Author: Stafford, Roy.

Title: Tirez sur le pianiste

Source: http://www.itpmag.demon.co.uk/Tirez.pdf [16.12.2003]. Riddlesden 2001. P. 1-7.

Publisher: itp (in the picture). Media Education Magazine.

Published with kind permission of the author and the publisher.

Roy Stafford

Tirez sur le pianiste

(Shoot the pianist)

France 1960

Directed by François Truffaut

Produced by Pierre Braunberger for Films de Pléïade

Written by Marcel Moussy and François Truffaut,

based on the novel Down There by David Goodis

Cinematography by Raoul Coutard

Film Editing by Claudine Bouché and Cécile Decugis

Production Design by Jacques Mély

Original music by Georges Delerue

Sound by Jacques Gallois

Runtime 85 mins

Leading players

Tirez sur le pianiste was Truffaut’s second feature, following on from the critical and commercial success of Les quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows). It failed to emulate the success of its predecessor, depressing Truffaut (who cared about commercial success) and pushing him towards the more obvious commercial appeal of Jules et Jim, made in the following year. Yet, from the perspective of 2001, Tirez sur le pianiste was a film “ahead of its time’. It has aged well and appears now to represent many of the significant innovations of la nouvelle vague – indeed it may be the most representative film of that important movement.

Truffaut and la nouvelle vague

François Truffaut (1932-84) became a convinced cinéphile in his early adolescence, escaping from his own unhappy family circumstances into the cinemas of Nazi occupied Paris. After the war he became an habitué of the Paris Cinémathèque, meeting the other young men with whom he would become identified as first a vigorous critic of the established tradition de qualité in French cinema in the 1950s and later as a ‘new director’. In 1954, at the tender age of 22, Truffaut wrote his famous essay, ‘Une certaine tendance du cinéma’, in which he denounced the cinema of ‘old men’, concerned with highly polished and carefully constructed artificial stories, and strove to promote an alternative cinema which gave true expression to the ideas and emotions of the filmmaker. From this developed la politiques des auteurs.

The emphasis on the director as auteur or ‘author’ as distinct from metteur en scène (literally the person who filmed the script) became the effective manifesto of the young, first time, directors who comprised what came to be known as la nouvelle vague towards the end of the 1950s.

La tradition de qualité

The idea of a ‘quality cinema’ was similar in France and the UK during the 1940s and into the 1950s. It referred to ‘highly polished’ studio based productions, very much the creation of script writers attempting to adapt literary works to produce a ‘psychological realism’ using established ‘star’ actors (as distinct to the more direct realism achieved through location shooting and use of non-professionals). ‘Quality films’ required relatively large budgets and by definition reduced opportunities for more experimental work.

Truffaut’s attack on la tradition de qualité was very much a polemic – he wanted to argue for a new kind of cinema so he exaggerated the uniformity of the established filmmaking style. In reality, the differences were not so great between the quality films and those which were emerging from new filmmakers in the 1950s.

Defining la nouvelle vague

The best way to conceive of la nouvelle vague from a contemporary perspective is perhaps to think of the ways in which the UK press created the idea of ‘cool Britannia’ or ‘Brit Art’. In France between 1959 and 1963 over 150 new filmmakers and actors became identified with the new and ‘youthful’ trend in French cinema (and the arts generally). The defining moment (i.e. when the term was first widely used) appears to have been the success at Cannes of Truffaut’s Les quatre cents coups in 1959.

Film scholars have discerned a number of different groups of filmmakers, each of which challenged the dominant mode of so-called ‘quality cinema’ from the 1950s onwards. The group which gained the highest profile were arguably the quintet of critics turned directors; François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard , Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette.

The group’s ideas were developed through the 1950s in their critical writing. Their filmmaking styles were not identical but they did share a number of commitments so that, at least in the beginning, there were identifiable elements in all their films (and in those of other young directors):

• characters were ‘young and reckless’

• they used new young actors, creating new ‘stars’ – Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean-Claude Brialy, Stéphane Audran, Anouk Aimée, Anna Karina etc.

• the films were set mostly in Paris or the ‘tourist’ areas of France

• mostly shot on location, using natural light and hand-held cameras – improvised and self-conscious cinematography

• editing ‘rules’ were broken and devices from cinema history re-worked

• rising stars of cinematography, music etc. worked on several new wave films, e.g. Raoul Coutard, Henri Decaë, Michel Legrand

• narratives were either ‘original’ or based on popular fictions; ‘small stories’ were as important as ‘big’ ones

• they often paid hommage to Hollywood and to the European masters (Renoir, Vigo etc.) with direct references in the films

• new producers appeared to back the films, including via co-productions with Italy

• the group helped each other get films started, taking on associate producer roles, providing script ideas or appearing as actors in small parts

• the directors were the product of years of film viewing and criticism rather than film school.

Tirez sur le pianiste as a ‘new wave’ film

In many ways this was the closest of any film to the ideal new wave film:

• Set on the streets of Paris and the mountains near Grenoble

• Based on a novel by the ‘hardest’ of ‘hard-boiled’ / ‘pulp’ writers, David Goodis

• Mixes American culture and traditional French popular culture, personified by French superstar Aznavour (arguably the most popular singer in Europe in the second half of the twentieth century)

• Looks back to the ‘tricks’ and devices of ‘silent’ cinema

• Although it does refer to ‘genre’ (like the quality films), it is a distinct mixture of generic references, prefiguring the ‘hybrid’ films of postmodern cinema in the 1990s. Ostensibly a ‘gangster/film noir’, Tirez sur le pianiste is also a comedy and a tragedy about the life and loves of Charlie Kohler. (This particular mixture recalls Alfred Hitchcock – a major influence on all Truffaut’s films.)

• A ‘personal’ film for Truffaut it includes several familiar elements from his other films, including familiar actors, childish, weak men and strong, ‘mysterious’ women. The mixture of ‘dark’ and ‘light’ tones is also a Truffaut trait

• Photographed with his usual flair by Raoul Coutard

• The film offers a running commentary on cinema itself – the camera is ‘knowing’, almost ‘winking’ at the audience at various moments.

Charles Aznavour as Charlie in Tirez sur le pianiste

The critics

The film was poorly received at the time. Ironically, the ‘faults’ which critics pointed to are now accepted as commonplace – the genre mixing and change of tone. Consider Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 film Pulp Fiction. The famous scene between John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson featuring a discussion about Big Macs (and the talk about Madonna in Reservoir Dogs) is similar in many ways to the inconsequential chat in the car between the two gangsters and their captives – first with Charlie and Léna about women and lingerie and then with Fido about gadgets and foreign clothes.

Truffaut as auteur

Although at first glance very different from the two more well known films that preceded and followed it, Tirez sur le pianiste is immediately recognisable as a ‘Truffaut film’. It is the first of a series of ‘genre explorations’, including three further films based on ‘hard boiled pulp fiction’ – La marieé etait en noir (The Bride Wore Black) (1967) (in which Jeanne Morea plays Julie Kohler) and La Sirène du Mississippi (Mississippi Mermaid) (1969), both based on stories by Cornell Woolrich (best known as the author of Rear Window) and Vivement dimanche! (Finally, Sunday!) (1982), Truffaut’s last film based on a story by Charles Williams.

Charlie is a typical ‘Truffaut male’, seeking the love of a ‘magical and mysterious’ woman, who is far stronger and more confident – not least in the physical sense, since Truffaut males are short and wear a puzzled expression. This also carries over into the the quartet of films which follow on from the autobiographical story of Antoine Doinel in Les quatre cent coups. The best example is probably Baisers volés (Stolen Kisses) (1968) in which Antoine becomes involved in comic attempts to become a private detective in his pursuit of a young woman.

Truffaut’s ‘personal’ style of filmmaking can also be identified in the mix of the comic and the tragic (often abruptly switching between the two), in his love of cinema and all its devices, and in his reverence for ‘masters’ such as Hitchcock and Renoir.

Discussion questions

1. Is Tirez sur le pianiste more accessible now than when first released? Has modern cinema absorbed the ideas that Truffaut thought were experimental (the genre mixing, changes in tone etc.)?

2. What kind of a hero is Charlie? How do we understand his attitude towards women (and that of the other male characters)?

3. Does the film have anything to say about French and American culture in the way it ‘plays’ with American genres like the gangster and the film noir? Is the representation of men and women in the film a reversal of the usual American representation?

References

Don Allen (1986) Finally Truffaut, London: Paladin

Jill Forbes (1998) ‘The French Nouvelle Vague’ in Hill and Church Gibson op cit Susan Hayward (2000) Key Concepts in Cinema Studies, London: Routledge

John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson (1998) The Oxford Guide to Film Studies, Oxford: OUP

Jim Hillier (ed) (1986) Cahiers du Cinéma: The 1960s, Harvard: Harvard University Press

Diana Holmes and Robert Ingram (1998) François Truffaut, Manchester: Manchester University Press

Graham Petrie (1970) The Cinema of François Truffaut, London and New York: Zwemmer and Barnes

This work, and any part of it, is copyright. Putting any part of this work to any unauthorised use is a punishable offence and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproduction, translation, copying, micro-filming, electronic storage or any other electronic re-working.