Maurice Pialat: three steps to magic

A deep look at how Maurice Pialat forged his searing emotional dramas across three stages of artistic alchemy – from discomposing his actors to distilling the resulting footage.

Celebrated for his films that renewed the art of cinematic realism through the 1970s, 80s and 90s, Maurice Pialat steadfastly refused the label of realism. His aim was not to record life as it is, but to reconstruct and stylise it according to his very particular view of human passions, attachments, needs and conflicts. “Cinema verité doesn't exist,” he used to say. “Everything is always reconstituted.”

Pialat had a unique response to the famous question ‘What is cinema?’. Based on his love for the Louis Lumière shorts he discovered just before shooting his debut feature L'Enfance-nue in 1968, he saw every take in a film shoot as a dynamic event. This event involves the performers, a situation set up by the narrative, and the camera as it follows, frames and records the action.

As Sight & Sound and the BFI bring the first complete Pialat retrospective in the UK to BFI Southbank, alongside a programme of films by the Pialat-influenced young French filmmakers of the 1990s, Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin look at four Pialat films – L'Enfance-nue, La Gueule ouverte (1974), Loulou (1980) and À nos amours (1983) – through the lens of Jean-Pierre Gorin's remark that Pialat's style can be defined in three consecutive stages: ‘manoeuvring’ his actors into scenes and narrative situations, ‘capturing’ the surprises, accidents and volatile interactions that occurred once the camera was rolling, and ‘working’ the results in post-production, reducing scenes to their essentials in a bold, stark montage.

The S&S Deep Focus season Maurice Pialat and the New French Realism screens at BFI Southbank, London, until the end of December:
https://whatson.bfi.org.uk/Online/mauricepialat

Read David Thompson's Deep Focus essay Maurice Pialat – the man who changed French cinema:
https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/features/deep-focus/maurice-pialat-french-realist-complete-career-retrospective-overview

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