International Genre Spotlight: French Sci-Fi

Welcome back to my kitchen for your next serving of Eye Protein! Next week we will be dropping a GoodTrash GenreCast show on 12 Monkeys. As you may know, Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys is based on the 1963 short film, La Jetée, directed by Chris Marker. It has been our habit here at Eye Protein to talk about genre in terms of international cinema lately and I thought we would just keep riding that train. This week let’s talk a bit about French science fiction.

A discussion of French science fiction could get really huge and unwieldy, so I am going to narrow things down a bit and discuss French sci-fi in terms of the late 60s and The New Wave. This only makes sense because the inspiration for 12 Monkeys comes from this movement and period. Here’s the quick crash course on the French New Wave: it’s a movement that began in the late 50’s that lasted into the 60’s that rejected the prestige cinema of France which was mostly adaptation of novels in favor of more contemporary stories. Their style was experimental ranging for long takes to jump cuts and generally DIY full of location shooting and improvised scripts.

These filmmakers, such as Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, and Claude Chabrol were former film critics that wanted to play with the conventions of film, particularly genre. There was also a smaller group within the New Wave called the Left Bank, which included Agnes Varda, Alain Resnais, and Chris Marker. The Left Bank was bit more artistic in character but that did not mean that they would not try the hand at genre experiments as well. However, the whole of the New Wave is not particularly marked by science fiction. Mostly they play with the film noir and the romantic comedy. However, there a few New Wave science fiction films that provide an interesting counterpoint to American science fiction in the late 60’s.

First, of course, we should talk about La Jetée in lieu of this week’s show. This film is the most experimental in our snapshot of French sci-fi and that it because it is almost entirely composed of snapshots. That’s right folks, its a motion picture without pictures in motion. It does not get much more bare bones than that, but the film becomes a brilliant meditation on memory, time, and fatalism. Much of which is retained and expanded upon in 1995 with Gilliam’s adaptation. Our main character is definitely being exploited by the powers that be and we will see more of that in the next films.

Staying on the Left Bank, we move to Alain Resnais’ Je T’aime, Je T’aime another time-travel film from 1968. This film is again a man exploited for time travel purposes but an accident causes him to be trapped in a feedback loop of past events, Quantum Leap style. However, it’s really not a very science-y science fiction here. Although his body disappears from the device, which looks like a cross between a couch and and a garlic clove, it’s really more like a feedback loop of memories than time-travel. What I mean by that is that he doesn’t act differently and change his past to alter his future, he is more or less doomed to relive that past. Interestingly there are slight differences in the repeated memories, not for his agency in changing them but more from the mere malleability and fallible nature of memory itself.

Moving to the heavy hitters of the New Wave, we look at the godfather, Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville. This film is like what Equilibrium would have been had it been intellectually consistent and a film noir (You can listen to Dalton and I nearly end our friendship talking about that here). A machine-run world has outlawed all emotion and free thought and our trench coat wearing protagonist must set things right. There are no sets used, it’s all just modernist architecture in contemporary Paris. Despite the slightly more commercial plot, Godard fills the script with a library of literary references from all corners of world literature. Sure the hardboiled film noir was a B movie in the States, but in Godard’s hands, it’s a treatise of love, freedom and poetry.

My observation in this very brief sketch of sci-fi is that French science fiction from the New Wave was not oriented around special effects which a major difference when compared to American films such as Planet of the Apes or 2001: A Space Odyssey. These films are all about the special effects and about humanity in the broadest strokes, mostly in terms of evolution. Contrast that with this far more paired down aesthetics of these French films which are much more interested in human psychology and memory. Thus the difference in scale.

There really is no reason why there could not have been high special-effects features coming out of France. In fact, there have been. Don’t forget that The Fifth Element is a French film. Since the American counterparts seem to be dealing with life on the grandest scale, massive budgets and huge productions makes sense. Since, these French science fiction films are dealing with the most basic questions of the human individual, memory, freedom, and emotion we see much smaller productions that really only provide a veneer for these much more philosophical preoccupations. Though there are ideas in American science fiction of the late 60’s the films seek to engage the viewer more or less viscerally through spectacle, be it the special-effects of 2001 or the uncanny make-up of Planet of the Apes. French science fiction, on the other hand downplays spectacle in favor of an engagement with the intellect. That’s not to say that films cannot be both nor that 2001 is an intellectual lightweight, but all the energy of these films is in the ideas first which outweigh the production. Conversely, American films tended (and typically still tend) to obsessed with spectacle and are fine with ideas so long as spectacle is achieved.

So if you’re a little more Star Trek (as in the TV series) than you are Star Wars in your science fiction tastes in that it’s the ideas that turn your crank, an exploration of French science fiction may be worth your time.