Luc Moullet
Encyclopedia
French New Wave
The New Wave was a blanket term coined by critics for a group of French filmmakers of the late 1950s and 1960s, influenced by Italian Neorealism and classical Hollywood cinema. Although never a formally organized movement, the New Wave filmmakers were linked by their self-conscious rejection of...
. Moullet's films are known for their humor, anti-authoritarian leanings and rigorously primitive aesthetic, which is heavily influenced by his love of American B-movies.
Though such influential filmmakers and critics as Jean-Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard is a French-Swiss film director, screenwriter and film critic. He is often identified with the 1960s French film movement, French Nouvelle Vague, or "New Wave"....
, Jean-Marie Straub
Jean-Marie Straub
Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet were a duo of filmmakers who made two dozen films between 1963 and 2006...
, Jacques Rivette
Jacques Rivette
Jacques Rivette is a French film director. His most well known films include Celine and Julie Go Boating, La Belle Noiseuse and the cult film Out 1....
and Jonathan Rosenbaum
Jonathan Rosenbaum
Jonathan Rosenbaum is an American film critic. Rosenbaum was the head film critic for the Chicago Reader from 1987 until 2008, when he retired at the age of 65...
have consistently praised his work, he has never found commercial success, even in his native France.
Moullet is known to frequently act in his movies.
Early Life, Criticism and the French New Wave
Moullet began writing for Cahiers du cinémaCahiers du cinéma
Cahiers du Cinéma is an influential French film magazine founded in 1951 by André Bazin, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca. It developed from the earlier magazine Revue du Cinéma involving members of two Paris film clubs — Objectif 49 and...
at the age of eighteen, where he was an early champion of the films of Samuel Fuller
Samuel Fuller
Samuel Michael Fuller was an American screenwriter, novelist, and film director known for low-budget genre movies with controversial themes.-Personal life:...
. Though reportedly initially disliked by François Truffaut
François Truffaut
François Roland Truffaut was an influential film critic and filmmaker and one of the founders of the French New Wave. In a film career lasting over a quarter of a century, he remains an icon of the French film industry. He was also a screenwriter, producer, and actor working on over twenty-five...
, the brash critic found a defender in a young Jean-Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard is a French-Swiss film director, screenwriter and film critic. He is often identified with the 1960s French film movement, French Nouvelle Vague, or "New Wave"....
. In one of his articles for the Cahiers (published in the March 1959) Moullet stated that "Morality is a question of tracking shots", a phrase which, along with Jean-Luc Godard's alternative, formulated shortly afterwards ("Traveling shots are a question of morality"), has since become well-known in French cinema studies.
Moullet's first short film was intended to be shown before Gordard's second feature, Le Petit Soldat
Le Petit Soldat
The Little Soldier is a 1960 French film, written and directed by French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, but not released until 1963. It was Godard's first film with Anna Karina, who starred as Véronica Dreyer alongside Michel Subor ....
, which was banned due to its political content. After several more shorts failed to attract attention, Moullet returned to criticism, authoring major studies on several directors (most notably a book on Fritz Lang
Fritz Lang
Friedrich Christian Anton "Fritz" Lang was an Austrian-American filmmaker, screenwriter, and occasional film producer and actor. One of the best known émigrés from Germany's school of Expressionism, he was dubbed the "Master of Darkness" by the British Film Institute...
which Brigitte Bardot
Brigitte Bardot
Brigitte Anne-Marie Bardot is a French former fashion model, actress, singer and animal rights activist. She was one of the best-known sex-symbols of the 1960s.In her early life, Bardot was an aspiring ballet dancer...
is seen reading in Godard's Contempt
Contempt (film)
Contempt is a 1963 film directed by Jean-Luc Godard, based on the Italian novel Il disprezzo by Alberto Moravia. It stars Brigitte Bardot.-Plot:...
).
His first feature, made in 1966, was the comedy Brigitte et Brigitte
Brigitte et Brigitte
Brigitte et Brigitte is a 1966 French feature-length film written and directed by Cahiers du cinéma film critic Luc Moullet. Moullet's debut film, Brigitte et Brigitte was praised upon release by one-time colleague Jean-Luc Godard as being a "revolutionary film."...
, which follows two young women who share a name and a Paris apartment. The film features cameos by Samuel Fuller
Samuel Fuller
Samuel Michael Fuller was an American screenwriter, novelist, and film director known for low-budget genre movies with controversial themes.-Personal life:...
, Claude Chabrol
Claude Chabrol
Claude Chabrol was a French film director, a member of the French New Wave group of filmmakers who first came to prominence at the end of the 1950s...
, Eric Rohmer
Éric Rohmer
Éric Rohmer was a French film director, film critic, journalist, novelist, screenwriter and teacher. A figure in the post-war New Wave cinema, he was a former editor of Cahiers du cinéma....
and André Téchiné
André Téchiné
André Téchiné , is a French screenwriter and film director. He has had a long and distinguished career that places him among the best post-New Wave French film directors....
. It was followed the next year by Les Contrebandières
Les Contrebandières
Les Contrebandières, known in English as The Smugglers, is a 1967 film by French director Luc Moullet; it was his second feature film....
(The Smugglers), a B-movie
B-movie
A B movie is a low-budget commercial motion picture that is not definitively an arthouse or pornographic film. In its original usage, during the Golden Age of Hollywood, the term more precisely identified a film intended for distribution as the less-publicized, bottom half of a double feature....
-influenced love triangle
Love triangle
A love triangle is usually a romantic relationship involving three people. While it can refer to two people independently romantically linked with a third, it usually implies that each of the three people has some kind of relationship to the other two...
centered around contraband
Contraband
The word contraband, reported in English since 1529, from Medieval French contrebande "a smuggling," denotes any item which, relating to its nature, is illegal to be possessed or sold....
runners in an imaginary country.
In 1971, Moullet made his first color film, Une aventure de Billy le Kid, also known by its English title, A Girl Is a Gun. A psychedelic Western
Western (genre)
The Western is a genre of various visual arts, such as film, television, radio, literature, painting and others. Westerns are devoted to telling stories set primarily in the latter half of the 19th century in the American Old West, hence the name. Some Westerns are set as early as the Battle of...
starring French New Wave icon Jean-Pierre Léaud
Jean-Pierre Léaud
-Early years:Born in Paris, Léaud made his major debut as an actor at the age of 14 as Antoine Doinel, a semi-autobiographical character based on the life events of French film director François Truffaut, in The 400 Blows....
, the film was never released in France, but was instead shown abroad in an English-dubbed version. The dubbing, conceived by Moullet as a tribute to the "shabbiness" he always admired in American genre films, is intentionally bad, and the short, slight Leaud is given a mismatched deep voice.
Filmmaking 1972 - Present
Moullet continued at a relatively slow pace throughout the 1970s. His most notable film of the period is Anatomie d'un rapportAnatomie d'un rapport
Anatomie d'un rapport , is a 1976 French film directed by Luc Moullet and Antonietta Pizzorno. The director plays himself in a docudrama fashion, an actress plays his wife and his real-life partner, Antonietta Pizzorno, co-directs and handles the camera...
(1976), a relationship drama that also attacks and parodies other relationship dramas.
In the early 1980s Moullet began to direct films at a quicker pace, making humorous short films in between his features. In 1987, his film La Comédie du travail won the Prix Jean Vigo
Prix Jean Vigo
The Prix Jean Vigo is an award in the Cinema of France given annually since 1951 to a French film director in homage to Jean Vigo. It was founded by French writer Claude...
at the Cannes Film Festival
Cannes Film Festival
The Cannes International Film Festival , is an annual film festival held in Cannes, France, which previews new films of all genres including documentaries from around the world. Founded in 1946, it is among the world's most prestigious and publicized film festivals...
, an award usually given to young directors (Moullet was 50 at the time).
Moullet has continued making shorts and features at a steady rate throughout the 1990s and to the present. His recent works include the feature La Prestige de la mort (Death's Glamour), the working title of which was La Seule solution (The Only Solution) and La Terre de la folie (Land of Madness) (2009), along with a number of short films in 2010.
In 2009 he participated in a roundtable discussion with critics Bill Krohn and Craig Keller on the subject of Jean-Luc Godard's 1964 Une femme mariée
Une femme mariée
A Married Woman , 1964) was the eighth narrative feature film by French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard....
for a book that accompanies The Masters of Cinema
Masters of Cinema
The Masters of Cinema organization began as a website dedicated to the most well-regarded film directors in the world. Founded by a diverse international group of like-minded film enthusiasts: Jan Bielawski, a mathematician; Doug Cummings, a graphic artist and freelance critic; Trond Trondsen, a Ph.D...
Series DVD release of the film. Moullet also contributed a new overture to the volume. Later in the year, the French publisher Capricci released two Moullet-related works: Piges choisies (Selected Filings / Selected Submissions) (an anthology of Moullet's film writing over the last fifty years), and Notre alpin quotidien (Our Daily Alpine, a pun on Notre pain quotidien or Our Daily Bread) (a new book-length interview with Moullet). In 2010, Moullet contributed a new essay to the Masters of Cinema
Masters of Cinema
The Masters of Cinema organization began as a website dedicated to the most well-regarded film directors in the world. Founded by a diverse international group of like-minded film enthusiasts: Jan Bielawski, a mathematician; Doug Cummings, a graphic artist and freelance critic; Trond Trondsen, a Ph.D...
DVD release of Max Ophuls' La signora di tutti.
Filmography
- La Terre de la folie (2009)
- Le Prestige de la mort (2006)
- Naufragés de la D17, Les (2002)
- Système Zsygmondy, Le (2000)
- ...Au champ d'honneur (1998)
- Nous sommes tous des cafards (1997)
- Fantôme de Longstaff, Le (1996)
- Odyssée du 16/9°, L' (1996)
- Ventre de l'Amérique, Le (1996)
- Imphy, capitale de la France (1995)
- FoixFoixFoix is a commune, the capital of the Ariège department in southwestern France. It is the least populous administrative centre of a department in all of France, although it is only very slightly smaller than Privas...
(1994) - Toujours plus (1994)
- Parpaillon (1993) (TV)
- Cabale des oursins (1991)
- Sept selon Jean et Luc, La (1990)
- Sièges de l'Alcazar, Les (1989)
- Essai d'ouvertureEssai d'ouvertureEssai d'ouverture is a 1988 French 15-minute-long film by Luc Moullet.It's about one narrator and his attempts at opening a Coca-Cola bottle....
(1988) - Comédie du travail, La (1987)
- Valse des médias, La (1987)
- L'Empire de Médor (1986)
- Barres (1984)
- Les Havres (1983)
- Minutes d'un faiseur de film, Les (1983)
- Introduction (1982)
- Ma première brasse (1981)
- Genèse d'un repas (1978)
- Anatomie d'un rapportAnatomie d'un rapportAnatomie d'un rapport , is a 1976 French film directed by Luc Moullet and Antonietta Pizzorno. The director plays himself in a docudrama fashion, an actress plays his wife and his real-life partner, Antonietta Pizzorno, co-directs and handles the camera...
(1976) - Une aventure de Billy le Kid/A Girl is a Gun (1971)
- Les ContrebandièresLes ContrebandièresLes Contrebandières, known in English as The Smugglers, is a 1967 film by French director Luc Moullet; it was his second feature film....
(1967) - Brigitte et BrigitteBrigitte et BrigitteBrigitte et Brigitte is a 1966 French feature-length film written and directed by Cahiers du cinéma film critic Luc Moullet. Moullet's debut film, Brigitte et Brigitte was praised upon release by one-time colleague Jean-Luc Godard as being a "revolutionary film."...
(1966) - Capito? (1962)
- Terres noires (1961)
- Un steack trop cuit (1960)