We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
FRANCE
Alexandre Astruc and Roger Vadim are best-known and are perhaps most representative of the current hopelessness of French intellectualism. Astruc's first film (after being a critic, theoretician and novelist), Le Rideau Cramoisi (1952) was to me greatly over-rated by the English critics and owed what virtues it had to the German cinema of the twenties. His second film, Les Mauvaises Rencontres (1955), I have unfortunately not seen but it aroused a storm of controversy and was said to be an accurate reflection of the cynical boredom and self-corruption of the young Paris intellectuals of the fifties. Vadim's talents have been partly obscured by the sex-exploitation of his star (and for a time wife) Brigitte Bardot, but Et Dieu crea la Femme(\95d) and Sait-on jamais? (1957) both accurately interpreted the amoral, transient and alltoo-cynical atmosphere of a certain strata of the young generation in Paris. Vadim has, too, a visual camera-sense that should not be dismissed.
Like Vadim, all other new names in French cinema are of young men — Louis Malle, assistant to Cousteau on the wonderful Le Monde du Silence (1956), whose Ascenseur pour I'echafaud (1957) has not been shown in England; Claude BernardAubert, whose film of a French military patrol in the Vietnam jungle, Patrouille de Choc (1957) was an honest attempt to comment on French overseas policy, and the same is reported of Marcel Camus's Mort en Fraude (1958), about the Indo-China war, which I have not seen; and Norbert Carbonneaux, whose work again has not been shown in England but is said to have a 'truly personal sense of humour'.1 Two recent films which, in spite of obvious faults, did strike me as revealing new exciting talent and approach were Claude Chabrol's Le Beau Serge (1958), an independently financed picture wholly shot on location in a village near Limoges, made with a raw integrity and human understanding; and Francois Truffaut's Les Mistons (1958), which had a freshness and youthful vitality which was stimulating. Meantime, we await the new Marcel Came, Les Tricheurs (1958) which has created quite a storm in
1 International Film Annual, No. 2 (Calder, 1958), article by Jean Queval and Gilbert Salachas.
741