The Modern Age of the French Cinema From the New Wave to the Present

Jean-Michel Frodon*
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Construire politiquement
One of the most remarkable episodes in the history of the film-making that came out of May 1968 cannot be seen -- at least not directly -- on movie screens. In this particular instance, it was a case of challenging the very film-making process by inventing new equipment adapted to the needs of a new cinema, with this equipment itself being produced in a new approach to the relations in the workplace. In 1967, Jean-Pierre Beauviala, a brilliant young engineer, junior electronics lecturer at the University of Grenoble and a great cinema fan, decided to make a film. The project was eminently political in that it was to tell of the place of man in the city. When he realized that the equipment corresponding to the project as he had imagined it did not exist, he decided to construct such equipment. He therefore built a prototype, whose main originality was that it gave a single reference to both film and audio takes: the exact time the images and the sounds were captured was recorded in clear form on both the film stock and on the magnetic tape. This system made it possible after the fact to reconstitute the simultanaeity of events which the shooting technique had by necessity separated. It did not just revolutionize the practical working conditions in terms of directing or editing the film; it pushed back the frontiers of "cinema - recording". Modern film-making, as it was conceived of up until then, allowed simultaneous takes of only one sound and one image at the same time, and had to make use of artifices in order to show on film the existence of two different, possibly even contradictory, but co-existing realities. Without relinquishing the prerogatives of film directing, Beauviala's "time-marking" made it possible to enlarge the "cinema-window on the world" from the dimensions of a picture frame to those of a picture window.

No sooner had the people at Eclair, the first manufacturer of the camera, seen photos of what Beauviala had produced by playing around with an Arriflex camera, that they hired him as a consultant engineer. They were indifferent to the political and esthetic commitments behind the prototype, but were very much attracted to the invention and the inventor, because of the ingenuity of the system and the practical solutions it offered. At Eclair, which manufactured cameras designed by André Coutant, Beauviala brought out the first lightweight 16 millimetre camera, with single system sound. A few barricades later, Eclair had been bought out by a British producer (Harry Saltzman, who got rich on James Bond films); Debrie, the other jewel in the crown of French camera manufacturing, had also changed hands. Beauviala set up his own company, still in Grenoble. He did not have money, but he did have ideas and friends. Above all, he was determined to work in accordance with the needs of his film-maker friends. Among them, the best known French film-maker was Jean Rouch, who occcupied a particularly good position both to formulate the needs of an experienced documentary film-maker, and to publicize the developments of the young company, Aäton, set up shop in a former chair factory. Among these precious friends was the crème de la crème of American militant documentary film-makers (Pennebaker, Leacock, the Maysles brothers, Barbara Kopple), as well as Louis Malle, Jean-Luc Godard, Félix Guattari.... In addition, several technicians and engineers, mostly from the Eclair days, were tempted by the ambition and the spirit of the adventure, and joined Beauviala in Grenoble. Despite their unkempt appearance and their ignorance of the elementary rules of business management, the creativity of the team and the prestige of its supporters convinced financiers to invest in the operation, which openly defied the most fundamental notions of hierarchy and company discipline. However the end product still needed to be defined: two competing projects at the same time stimulated and dispersed the strength of the group. On the one hand, at the instigation of Jean-Philippe Carson, a documentary film activist living in the US and connected with the Black Panthers as well as third world organisations, a "bush camera", as simple and robust as possible, using salvaged or easily pinched accessories and film stock. It would be used by guerilla fighters on the scene of their action. Producing this camera was part of a global project of "poor" use of the image by revolutionaries, something Carson called "Cinéminima": the rules called for teaching, as well as independence vis-a-vis industry and those in power. Though Beauviala shared his friend's strictly militant motives, he was for theoretical reasons reticent about the device he was supposed to manufacture: the "bush camera" required integrated audio recording on board. And taking the political reasoning behind modern film-making to its logical conclusion, he realized that by linking image and sound in this way they would in fact be enslaved to each other: the wealth of each would be lost, as would the wealth of relations that unite and oppose them when recorded separately. In short, on this issue as on a good many others, he was twenty years ahead of his time in foreseeing what audio-visual indigence would be.

The second project was technically speaking much more sophisticated, and less "political" in appearance: it was the cat-on-the-shoulder camera (again 16 millimetres). An intelligent camera, meeting both the physical and technical requirements of the film-maker / camera operator: lightweight, rational, ergonomic. Plus the famous universal time marking. Intended to alter the working conditions of all it users, it also presented much more promising commercial perspectives for a company that was perpetually on the verge of bankruptcy. Aäton worked on both ideas simultaneously, until Carson died in an accident in 1974. But the "cat-on-the-shoulder", which Beauviala preferred, made more rapid progress, soon winning over camera operators, technicians and buyers at the BBC, Swedish Television, and then Société Française de Production and French Channel One. The first mock-up of the 16 millimetre camera shown in 1971 -- it would ultimately be delivered in 1973 as the Aaton 7A -- presented unheard of qualities in terms of ease of handling, reliability and accuracy. The future seemed to look very good for Aäton. But in 1974-75, as they did with most of the initiatives that came out of May 1968, the dominant laws of society caught up with Beauviala's doubly pilot experience, innovative in the technical field, as well as in its alternate organisation of the mode of production. They were stormy times for the company in Grenoble; still the ship did not sink. Better than that, the workshops were starting to deliver cameras fitted with video assists, making it possible to follow everything the camera filmed on a screen. The set-up in itself had enormous potential (and also dangers, as will be shown below by the tangent the Louma was to take). In developing it, however, Beauviala conducted research on miniaturisation, which naturally led him to invent ... another camera: a video camera named "la Paluche". This camera was the size of a microphone, and just as easy to handle at the end of a lead. As always with Aäton, the technical invention went hand in hand with propitious theoretical considerations, this time on the respective advantages of cinema and video techniques.

Jean-Pierre Beauviala eventually achieved his initial objective: clear time marking on the film stock and on the audio tape. By altering the shooting conditions for both small independent film-making and editing, he made it possible for reportage and investigative film-makers to work outside of the norms set out for 35 millimetre studio work. Aaton's "technical" adventure was not just that of a brilliant inventor whose only connection to May 1968 was his long hair and anti-establishment vocabulary, though Beauviala does have a fertile mind and impressive technical knowledge. Yet it was by asking new questions, political questions on the cinema, and by rebelling against the habits and conformism that prevailed among manufacturers, that he invented a multitude of mechanical, optical and electronic responses. His solutions were so seminal that major international film and video equipment manufacturers then attempted to imitate or steal them. In February 1985, Arriflex sued Aaton, thus causing the company to go into receivership; however the firm was born again from its ashes.

* in charge of the cinema section of "Le Monde"

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