Friday, May 20, 2011

The film directors' favourite

Although the French screenwriter Jean-Claude Carri�re has collaborated with Tati, Bu�uel and Schl�ndorff, he is the invisible man of film

To read the newly published This Is Not the End of the Book, a conversation between Umberto Eco and Jean-Claude Carri�re, is to eavesdrop on two highly erudite minds. Digressive, anecdotal and humorous, they reflect on their love of the printed word and where the destiny of the book might lie, ranging from neglected French poetry of the 16th century to a forthcoming first edition of Waiting for Godot in the revived Nahuatl language of the Aztecs. But while Eco is internationally famous for his bestselling historical novels, Carri�re has a relatively low profile even in his native France. Low, that is, for someone whose career as a dramatist has encompassed collaborations with an unparalleled array of directorial talent from film and theatre, and 50 books, in addition to the 80 screenplays, 19 theatre plays and 20-odd teleplays.

Carri�re's long-lived creative relationships with three quite disparate figures form the spine of his career. The first, Jacques Tati, he met in 1957, having applied to write the novelisations of the films Monsieur Hulot's Holiday and Mon Oncle. Aged 26, Carri�re had only one novel to his name, set in a suburban Paris bistro of the kind his parents had run, having moved from a small village in their native Languedoc so that their only child might pursue the education for which he showed such aptitude. Titled Le L�zard, for the reptilian protagonist drawn from his parent's clientele, its author caught the eye of Tati, from whose mastery of comic observation his prot�g� would learn more deeply "how to start from reality . . . how to look at people". First, though, the cinematic na�f was dispatched by Tati to sit for a week with his editor, to appreciate the alchemy by which a script transferred to the screen.

For the five years that followed, while serving in the French army in Algeria during the civil war, Carri�re was kept from fully applying his new knowledge, able only to work by correspondence on a few short films and humorous sketches. On his return, however, in 1963, he promptly discovered his second "master" in Luis Bu�uel, to whom he was introduced as a potential screenwriter for Diary of a Chambermaid.

Bu�uel had been all but invisible for 20 years between the early successes of L'Age d'Or and Le Chien Andalou and his feted return with Los Olvidados in 1951. Now, in his 60s, he had found someone with whom to share the creative process yet whom he could trust to challenge his ideas. His own role, Carri�re once explained, was to push Bu�uel "to make the film that he needed to". It was a collaboration that would sustain Bu�uel through another two decades of work, which included many of the films for which he is now best known: Belle de Jour, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, The Phantom of Liberty and That Obscure Object of Desire.

There were rituals to their work, including daily exercises for the imagination, each man retreating to his room for half an hour each day before aperitifs to invent a story, with which to regale the other. Meanwhile their conversations roamed over the books and newspapers they were reading, world events and social observations. At night, it was Carri�re's task as scriptwriter to work up the notes of their freeform discussions into drafts, ready to be read through the following day. With so intimate a working method, it is scarcely surprising that it is almost impossible to assess the nature and extent of their individual contributions.

Intriguingly, though, in the year when Carri�re had first met Bu�uel, their affinity instantly confirmed by a shared love of wine and Buster Keaton, he also published the Anthology of Humour 1900, the first of four anthologies of folly to appear since, drawing on forgotten or overlooked historical texts. As editor, Carri�re drew the statistical conclusion that from 1880 to 1910, the "Belle Epoque" had experienced the greatest epidemic of laughter in history, but a laughter that had "nothing to do with the stupid laughter of our own time".

It is one of several historical periods in which Carri�re appears to be invested, in this case through the Paris house in which he has now lived for many decades. Acquired in a state of near dereliction, Carri�re had swayed the owner to sell by promising to retain the original staircase. Toulouse-Lautrec had occupied a studio there during the Belle Epoque, but it is the stairway itself that still betrays the building's erstwhile function as a brothel, its angled mirrors once allowing the madam to watch the comings and goings of the clients.

Are the imaginative seeds of Belle de Jour or of the absurdist satire of middle-class values in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie to be found here, sharing that quality of humane comedy that guided his selection in the anthologies? The historical stupidity that caused someone to ask in 1915 whether the Germans or French defecated more, mentioned by Carri�re to Eco, who shares with him a collector's fascination with stupidity, unavoidably calls to mind the iconic scenario in The Phantom of Liberty of middle-class socialites seated on toilets around a table and embarrassedly absenting themselves to consume food in private. Yet such truffling for clues is surely misguided, for the defining quality of Carri�re's art is that it is subsumed into the greater whole. "The screenwriter," as he has written, "needs humility, to learn to be invisible".

Restless in his creative interests, Carri�re entered in the mid-1970s into the third of the career-defining collaborations with what he has termed a "master" in the mid-1970s ? with Peter Brook. Having worked together initially on adaptations of late Shakespeare, Brook and Carri�re were soon embarked on a far longer exploration, listening together over the following five years to a professor of Sanskrit read them the stories of the vast Indian epic, The Mahabarata, and setting about a stage adaptation.

Brook has said of Carri�re: "He doesn't like to work for too long on the same subject. Three hours is usually enough, and he'll move on to something else, in a different field." Yet he abhors laziness, and no one could doubt his persistence, the nine-hour-long production of The Mahabarata taking 12 years to reach fruition, with Carri�re there every step of the way. In parallel, though, he answered the call of a pantheon of European directors who sought his collaboration: from Andrzej Wajda and Milos Forman to Louis Malle, Jean-Luc Godard to Volker Schl�ndorff. Out of these partnerships came such acclaimed works as The Tin Drum, Danton and Milou in Mai, while from the Alexandrine verse of Edmond Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac, in which Carri�re had immersed himself as a nine-year-old, he crafted a script for Jean-Paul Rappeneau that garnered 10 C�sars and nearly won Depardieu an Oscar.

"My parents thought of me as the owner of a small territory to which they had no means of access," Carri�re has said of his childhood self: he read through the legends of India by the age of six, before devouring the novels of Jules Verne, Jack London and Fenimore Cooper. How might they have viewed their son's domain as he reached 60? A decade earlier, while caught up in weaving the Indian epic of looming annihilation for Brook, and with the sense that his ignorance of science left something missing in his life, he had begun weekly visits to the Astrophysics Institute in Paris. Three books resulted, two of them collaborative works popularising physics, the third a novel about Einstein. As Bu�uel approached death in the early 1980s, he had asked his friend to assume his voice and draft his autobiography. Now Carri�re had shown a similar empathetic generosity to a genius from the world of science.

Asked by French television's grand cultural inquisitor, Bernard Pivot, to explain the focus of his work, Carri�re once replied, "in one word: it is to be a storyteller. My job is to choose the stories and tell them to my peers, that's to say to those who live at the same time as me, using the means available today."

In the age of auteurs and celebrity through which Carri�re has lived, this willingness "simply to transmit" is the defining characteristic of his art, and explanation enough for why others find in him the ideal collaborator. And yet there is surely more to his contribution than that of a mere dramaturgical mechanic, or the instinct to encapsulate an idea in an anecdote: a facility that is repeatedly apparent in This Is Not The End of the Book. Nebulous and elusive it may be, but a distinct sensibility does animate many works in which he has had a hand: a tendency to humane irony, and a fascination for those moments in history when questions of human agency are most politically acute.

The temptations of heresy and the risks of idealism are recurrent themes, from his work with Bu�uel on The Milky Way, with its time-slipping exploration of why one paradigm-shifting idea gains traction but another is rejected, to his play The Controversy of Valladolid, with its dramatisation of the 16th-century debate over the human rights of the inhabitants of the new world. Inevitably, the French revolution is a frequent point of reference, whether looming in Valmont, his adaptation of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, centre stage in the fraught days of the terror in Danton, or as another facet of the struggle between heresy and orthodoxy, both political and religious, in Goya's Ghosts.

Fifteeen years ago, before the popular advent of the internet, Carri�re seemed strickingly prescience when he wrote in his book The Secret Language of Film that "channel-hopping has become an objective form of creation . . . the remote control the latest personal film-making tool." He remains impressively engaged; an octogenarian veteran to whom leading contemporary film-makers continue to turn for assistance, as Michael Haneke did when the script of his remarkable The White Ribbon needed reworking.

Eco seemed likely to emerge as the dominant voice in This Is Not the End of the Book. Yet despite their common concerns about the desensitising welter of digital imagery, few readers familiar with Carri�re's career will be surprised that he consistently appears the more open-minded and flexible. For while Eco insists that, like the wheel or the spoon, the book can never be improved on, Carri�re, the son of the freethinking peasant who became a connoisseur of historical folly, knows deep down that the "future's main quality is to be consistently surprising".

Alex Butterworth is the author of The World That Never Was.


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Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/may/21/jean-claude-carriere-film-screenwriter

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