“All the mountain tops around are converted into fortresses, and the whole place runs over with soldiers, and seems to breathe the spirit of the colossal Lion of Belfort. This wonderful monument is partly cut out of the living rock at the foot of the castle, and seems always to gaze fiercely forth upon Alsace and upon Germany.”
So wrote a New York Times correspondent in 1894 about Belfort, a small city tucked away in a remote but strategic corner of north-eastern France, not far from the Swiss border. And the Lion, a sphinx-like red-sandstone beast some 22 metres long and 11 metres high, is still there beneath the garrison-like castle. It peers towards the city’s sole remaining movie-house, located in a former abattoir, run by international chain Pathé and, for the majority of the present decade home to Entrevues – Festival du Film Belfort, which celebrated its 24th edition at the end of last year.
There had been a forerunner festival in the city for several years before 1986, but Entrevues was instantly a more high-profile event thanks to the renown of its founder Janine Bazin, widow of legendary critic and cinema theorist André Bazin and described by Jean-Luc Godard as “a star who lit up the history of cinema.”
In an area not exactly over-brimming with cultural activities, Entrevues is organised with the support of the local council in collaboration with other artistic bodies, such as Paris’s venerable Cinémathèque Française.
Whereas the capital’s residents enjoy easy access to what’s effectively a 365-day film-festival, those in more far-flung localities are generally stuck with standard multiplex fare. Only half of the Pathé-Belfort’s 14 screens were dedicated to Entrevues during its nine-day run, festival-goers rubbing shoulders with popcorn-buyers en route to see Robert Pattinson in Twilight – Chapitre 2: Tentation and Woody Harrelson in Bienvenue a Zombieland.
And there was plenty of shoulder-rubbing going on during the 24th Entrevues, as many screenings were notably busy, especially with students from local schools and colleges – the Pathé being one of few entertainment options available to the youth in what’s a rather sleepy spot, especially after dark.)
Foreign visitors and journalists are clearly a secondary priority at what’s officially an “international” film-festival – a disappointingly small handful of movies have English subtitles. However, as an event designed to bring an eclectic range of challenging, seldom-screened work to adventurous local audiences, Entrevues must be counted a resounding success.
The programming is carefully divided into a multiplicity of sections and sidebars. And while new work is showcased – there are four competitions: long fiction, short fiction, long documentary and short documentary – the emphasis is heavily on archival fare.
I caught a smattering of fresh material, the only really notable discovery therein being Atlantiques, a poetic, elliptical 16-minute study of Senegalese refugees written, directed and shot by Mati Diop, the 27-year-old star of Claire Denis’ 35 Shots of Rum.
This year’s sections devoted to older fare included retrospectives dedicated to neglected auteurs Louis Skorecki (French) and Adolfo Arrieta (Spanish), a survey of the representation of workers in cinema, selections of films influenced by Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) and those inspired by Dziga Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera (1929) plus the first nine features of Brian De Palma.
Especially intriguing was the well-stocked sidebar devoted to directors and actors famed for their collaborations with one another – from Marlene Dietrich and Josef Von Sternberg to Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese. Among these, I was particularly drawn to the legendarily stormy pairing of Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski. The delirious conquistador fable Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) and the lesser-known Woyzeck (1979) were both shown from fine (but unsubtitled) 35-millmetre prints.
Belfort’s military backdrop proved an ideal place to experience the latter, adapted from Georg Büchner’s play and tracing an oppressed soldier’s jagged, jealousy-spurred descent into madness – almost entirely unfolding within the barracks and streets of a garrison town. The astonishingly well-preserved Renaissance streets and houses remain, despite Kinski’s pop-eyed histrionics, the real scene-stealers here.
English subtitles were also unnecessary for the screening of Francois Truffaut’s classic 1959 feature-debut, The 400 Blows (Les Quatre cent coups), starring Jean-Pierre Léaud as wayward schoolboy Antoine Doinel.
With more obscure titles, I tried to base my viewings around subtitled prints, which led me to a pair of pictures from the section devoted to Swiss cinema from 1964-1984.
I lasted only two reels of Daniel Schmid’s Violanta (1977), a stodgy period melodrama in the Catherine Cookson mode only partially redeemed by a cameo from a youthful Gerard Depardieu.
But Claude Goretta’s The Wedding Day (Le Jour de noces, 1970) proved a real find and an absolute delight for pretty much the whole of its brisk 71-minute running time. A loose adaptation of a Guy de Maupassant story, rather in the style of early, funny Mike Leigh, it follows members of an urban family as they go for an outing to a rural restaurant, there to stumble across a boisterous but dysfunctional middle-class al fresco wedding party.
Unfussily hilarious and structurally audacious, The Wedding Day is bafflingly little-known for such a gem of a movie – especially as Geneva-born Goretta, now 80, went on only a few years later to enjoy considerable international art-house success with 1977’s The Lacemaker, which propelled Isabelle Huppert to stardom.
Then again, with so few festivals able or willing to undertake such adventurous archive raiding as Entrevues these days, it’s perhaps no surprise that minor masterpieces are falling through the cracks.
Neil Young
