On DVDs of unknown origin - Finally a viewing of Maurice Pialat's LA MAISON DES BOIS (France, 1971)

It was long, long ago when I first read somewhere, I think a note by Adrian Martin, about watching, over a  weekend, a 16mm copy (the format on which it was filmed), from the then French Embassy collection, of Maurice Pialat's seven part 1971 TV series La Maison des Bois. Set during and shortly after the 1914-18 World War, Pialat's story of a 'family' of father, mother, two late teen children and three boys fostered into the home by mothers whose men have gone off to war. For the kids it's the time of their lives, most especially for Hervé, the only one of the three whose mother does not visit him. One of the eps makes this time of your life moment clearer when the family go off, possibly in homage to Renoir, for a day's picnic and fishing.  

A friend in the UK provided me with two subtitled DVDs which look like they have come off VHS copies or else recorded off TV and fanboy subtitles added. So finally I can tick it off the must see list. If you are curious it is being offered by The Movie Detective but I have no idea of the quality or indeed the legality.

Hervé (Hervé Lévy)

It's been 54 years but the effect is still astonishing. Sequence after sequence just rattles you and the number of single shot sequences involving intricate camera movements to record quite extraordinary detail is remarkable. Most notable is the shot/sequence where, as the guns get louder and the Germans closer, there is a mass-evacuation from the village. Horses, carts, people, wandering children, trucks carrying soldiers, are all caught up.

Pialat himself plays the role of the local school teacher. He has to deal with children whose emotions are constantly veering towards sadness but who still have all the naivete, all the wonder. His direction of the children is remarkable no moment more so when the two boys are in bed reading from a book. The sequence lasts for minutes, it's sense of the natural totally acute. The post-war tristesse of the mother who looks after the children and her family, who loses her son in the war's last days, and then sees the children reclaimed by parents, is sad beyond measure. The cast contains hardly an actor known to even the most devoted. That anonymity of course works to heighten the authenticity.

Maurice Pialat as the schoolteacher

1971 was an extraordinary year for French cinema. Pialat's series was made in the same year as Jacques Rivette's Out One. To add to those major TV events you can find an extensive  list of everything else. Major films by Truffaut, Malle, Tati, Marcel Ophuls, Chabrol, Bresson and André Delvaux included. Even Marcel Carné and Abel Gance made films that year. But Pialat's TV series may well be the greatest of them all...

One odd feature..there is no credit for a writer. Wikipedia  tells us it was written by René Wheeler, a veteran of French cinema whose credits go back to the 30s but do include a credit on Rififi. The credit at the beginning and the end is "Realisation Maurice Pialat".