Maurice Pialat

Maurice Pialat, born 31st August 1925, is a French film director who created a body of work considered among the best of modern French cinema. His movies limned domestic desperation and were notable for their immediacy and difficulty. Many of the 10 feature films Pialat made were nominated for major film awards. À nos amours (1983) won the César Award for best film, and Sous le soleil de Satan (1987) won the Palme d'Or at Cannes.
From his first feature (L'enfance nue, on deprived childhood), Pialat's films have shown an almost ethnographic concern with unglamorous areas of French society: difficult adolescents (Passe ton bac d'abord), semi-hooligans (Loulou), the bitter breakdown of a couple (Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble) and cancer (La gueule ouverte), combining a quasi cinma-vrit approach with the reworking of deeply personal matters. Although Pialat has claimed to be fed up with realism, and even though he has made forays into genre films with Police and Under The Sun of Satan, his cinema is still within a realistic idiom, fusing the New Wave concern with location shooting and contemporary setting with the intimate realism of the central European cinema of the 1960s. His films draw on basic realist strategies such as the use of nonprofessional or little-known actors, the frequent recourse to improvisation and colloquial language, hand-held camerawork, long takes, and shooting without a finished script. If these strategies traditionally produce a sense of immediacy and authenticity, they often combine, in Pialat's films, with a rare violence.
Pialat has earned a reputation as a difficult director. But part of his method consists precisely of inscribing his own personal relationships within the fabric of his films, as epitomized in A nos amours by the Pialat/Bonnaire couple. Pialat le terrible, as he was dubbed by a French paper, sometimes makes headlines, and occasionally the courtrooms. This would be mere gossip if it did not echo the very subject matter of his films. In the same way as Sam Fuller defined cinema as a battleground, Pialat's filmmaking might be described as belonging to the boxing ring. In Pialat's cinema, contact is more likely to be made through violence than through tenderness, particularly within the family, where the boxing ring overlaps with the oedipal stage. This is true both thematically (families and couples tearing each other apart) and in the way Pialat's films address their spectators. Pialat does not pull his punches, and his cinema, in the words of Editor Yann Dedet, tends more towards emotion than comprehension.
For one of his last films, Le Garçu (1995), he returned to childhood and family themes, casting his son Antoine, as the four-year-old victim of adulterous parents. He died in 11th January 2003 and with it, closed a career dominated by a rigorous, never facile, view of humanity.