On Being Radical

In a panel I participated in at Columbia last week, on what the prescient and indefatigable critic/programmer Scott Foundas calls a new New Wave of French critic/filmmakers, a few filmmakers in the group that Foundas calls the "Free Radicals" had a chance to speak together. In what felt like an exciting first attempt for this group to be described, in English, to an audience largely made up of people who hadn't seen the films (most of which were having their North American debuts later that weekend), my contribution to this group grasping for definitions was to read some quotes by Eric Rohmer from his 1953 essay on The Big Sky by Howard Hawks, a piece that this group's central figure, Serge Bozon, had cited as an influence. In the opening of that article, Rohmer describes his preference for the simple adventures of Robert Stevenson to the specious sentences of Conrad:

"One of cinema's assets is to have made us critical of words that sound nice but have little expression, more sensitive to a vigorous style than to a bombastic one, to the verb rather than to the adjective, to intention and movement more than to sensation and state, and to the moral rather than to some nebulous cosmogony."

I thought this description was appropriate for the intentions apparent in the films made by this group, and also the style of the films that they're reacting against, while also describing the prose style of the group's criticism (which at this early point has much more heft than the group's filmography).

"Yes," answered Bozon enthusiastically about the relevance of this quote. "We all make films that may be failures, but they are not pompous."

And as Bozon said stated earlier: "How does one maintain humor in film that is not necessarily a comedy? How does one break the tone and inject humor into the film itself, when it's not a comedy."