Douglas Messerli | Two Films by François Reichenbach [Introduction]

TWO FILMS BY FRANÇOIS REICHENBACH

by Douglas Messerli

 

The French-born composer, filmmaker, and art collector François Reichenbach, born into a wealthy family in 1921, is best known in the United States—if he is remembered in this country at all—for his many award-winning documentaries in the cinéma vérité mode, including The Deep South (1956), The Marines (1957), Burial of John Kennedy (1963), Brigitte Bardot's Trip to the USA (1967), American Prison (1971), In Monaco (1973), the Oscar-winning television series Arthur Rubinstein (1979), Maurice Ravel (1980), Jacques-Henri Lartigue (1980), Julio César Chavez (1990), and Michel Legrand (1992). The two films I review here, both from 1954, are Nus masculins (Male Nudes) and Last Spring.

     As Herve Picard noted in connection with the two films restored by the French Cinémathèque in 2016 which I am about to review:

 

“Traveler, musicologist, collector, enthusiast, François Reichenbach was everywhere and was interested in everything. Legend has it that he was always present at the right time: when he started up his camera, something unforeseeable happened in front of the lens. He turned with unparalleled ease, the camera was the extension of his arm, the viewfinder his third eye and the image the reflection of his desire, that of capturing unusual and poetic images. His life will be constantly driven by this desire to film bodies, wild landscapes and cities, to record sounds and voices.”

 

     Moreover, what the French have long known that international audiences rarely perceived is that Reichenbach also was an openly gay man for most of his life, and very early in his career directed two short gay films in 1954, influenced by both Jean Cocteau and Jean Genet, the second of which in my selection, Last Spring, is acclaimed by many to be one of the best gay films ever—most certainly of its time.

     Writing on Last Spring and the accompanying, only slightly longer “footnote” to the other, Nus masculins (Male Nudes), film critic Călin Boto describes a distinction in French filmmaking and literature between two opposing traditions of representing homosexuality, the gay or “homophile” one and the “queer” one. Boto further explains the distinctions:

 

“The first one [Last Spring] was in the air at the time when [Genet’s] Un chant d’amour was shot and released. A post-war activist movement, homophilia used a humanistic discourse to oppose laws that incriminated homosexuality. One of its recurrent preoccupations was to desexualize the LGBT+ community, an eternal obsession of its detractors. Meaning, if you prick us, we bleed. Well, it’s clear that Genet wasn’t all that preoccupied with homophilia. Because the flaming creatures that he himself sets alight in his short fiction, the thieves, the bandits, the slobs, the immigrants are far from the positive examples that homophilia was trying to push to the front. Genet is too dirty for the homophiles and anticipates the impious attitude of the queer movement. If you prick us, it will turn us on. Just a few minutes from the film, which encompass the short oneiric escapade of the two jailbirds into nature, can be attributed to a homophile heritage. Gentle touches, running around through the trees, flowers as sexual metaphors, a love set in the middle of nature, because nature cannot be dirty, and so any act of love that takes place in its midst is cleansed of its social stains.”

 

     Unlike Genet, Reichenbach was a true homophile, presenting his figures in both films in natural settings, from which only in Last Spring does one character “stray.” For this very reason, certainly compared with the highly poeticized presentations of gay life by Cocteau and the raw blood and sweat depictions of Genet, Reichenbach’s two short works may seem, as Boto suggests, somewhat “dim.” “We can call them notes, because that is what they actually are, since both give off an air of incompleteness. Even if they are to be taken together, as they should be, the sensation doesn’t dissipate.”

 

Los Angeles, December 13, 2020

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (December 2020).