‘An unclassifiable filmmaker in 20th century French cinema, Guy Gilles is the director of a little-known body of work, melancholic and poetic, that combines nostalgia for the past with a haunting evocation of the present. His work was a passion of many of the most respected French actors and actresses, and it remains a favorite of film buffs, who love his films for their acute literary references and close attention to private emotion.
From Love of the Sea (1965) to Nefertiti (1996), Guy Gilles developed his films on the sidelines of the New Wave, his work sometimes colliding painfully with the contemporary trends, and often facing the indifference of a public confused by the precious uniqueness of his vision.
‘It is in precarious conditions – three years of work and a more than limited budget – that, in his first film, Guy Gilles turned to the sea for a romantic love story of two protagonists who do not live with the same intensity. Already, in the film’s many obsessions (thematic and aesthetic), we see the lifelong interests of its director. We meet for the first time the actor who would become his favorite (Patrick Jouane) and number of stars attracted by the enthusiasm of the young filmmaker. He will always convince stars to volunteer their contributions to his cinema: Jean-Claude Brialy, Alain Delon, Jean-Pierre Léaud and Juliet Greco appear in his work repeatedly, contributing to their poetic strangeness a sense of timelessness that one can already see clearly in as early a work as Love of the Sea.
‘This atmosphere is also reflected in Au pan coupé (1967), starring Patrick Macha Meril Jouane, who created his own production company, Machafilms, in order to enable the film to be made. The charm of this sensitive film rests on the memory of a lost love. It shows none of the indifference of the work being made and celebrated at the time, by such as Jean-Louis Bory or Marguerite Duras.
‘While Gilles hoped to shoot his next film, Le Clair de terre (1969), in his native Algeria, he was forced by circumstance to do so in Tunisia. This delay forced him to replace Simone Signoret in the central role of the retired teacher. Edwige Feuillère accepted the role, and brings much to the film’s character and its imperial, faded elegance. Considered Gilles’s masterpiece, Le Clair de terre is a concentration of all of his art, lingering between nostalgia and modernity.
‘He would never again find this delicate balance, even in Absences répétées (1972), despite winning the Prix Jean Vigo for the film. Darker than his previous films, Absences répétées follows the deadly process of a young man isolating himself in a haze between drugs and a desire to commit suicide. Apart from the very impressionistic Jardin qui bascule (1974) starring Delphine Seyrig, Guy Gilles made no feature films for the next decade.
‘Le Crime d’amour (1982) is a flawed film situated between a police investigation and the story of a crazy and tragic love affair between a young man and an older woman (Macha Meril), and it exudes a strange and powerful latent homosexual drive. The film’s staging rarely succeeds in articulating these various levels. This failure is even more obvious with Nuit docile (1987) which was met with general indifference from both critics and the French public.
‘Although he was already very ill, Gilles then began to make the film Nefertiti, an ambitious international co-production that exhausted him and was considered a fiasco. In 1995, an unfinished version was shown very quietly on television. On February 3, 1996, Gilles Guy died from complications from AIDS. His brother, Luc Bernard, later devoted a documentary to Gilles’s work in 1999: Letter to my brother Guy Gilles, filmmaker too soon.
‘Parallel to his achievements in film, Guy Gilles was a prolific director for television. He directed a very highly regarded documentary about Marcel Proust (Proust, art and pain, 1971) and another successful documentary about Jean Genet (Holy martyr and poet, 1974). He was also a cultishly beloved photographer and painter, and he wrote several books, most of them as yet unpublished.’ — Cinematheque Francaise
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Stills
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Further
Guy Gilles Website
Guy Gilles @ IMDb
‘Absences répétées’: A Guy Gilles Retrospective @ Cinematheque Francaise
‘(Re) découvrir la splendeur des films de Guy Gilles relève de l’urgence…’
Guy Gilles @ Ciné-club
‘L’Amour à la mer de Guy Gilles (1964) – Analyse et critique’
Video: ‘Guy GILLES sur GODARD et la nouvelle vague’
‘Les courts métrages de Guy Gilles’
Hommage à Guy Gilles
‘Je suis formaliste, mais la forme est l’expression de la sensibilité,’ Guy Gilles
‘Guy Gilles, Nouvelle vague proustienne’
DVD: 3 films by Guy Gilles
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Extras
Les films de Guy GILLES, 1958-1972
Guy GILLES, souvenirs
Marcel PROUST et Guy GILLES
Rétrospective Guy Gilles. Présentation par Marcos Uzal
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Une vision plastique du monde (1967)
by Guy Gilles
I fell in love with Henri Langlois, the Director of our Cinematheque, the day I heard him say to Henry Chapier, who interviewed him for the French Television, that the cinema was, you should never forget it, first and foremost a plastic art.
Great creators like Eisenstein, Murnau or Stroheim had opened magnificent doors on this road and, with the exception of Hitchcock and a few others, with their disappearance these paths were deserted.
I think that it is impossible to translate in other ways than the image and the plastic, cinematographic poetry, in the Wellesian sense of the word: “the camera is an eye in the poet’s head”.
Neither painting, nor literature, nor related to any other existing art, the cinematograph is a plastic vision of the world – this having nothing to do with aesthetics, because if I can not do even a plan, in a way other than that which corresponds to my visual vision of everything, it is the same way and above all, of course, impossible to film a feeling, an idea, which is in opposition to my convictions politics or with my heart.
A flower, a wall, a street or the face of Greta Garbo are, I believe, also “vehicles” of poetry and sources of emotion. It all depends on the gaze on them.
Author of my films, I take full responsibility. I believe in the importance of every detail, plan as well as word, framing as well as sound, scenery, choice of actors, music.
More than the title of director, I would like the one invented by Sternberg of “commissioner”. A true film author is responsible for everything, of which he must of course have deep knowledge. That’s why I wanted to be able to be my own cameraman, my own director of photography and I would like, like Chaplin, to know how to write the music of my films.
I believe that a film creator must have an idea and the science of each element of the film: script, dialogue, image, cutting (sound, words, sounds and music) editing. (Resnais, Bresson, Melville or Godard for example).
The rest being, as François Truffaut puts it, a question of balance to be found, of the dosage of all the elements and, finally, of that inexplicable something that makes the mystery and the beauty of the cinematograph.
From there, if I am very strict with myself, I am on the contrary very free and very open to the work of the other men of cinema. We can, as François Truffaut still says, draw his plans as Eisenstein or Hitchcock, or shoot in 16mm and color with a crazy camera like some young American filmmakers, the important thing is the film. A beautiful movie is a beautiful movie.
Since my first short film in 16mm and in black and white, Sun off, until the Pan Coupé, as in TV shows that I made for my friend Roger Stéphane, there is not a single idea or an image that I have turned according to my heart. To resume the beautiful article by Sylvain Godet (about a film Rouch), I also believe that it is necessary in this hard and beautiful job of cinema “to win the right to film the sunset or the sunrise” , and I will try to deserve it, and to forget those who are on the side of the chromos …
The sunrise and the sunset, these enchantments, are the heart of the beating nature, and the trace of time.
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19 of Guy Gilles’s 54 films
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Au biseau des baisers (1959)
‘Algiers, summer, Sunday. A young couple in love goes to Tipaza: strolls on the beach, seeing the dancing, ride scooters. Imperceptibly, there is the initial crack in their harmony. “When kissing the years pass too quickly; avoid, avoid, avoid the broken memories” (Aragon)’ — guygilles.com
the entire film
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L’Amour à la mer (1965)
‘Waltzes between youths displaced from their country characters, feelings of confusion and Daniel Guy, sailors return to France after the war in Algeria, and Genevieve, also moving between Paris and Brest , young people troubled by their dreams of freedom and hesitations between Paris seductions and sunny beaches of summer … ‘ — collaged
Trailer
Excerpt
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Ciné Bijou (1965)
‘All too brief a documentary by the director Guy Gilles, and just in this short poem of a film I could see a poet of the cinema at work. His voice is heard as he recounts the loss of local cinemas in Paris, and the sight of this loss and the fragments of posters on desolate walls outside one specific cinema brought tears to my eyes. The abandoned cinema was about to be converted into a garage, and his filming in black and white evoked memories of the many films of the past not made in colour and in 1965 when this documentary was made colour was almost a necessity in the larger cinemas in Paris. All of this is seen through a teenage youth’s eyes, and I realised this was Guy Gilles recalling his own former years and the attachment he had to such lost places of ordinary cinematic entertainment. To be found on YouTube, and I hope like me viewers will want to hunt down more of this poet of the cinema’s work. The youth in the film is Patrick Jouane. I believe he is in other films by this extraordinary director.’ — jromanbaker
the entire film
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Song of Deeds (1966)
‘Guy Gilles walked through Paris and in the countryside with his camera and took the familiar gestures of passers-by, craftsmen, workers, beggars, and peasants. Ballet of familiar gestures that the author has managed to embellish with a particular and original perspective.’ — MUBI
Excerpt
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Pop Age (1966)
‘Report on the young people of the yéyé period and pop music. Jerk at the Palladium, Beatles, press clippings, questions about the impact of fashion (long hair and accoutrements) and modernity, youth, change, freedom.’ — Letterboxd
Excerpt
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Un dimanche à Aurillac (1967)
‘A whole day in Aurillac, on a rainy Sunday. Angling, shooting range, little ball, walks hand in hand on the roads around. Coffee at the station, the places, the faces and the time that elapses are captured in an impressionist way, without dialogue or comment.’ — unifrance.org
Excerpt
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Wall Engravings (1967)
‘Guy Gilles’s film Au pan coupé (Wall Engravings, 1967) instantiates a complex interweaving of poetry and cinema, as much in its form as in its content. Gilles’s poetic film calls for a closer analysis of how both media are entangled, reaching a state of photogenic intensity (Jean Epstein) that evades narrativity and denies conceptual categories, ushering in what the authors, drawing on Yves Bonnefoy’s theoretical texts, call Gilles’s cinepoetics of presence.’ — Marion Schmid, Hugues Azérad
Excerpt
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Au pan coupé (1967)
‘A boy and a girl meet in a cafe in At the cutaway. They love each other. They will separate, however. There is in Jean a lack, a revolt that makes him powerless to live. To redo the world in its own way is to be free. To Jeanne who wants to understand him, he tells of his troubled adolescence, the prison of children, the runaways and always the desire to break rank … One day he disappears. Jeanne searches for it and discovers the impossibility of forgetting and, in turn, the strength of “lack”. At the Cutaway is the second feature film by Guy Gilles, with a taste of first film. There are two types of films to be made, explains Guy Gilles, the composition film that explains open, free situations. Let’s say that the camera follows people who leave from given points, cross various places and meet other people. Then the inspirational film that is done in an intimate story and revolves around specific characters. The cutaway is an intimate film, but both forms of interest interest me.’ — guygilles.com
Trailer
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Le Partant (1969)
‘In the Saint-Lazare metro and station, a young man dreams of getting away from the dullness and everyday life. Colored snapshots of postcards, metro stations or signs, symbolizing distant destinations, mingle with black and white images of reality in a sort of invitation to travel.’ — Letterboxd
the entire film
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Le Clair de Terre (1970)
‘Pierre Brumeu, a twenty-year-old young man, leads a drab life in Paris with his father, a man he does not understand very well, and his friends Michel and Sophie. Father and son live in the memory of Pierre’s mother, who died too early. One day, Pierre decides to go to Tunisia, the sunny country where he was born…’ — IMDb
Excerpt
Excerpt
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Cote cours, coté champs (1971)
‘On the Champs-Elysees, between windows, cars, passers-by, various characters cross each other. An old lady in Rolls, a young house painter, a young couple. From their fugitive appearance, the montage of sounds and images describes the course of a day on the main avenue.’ — guygilles.com
Excerpt
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Absences répétées (1972)
‘Guy Gilles knows how to show the thousand and one flashes of the daily spectacle and memory. Series of flashes mounted alive, crumbling the real fast notations – which does not prevent the sharpness of the observation nor the precision of the memory. With this swarm of lights and reflections, faces seen in the flash of a glance and objects a second elected by attention or memory, Guy Gilles composes a symphonic pointillist, true poem enriched a soundtrack, music, sounds, words, mounted with as much skillful sensitivity as the images.’ — Le Nouvel Observateur
Excerpt
Excerpt
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Le Jardin qui bascule (1974)
‘This is an interesting film that the public and fans of Delphine Seyrig should seek out. She is given a substantial role and makes the most of it. The film is genuinely odd in that it feels like two unrelated tales; Karl (a hit-man) dispatches his victims coolly. Then he enters the tranquil world of Kate and falls in love, with tragic consequences. The film is beautifully shot and well observed, its complex characters interacting and developing. For no apparent reason Jeanne Moreau appears and sings a song by Stephane Grappelly. There are shades of Rohmer and painterly influences. The French countryside has rarely appeared lovelier. At times the camera simply lingers on a tree or glass which creates an atmosphere. The performances are terrific, Guy Bedos, usually a comedian, plays it straight here with great success. However, the film belongs to Seyrig, one of the most totally underrated and truly great actress’ of theatre and cinema.’ — IMDb
Excerpt
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La loterie de la vie (1977)
‘The real museum in Mexico City is the city, it’s the street. To grasp the impalpable, Guy Gilles decides to tell Mexico by questioning the value of images and sounds, far from tourist clichés.’ — La Cinémathèque française
Excerpt
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Le crime d’amour (1982)
‘A young man (Jacques Penot) finds a woman’s dead body and admits to having committed the crime. He is bisexual, mythomaniac, a bit masochistic, but most of all, he wants to read his name in the headlines of the newspapers.’ — IMDb
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Un garçon de France (1985)
‘The action takes place in Paris in 1959, with some backtracking. A teenager looking for a mother he did not know enters the age of man and discovers love.’ — guygilles.com
Excerpt
Excerpt
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Nuit docile (1987)
‘Jean is a successful painter who leaves his mistress, though he stops intermittently to phone her with explanations. Sometimes she is responsive but other times hangs up on him. Meanwhile, a 16-year-old male prostitute with whom Jean had a brief homosexual affair stalks the painter.’ — Letterboxd
Extracts
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Dis papa, raconte moi là bas (1993)
‘The times however are hard and it is only five years after The crime of love that he manages to film Nuit Docile, with Claire Nebout and Patrick Jouané, perhaps his most personal film. It is then a new homecoming, with a documentary: Dis Papa, tell me there, where Richard Berry interprets the role of a blackfoot father who explains to his film what was his Algeria.’ — guygilles.com
Excerpt
Excerpt
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La lettre de Jean (1994)
‘Guy Gilles’s final film. With Maria Schneider, Luc Bernard.’ — IMDb
Excerpt
Excerpt
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p.s. Hey. ** Charalampos, Hi. I’m okay with the Cannes thing, it was totally expected, but thank you. Ditto re: social media. The new Pet Shop Boys isn’t bad if you’re in the mood for them, imo. Bear hug from here’s near center. ** Dominik, Hi!!! I like the round surround screens at planetariums. I like that you have to look up. Yes, about Cannes, it doesn’t seem surprising. I’m kind of amazed we got as far as we did given how non-normal our film is. Tough road ahead, obviously, but I’m not worried. Dislike would definitely be easier. There are only two people I personally know that I truly hate, which doesn’t seem like an excessive amount. I wouldn’t have recognized Khloe Kardashian from Adam, but Yury was watching some YouTube show about her a couple of days ago, and I paused long enough to get her dreadfulness, about a minute, as I recall. Well, yes, those things should be free, shouldn’t they? Love feeling grateful that a woman who was friends with George Miles just read ‘I Wished’ and contacted me, and we’re going to talk (about him), which was one of the big goals of writing that novel, so whoa, G. ** _Black_Acrylic, Oh, yes, you lads have a fair number, I believe. Dundee’s looks very classical. His band’s new name, while hardly a page turner, is an improvement, yes. Nice goal. And by a Dutch dude. Heel lekker! ** Dev, Hi. I think the first time I went to a planetarium it was for one of those silly laser light shows they used to splash on the ceilings of planetariums with Pink Floyd soundtracks back in the … 80s? N.O. makes sense to me. Awesome about the French preschool. For a while I lived next door to a French school in West LA, and hearing those little voices chirp in French all day was a real pick-me-up. Amazing you knew Japanese. What a dream. I like John Prine a lot. I must admit I mostly know his early work. Is the later work great as well? I saw him live a number times back in the 70s. Yeah, he’s fantastic. I love his voice too. ** Steve, Jesus, the scammer. There’s a special place in hell, etc. No, I don’t think animation will be a route. We’re trying to write this film so it will be as economical to make a possible so we don’t have go through the major four+ year hell to raise funds that we had to do with ‘RT’. Alright, I will do a concentrated dig into Aaliyah. I have to admit, I would never have imagined. ** Justin D, Hi, Justin. Me too, obvs. The June pub. date is just a thought/rumor at this point, but it does seem possible. We can do a double birthday celebration of some sort. Yeah, I feel like, pre-internet, pop stars were still kind of mysterious, and available only fleetingly in magazines and so on as opposed to having their faces and beings avalanching at you all the time like now. I don’t know. But, yeah, that might be it, although that doesn’t seem to stop people all around me from being lust-crushed about the current crop. Interesting. Festivals are very political animals, to generalise obviously. Like everything else these days, yes. There needs to be a new underground, or else we need to locate it. ** Jeff J, Hey there, pal. Great to see you! I’ve had Mayrocker in ‘books I’ve loved’ posts. I should do a spotlight on her, it’s true. I was sad when she died fairly recently. Lord, your body owes you so much compensation for all this misbehaving. I’m so glad you’re really upswinging. Awesome you got to Big Ears. And, of course, very good news that the three novels are moving along! We’re about to submit the film to two big festivals. Maybe three, I can’t remember. No, the short fiction pieces are all things mostly written in the last ten years, and I was just editing and refining them. Right now my brain is focused on the new film script. But I’m open to a new novel idea, for sure. Yes, Zooming soon would be great. xo. ** Harper, Hi. Okay, interesting. I’m a real morning guy. I generally write in the mornings and then try to keep the energy going into the afternoon, but for some reason by the evening I’m too distracted, but I don’t know by what. I wrote all of my novels by hand until ‘The Sluts’, and then I got seduced into typing them from the outset, although I still jot stuff down in a notebook when I’m out and about. Your method doesn’t sound crazy at all. I write novels in really unorthodox, overly complicated ways. I totally get the virtue of making a thing impractically. It’s terrible to have to edit out things in a work for practical reasons. But, like, I’m about to put out a book of short fictions, and a couple of them were parts of novels I had to discard and which I reworked later to be stand-alone pieces, so at least there’s a way to possibly keep them valuable. Gotcha on the length. My novels take a long time too. And, heck, our new film took more than five years to make. So, no sweat. Fingers very crossed from me indeed! ** Rafe 🌝, A tent! With seemingly excellent WiFi! I almost envy you. I haven’t been to a planetarium in ages, and I guess I figure they must’ve upped their visuals given technology’s advancement and all of that. But maybe the primitivism is their lure now. Like the vinyl revival or those theaters that proudly only screen movies on film. Mm, I don’t think I get tired of reading and movies, but I should say that I give myself total freedom not to finish things. I actually rarely read a whole book, I guess because I don’t care about stories and characters very much. So reading long enough to get a sufficient taste of what a book is and what its value is and then bailing on it seems like a totally fine approach to me. Same with films, actually, But I’m weird. ** Uday, Aw, thanks. Hm, I don’t know Hujar’s Jute Harper work, and I honestly never knew that he worked under a pseudonym until you just told me. Huh. That work isn’t just included in the books of his main work? Ha, no, I didn’t know that Flaubert quote before, but it’s a good one, yes. No, I just always wanted to know what technically was responsible for and behind the scenes of attractive people’s looks, I guess? I always thought that was a natural curiosity, but I guess not. ** Darbyyy🥛, There you are, and with just the milk today. Do you drink milk? I don’t. Milk makes me a little nauseous, which is weird since I love cheese and ice cream and stuff. No problem about complaining. I do the same thing. People I know IRL must be so tired of hearing me complain about the problems surrounding our film since I’ve been kvetching about them for years. You should have the best friends. Friends on your level. Friends who dazzle and amaze you while being dazzled and amazed by you. It’s highly possible. Jeez, thanks for finding and removing that from my brain. And I don’t even have a scar! Jar will do, yes, please. ** Catachrestic, Hi. I went to an Omnimax once. I can’t remember where. In LA? I saw a IMAX film there about Siegfried & Roy. It was genius. I’m not kidding. Do they still exist, those Omni-things? Happy, what, Thursday! ** Okay. Today I invite and urge you to look into the oeuvre of the wonderful and underknown, at least outside of France, auteur filmmaker Guy Gilles. So why not take the opportunity, eh? See you tomorrow.
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