Pialat and Cassavetes - Filming the Body
(A summary of Lubac's translated Senses of Cinema article.)


Pialat and Cassavetes make for odd bedfellows, and this extended (7500 word) comparison seems to prove it. As directors laboring in the limbo between the French New Wave and whatever it is that came next, each did seem content to simply work parallel both to the mainstream and to the variety of fringes dipping their toes in more experimental waters. Pialat has always struck me as one of those guys that shows up late for the party but manages to shoulder his way into the action anyway (his first film, L’enfance nue, appeared in 1969 after Godard and Chabrol had already racked up more than 25 films between them).


It is a long essay, packed with very dense readings of the films it is looking at, but the basic premise regards the way each director uses the actual physical bodies of their actors within the frame itself. Lubac wants to demonstrate both what the positioning of these bodies communicates to us, and what they say about the actor – director relationship. As test cases, he looks at Pialat’s L’enfance nue (1969) and A nos amours (1972), and Cassavete’s Faces (1968), and A Woman under the Influence (1974).


In terms of the first question, the essay highlights a scattershot of issues the presence of the body raises in these four films. Pialat tended to work with both professional actors and beginners in his films, allowing this interaction between innocence and expertise to breathe a spark of life into what could often become fairly droll storylines. In the scene that opens A nos amours, a poem is read inexpertly by a young girl. Her obvious, though sweet, ineptitude is grating on the audience. This essay helpfully interprets this puzzling opening through the lens of Pialat’s use of his actors, as this specific use of an untrained voice sets us up to percieve the film as a living progression, as something that takes on a life of its own. Lubac says, "Pialat thus inserts into the very core of his fiction this idea of the actor's body, "primary material" in its raw state, yet to be chiselled into shape by the director." And then, I suppose, Pialat sets at the work of setting these bodies into his film. On the other hand, Cassavetes sets the human body within his close frames in a way that maximizes the unpredictability of his performers. Their grimaces, tears, and telling glances happen upon the viewer with no warning. In this way their bodies, and not framing devices, bear the weight of the narrative. This really does explain many of the odder formal features of A Woman Under the Influence. I have always been unsettled by the raw physicality of the film, which I previously just assigned to the ad hoc nature of Cassavetes’ approach.


In terms of the second question, the essay covers an equally random ground. But generally, for Pialat: "The idea of taking non-professional actors and making them into central pivots of the fiction also reveals a desire to print and capture traces of their reality, their own past life onto film." For Pialat, realism is a result of the physical presence of his actors and their histories. By using a combination of professionals and amateurs, there are points in his films where the fiction is grounded in an almost documentarian moment. The presence of an actual person, not an actor, allows this to happen.


Lubac pulls out a ripping J. L. Comolli reference to describe Cassavetes’ similar quality:


"… The behaviour of the characters – who provide the sole fictional basis in Faces – no longer refers to a realistic slice of life which they might more or less faithfully represent, the characters only have coherence and realism in relation to each other, to the film itself. Certainly, nothing is produced on screen which might not also be produced 'in life', but this 'in life' here means in front of the camera and because of the camera. Cassavetes and his friends do not use the movies as a means of reproducing facts, movements, faces or ideas, but as a means of producing them."


He identifies this also at work in a famous sequence towards the end of A Woman Under the Influence. Here Peter Falk walks listlessly in the rain down the sidewalk in front of his house. Towards the end of this scene, an umbrella pops into the side of the frame, leading us to postulate that here Cassavetes has directed Peter Falk mid-shot to continue past the predetermined cut. (The umbrella probably belonged to one of the crew who just couldn’t step back far enough.) In this scene then, we have Cassavetes literally pulling Falk further into the frame, and as an actor farther away from his physical expectations. What happens here is a little improvised parable for the film as a whole.