of absurdist fantasy that enlivened his earliest narrative movies had its last expression in 1952's Les belles de nuit,...
While Carné and the rest struggled on, defiantly filming when they could, Clair apparently had no stomach for the fight: if people thought he was old-fashioned, maybe he should stop.
One doesn't have to hate Clair with the ferocity that Truffaut could muster in order to see some sad wisdom in this retirement: for some time, Clair's films had been a little stiff. His early days among the surrealists, when he could make a kinetic exercise in visual absurdity like Entr'acte (1924), were long gone, and the vein of absurdist fantasy that enlivened his earliest narrative movies had its last expression in 1952's Les belles de nuit,...
- 7/11/2013
- by David Cairns
- MUBI
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