Hidden in plain sight, the films of Maurice Pialat (1925 – 2003) may have eluded the international fame bestowed upon the works of his Nouvelle Vague or neorealist contemporaries, yet his particular form of emotional realism continues to ring timelessly throughout cinema—so much so that he bears more in common with some independent filmmakers today than those of his time. Like the man himself—who was outspoken, passionate and sometimes antagonistic both on and off set—his films followed no distinct movement or style. Incorporating both documentary and narrative aspects, his uncompromising visions followed their own organic rules as productions unfolded. With intense psychological force, disconcertingly disjunctive editing and an uncomfortable focus on the economic, social and psychological margins, Pialat’s films look their audiences straight in the eye with a fearless, respectful challenge. Indeed, he developed quite a fractious relationship with fellow French filmmakers and filmgoers, which culminated in the infamous Cannes incident in 1987. Receiving the coveted Palme d’or for Under the Sun of Satan to a jeering chorus, Pialat raised his fist in victory and quipped “if you do not like me, I can say that I do not like you either.” The prickly ambivalence was mutual; despite his less-than-iconic status, French filmgoers attended more of his films than those of all the New Wave directors combined, his films received regular critical accolades, and today he is one of the most frequently cited influences among French filmmakers.

Pialat’s relatively limited output may not have bolstered his legacy; yet, perhaps, a director so complexly immersed in his work could not survive that many painfully personal films over the course of a single lifetime. Pialat seemed to be perpetually replaying his life and exorcising his own demons through his films (with the exception of his late 80s feature Police). If the script were not already autobiographical, it became so over the course of a production through impromptu revisions and improvisations. And beyond merely telling the story of his family and love relationships, Pialat relived them through the difficult, familial bonds he either formed on the set or brought into the productions by frequently involving former and current romantic partners in his work. For Pialat, the act of filmmaking was inherently personal, and his close and often difficult relationships with cast and crew seemed to ignite and stoke his creative flames. By bringing actors’ offscreen lives into the narrative, ceasing to film actors who no longer interested him, and airing his resentments toward his collaborators via the script, Pialat steeped his films in a bracingly honest emotional truth. Notorious for his sadistic treatment of actors, collaborators and himself, Pialat orchestrated the eruption of emotionally spontaneous moments where the actors were prodded into accessing much deeper emotions and triggering the startling naturalism that seems to reach his viewers intravenously.

Born in the provinces to middle-class, financially troubled parents who left him for long periods of time with his grandparents, Pialat accused them of abandoning him at an early age (the origins of his first feature Naked Childhood). As a young man, he turned to art, yet struggled to make a living as a painter and, after a period of deep depression, took sales positions. His first films, in fact, were comic shorts for a company party at Olivetti. Noticed by the producer Pierre Braunberger, he received financing and encouragement to make the short documentary L’Amourexiste, which won many awards and eventually enabled him—after years of television shorts and government film work—to secure the funds to complete Naked Childhood at the age of forty-four.

With the startling Naked Childhood, he introduced many recurring elements: the autobiographical aspect, the provincial setting, the mix of professional actors with non-actors within an ambiguously semi-documentarian realm, the sense of eternal loss and displacement expressed both through the story and the structure, and the breakdown of the family, the patriarchy, history and tradition. Without judgment or fanfare, his lost souls fight irrevocable forces often through unpredictable, paradoxical, self-destructive behavior that itself seems uncontrollable. Betrayed, resentful figures who cannot quite articulate their feelings nor change them—like Suzanne and her father in To Those We Love or the couple in We Will Not Grow Old Together—they connect most deeply just as they push away.

Forgoing the common buttresses of narrative storytelling—establishing shots, suspense, mood music, transitions, backstory, reaction shots, special effects, gratuitous violence or sex—Pialat’s cinema simply shows what needs to be shown without feeling cool or underdressed. Grounded in the vitality and transience of the present moment, the true drama of life does not need underscoring or any assistance and, in fact, may suddenly transform into poetic rhapsody despite itself. From this place, his films seem to move within their own time, a time that always feels palpably present—regardless of the era in which the film is set—and wrenchingly emotional. With no distinct arc or center to grasp onto, and the audience is placed in the same confusing, chaotic, abandoned space as the characters, having to sometimes feel their way through a scene as if they too are players in Pialat’s parallel reality. With the gaps that naturally occur in Pialat’s translation of time, there is a sense of occasionally missing out, of having to deduce who someone is or what they are talking about from other clues or, finally, realizing it does not matter, because to Pialat—whose characters often talk over each other, mumble or use heavy slang—it is that fleeting, complex expression or silent gesture that communicates the unaffected, inarticulate depths. In his words, Pialat’s ideal cinema is one “where time would no longer exist, where you would go deeply into what you had to say and really say it.”

Even when working with a script, Pialat operated in an open, instinctive way toward his productions, charting a brave new path each time. Always prepared for necessary changes and thriving on obstacle, limitation and accident, Pialat had to have been as electrically present as his cinema. His films do not seem to age because, for him, it was a living cinema, one locked in an endless, emotional present, alive with a freshness and vitality, and captured as if still in motion by his exacting eye. Pialat agreed with film critic François Chevassu’s comment that his cinema creates and records its own life: “Realism, after all, is filming the scene that we are in the act of living.”

The Harvard Film Archive proudly presents all of Pialat’s features with a selection of short films for a rare retrospective of this uniquely masterful force of cinema and life. – Brittany Gravely