Claude Mauriac (1914-1996) was a French author and journalist. Between 1944 and 1949, he was Charles de Gaulle’s personal secretary before starting to work as a film critic for Le Figaro Littéraire, a French daily morning newspaper with a long tradition in France. He was also a close friend of philosopher Michel Foucault’s. On May […]
The first detail one notices in Henry Chapier’s review of Clément’s Jeux interdits for Combat is its publication date: January 1968. 16 years after the film was first presented to the public, Chapier dedicated another article to it, emphasizing its continuing significance at a time when one of the biggest cultural revolutions in Western history […]
Let us take a closer look at Georges Charensol’s evaluation of René Clément’s film, since it is one of the few articles that judge it rather critically. Georges Charensol (1899-1995) was a French journalist, art and film critic. He wrote for several highly distinguished art, film and literature magazines, such as Paris-Journal, La Vie du […]
In November 1955, François Truffaut (1932-1984) published a scathing review of Jean Delannoy’s children’s film Chiens perdus sans collier (Lost Dogs without Collars), presented to the public earlier in the same year. Part of his criticism was aimed directly at the team of writers that had adapted Gilbert Cesbron’s novel of the same title: Jean […]
The little blurb about the film Forbidden Games, written by Jacques Doniol-Valcroze (1920-1989) in October 1952, deserves a quick mention. It does not offer an analysis of the film but rather presents itself as a laudation of Clément’s “victory” (Doniol-Valcroze 1952: 5). It gives us an idea about the critical reception of Forbidden Games when […]
About Jean Queval In order to understand better where Queval is coming from in his critique of Forbidden Games, a bit of information about Queval himself, whose life is equally fascinating. Queval (1913-1990) was a prolific writer, journalist, film critic and translator with an affinity to English literature. He translated, for example, James Agee, Iris […]
Pierre Kast (1920-1984) was a French film director, TV and screenplay writer, novelist and journalist of the Nouvelle Vague. He wrote film reviews for Action and Cahiers du Cinéma, which was edited by André Bazin and Jacques Doniol-Valcroze. His style of film-making was heavily influenced by Jean Grémillon, a well-known film director and president of […]
Now, a few notes about the narrative style of Boyer’s Forbidden Games (1947). The story is told by a seemingly bodyless third-person narrator who is not explicitly characterized, who appears to stand outside of the narrative (“disembodied”, cf. Klarer 2004: 20; “heterodiegetic”, “hidden”, cf. Booth 1974). While much of the story is told from the […]
(spoiler alert: this blog post reveals details and the end of the story!) Boyer’s Jeux interdits, published by Editions de Minuit in 1947, is a comparatively short novel with a turbulent history. With its length of only 150 pages (1968 Denoël edition), it might even be better described as a novella. Its protagonists are 9-year-old […]
Trying to find information about François Boyer and his life, I took a research trip to Paris in the spring of 2018. One of the most interesting findings in the archives was an original letter by François Boyer, formally addressed to Marcel L’Herbier (1888-1979) via an initial “Cher monsieur”. It is a letter handwritten and […]