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Movies Forum Index » International Movies Forum » Cercle Cinemane (Part One)
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| Author |
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| Tom Sutpen |
 Posted: Mon Feb 23, 2004 2:45 pm |
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‘Cercle Cinemane’: A Strange and Terrible Saga
I. The Movie Maniac
Somewhere in the middle of September, 1948, Francois Truffaut had an
inspiration.
It didn’t come to him in a rush of wild invention; no cries of
‘Eureka’ were raised to the ceiling. The idea had been rolling around the
back of his head, in one form or another, long before he determined to act on
it. It was a good, possibly brilliant idea, he thought; and if ever there was a
time to do it, it was now. As much as anything, the scheme grew out of his
ever-deepening conviction that the art and craft of cinema would . . . somehow
.. . . take permanent root in his existence.
In the end, it would come closer to destroying his life than anything
prior to the brain tumor that ended it in 1984.
In less than a decade Truffaut’s fanaticism for anything connected with
film began assuming proportions so vast there was practically nothing else of
value to him. Film was everything. Everything he talked about, thought about,
dreamt about. Having left his parents abode more or less officially, he now
lived his obsessed life in a tiny room just off the rue Pigalle with his
boyhood stooge, Robert Lachenay; the place overflowing with an immense archive
of files, comprised entirely of pieces he’d clipped out of just about every
superficial, cheesy movie magazine and newspaper he could lay his hands on;
articles and reviews and essays arranged alphabetically according to movie
director; endlessly poured over, read and re-read. Added to this pile of dead
trees was a collection of stills that he and Lachenay purloined from movie
houses during after-hours raids around Paris. It constituted nothing less than
the life he’d chosen for himself. He’d given up on school two years before
.. . . or perhaps it was the other way around . . . and four months earlier
he’d quit his day job as a messenger for Albert Simpere et Compagnie, a Paris
grain merchant. All to devote more and more time to immersing himself in
cinema.
Truffaut was like something out of a Dostoevsky novel back then; yearning
for a life in film as though it were a sensation in the blood. He wanted one
day to wake up and find himself . . . involved in that universe up there on the
screen. It didn’t matter how, or in what capacity. He just wanted to join it,
that was all. The avenues open to him were cruelly limited, however: He had no
experience whatsoever in film production, not even in the most menial
capacities, no connections to help get his foot in the door. By his own later
account, as a dyed-in-the-wool film ecumenist he was governed by a
consciousness so receptive to any form of cinematic expression he could barely
tell a good movie from a bad one. So he lacked what is arguably the rudimentary
equipment required to be a critic (and that was the bottom rung on the
cinematic ladder even then). For eight years he’d been a watcher, a consumer;
just another kid who came in out of his daily nightmare and planted himself
close to the screen . . . ANY screen he could find . . . at every available
opportunity. Once, that was enough. Now, at sixteen, he wanted more from cinema
than cinema was willing to provide. It was that simple.
Other than taking a job as an usher in some crummy movie house on the
outskirts of Paris, cleaning up after the customers with a mop and watching the
same Claude Autant-Lara picture three and four times a day, only one
alternative lay open to him. And the more he and Lachenay chewed over its
possibilities, the more they began to feel the inescapable pull of destiny.
They resolved to start their very own cine-club.
Why hadn’t he thought of it before? After all, everyone else was doing
it back then. What’s more, Truffaut already held membership at a number of
cine-clubs in and around Paris -- and had snuck into screenings at countless
others. He had a vital understanding . . . or thought he did (which amounted to
the same thing) . . . of how they operated; the fundamentals of booking and
screening old movies. More importantly, since he repeatedly bore witness to the
solemn, ever-thickening atmosphere of cinephilia that Parisian cineastes had
retreated into after the first rush of film ecumenism produced so much cultural
vertigo, he had an intimate knowledge of the indispensable ambience that
reigned over these joints. All it would take to launch the thing was a bit of
fast cash and low cunning, he reasoned. And while he had a surplus of the
latter, he could always find ways to get his mitts on the former.
Truffaut dubbed his new venture “Cercle Cinemane” (The Movie Maniacs
Circle) and in short order anointed himself its ‘Artistic Director’. This
meant he would program the screenings, set the schedule; lend whatever
resources he could find to the task of propelling it into the collective
consciousness of French cine-maniacs. Lachenay was eighteen then; legally
competent to sign checks and handle the finances of the outfit overall, so he
got to play ‘General Secretary’. From all outward appearances, it was an
equable distribution of duties, a real partnership. This was deceiving,
however. ‘Cercle Cinemane” was Francois Truffaut’s project from beginning
to end. Robert Lachenay certainly loved movies, but his ardor would never be a
match for his friend’s; and through the years, no matter what scheme they
embarked upon, Robert was fated to be nothing more than a subordinate to
Francois’ iron-clad will; a sidekick. Another Gabby Hayes, just along for the
ride.
After assuming style and title, the entrepreneurs set about scouring the
area for a theater. Despite not having a single movie in their possession to
present to the public, they succeeded in conning a Monsieur Marcellin, owner of
the Cluny-Palace, a small cinema on the Boulevard Saint-Germaine, into letting
them rent out his dump on Sunday mornings for 4,000 francs a shot. The first
screening, Opening Day if you will, was planned for October 31. Not a tentative
date. Truffaut had it practically etched in stone. Everything was falling into
place at such an extraordinarily rapid speed, there was no reason he could see
to start taking half-steps. Now, the only thing left for Amos’n’Andy to do
was get hold of some product to show the public. Then they’d be in business
for real, right?
Well, that’s where things started getting complicated.
Truffaut wanted to open ‘Cercle Cinemane’ with as much pomp and
ceremony as he and his cohort could muster; consequently, there was only one
source he felt he could go to. After cutting the deal with Marcellin, he
marched on over to the epicenter of French Cinemania, the ‘Musee Permanent du
Cinema’ on the avenue de Messine, to snag some artifacts from the Saint-Simon
of Cinema, the Fourier of Film himself, Henri Langlois, Secretary-General of
the ‘Cinematheque Francaise’. You see, in order to enhance the prospects of
‘Cercle Cinemane’, Truffaut felt he needed both the participation of the
‘Cinematheque’ as well as the enormous prestige that attended having the
archive as a resource for it.
Ever since Langlois took ‘Cercle du Cinema’ out of its coffin three
years earlier, and the film ecumenism he pioneered in the 1930s became all the
rage among Parisian cinephiles, he’d found himself having to put up with a
veritable army of these self-proclaimed ‘Children of the Cinematheque’
coming out of the woodwork to pay him tribute as though he were some kind of
prophet; a Montmarte Mohammed in the flesh. And every one of them seemed to
have his mouth open and his hand out.
A year after Truffaut made his pitch, for instance, a kid from Los Angeles
.. . . that’s right, Los Angeles (The Word was spreading that far) . . . sent
Langlois this fourteen minute home movie he directed; a rough-trade version of
“Follow the Fleet” with a thin coating of avant-garde gloss called
“Fireworks”. It was exceptionally hokey stuff, but because it was an
American knock-off of the long-dead French avant-garde school of cinema, the
film represented such a curiosity overseas that Langlois decided to screen the
thing at that year’s ‘Festival du film maudit’ (Accursed Film Festival)
in Biarritz. Just for a blast of Modernist nostalgia, if nothing else. Needless
to say, it went over big in certain quarters (Jean Cocteau reportedly had to be
revived with smelling salts after seeing it).
Next thing Langlois knew, here was the director of “Fireworks”,
Kenneth Anger, practically on his doorstep, asking for shelter. Word of the
rousing reception his 16mm handjob received from the Old Lions of the
avant-garde floated back to him in the States, so he pawned mommy and daddy’s
silverware and bought himself a one-way ticket on the French Line, all the way
to Paris, just to pay his respects to the man who made it all possible. Not
that Langlois made the movie possible, of course. He’d simply done more than
anyone around to create the environment in which such a movie could possibly
thrive.
Henri Langlois saw Truffaut coming a mile away. He may have been getting
used to these importunities from newly-minted cineastes, but that didn’t make
him a soft touch; his occasional ‘beau geste’ to acolytes such as Anger
notwithstanding. When Truffaut put the arm on him, he wasn’t really in the
giving mood. He let him borrow a couple of old avant-garde shorts, “Un Chien
Anadalou” and “Entre-acte” (both 1924), then tried to send the pest on
his way.
At the first signal that things weren’t going to go as smoothly as he
thought, Truffaut’s heart must have turned into balsa wood. Two avant-garde
shorts from the 20s? This wasn’t exactly the Renoir retrospective of his
dreams. Not that he had anything against the avant-garde. Hell, he was enough
of an ecumenist to see merit in any kind of movie. It just . . . wasn’t what
he had in mind. And, what’s more, that October 31 opening was looming larger
by the second. Truffaut tried to explain to the archivist that ‘Cercle
Cinemane’ wasn’t supposed to be just any old Cine-club. This was the
landmark effort of two youths possessing boundless, youthful enthusiasm for
‘le cinema’, not some clip-joint designed to separate grubby cineastes from
their cash so they could bask in the glow of those images up there. He was
convinced that, fifty years hence, people would speak of ‘Cercle Cinemane’
in the same breath as . . . as . . . the Louvre!! For the opening of a venture
so monumental, a couple of old shorts (however noteworthy) simply wouldn’t be
enough! Christ, even with an intermission the running time wouldn’t last more
than an hour; maybe not even that. So if he was stuck with doing an avant-garde
revival, couldn’t he borrow a feature? Maybe “Le Sang d’un Poete” (The
Blood of a Poet; 1930), Jean Cocteau’s film? Pleeeeease?
Langlois, his eyes no doubt rolling up into the back of his skull, saw the
time had come to sit the boy down and explain to him the facts of life as far
as Cine-clubs in the real world were concerned.
In the first place, despite anything he might have been reading in
‘L’Ecrain francaise’ recently, the ‘Cinematheque’ was not a lending
library. So Truffaut could forget about the Cocteau film. Pronto. In the second
place, even if he wanted to lend it to him he couldn’t. Langlois had recently
been getting some serious flack from the ‘Federation francaise des
cine-clubs’, a regulatory body set up in the last few years to oversee the
ebb and flow of product between established film societies. Not only that, but
the Ministry of the Interior was starting to make noise about cracking down on
exhibitors projecting ‘unregistered’ films; broadly hinting at police
action as a remedy to stem the tide of potentially unlawful screenings.
He didn’t take the Interior Ministry’s threats all that seriously.
They were a bureaucracy, after all, and their investigators probably couldn’t
find their way across the street. But the ‘Federation’ was another matter
entirely. Langlois had always been careful never to get his ‘Cinematheque’
too deeply involved with that outfit. He was, in fact, convinced that they were
nothing more than a pack of Communists looking to cut in on his territory
(given the alarming politicization of segments within the French film community
in those years, this was probably a safe bet). He’d long thought it the
better part of valor to hold them off as far as humanly possible. If they were
to catch wind of him handing out prints willy-nilly to any punk kid starting up
a backyard cine-club, then they could gravely hamper his operations. And if the
Interior Ministry sharpened up and got into the picture, they could shut him
down for good. Even worse, they could take his movies away from him.
So Truffaut had to make do with the two shorts Langlois gave him. That,
and some not-so-fatherly advice: His only hope of getting Cocteau’s movie
legitimately . . . was obtaining it from Cocteau himself.
Truffaut probably didn’t know if Langlois was being facetious with that
piece of advice he extended before tossing him out the door, but whatever the
case, he thought it an ingenious solution to his dilemma; even if it meant
pushing the inaugural festivities back a couple of weeks. He promptly sat right
down and wrote himself a letter to Jean Cocteau himself, asking the poet and
filmmaker to come down for Opening Day, bring his movie with him and, as an
afterthought, maybe get up on stage and free-associate for an hour or two on
his ‘pensees metaphysiques du cinema’. All for free, of course.
Full of resolve and renewed purpose, Truffaut and Lachenay set to work
plastering every square inch of bare wall in the Saint-michel and the Boulevard
Saint Germaine with flyers advertising the opening of ‘Cercle Cinemane’;
inviting the public, one and all, to see “Le Sang d’un Poete” and hear
Jean Cocteau, as a featured attraction, do his stand-up act in person.
On Sunday morning, November 14, 1948, the turnout at the Cluny-Palace was
respectable. No lines around the proverbial block, but not a dismal showing
either. About a hundred people, every one of whom had no doubt come expressly
to see Cocteau, sat through the Bunuel and Clair shorts, eagerly anticipating
the main event. At last, when the house lights went up . . .
Jean Cocteau’s film wasn’t there . . . and Jean Cocteau evidently
hadn’t arrived.
What the audience didn’t realize, of course, was that the promoters of
the event, Francois Truffaut and Robert Lachenay, had known the entire time
that Cocteau wouldn’t be coming; they’d known it before they printed the
flyers. The filmmaker, it turned out, hadn’t even bothered replying to
Truffaut’s invitation, so the two entrepreneurs, undaunted, elected to
advertise the event anyway. The whole idea was to start off ‘Cercle
Cinemane’ with that Bang everyone was always talking about, by attracting the
biggest audience possible. And when it came to the old Show Business game of
putting asses in the seats, they knew that the next best thing to actually
having Cocteau show up was to publicize it and make a clean getaway before
anyone knew what had happened.
Which is precisely what they did that morning. By the time it dawned on
the audience that the Star was a no-show and they’d been well and truly
ripped-off, Truffaut and Lachenay were long gone from the scene of the crime;
having the presence of mind to heist the box-office take on their way.
Marcellin, who wasn’t a party to the scam, had to stand there in the middle
of a near riot and inform a hundred very angry customers that their money had
just disappeared out the back door. It isn’t known whether Marcellin then ran
for his life while enraged cinephiles tore the Cluny Palace to shreds. It’s
possible, even likely, that they blamed Cocteau and went home . . . or to
another movie (two shorts in one day would not have been enough for some of
these people). What we do know is that no legal repercussions attended the
incident. Nobody, it seemed, was about to go to court over a few francs, and
the only individual who might have brought an action, Monsieur Marcellin,
didn’t. There was no need. The Cluny-Palace’s owner had already been given
his 4,000 francs.
Up front.
And so it was that ‘Cercle Cinemane’, Francois Truffaut’s first
venture into film as something other than a patron, began its short existence.
Truffaut and Lachenay got to pocket 5,000 francs for themselves (minus the cost
of the flyers), so it was a nice payday all around. For the moment at least,
‘Cercle Cinemane’ survived and the two were home free.
But when word got around about the Opening Day debacle, and the stunt that
evinced an ethical twilight unusual even for movie exhibitors, what little
credibility ‘Cercle Cinemane’ had at the outset (which was marginal)
totally evaporated. Truffaut and his partner were branded from that moment
forth as nothing more than a pair of wanton adolescent swindlers. He was even
getting death rays from the likes of Henri Langlois, who was practically God in
the cinephile community. Given what we know about his character, Truffaut
probably couldn’t fathom the spot he was suddenly in: Having gotten away with
his first Great Hustle scot-free, he had to have been positively indignant that
anyone thought it implied something negative about his moral fiber.
Okay, maybe it wasn’t how Opening Day should have turned out. And maybe
they stretched the truth a LITTLE bit when they told the public they’d be
seeing Jean Cocteau in person that morning, but . . . c’mon . . . did anyone
really get hurt? And who wanted to hear that old Queen orate on his avant-garde
relic for two hours, anyway?
It was at this point that Truffaut resolved to make a success of ‘Cercle
Cinemane’. No matter what it took.
(cont.) |
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